Community Power Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Community power addresses the question of whether, and to what extent, power is distributed, and how power should be measured within local communities.

In the United States, the debate on community power coincided with the debate between elitists and pluralists. Elitist scholars took a stratification theory of power as a point of departure, viewing power as subsidiary to the social structure in a community. Thus, according to Floyd Hunter in 1953, a small financial and economical elite ruled the city of Atlanta, Georgia, at that time. Hunter arrived at this conclusion by first asking organizations representing four domains of Atlanta to provide him with a list of leaders in their domain. Subsequently, fourteen judges were asked who, from their individual perspectives, were “top leaders” on each of the lists of 175 persons. This resulted in a list of forty top leaders.

Similarly, in 1956, C. Wright Mills detected a “power elite” in the American society of his time. According to Mills, several developments taking place during and after World War II (1939–1945) resulted in increasingly enlarged, centralized, and interlocking hierarchies in the economic, political, and military realm of the United States. The power elite consisted of persons occupying the top positions in these three hierarchies and, as such, made or failed to make decisions with more consequences for more people than ever before. The methods Hunter and Mills applied to measure power are known as the reputation method and position method, respectively.

Pluralist scholars, however, criticized these studies for measuring actor properties and thus only potential power instead of actual, exerted power. The elitists’ findings would follow from the methods they applied. Robert Alan Dahl and Nelson W. Polsby argued that studying the contribution actors make to specific decisions on key issues in a community could measure the actual, exerted power. In his study of New Haven, Connecticut, Dahl examined, for several decisions in three issue areas, which of the participating actors had most frequently initiated proposals that were later adopted (without or despite opposition of the other actors) or vetoed proposals of other participants. Only three of the fifty persons meeting the test of successfully initiating or vetoing proposals did so in more than one issue area. Among the actors who successfully initiated or vetoed proposals more than once, only a few were social or economic “notables.” Thus, there appeared no one ruling elite in New Haven, drawn from a single homogeneous stratum that exerted power on all decisions in all three issue areas. Instead, power appeared to be distributed pluralistically: different actors exerted power concerning different decisions in different issue areas.

Nondecision Making

Dahl’s method became known as the decision method, and in 1970 Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz upheld criticism for the method not providing an objective criterion to discriminate between important and unimportant issue areas. As the notables were not interested in two of the three issue areas Dahl had selected, it was not surprising that he ended up with pluralist rather than elitist conclusions. Bachrach and Baratz argued that power was exercised during the process of decision making, which they called the first face of power, and also during the process of nondecision making. This second face of power concerned setting the agenda of available options for decision making, where some issues become part of the agenda, whereas others—the nonissues—were kept from the agenda, resulting in nondecisions. Just as in case of the elitists, the pluralists’ research method would thus predetermine their empirical findings.

In 1971, Matthew Crenson’s comparative study of air pollution in American cities falsified the objection that nondecisions were nonevents and could thus not be empirically studied. His study examined two nearby urban areas with similar population characteristics and dirty air levels, and aimed at explaining why east Chicago’s air pollution became an issue and resulted in local policy in 1949, whereas Gary, Indiana’s, air pollution remained a nonissue, and no action was undertaken until 1962. Crenson argued that Gary was dominated by one steel company, U.S. Steel, and had a strong party organization, whereas east Chicago had several steel factories and no strong party organization. U.S. Steel managed to circumvent the dirty air issue, backed by its reputation for power, without having to do anything.

More recently, the debate on community power has been continued by regime theory scholars on the one hand, such as Davies and Imbroscio, and rational choice theory scholars on the other, such as Dowding and colleagues, from an increasingly integrative and comparative perspective.

Bibliography:

Bachrach, Peter, and Morton S. Baratz. Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Clark, Terry N., ed. Community Structure and Decision-Making: Comparative Analyses. San Francisco: Chandler, 1968.
Crenson, Matthew A. The Un-Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of NonDecisionmaking in the Cities. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1971.
Dahl, Robert A. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Davies, Jonathan S., and David L. Imbroscio, eds. Theories of Urban Politics, 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2009.
Dowding, Keith, Patrick Dunleavy, Desmond King, and Helen Margetts. “Rational Choice and Community Power Structures.” Political Studies 43, no. 2 (1995): 265–277.
Hunter, Floyd. Community Power Structure. A Study of Decision Makers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953.
Mills, C.Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Polsby, Nelson W. Community Power and Political Theory: A Further Look at Problems of Evidence and Inference, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.