Power in New Haven: A Reassessment of ‘Who Governs?’

One of the issues that has dominated American political science in the last twenty years has been the debate between those who assert that America is ruled by an elite, and those who believe that the pluralist model is a more accurate description. Robert Dahl, who is the most influential of the pluralists, has attacked ‘elitists’ on two fronts: negatively, he has argued that they misperceive the nature of power and are sloppy in their criteria for determining a ruling elite; positively, in Who Governs? ,he has attempted to apply his own conceptualization of power to an American community and thus give empirical backing to the pluralist model.