Power (social and political)

• 1. Introduction

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  Power, in political science, is the ability to influence or direct the actions, beliefs, or conduct of other actors, usually through law. That definition sounds tidy, but the source insists it is anything but simple. Power does not reduce to the threat or use of force. It also works through diffuse means like institutions, and through structure itself. It orders a master above an enslaved person, an employer above employees, a parent above a child, a representative above voters. It even works through language, where categories lend legitimacy to some behaviors and groups over others. When power looks legitimate or socially approved, we give it a different name: authority. So how does a thing this slippery actually operate? Who holds it, what does holding it do to them, and what happens when the people underneath simply stop obeying? Scholars from social psychology to Marxist theory have spent decades trying to answer that, and they rarely agree.

• 2. Soft And Hard

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  Soft tactics take advantage of the relationship between the influencer and the target. They are indirect and interpersonal, things like collaboration and socializing. Hard tactics, by contrast, are harsh, forceful, direct, and rely on concrete outcomes. Yet the source is careful to note that hard is not always stronger. In many situations the fear of social exclusion motivates a person far more than physical punishment ever could. Power tactics also split along a rational and nonrational line. Rational tactics use reasoning, logic, and sound judgment, such as bargaining and persuasion. Nonrational tactics lean on emotionality or misinformation, like evasion and put-downs. A third axis is unilateral versus bilateral. Bilateral tactics such as negotiation involve reciprocity from both sides. Unilateral tactics, including disengagement and the deployment of fait accomplis, develop without any participation from the target. People do not pick from this menu at random. Interpersonally oriented people tend toward soft and rational tactics. Extroverts use a wider variety of tactics than introverts do. And almost everyone shifts from soft to hard the moment they meet resistance.

• 3. The Balance Of Power

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  Because power operates relationally and reciprocally, sociologists speak of a balance of power between the parties in any relationship. The source makes a striking claim here: all parties to all relationships have some power. The sociological task is to discover the relative strengths, whether they are equal or unequal, stable or subject to periodic change. There is a reason the word is used carefully. When the parties are roughly equal, sociologists tend to describe the relationship in terms of constraint rather than power, because power carries a connotation of unilateralism. If every relationship were simply called power, the word would lose its meaning. The source also stresses that power is not innate. It can be granted to others. To acquire it, one must possess or control what the source calls a form of power currency. That idea of a currency that can be held, spent, or handed over sets up a darker question: what does that currency look like when one leader controls almost all of it?

• 4. Rule By The Few

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  In authoritarian regimes, political power concentrates in the hands of a single leader or a small group who exercise almost complete control over the government and its institutions. Because some of these leaders are not elected by a majority, their main threat comes from the masses, and they answer that threat with specific tactics. Repression targets actors who challenge the regime's beliefs, directly or indirectly. Autocrats repress those they see as having irreconcilable interests and cooperate with those they think can be reconciled. Repression alone often falls short because of preference falsification, the gap between what an individual privately prefers and what they publicly profess. Indoctrination fills that gap. The state controls public education and uses propaganda to spread its values, and the numbers are pointed: a one standard deviation increase in pro-regime propaganda reduces the odds of protest the following day by 15 percent. Coercive distribution hands out welfare and resources to keep people dependent while rewarding those who can be manipulated. Infiltration sends agents to the grassroots to sway the public toward the regime. Different authoritarian sub-regime types lean on different combinations of these controls.

• 5. What Power Does To People

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  Power changes both those who hold it and those who are its targets, and a theory developed by D. Keltner and colleagues explains why. Their approach and inhibition theory assumes that having and using power alters a person's psychological state. Most organisms react to events in two ways. Approach is tied to action, self-promotion, seeking rewards, and increased energy. Inhibition is tied to self-protection, vigilance, avoiding danger, and an overall reduction in activity. Power promotes approach; losing power promotes inhibition. The upside is real. Power prompts people to take action and to respond more readily to changes in a group and its environment. Powerful people speak up, make the first move, lead negotiations, plan more task-related activities, and carry out executive cognitive functions more rapidly. They feel more positive emotions and smile more than low-power individuals. The downside is just as real. Powerful people are prone to risky, inappropriate, or unethical decisions and often overstep their boundaries. As they gain power their self-evaluations grow more positive while their views of others turn more negative. Their social attentiveness weakens, making it harder to grasp another person's point of view. They spend less time understanding subordinates, perceive them in stereotypical ways, and come to believe the less powerful are untrustworthy.

