Power Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Power, a central concept in political science, is the capacity to achieve values in collaboration with and in opposition to others. It includes the ability to act autonomously and to exercise influence or control over others. Power can be an end in itself, but it is primarily instrumental to the achievement of other objectives. Within a group or in relationships between a group and others, capacities tend to be distributed unevenly, so that more powerful people and groups have more autonomy than others, as well as more effect over others. When a distribution is extreme and persists over time, it is referred to as domination.

At the same time, less powerful individuals, groups, and political units may act autonomously to organize resistance to the demands of the more powerful and even seek to increase their capacities—both to act autonomously and to shape their environments. It is such contention and conflict that give politics its distinctive character, while interactions with others give power its essentially relational character. Power relations shape political activities as discrete phenomena, but they are often embedded perceptibly in institutions and invisibly in structures.

Power In Political Theory

The classical political theorists concerned themselves primarily with concepts such as justice, the good life, equality, and so forth. At the same time, they also understood that power was instrumental to the achievement of these values. In Politics, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) used the distribution of power as the central criterion by which to distinguish governments of the one, the few, and the many. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (ca. 460–400 BCE) related, in the dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians, the aphorism, “The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must,” indicating the inequality of power and its consequences. Roman writers concerned themselves with gaining control of, managing, and regulating power.

As an analytical concept, power dates from the work of Niccolò Machiavelli, who devoted much of his writing (e.g., The Prince, 1532) to elucidating the uses and mechanisms of power. In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes held the view that power should be concentrated and institutionalized in a sovereign. John Locke, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, and the authors of The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, devised their institutional arrangements of dividing, sharing, and separating power with the aim to avoid a concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, group, or institution.

In the twentieth century, writers sought to give more precise shape to the meaning of power, and they conducted extensive debates about its various aspects, its sources, its forms and manifestations, its uses, and its effects. In the primary modern discourse about power, shaped greatly by the writing of Robert Dahl and reactions to his ideas, democracy provided the central normative guideline. In parallel debates in international politics, a normative concern with stability primarily drove writers.

Components Of Capacity

Capacity is built upon material resources—such as economic wealth and production facilities as well as military capabilities—and individual characteristics, social resources, and political arrangements. Accumulated wealth and current income can be used to purchase commodities and services that can be wielded to ensure autonomy, to gain the cooperation of others in amassing power, and to exercise power over others. Similarly, production facilities can be mobilized to extract, grow, and manufacture instruments for use in achieving political goals. In international politics but also in internal situations, military capabilities afford means for ensuring autonomy and exercising power, both through threats and through the actual use of military power to prevail in contested situations.

Some writers, such as Hannah Arendt in On Violence (1970), draw a sharp distinction between power and violence, whereas others, like Thomas Schelling in Arms and Influence (1966), have demonstrated the efficacy as well as the limitations of using violence to exercise influence. In maintaining a social order, the latent violence embodied in a police force proves an important component for ensuring domination, and sometimes the actual use of force conveys to society at large the power of the existing order and the high cost of opposition and resistance, thus gaining compliance.

Certain characteristics adhering to individuals also provide capacity. Max Weber, in Economy and Society (1978), analyzed the concept of charisma, an attribute of an individual that inspires others to defer to him, allowing the individual to amass power to achieve goals and to exercise power over others. Individuals also command respect and deference, and thus power capacity, by means of intellect and will, by use of knowledge, through rhetoric, by guile, and by the performance of brave and admired deeds.

The quality of personal magnetism provided for Weber one of three types of authority; the others were the traditional authority of inherited leadership and legitimate authority based in law and orderly procedure. These last two stem from social and political arrangements and are thus institutionalized. Whether derived from personal, social, or political characteristics, authority confers on leaders and officials the capacity to achieve values and to exercise power over others.

Social and political arrangements vary considerably in their allocation of authority and distribution of power. For example, monarchical political systems and aristocratic societies provide for inherited offices, titles, wealth, and privileges that confer power on those holding positions. In contrast, democratic electoral systems offer opportunities to many contenders to seek, win, and lose office, while capitalist economic arrangements are based on competition, with rewards for success and risks of failure. Patriarchal social arrangements place men in positions of power over women, whereas egalitarian societies aim for more nearly equal power for men and women. Slave societies structure power so that masters have nearly complete control over slaves. As slave revolts and political revolutions attest, those who are dominated sometimes resist and occasionally are able to overthrow a social and political order and replace it with another. In both these cases, violence provides the instrument for maintaining and overthrowing systems of domination, although in both cases the violence is organized and wielded in the service of ideas and principles.

In less fundamental circumstances, individuals and groups contend to shape the behavior of those whose power derives from authority. Within polities, citizens, interest groups, and political parties contend over public policy and sometimes over constitutional arrangements. Within business organizations, workers and labor unions resist oppressive forms of domination and strive to control the structure of their working conditions and wages and benefits. Within markets, firms compete not only to gain greater shares but also to shape the rules and structures within which competition takes place. Within families, individuals contend to influence collective decisions and power structures governing family life.

