Encyclopedia of Power

Encyclopedia of

POWER

Editorial Board Editor Keith Dowding Australian National University

Advisory Board David A. Baldwin Princeton University

Nicholas R. Miller University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Susan Fiske Princeton University

David L. Swartz Boston University

Mark Haugaard National University of Ireland, Galway

Encyclopedia of

POWER Edited by

Keith Dowding Australian National University

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Copyright © 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of power/edited by Keith Dowding.

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p. cm. — (A SAGE reference publication) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4129-2748-2 (cloth : acid-free paper)

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11 12 13 14 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents List of Entries vii Reader’s Guide xi About the Editor xvii Contributors xix Introduction xxiii Entries A B C D E F G H I J K L

1 45 83 163 209 239 269 301 331 357 365 369 Index

M N O P Q R S T U V W

725

395 435 457 471 543 549 585 657 677 683 701

List of Entries A Priori Unions. See Owen Value Ability Ableness Absolutism Adler, Alfred Adorno, Theodor Adverse Selection Agency Agency–Structure Problem Agenda Power Agenda Setters Alliances Althusser, Louis Anarchism, Power in Anarchy in International Relations Animal Groups, Power in Apparatus. See Dispositif Appeasement Arendt, Hannah Argument, Power of Aristotle Arms Race Authoritarian Personality Authority Autonomy Autonomy of the State. See Relative Autonomy of the State Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton Bakunin, Mikhail Balance of Power Banks Banzhaf. See Banzhaf Voting Power Measure Banzhaf Value

Banzhaf Voting Power Measure Bargaining Bargaining in International Relations Barry, Brian Bases of Power Bicameral Legislature Biopower Blackmail Blocking Coalition Bourdieu, Pierre Bribe Index Budget-Maximizing Bureaucrats Bull, Hedley Bureaucracy. See Bureaucratic Power Bureaucratic Power Business and Power Cabal Capability Capital, Marxist Capital, Neoclassical Capture Theory of Regulation Carr, E. H. Cartwright, Dorwin Caste System (India) Castells, Manuel Causal Theories of Power Causation Central Intelligence Agency Chicken Games Civil War Clausewitz, Carl von Clegg, Stewart Coalition Theory Coercion, Analytic Coercion and Power vii

Coleman, James S. Coleman Index Collective Action Problem Collective Goods. See Public Goods Community Power Debate Complex Equality (Walzer) Compliance (International) Computer Algorithms for Power Indices Consensual Power, Theories of Consent Constructivist View of Power in International Relations Control Conventional Deterrence Cooperation Coordination Core of a Game Core Parties Corporatism Corruption Coup d’État Cox, Robert W. Critical Theory Cuban Missile Crisis Dahl, Robert A. Decentering (of Subject, of Structure) Defensive Realism Deflected Wants Deliberation Deliberative Democracy Democracy Dependency Theory in International Relations Determinacy Determinism

viii

List of Entries

Deterrence Theory Deterrent Threats Deutsch, Karl Dictatorship Diplomacy Discipline Discourse Dispositif Distributive Justice Domain Domhoff, G. William Dominant Parties Domination Dowding, Keith Eagly, Alice e-Governance Elections Elite Theories Empire Entrepreneurs Environmental Treaties Espionage Essentially Contested Concept Exchange Theory Exclusion Executive Power Exercise Fallacy Exit and Voice as Forms of Power Expectancy Confirmation, Power and Exploitation Extended Deterrence Fair Division False Consciousness Fascism Fear, Use of Federal Structure Felsenthal, Dan S. Female Leadership Among Mammals Feminist International Relations, View of Power Feminist Theories of Power First-Strike Capability Fiske, Susan Flyvbjerg, Bent Foucault, Michel

Framing Free Market Free Rider. See Collective Action Problem Free Will Freedom French, John R. P., Jr Fungibility of Power Resources

Imperialism Influence Intelligence Interdependence Theory Interests Internet and Power Invisible Hand I-Power

Game Forms, Power in Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power Gender, Role of Power in Giddens, Anthony Global Cities. See World Cities Global Governance Globalization Governmentality Gramsci, Antonio Grand Coalition Granovetter, Mark Groupthink Growth Coalitions Growth Machine. See Growth Coalitions Gunboat Diplomacy

Jessop, Bob Jost, John Jursidictions and StructureInduced Equilibria Justice

Habermas, Jürgen Habitus Hall, Judith A. Harsanyi, John C. Haugaard, Mark Hegemonic Power Hegemonic War Hegemony Heresthetics Heterosexism, Role of Power in Hierarchy Hobbes, Thomas Holler, Manfred Homogeneous Weighted Majority Games Human Dominance Motivation Hunter, Floyd Idealism in International Relations Ideas Ideology Imperial Power

Knowledge and Power Kropotkin, Peter Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal Language and Power Lasswell, Harold Leadership Leadership and Gender League of Nations Legislative Power Legitimation Lewin, Kurt, and Power Liberalism Loyalty Luck Luck, Brute Luhmann, Niklas Lukes, Steven Machiavelli, Niccolò Machine. See Dispositif Machover, Moshé Manipulation Mann, Michael Martin. See Martin Index Martin Index Marx, Karl Marxist Accounts of Power McClelland, David Mechanisms Media, The Michels, Robert Miliband, Ralph Miliband–Poulantzas Debate

List of Entries

Military in Government Mills, C. Wright Minimal Winning Coalition Mobilization of Bias Monopoly Power Moral Hazard Morgenthau, Hans J. Morriss, Peter Multinational Corporations Mutually Assured Destruction Nash Equilibrium Nationalism Neocorporatism. See Corporatism Neoliberalism Neorealism Networks, Power in Networks and Communities Nietzsche, Friedrich Non Decision Making Noncooperative Games Nonverbal Communication and Power Offense/Defense Dominance Offensive Realism. See Defensive Realism Opportunity Organization of the State Owen Value Paradox of New Members Parsons, Talcott Parties, Policy-Seeking Versus Power-Seeking Parties, Strong and Very Strong Paternalism Penrose Voting Power Measure Perceptual Symbols of Power Persuasion Pivot Player Pivotal Politics Pluralism Police State Policy Entrepreneurs Political Entrepreneurs. See Policy Entrepreneurs Political Legitimacy Political Parties

Political Thinking as Power Post-Fordism Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations Poulantzas, Nicos Power, Cognition, and Behavior Power as Control Theory Power as Influence. See I-Power Power as Prize. See P-Power Power Elite Power Indices Power Laws Power Motive Power To and Power Over Power to Initiate Action and Power to Prevent Action Power Transition Theory Power With P-Power Preference Versus Nonpreference-Based Concepts Prime Ministerial and Presidential Principal–Agent Relationship Prisoner’s Dilemma Propaganda Proper Simple Game Psychological Empowerment Public Goods Public Goods Index Qualified Majority Voting Quarreling Paradox Queer Theories of Power Racism, Role of Power in Rationality Raven, Bertram Realism in International Relations Realist Accounts of Power Referendums Regime Theory in International Relations Regime Theory in Urban Politics Relational Power Relative Autonomy of the State

ix

Religious Power Reputational Analysis Resources as Measuring Power Responsibility Revolution Revolutionary Cell Structure Rhetoric Right-Wing Authoritarianism Riker, William H. Riots Sabatier, Paul Scope Scott, James Sea Power Second Dimension. See Second Face Second Face Security Security Dilemma Separation of Powers Sexism, Role of Power in Shapley Value Shapley–Shubik Index Shareholder Voting Power Simple Games Small Worlds, Power in Social Breakdown Social Capital Social Dominance Theory Social Exchange Theory. See Exchange Theory Social Power Sovereignty Spatial Voting Analysis Spence, Janet Spiral Model Sprout, Harold Square Root Rules Status Strategic Interaction in International Relations Strategic Power Index Strength of Weak Links. See Strength of Weak Ties Strength of Weak Ties Striving for Superiority Structural Power Structural Suggestion Structuration

x

List of Entries

Structure-Induced Equilibrium Submissive Subordination Substructure and Superstructure Swing Player. See Ability Symbolic Power and Violence System Justification Theory Systematic Luck Systemic Power

Throffers Tijs Value Totalitarianism Trade Transactional and Transformational Leadership Transnational Corporations. See Multinational Corporations Trust

