Discipline: Political Science
Descriptive and prescriptive theory of power in modern societies.
Either: since people gain their identity from the groups of which they are members, political power should wherever possible be distributed to functional groups; or: in modern democracies, bargaining between groups contributes as much to policy as does formal democracy.
Also see: impacted pluralism
Source:
David Miller et al., eds, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Oxford, 1987)