Toward a Class-Dialectical Model of Power: An Empirical Assessment of Three Competing Models of Political Power

The paper outlines the characteristics of three competing models of political power: pluralist, elitist, and class-dialectic. The latter model has been neglected by mainstream sociology, particularly at the empirical level of the community. Using systematic case studies of five related political decisions, this study assesses the relative explanatory power of the three models. The analysis demonstrates that the class-dialectic model is highly useful and that it deserves to be treated as a serious guide to studies of political power. Over the last two decades a central issue within political sociology in the United States has been the debate over the relative merits of the pluralist and elitist models of the political system. A review of that debate is not the purpose of this paper. Rather, this work aims to accomplish two things. First, it develops a third model of the political system, a class-dialectical model, that has been largely obscured by the pluralist/elitist controversy. Second, this paper attempts to demonstrate empirically the cogency and explanatory power of the dialectic as compared with either pluralist or elitist interpretations. That the pluralist/elitist debate has