Clarence N. Stone

Systemic Power in Community Decision Making: A Restatement of Stratification Theory

In their continued considerations of political inequality, urban scholars are especially concerned with less visible influences surrounding community decision making, and have employed such concepts as potential power, nondecision making, and anticipated reactions. However, these concepts leave some patterns of influence unexplained. There is also a dimension of power in which durable features of the socioeconomic system confer advantages and disadvantages on groups in ways that predispose public officials to favor some interests at the expense of others. Public officials make their decisions in a context in which strategically important resources are hierarchically arranged. Because this system of stratification leaves public officials situationally dependent on upper-strata interests, it is afactor in all that they do. Consequently, system features lower the opportunity costs of exerting influence for some groups and raise them for others. Thus socioeconomic inequalities put various strata on different political footings.

Looking Back to Look Forward Reflections on Urban Regime Analysis

In differentiating urban regime analysis from pluralism, this article argues that the politics of bringing together governing arrangements poses challenges that are much greater than the “retail” politics of pressuring government officials regarding particular decisions. Agenda setting, coalition building, resource mobilization, and devising schemes of cooperation are central elements in a model of governing. Seen in structural context, particularly of the system of social stratification, these elements in combination can explain why it is so difficult to give priority to policies to overcome social exclusion. Furthermore, because the impact of social-reform initiatives depends greatly on how governmental actions mesh with nongovernmental actions, sustained efforts depend on contributions from nonelites as well as strategic supports from elites.

It's More than the Economy after All: Continuing the Debate about Urban Regimes

The study of urban regimes is an evolving activity and not a tightly defined form of analysis. With ongoing research new questions and issues arise, and old ones stand in need of refinement. Recent articles by David Imbroscio (1998, 2003) and Jonathan Davies (2002, 2003) raise important questions about the future direction of research. As I read their work, I see much to be praised, but also some positions that are debatable. In this essay I concentrate on the latter. Celebrating points of agreement is a pleasant activity, but John Stuart Mill teaches us that the exchange of conflicting views is more conducive to enlarged understanding. Three questions help clarify differences. The first concerns the nature and scope of the economic imperative. The second is about the level of analysis for which the concept of an urban regime is appropriate. Third, how should we think about urban regimes—what exactly are they and what line of inquiry flows from this conception?

The Atlanta Experience Re-examined: The Link Between Agenda and Regime Change

In recent years, Atlanta appears unable to move from diffuse problem recognition to the framing of a broad program of action, despite major problems associated with a high level of poverty. With its exceptionally fragmented structure of local government, a tradition of business wariness of a strong governmental sector, and continued reliance on personal and informal collaboration, the city has failed to put together a plan to address the citys social-investment needs. Atlantas once-vaunted biracial coalition shows signs of a declining ability to adapt to emergent issues and frame purposes accordingly. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.

Civic Capacity and Urban Education

In 1993, a team of political scientists launched an 11-city study of school reform, centering on the concept of civic capacity. In the field of urban education, the 11-city study found places ranging from those with low levels of civic capacity in which diffuse and scattered concerns never became focused and synergistic to those with relatively high levels of civic capacity in which key actors came together in concerted action. Community leaders develop civic capacity to respond to major community-wide problems with a high potential for controversy. An ever-present potential for conflict means that a spirit of cooperation can quickly erode, and civic capacity differs from micro versions of social capital. To be lasting, civic capacity needs an institutional foundation for interaction among elites and a “grassroots” base through which ordinary citizens are engaged.

Power, Reform, and Urban Regime Analysis

Although “power over” and “power to” are conceptually distinct, in political reality they are intertwined. As forms of “power to,” urban regimes are not neutral mechanisms, but are forms of empowerment. Still, they may come less out of a contest of wills around fixed preferences and more out of how preferences are shaped by relationships. Perceived feasibility plays a major part. Given bounded rationality, one alignment of relationships may crowd out others, facilitating the pursuit of some aims while hindering others. Reformers often face the handicap of being inattentive to the reality that some forms of interaction have higher opportunity costs than others and therefore are less sustainable. Reformers frequently see their task mainly in “power over” terms, that is, of ousting defenders of the status quo. But if reformers think about their task in terms of “power to,” then they can see that a major obstacle is the difficulty of achieving a settlement with sustainable forms of interaction. Going beyond particular battles to win the war for reform calls for a regime‐building effort that rests on viable forms of cooperation.