Terror Regimes Terrorism Testosterone, Power and Third Dimension. See Third Face Third Face Threats Three Faces of Power

Unicameral Legislature Unintended Consequences U.S. Electoral College, Power in Value of a Game Variable-Sum Games Vehicle Fallacy

Veiled Women Veto Players Veto Power Vote-Maximizing Parties Voting Voting Paradoxes Voting Power Waltz, Kenneth War Weber, Max Weighted Majority Game Weighted Voting Wight, Martin Will to Power Wolfers, Arnold Women as Political Leaders World Cities Wright, Quincy

Reader’s Guide Biography Adler, Alfred Adorno, Theodor Althusser, Louis Arendt, Hannah Aristotle Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton Bakunin, Mikhail Barry, Brian Bourdieu, Pierre Bull, Hedley Carr, E. H. Cartwright, Dorwin Castells, Manuel Clausewitz, Carl von Clegg, Stewart Coleman, James S. Cox, Robert W. Dahl, Robert A. Deutsch, Karl Domhoff, G. William Dowding, Keith Eagly, Alice Felsenthal, Dan S. Fiske, Susan Flyvbjerg, Bent Foucault, Michel French, John R. P., Jr. Giddens, Anthony Gramsci, Antonio Granovetter, Mark Habermas, Jürgen Hall, Judith A. Harsanyi, John C. Haugaard, Mark Hobbes, Thomas Holler, Manfred Hunter, Floyd

Jessop, Bob Jost, John Kropotkin, Peter Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal Lasswell, Harold Lewin, Kurt, and Power Luhmann, Niklas Lukes, Steven Machiavelli, Niccolò Machover, Moshé Mann, Michael Marx, Karl McClelland, David Michels, Robert Miliband, Ralph Mills, C. Wright Morgenthau, Hans J. Morriss, Peter Nietzsche, Friedrich Parsons, Talcott Poulantzas, Nicos Raven, Bertram Riker, William H. Sabatier, Paul Scott, James Spence, Janet Sprout, Harold Waltz, Kenneth Weber, Max Wight, Martin Wolfers, Arnold Wright, Quincy

Concepts Related to Power Ability Ableness Absolutism Adverse Selection xi

Agency Agenda Power Agenda Setters Argument, Power of Authority Autonomy Bargaining Blackmail Bureaucratic Power Cabal Capability Capital, Marxist Causation Coercion, Analytic Coercion and Power Collective Action Problem Complex Equality (Walzer) Consent Control Cooperation Coordination Corruption Decentering (of Subject, of Structure) Deflected Wants Deliberation Determinacy Determinism Discipline Discourse Dispositif Domain Domination Entrepreneurs Exclusion Exercise Fallacy Exit and Voice as Forms of Power

xii

Reader’s Guide

Expectancy Confirmation, Power and Exploitation Fair Division False Consciousness Fear, Use of Female Leadership Among Mammals Free Market Free Will Freedom Governmentality Habitus Hegemony Hierarchy Ideas Ideology Influence Interests Invisible Hand Leadership Legitimation Loyalty Luck Luck, Brute Manipulation Mechanisms Mobilization of Bias Moral Hazard Networks and Communities Nonverbal Communication and Power Opportunity Perceptual Symbols of Power Persuasion Pluralism Policy Entrepreneurs Political Thinking as Power Power Elite Power Motive Propaganda Public Goods Racism, Role of Power in Rationality Relative Autonomy of the State Responsibility Rhetoric Scope Second Face Social Capital Subjugation

Submissive Subordination Systematic Luck Systemic Power Third Face Threats Throffers Trade Trust Unintended Consequences Vehicle Fallacy Will to Power

Decisions and Game Theory Agenda Power Agenda Setters Banzhaf Value Banzhaf Voting Power Measure Bargaining Blocking Coalition Bribe Index Chicken Games Coalition Theory Coleman, James S. Coleman Index Computer Algorithms for Power Indices Core of a Game Dowding, Keith Fair Division Felsenthal, Dan S. Game Forms, Power in Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power Grand Coalition Gunboat Diplomacy Harsanyi, John C. Holler, Manfred Homogeneous Weighted Majority Games I-Power Jurisdictions and Structure-Induced Equilibria Machover, Moshé Martin Index Minimal Winning Coalition Mutually Assured Destruction Non Decision Making Noncooperative Games Owen Value Paradox of New Members

Parties, Policy-Seeking Versus Power-Seeking Penrose Voting Power Measure Pivot Player Power Indices Power Laws Power to Initiate Action and Power to Prevent Action P-Power Preference Versus Nonpreference-Based Concepts Proper Simple Game Public Goods Index Qualified Majority Voting Quarreling Paradox Shapley Value Shapley–Shubik Index Shareholder Voting Power Simple Games Small Worlds, Power in Spatial Voting Analysis Square Root Rules Strategic Power Index Tijs Value U.S. Electoral College, Power in Value of a Game Variable-Sum Games Veto Players Veto Power Voting Paradoxes Voting Power Weighted Majority Game Weighted Voting

Institutional Issues Agenda Power Agenda Setters Bicameral Legislature Budget-Maximizing Bureaucrats Bureaucratic Power Capture Theory of Regulation Central Intelligence Agency Corporatism Dominant Parties e-Governance Elections Federal Structure Internet and Power

Reader’s Guide

Leadership Media, The Organization of the State Political Parties Prime Ministerial and Presidential Principal–Agent Relationship Prisoner’s Dilemma Referendums Structure-Induced Equilibrium Unicameral Legislature U.S. Electoral College, Power in

International Relations Alliances Anarchy in International Relations Appeasement Arms Race Balance of Power Banks Bargaining in International Relations Bull, Hedley Carr, E. H. Cartwright, Dorwin Chicken Games Civil War Clausewitz, Carl von Compliance (International) Constructivist View of Power in International Relations Conventional Deterrence Cox, Robert W. Cuban Missile Crisis Defensive Realism Dependency Theory in International Relations Deterrence Theory Deterrent Threats Deutsch, Karl Diplomacy Empire Environmental Treaties Espionage Executive Power Extended Deterrence Feminist International Relations, View of Power First-Strike Capability

Gunboat Diplomacy Hegemonic Power Hegemonic War Hegemony Idealism in International Relations Imperial Power Imperialism Intelligence Lasswell, Harold League of Nations Military in Government Morgenthau, Hans J. Multinational Corporations Mutually Assured Destruction Neoliberalism Neorealism Offense/Defense Dominance Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations Power Transition Theory Realism in International Relations Regime Theory in International Relations Sea Power Security Security Dilemma Separation of Powers Sovereignty Spiral Model Sprout, Harold Strategic Interaction in International Relations Terror Regimes Terrorism Waltz, Kenneth War Wight, Martin Wolfers, Arnold Wright, Quincy

Interpersonal Relationships Agency–Structure Problem Authority Caste System (India) Chicken Games Deliberative Democracy Gender, Role of Power in Heterosexism, Role of Power in

xiii

Hierarchy Interdependence Theory Leadership and Gender Power as Control Theory Psychological Empowerment Submissive Veiled Women

Intrapersonal Matters Agency Agency–Structure Problem Autonomy Bases of Power Free Will Gender, Role of Power in Interdependence Theory Leadership and Gender Psychological Empowerment Submissive

Key Debates Agency–Structure Problem Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton Barry, Brian Bourdieu, Pierre Community Power Debate Consensual Power, Theories of Critical Theory Dahl, Robert A. Defensive Realism Deliberative Democracy Dependency Theory in International Relations Discourse Domhoff, G. William Domination Dowding, Keith Elite Theories Essentially Contested Concept Free Will Freedom Global Governance Hunter, Floyd Liberalism Luck Miliband, Ralph Miliband–Poulantzas Debate Mills, C. Wright

xiv

Reader’s Guide

Mobilization of Bias Neoliberalism Neorealism Non Decision Making Organization of the State Pluralism Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations Poulantzas, Nicos Power as Control Theory Power Elite Power To and Power Over Psychological Empowerment Queer Theories of Power Rationality Realism in International Relations Regime Theory in International Relations Regime Theory in Urban Politics Relative Autonomy of the State Resources as Measuring Power Second Face Social Dominance Theory Spiral Model Structural Power Structural Suggestion Structuration Three Faces of Power Transactional and Transformational Leadership

