The Definitions of Power, and the Three Faces of It

In the same passage Weber defines two narrower terms that examiners like, because students confuse all three. Herrschaft, which we render as domination or authority, is the chance of finding obedience for a command of a given content among specifiable persons. Disziplin, discipline, is the chance of finding prompt, automatic and unthinking obedience among a specifiable number of people, by force of habit. Power is the widest, authority is narrower, discipline is narrowest.

Bertrand Russell

Russell defined power as the production of intended effects. It is the shortest definition in the field and its virtue is that it links power to purpose: an earthquake produces enormous effects and has no power, because it intends nothing.

Its weakness is the mirror image. A great deal of power produces effects nobody intended. A change in the rate of customs duty may destroy an industry the minister never thought about. On Russell's definition that is not an exercise of power at all, which most political scientists find too narrow.

Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan

They defined power as participation in the making of decisions, adding that the exercise of power involves severe sanctions for non-compliance. This is the definition that made power researchable: to find out who has power in a town, find out who takes part in decisions.

Its weakness is what Bachrach and Baratz built a career on. It can only find power in the decisions that were actually taken.

Robert Dahl

Dahl's formulation is the most quoted in the English-speaking world: A has power over B to the extent that A can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do. It is precise, it is comparative, and it can be tested. You watch a decision, you see who wanted what, you see who prevailed.

Its weakness is that it assumes the conflict is visible and that the issue got as far as being decided.

R. H. Tawney

Tawney defined power as the capacity of an individual or group to modify the conduct of other individuals or groups in the manner which he desires, and added that it may be limited by the resistance he encounters. His contribution to an answer is the emphasis on power as a capacity that is always relative to a countervailing capacity.

The three faces of power

This is the framework that makes a good answer, and MU's own reading list points at the middle one.

The first face: who wins the argument

The first face is Dahl's. Power is the ability to prevail in a decision when there is an open conflict of preferences. To study it, take a decision that was made, find the participants, find what each wanted, and see whose preference carried.

Its blind spot. It sees only decisions that were made.

The second face: who decides what gets discussed

Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz argued in 1962 that power has a second face: the ability to keep an issue from ever reaching the agenda. They called this non-decision making. A grievance that is never articulated, or is articulated and never put on the list, has been defeated as thoroughly as one that is put to the vote and lost, and more cheaply, because the losers may never know a contest occurred.

The apparatus that does this is the mobilisation of bias: the settled procedures, rules, rituals and expectations of an institution, which make some kinds of demand easy to raise and others almost impossible. A rule that a matter can be tabled only by a member, in a body that has no member from the affected group, is a mobilisation of bias.

Its blind spot. It still assumes there is a grievance somewhere, felt by somebody.

The third face: who shapes what people want

Steven Lukes argued in 1974 that the most effective and insidious use of power is to prevent the grievance from arising at all, by shaping perceptions and preferences so that people accept their situation as natural, unchangeable or divinely ordained. On this view there may be power at work even where there is no conflict and no complaint, and the absence of complaint proves nothing.

Its blind spot. If power can operate with no observable conflict, it is very hard to prove that it did, and critics say the third face makes power unfalsifiable.

A worked example

A textile mill on the edge of a city discharges effluent into a creek. Three hundred families live along it.

First face. The municipal corporation debates a resolution requiring a treatment plant. The mill's supporters vote it down eighteen to twelve. The mill has exercised power in the first face: an open conflict, a visible defeat.

Second face. The following year the residents' association drafts a fresh resolution. The standing committee rules that effluent is a state pollution board subject and outside the corporation's competence, so the resolution is never tabled. No vote is taken and no defeat is recorded. The mill's power has been exercised more efficiently than before, and the minutes of the corporation show nothing at all.

Third face. Ten years pass. The families along the creek have always lived beside a dirty creek, as their parents did. Nobody drafts a resolution because nobody regards the state of the creek as a thing that could be otherwise. There is no conflict, no non-decision and no record. If you asked the residents whether anybody had power over them they would say no.

An examiner asking "discuss the definitions of power" is asking whether you can see all three of those and say which definition catches which.

Distinctions that carry marks

What these definitions are NOT

They are not rival descriptions of the same fact. They are searchlights pointed at different parts of the field. An answer that says "Dahl was wrong and Lukes was right" has misunderstood the argument. Dahl's definition is correct about the thing it measures.

"Definitions of power" is not an invitation to list names. Every definition in an answer should be followed by what it lets you see and what it hides.

Weber's definition is not a definition of authority. Weber gives three definitions in one passage and they are not the same. Using Macht where you mean Herrschaft is the error the next chapters exist to prevent.

Quick revision

1. Weber: power is every chance of carrying through one's own will within a social relationship even against resistance, whatever that chance rests on. In the same passage: Herrschaft is the chance of obedience to a command, Disziplin is the chance of automatic obedience.
2. Russell: the production of intended effects. Lasswell and Kaplan: participation in the making of decisions. Dahl: A gets B to do what B would not otherwise do. Tawney: capacity to modify others' conduct in the manner desired.
3. First face, Dahl: winning open conflicts.
4. Second face, Bachrach and Baratz 1962: non-decision making, and the mobilisation of bias.
5. Third face, Lukes 1974: shaping preferences so that no grievance arises.
6. Each definition's weakness is the next definition's reason for existing. That sentence is what turns a list into an answer.

Test yourself

1. State Weber's definition of power and explain its three key elements. Power means every chance, within a social relationship, of carrying through one's own will even against resistance, whatever that chance may rest on. "Every chance" makes power a probability rather than an act, so it exists without being exercised. "Even against resistance" makes opposition the test case. "Whatever it rests on" makes the concept deliberately amorphous: Weber says any human quality and any configuration of circumstances may confer it, so power has no single source.

2. What did Bachrach and Baratz add to Dahl's account? They argued that power has a second face. Besides prevailing in decisions that are actually taken, power operates by preventing issues from reaching the agenda at all, which they called non-decision making. The instrument is the mobilisation of bias, the settled rules and procedures of an institution that make some demands easy to raise and others practically impossible. A grievance suppressed before it is tabled has been defeated more cheaply than one that is voted down.

3. Why is Russell's definition thought too narrow? Russell defines power as the production of intended effects, which usefully separates power from a natural force such as an earthquake. But much power produces effects nobody intended: a change in a duty may ruin an industry the minister never considered. On Russell's definition that is not an exercise of power at all, and most political scientists think a definition should capture it.

4. Give a worked illustration of the three faces of power. A mill pollutes a creek. In the first face, a resolution requiring treatment is tabled and voted down: open conflict, visible defeat. In the second face, the next resolution is ruled out of order as beyond the body's competence and is never tabled: no vote, no record, the same result more cheaply. In the third face, years later nobody drafts a resolution because a dirty creek has come to seem the natural state of things: no conflict, no grievance, and nothing at all in the minutes.

5. What is the main criticism of the third face of power? That it cannot be proved. If power can operate where there is no observable conflict and no complaint, then any state of contentment can be attributed to power, and the claim cannot be tested against evidence. Defenders answer that the difficulty of proof is not a reason to deny that the thing exists, and that latent conflict can be argued for by showing what people would want under conditions of relative autonomy.