Regime Politics - Ch. 8

Using Atlanta as the case, it is a study of how a city government makes its policy outputs. The author's basic assertion is that it is the political concerns of internal coalition building among selected group of elites (notably business elites) that is the most important driving factor of city politics. Other potential explanations, as straight elite domination, pluralism in the form of numerous veto groups, majoritarian influence through the ballot box, and apolitical economic enhancement - are all downplayed as determinants of policy outputs. Particularly of the last, the concern with simple economic competition, Stone notes the following: "Policy outputs are thus best understood as emanating, not from an abstraction called the logic of market competition, but from efforts of the partners in a governing coalition to mobilize a supporting constituency and preserve the cohesion of the coalition itself" (p. 174).

What sort of coalition is of especially important concern to the elites who have access to some amount of political power? Of this, Stone seems to claim that the unity of business elites, as well as the "investor prerogative", is one of the crucial concern within the processes of political coalition formation. In this process, the CAP is identified as one key organization as it lets the business community express "unified interests" through it. This is possible, in part because there is a fairly well accepted order of hierarchy among private business establishments and the smaller businesses are reluctant to openly challenge the big guys. Further, CAP is small enough to permit plenty of interpersonal interaction, which itself promotes group unity - another evidence that coalitional building among the selected group of elites is taking place. CAP wants to avoid issues that divides its members in any deep sense. Instead, "the organization focuses on getting government support for initiatives that maintain wide investor prerogative and in that way further business unity" (p. 171). As a result, public policy often comes to be shaped to protect "investor prerogative", thus maintaining the unity within business elites. For instance, business elites do not want to restrict their own economic activities for the sake of public safety - instead, it tries to promote additional public projects that can offset any negative consequences that may be incurred due to their own economic activities. Further, Stone also notes that while this investor prerogative is guarded politically, it also has political consequences of its own. That is, the relationship between policy and political processes is a complex one - with each influencing the other in a on-going cycle so that the causal direction is not one way or the other.

Finally, in the context of Atlanta, maintenance of biracial coalition between whites and blacks in the interest of business has been particularly important - which is one the reason why in Atlanta public policies tended to be more accommodating to black middle class than most other cities. On the other hand, this coalition of well to do blacks and whites is described by Stone as a political mechanism that hindered the effective mobilization of lower-class blacks to pursue their own interests, as it was difficult for any blacks to mobilize against a black political leader.