Methodological Issues Adverse Selection Agency–Structure Problem Community Power Debate Essentially Contested Concept Exercise Fallacy False Consciousness Fungibility of Power Resources Mechanisms Pluralism Power Elite Power Laws Preference Versus Nonpreference-Based Concepts Principal–Agent Relationship Rationality

Realism in International Relations Realist Accounts of Power Reputational Analysis Resources as Measuring Power Systematic Luck Third Face Three Faces of Power

Political Science Agenda Power Agenda Setters Authority Banzhaf Value Bicameral Legislature Budget-Maximizing Bureaucrats Bureaucratic Power Business and Power Capital, Marxist Capital, Neoclassical Capture Theory of Regulation Central Intelligence Agency Civil War Coalition Theory Collective Action Problem Community Power Debate Core Parties Corporatism Coup d’État Dahl, Robert A. Democracy Dictatorship Dominant Parties Dowding, Keith e-Governance Elections Executive Power Fascism Federal Structure Global Governance Globalization Governmentality Grand Coalition Growth Coalitions Heresthetics Hierarchy Hunter, Floyd Intelligence Internet and Power

Jursidictions and StructureInduced Equilibria Lasswell, Harold Leadership Legislative Power Liberalism Lukes, Steven Martin Index McClelland, David Michels, Robert Military in Government Mills, C. Wright Minimal Winning Coalition Morris, Peter Nationalism Organization of the State Parties, Policy-Seeking Versus Power-Seeking Parties, Strong and Very Strong Pivotal Politics Pluralism Police State Policy Entrepreneurs Political Parties Post-Fordism Power Elite Power To and Power Over Prime Ministerial and Presidential Principal–Agent Relationship Realist Accounts of Power Referendums Relative Autonomy of the State Revolution Revolutionary Cell Structure Right-Wing Authoritarianism Riker, William H. Riots Second Face Social Capital Social Power Spatial Voting Analysis Structural Power Structural Suggestion Structure-Induced Equilibrium Terror Regimes Terrorism Testosterone, Power and Totalitarianism

Reader’s Guide

Unicameral Legislature U.S. Electoral College, Power in Veiled Women Veto Players Vote-Maximizing Parties Voting Voting Paradoxes Voting Power Weber, Max Weighted Voting Women as Political Leaders

Political Theory Agency–Structure Problem Anarchism, Power in Authority Barry, Brian Bourdieu, Pierre Capital, Marxist Capital, Neoclassical Castells, Manuel Deliberative Democracy Democracy Dispositif Distributive Justice Domhoff, G. William Dowding, Keith Freedom Global Governance Globalization Governmentality Gramsci, Antonio Habermas, Jürgen Hobbes, Thomas Hunter, Floyd Jessop, Bob Justice Liberalism Lukes, Steven Macchiavelli, Niccolò Marx, Karl Michels, Robert Miliband, Ralph Mills, C. Wright Morriss, Peter Nationalism Nietzsche, Friedrich Paternalism Pluralism

Political Legitimacy Post-Fordism Poulantzas, Nicos Power Elite Power To and Power Over Power With Sabatier, Paul Scott, James Second Face Social Capital Social Power Sovereignty Structural Power Structural Suggestion Will to Power

Social Psychology Adler, Alfred Authoritarian Personality Bases of Power Deflected Wants Eagly, Alice Expectancy Confirmation, Power and Fiske, Susan Framing French, John R. P., Jr. Granovetter, Mark Groupthink Hall, Judith A. Human Dominance Motivation Interdependence Theory Jost, John Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal Lewin, Kurt, and Power Power, Cognition, and Behavior Power as Control Theory Power Motive Psychological Empowerment Rationality Raven, Bertram Social Dominance Theory Status Striving for Superiority System Justification Theory Transactional and Transformational Leadership

Social Theory Agency Agency–Structure Problem Biopower Caste System (India) Clegg, Stewart Decentering (of Subject, of Structure) Deliberation Flyvbjerg, Bent Foucault, Michel Free Will Giddens, Anthony Governmentality Groupthink Habermas, Jürgen Habitus Haugaard, Mark Jessop, Bob Luhmann, Niklas Lukes, Steven Mann, Michael Michels, Robert Miliband, Ralph Mills, C. Wright Morriss, Peter Nationalism Parsons, Talcott Perceptual Symbols of Power Post-Fordism Propaganda Rationality Realist Accounts of Power Revolution Rhetoric Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scott, James Second Face Small Worlds, Power in Social Breakdown Social Capital Substructure and Superstructure Status Strength of Weak Ties Structural Power Structural Suggestion Structuration Subjugation Trust Veiled Women

xv

xvi

Reader’s Guide

Weber, Max Will to Power

Theories of Power Animal Groups, Power in Causal Theories of Power Coercion and Power Collective Action Problem Community Power Debate Elite Theories Exchange Theory Feminist International Relations, View of Power Feminist Theories of Power Marxist Accounts of Power Neoliberalism Neorealism Post-Fordism Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations Power as Control Theory Power To and Power Over Queer Theories of Power Realism in International Relations Realist Accounts of Power Relational Power Social Power Striving for Superiority System Justification Theory Third Face Three Faces of Power

Types of Power Animal Groups, Power in Consensual Power, Theories of Constructivist View of Power in International Relations Critical Theory Defensive Realism Deterrence Theory Elite Theories Exercise Fallacy Exploitation False Consciousness

Female Leadership Among Mammals Fungibility of Power Resources Hegemonic Power Hegemony Heterosexism, Role of Power in Human Dominance Motivation Ideology Imperial Power Influence Invisible Hand Knowledge and Power Language and Power Legislative Power Manipulation Media, The Military in Government Mobilization of Bias Monopoly Power Networks, Power in Networks and Communities Nonverbal Communication and Power Perceptual Symbols of Power Persuasion Pluralism Police State Political Thinking as Power Power, Cognition, and Behavior Power as Control Theory Power Motive Power To and Power Over Power Transition Theory Power With Prime Ministerial and Presidential Propaganda Psychological Empowerment Regime Theory in International Relations Relational Power Relative Autonomy of the State Religious Power Revolutionary Cell Structure Rhetoric Sea Power

Second Face Sexism, Role of Power in Social Capital Social Dominance Theory Social Power Striving for Superiority Subjugation Symbolic Power and Violence Systematic Luck Systemic Power Terrorism Testosterone, Power and Third Face Threats Three Faces of Power Throffers Transactional and Transformational Leadership Will to Power

Urban Studies Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton Castells, Manuel Community Power Debate Dahl, Robert A. Domhoff, G. William Dowding, Keith Elite Theories Flyvbjerg, Bent Growth Coalitions Hunter, Floyd Lukes, Steven Mobilization of Bias Non Decision Making Pluralism Post-Fordism Power Elite Regime Theory in Urban Politics Sabatier, Paul Systematic Luck Systemic Power Third Face Three Faces of Power World Cities

About the Editor Keith Dowding is Professor of Political Science in the School of Political Science and International Relations, Research School of Social Science, and Director of Research for the College of Arts and Social Science at the Australian National University. He has published extensively in political science, political philosophy, social choice theory, public administration, public policy, and urban politics in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Politics, Public Choice, Public Administration, Rationality

and Society, and Urban Studies Quarterly. He has published two books, Rational Choice and Political Power (1991) and Power (1996), and many articles on the subject of political power. He is on the boards of the Journal of Power and British Politics. In 2009, he coedited the fourvolume Rational Choice Classics for SAGE as well as The Selection of Ministers in Europe for Routledge, published under the auspices of the network of scholars Selection and De-Selection of Political Elites (SEDEPE), which he chairs. He has been coeditor of the Journal of Theoretical Politics since 1996.

xvii

Contributors Kate Allison University of Manchester André Azevedo Alves London School of Economics and Political Science Joseph Angolano London School of Economics and Political Science

John Breuilly London School of Economics and Political Science Ian Carter University of Pavia Philip G. Cerny Rutgers University

Andreas Antoniades University of Sussex

Zsuzsanna Chappell London School of Economics and Political Science

Stuart Astill London School of Economics and Political Science

Brian D. Christens University of Wisconsin– Madison

David A. Baldwin Princeton University

Philip Cunliffe University of Kent

Alex Bavister-Gould University of York

Douglas J. Dallier Western Carolina University

Coral Bell Australian National University Jennifer L. Berdahl University of Toronto Cesarino Bertini University of Bergamo Malgorzata Olimpia Bielenia Technical University of Gdansk Tanja A. Börzel Freie Universität, Berlin William Bosworth Australian National University

