Political Concept : Power

All politics is about power.The practice of politics is often portrayed as little more than the exercise of power, and the academic subject as, in essence, the study of power. Without doubt, students of politics are students of power: they seek to know who has it, how it is used and on what basis it is exercised. Such concerns are particularly apparent in deep and recurrent disagreements about the distri-bution of power within modern society. Is power distributed widely and evenly dispersed, or is it concentrated in the hands of the few, a ‘power elite’ or ‘ruling class’? Is power essentially benign, enabling people to achieve their collective goals, or is it a form of oppression or domination? Such questions are, however, bedevilled by the difficult task of defining power. Perhaps because power is so central to the understanding of politics, fierce controversy has surrounded its meaning. Some have gone as far as to suggest that there is no single, agreed concept of power but rather a number of competing concepts or theories.

Moreover, the notion that power is a form of domination or control that forces one person to obey another, runs into the problem that in political life power is very commonly exercised through the acceptance and willing obedience of the public.Those ‘in power’ do not merely possess the ability to enforce compliance, but are usually thought to have the right to do so as well. This highlights the distinction between power and authority. What is it, however, that transforms power into authority, and on what basis can authority be rightfully exercised? This leads, finally, to questions about legitimacy, the perception that power is exercised in a manner that is rightful, justified or acceptable. Legitimacy is usually seen as the basis of stable government, being linked to the capacity of a regime to command the allegiance and support of its citizens. All governments seek legitimacy, but on what basis do they gain it, and what happens when their legitimacy is called into question?

POWER

Concepts of power abound. In the natural sciences, power is usually understood as ‘force’ or ‘energy’. In the social sciences, the most general concept of power links it to the ability to achieve a desired outcome, sometimes referred to as power to. This could include the accomplishment of actions as simple as walking across a room or buying a newspaper. In most cases, however, power is thought of as a relationship, as the exercise of control by one person over another, or as power over. A distinction is, nevertheless, sometimes drawn between forms of such control, between what is termed ‘power’ and what is thought of as ‘influence’. Power is here seen as the capacity to make formal decisions which are in some way binding upon others, whether these are made by teachers in the classroom, parents in the family or by government ministers in relation to the whole of society. Influence, by contrast, is the ability to affect the content of these decisions through some form of external pressure, highlighting the fact that formal and binding decisions are not made in a vacuum. Influence may therefore involve anything from organised lobbying and rational persuasion, through to open intimidation. This, further, raises questions about whether the exercise of power must always be deliberate or intentional. Can advertising be said to exert power by promoting the spread of materialistic values, even though advertisers themselves may only be concerned about selling their products? In the same way, there is a controversy between the ‘intentionalist’ and ‘structuralist’ understandings of power. The former holds that power is always an attribute of an identifiable agent, be it an interest group, political party, major corporation or whatever. The latter sees power as a feature of a social system as a whole.

One attempt to resolve these controversies is to accept that power is an ‘essentially contested’ concept and to highlight its various concepts or conception, acknowledging that no settled or agreed definition can ever be developed. This is the approach adopted by Steven Lukes in Power: A Radical View (1974), which distinguishes between three ‘faces’ or ‘dimensions’ of power. In practice, a perfectly acceptable, if broad, definition of power can encompass all its various manifestations: if A gets B to do something A wants but which B would not have chosen to do, power is being exercised. In other words, power is the ability to get someone to do what they would not otherwise have done. Lukes’s distinctions are nevertheless of value in drawing attention to how power is exercised in the real world, to the various ways in which A can influence B’s behaviour. In this light, power can be said to have three faces. First, it can involve the ability to influence the making of decisions; second, it may be reflected in the capacity to shape the political agenda and thus prevent decisions being made; and third, it may take the form of controlling people’s thoughts by the manipulation of their perceptions and preferences.

