Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?

Somewhat favor: 29%
Strongly favor: 36%

The second one found:

Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?

Somewhat favor: 25%
Strongly favor: 52%

Total support jumped 12 points from 65% to 77%, while strong support jumped 16 points (36% to 52%).

• Read the paper

Additional results: Another condition replaced “mostly black” with “many innocents” with no significant effect. 50% of blacks favored the death penalty in the neutral phrasing, 38% in the “mostly black” condition, and 34% in the “many innocents” condition.

Who Governs? argues that New Haven worked according to Dahl’s theory of “pluralism”: elite political groups exist, but they aren’t very powerful. Instead, they balance each other out, leaving politicians (and thus their voters) firmly in control.

Fifteen years later, the political sociologist G. William Domhoff went over the issues covered in the book (including Dahl’s notes and sources, which Dahl was honest enough to share) only to find that Dahl had badly bungled the research. Upon closer review, Dahl’s own notes, plus a few new sources, revealed exactly the opposite story. This is the story of how Dahl got things so badly wrong.

Finding the elite

Dahl begins by claiming that there’s little overlap between the city’s social and economic elite, part of his argument that different groups of elites balance each other out. So he counts company presidents, individuals with significant property in the city, directors of multiple sizable city firms, and any director of a bank in the city. Then he takes this list and sees how many of them attended the New Haven Lawn Club debutante ball. He doesn’t find much overlap.

Domhoff points out that this is kind of an odd metric. For one thing, not all the elites go to the debutante ball, while many people from out of town do. So instead he says any member of one of New Haven’s three elite social clubs is a social elite, while anyone who’s a director of one of New Haven’s ten most interlocked firms is an economic elite. (Firms are interlocked when they share members of their board of directors.) He finds incredible overlap — of the entire corporate network, 55% are in a social club; of those on two boards, 80% are. So much for that.

Deciding urban renewal

But the bulk of Dahl’s study is his attempt to see who actually makes decisions on three important issues. He picks (arbitrarily) political nominations, public education, and urban renewal. For each, he interviews the major players to find out how the relevant decisions got made. Domhoff points out that political nominations are rather uninteresting, since they’re internal party disputes, and that elites don’t care about public education, since they all live in the suburbs or send their kids to private schools. Which leaves urban renewal.

New Haven went through a massive urban renewal shortly before Dahl’s study and Dahl claims it was orchestrated by the city’s mayor, who heroically fought resistance-to-change on all fronts, selflessly ensuring what was best for New Haven. (The urban renewal project in fact ended up completely destroying New Haven’s downtown, but that’s a separate story.) As Dahl quotes the mayor: “Redevelopment in New Haven began in February of ’55. We had to start from scratch and assemble a team and start to file all the papers and get the whole program launched.” But Dahh omits a key piece of context.

Urban renewal had in fact been in the works for years, at the insistence of the town’s Chamber of Commerce. When the new mayor took office, the Chamber of Commerce quickly organized a meeting with him at which “the entire program [of urban renewal] would be explained to him and he would be urged to get action started on the program” (as their own minutes described it). A representative met with Mr. Lee at one of the elite social clubs and reported back that “Mr. Lee said he was in entire agreement with [our] program for action.”

So why did Lee claim that he had to start from scratch? Turns out, the city was having trouble getting some of their filings approved, so they decided to try a new strategy and assemble a new team, which begun by refiling all the relevant permits. But this was just a technical detail — the urban renewal plans themselves had long been in the works.

Normally in science, you refute someone’s results by conducting the same form of research yourself under different circumstances. But Domhoff went much further: he reexamined the very same research that Dahl conducted, even using Dahl’s own notes and transcripts. But the conclusions he came to were wildly different. It’s hard to think of a more stunning refutation. Not that political science was interested in hearing it. Dahl remains the field’s idol, while Domhoff is an obscure professor at UC Santa Cruz.

• Read Domhoff’s refutation
• Buy Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City, Robert A. Dahl
• Buy Who Really Rules?: New Haven and Community power Reexamined, G. William Domhoff
• Buy Who Rules America?: Power, Politics and Social Change, G. William Domhoff
• Visit Domhoff’s website