Michael Dalvean Australian National University Philip H. J. Davies Brunel University Rekha Diwakar Goldsmiths College Andrew M. Dorman King’s College London Keith Dowding Australian National University

Matthew Braham University of Groningen

Lindy Edwards Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra

Steven J. Brams New York University

Lina Eriksson Adelaide University xix

Dan S. Felsenthal University of Haifa Jennifer Filson University of Minnesota Bryan Finken University of Colorado at Denver Susan Fiske Princeton University Michael Freeden University of Oxford Gianfranco Gambarelli University of Bergamo Azar Gat Tel Aviv University Peter Glick Lawrence University Dogan Göçmen University of London Gregg J. Gold Humboldt State University Brooke C. Greene Columbia University Catia Gregoratti Lund University Penny Griffin University of New South Wales Ana Guinote University College London Vsevolod Gunitskiy Columbia University

xx

Contributors

Stefano Guzzini Danish Institute for International Studies & Uppsala University Judith A. Hall Northeastern University Mark Haugaard National University of Ireland, Galway Paul ‘t Hart Australian National University Mary Hawkesworth Rutgers University Jonathan Hearn University of Edinburgh Paul Henman University of Queensland Andrew Hindmoor University of Queensland Manfred J. Holler University of Hamburg Li-Ching Hung Overseas Chinese University György Hunyady Eötvòs Loránd University, Budapest

Marc Kilgour Wilfrid Laurier University

Helen Margetts University of Oxford

Ruth Kinna Loughborough University

Aaron Martin Australian National University

Andrew James Klassen Australian National University Mathias Koenig-Archibugi London School of Economics and Political Science Edward A. Kolodziej University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Bernd Lahno Frankfurt School of Finance & Management Valentino Larcinese London School of Economics and Political Science Dennis Leech University of Warwick Liane J. Leedom University of Bridgeport Chris Lewis Australian National University Robert H. Lieshout Radboud University

Oliver James University of Exeter

Johnson Y. K. Louie Australian National University

Bob Jessop Lancaster University

Melissa Lovell Australian National University

Peter John University of Manchester

Debra Lucas D’Youville College

Christer Jönsson Lund University

Moshé Machover University College London

Jonathan Joseph University of Kent

John Madeley London School of Economics and Political Science

John T. Jost New York University André Kaiser University of Cologne

Martín A. Maldonado Universidad Católica de Córdoba

Alem S. Kebede California State University, Bakersfield

Siniša Maleševic´ National University of Ireland, Galway

Matt Matravers University of York Nicholas R. Miller University of Maryland, Baltimore County Patit Paban Mishra Sambalpur University Maria Montero University of Nottingham Peter Morriss National University of Ireland, Galway Vanessa E. Munro University of London, King’s College Stefan Napel University of Hamburg Sik Hung Ng City University of Hong Kong Hannu Nurmi University of Turku Rosemary H. T. O’Kane Keele University Adam Packer Australian National University Pamela Pansardi University of Pavia Fioravante Patrone University of Genoa Hans Peters University of Maastricht Bertram H. Raven University of California, Los Angeles Ingrid Robeyns Erasmus University Rotterdam

Contributors

Daniel Rubenson Ryerson University Caryl E. Rusbult Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Kevin Ryan National University of Ireland, Galway Lawrence Sáez London School of Economics and Political Science

Izabella Stach AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow Steven J. Stanton University of Michigan Bernard Steunenberg Leiden University Kennedy Stewart Simon Fraser University

xxi

Bert van den Brink Utrecht University Jan-Willem van der Rijt University of Groningen Jojanneke van der Toorn New York University Peter van der Windt Columbia University

Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca Juan March Institute

David Strecker Friedrich-Schiller-Universitaet Jena

Stephen Van Evera Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Michael Saward Open University

Doug Stuart Dickinson College

Paul A. M. Van Lange Free University Amsterdam

Darrow Schecter University of Sussex

Gita Subrahmanyam London School of Economics and Political Science

Bertjan Verbeek Radboud University Nijmegen

Ralph Schroeder University of Oxford Oliver C. Schultheiss Friedrich-Alexander University Len Scott University of Wales, Aberystwyth Maija Setälä University of Turku

Ngai-Ling Ivin Sum Lancaster University David L. Swartz Boston University Patricia Lee Sykes American University James Stacey Taylor College of New Jersey

Andreas Warntjen University of Twente Patricia A. Weitsman Ohio University David West Australian National University Garrath Williams Lancaster University Jeffrey D. Wilson Australian National University

Julia Skorupska University of Oxford

Jessica Templeton London School of Economics and Political Science

Cary Stacy Smith Mississippi State University

Geoffrey Till King’s College London

Peter Wilson London School of Economics and Political Science

Mark Snyder University of Minnesota

Jacob Torfing Roskilde University

David G. Winter University of Michigan

Arthur Spirling Harvard University

John Uhr Australian National University

Chris Wyatt University of Brighton

Introduction Power is a ubiquitous theme in the social sciences, not only as a topic in its own right, but also as an issue that underlies many debates and questions that do not explicitly address it. I believe this is the first Encyclopedia of Power to be found in the social sciences; it continues the SAGE Encyclopedia series providing a comprehensive coverage of disciplines and themes in the social sciences. The encyclopedia includes entries from political science, international relations, public administration, public policy, urban studies, sociology, social psychology, cultural studies, some also from the viewpoint of economics and studies of animal behavior. Encyclopedias typically offer summaries and discussions of topics rather than the cuttingedge research presented in a handbook. Nevertheless, many of our entries are by leading scholars in their respective fields, and they have been encouraged to give their own take on the issues as well as summarizing the current state of knowledge. In addition to the longer entries, in keeping with the SAGE series we also have numerous shorter entries. Some of these expand on concepts touched on in the longer entries, and others offer insights into key concepts related more generally to the field of power. Many encyclopedias in the SAGE series are fields of study—Geography, Social Theory, Political Science, and so on—whereas this one is concerned with a specific concept within social science. However, as the entries herein demonstrate, that concept has been treated quite differently within different fields of study, while we find similar controversies and debates about the concept across fields of study. Providing a single encyclopedia where these contrasting or converging debates and ideas are laid out supplies a ready source of knowledge for scholars working in different fields. Ideas from different fields of study can be “taken for a

walk” into new areas for mutual benefit and innovation. Although all of the relevant social sciences are covered in their accounts of power, the bulk of the entries relate to political science (and related subdisciplines such as public administration and urban studies), international relations, and sociology. I make no apology for that fact because power lends itself to those disciplines more directly than to others, and there has been far more debate explicitly about power in those three. We also have a large number of formal entries concerned with decision- and game-theoretic measures of power. One reason for the large number in this field is the subtleties of the concept of power that have been formalized and applied particularly in economics, politics, and international relations, though there has also been some application in sociology. Some of these entries provide shorter definitions of technical terms that appear in longer formal entries. I will begin with a general introduction to the idea of power in the social sciences that introduces the types of debates that we find in all fields of study. I will then discuss the organization and use of the encyclopedia, explaining the rationale of the listing in the Reader’s Guide.