Reflections on Regime Politics: From Governing Coalition to Urban Political Order

With hindsight covering a quarter of a century of Regime Politics, this reflection calls for refashioning the concept of an urban regime into a more encompassing idea of a multitiered political order. As an approach to political change, cross-time comparisons suggest that periodization can highlight how forces conjoin in different ways as political development unfolds. From this perspective, there is little reason to expect to find in today’s cities a stable and cohesive governing coalition held together around a high-priority agenda. Yet the need for resources to be commensurate with policy goals and the strength of purpose in the face of an established mind-set are key lessons to be retained from the past experiences of Atlanta and other cities. While systemic inequality continues as an overarching reality, mitigating responses can be worked out in the middle ground between structure and agency.

Preemptive Power: Floyd Hunter's "Community Power Structure" Reconsidered*

Much of the analysis of community power has occurred within a cost of compliance paradigm. The character of this conceptualization of power leads inevitably to pluralist conclusions and results in a misreading of Floyd Hunters Community Power Structure. The alternative conception presented here, one of preemptive power, allows a restating of Hunters argument and enables us to see how power in a complex community can at the same time be fragmented (as seen through a command and compliance prism) and concentrated (in the form of preemptive occupancy of a strategic role). The concept of preemptive power also provides a way of comparing power in Atlanta during the initial era studied by Hunter with the current era of the mid- i98os. In a context of profound social and political change, such a comparison reveals continuities and modifications in the power position of business. Bachrach and Baratz (1970) were surely right in suggesting that there are two faces of power. Yet their concept of nondecision making has never fully fended off its critics. When Bachrach and Baratz applied their ideas in an examination of poverty in Baltimore, their analysis proved vulnerable to the charge that it was not so much a study of nondecision making as an account of how ideological and institutional change ultimately did alter the structure of power in that city. Defenders of pluralism have thus argued that either nondecision making is not all that different from decision making or that it is unresearchable (Polsby, I980; Wolfinger, 1971). Yet, despite these criticisms, many observers continue to believe that Bachrach and Baratz were on the right track in treating power as having more than one face.

Social Stratification, Nondecision-Making, and the Study of Community Power:

The nondecision process can best be studied by viewing power as having a strategic dimension and as operating at three levels. A nonpluralist approach treats the public and private sectors as highly interdependent and assumes that a wide range of social resources and community activities are politically relevant, though not always manifestly so. Given that social resources are unequally distributed among different social strata, we have good cause to consider how behavior in the power arena might be affected by the distribution of resources and the structure of the situation. We can hypothesize that the scope and extent of efforts made by various strata are influenced by the amounts of resources possessed, opportunity costs, likelihoods of success, and immediacy of costs and benefits at stake. Thus, while those who are disadvantaged might in the abstract be motivated to work for system change, we can see that their concrete circumstances could dictate otherwise. We can therefore hypothesize further that imbalances in social resources contribute to sets of arrangements through which those imbalances are protected rather than challenged politically. These arrangements can be categorized and analyzed as elements in a nondecision process.

RETHINKING THE POLICY–POLITICS CONNECTION

One aspect of the policy–politics connection is that policy needs shape politics, but recognition of a policy need is itself inevitably a political action. Cities face an economic imperative, but how decision-makers understand and act on that imperative is a complex matter. Although an integrating body of arrangements may generate a common understanding, actors within these arrangements are not detached from the mutual interests, shared values, and common procedures that bring them together and inform their understanding. In this way, politics shapes policy, and it poses an ever-present risk that decision-making will rest on a perspective, drawn too narrowly from the relationship among decision-makers. Thus, as we examine the connection between policy and politics, we should consider a two-way flow of influence. While recognition of policy needs can contribute to new political relationships, the connection is not one-way. Prevailing political relationships play a large part in how policy needs are perceived.