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Nondecisions and the Study of Local Politics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Raymond E. Wolfinger
Raymond E. Wolfinger*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

The widely cited concept of nondecisions is particularly prominent in criticisms of “pluralist” research on local politics. But no scholars, including those who introduced the notion of nondecisions, have done empirical research explicitly on this topic. The lack of research on nondecisions reflects the concept's weaknesses as a guide to field research: (1) It involves a number of unrealistic assumptions about political life. (2) It requires data that are difficult to gather or wholly unobtainable. (3) Even the data that can be collected do not provide a basis for sensible conclusions about the distribution of political power.

The impracticability of research on nondecisions is not a serious setback for political science, however, for most of its specific component ideas, such as the policy consequences of different governmental forms or the impact of political socialization, are being studied without reference to the notion of nondecisions. Judged by its utility for empirical research, then, the idea of nondecisions appears to be superfluous. The same might be said of the notion of “power structures.”

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 1063 - 1080
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1971

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to students in a graduate seminar at Stanford University for help in formulating the first draft of this article, which in turn was usefully criticized by J. H. Brand, Richard A. Brody, Martha Derthick, Alexander L. George, Robert J. Mundt, Robert A. Packenham, and Nelson W. Polsby. Frederick W. Frey's intelligent and constructive comments as a referee for The American Political Science Review helped me make many improvements in the version submitted for publication. Ellen Siegelman's skilled editing was very helpful. I owe the passage from archy and mehitabel to Hugh Douglas Price.

References

1 The American Political Science Review, 56 (December, 1962), pp. 947–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For a 240-item bibliography on “community power” see Hawley, Willis D. and Wirt, Frederick M., eds., The Search for Community Power (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968)Google Scholar.

3 Dahl, Robert A., Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

4 Dahl, Robert A., “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science, 2 (July, 1957), pp. 202–203Google Scholar. This definition resembles Mills', C. Wright: “By the powerful we mean, of course, those who are able to realize their will, even if others resist it.” See The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 9Google Scholar.

5 Dahl, , Who Governs? p. 163 (emphasis in original)Google Scholar.

6 “Two Faces of Power,” p. 947.

7 “On the Neo-Elitist Critique of Community Power,” The American Political Science Review, 62 (June 1968), pp. 451–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For examples of their influence on explicitly leftist writers see Gitlin, Todd, “Local Pluralism as Theory and Ideology,” Studies on the Left, 5 (Summer, 1965), pp. 21–45Google Scholar; and Shin'ya Ono, “The Limits of Bourgeois Pluralism,” ibid., pp. 46–72.

9 See, for example, Riker, William H., “Some Ambiguities in the Notion of Power,” The American Political Science Review, 58 (June, 1964), p. 348CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While the idea of nondecisions is frequently invoked in discussions of power, it has bad scant impact on empirical research.

10 By Dahl's criteria there were 231 Social Notables and 238 Economic Notables. Only 24 people were in both groups, which casts some doubt on the neo-elitists' habit of treating the groups as identical (Who Governs? pp. 64–68).

11 There are some elementary factual deficiencies in the neo-elitists' statements: About a third of the Notables lived in New Haven itself. Regardless of where they lived, men qualified as Economic Notables by virtue of their control of property in the city of New Haven, which would give them a stake in city politics.

12 “Two Faces of Power,” p. 948 (emphasis in original).

13 See also, by the same authors, “Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytical Framework,” The American Political Science Review, 57 (September, 1963), pp. 632–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Deutsch, Jan G., “Neutrality, Legitimacy, and the Supreme Court: Some Intersections Between Law and Political Science,” Stanford Law Review, 20 (January, 1968), p. 251 (emphasis added)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

For a critique of Deutsch's article see Polsby, Nelson W., “On Intersections Between Law and Political Science,” Stanford Law Review, 21 (November, 1968), pp. 142–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Bachrach, and Baratz, , Power and Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 47–48Google Scholar.

16 The best discussion of the prevalence and deficiencies of this a priori assumption is Polsby, Nelson W., Community Power and Political Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

17 In “Middletown,” for example, the very wealthy “Y” family was wholly uninvolved in civic affairs and maintained a “large degree of isolation from the city's central interests.” See Lynd, Robert S. and Lynd, Helen M., Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), p. 91Google Scholar.

