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Urban Politics and Markets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Roger King
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Extract

The study of urban politics has undergone considerable change over the last ten to fifteen years. During the 1950s and 1960s the ‘community power’ approach became well-established in American political science as the dominant form of analysis of local politics, although it was less marked in Britain. In contrast, and in part as reaction, to the ecological determinism and naturalistic explanation of the Chicago school in urban sociology that preceded it, power and decision making were seen as key features in explaining urban processes. Intentionality and human action were afforded explanatory dominance. In turn, however, this approach came under sustained critique as part of the ‘anti-behaviouralist’ or structuralist resurgence in Western social science in the 1970s which attributed causal primacy to structural determination and system contradictions, not actors or voluntarism. Yet structural approaches face methodological problems of functionalism and circularity, and in constructing tests of empirical adequacy and falsifiability. Some of the more interesting, recently-published work in urban politics seeks to maintain a non-behaviouralist, more structuralist interpretation of local policy outcomes within empirically-grounded analyses that allow space for politics and power. Dunleavy, Friedland and Saunders provided three of the best examples of such an approach, and have each sought to understand either a particular policy, or a set of policies in a particular locality, through frameworks which in varying degrees incorporate structuralist assumptions. They seek to apply objective cost-benefit analyses of public policies as empirically refutable hypotheses and accept the necessity of objective criteria for assessing whether or not interests have been met in any given situation. This article examines the extent to which these selected ‘non-behaviouralist’ interpretations of urban politics have successfully been applied to empirical contexts. A central element in this examination is a consideration of the way in which business is seen as a major influence in local politics.

Type
Review Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 1985 , pp. 255 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 Dunleavy, Patrick, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Friedland, Roger, Power and Crisis in the City (London: Macmillan 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saunders, Peter, Urban Politics (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1980).Google Scholar

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8 See, for example, Wilson, G., Interest Groups in the United States (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).Google Scholar

9 See, for example, King, R., ‘The Political Practice of Local Capitalist Association’, in King, R., ed., Capital and Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 107–31.Google Scholar

10 See, for example, the pieces in Schmitter, P. and Lehmbruch, G., eds., Trends Toward Corporaiist Intermediation (London: Heinemann, 1982).Google Scholar

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16 Saunders, , Urban Politics, p. 22.Google Scholar

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