Who has the Power?

Todd Swanstrom of SLU's Public Policy Studies program will be teaching a course on St. Louis power next semester.

Power, Coalitions, and Decision-making: Who rules St. Louis?

Have you ever wondered who rules St. Louis? PPS 630 will try to help you answer that question. The seminar will be divided into two sections. The first half of the course is designed to introduce students to the scholarly literature on community power. This literature addresses the deceptively simple question: Who governs? It turns out that there are many different methods for studying power and which method you choose dramatically alters your conclusions. The approaches we will study include elitist, pluralist, nondecision making, public choice, growth machine, and regime theory. The first half of the course will end with an exam.

In the second half of the semester, the seminar will conduct a community power study of St. Louis on a topic, chosen by the seminar participants, using one or more of the approaches to community power that we studied. Examples of topics we could study are the decision to build a new Cardinals stadium, the decision to build a new runway for Lambert Airport, the expansion of the Metrolink through Clayton and Richmond Heights, the desegregation of the schools, or the recent failure to pass charter reform in the city of St. Louis. The second part of the seminar will result in a group paper on the chosen topic.

Time: 4:20-6:50 pm on Tuesdays