The rise of American pluralism

In the post-war period pluralism (what some call interest group pluralism) became the dominant paradigm in US political science and had a considerable impact on the analysis of politics in the rest of the world.

As pluralist theory developed, however, it transformed from a norma­tive theory - this is how things should be - to an empirical theory - analysing how power is distributed. It then became, in the words of Merelman (2003: 18), a legitimizing discourse: ‘That is, they support the claims American political leaders typically make to justify their power’. Pluralist theorist in post-war America confused normative claims with empirical reality. Pluralists desired a state limited by multiple power centres and the influence of groups and this was their perception of politics in post-war America. Consequently, the US pluralist theory of the state was actually a model of how they believed American politics operated and, in a manner similar to the way in which the works of Walter Bagehot and Sir Ivor Jennings legitimized executive sovereignty in Britain, the pluralists legiti­mized the US political system.

The key elements of pluralist state theory are well summarized by Dahl (1963: 325):

Important government policies would be arrived at through negotiation, bargaining, persuasion and pressure at a considerable number of different sites in the political system - the Whitehouse, the bureaucracies, the labyrinth of committees in Congress, the federal and state courts, the state legislatures and the executives, the local governments. No single organized political interest, party, class, region or ethnic groups would control all of these sites.

For pluralists the state was fragmented into multiple power centres and check points. According to Dahl (1963: 327), ‘Neither the executive, the House nor the Senate is monolithic.’ It is impossible for any single actor to control all of these centres and any over-powerful interest will be constrained by other elements of the system. For Dahl, it is rare ‘for any coalition to carry out its policies without having to bargain, negotiate and compromise with its oppo­nents; often, indeed, it wins a victory in one institution only to suffer defeat in another’. Powerful groups are likely to be constained by countervailing powers (Galbraith 1963). If there are no countervailing groups, they will be checked by ‘potential groups’ (Truman 1951a).

Underpinning the modern democratic system then are three core principles: first, is the centrality of groups to the political process; second, is the way in which power is dispersed between different power centres and third, is the degree of consensus underlying the political process. Consensus, which was a core concept in the work of the early American pluralist Mary Follet, plays a key role in post-war pluralism. For pluralists the fundamental features of US politics are agreed. Political conflicts are not about the boundaries of the system, they are usually about the distribution of resources within the system (Dahl 1963: 329-40). In addition, consensus is a sign of agreement. Or more critically, the lack of political opposition is seen as a sign of agreement.

The American pluralists constructed a benign notion of the state. Like Ivor Jennings in Britain, they confuse the constitution with the actual practice of politics. Institutional fragmentation means that the state is open to a wide array of interests. Perhaps most importantly power is not only fragmented but non-cumulative. Success in one area does not lead to success in other areas.

However the dominance and complacency of American pluralism was short-lived. Whilst the ink was still drying on Dahl’s claim (1963: 24) that, ‘The theory and practice of American pluralism tend to assume that the existence of multiple centers of power, none of which is wholly sovereign will help (may indeed be necessary) to tame power, to secure the consent of all, and to settle conflicts peacefully’, blacks in the South were being killed for demanding their political and civil rights. The point where the Yale school thought pluralism was firmly established in the US was the point when its limitations were becoming apparent. During the 1960s and 1970s pluralism was subject to both an empirical and academic critique.

Empirically many of the assumptions concerning pluralism were challenged by the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war move­ments of the 1960s. The civil rights movement illustrated that a group with a forceful grievance was excluded from the political protest. Despite the apparent pluralism of the American system, there were considerable barriers to political participation. Robert Putnam’s response to the assassi­nation of Martin Luther King, and the riots that followed, captures the pluralist impasse: ‘What that glow in the sky on that evening of the Martin Luther King assassination conveyed was a sense that there was something happening in American politics that was not encompassed by the conceptual framework that we were all working with’ (Merelman 2003: 211-12). In many ways the Vietnam War was a greater challenge to pluralism. It undermined any claim that American politics was based on consensus. The anti-war protest refuted the idea of a shared sense of US politics and society-wide agreement over the form of the political system.

The collapse of the consensus fed into a number of academic critiques of pluralism. First, rather than there being a consensus, what pluralism was presenting was a Cold War inspired view of the American system. The picture of a perfect functioning democracy, differentiating power and open to all interests was hiding a process of manipulation, exclusion and elite domi­nance. This was Merelman’s legitimizing discourse, intent on demonstrating the superiority of the American system. Second, the Vietnam War and civil rights movement, and the more radical women’s and gay movements that followed, undermined the notion there was a general acceptance of values in society (see Lockwood 1964). Indeed, the period since the 1960s has seen a considerable bifurcation of beliefs in the US between say those who support notion of gay marriage and the fundamentalist Christian Right.

Third, Bachrach and Baratz (1962) and Lukes (1974) highlighted the way in which notion of consensus can be manipulated in the political process. Lukes and Bachrach and Baratz were also critical of the pluralist dependence in behavioural methodology derived from Bentley. Pluralism was based on observable power not the way hidden structures and ideas shape the political agenda (Polsby 1980: 4; Polsby 1960: 477). The work of Lukes highlighted the structural mechanisms that meant that consensus often covered forms of coercion. As Merelman (2003: 99) boldly states, a combination of social change and theoretical critique meant that: ‘By the early 1970s, pluralism had been dethroned at Yale.’