Regime Politics
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Clarence N. Stone in Regime Politics uses the city of Atlanta as a case study illustrating the state of politics in American cities today and the dynamics of race as it operates in the urban political environment. At the outset, Stone makes it clear that there is a partnership between the formal machinery of government and city government, indicating that economic power and political power are closely related to one another. It is this informal partnership that constitutes the regime of the city as Stone views the matter. A regime is any informal and relatively stable group that comes together to make a decision and that has access to institutional resources that enable it to have a sustained role in making decisions about governance. Such a group has a purposive coordination of efforts but no formal structure of command guiding everyone's behavior. What Stone says about the urban structure in Atlanta is echoed in different from by Robert A. Dahl in Who Governs? with reference to the city of New Haven, Connecticut. The types of problems and political structures these two writers discern are part and parcel of urban life today.One of the consequences of the informal partnership that constitutes the regime of the city is that the economically disadvantaged groups in society are also the politically disadvantaged groups. Stone offers two reasons for concentrating on business interests in examining the political regime: 1) there is a need to encourage business investmen
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the institutions and processes of industrial society in such a way that there was a dispersion of political resources. This was a change from the existing centralization of power, but it did not eradicate political inequality. Political resources in the oligarchical past were marked by cumulative inequality: "when one individual was much better off than another in one resource, such as wealth, he was usually better off in almost every other resource--social standing, legitimacy, control over religious and educational institutions, knowledge, office" (85). Today, however, inequalities in political resources are noncumulative, and this means a political system of dispersed inequalities. While this means a pluralist system, it does not mean a system of political equality.
Inequalities occur not only on the basis of strict economic difference but also on the basis of race, and Atlanta as Stone sees it shows this clearly. As Stone describes the situation, gains made by minority groups are singular rather than part of a long-term and deep-seated change. To the degree that this group can gain economic power, it can gain political power. This does not necessarily mean the accumulation of resources in the way that the business com
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Approximate Word count = 1535
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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