What is power in politics?
Power is a central concept in politics, but not always its meaning is clear. For this reason, we are going to see the main approaches to this topic, and later we’ll focus on political power.
Today, I want to speak about power in politics.
First of all, this topic is not easy to explain. The reason is that power doesn’t have a single meaning. This situation is usual in social sciences because the human being is ambiguous, and it’s hard to provide definite explanations for some concepts. Instead of that, we can take into account the different standpoints available. That’s what we are going to do on this occasion.
I’ll start discussing the most relevant perspectives on this topic, and how different authors understand power. This discussion will be useful because this is an introduction, and it will allow us to focus on the more specific concept of political power.
In general, we can consider power in three different ways. First, there is the subjectivist interpretation. (Frankly speaking, I couldn’t find a better name for it). Second, we find the theory that considers power a substance. And finally, the relational approach.
The subjectivist interpretation
The subjectivist interpretation considers power something exogenous and given by somebody else. That is, you have power because you have the authorization to do certain things.
This perspective is very usual among attorneys and other professionals related to law and constitutional matters. The law establishes who is officially in charge of specific responsibilities, and that entails to wield power to carry out these tasks. So, the legislation enables someone with the capacity to get certain effects. In this way, this person can influence the behavior of other people insofar as they have the mandate to do so. Their scope is confined by the rules that regulate their power because power doesn’t belong to them; it’s neither their attribute nor their property. Power is, as I said, something external and given.
This approach works very well when we apply it to constitutional regimes and democratic political systems. In these cases, power is something delegated to someone who is vested with authority, and whose scope has legal limitations. Therefore, an elected official wields authority insofar as they carry out a specific function. A function that has been established by the law. That is the essence of the representative and limited government. Power comes from the people who elect their representatives who are in charge of those functions they were appointed for. And power remains in people because they can remove any elected official at the poll, according to the law.
This interpretation was developed during the seventeenth century when constitutional quarrels were at their height in England. John Locke is an excellent example of this way of considering power.
Power as substance
As its name indicates, this interpretation considers power a substance. That means power is something you can own, and you use to attain a particular goal in the future. It’s an instrument, and it can include a wide range of means such as intelligence, wealth, physical force, and so on. Consequently, power enables you to get a specific effect. In this way, power is not limited, but by itself, by its capacities.
Thomas Hobbes, another English seventeenth-century thinker, is an outstanding example of this theory of power. He defined power in this way. “The power of a man, to take it universally, is his present means to obtain some future apparent good, and is either original or instrumental.”
In the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell set forth his point of view about power in similar terms as Hobbes. He considered power as the capacity to get the effect pursued. However, he made the difference between the three separate forms of power. First of all, physical and constraining power, such as military power. Second, psychological power based on the threat of punishments or future rewards. And finally, the power of persuasion and deterrence.
Power as a resource or an object can be accumulated and concentrated. For this reason, power may be controlled or even monopolized, by individuals, groups, institutions, elites, social classes, and so on. That explains why we say someone has the power, or someone seizes power. Therefore, power is something exclusive that depends on access to resources, which gives you the capacity to attain a specific effect.
You may ask yourself what kind of resources?. Well, there are many, because humans are not one-dimensional beings. The control of people requires several sorts of resources. Each of them is suitable for a specific field. I don’t want to go into this matter in-depth, but for now, I’ll mention some of them.
Economic, coercive, and symbolic resources are the most usual, and they work in a very different way. Economic resources reward or punish certain behaviors, while coercive resources limit or force others’ decisions. Symbolic resources include information, culture, religion, and so on, and they depict reality.
From the perspective of this theory, politics is chiefly concerned about how to take power and manage it. But also, who wields power and where it resides. In brief, what matters here is the distribution of the resources mentioned before because it determines who controls the political power in a community.
Aside from Hobbes and Russell, more authors maintain this view, such as Karl Marx, Gaetano Mosca, or Charles Wright Mills, among others.
Relational theory
The final interpretation considers power the consequence of a relation. In this way, power is a relation between two people in which one of them makes the other one behave in a specific way that wouldn’t otherwise behave. So, power is something you don’t own because it’s linked to a situation that someone enjoys in a particular relation to another person or a group.
From this perspective, power is an opportunity that shows up in a specific situation. It is the result of social relations. Because of this, every individual or group tries to identify and take advantage of these opportunities to get a relative gain. Every actor seeks to improve their position in the web of social relations.
This theory of power is concerned about the position each actor occupies. Therefore, every actor looks for improving their position to dominate other individuals or groups. Power is not something you store or accumulate, but something that flows consistently through social relations. This feature makes it reversible. Insofar as situations change accordingly to social interactions, power does the same, and it favors certain actors in specific moments and places and others in a different context.
