When I was in graduate school at Penn State in the Sixties, two schools of thought on governmental power were in conflict. The elitists, mostly sociologists, asked the question, “Who has power?” and they came up with an elite that ran the city (or the country.) Their spokesmen were C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, and Floyd Hunter, who studied Atlanta and wrote Community Power Structure.
The pluralists asked a different question: “Who made the decisions?” Their main spokesman was political scientist Robert Dahl, who studied New Haven and wrote Who Governs? Dahl found that different groups were important in different issue areas. Thus one group might be powerful in educational policy, a second group in public safety issues, and neither of those groups might have anything to do with transportation policy.
It has been suggested that maybe Atlanta was governed by one elite and New Haven by various groups, but I always thought the answer depended on the question, and I also thought Dahl got it right. I believed that pluralism was a much better explanation for American policy at both the local and national levels than elitism was. Lobbyists who are concerned about immigration are not the same as lobbyists concerned about the Keystone Pipeline. I’m with Dahl on that.
On the other hand, the Koch Brothers and PACs of their ilk are exerting more and more influence. Think about banking rules, or fracking, or voting rights. Since the “Citizens United” decision the 1% is really exerting more and more power. I don’t know what Robert Dahl thought about this in the last few years of his life, but knowing what I know about his beliefs, I don’t think he was optimistic.
No comments:
Post a Comment