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 investment in order to have an economically thriving community; and 2) businesses control politically important resources and are rarely absent totally from the scene: "They may work through intermediaries, or some businesses may even be passive because others represent their interests as property holders, but a business presence is always part of the urban political scene" (7).
It is this fact that gives business interests much of their political power. Put another ...