Decision-making

The first ‘face’ of power dates back to Thomas Hobbes’s suggestion that power is the ability of an ‘agent’ to affect the behaviour of a ‘patient’. This notion is in fact analogous to the idea of physical or mechanical power, in that it implies that power involves being ‘pulled’ or ‘pushed’ against one’s will. Such a notion of power has been central to conventional political science, its classic statement being found in Robert Dahl’s ‘A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model’ (1958). Dahl was deeply critical of suggestions that in the USA power was concentrated in the hands of a ‘ruling elite’, arguing that such theories had largely been developed on the basis of reputation: asking where power was believed or reputed to be located. He wished, instead, to base the understanding of power upon systematic and testable hypotheses. To this end, Dahl proposed three criteria that had to be fulfilled before the ‘ruling elite’ thesis could be validated. First, the ruling elite, if it existed at all, must be a well-defined group. Second, a number of ‘key political decisions’ must be identified over which the preferences of the ruling elite run counter to those of any other group. Third, there must be evidence that the preferences of the elite regularly prevail over those of other groups. In effect, Dahl treated power as the ability to influence the decision-making process, an approach he believed to be both objective and quantifiable.

According to this view, power is a question of who gets their way, how often they get their way, and over what issues they get their way. The attraction of this treatment of power is that it corresponds to the commonsense belief that power is somehow about getting things done, and is therefore most clearly reflected in decisions and how they are made. It also has the advantage, as Dahl pointed out, that it makes possible an empirical, even scientific, study of the distribution of power within any group, community or society. The method of study was clear: select a number of ‘key’ decision-making areas; identify the actors involved and discover their preferences; and, finally, analyse the decisions made and compare these with the known preferences of the actors. This procedure was enthusiastically adopted by political scientists and sociologists, especially in the USA, in the late 1950s and 1960s, and spawned a large number of community power studies. The most famous such study was Dahl’s own analysis of the distribution of power in New Haven, Connecti-cut, described in Who Governs? (1963). These studies focused upon local communities, usually cities, on the grounds that they provided more manageable units for empirical study than did national politics, but also on the assumption that conclusions about the distribution of power at the national level could reasonably be drawn from knowledge of its local distribution.

In New Haven, Dahl selected three ‘key’ policy areas to study: urban renewal, public education and the nomination of political candidates. In each area, he acknowledged that there was a wide disparity between the influence exerted, on the one hand, by the politically privileged and the economically powerful, and, on the other hand, by ordinary citizens. However, he nevertheless claimed to find evidence that different elite groups determined policy in different issue areas, dismissing any idea of a ruling or permanent elite. His conclusion was that ‘New Haven is an example of a democratic system, warts and all’. Indeed, so commonly have community power studies reached the conclusion that power is widely dispersed throughout society, that the face of power they recognise – the ability to influence decisions – is often referred to as the ‘pluralist’ view of power, suggesting the existence of plural or many centres of power. This is, however, misleading: pluralist conclusions are not built into this understanding of power, nor into its methodology for identifying power. There is no reason, for example, why elitist conclusions could not be drawn if the preferences of a single cohesive group are seen to prevail over those of other groups on a regular basis. However, a more telling criticism is that by focusing exclusively upon decisions, this approach recognizes only one face of power and, in particular, ignores those circumstances in which decisions are prevented from happening, the area of non-decision-making.

Agenda-setting

To define power simply as the ability to influence the content of decisions raises a number of difficulties. First of all, there are obviously problems about how hypotheses about the distribution of power can be reliably tested. For example, on what basis can ‘key’ decisions, which are studied, be distinguished from ‘routine’ ones, which are ignored; and is it reasonable to assume that the distribution of power at the national level will reflect that found at community level? Furthermore, this view of power focuses exclusively upon behaviour, the exercise of power by A over B. In so doing, it ignores the extent to which power is a possession, reflected perhaps in wealth, political position, social status and so forth; power may exist but not be exercised. Groups may, for example, have the capacity to influence decision-making but choose not to involve themselves for the simple reason that they do not anticipate that the decisions made will adversely affect them. In this way, private businesses may show little interest in issues like health, housing and education – unless, of course, increased welfare spending threatens to push up taxes. In the same way, there are circumstances in which people defer to a superior by anticipating his or her wishes without the need for explicit instructions, the so-called ‘law of anticipated reactions’. A further problem, however, is that this first approach disregards an entirely different face of power.

