Power

Definitions of power

 * Distinguish first between potential (the capacity to make X do Y) and actual power (the successful attempt to make...)
 * A way of conceiving power (or a way of defining the concept of power) that will be useful in the analysis of social relationships must imply an answer to the question: what counts as a significant manner?, what makes A’s affecting B significant? The concept of power, thus defined, when interpreted and put to work, yields one or more views of power that is, ways of identifying cases of power in the real world.
 * Many definitions of power are revisionary redefinitions. They focus on the locution ‘power to’, ignoring ‘power over’. Thus power indicates a ‘capacity’, a ‘facility’, an ‘ability’, not a relationship. Accordingly, the conflictual aspect of power the fact that it is exercised over people disappears altogether from view.
 * An attribution of power is at the same time an attribution of (partial or total) responsibility for certain consequences. The point, in other words, of locating power is to fix responsibility for consequences held to £ow from the action, or inaction, of certain specifiable agents.
 * Power is legitimated domination
 * Power is A getting B to do something
 * But then a favor is also power?
 * Edit (power involves an element of overcoming volition – otherwise its persuasion): Power is A getting B to do something that they otherwise would not want to do through coercion
 * Power does not require that the effect is also achieved (that, in turn, is dependent on influence)

Dimensions

 * Power-sender vs. power-recipient
 * (Un)Consciousness of exerting power on the part of sender vs. recipient

Necessary conditions

 * All cases of co-operative activity, where individuals or groups significantly affect one another in the absence of a conflict of interests between them, will be identifiable, as cases of ‘influence’ but not of ‘power’.
 * Necessary pre-conditions for power to exist: some minimal form of freedom on the part of the power-recipient is a prerequisite so that there is an alternative – only if I as a power-recipient know about the alternative (that I want to have) and hence try to avoid the unpleasant alternative (sanctions), will I bow to the powerful
 * For power to exist at all it must be relative or differential and it must encounter resistance or opposition
 * Power is always relational

Decision-making/pluralist power

 * The most public/behaviorally observable of the three dimensions
 * Analysis of this "face" focuses on policy preferences revealed through political action and actual decision-making
 * In this understanding, control, influence, and power are interchangeable terms
 * The method to identify power, then, is to study actual direct conflict/disagreement (between preferences) and its outcomes
 * Interests are to be understood as policy preferences so that a conflict of interests is equivalent to a conflict of preferences. They are opposed to any suggestion that interests might be unarticulated or unobserveable, and above all, to the idea that people might actually be mistaken about, or unaware of, their own interests
 * Speak of the decisions being about issues in selected key issue-areas the assumption again being that such issues are controversial and involve actual conflict.
 * In short, the pluralists see their focus on behaviour in the making of decisions over key or important issues as involving actual, observable conflict. This one-dimensional view of power involves a focus on behaviour in the making of decisions on issues over which there is an observable conflict of (subjective) interests, seen as express policy preferences, revealed by political participation.

Non-decision-making power

 * That which sets the agenda in debates and makes certain issues unacceptable for discussion in "legitimate" public forums; control over the agenda of politics and of the ways in which potential issues are kept out of the political process
 * Power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A
 * The extent that a person or group consciously or unconsciously creates or reinforces barriers to the public airing of policy conflicts
 * Power is exercised by constraining the scope of decision-making to relatively 'safe' issues. The prominence of one issue appears to be connected with the subordination of the other
 * All forms of political organization have a bias in favour of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others, because organization is the mobilization of bias. Some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out.
 * Thus, in this view it is crucially important to identify potential issues which nondecision-making prevents from being actual.
 * The mobilization of bias is a set of predominant values, beliefs, rituals, and institutional procedures (‘rules of the game’) that operate systematically and consistently to the benefit of certain persons and groups at the expense of others. The bias of the system is not sustained simply by a series of individually chosen acts, but also, most importantly, by the socially structured and culturally patterned behaviour of groups, and practices of institutions, which may indeed be manifested by individuals’ inaction.
 * This typology of power embraces securing of compliance through coercion (compliance by the threat of deprivation), influence (make B change his course without a tacit/overt threat of deprivation), authority (B complies because A's command is seen as reasonable/legitimate), force (stripping B of the choice and manipulation (force, but compliance in the absence of recognition on the complier’s part either of the source or the exact nature of the demand) upon him
 * In contrast to the decision-making power, this one allows for consideration of the ways in which decisions are prevented from being taken on potential issues over which there is an observable conflict of (subjective) interests, seen as embodied in express policy preferences and sub-political grievances.
 * This power, however, has in common with the first the stress on actual, observable conflict, overt or covert. If there appears to be universal acquiescence in the status quo, then it will not be possible to determine empirically whether the consensus is genuine or instead has been enforced through nondecision-making. Interest remains subjective rather than objective
 * The domination of defenders of the status quo may be so secure and pervasive that they are unaware of any potential challengers to their position and thus of any alternatives to the existing political process, whose bias they work to maintain.