Main Themes in the Study of Power Power can be personal, social, or institutional. It can involve conflict where one forces another to behave in ways the second does not wish, or can be consensual where agents achieve more together than they could alone. It can be thought of as a property of people, or of institutions or other social objects. For some, it can be measured and analyzed; for others, it is a concept that will forever remain partly mysterious and always qualitative. In some areas of social science, the concept of

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power has almost completely disappeared, reduced to component parts such as resources, or analyzed in terms of strategic interaction where the term power has become redundant. I will briefly consider 10 interwoven and overlapping debates or controversies that cut across many fields of study. A major debate concerns the issues of whether power is a property of agents—whether these are people or institutions—or a property of the relations between agents, the structure of society or groups. Much discussed in sociology and political science, the issue also concerns social psychology where questions about the nature of agency perform a key role. To what extent can we predict agency by influences around people and subtle influences outside of their ken, and how far are people in control? These issues shade into a second question about the nature of autonomy and free will. Even if we see power as a property of people, their actions might still be determined by the environment around them. In many disciplines, the nature and scope of constraints upon action and the causes of beliefs and actions constitute important elements in explanation of social outcomes. Power then can be seen as personal or institutional or as agency-based or structural. Another theme that pervades all disciplines is whether power is exclusively a descriptive or positive term, or whether it is normatively implicated. In cultural studies, sociology and political theory especially, how far it is possible to produce theory-free or nonnormative accounts of power is hotly disputed. In international relations too, the types of theories that are used to describe and explain relationships between nations are normatively implicated in how theorists view power. Here, for example, realists believe that power relations can be objectively defined in terms of the strategic concerns of nations, whereas constructivists believe that we construct the nature of the conflict, which determines actions, and different nations might construct the international system differently. See the entries on realism and constructivism for a much more nuanced and careful study of these theories. The normative nature of power means that it is implicated in different theories in different sorts of ways, and this partly explains different conceptions. The normative force of concepts such as power helps explain another set of concerns. Some analysts

see power in terms of one set of agents’ power over others (or the power of structure over people); others see that form of power as a subset of power that is descriptive of what people can achieve. Thus, “power over” versus “power to” is a theme running through many debates. In a related sense, some writers concentrate on power as a notion concerning conflict. Where agents have interests at variance with each other, they come into conflict and here power plays out to the advantage of the strongest. Others see power more in consensual terms where working together leads people to achieve more than they could on their own. The reader should read different accounts of power in terms of power to and power over, conflictual or consensual, or in terms of both. Some believe that power, being a somewhat mysterious notion, is impossible to quantify. Others believe that it can be quantified, if only roughly, often in terms of the resources that agents bring to situations of conflict or consensus. The mathematical and decision-theoretic formalizations of power are attempts to quantify theoretically and have been applied most thoroughly to voting power. Strategic considerations also enter into such formalizations through game-theoretic interactions of agents. Taken to its extreme, power can disappear from social scientific analysis if it is reduced to resources and strategies in games—or rather, the term power disappears, reduced to other, more quantifiable and measurable entities. The purpose of such analysis will reveal power even if the term does not appear in the analysis itself. Many other concepts in the social sciences are related to power, though they are neither reducible to power nor is power reducible to them. Freedom, ability, and capability are three such concepts. Many entries here discuss the relationship between power and such terms, as well as discussing the role of power in grand social scientific theories, whether they be normative, such as liberalism, or positive, such as pluralism.

The Reader’s Guide The encyclopedia has 381 entries ranging from about 400 words to 4,000 words in length, written by 157 authors from 17 countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary,

Introduction

India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United States, and the United Kingdom). We have a very broad coverage of the field, and no area, I believe, has been ignored, though the difficulty of finding authors to provide entries on some topics means that some entries I would like to have included have had to be omitted. The editorial board of five each assisted the editor in selecting topics, authors for those topics, and in some cases helped edit the entries. Of the board members, Nicholas Miller deserves special mention for his extensive work in editing the decision- and game-theoretic entries to ensure consistency in algebraic formulation throughout the work. I am deeply appreciative of his help. I have developed a guide to assist readers in their examination of entries and will explain the rationale behind it. The groupings are not mutually exclusive, and many entries appear in more than one category. Some categories are relatively straightforward: Biography, International Relations, Key Debates, Political Science, Political Theory, Social Psychology, Social Theory (whose disciplinary home largely is sociology), and Urban Studies are largely self-explanatory. In Biography, we have a fairly long list of names of major figures in power studies, again dominated by those in politics, international relations, and sociology. Key Debates lists entries that are devoted to a specific debate—some between a relatively limited set of authors, others more general. The other categories just listed are all entries that are discipline-based. Some entries will occur under several of those categories: what constitutes Political Science, Political Theory, or Social Theory is somewhat fluid, with some entries belonging exclusively to one category but others being discussed across all three disciplines. International Relations and Social Psychology tend to contain more exclusive entries, whereas many of those under Urban Studies are also listed under Political Science. Other categories are not disciplinary but themebased. Under Concepts Related to Power, we have entries on concepts that are subsets of power, such as “Bureaucratic Power” or “False Consciousness.” Some are terms closely related to power, such as “Coercion, Analytic” or “Systematic Luck.” Others are technical or quasitechnical terms that denote ways of considering power or are used in

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the explanation of a particular approach to power; “Ableness” is a good example. Others have more tenuous connections to power itself but are important in ways of looking at power and are usually mentioned in longer entries; “Adverse Selection” and “Dispositif” are examples of such terms. Others still are broader concepts and the way in which one views these concepts will affect how one conceptualizes power; for example, “Rationality.” Institutional Issues entries refer to organizations or ways of organizing the state and how this affects power—such as “Federal Structure” and “Media, The”—or they refer to power relations that are affected by institutions—“Bureaucratic Power” and “Internet and Power,” for example. The Interpersonal Relationships category refers to power relations between people; for example, “Interdependence Theory” is about how relations between people affect power and the ways in which people look at themselves; although Intrapersonal Matters entries are those that come largely though not exclusively from social psychology, and refer to entries that affect individuals’ abilities to do what they want—or whether their wants are a reflection of something else in society; thus, “Agency” and “Psychological Empowerment” are included in this category. Methodological Issues is a category for methodological issues in power studies or sometimes specific models or ways of looking at power relations that affect how we view power. Two of the categories are Theories of Power and Types of Power. The former is concerned with grand theories about the power structure or midrange theory or models that examine specific aspects of power. An example of the first is “Feminist Theories of Power”; an example of the second is the “Collective Action Problem.” Types of Power is concerned more with specific means by which power is generated, thus “Exploitation” makes its home in this category, as does “Manipulation.” Again, however, the entries are rather fluid and some are contained within both of the categories. The Decisions and Game Theory category is a vital one for this encyclopedia. Formal writers have mathematically defined the nature of power within voting games and committees. These entries try to formalize power for clarity and quantification. Many of these entries appear only

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in this section. Merely because the notion of power has been formalized mathematically does not mean that controversy over the concept can be overcome. Many of the issues that arise in less formalized approaches remain. Issues arise over whether power should be defined in terms of what can be done no matter what actors’ preferences are, or whether it should be defined in terms of what agents’ actually are. Structural and agential issues arise here too. Some have tried to take the formalized account of power out of the context of voting within committee and across parties within parliaments and apply their results to society more widely. This is a dynamic and growing program. The Encyclopedia of Power covers most aspects of power in society as a whole. Undoubtedly some issues have been left aside and some covered in more depth than others. That will always be the case with an enterprise such as this. However, the encyclopedia provides the reader with all the major and central debates and covers all the main issues with regard to power in society. Happy reading.

Acknowledgments This project has taken longer than originally projected, not helped by my move from the London School of Economics and Political Science to the Australian National University. I would like to thank members of the SAGE team in California who have kept the encyclopedia on track while I was distracted and have ensured its steady transition from drafts to final copy, including Diana Axelsen, Alan Cook, Robin Gold, Leticia Gutierrez, Laura Notton, Yvette Pollastrini, Kate Schroeder, and especially Sanford Robinson. I have already mentioned the sterling support provided by Nick Miller of the editorial board. I would also like to thank Lucy Robinson who first approached me to run this project and Rolf Janke who together with Lucy discussed the project in the early stages and commissioned it. I would also like to thank Anne Gelling who helped me at the first editing and checking stage of the entire set of entries. Keith Dowding Australian National University

A Yet, typically, abilities are the sorts of things that can be exercised: they require a choice. It is up to you whether to read. But, when you choose not to, you retain the ability. This sometimes creates difficulties in deciding whether an ability is present or not because an ability claim is of the form that you could have done X, not that you did do X, and establishing the truth or falsity of such statements is more difficult than it is for statements about what did happen. But, difficult or not, it has to be done and can be done. The ability approach to power can apply to both power to and power over. Although it is more normally associated with power to (because that is what Morriss concentrated on), someone who has power over someone else also has a particular sort of ability. Thus, if a master has power over his or her slaves, the master can get the slaves to do a large range of things, some of which are mutually incompatible; it is up to the master which of this range of things he or she gets the slaves to do. Power as an ability is thus different from two other concepts. First, as a dispositional concept, power as an ability is different from the action of exercising power. Second, it is different from a pure disposition or “natural power”—one that is not subject to the actor’s choice, such as the capacity to perform reflex actions under appropriate stimuli. It follows that when we consider the power of nonhuman actors (such as institutions or countries), only those that can be said to form intentions and make choices can have power-as-ability.

