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‘American Democracy Reconsidered’ - Some Comments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

K. Newton
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Extract

L. J. Sharpe's two-part article ('American Democracy Reconsidered’ in this Journal, III [1973], 1–28,129–68) is an important and controversial one. He questions many of the orthodox interpretations of American urban politics, suggests that some of the supposedly well-established observations about British and American contrasts may boil down to bits of conventional wisdom, and raises many points about social justice and democracy, which are at the centre of everyday practical politics but which sometimes slide from view in modern ‘value free‘ social science. The article will hopefully attract the critical attention of American writers, but meanwhile here are some reflections from a slightly different point of view on some of the themes of the article.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 1975 , pp. 123 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 Sharpe, , ‘American Democracy Reconsidered’, p. 158.Google Scholar

2 Dahl, Robert A., Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 229–30.Google Scholar

3 Dahl, Who Governs?.

4 Sayre, Wallace S. and Kaufman, Herbert, Governing New York City (New York: Norton, 1960).Google Scholar

5 Lockard, Duane, The Politics of State and Local Government, 2nd edn. (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1970), p. vii.Google Scholar

6 Lineberry, R. L. and Fowler, E. P., ‘Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities’, American Political Science Review, LXI (1967), 701–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adrian, Charles R., ‘Some General Characteristics of Nonpartisan Elections’, American Political Science Review, XLVI (1952), 766–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salisbury, Robert and Black, Gordon, ‘Class and Party in Partisan and Nonpartisan Elections’, American Political Science Review, LXII (1963), 587–98Google Scholar; Williams, Oliver P. and Adrian, Charles R., ‘The Insulation of Local Politics Under the Nonpartisan Ballot’, American Political Science Review, LIII (1959), pp. 587–97Google Scholar; Dye, Thomas R., Politics in States and Communities (Englewood Cliffs, N J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 276–7.Google Scholar

7 Williams, Oliver P., Metropolitan Political Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1971), p. 51.Google Scholar

8 Stephens, G. Ross, ‘The Power Grid of the Metropolis’, in Wirt, Frederick M., ed., Future Directions in Community Power Research (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of Governmental Studies 1971), p. 135.Google Scholar

9 This is a foreshortened version of an argument elaborated by Williams, Metropolitan Political Analysis, Chap. 6.

10 Kaplan, Harold, Urban Political Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 32.Google Scholar The argument that public political bodies in the United States are often too weak to control private organizations and interests is, of course, a central theme in Mcconnell, Grant, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1967)Google Scholar, and Lowi, Theodore J., The End of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1969).Google Scholar

11 Sayre, and Kaufman, , Governing New York City, pp. 657–99Google Scholar; Banfield, Edward C. and Wilson, James Q., City Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press and MIT Press, 1963), pp. 110–11Google Scholar; Banfield, Edward C., Big City Politics (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 84.Google Scholar In Los Angeles, according to Edward Banfield, Mayor Yorty was forced to resort to publicity as a way of trying to overcome the near powerlessness of the mayor which is caused by an even more extreme form of decentralization and fragmentation than is found in New York.

12 Studies of the political activity of a whole range of voluntary organizations are exceptional. Banfield and Wilson's City Politics has chapters on city employees’ associations, businessmen, trade unions, and Negro associations. Sayre and Kaufman's Governing New York City has a rather short and inconclusive chapter on nongovernmental groups. Presthus, Robert, Men at the Top (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, has the most complete and systematic examination of group politics of any of the community power and urban politics studies, but even this is brief and sketchy by comparison with the great theoretical weight given to groups and associations. As a recent and extensive bibliography on the subject says, ‘For the most part the field is still underdeveloped and the available information is scanty’; Constance Smith, Constance and Freedman, Anne, Voluntary Associations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. vii.Google Scholar There is a great deal of work on the individuals who join organizations (liberal individualism again!), but remarkably little on the organizations they join. There are, of course, many pressure group studies, but they tend to concentrate on one rather special issue or one special group, and do not attempt to give a general, overall picture of the political world of a whole range of voluntary organizations.

13 This point has been made about the community power literature by Anton, Thomas J. ‘Power, Pluralism, and local Politics’, Administrative Science Quarterly, VII (1963), 448–57.Google Scholar