What matters for this theory is what positions facilitate the domination and the subordination of actors. This point of view leads us to strategic and pluralistic conceptions concerned with the analysis of strategies to attain advantageous situations.
The importance of the former explanation is that always a specific theory of power is the base of any theory of political power. That’s why we can’t overlook these approaches.
The evolution of power from the Middle Ages to modern times
The general belief in the Middle Ages was that power came from God, who chose some individuals as trustees. A single authority didn’t monopolize power, but many individuals shared it in the same hierarchy.
However, the situation changed in the early modern age when power started to be an exclusive prerogative to rule by using force. It became something more material and stopped being part of a web of personal bonds.
At that time, the principle of sovereignty appeared, although its origins are in the Middle Ages. It’s a political attribute of the ruler, who has an exclusive right to use force to apply binding decisions on society. This principle defines political power in the historical frame of modernity. So, political power is identified with the use of force to get certain effects. And it’s also related to the search for the monopoly of violence every ruler tried to achieve.
But it’s necessary an additional precision to this. Although force is essential to define political power, it’s not enough. Besides force, there is also the exclusivity to use it in a particular geographical area. In brief, political power is the supreme authority to rule over a polity. And it’s supreme insofar as it has no superior. Consequently, political power gathers the use of force and the exclusive right to exercise it in a specific territory.
At this point, it’s convenient to make some additional comments. I refer to the explanation of political power provided by Jean Bodin. It’s relevant because he was a forerunner of the modern notion of this concept, and he linked it to the principle of sovereignty.
So, he considered this power something absolute, because it’s not under any other rule, aside from natural and divine laws. He also considered it perpetual, insofar as it gets obedience thanks to the exclusive use of coercion. And this is the modern form of political power, which remains in the exclusive right to use force in the execution of its mandates. Hence, no other authority or body has the right to use force in the territory of the sovereign.
We have seen different theoretical perspectives of power so far, besides a definition of political power. But it’s time to take one more step and approach the role of power in politics. Remember, this information is just available here.
The role of power in politics
Power is essential in politics because it’s the core of this field. That entails politics has to do with the formation, distribution, and exercise of power. However, it raises a question about the components of power. What does constitute power?.
Components of power
Power includes force, influence, and authority. Force entails the coercive capacity to limit others’ decisions, and it resorts to threat and intimidation to cause fear. Influence, yet, resorts to persuasion to convince. And authority resorts to reputation to create trust.
Now, let’s see how these three components work by giving specific examples.
When we talk about force in politics, we usually refer to violence. For instance, when someone is jailed, executed, their properties confiscated, and so on. Force can be exercised by a government, but also by other actors when they block a highway, occupy a building, blow up an infrastructure, and take other similar actions.
When we think of the use of influence in politics, it brings to mind some methods such as persuasion with the use of argumentation to convince other people. That includes propaganda to spread certain ideas and proposals, but also the influence of any organization. Leaflets, meetings, talks, interviews, e-mail campaigns, and so on, are the most usual ways to persuade people.
Finally, authority is based on the credibility of certain individual and collective actors. In this way, those who wield authority don’t need to resort to rational arguments. Their prestige creates the necessary trust in the public to attain those effects they want. They have a reputation because they are skillful experts in a specific field, or because they are just charismatic leaders.
Force, influence, authority, intimidation, reputation, persuasion, leaflets, charismatic leaders, meetings, executions, and so on, they all are power components or instruments. It seems to me that power works in many different fields at once, and it creates a disturbing atmosphere. We can’t overlook the fact that power tends to expand and overcome its limits. That is the origin of the separation of powers doctrine, which was created to avoid an overwhelming concentration of power in one single authority.
This doctrine is essential to understand political power nowadays. It talks about the three branches of government, namely, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. And it also leads to Montesquieu, the French philosopher of the eighteenth-century. But we’ll address all of this in the next video. So, subscribe if you don’t want to miss anything.
Question of the day
Question of the day! How do you consider power? as a substance, as something given, or as a relation. Post your opinion in the comments section below, because I’m really interested.
Bibliography used:
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan
Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government
Russell, Bertrand, Power: A New Social Analysis
Mills, Charles W., The Power Elite
Mosca, Gaetano, The Ruling Class
Dahl, Robert, “The Concept of Power” in Behavioral Science 2(3), 1957, pp. 201-215
Dahl, Robert, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City
Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince
Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the Revolution
Bodin, Jean, Six Books of the Commonwealth
Jouvenel, Bertrand, Sovereignty
Jouvenel, Bertrand, On Power
Lasswell, Harold and A. Kaplan, Power and Society: A Frameword for Political Inquiry
Vallès, Josep M., Ciencia Política: Una introducción
Bobbio, Norberto, Democracy and dictatorship
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