11.4.3: Which View Is Right?

 11.4.3: Which View Is Right? 

The functionalist and conflict views of power in U.S. society cannot be reconciled. Either competing interests block any single group from being dominant, as functionalists assert, or a power elite oversees the major decisions of the United States, as conflict theorists maintain. After years of rancorous arguments by proponents of each view, researchers seem to have come up with the answer. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014) reviewed 1,800 policy decisions made by the U.S. government. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the wealthy and business groups are the major influence in U.S. policy. With such solid research and firm conclusions, the controversy seemed to be settled. But far from it. The research has come under attack (Gilens and Page 2016). Other researchers who reviewed the data they used have found that the middle class and the wealthy agreed on 90 percent of the policy decisions. In addition, when the two disagreed, they each got their way about half the time (Enns 2015; Branham et al. 2017). At this point, then, the pluralist/elitist controversy continues.