In their seminal essay ‘The Two Faces of Power’ ([1962] 1981), P. Bachrach and M. Baratz described non-decision-making as the ‘second face of power’. Although Bachrach and Baratz accepted that power is reflected in the decision-making process, they insisted that ‘to the extent that a person or group – consciously or unconsciously – creates or reinforces barriers to the public airing of policy conflicts, that person or group has power’. As E.E. Schattschneider succinctly put it, ‘Some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out’; power, quite simply, is the ability to set the political agenda. This form of power may be more difficult but not impossible to identify, requiring as it does an understanding of the dynamics of non-decision-making. Whereas the decision-making approach to power encourages attention to focus upon the active participation of groups in the process, non-decisions highlight the importance of political organization in blocking the participation of certain groups and the expression of particular opinions. Schattschneider summed this up in his famous assertion that ‘organization is the mobiliza-tion of bias’. In the view of Bachrach and Baratz, any adequate under-standing of power must take full account of ‘the dominant values and the political myths, rituals and institutions which tend to favour the vested interests of one or more groups, relative to others’.

A process of non-decision-making can be seen to operate within liberal-democratic systems in a number of respects. For example, although political parties are normally seen as vehicles through which interests are expressed or demands articulated, they can just as easily block particular views and opinions. This can happen either when all major parties disregard an issue or policy option, or when parties fundamentally agree, in which case the issue is never raised. This applies to problems such as debt in the developing world, divisions between the North and South and the environmental crisis, which have seldom been regarded as priority issues by mainstream political parties. A process of non-decision-making also helped to sustain the arms race during the cold war. During much of the period, Western political parties agreed on the need for a military deterrent against a potentially aggressive Soviet Union, and therefore seldom examined options such as unilateral disarmament. Similar biases also operate within interest-group politics, favouring the articulation of certain views and interests while restricting the expression of others. Interest groups that represent the well-informed, the prosperous and the articulate stand a better chance of shaping the political agenda than groups such as the unemployed, the homeless, the poor, the elderly and the young.

The analysis of power as non-decision-making has often generated elitist rather than pluralist conclusions. Bachrach and Baratz, for instance, pointed out that the ‘mobilization of bias’ in conventional politics normally operates in the interests of what they call ‘status quo defenders’, privileged or elite groups. Elitists have, indeed, sometimes portrayed liberal-democratic politics as a series of filters through which radical proposals are weeded out and kept off the political agenda. However, it is, once again, a mistake to believe that a particular approach to the study of power predetermines its empirical conclusions. Even if a ‘mobilization of bias’ can be seen to operate within a political system, there are times when popular pressures can, and do, prevail over ‘vested interests’, as is demonstrated by the success of campaigns for welfare rights and improved consumer and environmental protection. A further problem nevertheless exists. Even though agenda-setting may be recognized with decision-making as an important face of power, neither takes account of the fact that power can also be wielded through the manipulation of what people think.

Thought Control

The two previous approaches to power – as decision-making and non-decision-making – share the basic assumption that what individuals and groups want is what they say they want. This applies even though they may lack the capacity to achieve their goals or, perhaps, get their objectives on to the political agenda. Indeed, both perspectives agree that it is only when groups have clearly stated preferences that it is possible to say who has power and who does not. The problem with such a position, however, is that it treats individuals and groups as rational and autonomous actors, capable of knowing their own interests and of articulating them clearly. In reality, no human being possesses an entirely independent mind; the ideas, opinions and preferences of all are structured and shaped by social experience, through the influence of family, peer groups, school, the workplace, the mass media, political parties and so forth. Vance Packard (1914–96), for instance, described this ability to manipulate human behaviour by the creation of needs in his classic study of the power of advertising, The Hidden Persuaders (1960).