The values human beings seek are countless. Political values include specific policy objectives but also more enduring concepts such as order and justice, equality and freedom, security and stability, and control and checking to avoid despotism and arbitrary rule. Aspirations to domination usually accompany some conception of a future order, but occur sometimes simply to achieve extrication from another group’s domination and the achievement of autonomy. Because the future is contingent and others’ intentions are uncertain, accumulation of power alone provides an important value in itself.

Collaboration And Conflict

Collaboration is essential to gaining political power. Acting together with others through debate and deliberation to agree on common arrangements and objectives provides the basic dynamic for accumulating power. Although such collaboration can occur at many levels and in many ways, the most common comprehensive unit for composing political power in the contemporary world is the nation-state, with nationalism providing the impetus and identity and the state offering the mechanism for accumulating and exercising power. The state establishes the autonomy necessary for operating in a world in which the state form remains the fundamental political organization. Other institutions for political collaboration operate in a context of politics either within states or among them. Accumulated power provides the capacity to achieve goals, but objectives are more often than not achieved in the face of resistance by other centers of accumulated power, or by the actions of others who submit to a determined power wielder.

Thus, conflict characterizes political life as one group or political unit strives to achieve goals against others who may possess the values at stake or who hold incompatible values. Conflict occurs in greatly varied circumstances, ranging from local political issues like school bond issues and zoning decisions, to great matters of state within a polity that run the gamut from conflicts over the suppression of civil liberties and issues of war and peace to mundane issues such as allocating funds for road building, to struggles among states for regional or world domination. Each set of circumstances, to some extent, shapes the exercise of power. Within ordinary local and national politics in well-ordered societies, for example, space has been created to allow conflict to occur without overt violence. On the other hand, armed struggle commonly occurs in situations in which such space has not been insulated from violence, such as civil war situations and deep conflict over the control of territory and political arrangements in international relations.

Effects Of Distribution Of Power

Although cultural and ideological considerations as well as political arrangements contribute to the circumstances in which political conflict occurs, the distribution of power itself shapes the manner in which conflict takes place and the instruments that are employed. In a hierarchical system, especially one in which government holds a monopoly on legitimate violence, conflict mostly occurs without war. In democratic polities, politics provides an arena for contention among groups that employ rhetoric, deliberation through constitutional means, resolution of conflict through legislative and judicial processes, and contested elections. The state exercises power by means of law and administrative routine and the latent power of police and its military monopoly, and it demonstrates its power through rituals, manipulation of symbols, and organizational practices. Other hierarchically organized societies concentrate power more in leaders or relatively small elites, leading to a more arbitrary exercise by the elites. Resistance cannot be channeled through legitimate means, but must be exercised through noncompliance, clandestine behavior, and violence. In such polities, the state usually employs violence more actively against its citizens than democratic polities do.

In anarchical systems, such as those that exist in international politics and civil war situations, power is distributed unevenly but still more equally than in a well-ordered state. The threat and use of force tend to be routine, although diplomacy, law, economic inducements, and institutional means also are brought into play. Distribution of power among more than two major powers in an international system results in greater uncertainty than occurs in a system with only two major powers. Balancing and checking tend to be routine activities in anarchical systems. In systems with a single state whose power greatly exceeds that of others, the leading state may be tempted by hubris in which it overestimates its potential to dominate the system, and resistance and checking are likely to be diffuse; they may also involve violence, even by nonstate actors, because no state or coalition of states may be in a position directly to confront the leading state. Still, the leading state is unlikely to be able to conquer the territories of other major powers whose autonomy remains intact. Structural distribution of power has other, subtler effects, as evidenced by the exponential growth of international nongovernmental organizations as the cold war ended and liberal states, whose ideology encourages nongovernmental political activity, assumed a position of hegemony in the international system.

Within domestic polities, structure results not only from the distribution of power, but also from constitutional or legal allocation of authority, processes, and capabilities. Structures are evident in such arrangements as the allocation of authority between national and provincial or state governments in a federal system and among different branches of government. They tend to be more obscure when they result from policy decisions, for example, tax policies that privilege certain groups who become more powerful over time and injure others who become weaker over time.

In the last part of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first century, neoliberal ideology in favor of privatizing what had previously been public functions produced a trend toward allocating authority to private groups and firms, thus strengthening the structural power of nongovernmental institutions and weakening public ones. This devolution of power to private agencies encompassed not just functions such as cleaning and food provision services, but also police functions such as running jails and providing personal security to government officials in foreign combat zones. Aside from the implications for power, these arrangements diminished public accountability in democratic political systems.

