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Rejoinder to Frey's “Comment”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Raymond E. Wolfinger
Raymond E. Wolfinger*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

Professor Frey and I seem to be in agreement on several points: (1) The research procedures proposed by Bachrach and Baratz are unsatisfactory. (2) Worrying about criteria of issue selection is unnecessary; policy formation can usefully be studied issue by issue. Indeed, I would add that typologies of issues are one of the more promising developments in the study of politics. (3) The notion of nondecisions is not a club with which to belabor Who Governs? in particular or “pluralists” in general. Frey has performed a considerable service by rescuing the idea of nondecisions from the ideologically tinged context in which its advocates generally have discussed it. (4) Analysts of policy formation who limit their attention to overt conflict miss many exercises of power. (5) The pluralist-elitist dichotomy is not a useful distinction.

The last two points call for further discussion. I do not know of any researcher who has disputed the fourth point. In his study of New Haven, Dahl employed three indices of power, “of roughly the same strength.” One of these was: “When a proposal initiated by one or more of the participants is adopted without opposition.”

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 1102 - 1104
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1971

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References

1 For the best known and most influential issue typology see Lowi, Theodore J., “Distribution, Regulation, Redistribution: The Functions of Government,” in Ripley, Randall B., ed., Public Policies and Their Politics (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1966), pp. 27–40Google Scholar.

2 Dahl, Robert A., Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 332–33Google Scholar.

3 Lists of definitions of “pluralism” are given in Polsby, Nelson W., “ ‘Pluralism’ in the Study of Community Power, Or, Erklarung Before Verklarung in Wissenssoziologie,” The American Sociologist, 4 (May, 1969), 118–22Google Scholar; and in my The Politics of Progress (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), Chap. 1Google Scholar.

4 Who Governs? pp. 34–36; Parenti, “Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification,” American Political Science Review, 61 (September, 1967), 717–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfinger, , “The Development and Persistence of Ethnic Voting,” American Political Science Review, 59 (December, 1965), 896–908CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wolfinger, , “Some Consequences of Ethnic Politics,” in Zeigler, Harmon and Jennings, M. Kent, eds., The Electoral Process (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), pp. 42–54Google Scholar.

5 Polsby, , “Toward an Explanation of McCarthyism,” in Polsby, , Dentler, Robert A., and Smith, Paul A., eds., Politics and Social Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963), pp. 809–24Google Scholar; Bell, Daniel, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion Books, 1955)Google Scholar; and Rogin, Michael P., The Intellectuals and McCarthy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

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