Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:02:36.575Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Pluralist Case Not Proven: Hewitt on Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Peter Morriss
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is some fifteen years since Dahl and his associates inaugurated the ‘issue’ approach to studying power; it is therefore somewhat surprising that two recent articles by Christopher Hewitt1 comprise the first attempt at applying this method to Britain. But over the past decade and a half Dahl's approach has come in for some severe criticisms; it is unfortunate that Hewitt does not update the method to meet some of these criticisms - indeed his articles are, in some respects, a step backwards from Dahl.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , July 1975 , pp. 385 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hewitt, C. J., ‘Policy-making in Postwar Britain: a Nation-level Test of Elitist and Pluralist Hypotheses’, British Journal of Political Science, IV (1974), 187–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power in British Society’, in Stanworth, P. and Giddens, A., eds., Elites and Power in British Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974)Google Scholar present the same research in slightly different manners.

2 Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M. S., ‘Two Faces of Power’, American Political Science Review LVI (1962), 947–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytical Framework’, American Political Science Review, LVII (1963), 632–42.Google Scholar

3 Figures vary from approximately 600 deaths a year of the Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories (which excludes deaths through diseases contracted at work) to the 3,000 a year of Pat Kinnersly. ‘In 1971 the Inspectorate [of Factories] itself reported that nearly one in three deaths in factory processes was due to the employer's criminal act. In construction, the employer broke the law in more than half the cases where a man was killed.’ Kinnersly, P., Hazards of Work (London: Pluto Press, 1973), p. 225.Google Scholar Fines for such breaches of the law have been derisory; one recent example may be quoted: ‘Imperial Metal Industries were fined £10 yesterday at Birmingham for an offence which last year caused the explosion in their Birmingham factory in which six workers died’: The Guardian, 29 June 1974, p. 4.

4 Geraint Parry and Peter Morriss, ‘When is a Decision not a Decision?’, in Crewe, I., ed., Elites in Western Democracy, British Political Sociology Yearbook, Vol. I (London: Croom Helm, 1974).Google Scholar

5 Hewitt, , ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’ p. 50.Google Scholar My emphasis.

6 Hewitt, , ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’, p. 45;Google Scholar ‘Policy-making in Postwar Britain’, p. 193.

7 I am here entirely in agreement with Hewitt's comment that ‘To a great extent the “pluralism” of the power structure depends upon the unit of analysis that one chooses to adopt’. ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’, p. 52.

8 Hewitt, , ‘Policy-making in Postwar Britain’, pp. 211–212, 213Google Scholar; ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’, pp. 58, 60.

9 See, for example, Finer’s, consideration of the decision on ‘C’ licenses within the general issue of the nationalization of road haulage, in his ‘The Political Power of Private Capital – II’, Sociological Review, IV (1956) pp. 9–10 and fn. 15.Google Scholar Road haulage is one of Hewitt’s issues in his ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’.

10 Table 8 of ‘Policy-making in Postwar Britain’, and Table 4 of ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’.

11 Ten out of twenty-four in ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’.

12 See Lieber, R. J., British Politics and European Unity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), Chap. 5, partic. p. 115Google Scholar. In fact, Lieber describes the unions as sympathetic to entry, although unimportant; the reason Britain did not enter, according to Lieber, was the opposition of the National Farmers’ Union – not, despite its name, a trade union but an employers’ organizaation – aided by the inability of the Conservative leadership to make up its mind and commit itself.

13 Hewitt does distinguish between involvement and significant involvement; the latter is ambiguous, however, in that it includes groups whose involvement was significant to the outcome of the issue, but also groups for whom the issue was significant but who were, in fact, irrelevant.

14 This elite is not considered in ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’.

15 Hewitt, in a footnote, refers to Epstein, Leon, British Politics in the Suez Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), p. 169.Google Scholar Here Epstein mentions, as an aside in the section on the media, that ‘the great bulk of British citizens were unrestrained in publicizing their opinions during the crisis… [This] can be guessed from the flow of individual letters to newspapers in the first weeks of November. Letters to The Times, as always, constituted a major opinion-giving medium. Now, however, all newspapers were flooded with letters of opinion on Suez’. One has to read a lot into this remark to see letters to The Times as evidence of elite opinion. A few pages earlier, Epstein had written: ‘The impression to be gathered from the policies of The Economist and the Spectator, when taken along with those of the Guardian and the Observer, is that opinion of what may be called the liberal, humanitarian sub-Establishment [my emphasis - PM] was anti-Suez.’ So Epstein does not support Hewitt on this point.

16 Parry, G., Political Elites (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), p. 87.Google Scholar

17 As is implied in ‘Policy-making in Postwar Britain’, pp. 204, 206–7; ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’, pp. 53–4.

18 ‘Policy-making in Postwar Britain’, p. 214; ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’, p. 61.

19 ‘Policy-making in Postwar Britain’, pp. 197–8, at p. 198; ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power’, pp. 57–8, at p. 57.

20 This need not equate the media with propaganda. For the powerful effects of selective information on a rational man, see Bartlett, R., Economic Foundations of Political Power (New York: Free Press, 1973).Google Scholar