Democracy's Power Structure

...Dahl characterizes this sequence of changes as a movement "from oligarchy to pluralism from a political system dominated by one cohesive set of leaders to a system dominated by many different sets of leaders, each having access to a different combination of political resources...

...Where methods are concerned, some researchers have attempted to infer the power structure by asking people to name the powerful, while others have insisted on the necessity of studying directly the actual exercise of power-i.e., how particular decisions came to be made and implemented...

...But these atypicalities, he argues, make New Haven especially suitable as a model for the study of the problem of power and democratic politics in general...

...After 1840 this truly "monolithic" elite withdrew from politics...

...Efforts to study empirically the structure of power in American society in recent years have produced a mass of undigested, and perhaps indigestible, information and a large literature of controversy over everything from elementary methods of observation to the essence of power itself...

...One wealthy man may collect paintings...

...He finds that the participants represented a small minority of the population...

...The core of Dahl's research is the effort to identify by interviews and public records every person who was involved from 1955-59 in decision-making in three "issueareas": party nominations for public office, urban redevelopment, and public education...

...He documents the unequal distribution in New Haven of the political resources of social standing, education, cash, credit and wealth, access to legality, popularity and collective solidarity, control over jobs and control over information...

...To equate potential power with actual power is perhaps the most common basic error of analysts of power structure, one that is found in scholarly elitist theories of society as well as in crude conspiracy ideologies that single out the bankers, the Jews or the labor bosses as the ultimate holders of power...

...Insofar as the question "Who governs New Haven...

...He was, rather, the leader of what Dahl calls an "executivecentered coalition" of groups, and his power was limited by the terms of coalition...

...The conditions that produced the Lee Administration, which successfully carried out a far-reaching program of urban redevelopment in downtown New Haven that has become the envy of other American cities, are fairly recent...

...Several overlapping but distinguishable lines of division have emerged from the debate...

...And here the latency as well as the actuality of power becomes an important datum...

...Dahl concedes that New Haven is unrepresentative of other American cities in possessing a competitive two-party system of long standing and in having benefited during the 1950s from unusually vigorous political leadership...

...another may collect politicians...

...But if New Haven is no longer ruled by a single elite, it is far from exemplifying full political equality and rule by the people in accordance with the ideological creed of democracy...

...Until the rise of Jacksonian democracy New Haven was dominated by a tight oligarchy of Yankee patricians, whose political instrument was the Federalist party and who monopolized the key "political resources" of wealth, education and social standing...

...The Mayor was the common link uniting the various specialized leaders-party politicians, businessmen, civil servants and professional experts-who were active in different issue-areas...

...Political resources remain unequally distributed, although dispersed inequalities have replaced the cumulative inequalities of the era of patrician rule...

...Essentially, what Dahl presents is less a full analysis of community power structure than a study of municipal government-more precisely, an account of the formal decision-making apparatus of local politics and government and an analysis of the social composition of those who participate in it...

...Dahl therefore begins his book with a short history of New Haven politics since the city was first incorporated in 1784, suggesting that other American cities, and indeed American society at large, have followed the same broad course of evolution...

...Although proponents of the latter view have often accused holders of the former of a vulgar Marxism that "reduces" political to economic power, there is probably a real difference in emphasis between sociologists and political scientists, independent of the role ascribed to economic power...

...He thus stood at the "center of intersecting circles": chief executive and negotiator for a coalition of coalitions...

...But in general, his emphasis on the participants in actual decision-making is a great improvement over the socalled "reputational method," which usually amounts to little more than a refined way of asking people, "Who are the big shots around here...

...others have seen it as "pluralistic," with a variety of groups forming an intricate pattern of coalitions that changes from issue to issue...

...One cannot help feeling, however, that his data and his approach do not fully confront the questions to which other students of community power structure have addressed themselves...

...Another group, chiefly sociologists, have minimized the importance of official governmental power, at least on the level of the local community...

...Dahl's use of his data to illuminate the big questions of political theory is thoroughly praiseworthy, particularly in contrast to the raw empiricism that usually characterizes such studies...

...Convictions as to what might happen are legitimate data in the study of power as well as what actually did happen in urban renewal or the appointment of a new school superintendent...

...Although I do not think it in any way invalidates his findings, the fact that Dahl was a respected professor at Yale (itself, as he indicates, a significant power in New Haven), and that Mayor Lee was a former administrative employe of Yale, gave the author peculiar advantages of access to those influential in city government...

...Although he frequently recognizes that many decisions with broad consequences for the community as a whole are made by private rather than public agencies (e.g., decisions on plant location), his focus is primarily on government and legality...

...Robert Dahl, Professor of Political Science at Yale, and some of his students and collaborators in the study of city government in New Haven, have participated vigorously in this debate...

...Still others, chiefly political scientists, have insisted on the autonomy, if not the priority, of government...

...Yet it is also, surely, a belief, perhaps unfounded though never actually put to test, as to what the outcome would be if certain demands were raised or actions taken...

...They have argued that the power structure of American communities today is pluralistic, that there is no "invisible government" of business oligarchs or anyone else controlling the visible one in violation of democratic principle, and that power is most profitably studied by concentrating on the actual decision-making process in politics...

...that different sets of leaders and subleaders were active in each issuearea...

...One must also consider, to adapt a remark of Paul Goodman's, what gets inside those heads or fails to do so...

...Valuable as his book is, many of the sociological analysts of community power have been pursuing other hares, albeit with a clumsiness and naivete that Dahl avoids...

...Wealthy entrepreneurs, most of them self-made men, dominated city government until they were displaced at the turn of the century by the leaders of the new immigrant proletariat...

...Rivalry between Yankees, Irish and Italians gave form to party competition for votes until roughly the 1950s, when "class politics" partly supplanted "ethnic politics" as the older ethnic groups (Negroes excepted) achieved greater security and became fully Americanized...

...Dahl now supports and illustrates these conclusions in Who Governs?, which sets forth the findings of his New Haven study...

...Some writers, such as the late C. Wright Mills, have tended to see the power structure as "monolithic," with a relatively unified and well-defined elite at the top controlling major decisions...

...With a clarity and brevity that are rare among social scientists, Dahl relates his conclusions about New Haven's political system to the classic discussions of democratic government by Tocqueville, Bryce and others...

...can be answered by naming a single man, the answer is the Mayor-specifically, Richard Lee, who headed the most popular and aggressive Administration in the city's history during the period when the study was undertaken (and is still in office today...

...But they were long in the making...

...But if Lee was not anyone's puppet, he was no dictator either...

...Power is certainly a form of behavior, in principle observable in operation or capable of being described retrospectively...

...author, "Population and Society" Social power is an elusive and ambiguous phenomenon, as the ubiquity of phrases like "the mystery" and "the enigma" of power attests...

...The "fit" between New Haven's political system and that of the larger American society, or even of other Western democracies where universal suffrage has gradually been made use of by all major groups through the agency of political parties, seems a little too neat...

...Thus, to show that a democratic counting of heads-the result of an election-genuinely determined the outcome of an issue is only part of the process of assessing the reality of democracy...

...But between the possession of a political resource-that is, an opportunity to exercise influence over government decisions-and its actual use, falls the shadow of apathy, temperamental distaste for the life of politics, primary commitment to non-political values and lack of political confidence...

...and that, while the leaders and sub-leaders ranked somewhat higher than their fellow-citizens in social class, they were not drawn from a single homogeneous stratum in the community...