Non Decision Making

In their empirical work, pluralists have studied controversial decisions made in local politics in order to determine who influenced those decisions. They were criticized for concentrating upon issues that were in the public eye and ignoring issues that were not publicly discussed. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz introduced the phrase non decision making to describe processes that led to some issues being organized out of politics. They defined a non decision as “a decision that results in the suppression or thwarting of a latent or manifest challenge to the values and interest of the decision maker” (Bachrach & Baratz, 1970, p. 44) and went on to say that such non decision making allows “demands for change on the existing allocation of benefits and privileges in the community to be suffocated before they are even voiced; or kept covert; or killed before they gain access to the relevant decision-making arena; or failing all these things, maimed or destroyed in the decision-implementing stage of the policy process” (Bachrach & Baratz, 1970, p. 44). They broke non decisions down into four categories:

• 1.
  force (including harassment, imprisonment, and murder);
• 2.
  the threat of sanctions;
• 3.
  the use of prevailing norms, rules, and procedures to quash issues;
• 4.
  reinforcing or creating new norms to stop incipient conflict.

Their account was criticized by pluralists such as Raymond Wolfinger and Nelson Polsby, who suggested that non decisions could not be said to exist if they could not be seen and measured. However, from the definition and empirical work of Bachrach and Baratz and others, it is obvious that at least some non decisions are observable and measurable. Certainly harassment, imprisoning, and murdering are actions that can be seen and measured. What Bachrach and Baratz meant was that decisions are often taken on issues in order to keep them out of the public eye and out of political discussion. However, to the extent that such issues are controversial and different groups become involved, these types of non decisions are not outside pluralist discussions of power, even if they fall outside some empirical pluralist studies.

More radical writers criticize the concept of non decisions from precisely the opposite viewpoint. Radical critics suggest that we need to go beyond non decisions into the creation of values. They suggest that issues might be uncontroversial despite being against the interests of most people. For example, the abolition of the wealth tax in the United States received popular support, even though it was a redistributive tax from the richest 2% to 98% of the population. The unpopularity of wealth taxes might be an example of the third category of non decision making. Furthermore, non decisions, according to the fourth part of the definition, seem to include the creation of values, which radical writers see as an important element of power. However, the all-encompassing nature of the definition of non decision making is itself a problem for the concept. Because the concept utilizes the notion of “force” (its first manifestation) and the idea of “creating new norms” (its fourth manifestation) it seems too broad to be used analytically. Surely identifying power through force is very different from identifying power through creating norms. And the radical critics are correct in the idea that value systems do not have to be created by the powerful or privileged in order to help maintain their power and interests, yet non decision making as laid out by Bachrach and Baratz seems to have a deliberative element within it.

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