A PRIORI UNIONS See Owen Value

ABILITY Often when we talk of a person’s power, we are simply referring to what they can do or have the ability to do. This is the idea behind the ability approach to power, which is associated with Peter Morriss. Abilities are capacities, or dispositions. This means that they exist over an extended period. During the period that they exist, they may remain unexercised for much, or even all, of the time. Thus, you (probably) have the ability to read English. If you were to spend the next year doing anthropological fieldwork in deepest Borneo, you might not exercise this ability (because there is nothing there in English for you to read), yet you would retain the ability to read English. Abilities are also acquired and lost. When you were 3 months old, you did not have the ability to read English; you subsequently acquired it. Conversely, after you had spent 30 years with that tribe in Borneo, you might well have lost the ability to read English. But losing an ability is very different from not exercising it. On the ability account of power, what matters is what abilities you have, not what abilities you are exercising.

Peter Morriss 1

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Ableness

See also Ableness; Exercise Fallacy; Morriss, Peter; Power To and Power Over

Further Readings Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A philosophical analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

ABLENESS The term ableness was introduced into the literature by Peter Morriss to describe a refinement in the ability account of power. The idea is that there is an ambiguity in how we normally talk of abilities. Abilities can refer to what you can, in general, do: you can, let us say, read English. But we are often interested, not in such generic abilities, but in what you can do now. Or more generally, we are often interested in your abilities at some specified time, t. What you can do at time t will depend on the particular circumstances that exist at t, and those circumstances might be unusual. So, although you are able (generically) to read English, you would not be able to do so at time t if, at that time, you do not have your reading glasses with you. Without your glasses, let us suppose, you are not able to read anything. To mark this distinction, Morriss used the word ability to refer to the generic sense, and ableness for the time-specific sense. So, without your glasses, you have the ability to read, but lack the ableness. Confusion can arise if we do not mark this distinction. If, at a time when you do not have your glasses, someone were to ask you if you are able to read, you might not know how to reply: if the questioner is conducting a literacy survey, he or she will be enquiring after the ability to read, but if he or she needs you to read something right now, then he or she is asking after your ableness. Here the context makes clear which is meant; in more abstract academic work, there is no context, and so clarity requires us to state which sense is to be understood. Similarly, lack of power can be either lack of ability or lack of ableness. The poor have the ability to dine on caviar and champagne (because they could consume them if they were provided), but they lack the ableness (for they are not provided,

and the poor cannot get them). This example suggests that for most political purposes, ableness is more important than is ability: usually what people are able to do with the goods they do have is what interests us, rather than what they would be able to do with a “standard” allocation of goods. This example shows why Morriss used the term ableness rather than time-specific ability. For the distinction does not rest on whether a time is specified: the poor can never afford champagne. What the distinction does rest on is that ableness refers to a set of actually existing background conditions, whereas abilities are established by reference to some set of hypothetical, standardized, background conditions. Peter Morriss See also Ability; Morriss, Peter

Further Readings Dowding, K., & van Hees, M. (2008). Freedom, coercion and ability. In M. Braham & F. Steffen (Eds.), Power, freedom and voting. Berlin: Springer. Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A philosophical analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

ABSOLUTISM In the 17th and 18th centuries, various European monarchs claimed absolute powers within their states. Monarchs claimed a divine right to rule with their subjects having no claim to limit their powers. The Danish “King’s Law” of 1665 states that the monarch was the most perfect and supreme person and stood above all human laws, having no judge above him apart from God. Louis XIV of France is claimed to have stated, “L’État c’est moi” (“the state is me”). The Russian tsars Ivan III, Ivan IV, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great all had absolute powers; Russia had no parliament until 1905. Even in the 1906 constitution, the tsar is described as an autocrat. Similarly, absolute monarchs ruled in Austria, Portugal, Prussia, and Sweden. The term absolutism is thus often used to describe the nature of the state in these countries at

Adler, Alfred

this time. These monarchs had great formal powers, which in practice extended to closing down other power centers, emasculating parliaments, creating powerful bureaucracies and standing armies, and generally centralizing power to a greater extent than previously happened. This was the time when many European nation-states were formed, though not all had absolutist rulers. The English Civil War was caused by Charles I’s attempt to assert absolutist powers. The idea of a single supreme sovereign power was an influential doctrine given rational rather than religious justification by Thomas Hobbes, precisely because of the fear that divided sovereignty would lead to discord, strife, and civil war. Even Hobbes, though, argued that sovereigns cannot arbitrarily take the life of subjects: that is one power too far because undivided sovereignty is justified by the security it brings. The power of these monarchs can be overemphasized. Certainly there were other centers of power, notably the churches and nobility, though absolutist monarchs attempted to enfeeble the latter by requiring them to work with state officials on their lands. Although the idea of absolutism was established at this time, it is not clear that the absolute rulers had significantly greater power than other rulers. Absolute rulers still needed to negotiate with barons and with the church and were beholden to powerful figures within their palaces and bureaucracies. Keith Dowding See also Bureaucratic Power; Hobbes, Thomas

Further Readings Anderson, P. (1974). Lineages of the absolute state. London: Verso. Mettam, R. (1988). Power and faction in Louis XIV’s France. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Miller, J. (1990). Absolutism in seventeenth-century Europe. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

ADLER, ALFRED (1870–1937) Alfred Adler is known as the founder of a school of individual psychology. He was born into a

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Jewish family on February 7, 1870, in Penzing, a suburb of Vienna, and at an early age decided to become a physician. After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1895, he became an ophthalmologist, but soon switched to general practice, in which he began to study the linkage of illness and physical deformities to personality development. In 1902, he was invited to join a discussion group that had been initiated by the pioneering Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Adler, Freud, and two other psychoanalysts met on Wednesday evenings initially, and the group came to be known Mittwochsgesellschaft (Wednesday Society). Adler’s book, Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation, was published in 1907. He became the coeditor of the society’s newsletter and, in 1910, Adler was named president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Adler’s perception of human behavior and personality differed from Freud’s. Adler challenged Freud’s concept of ego and id and Freud’s belief that sexuality was the root cause of neurosis; Adler contended that the social realm, or exteriority, was as important to psychoanalysis as any internal realm, or interiority. Adler promoted the importance of perceiving an individual holistically, rather than reductively. In 1911, Adler parted company with Freud and his circle and, along with nine of his associates, established the Society for Free Psychoanalysis, shortly thereafter renamed as the Society for Individual Psychology. In 1912, Adler published his seminal treatise, The Neurotic Constitution, describing his main ideas. During World War I, Adler served as a doctor in the Austrian army on the Russian front. Later, Adler wrote numerous books on psychology and organized counseling centers in the Vienna schools. As a theorist of human psychology, Adler dealt exhaustively in psychotherapy, personality theory, and social action. Between 1907 and 1937 he developed theories regarding the inferiority complex, superiority complex, and psychological compensation as well as the relationship between body, mind, and spirit. Adler believed inferiority and superiority complexes were two sides of the same coin. The feeling of superiority was the fruit of a striving whose roots lay in the inferiority complex. Moreover, each human emotion found expression in one’s body language, a manifestation of the

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Adorno, Theodor

close connection between mind and body. Adler’s social theory arose from his conviction, based on observation, that to be understood, an individual must be viewed within a social context. Adler’s psychotherapy agenda included information about the lifestyle of patients, self-explanation of patients, and encouragement of the patient’s social interests. Adler thought it important to avoid conveying an authoritarian attitude. His method was to speak face to face with the patient, unlike the Freudian method in which the patient lay on a couch and the analyst sat in a chair not directly facing the patient. In 1934, Adler emigrated to the United States following the forced closure of his clinics under Nazi policies that targeted Jews and those of Jewish heritage for persecution. While on a European tour in 1937, he died of a heart attack én route to a lecture at Aberdeen University in Scotland. Among those on whom Adler’s work has exerted an enormous influence are the American psychologists Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), Rollo May (1909–1994), and Albert Ellis (1913–2007). Patit Paban Mishra See also Striving for Superiority; Submissive

Further Readings Adler, A. (1956). The individual psychology of Alfred Adler: A systematic presentation in selections from his writings. New York: Basic Books. Crandall, J. E. (1981). Theory and measurement of social interest: Empirical tests of Alfred Adler’s concept. New York: Columbia University Press. Grey, L. (1998). Alfred Adler, the forgotten prophet: A vision for the 21st century. Westport, CT: Praeger. Rattner, J. (1983). Alfred Adler. New York: F. Ungar.

