Preemptive Power: Floyd Hunter's "Community Power Structure" Reconsidered

Much of the analysis of community power has occurred within a cost of compliance paradigm. The character of this conceptualization of power leads inevitably to pluralist conclusions and results in a misreading of Floyd Hunter's Community Power Structure. The alternative conception presented here, one of preemptive power, allows a restating of Hunter's argument and enables us to see how power in a complex community can at the same time be fragmented (as seen through a command and compliance prism) and concentrated (in the form of preemptive occupancy of a strategic role). The concept of preemptive power also provides a way of comparing power in Atlanta during the initial era studied by Hunter with the current era of the mid- i98os. In a context of profound social and political change, such a comparison reveals continuities and modifications in the power position of business. Bachrach and Baratz (1970) were surely right in suggesting that there are two faces of power. Yet their concept of nondecision making has never fully fended off its critics. When Bachrach and Baratz applied their ideas in an examination of poverty in Baltimore, their analysis proved vulnerable to the charge that it was not so much a study of nondecision making as an account of how ideological and institutional change ultimately did alter the structure of power in that city. Defenders of pluralism have thus argued that either nondecision making is not all that different from decision making or that it is unresearchable (Polsby, I980; Wolfinger, 1971). Yet, despite these criticisms, many observers continue to believe that Bachrach and Baratz were on the right track in treating power as having more than one face.