18 This notion may explain the hitherto puzzling distinction that some writers drew between the “power structure” and the outcome of political decision making. For example, Lawrence J. R. Herson mused “If power structure does determine community action; and if this structure reflects the wishes of top influentials …” (emphasis in original). See his “In the Footsteps of Community Power,” The American Political Science Review,55 (December, 1961), p. 823Google Scholar.

19 Polsby developed explicit criteria stating what factors should be taken into account in choosing issues to study (op. cit., pp. 95ff.). Andrew S. McFarland has suggested four additional criteria. See his Power and Leadership in Pluralist Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 82Google Scholar. Neither Polsby nor Mc-Farland provided thresholds for distinguishing between important and unimportant issues.

20 Lee was first elected in 1953 and retired at the end of 1969.

21 Who Governs? ch. 10.

22 This article and “Decisions and Nondecisions” are included in the recent Power and Poverty, which also contains an explicit definition of “nondecision.” But in this new formulation the concept has become so protean as to lose all utility: “A nondecision, as we define it, is a decision that results in suppression or thwarting of a latent or manifest challenge to the values or interests of the decision-maker” (p. 44). This seems to say that “the decision-maker” perpetrates a non-decision every time he wins.

Subsequent discussion expanded the term's meaning even further: “Simply supporting the established political process tends to have this effect” [of making nondecisions] (p. 50). “An attempt to prevent an issue from reaching the decision-making stage” is a non-decision (p. 57). Examples in the House of Representatives include the Rules and Ways and Means Committees and the seniority system (p. 60). Among the nondecisions uncovered by the authors in their research on Baltimore were: conservative appointments to municipal boards and commissions (p. 70); liberal majorities on municipal task forces (p. 71); and attempts to help the poor by the city's most important business association, for “its warm support for the cause of racial integration amounted to a nondecision in that it helped sustain the ideological breach between the ‘bourgeois’ and the militant blacks, thereby further weakening the political leverage of the latter” (p. 73).

In view of the expanded meaning suggested by these examples, I have confined my discussion of nondecisions to the earlier articles, except when Power and Poverty helps answer questions raised by its authors' previous work. or in what it represented) so powerful that Lee ventured nothing it would find worth quarreling with.

23 “Two Faces of Power,” p. 952. As many readers may know, Dahl presented a mass of data to support his conclusions about the absence of business dominance of urban renewal in New Haven. The CAC's failure to object to Lee's proposals is only a piece of this proof, not (“evidence enough”) the whole argument.

24 For an extended description of this process of conversion and co-optation see my The Politics of Progress (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), ch. 9Google Scholar. Much of this information was also available to Dahl's critics in Who Governs?

The truth about the relationship between the Lee Administration and the CAC seems to have been grasped by the people of New Haven much more readily than by the neo-elitists. By the early 1960's the CAC had acquired a somewhat tarnished reputation as the mayor's creature: “it had served Lee's purposes in urban renewal but in serving them it had lessened its credibility and effectiveness.” See Murphy, Russell D., Political Entrepreneurs and Urban Poverty (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Press, 1971), p. 39Google Scholar.

25 The magnitude of urban renewal programs is measured by federal capital grants for all projects in the execution phase, or with a loan and grant contract approved but not formally executed, as of December 31, 1963. The raw data were taken from the Urban Renewal Directory, December 31, 1963 (Washington: Urban Renewal Administration, 1964)Google Scholar. Federal grants generally cover two-thirds of net project costs; the rest is paid for by local funds, in some cases supplemented by state grants. It should not be thought that such projects are “easy.” At the end of 1963, 14 years after the beginning of the federal urban renewal program, 29 per cent of cities with populations between 100,000 and 250,000 did not have a single project in the execution phase.

In 1966, on a similar measure of program size, New Haven had a score of $790.25 per capita, compared to a mean of $53.51 for all cities, and was more than eight standard deviations above the nationwide mean. (Source: Robert R. Alford and Michael Aiken, “Com-munity Structure and Mobilization: The Case of Urban Renewal,” unpublished paper, University of Wisconsin.)

