Dang, beat me to it. %-)

Just so y'all know, this comes from this thread in /r/politics/, which refers to the Gilens-Page paper "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens". (Decent summary of article here.)

While the specific discussion in that thread has gone along the lines of "what would it take to pull America back from plutocratic oligarchy (or oligarchic plutocracy, we haven't settled on one or the other just yet)?", it's no surprise that it led to /u/Pisodeuorrior asking the above question.

I'm sorry, but we don't allow "throughout history" questions, so I'm forced to remove this.