Political Pluralism: In-between Theory and Reality

Power, its distribution, and the quality of government relation with citizens and groups and the amount of their influence on the political decision-making processes are of the most fundamental questions encountering politics researchers. The aim of pluralism in status of a theoretical approach toward politics is specification and measurement of these issues; therefore, it defines politics as the arena of competition for different groups who have access to different sources; as a result, no single group can dominate others completely, and political decisions were seen as the outcomes of balance among forces and an open process. After specifying this approach in association with the democratic thought and the comparison of previous and recent conclusions of it, this article reviews its concrete implications in political order so as to assess the accuracy of its analyses in practice; therefore, in answering to this question that do the available political reality assert the theoretical hypotheses of the pluralist approach, it takes an intermediate status (depending on the kind of conclusion from pluralism).