26 Who Governs? p. 164.

27 “Decisions and Nondecisions,” pp. 633–34n. Another neo-elitist, Michael Parenti, acknowledged Dahl's discussion of indirect influence, but incorrectly claimed that Dahl limited the term to the poor, and suggested that it was “postulated, without the benefit of empirical research that ordinary voters, exercise indirect controls over decisions …” See his “Power and Pluralism: A View From the Botton,” Journal of Politics, 32 (August, 1970), p. 506Google Scholar. Lee's constant concern with his next election was not postulated, but was ascertained through my direct observation of him and his principal lieutenants.

28 For a brief discussion of the problem of “translating votes into public policy,” see Matthews, Donald R. and Prothro, James W., Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1966), pp. 477–81Google Scholar. William R. Keech has studied the vote as a political resource for Negroes in two southern cities. His findings emphasize limitations on what can be accomplished by means of the ballot box alone and indicate dimensions along which this problem can be analyzed. See hisThe Impact of Negro Voting (Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1968)Google Scholar.

29 “Political Ambitions, Volunteerism, and Electoral Accountability,” The American Political Science Review, 64 (March, 1970), pp. 5–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For data on the political careers of mayors see Wolfinger, ch. 13.

30 Prewitt, pp. 11–12.

31 Whom an official is willing to offend depends in part on how much he can be hurt by a given group, and how much he needs its support. For example, a Democratic Congressman from Chicago need be less solicitous of labor unions than a Democrat elected from a city like Detroit, where party organization is weaker and unions thus are more important politically.

32 For an account of this episode see Wolfinger, ch. 10.

33 The most succinct statement of Lindblom's views on this point is “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,’” Public Administration Review, 19 (Spring, 1959), pp. 79–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 “The Analysis of Issue-Contexts in the Study of Decision-Making,” Journal of Politics, 24 (November, 1962), p. 718Google Scholar.

35 For an interesting discussion of these “set patterns of responses” see Sharkansky, Ira, The Routines of Politics (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1970)Google Scholar.

36 In Power and Poverty they say (p. 47) that “direct questioning of those concerned will be to little avail” since unawareness, a desire for concealment, or pre-occupation with defeat would keep both the subjects and objects of nondecisions from being good informants.

37 Answers to these questions will not be found in Power and Poverty, which reports the authors' field research in Baltimore. If they did follow their own advice about “prior study of the political and social views of all concerned,” the results are not reported in this book.

38 For a creative synthesis of findings on this point see Converse, Philip E., “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Apter, David E., ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 206–61Google Scholar.

39 “Two Faces of Power,” p. 952n.

40 Using the reputational method in Seattle, Delbert C. Miller identified a “power structure” of big businessmen. Miller reported that the most important issue decided in Seattle during his research there was a proposed right-to-work law. Most of his “Key Influentials” and “Top Influentials” favored the proposal, but were afraid to express their support publicly. The measure was defeated. See his “The Measurement of Influence in Community Affairs,” Proceedings of the Pacific Sociological Society, Research Studies, State College of Washington, 25 (June, 1957), pp. 148–54Google Scholar.

41 McFarland (p. 86) suggests that comparative analysis might identify nonevents in a particular locality.

42 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958.

43 Vidich, and Bensman, , Small Town, pp. 112–23Google Scholar.

44 Small Town, p. 123. Vidich and Bensman go on to describe the anti-status quo activities of the Community Club, which was a means of prodding the village board to act. When the proponents of a specific measure mobilized enough support for it, the board responded favorably in order to avoid organization of an alternative slate of candidates who would threaten the tenure of the incumbent board members (ibid., pp. 128–36). In other words, the village board was moved by anticipated reactions.

45 Power and Poverty, p. 49 (emphasis in original). Parenti (p. 523) suggested a similar way to locate non-decisions: “Any widely felt deprivation discovered by the investigator that fails to become an issue because the deprived don't have the ability to force a confrontation may be considered a ‘non-issue.’” But Parenti did not pursue this point in his report of his research on Newark, which is limited to description of several controversies between the city administration and a tiny black neighborhood group organized by members (presumably white) of Students for a Democratic Society. During the thirty months of the organizing campaign, after which the group dissolved, “as many as 150 residents” participated in one way or another in all its activities (Parenti, p. 509).

