Logan on Molotch and Molotch on Logan: Notes on the Growth Machine-Toward a Comparative Political Economy of Place

Abstract

For years the study of urban politics was burdened by the theoretically sterile debate over the degree of concentration of power in American cities. Researchers from both sides implicitly presumed that cities were relatively homogeneous in their pattern of politics, to the point that one analyst attributed variations in the results of case studies simply to methodological differences (Walton 1966). It was therefore an important breakthrough when Terry Clark (1968) initiated a program of comparative studies in which he took seriously the possibility of real political differences among communities. From the functionalist perspective taken by Clark, the power structure is expected to be differentiated ("decentralized") according to the social differentiation of the urban community. Large, heterogeneous cities have less centralized power structures than small, homogeneous cities; urban growth is expected to create more pluralistic structures of power as new interests develop and are accommodated within the political system. Fundamental to this model (and to that of the pluralists with whom Clark's work is theoretically consistent) is the conception of power as influence over a series of loosely related discrete decisions in a variety of issue areas. Clark identified five such areas, ranging from mayoral elections to air pollution controls; Dahl (1961) studied three. "Decentralization" is operationally defined in terms of the number of types of interests which participate in decision making in these areas and the degree of overlap in influential persons and organizations among areas. "The City as a Growth Machine" (Molotch 1976) challenges the premise and hence the conclusions of the functionalist model. Molotch asserts that "the political and economic essence of virtually any given locality, in the present American context, is growth," and therefore that "growth is not ... merely one among a number of equally important concerns of political process" (pp. 309-10, 313). This same identification of one type of issue as the "big issue" of municipal politics can be found in Hunter (1954) -he also emphasized the issue of growth-and I propose that it is this conceptual step on which Hunter's interpretation of politics is based. From this position, the "decentralization" which Clark associates with growth is irrelevant to the essence of the urban political economy. Rather, growth is the result of the usurpation of political control by unrepresentative landbased local elites and is the source of their continuing coherence as a power bloc.