A Macat Analysis of Robert A. Dahl's Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City

Robert A. Dahl argues that American liberal democracy is a pluralist system in which policy is not, as you might think, shaped by a small group of powerful individuals. Rather, power is distributed among several competing groups, with each of these groups seeking to influence decisions. Dahl provides evidence for this by making a case study of the decision-making process in New Haven, Connecticut, where only the mayor has power in all areas. The city's "highly competitive two-party system" leads Dahl to view the entire United States as New Haven writ large. A key text of pluralist democratic theory, the thinking that dominated the way America studied the notion of power in the late 1950s and 1960s.