ADORNO, THEODOR (1903–1969) Together with Max Horkheimer, Theodor Weisengrund Adorno was the main representative of the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School. As a theorist of power, Adorno is perhaps best characterized as an early post-Marxist. As a scholar, his aim was a critical theory of modern society that

analyzed its social pathologies from an evaluative standpoint inspired by emancipatory, utopian interests. All this he shared with Karl Marx. Different from Marx, Adorno analyzed pathological power relations in terms of the dominance of a one-sided instrumental rationalization of modernity that leaves no room for genuine self-government and self-realization. According to Adorno, capitalistic economic relations are just one instantiation of this deeper social pathology of modernity. Bureaucratic power and the culture industry are two others. The control, discipline, social categorization, and amusement they offer reconcile people with the reifying functional requirements of capitalism and stand in the way of genuine freedom. Adorno inherited his focus on rationality and reason rather than on socioeconomic issues from German idealism, most importantly from Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel. In its sociotheoretical consequences, Max Weber’s influence is strong. With Horkheimer, Adorno developed a critique of instrumental rationality in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Their main thesis is that in striving for enlightenment—individual and collective freedom through the use of reason—humans are doomed to lose the very freedom they are after. Immediate and uncontrolled desires, bodily experience, and aesthetical awe for nature have to give way to instrumentalizing forms of control by means of which we preserve and govern ourselves. This control is power. It forces us to objectify ourselves, others, and nature and thus reify ourselves, others, and nature. We need to exercise power in our struggle to be free, but in exercising power we necessarily alienate ourselves from the non-instrumentalizing relations to self, others, and nature that are a precondition of genuine freedom. As in the writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Weber, Adorno’s rationalized modern person has lost all orientation in life. In the 1930s and 1940s, Adorno, who with most of his colleagues from Frankfurt had to flee Nazi Germany, lost all socialist hopes of a revolution of the proletariat against failed modernity. He understood National Socialism as the disappointed masses’ escape into a quasi-mythical system that promised to restore the meaning and sentient freedom that modernity had destroyed. Adorno noted that the proletariat happily accepted this devastating

Adverse Selection

modern myth. He explained the Holocaust as part of this quasi-mythical struggle against failed modernity, of which the Jews were presented as the main architects. Adorno never developed a systematic theory of nonpathological rationalization, or productive power, as his junior colleague and later successor in Frankfurt Jürgen Habermas did in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981). For glimpses of freedom from arbitrary power, Adorno rather set his hopes on an extra-theoretical form of ethical reflection (Minima Moralia, 1974), a critique of identity thinking, deconstructing the power that generalizing concepts have over our particular experience of the world (Negative Dialectics, 1966), and an understanding of the aesthetical experience as a last resort for a critique of rationality. “The falsehood opposed by art is not rationality per se but the fixed opposition of rationality to particularity” (Aesthetic Theory, 1970). Bert van den Brink See also Critical Theory; Habermas, Jürgen; Weber, Max

Further Readings Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1966) Bernstein, J. M. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, A. (1993). The critique of power. Cambridge: MIT Press. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane. (Original work published 1944)

ADVERSE SELECTION Gresham’s law states that bad money drives out good and is the classic expression of adverse selection. In the days when coins were composed of real silver, their holders might shave a small sliver off before using the coin in exchange. Everyone realized that any coin one received might have been shaved in this manner, so people were not prepared to exchange as much for any coin as they

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would for a coin they knew had not been shaved. Knowing this, those who held unshaved coins would then not spend them or would shave them before using them. Bad money drives out good. The idea of adverse selection is now a key aspect of economic theory. George Akerlof reintroduced the idea of adverse selection in his classic article based on the used-car market. In his version, every car owner knows whether his car is a good one; however, the buyer is unsure. Good cars are worth a high price to both buyer and seller, but because buyers do not know if used cars are good or bad, they will only pay the amount of a bad car. Thus, good cars will not come on the market. Adverse selection in the health market, for example, will come about because those who know that they have or are likely to have health problems are those who are keenest on getting health insurance. The problem arises because, as in the coin and car examples, there is asymmetry of information: one contractor knows more about himself or herself than does the other. However, the other contractor can realize that there is this informational asymmetry and respond. Insurance companies need to price their products on the assumption that there will be adverse selection, making insurance in the health case more expensive for those who are not so likely to have health problems. Of course, insurance companies can also attempt to gain information, by running health checks on applicants, and making their customers pay a certain percentage of health costs on top of their insurance premium. The idea of adverse selection is used as part of the principal–agent problem, a problem of contracting. In the principal–agent problem, adverse selection occurs because those least qualified for a job are also those most keen to attain it. At any level of remuneration, those least qualified are likely to gain the most in comparison to the job they already have and thus be more eager to get the job. They will sell themselves more and work harder to secure the position. Adverse selection only occurs where there is heterogeneity in the population of qualified candidates, and those with some characteristics that the principal does not want are most likely to be those who come forward. In general, we can see adverse selection as an informational problem that gives one person some power over another to the latter’s disadvantage. In

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Agency

that sense, this is an example of the idea that “knowledge is power.”

agency. Collective agency is therefore discussed toward the end of this entry.

Keith Dowding See also Knowledge and Power; Moral Hazard; Principal–Agent Relationship

Further Readings Akerlof, G. (1970). The market for lemons: Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488–500.

AGENCY Agency plays a central role in social science and yet, outside of ethical theory, it is rarely discussed except in the context of the agency–structure problem. Agency has an obvious relationship to certain understandings of power. Agents have effects on the world through their actions. Outcome power is often defined as the extent to which agents could affect the world. In that sense, the degree of individual agency specifies an agent’s outcome power. However, delving deeper into the concept of agency itself raises questions about how those agents’ actions are determined. The extent to which agency is constrained by others, and the extent to which individual agency is caused by environmental or structural factors, limits what we see as individual agency. We can see immediately why agency is so often discussed only in relationship to structure. Issues of free will and autonomy are also therefore implicated in discussions of agency. The bulk of the discussion here will be concerned with human agency. In many social science applications, however, collective agents appear. Social science often describes organized collectives—such as political parties, firms, or governments—as agents. In some applications, unorganized collectives such as social classes and factions are considered agents. One of the problems in discussing human agency is seeing inside the person (the issue of free will or autonomous behavior), so considering collective agency where the “inside” is easier to perceive might help us understand some aspects of human

Norm-Based Versus Instrumental Rationality We can define action as a contemporary event embedded in an environment informed by the past and oriented to the future. In such a definition, we give credit to the causal aspects of agency: that is, the past is implicated in current agency, either through rational calculation or causal determination, and we give credit to the fact that acts are directed at changing the world in some sense. They are future-oriented. Historically, a great deal of debate about agency is normative in the sense that what constitutes agency is thought to define human agency. Some argue that human agency needs to be seen as rational will driven by norms of appropriate behavior. Others argue that agency is best seen as instrumental rationality where people rationally choose their actions given the information they have about the world. The first sees certain goals as being rational; the second does not question the goals that people might have: rational action is only concerned with the best way of attaining those goals. The former approach can be traced to a Kantian idea that freedom is normatively grounded within the human will governed by categorical imperatives. Agents choose to act based on their will within a rationalized moral framework; they do not act out of material necessity. On the other side, some see freedom as individuals rationally choosing actions based on their desires and goals. Such instrumental rationality is often seen in purely selfinterested or material terms, though modern accounts of instrumental rationality deny the distinction and suggest that goals can be equally value-based as self-interested. This distinction between norm-based and instrumental rationality should not be confused with habitual versus autonomous action.