This suggests a third, and most insidious, ‘face’ of power: the ability of A to exercise power over B, not by getting B to do what he would not otherwise do, but, in Steven Lukes’s words, by ‘influencing, shaping or determining his very wants’. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse, the New Left theorist, took this analysis further and suggested that advanced industrial societies could be regarded as ‘totali-tarian’. Unlike earlier totalitarian societies, such as Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which repressed their citizens through terror and open brutality, advanced industrial societies control them through the pervasive manipulation of needs, made possible by modern technology. This created what Marcuse called ‘a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom’. In such circumstances, the absence of conflict in society may not attest to general contentment and a wide dispersal of power. Rather, a ‘society without opposition’ may be evidence of the success of an insidious process of indoctrination and psychological control. This is what Lukes termed the ‘radical view’ of power.

A central theme in the radical view of power is the distinction between truth and falsehood, reflected in the difference between subjective or ‘felt’ interests, and objective or ‘real’ interests. People, quite simply, do not always know their own minds. This is a conception of power that has been particularly attractive to Marxists and postmodern theorists. Capitalism, Marxists argue, is a system of class exploitation and oppression, within which power is concentrated in the hands of a ‘ruling class’, the bourgeoisie. The power of the bourgeoisie is ideological, as well as economic and political. In Marx’s view, the dominant ideas, values and beliefs of any society are the ideas of its ruling class. Thus the exploited class, the proletariat, is deluded by the weight of bourgeois ideas and theories and comes to suffer from what Engels termed ‘false consciousness’. In effect, it is prevented from recognizing the fact of its own exploitation. In this way, the objective or ‘real’ interests of the proletariat, which would be served only by the abolition of capitalism, differ from their subjective or ‘felt’ interests. Lenin argued that the power of ‘bourgeois ideology’ was such that, left to its own devices, the proletariat would be able to achieve only ‘trade union consciousness’, the desire to improve their material conditions but within the capitalist system. Such theories are discussed at greater length in relation to ideological hegemony in the final part of this chapter.

Postmodern thinkers, influenced in particular by the writings of Michel Foucault, have also drawn attention to the link between power and systems of thought through the idea of a ‘discourse of power’. A discourse is a system of social relations and practices that assign meaning and therefore identities to those who live or work within it. Anything from institutionalized psychiatry and the prison service, as in Foucault’s case, to academic disciplines and political ideologies can be regarded as discourses in this sense. Discourses are a form of power in that they set up antagonisms and structure relations between people, who are defined as subjects or objects, as ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’. These identities are then internalized, meaning that those who are subject to domination, as in the Marxist view, are unaware of the fact or extent of that domination. Whereas Marxists associate power as thought control with the attempt to maintain class inequality, postmodern theorists come close to seeing power as ubiquitous, all systems of knowledge being viewed as manifestations of power.

This ‘radical’ view of power, however, also has its critics. It is impossible to argue that people’s perceptions and preferences are a delusion, that their ‘felt’ needs are not their ‘real’ needs, without a standard of truth against which to judge them. If people’s stated prefer-ences are not to be relied upon, how is it possible to prove what their ‘real’ interests might be? For example, if class antagonisms are submerged under the influence of bourgeois ideology, how can the Marxist notion of a ‘ruling class’ ever be tested? Marxism has traditionally relied for these purposes upon its credentials as a form of ‘scientific socialism’; however, the claim to scientific status has been abandoned by many modern Marxists and certainly by post-Marxists. One of the problems of the postmodern view that knowledge is socially determined and, usually or always, contaminated with power, is that all claims to truth are at best relative. This position questions not only the status of scientific theories but also the status of the postmodern theories that attack science. Lukes’s solution to this problem is to suggest that people’s real interests are ‘what they would want and prefer were they able to make the choice’. In other words, only rational and autonomous individuals are capable of identify-ing their own ‘real’ interests. The problem with such a position, however, is that it begs the question: how are we to decide when individuals are capable of making rational and autonomous judgements?