Recent quantitative evidence indicates that higher-income Americans have considerably more influence than lower-income citizens on national policy decisions. But the implications of these findings depend on what the affluent want from politics. If their policy preferences closely resemble those...

We examine how people evaluate a series of competing political messages received over the course of a campaign or policy debate. Instead of assuming a message has a fixed effect, we emphasize the variable effect of a message depending on when it is received in relation to other messages. We...