46 Power and Poverty, p. 96. This sentence is virtually the only mention by Bachrach and Baratz of their findings from the sample survey of Baltimore residents, which they apparently did not rely on to discuss “overt grievances.”

47 See Dahl, Who Governs? ch. 26; and Wolfinger, ch. 5.

48 Ban, Carolyn, “The Party Activist, 1956–68” (Stanford: Stanford University unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1972)Google Scholar.

49 Schattschneider, E. E., The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 71Google Scholar.

50 Mancur Olson, Jr. has argued that abstention from collective political action may be rational behavior for any individual, since the likelihood that his own action will produce benefits to him is minimal. See The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

51 In Bachrach, and Baratz, , Power and Poverty (pp. 140–64)Google Scholar James R. Taylor's appendix on “Key Actors in Baltimore's Anti-Poverty Public” does not consider unions, political machines, civil rights groups, neighborhood organizations, or federal field offices; nor is there any discussion of why they were excluded. One assumes that some explicit or implicit theory led to these omissions.

52 “Two Faces of Power,” p. 948.

53 Power and Poverty, p. 43 (emphasis added).

54 Ibid., pp. 53, 56.

55 Cf. Merelman, pp. 453–54. There is no indication in Power and Poverty that the authors used their sample survey or unstructured interviewing of political actors to gather data on attitudes toward values, institutions, or procedures.

56 Power and Poverty, p. 58.

57 See, e.g., McClosky, Herbert, “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” The American Political Science Review, 58 (March, 1964), pp. 361–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dennis, Jack, “Support for the Party System by the Mass Public,”The American Political Science Review, 60 (September, 1966), pp. 600–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Dennis, p. 604.

59 Procedures that increase popular participation in decision making may also increase the probability that issues will be decided so as to maintain social or political inequality. For a discussion of this problem see Wolfinger, Raymond E. and Greenstein, Fred I., “The Repeal of Fair Housing in California: An Analysis of Referendum Voting,” The American Political Science Review, 62 (September, 1968), pp. 767–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 For data on the effect of nonpartisan ballots on the turnout of various groups see Salisbury, Robert H. and Black, Gordon, “Class and Party in Partisan and Non-Partisan Elections: The Case of Des Moines,” The American Political Science Review, 57 (September, 1963), pp. 584–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Eugene C., The Politics of Non-partisanship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960)Google Scholar; and Alford, Robert R. and Lee, Eugene C., “Voting Turnout in American Cities,” The American Political Science Review, 62 (September, 1968), pp. 796–813CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 The “inconsistency” of municipal governmental forms is discussed in Wolfinger, Raymond E. and Field, John Osgood, “Political Ethos and the Structure of City Government,” The American Political Science Review, 60 (June, 1966), pp. 312–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 “Two Faces of Power,” p. 949 (emphasis added).

63 Ibid., p. 952 (emphasis in original). Deutsch's recommended strategy is equally demanding: “… we may conclude that any study of the distribution of political power that does not include a detailed analysis of the origins and content of the community agenda must be adjudged incomplete” (p. 256).

64 Power and Poverty, p. 106. As a matter of fact, nowhere in this book is there even a fragmentary description of the distribution of public benefits and burdens in Baltimore. As with Parenti (pp. 507–508), who also criticized “pluralists” for focusing on processes as opposed to outputs, Bachrach and Baratz did not present data on who benefits. Here, as elsewhere, they failed to follow their own advice on how to do research on power. It is difficult to see how their empirical material differs from conventional narratives of political controversy and decision.

65 For data on these propositions see Wolfinger, ch. 1. See also Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, pp. 132–36.

66 Citations of many of these studies may be found in Fry, Brian R. and Winters, Richard F., “The Politics of Redistribution,” The American Political Science Review, 64 (June, 1970), pp. 508–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Coulter, Philip B., “Comparative Community Politics and Public Policy,” Polity, 3 (Fall, 1970), pp. 22–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 For data on output variations see, e.g., Fry and Winters, p. 515; and Sharkansky, ch. 6. Wolfinger and Field describe variations in the incidence and combinations of local governmental forms.

