Pluralism and its advocates once dominated the study of American politics. And by staking out a strong positivist position on the fundamental issue of political power in their battle with elite theorists, pluralists also influenced the discipline of political science as a whole. Yet, in contemporary American politics, pluralism is rarely invoked as a theoretical guide, and when it is discussed, it is often as a foil for some alternative conceptual approach. So what happened to pluralism? In Neopluralism, Andrew McFarland seeks to explain what happened and to restore pluralism to a place of prominence in American politics and within the discipline of political science.

The pluralist approach, as McFarland explains, began with the group theory of Arthur Bentley and David Truman. Although not all of their ideas became a part of pluralism, these early group theorists contributed the notion that to understand politics, we should study how public policy is made and that policy is made through an ongoing series of interactions among numerous contending agents. The second stage in the creation of the pluralist approach was the development of the idea that political power could be understood in causal terms and that the exercise of power could vary across policy areas. This causal view of political power was articulated most prominently in the work of Robert Dahl. To this point, McFarland's explanation of the development of pluralism is fairly conventional. His thesis, however, is that pluralism did not stop at this second stage but in fact continued to develop, even though this theoretical progress has not been widely recognized.

McFarland points out that the pluralism of the 1960s was confronted with a number of challenges. Some were grounded in differing interpretations of empirical evidence, such as those of scholars who observed the policy process and found evidence of “iron triangles” or “agency capture,” rather than power being widely dispersed among competing actors. Other challenges, however, were more fundamental, such as Mancur Olson's (1965) The Logic of Collective Action and the “the two faces of power” critique (Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56 [December 1962]: 947–52). Although many may have regarded these criticisms as effectively undermining pluralism, McFarland argues that continued research into the policy process demonstrates that while the objections of critics must be taken seriously, they are not insurmountable obstacles. Indeed, his neopluralism is essentially an effort to bring together the central features of 1960s pluralism with decades of empirical research on interest groups and policymaking and to do so in such a way as to recognize the merit in many of these criticisms.

McFarland's neopluralism is thus intended to be “a general theory of power, policymaking, and interest groups” (p. 62) that incorporates an array of related approaches, such as advocacy coalitions, issue networks, and policy niches. More ambitiously, the author seeks to infuse neopluralism with an historical dimension and to integrate neopluralism and the study of social movements. In doing so, his work both narrows and broadens the conception of classic pluralism. He seeks to narrow the scope of pluralism by moving it from a general explanation of how power is distributed in the United States to a theory of the policymaking process. Simultaneously, he broadens pluralism by attempting to incorporate a variety of developments in the discipline into what is now termed “neopluralism.”

In sum, Andrew McFarland undertakes a sweeping reinterpretation of a broad range of social science research on political power, policymaking, interest groups, social movements, and the state. This book is both an intellectual history and an effort at theory construction. In the end, it is more successful as an intellectual history because he presents a compelling argument that we should reconsider the place of pluralism in the study of politics. It is less successful as an articulation of a coherent theoretical framework. While his “neopluralist synthesis” is impressive in scope, neopluralism never really comes across as a logically coherent whole. As it is presented here, neopluralism remains more of a collection of related concepts—some clearly complementary but others potentially antithetical—organized under a rather broad umbrella.

Whatever limitations it may have, this book deserves a wide audience among students of American politics, interest groups, and public policy. McFarland has written an impressive work that speaks directly to important themes in American politics and the discipline of political science. As such, Neopluralism should be read and debated within the discipline for years to come.