POL 3910:
HONORS SEMINAR: AMERICAN POLITICS:
THE ELITIST-PLURALIST DEBATE
Fall 2003

Term Paper

The term paper should be a 15-20 page essay on some aspect of the elitist-pluralist debate and/or the nature of power and/or the structure of power in a specific social unit.  As with all your assignments, please follow this standard writing format.

Here is a list of some possible topics.  I give them not to say this is what you should write about but rather to indicate the range and variety of possibilities.  I encourage you to think of your own topic.

• Philosophical/theoretical
  • Trace the history of different conceptions of power.
  • Contrast Hannah Arendt's conception of power with other conceptions of power.  (One can look at this — stereotypically, but not unreasonably — as a contrast between "female" and "male" conceptions of power — "power to" vs. "power over".)
  • Clarence Stone's Regime Politics was a study of Atlanta that introduced the concept of an "urban regime".  Read Stone's work plus others' subsequent work in that tradition and use these to describe the nature of Stone's concept.  Think of it as creating a lecture that might be given in a course like ours.
  • Robert Dahl's Who Governs? introduced the concept of "pluralism", which became political science's dominant understanding of power.  How has that concept been revised during the 40 years since its introduction?
  • How have psychologists understood "power"?  What have been their findings about the psychologies of powerful people.
    • What aspects of h/her psychology makes a person powerful?
    • What psychology (or psychopathology) makes a person pursue power?  Contrariwise, what makes a person fear to pursue power?
    • What kinds of psychological characteristics (or psychopathologies) are created by being powerful?  Contrariwise, what are created by being weak?
  • I stopped paying close attention to the community power literature about fifteen years ago, feeling that elitists and pluralists had become stalemated.  Report on what has been happening in the literature during these past years.  Is anyone doing any studies any more?  Has anyone developed new methods any more?  Have Dahl's findings been replicated, whether in New Haven or elsewhere?
  • There are a number of quantitative algorithms to analyze sociograms (data about interaction patterns within a group of people).  What are they?  What are their relative merits and demerits?
• Power structures of specific social units
  • Study the power structure of a specific social unit — a city, a firm, a fraternity, an academic department, a bridge club, whatever.  It should be small enough so that you can meet the necessary number of people, it should be accessible to you, it should have some sort of necessity for power, and it should be a unit I have no stake in learning about.  You could use any of a number of analytical methods:  formal analysis (legislation, constitution, by-laws), Hunter's reputational method, Dahl's decisional method, etc.  Note that if you want to interview people, you need to fill out an application to the university's human subjects committee.  (I will help you.)  Here are some aspects and/or types of power to consider:
    • Power as quantity:  formal vs. informal power;  coercive power;  legitimate power;  expert power;  personal power (e.g., charm, charisma); reward power;  information power;  moral power (i.e., the power inherent in having and supporting inherently good ideas)
    • Power as relationship:  the power to direct attention to this or that issue;  agenda-setting power / nondecisionmaking power;  the power of unity within a group of similarly-minded people;  the power of a shared ideology or perspective
  • Study a specific decision in a community.  Here, for example, is an editorial about power being used to block the construction of a homeless shelter in Atlanta:  http://aspin.asu.edu/hpn/archives/Dec98/0405.html
  • There has been a bit of research into the structure of power in science.  Here is one tidbit;  see esp. the second section, "The Power Structure of Science":  http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/92prom.html.  Here is another:  N. Gilbert (1997). A simulation of the structure of academic science. Sociological Research Online  2(2).
  • Archbishop: Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church by Thomas J. Reese, S.J. discusses — surprise! — the power structure of the American Catholic Church.  He states in his introduction that this account "is not an attempt to describe the Spirit working in the church", but this raises the question of whether social science is capable of including such a description.  After all, if the workings of the Spirit have some real consequence, they must be observable to some extent.  How do we handle this (or, more generally, how do we deal with the role of morality in power)?  The text of the book appears at http://www.americamagazine.org/reese/archbishop/ab-content.htm.
  • Investigate the proposition, "Men constitute a power elite in U.S. society."  This will involve both a theoretical investigation of what constitutes an elite and an empirical investigations of the nature of gender relations in our society.

Here are some ideas to go with the specific subfields of political science:

• American government and politics
  • Examine the power relationship between presidents and vice-presidents.  What are the varieties of relationships?  What are the underlying power considerations?  How have all these changed over time?  [Thanks to William for suggesting this.]
• Public policy
  • What are the characteristics of the powerful?  (They tend to be male, older, wealthier, better educated, longer resident in their community.)  Do these characteristics differ from issue to issue?
  • Here is an example of a power study on a specific policy:  Flood Policy on the Chehalis River in Lewis County, Washington: Who Makes the Decisions? <http://www.crcwater.org/issues11/20001006index.html>
• Comparative politics
  • ??
• International studies
  • ??

Here are some random research works that might provide a springboard for your thinking:

• Using email patterns to identify corporate power structures <http://www.zdnet.com.au/itmanager/trends/story/0,2000029592,20273141,00.htm> and <http://www.nature.com/nsu/030317/030317-5.html>

I obtained much of the above simply by googling "community power structure research", which brought up several million hits.  If you wanted ideas, you could do the same.

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