Community Power Debate

First Phase

In the interwar period, a number of sociological studies of small-town life in the United States were conducted. They did not, however, address questions of power directly; nevertheless, they usually identified key figures in communities, often bankers and leading businesspeople around whom much of the social and political life of communities revolved. The book that might be thought to have started the community power debate is Floyd Hunter's Community Power Structure, published in 1953. Using a reputational method, he argued that there was a clear power elite in Atlanta (which he called “Regional City”). He argued that members of this relatively small power elite were socially and economically linked and included important businesspeople, corporate lawyers, and politicians. He viewed power as a set of interlinked power pyramids; although the same people dominated within different pyramids or issue-areas, different people might be found at the head of each pyramid. At about the same time C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite (1956), arguing that the United States was dominated by a [Page 123]political-industrial-military complex whose membership all came from the same social (and often also family) backgrounds, having attended the same schools and universities and belonging to the same clubs. Together, these two books created “elite theory” and provided the first side in the community power debate.

The second side emerged through the work of Robert Dahl, whose book Who Governs?, published in 1961, examined the power structure of Dahl's home university town of New Haven, Connecticut. Dahl and his researchers had a number of criticisms of Floyd Hunter's methods and conclusions. The critique was that reputational methods were bound to produce lists of power elites and people who view some actors as more important than others; selecting people from those lists would simply reinforce the assumption that their colleagues and acquaintances were also powerful. Instead, Dahl chose a set of issues to study from what was being reported in the local newspapers and interviewed sets of people at all levels within those issue areas. For all the heat of the subsequent debate, Dahl's conclusions were not that different from Hunter's, though the manner in which they were expressed differed. Dahl also found that there were important elites who figured in different issue areas. However, he emphasized their differences rather than the fact they came from similar backgrounds. He suggested that power diffused among different competing elites in different issue areas. His pluralist view, despite similar evidence, contrasted sharply with the elite views expressed by Hunter, Mills, and others.

This first stage in the community power debate differed both in methods—the reputational versus the behavioral methods—and in their conclusions, one emphasizing the elite domination and the other the plurality of centers of power.

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