The problem with the Gilens and Page study is that it shows the elites and regular people agree about 90% of policies: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-.... They look at the situations where the elite and regular people disagree, and conclude that because the rich win those areas of disagreement, we live in an “oligarchy.” But it does almost no analysis of those issues. Without that analysis, it’s hard to tell whether that’s oligarchy, or just republican democracy doing the “republican” part. The paper also makes the huge mistake of using survey data without systematically accounting for whether respondents are likely voters. It is well known that voters are not representative of the population as a whole. They skew older, whiter, and more conservative.