68 For specific examples of these commonplace observations see Fry and Winters, pp. 514–15.

69 Sharkansky, , Routines of Politics, pp. 92–93Google Scholar.

70 Fry and Winters, p. 515.

71 See Fry and Winters, pp. 511–15 for various cautions about the data.

72 A milestone in this field is Davvson, Richard E. and Robinson, James A., “Inter-Party Competition, Economic Variables and Welfare Policies in the American States,” Journal of Politics, 25 (May, 1963), pp. 265–89Google Scholar.

73 Hofferbert, Richard I., “The Relation between Public Policy and Some Structural and Environmental Variables in the American States,” The American Political Science Review, 60 (March, 1966), pp. 75, 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other studies have produced generally similar results. For a summary of research on this subject, see Grumm, John G., “The Effects of Legislative Structure on Legislative Performance,” in Hofferbert, Richard I. and Sharkansky, Ira, eds., State and Urban Politics (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), pp. 302–305Google Scholar. Grumm's article discusses the policy consequences of various kinds of legislative organization, i.e., of some “mobilizations of bias.” Like other scholars who have asked “What effects do the structures of political in-stitutions have on the performance of these institutions” (p. 298), he is able to deal with this question without recourse to the concepts of nondecisions and “power structures.”

74 Sharkansky, Ira, “Government Expenditures and Public Services in the American States,” The American Political Science Review, 61 (December, 1967), pp. 1066–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 For a discussion of failure to deal with these problems in one such study, see Wolfinger, Raymond E. and Field, John Osgood, “Communications,” The American Political Science Review, 62 (March, 1968), pp. 227–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 “Community Structure and Innovation: The Case of Public Housing,” The American Political Science Review, 64 (September, 1970), p. 859Google Scholar.

77 cf. Deutsch: “As long as that agenda continues to benefit the elite, therefore—and if an elite exists at all it is presumably because the agenda does favor it—it seems reasonable to expect that the elite will remain largely indifferent to the outcomes of community decisions” (p. 255).

78 For a brief description of the social bases of Wallace's support see Converse, Philip E.et al., “Continuity and Change in American Politics,” The American Political Science Review, 63 (December, 1969), pp. 1102–1103CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some of the mayoral elections are described in Wilson, James Q. and Wilde, Harold R., “The Urban Mood,” Commentary, October, 1969Google Scholar. Andrew Greeley explains this conservative populism this way: “From the perspective of the Polish TV watcher … on the northwest side of Chicago, the long-haired militants are evéry bit as much part of the Establishment as are the presidents of corporations. … They see the protesters and the militants as sons and daughters of the well-to-do, who have attended elite colleges and are supported financially by their parents through all their radical activity” (“The War and White Ethnic Groups: Turning Off ‘The People,’” The New Republic, June 27, 1970, p. 15Google Scholar).

79 See, e.g., Key, V. O. Jr., Southern Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949); and Matthews and ProthroGoogle Scholar.

80 No one seems to have found this failing in the work of those scholars who report cities dominated by small elites, although one would think that their work was equally vulnerable to the charge.

81 I am indebted to Lawrence E. Rose and Richard F. Winters for this point.

82 Cf. this comment by Ono (p. 52):

As a general model of politics in American society, the [“pluralist”] theory just presented cannot be challenged on a purely empirical basis. It is an in genious theory. To be sure we can point out certain tendencies in American society that seem to contradict its optimistic conclusions, but as long as we remain within the framework of purely “empirical” and “descriptive” analysis, we can never clarify the fundamental limitations of this general conception.

83 For a similar definition see Dahl, , Modem Political Analysis, Second Ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), p. 17Google Scholar.

84 Cf. Huitt, Ralph K., “The Outsider in the Senate: An Alternative Role,” The American Political Science Review, 55 (September, 1961), pp. 566–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 See Banfield's, Political Influence (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1961)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the pitfalls in trying to describe a “power structure,” see Who Governs? ch. 24.

86 Many specialists on power are pessimistic about its utility for field research. See Riker, p. 348; and March, James D., “The Power of Power,” in Easton, David, ed., Varieties of Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), p. 70Google Scholar. Dahl has written that “Power has turned out to be a concept that seems highly useful so long as one does not demand that it be defined.” See his “Power, Pluralism and Democracy: A Modest Proposal,” paper delivered at the 1964 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, p. 5.

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