2 Power, legitimacy and authority

2.1 Power

Power is the central concept in political science. Yet it cannot be measured: there is no unit of power. We speak of people having less power or more power or no power, but these are all assessments and they may be guesses. One has to assess powerand assess it wellin order to understand political situations. Politicians who make mistakes in estimating power are not likely to be successful. Political scientists could be judged on their ability to identify where power lies, how it is exerted and how it is divided. (It is rare for anyone to have total power.) One reason why power is elusive is that much exertion of power goes on behind the scenes. It is often in the interests of power-holders not to reveal how much power they possess. Perceptions may deceive. Some may appear to have power when they do not possess it. Paradoxically, the perception of holding power may in fact confer power.

2.1.1 Definitions of power

It is therefore difficult to define power. Three recent attempts illustrate the problem.

Weber

Probably the best known definition is that of Max Weber (1864-1920) who characterised power as the chance of a man or number of men to realise their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action. ¹ Two comments that spring to mind about this definition are that it puts an emphasis on opportunity and will, and that it assumes that the exertion of power takes place within a formal context. Hence power is visible and can be located by empirical investigation and evaluated in terms of Lasswell's characterisation of politics, 'Who gets what, when, how?'² Robert Dahl (1915-), adopting the Weberian definition, investigated the decision-

making process in New Haven, Connecticut and came to the conclusion that power-wielders' preferences were realised only partially in contested situations. ³ In the democratic context, structures of power were pluralistic (see Chapter 4) and a situation he called 'polyarchy' prevailed.

Others have defined power as the ability and capacity to achieve desired ends. Bertrand Russell said power was the production of intended effects.⁴ Like Weber's definition, these neglect the need to want to exert power. Unless one has the will to use power all the resources and skills will be of little avail. It does not require much research to discover that most people do not appear to want power to any great degree.

Bachrach and Barantz

Hence later commentators were concerned as much with the powerless as the wielders of power in the formal decision-making process. Bachrach and Baratz pointed to the neglect of the study of non-decisions.⁵ Was it not likely that the real wielders of power were those who prevented decisions being taken because they did not allow issues they considered embarrassing to appear on the 'political agenda'? This suggested power was much more complex than the simple pluralists had implied. Moreover, some issues were more important than others. Perhaps political scientists who studied visible decision-making and assessed the achievement of 'intended effects' were deceiving themselves. Much more powerful people were preventing the most important issues from being discussed and from entering the decisionmaking arena. Therefore people's preferences were being ignored for the benefit of the interests of a ruling group or class. What political scientists should be studying was the way political agendas were drawn up. As the implication was that many of these agendas were hidden, this task appeared far from easy.

Lukes

Lukes took the problem of power into a further dimension of complexity.⁶ He argued that power was being exercised by hegemonies whose interest was to maintain the status quo by fashioning people's perceptions, beliefs and values so that their stated 'preferences' (Dahl's term) were contrary to their interests. Consequently, in order to understand a political situation one needed to know the strategies underlying the decision-making processes, including the agenda-setting procedures and the way in which the perceptions of the powerless are shaped. This three-dimensional insight into the complexities of power puts a premium on the study of deception and the manipulation of minds

People's conceptions of their interests are not the real ones. They suffer from 'false consciousness'.

Various implications stem from Lukes's radical view of power. One is that the pluralistic democratic process as described by Dahl is a fraud. We have to accept either the classical elitist theories of inevitable oligarchic rule as portrayed by Mosca ⁷ and Pareto⁸ (see Chapter 15), or some other hegemony which can be overthrown by the powerless seizing the levers of power by which their consciousness has been distorted, as in Marxist theory (see Chapter 13). Lukes moved the problem of power from an empirical to a theoretical and normative plane.

The implication for political scientists is that they should be concerned with the identification of the real consciousnesses of people and not with their false ones as indicated by their statements of their preferences and voting records. It is not clear how this can be done by empirical method. It assumes colossal presumption on someone's partto be prepared to judge what people's actual interests are even when they say they are otherwise.

Alford and Friedland have conceived a typology of power at three levels.⁹ The situational corresponds to Weber's notion of power being a situation of command and obedience; the institutional level of power refers to the features of institutional frameworks which bias decisionmaking in the interests of certain groups; and the systemic level concerns the characteristics of society which help certain people, classes or groups to realise their aspirations. This last level is what Lukes called the 'third face of power'.

2.1.2 Resources of power

While some of the resources of power are material and easily identified, others are more subtle.

Weaponry

Everyone knows Mao Tse-tung's (see Chapter 4) remark, 'Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' The death threat is clearly a good way of making people do what they do not wish to do. All arms from knives to nuclear missiles deserve respect, especially from the unarmed. They are very important in the evaluation of power in relationships between states, but they can also be used by military dictatorships to cow populations. 'Why are they not in power everywhere,' Finer enquires; 'they have all the guns?'¹⁰ It is a rhetorical question. Guns are not appropriate in some contexts. The President of the USA is a powerful international figure who is commander-in-chief of the us armed forces, yet he cannot use arms to make Congress pass his proposals. Nor do the big guns always win. The heavily armed USA could not, after many years' fighting, defeat the guerrilla armies of the Vietcong.

Wealth

Wealth is a power resource in most circumstances. In primitive societies it will not be wealth measured in money. Wealth will be most effective where law and order is enforced. Wealthy people hold power because they can use it to buy people and politicians in order to achieve their ends. In modern democratic politics money is particularly important in election campaigns when it is used for publicity purposes. Political parties and pressure groups may depend on wealthy donors for a good deal of their income. Industrialists and financiers are often perceived as manipulating markets and stock exchanges in order to obtain the sort of government they want. Left-wing governments tend to suspect them of this intention. Socialist parties saw the 1931 financial crisis as a 'bankers' ramp'.

Numbers

Other things being equal (which frequently they are not), it is better to be supported by more people than less. In democracies it is clear that more than 50 per cent support at elections usually confers power: at least the power to assume office. But one can overestimate the power of numerical majorities. Stein Rokkan, a Norwegian political scientist, said 'Votes count: resources decide', ¹¹ meaning resources other than numbers of people. Organised numbers, whose support is unconditional, confer more power than disorganised supporters with ephemeral allegiance. In the field of international relations large armies confer power on states. Stalin, whose view of power was brutally cynical, summed it up when he enquired 'How many divisions has the Pope?

Strategic location

Position may be a power resource in all senses of the word. A small country in a strategically important position may find its bargaining strength a help even in terms of international trade. People who hold strategic positions in organisations may acquire power. They may be in situations where they can control the flow of resources, including information and access to a power hierarchy. Such people are known as 'gatekeepers'