Power

IV Trimester
 Power
• Could be force, might or energy
• Could be an ability to influence mind and action
of others to get desired results
• Power is central to the understanding and
practice of politics. It can be exercised on three
levels through the ability to make or influence
decisions; through the ability to set agenda and
prevent decisions being made; and through the
ability to manipulate what people think and want
 Power
• Power is the ability to influence the behaviour of
others based upon the capacity to reward or
punish. By contrast, authority is the right to
influence others based upon the acknowledged
duty to obey. Weber distinguished between three
kinds of authority: traditional authority, based
upon custom and history; charismatic authority
the power of personality; and legal rational
derived from the formal power of an office or post.
 power
• In most cases 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 as power and what is thought
as influence.
• Power is here seen as the capacity to make formal decisions which are
in some way binding upon others, whether they are made by parents,
teachers or government etc.
• 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 vacuum. (it may
involve lobbying and rational persuasion, through to open
intimidation).
Question related to the nature of power
• Intentional or structural?
• Is exercise of power always deliberate or intentional?
• Can advertisers be promoting the spread of
materialistic values deliberately?
• The intentionalist hold that the power is always an
attribute of an identifiable agent be it an interest
group, political party, major corporation or whatever.
• The structuralists see power as a feature of a social
system as a whole.
 Various Interpretation of Power
• Steven Lukes in Power: A Radical View (1974)
Gave three faces of power-
1. It can involve the ability to influence the making of
the decisions;
2. It may be reflected in the capacity to shape the
political agenda and thus prevent decision making;
3. It may take the form of controlling people’s
thoughts by the manipulation of their perception
and preferences
 1. Decision Making
• Robert Dahl, A Critique of the ruling Elite Model (1958)
• Proposed 3 criteria that had to be fulfilled before the ‘ruling
elite’ thesis could be validated-
1 the ruling elite, if it existed at all, must be a well defined group;
2 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;
3 there must be the evidence that the preferences of the elite
regularly prevail over those of other group.
According to Dahl power as an ability to influence the decision
making process is objective and quantifiable
 Decision making
• According to this view –power is a question of-
who gets their way; how often get their way; and
over what issues they get their way
• It can be tested by way of selecting key decision
making areas identify the actors involved and
discover their preferences and
• finally analyze the decision made and compare
these with the known preferences of the actors
• Who Governs? 1963
 Robert Dahl
• Who Governs?-
• Selects 3 key policy areas to study-1. urban renewal; 2. public
education and 3. the nomination of political candidates.
• Acknowledges disparity between the influence of privileged
and ordinary people
• Dismisses idea of a ruling or permanent elite
• Concludes that power is widely dispersed throughout the
society, that the face of the power they recognize –the ability
to influence decisions –is often referred to as pluralistic view
of power, suggesting the existence of plural or many centers
of power.
 Criticism
• This method is misleading –pluralist conclusions are not
built into this understanding of power.
• There is no reason why elitist conclusions can not be
drawn if the preferences of a single cohesive group are
seen to prevail over those of other groups on a regular
basis.
• By focusing exclusively upon decisions, this approach
recognizes only one face of power and particularly ignores
those circumstances in which decisions are prevented
from happening that is the areas of non decision making.
 Agenda Setting
• It focuses on the extent of power in possession
reflected in wealth, political position, social status etc.
• Power may exist but not exercised for the reason that
the decisions will not affect them adversely. For
example business class –on their own they may show
little concern for the issues like housing, health and
education etc.
• Law of anticipated reactions where people defer a
superior by anticipating his or her wishes without the
need for explicit instructions.
 P. Bachrach and M. Baratz
• The Two Face of Power (1962) –
• Accepted that power is reflected in the decision
making process they insisted that “to the extent that a
person or group –consciously or subconsciously –
creates or reinforces barriers to the public airing of
policy conflicts that a person or group has power”.
• E F Schattschneider- “some issues are organized into
politics while others are organized out.
• Therefore power quite simply is the ability to set
agenda.
• Schattschneider-
• Non decision making – highlights the importance of political
organization in blocking the participation of certain groups and
the expression of particular opinions.
• “organization is the mobilization of bias”
• Bachrach and Baratz -any adequate understanding of power
must take full account of the “dominant values and the
political myths, rituals and institutions which tend to favor the
vested interests of one or more groups, relative to one other’
• Political parties in liberal democracies could be one of the
example.
 Observation
• The analysis of power as non decision making has generated elitist
rather than the pluralist conclusions.
• Bachrach and Baratz 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.
• Liberal democracy for them has proven to be a filter through which
radical proposals are weeded out and kept off the political agenda.
• But exception to this is popular pressure that can prevail over the
vested interests like successful campaigns for welfare rights and
improved consumer and environmental protection.

