Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton

Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz are neo-Marxists who made important contributions to the community power debate in the 1960s and 1970s. In a series of articles culminating in a short book, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice, they introduced the concept of non decision making. Criticizing the pluralist accounts of power in communities, notably Robert Dahl's in his Who Governs?, Bachrach and Baratz argued that pluralists only looked at the surface of conflict. Bachrach and Baratz suggest that there is a second face (or dimension) of power that concerns the way in which some issues are organized into politics and other issues are organized out. Thus, they argued, some issues do not come to the surface in democratic politics because elites ensure that these issues stay buried. One example of such a buried issue is race and poverty (in the late 1950s). In Who Governs?, a study of power in New Haven, Connecticut, Dahl and his researchers identified important political issues by examining what was being discussed in the local newspapers. They then explored who was influential in policy making for those issues. Neither race relations nor poverty were discussed in the local media and so were not studied by the New Haven pluralists. However, as Who Governs? was published, race riots tore across U.S. cities, including New Haven. Race was an important issue, but one that was simply not discussed by the media until the riots.

Some writers, such as Raymond Wolfinger, have argued that non decision making cannot be studied empirically. How can one study something that has not happened? But non decision making was not about processes that had not yet occurred. Rather, Bachrach and Baratz showed that examining the media to discover important issues was a flawed technique, potentially overlooking issues that elites either were not interested in or were attempting to ignore or remove from the agenda. In that sense, the idea is about agenda setting and how to surface important issues that elites and the mass media are not discussing.

Bachrach and Baratz's work was later criticized from the Left for ignoring the processes of interest formation. Writers such as Steven Lukes argued that non decision making was only concerned with actual struggle, albeit a struggle that is submerged. However, important power issues are involved in preference formation and the dominated agents may not realize that what they take to be in their own best interests are, in reality, the interests of the dominant. Bachrach and Baratz argued that, although preference formation was important, emphasis should still be placed on examining empirically the struggles in which agents wanted to engage.

Their later work was less influential, and ironically, Bachrach's later book Power and Empowerment (coauthored with Aryeh Botwinick) argued for participatory democracy through the workplace, in an account of democracy bearing striking similarities to that of Dahl from the latter's doctoral thesis through to his later writings.