Policy-making in Postwar Britain: A Nation-level Test of Elitist and Pluralist Hypotheses

Abstract

In the study of power structures, whether of the local community or the national society, three main approaches have been proposed: the reputational, the sociology of leadership and the issue approaches. Of these the least popular in practice is the last-named, which would attempt to discover ‘who rules?’ through an analysis of actual decision-making in a series of issues. This is particularly true of studies of national power, where evidence on how high-level political decisions were made is cited only to illustrate or exemplify an argument.² Although some studies of local community power have relied primarily on the issue method, studies of national power have almost invariably utilized the sociology of leadership method,³ and no systematic comparative analysis of a sample of national issues has been made. Since even those writers like Bachrach and Baratz who have raised objections to ‘the assumption that power is totally embodied and fully