WHO GOVERNS?
Democracy and Power in an American City
Robert Alan Dahl
Yale University Press (1989)
(first published in 1961)

Winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for 1962.

"...The patricians had all the political resources they needed: wealth, social position, education, and a monopoly of public office: everything, in fact, except numbers—and popularity with the rank and file....

...New Haven, and for that matter the colony and the state of Connecticut, had been ruled for a century and a half by an elite, the 'Standing Order,' consisting of Congregational ministers, lawyers, and men of business, of whom the ministers had historically furnished most of the leadership. Like Connecticut itself, New Haven was a kind of Congregational theocracy in the trappings of primitive democracy....

...They were of one common stock and one religion, cohesive in their uniformly conservative outlook on all matters, substantially unchallenged in their authority, successful in pushing through their own policies, and in full control of such critical social institutions as the established religion, the educational system (not only all the schools but Yale as well), and even business enterprise. Both they and their opponents took their political supremacy as a fact. By 1800 they were so thoroughly accustomed to the habit of ruling that their response to the emerging challenge of Jeffersonian republicanism was a kind of shocked disbelief: a response immediately followed, however, by energetic efforts to stamp out the new political heresy root and branch." Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? (1989 paperback edition), Equality and Inequality in New Haven, Book 1. From Oligarchy to Pluralism, Chapter 2, "The Patricians," pp. 15-16

BOOK DESCRIPTION
THE READER'S CATALOG
"A classic study of how local American government really works, first published in 1961 and based on a study of New Haven politics."

PUBLISHER
Winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for 1962. The citation reads, in part: "Professor Dahl has illuminated a central question in political science, the problem of how men can govern themselves in complex societies, through the close and exhaustive tracing of the rubric of power in an American city. His book provides a dynamic, pluralist theory of local power structure....Who Governs? will become a classic reference for those seking an understanding of political behavior in modern urban environments under democratic regimes."

BOOK REVIEWS
Hugh Douglas Price, POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
"Anyone seriously concerned with current systematic political theory or with urban politics should read Who Governs? "

Heinz Eulau, AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
"I have no doubt that the book will join the classical community studies as a classic in its own right....A sophisticated and undogmatic treatise on democratic politics."

Duane Lockard, THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
"One of the most intriguing aspects of this work is its use of sociological methods in political research....Particularly important are his analyses of ethnic group politics, his demonstration of enormous changes in the governmental operations of the city with a change of mayor...and some provocative insights into the connection between the consensus on democratic ideals that permeates American society and the stability of the political system....This volume will become a landmark of American political science."

Lewis A. Coser, COMMENTARY
"A book which no one interested in politics can afford to ignore."