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Systemic Power in Community Decision Making: A Restatement of Stratification Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Clarence N. Stone
Clarence N. Stone*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
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Abstract

In their continued considerations of political inequality, urban scholars are especially concerned with less visible influences surrounding community decision making, and have employed such concepts as potential power, nondecision making, and anticipated reactions. However, these concepts leave some patterns of influence unexplained. There is also a dimension of power in which durable features of the socioeconomic system confer advantages and disadvantages on groups in ways that predispose public officials to favor some interests at the expense of others. Public officials make their decisions in a context in which strategically important resources are hierarchically arranged. Because this system of stratification leaves public officials situationally dependent on upper-strata interests, it is a factor in all that they do. Consequently, system features lower the opportunity costs of exerting influence for some groups and raise them for others. Thus socioeconomic inequalities put various strata on different political footings.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , December 1980 , pp. 978 - 990
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1980

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