WHO GOVERNS? WHO GOVERNS? Democracy and Power in an American City Second Edition ROBERT A. DAHL Foreword by Douglas W. Rae New Preface by the author Contents Foreword to the Second Edition by Douglas W. Rae Vii Preface to the Second Edition xi Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii 1. The Nature of the Problem 1 EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY IN NEW HAVEN Book I. From Oligarchy to Pluralism 2. The Patricians 11 3. The Entrepreneurs 25 4. The Ex-plebes 32 5. The New Men 52 6. Shadow and Substance: The Social and Economic Notables 63 7. Overview: From Cumulative to Dispersed Inequalities 85 Book II. The Distribution of Influence 8. Overview: The Ambiguity of Leadership 89 9. Leaders in Political Nominations 104 10. Leaders in Urban Redevelopment 115 11. Leaders in Public Education 141 12. Overview: Direct versus Indirect Influence 163 Book III. Patterns of Influence 13. Specialization of Influence: Subleaders 169 14. Specialization of Influence: Leaders 181 15. Five Patterns of Leadership 184 16. Pattern A: Spheres of Influence 190 17. Pattern B: The Executive-centered Coalition 200 18. Pattern C: Rival Sovereignties 215 PLURALIST DEMOCRACY: AN EXPLANATION Book IV. The Distribution of Political Resources 19. On the Species Homo Politicus 223 20. Social Standing 229 21. Cash, Credit, and Wealth 239 22. Legality, Popularity, and Control over jobs 246 23. Control over Sources of Information 256 Book V. The Use of Political Resources 24. Overview: Actual and Potential Influence 271 25. Citizenship without Politics 276 26. Variations on a Theme 282 Book VI. Stability and Change 27. Stability, Change, and the Professionals 305 28. Stability, Change, and the Democratic Creed 311 APPENDIXES A. Comparison of New Haven with Other Urban Areas, 1950 329 B. Methods and Data 330 C. Indices and Social Position 341 D. Indices of Political Participation 342 List of tables and figures 345 Index 351 Foreword to the Second Edition DOUGLAS RAE Robert Dahl is the most celebrated political scientist of the twentieth century. Such distinction cannot be built on any single piece of scholarship, however brilliant, and Dahl's reputation rests on scores of publications spanning six decades. His subject matter has ranged from the U.S. Congress to city politics, from democratic theory to the control of nuclear weapons, from constitutionalism to participation in the workplace. Asked to pick Dahl's single greatest work, many would select Preface to Democratic Theory (1956) for its penetrating logic and elegant construction of the way ideals of popular control can (and cannot) be approximated in the actual working of large polities. Others might chose his later work on participatory democracy, still others his early tour de force (written with C. E. Lindblom), Politics, Economics and Welfare (1953). Many, today, are greatly impressed with his How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2002). My pick, however, is the book you hold in your hands, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (1961). In 1929, R. Staughton Lynd published a celebrated study of Muncie, Indiana, under the title Middletown. In this alluring work, Lynd created a prevailing genre of urban interpretation-a genre stressing the dominant role played in local life by economic and social elites (often, reportedly, joined by family ties, club memberships, and the like to form cohesive upperclass groupings). Overshadowing and often manipulating the nominally democratic working of municipal government by means of (often vaguely described) structures, these unelected archons seemed to reduce ordinary politics to a shallow imitation of democracy. Work of the same general sortpopularizing the term power structure- spread across the national landscape, with particularly notable instances falling on Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Ypsilanti, and Seattle (the classic critical survey is provided by Dahl's gifted student, Nelson Polsby, in Community Power and Political Theory [1963]). These works varied in many respects but held firm in two particulars. First, they conceived local power structures as rather static affairs, not as moving parts of historical change. Second, they rested on little or no evidence about just how and when elite members controlled or manipulated actual decisions in and near city hall. In many instances, the reputation for being powerful was taken as equivalent for the fact of controlling actual outcomes-an equation that is at best a first approximation. Despite the obvious difficulties facing work that took little account of historical change and neglected vital details of empirical verification, this genre held something like canonical status in the late 1950s when Dahl and his students began to examine the one city most accessible to their direct observation from Yale's front porch: New Haven, Connecticut. Dahl opens with a remarkable historical analysis running from the city's incorporation within the newly minted U.S. political system in 1784 to the middle of the twentieth century. Charting a complex series of changes-from the powerful "standing order" left over from the Puritan colony to a business elite not wholly different from the one Lynd described in Muncie, and then to a system in which voting power, often held by immigrant groups, came to rival economic and social distinction, Dahl established that this last transformation had altered the very nature of power and control: "Within a century a political system dominated by one cohesive set of leaders had given way to a system dominated by many different sets of leaders, each having access to different combinations of political resources. It was, in short, a pluralist system" (p. 86). What had been static for others was dynamic for Dahl; what had been relatively simple for others had become complex for Dahl. This analysis, covering fewer than a hundred pages, is in itself among the classic works of political science. As Dahl conducted his careful field research about the then-present city, Democrat Richard C. Lee had recently defeated New Haven's last-ever Republican mayor, William Celentano, in the election of 1953. Dahl based his work on detailed interviews and participant observation of actual decisions taken on such topics as political nominations, urban renewal (an immense program under Lee), and public education. He discovered that the social and economic notables were by and large unimportant in determining the outcomes to these decisions. In matters narrowly political, ward-level practitioners, and minor elected officials, were predominant. In the details of urban renewal, staffers (many of whom were remarkably gifted professionals) often played pivotal roles. (Dahl's student Raymond Wolfinger provides the most detailed and sophisticated narrative of Lee-era policy-making in Politics of Progress [1971].)