Effectiveness And Control Of Power

A paradox stems from the fact that power needs to be concentrated in order to be effective, while centralized power can easily be abused unless constrained. The problem of instituting means to control power has occupied thinkers who devise governing systems and practitioners who write constitutions. Limited terms of office and contested elections provide constraints in democratic systems, as do accompanying debates, a free press, and political parties. Other constitutional constraints, such as judicial review of executive decisions, have been employed. Governments employ surveillance in their exercise of power, but citizen groups watch over their public officials to hold them accountable. Elites contend for prestige, authoritative positions, and policy preferences, thus checking the power of incumbent elites. Since the rise of professional armed forces in the twentieth century, military leaders in some polities, such as Turkey, have regarded themselves as guardians of the state constitution and intervene against a government when they believe it to have exceeded or abused its power.

Without such mechanisms of control and constraint, authoritarian political leaders have provided many examples of the abuse of power. Abuses range from kleptocracy, in which a ruling elite appropriates the wealth of a country for its private gain, to despotic systems, in which small elites engage in repression of their citizens through torture, killing, and removal of populations on a large scale. In the late twentieth century, liberal governments and nongovernmental groups have organized internationally in attempts to control and constrain such abuses of power through the development of norms, treaties, and institutions as well as direct military intervention and the employment of economic sanctions.

Among international relations writers, there is some division between those who think that stability emanates from concentration of power and others who believe that it is more likely to be achieved through limited diffusion among great powers that check one another. Concepts of concentration of power include concert of power in which leading powers, on the basis of some principle, agree to cooperate in managing the international system. Another view, called power transition theory, holds that the system tends to be dominated by a single power, which is eventually supplanted through the rise of a challenger that replaces it. Similarly, hegemonic stability theory stresses that a dominant power provides the underpinning for an international political economy but that such a power may decline over time and be challenged by a rising power. In long-cycle theory, a system led by a dominant naval power is forged by consensus and rules until it is succeeded by the next power that commands the seas. Most commonly in international relations theory, however, balance of power is the prevalent conception and holds that great power is checked through the opposition and actions of other states that prevent, through diplomacy and war, the assumption of predominance by any single power, as did European powers that checked Napoleon, and the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States that checked Nazi Germany.

There are also debates among international relations scholars over the fundamental driving forces of power. As neatly summarized by John Mearsheimer in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), there are three schools of thought: human nature realism, defensive realism, and offensive realism. In the first, an innate and universal quest for power drives human beings. The second holds that states seek limited power in order to maintain their positions in the international system. The third argues that the fear of domination leads states to seek unlimited power, which is checked only by inherent material limitations and others acting out of the same motivation. Other views include liberalism, which claims that power is controlled domestically through democratic political systems and internationally through cooperative institutions. Constructivists offer yet another perspective, arguing that international conflict is constructed through intersubjective understandings, thus a less conflictful system can be built through more cooperative discourse and less belligerent interpretations of the words and actions of others.

Legitimacy

Whether international or domestic, democratic or authoritarian, those who govern and impose system rules claim legitimacy for their domination, more often than not by asserting that the values that they embody are universal. In contrast, the weak, especially those who feel oppressed or who envision alternative governing arrangements, set forth claims for justice. Such disputes over values themselves form part of ongoing struggles for power. In general, dominant groups tend to stand for stability, whereas subordinate groups tend to advocate for change, and this pattern engenders a dynamic of politics. However, this tendency is not universal; dominant groups sometimes advocate change to enhance their positions of domination or to bring additional groups within the scope of their rule. Revolutionary regimes frequently aim to spread their revolutions to other countries; but the United States, the leading country at the turn of the twenty-first century and a formidable stabilizing force in the world, has also endorsed changes of regimes from authoritarian rule to democratic rule and has taken actions that have destabilized certain countries and regions.

Legitimacy can be eroded by entropy engendered by incompetence of rulers and corruption within a political system, when a government no longer functions to achieve its declared values. In such conditions, a crisis can be brought on by economic failure, inept attempts to reform political arrangements, and outside pressures that illuminate government failure. In conditions of crisis, vigorous and sometimes virulent struggle occurs as new groups and new leaders seek to create a new order.

Continuing Debates

In academic debates about power, some writers have drawn attention to nondecisions, the fact that certain issues cannot arise in public debate because dominant groups have settled positions not allowing consideration of problems or values that some members of a polity would otherwise bring up. Another concern that has arisen in these debates involves the question of whether individuals and groups sufficiently understand their positions within a system of power to make claims for the values that would serve their interests. This is an unsettled area, but Stephen Lukes, a leading advocate of this view, in 2004 cast doubt on his own previous position, which held that subordinate groups did not understand their own interests.

With varied approaches and alternative interpretations of power, scholarly and public debates continue. Whatever disagreements about the meaning and place of power in politics may be, the use of material resources, individual skills, and social and political institutions in the pursuit of values remains a ubiquitous and universal characteristic of politics. Because individuals and groups aspire to achieve so many values, contention and conflict may be considered the essence of politics. Importantly, individuals and groups need to collaborate to enhance their power resources to achieve their values, and other individuals and groups with different values and objectives are certain to oppose them. Thus, the ancient concept, power, remains a central idea in political science today.

Bibliography:

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Wendt, Alexander. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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