• But all this can be achieved by manipulation of what people think

 Thought control
• First two approaches to power –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 perspective agree that it is only when
groups have clearly stated the preferences that is
possible to say who has power who does not.
• The problem with such a position 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 possess an entirely independent
mind; the ideas; opinions and preferences all are structured
and shaped by social experience; through the influence of
family; peer groups; school; the workplace; the mass media,
political parties etc.
• Vance Packard (1914-96)-in The Hidden Persuaders (1960)
describes this ability to manipulates human behaviour by
the creation of needs. (like power of advertising).
 Interpretation by the Leftists
• The third ‘face’ of power that is ability to influence is most
insidious like the ability of A to exercise power over B, not by
getting B to do what he would not otherwise do, but, as Steven
Lukes says “ by influencing, shaping or determining his very
wants’.
• Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (1964) (the new left
theorist) suggests that advanced industrial societies could be
regarded as "totalitarian”. The industrial societies control people
through the pervasive manipulation of needs, made possible by
modern technology.
• According to Marcuse it creates “ 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 called “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.
• On the basis of this reasoning Marx holds capitalism to be a system of
classic exploitation and oppression within which the power is
concentrated in the hands of a “ruling class” the bourgeoisie.
• The power of bourgeoisie is ideological, as well as economic and
political.
• Thus the exploited class, the proletariat, is deluded by the weight of
bourgeoisie ideas and theories and comes to suffer from what Engles
termed “false consciousness”. (In effect, it is prevented from
recognizing the facts of its own exploitation.
• Lenin says that the power of bourgeoisie 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.
 Post modernists
• Michel Foucault –link between power and systems of thought control 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, to academic
disciplines and political ideologies can be regarded as discourse in this sense.
• Discourses are a form of power in that they set up antagonism 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 Marxist view, are unaware of the fact or extent of those
domination.
• Marxists associate power as thought control with the attempt to maintain class
inequality; Post modernists consider power as ubiquitous, all systems of knowledge
being viewed as manifestations of power
 Criticism
• Radical View of Power-
• It is right to consider people’s perceptions and preferences
are delusions, that their “felt” needs are not their “real”
needs, without a standard of truth against which to judge
them.
• If people’s stated preferences are not to be relied upon,
how is it possible to prove what their real interests might
be?
• If class antagonisms are submerged under the influence of
bourgeois ideology, how can the Marxist notion of ‘ruling
class’ can be tested?
• one problem with the Postmodernist view that knowledge is
socially determined and, usually or always, contaminated
with power, is that all claims to truth are at best relative.
• According to Lukes the answer to all such interpretation is –
that people’s real interests are ‘what they would want and
prefer were they able to make choice’.
• In other words only rational and autonomous individuals are
capable of identifying their own ‘real’ interests.
• The key question to be answered is –How are we to decide
when individuals are capable of making rational and
autonomous judgments?
• Foucault therefore turns in his later work to the concept of "government" in order to
explain how power functions:
• Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one
to the other than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very
broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. "Government" did not refer
only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it designated the
way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the
government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not
only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection, but
also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were destined
to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to
structure the possible field of action of others. The relationship proper to power
would not therefore be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of
voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but
rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which
is government.
• The turn to this concept of "government" allowed Foucault to include a
new element to his understanding of power: freedom. "Power is
exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" ,
Foucault explains. Conversely, "slavery is not a power relationship when
man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of
constraint.)" . Indeed, recalcitrance thus becomes an integral part of the
power relationship: "At the very heart of the power relationship, and
constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the
intransigence of freedom" . Foucault thus provides us with a powerful
model for thinking about how to fight oppression when one sees it: "the
analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and
the 'antagonism' between power relations and the intransitivity of
freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence".