Duane Lockard

ROBERT A. DAHL. Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City. Pp. xii, 355. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961.

This book represents a significant point of confluence of several streams of development in contemporary political science, or perhaps one should say social science, since one of the most intriguing aspects of this work is its use of sociological methods in political research. Although Dahl is critical of some recent attempts by sociologists to fathom the character of political power in the contemporary city, his criticism is mild and his alternative explanations are convincingly supported with sociological and political data. He limits his assertions to the city he studied (New Haven), but his general comments on pluralism fit many aspects of contemporary American politics. To state the essence of his case in an oversimplified way one could say that he tested and found inapplicable the proposition that a &dquo;power elite&dquo; rules New Haven. He is inclined to believe that a power elite did rule it in the past but finds no evidence that one does today. He found many elites, not a single dominating one. Dahl’s method of identifying the elite groups in the city was not &dquo;reputational&dquo; as in some of the &dquo;power structure&dquo; analyses ; rather he focused on certain areas of policy and, by various observational means, compiled lists of persons who had been involved in measurable degree in decisionmaking in a policy area. His evidence indicated a series of elite groups who effectively dominated various areas of public policy such as education, nominations to public office, and urban renewal. There was, of course, some overlapping of names, particularly where public officials were concerned, but the extent of overlap was surprisingly small. To show that New Haven has a pluralistic politics without a single recognizable power elite is not to say that all cities are like New Haven, a point which Dahl not only concedes but emphasizes. Of greater importance is the fact that Dahl’s methods of analysis are entirely different from those of the power elite school and that the methods he uses