• 6. The Five Bases

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  In a now-classic 1959 study, social psychologists John R. P. French and Bertram Raven built a schema of the sources of power to analyze how power plays work or fail in a relationship. They insisted that power be distinguished from influence. Power is the state of affairs in a relationship between A and B such that an influence attempt by A makes A's desired change in B more likely. Power, conceived this way, is fundamentally relative. It requires B to recognize a quality in A worth changing for, and A must draw on the right base of power for the relationship. Drawing on the wrong base can backfire and even reduce A's own power. Expert power derives from a person's skills and the organization's need for them. It is highly specific, limited to the area in which the expert is trained, and it earns trust because people listen to those who understand a situation and offer solid judgment. Coercive power is the application of negative influences, including the ability to defer or withhold rewards. The source notes it appears in the fashion industry coupled with legitimate power, described in that field's literature as the glamorization of structural domination and exploitation. Around reward power, the source raises cancel culture, calling mass ostracization an upward power and policies for policing the internet a downward power. French and Raven counted five significant categories, and later thinkers, notably Gareth Morgan in his 1986 book Images of Organization, proposed further bases.

• 7. Theorists Of Domination

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  Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist writer, asked why no Communist revolution had come to Western Europe while one was claimed in Russia. Drawing on Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, he pictured cultural hegemony as a centaur in two halves. The beast at the back was the classic image of power through coercion and brute force, physical or economic. The human face at the front projected power through consent. In Italy, capitalism had convinced the working classes their interests matched those of capitalists, and so a revolution was avoided. The Marxist-feminist writer Michele Barrett stressed instead how ideology extols family life, pointing to women as a reserve army of labour, called up for masculine tasks in wartime and sent back afterward. Michel Foucault argued that real power relies on the ignorance of its agents. No single human runs the dispositif; power disperses through the apparatus silently, remaining elusive to rational investigation. He developed the concept of docile bodies in Discipline and Punish, writing that a body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. Gene Sharp, an American professor of political science, held that power is not monolithic and ultimately derives from the subjects of the state. If subjects do not obey, leaders have no power. His work, citing Etienne de La Boetie, is thought to have influenced the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic and the 2011 Arab Spring. Other models multiply the dimensions. Stewart Clegg's circuits of power theory likens power to an electric circuit board with episodic, dispositional, and facilitative circuits meeting at obligatory passage points. John Kenneth Galbraith, who lived from 1908 to 2006, sorted power in his 1983 book The Anatomy of Power into types based on force, compensation, and persuasion, drawn from personality, property, and organization. Bjorn Kraus, starting from Max Weber, split the term into instructive power, which can be rejected, and destructive power, which cannot.

• 8. Pushing Back

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  Eugen Tarnow studied what airplane hijackers hold over passengers and drew a parallel with power in the military. His point is that a group amplifies a leader's power over an individual. If the group conforms to the leader's commands, that power is greatly enhanced; if the group refuses, the leader's power over the individual is non-existent. That hinge between conformity and refusal runs through the source's treatment of resistance. Harsh power tactics like punishment and rule-based sanctions prove less effective than soft tactics like expert power, referent power, and personal rewards, because harsh tactics breed hostility, fear, and anger while soft ones invite cooperation. Coercive influence can trigger what the source calls disruptive contagion, or the ripple effect, where reprimanding one member spreads bad behavior through the group, especially when that member has high status and the authority's requests are vague. When low-power members share an identity, they may form a Revolutionary Coalition to oppose the authority structure, most often when the authority lacks referent power and demands unpleasant tasks. Herbert Kelman traced how reluctant recruits become zealous followers through three step-like stages: compliance without agreement, identification that imitates the authority, and internalization, where the induced behavior fuses with a person's own values. The countervailing force has its own name. The anthropologist David Graeber defined counter-power as social institutions set against the state and capital, from self-governing communities to radical labor unions to popular militias, and noted that when such institutions hold their ground it becomes a dual power situation. Tim Gee, in his 2011 book Counterpower, split it into idea, economic, and physical counterpower. The word is old. Martin Buber's 1949 book Paths in Utopia carries the line that power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power, a reminder that the surest measure of any power is how it answers the force pushing back against it.