Community Power and Community Mobilization

The debate among sociologists and political scientists about community power structure was concerned primarily with questions of methodology and the appropriate imagery for describing the distribution of power in American communities. The question of what difference it made for a local community and its citizens, if any, whether power was narrowly concentrated or widely dispersed was seldom raised. Two alternative hypotheses relating the concentration of community power to community-mobilization are discussed. The first argues for a positive relationship between concentration of power and community-mobilization while the second argues the obverse of this hypothesis. A diffusion-of-power scale is constructed based on a content-analysis of thirty-one American communities that were the subject of decision-making studies, and this scale is related to community participation in four federal self-help programs—public housing, urban renewal, Model Cities, and the war on poverty. The results show that the cities in which power is most diffused have greater participation in these programs. An outline of some key concepts that may be most appropriate for explaining such findings is suggested.