Ideological power

 * Allows one to influence people's wishes and thoughts, even making them want things opposed to their own self-interest (thus, a latent, non-observable variable)
 * Power is not always behavioral
 * Two separate cases: First, there is the phenomenon of collective action, where the policy or action of a collectivity is manifest, but not attributable to particular individuals’ decisions or behaviour. Second, there is the phenomenon of ‘systemic’ or organizational effects, where the mobilization of bias results from the form of organization.
 * Probably the most indispensable of all characteristics in a dominant group is the sense, shared not only by themselves but by the populace, that their claim to govern is legitimate
 * Leaders, he says, ‘do not merely respond to the preferences of constituents; leaders also shape preferences’. Indeed, is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have that is, to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires through the control of information, through the mass media and through the processes of socialization
 * Is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial? To assume that the absence of grievance equals genuine consensus is simply to rule out the possibility of false or manipulated consensus
 * Thus, actual conflict is not necessary for the exercise of power. The most effective and insidious use of power is to prevent such conflict from arising in the first place.
 * The ideological power as a third face of power, then, allows for consideration of the many ways in which potential issues are kept out of politics, whether through the operation of social forces and institutional practices or through individuals’ decisions. What one may have here is a latent conflict, which consists in a contradiction between the interests of those exercising power and the real interests of those they exclude
 * There is something like an inarticulate ideology in political institutions, even in those that appear to be most open-minded, flexible and disjointed an ideology in the sense that it promotes the selective perception and articulation of social problems and conflicts. Political institutions and political leaders may exercise considerable control over what people choose to care about and how forcefully they articulate their cares


 * 3_faces_of_power-1.jpg

Structural power

 * Structural/instrumental power ≠ level of abstraction:
 * Level usually refers to the unit of analysis you are talking about: micro level is usually focused on agents and you can be more concrete and specific in analysing policymaking outcomes; meso level generally means the focus is on institutions and how actors navigate within those institutional boundaries; macro level of capitalism and classes concerns how the system gets reproduced and how it impinges on class conflict and structures a tendency towards class bias in policy outcomes.
 * Automatic: there is no strategic intentionality behind it; this doesnt mean that x happens in every instance of y, but rather that when it does happen (as it usually does) the mechanisms functions as an "automatic recoil effect" (to use Lindbloms phrase) without any strategic political intentionality

Other notes

 * Talk of interests provides a licence for the making of normative judgments of a moral and political characte → different conceptions of what interests are are associated with different moral and political positions. Extremely crudely
 * The liberal: takes people as they are and applies want-regarding principles to them, relating their interests to what they actually want or prefer, to their policy preferences as manifested by their political participation
 * The reformist: seeing and deploring that not everyone’s wants are given equal weight by the political system, also relates their interests to what they want or prefer, but allows that this may be revealed in more indirect and subpolitical ways in the form of defected, submerged or concealed wants and preferences
 * The radical: however, maintains that people’s wants may themselves be a product of a system which works against their interests, and, in such cases, relates the latter to what they would want and prefer, were they able to make the choice