Page 28 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

14 Changing Definitions of Politics and Power

society (Smith, 1995 : 211). For this reason, they avoid the term, preferring
to think in terms of government. Similarly, the “ people ” in a democracy

is not a unified whole with a single will to be exerted, far less an apathetic,
incompetent mass which needs to be ruled by an elite. Democratic politics

involves endless bargaining in order to influence government policy, which
is nothing more than a compromise between the differing interest groups
involved in the political process (Dowse and Hughes, 1972 : 135).
In response to their critics, pluralists have revised what has been taken
as na ï ve view of the openness of liberal democratic politics. Neo - pluralists
see elites, and especially corporate elites, as having a greater degree of

influence than other groups on government policy; they take it that this
may not be openly and visibly exerted in the political process and that

it may constrain the effective influence of other interest groups (Held,
1987 : 202). In this respect, in neo - pluralism, there is a convergence
between neo - Marxism, pluralism, and radical elite theory (Marsh, 1995 ).
However, neo - pluralists do not fully endorse the presuppositions of elite

theory; instead, they argue that the elite are not unified, nor are they
capable of manipulating and deceiving the citizens into accepting elite
rule. On the pluralist view, elites must be seen as existing only insofar
as they are genuinely responsive to the interest groups they purport to
serve (Dowse and Hughes, 1972 : 138). Neo - pluralists also depart from
the assumptions of neo - Marxists: although business may on occasion
subvert the democratic process, this is a contingent matter; politics at the
level of the state is primary and so it cannot be the case that the state is
ultimately driven by the interests of any particular group, including the
capitalist class.
Although pluralists take a wide view of politics as central to social life
and independent of the state, ultimately they share the defi nition of poli-
tics held by classical political sociologists. Pluralists are interested in the
plurality of interest groups which form and re - form in the social only
insofar as they orient their demands to governmental institutions. Although
the state is seen as little more than the arena in which social groups engage

in political conflict, it is only insofar as these confl icts take place at the
level of the state that they are treated as political (McClure, 1992 : 118 –

19). By definition, for pluralists there is no politics outside the state.

This limited pluralist definition of politics is linked to a restricted defi -
nition of power which, although wider than that of other schools in
traditional political sociology, nevertheless makes it impossible to see the
construction and contestation of social identities as political. Famously,

Dahl ( 1956 : 13) defines power as “ a realistic … relationship, such as A ’ s
capacity for acting in such a manner as to control B ’ s responses. ” This