“Write short note: Community Power.” (2002, 1990)
Community power is the capacity of individuals, groups and institutions to shape binding decisions within a local, territorially bounded unit such as a town, city or village. Its structure is the relatively stable pattern in which that capacity is distributed. The concept grew out of American political sociology in the 1950s, when the local community became a manageable laboratory for the national question raised by C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956): is power concentrated or dispersed?
The founding debate
| Floyd Hunter (Community Power Structure, 1953) | Robert A. Dahl (Who Governs?, 1961) | |
|---|---|---|
| Site | “Regional City” (Atlanta) | New Haven, Connecticut |
| Method | Reputational: informed residents name who “really runs” the city | Decisional: trace who initiated, vetoed or won concrete decisions |
| Issues | Urban renewal, sales tax | Redevelopment, public education, party nominations |
| Finding | A small, cohesive business elite made policy; politicians enacted it | Different groups prevailed in different issue areas; dispersed inequalities |
| Model | Elitist, pyramidal | Pluralist (polyarchy) |
- Nelson W. Polsby (Community Power and Political Theory, 1963) objected that the reputational method measures a reputation for power, not its exercise, and presupposes the hierarchy it then “discovers”.
- A third, positional method identifies incumbents of top offices in business, government and civic bodies, but assumes that office equals influence.
Beyond visible decisions
- Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz (“Two Faces of Power”, 1962) argued that Dahl saw only issues that reached the agenda. Power also works through non-decision-making: a mobilisation of bias keeps threatening issues off the agenda altogether.
- Steven Lukes (Power: A Radical View, 1974) added a third dimension, shaping people’s very wants so that grievances never surface. A quiet community is not necessarily a pluralist one.
- Later work asked how governing coalitions are built. Harvey Molotch (“The City as a Growth Machine”, 1976) placed land-based elites at the centre of urban politics. Clarence N. Stone (Regime Politics, 1989), returning to Atlanta, showed that elected leaders govern only by forging durable regimes with business, which controls the resources needed to get things done.
Indian application
- M. N. Srinivas’s dominant caste in Rampura is India’s closest analogue to Hunter’s pyramid. Numerical strength, landownership and fairly high ritual rank gave one caste control over dispute settlement, the village panchayat and links with outside officials.
- Urban India shows how elected bodies can hold formal authority while effective power lies elsewhere. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s 2024 compendium of audits on the 74th Amendment in 18 states found that urban local bodies raised only 32% of their revenue themselves. They also enjoyed complete autonomy over just four devolved functions. Decisions on land, water and transport therefore rest largely with state departments and parastatal development authorities, the arena where Molotch’s growth coalitions operate.
Conclusion
Community power studies tended to find what their methods allowed: reputational studies found elites, decisional studies found pluralism. Their lasting lesson is methodological. Power has to be traced across its visible, agenda-setting and ideological faces, and every local structure has to be read within the wider state and economy that shapes it.