# Plutocracy Government in which political power is held disproportionately by the wealthy. From Greek *ploutokratia*, "rule by the rich." A *subtype* of [[Oligarchy]] — specifically, oligarchy in which the elite is defined primarily by wealth. ## Defining features 1. **Wealth as the primary criterion** for political power and access 2. **Concentration of wealth and political power in the same hands** — they reinforce each other 3. **Policy systematically advantages the wealthy** — tax structure, regulation, labor law, asset protection, antitrust enforcement 4. **Often coexists with formal democracy** — plutocracy describes the distribution of political power, not necessarily institutional form ## Vs. formal regime mismatch Plutocracy is rarely a formal regime classification — almost no state describes itself as a plutocracy. The accusation arises when: - Formal democratic institutions exist but - Wealthy individuals and corporations exert outsized policy influence through campaign finance, lobbying, dark money, ownership of media, regulatory capture, or revolving-door personnel flows This is the *substantive plutocracy* charge. Whether the US (or specific eras of it) qualifies is one of the long-running empirical and normative debates in American political science. ## Mechanisms of plutocratic influence The KB tracks the operational mechanisms in concrete entries: - **Campaign finance** — *[[Citizens United v. FEC]]* (2010) and subsequent decisions enabled large-scale corporate and individual political spending - **[[Dark Money]]** — political spending through 501(c)(4) and similar structures shielded from disclosure - **Lobbying** — direct policy advocacy by paid representatives - **[[Revolving Door]]** — personnel flow between regulators and regulated industries - **[[Corporate Capture]]** — broader pattern of industry control over its regulators - **Media ownership** — concentration of media in wealthy hands; cross-link [[Tech Oligarch Media Map]] - **Donor networks** — coordinated giving infrastructures; cross-link [[Koch Network]], [[Koch Donor Summit Model]], [[DonorsTrust]] ## Historical and contemporary cases - **Late Roman Republic** — extreme wealth concentration in senatorial class, enabling political dominance and contributing to republican collapse - **Italian city-state republics** (Florence under the Medici, Venice's wealthy merchant elite) - **American Gilded Age** (~1870-1900) — the canonical English-language reference point; cross-link [[Gilded Age Plutocracy]] - **Russia post-1991** — "the oligarchs" emerged as a wealth-based political class, though the relationship has reversed under Putin (state now dominates wealth-holders rather than vice versa) - **Contemporary US** — argued by Gilens & Page (2014), Winters (2011), and others to have drifted toward plutocratic outcomes despite formal democratic institutions ## The "second Gilded Age" thesis Many contemporary commentators — Krugman, Stiglitz, Piketty, Reich — argue the US has entered a second Gilded Age since roughly 1980, with wealth concentration approaching late-19th-century levels and corresponding political consequences. Piketty's *[[Capital in the Twenty-First Century]]* (2013) provides the most-cited empirical case using long-run wealth and income data. Cross-link [[Gilded Age Plutocracy]] for the historical-and-contemporary discussion. ## Distinguishing from neighbors - vs. **[[Oligarchy]]** — plutocracy is the wealth-specific subtype. All plutocracies are oligarchies; not all oligarchies are plutocracies. - vs. **[[Democracy]]** — vs. formal. A state can be formally democratic and plutocratic. The empirical question of how to measure this is contested but live (Gilens-Page is a leading attempt). - vs. **[[Authoritarianism (Government Type)]]** — different axis. Plutocracy concerns who holds power (the wealthy); authoritarianism concerns whether power is constrained by institutional checks. ## Right-wing relevance The contemporary US right has built one of history's most sophisticated infrastructures for translating wealth into policy: think tanks, donor networks, dark-money flows, judicial-pipeline organizations, media properties, and political action committees, organized into a coordinated movement. Whether this constitutes *plutocracy* in the regime-type sense is contested but the operational machinery is documented in detail throughout this vault. Cross-link to [[Powell Memo]], [[Mont Pelerin Society]], [[Federalist Society]], [[Heritage Foundation]], [[State Policy Network]] for the institutional architecture. ## See also - [[Oligarchy]] — parent category - [[Gilded Age Plutocracy]] — the historical-American reference and contemporary parallels argument - [[Economics]] (Subjects hub) — for the political-economy framing