Habitual Versus Autonomous Action A great deal of modern sociology from Talcott Parsons to Anthony Giddens, from structuralists to poststructuralists, uses a norm-based approach to agency. However, the norm-based accounts here

Agency

are not Kantian as such but rather based on notions of habit, which owe more to stimulus response than to normatively grounded rational will. Parsons believed humans create understandings of themselves in the roles they play in society by internalizing the standards expected of that role as they see them within their environment. Their conformity to those roles then has that same effect on others. In a similar fashion, Pierre Bourdieu uses the concepts of field, habitus, and capital to explain action in terms of conformity to expectations. A field defines a set of roles and relationships that develop over time and their worth or capital is given by the differential rewards and status afforded to those roles by the fields. Actors develop values based on the reward systems within each field. Each agent thus internalizes a set of values that is expected of him or her, and these form the agent’s habitus. Neither Parsons nor Bourdieu denies autonomy, but they emphasize habit as a learned environmental response. Giddens, despite claiming he transcends the dualism of structure and autonomy, also places routine at the heart of his account of structuration where rules and resources ensure the replication of structure. Agency in these habitual accounts is explained by dispositions or habits, themselves explained in terms of the environment or structure that causes them. These habits are not simply learned responses but also include the actors’ own interpretations of their responses in terms of their values. Here, the Kantian norms seem to be explained not through rational reflection and free will, but through socialization. It appears that on these accounts autonomous action can only be identified through the fracturing of habits, when individuals break away from their roles and values. It might appear that instrumental accounts of agency do not suffer the determinism of habitual accounts. If every action that an agent takes is based on the agent’s aims and objectives—directed at some future gain—and based on the agent’s own beliefs and desires, and we model that action as based on instrumentally rational reflective action, then we seem to be assuming autonomy. Many writers who work with the tradition of instrumental action assume individuals are autonomous and rationally decide their actions through free choice. However, those very beliefs and desires might have come about through stimulus response,

7

through habit; modeling human action as though it is instrumental and reflective is not to say that action is instrumentally rational and reflective. In other words, modeling the world in terms of instrumental rationality in the manner of rational choice theory or economics does not demonstrate agency; it merely posits a particular way in which we can view social processes.

The Evolution of Human Agency If stimulus response is not considered to be agency, then we need to consider how we move from stimulus response to agency. Although animals, and indeed plants, act on the world in some way— grazers eat grass, bees pollinate flowers, and so on—their behavior with regard to the external world is generally modeled as stimulus response. The right kinds of external stimuli lead a bee to a plant; the right kind of stimulus leads to fight-orflight responses in animals. Agency is thought to be beyond such simple stimulus response. It might be related to Kantian norm-driven behavior or might result from instrumental reasoning, but it is not a straightforward stimulus response. That is not to deny, of course, that humans react to the world both habitually and through learned responses, but their behavior is more self-reflective than simple stimulus response. Self-reflectivity thus looks like a candidate for the “internal” aspect of agency. How does self-reflectivity evolve? Simple organisms track their environment through simple cues. Simple cues can, however, be exploited by other organisms. For example, some fireflies are exploited by predators that use the fireflies’ signals as lures. Any creature whose behavior relies on simple cues is fragile. More complex creatures develop multiple cues for their stimulus–response reactions, allowing more robust responses within strategic environments of competing creatures. Apes monitor the body language, facial expressions, and relative location of rival apes using three complex cuing systems. These might still be considered stimulus–response mechanisms, but the important aspect for considerations of agency is how creatures start to predict the behavior of their fellows. One philosophical tradition suggests that the apes, including humans, develop a theory of mind. They track what other apes are going to do through examining their

8

Agency

behavior and imagining what they would do under those circumstances. Human children start to develop such a theory of mind from the age of three. In some experiments, a toy is placed in a box. An adult then leaves the room, and the child sees the toy being removed from one box and put in another. The adult comes back. The child is then asked where the adult thinks the toy is. Young children assume the adult will know what they know, that the toy has been moved. Older children realize that because the toy was moved when the adult was out of the room, the adult will think it is in the original box. The change marks the ability to think of the other as having a mind. The child develops a theory of mind and can make inferences about what that other person could know given the information that person has. Apes seem to have a theory of mind of other apes. After conflict, chimpanzees seek reconciliation, which seems psychologically important. There are standard cues for this, such as putting out a hand, but there are multiple responses. Reconciliation gestures can be strategically refused, perhaps by an ape demanding the other demonstrate inferiority. In other words, we do not have simple stimulus response—a conflict, a sign of reconciliation, and then a stimulus response to that. Rather, a whole suite of cues exists, and the chimps are not stimulus-bound to respond to them in the same way. Instead, the chimps respond to the mental states of others, tracking what those states are by the cues, but being able to grasp that the behaviors are only signals of the state, and not the state itself. Assuming some sort of inner life and interpreting behavior in terms of reasons for action is named “the intentional stance” by Daniel Dennett. The intentional stance occurs when we posit teleology or intentional action to agents. Thus, we can suggest that a dog can bark up the wrong tree, because we assume the dog wants to bark up the tree with the cat in it, and we know the cat is in a different tree. By saying the “dog wants” to bark up the tree with the cat in it, we are positing desires (to bark at the cat) and beliefs (the cat is in this tree) to constitute a reason for the act. To what extent a dog has reasons in this manner (and the barking is not simply a stimulus response) is not necessarily a concern for Dennett. What is important is that imputing reasons to creatures for their actions allows us to predict and (through prediction)

explain their actions. Positing an internal world of thought is an efficient means of predicting what is around us. We can take the intentional stance with all sorts of things, including plants (the flower wants to follow the sun) without actually positing an internal world. However, the more complex the cuing of behavior is, the more useful and efficient the intentional stance is. With simple stimulus response (flowers following the sun), positing intentionality does not bring any real efficiencies; with complex behaviors it does. The next step in intentionality is to posit the intentional stance with regard to our own behavior. Our reasons for acting as we do are simply our own interpretations of our actions. The intentional stance in this way is sometimes described as compatibilist because it is compatible with strict determinism. Even if our behavior is strictly determined, we might still more efficiently predict our own and others’ behavior by positing the internal world. Of course, you might say, “But I know I have an internal world! I have my thoughts and plans and so on.” However, having them does not show they are really causal; one’s behavior might be caused by elements outside of oneself, and all one’s thoughts are still interpretations of the actions, just as they are for others. The only difference is that we are with ourselves more often than we are with others; hence, our interpretations of our own behaviors are more secure. However, we might still get a stronger agency out of this view.

Self-Reflection and Agency If our reasons for action are our interpretations of our behavior caused in some manner, those reasons might still be implicated in further behavior. As we narrate our lives, we impose a structure on our actions. That structure might affect our behavior just as any other structure constrains and opens possibilities for action. We can return to the idea of habitual behavior here. Our narration of our own lives gives us a prediction for how that story will continue. Our own narration will be built on what we have learned, the roles or habitus that we have formed through the expectations we have engendered via the expectations of others. Thus, our own reasons for action are constituted by sets of external meanings, though they are still our reasons for

Agency

action. Our past behavior need not always be a good guide for future behavior. Sometimes, notably in strategic situations, we want our behavior to be unpredictable. We might even randomize our behavior in certain contexts precisely to fool equally strategically minded opponents. Either way, however, our own interpretations of our actions correlate with our behavior whether or not those interpretations, in the sense of meaningful propositions, can be said to cause our actions. (Our actions might be preceded by neuronal activity, but such neuronal activity does not itself constitute meaningful propositions without the interpretation that is given to the action. Indeed it is unlikely that we will find specific neuronal activity that correlates precisely with meaningful propositions, even if those meaningful propositions correlate directly with behavior.) The interpretative stance gives us a way into agency by suggesting that agency, as opposed to behavior or stimulus response, is composed of interpretations of action. We can interpret the behavior of creatures in terms of reasons for action. In that sense, we treat animals (or even plants, robots, or animated characters in computer games) as agents. However, the agential form is composed of the imposition of our interpretation on their behavior rather than on their own. In that sense, the animals or animations are agents, but not their own agents. We, however, can also interpret our own behavior, and that self-reflection makes us agents in our own right.

Losing Agency So we are agents because we have our own reasons for action, and these predict our behavior. Can we be wrong in our assertion of reasons for action? If some observer were to better predict our behavior by asserting reasons for our actions different from our own, then we might think that those reasonsfor-action are superior to those we give to ourselves. And that is not unusual. After all, many people can realize through discussion with a friend or psychoanalyst that perhaps they did have ulterior motives in some action of which they were unaware. Hypnotists can lead people into crazy behavior, and when asked to justify that behavior, the subjects come up with plausible reasonsfor-action that observers realize are specious. One

9

way in which we lose agency is to lose the ability to predict our own behavior. Strong emotions such as anger or jealousy, drugs and chemicals, or hypnosis might lead to unpredictability. In other cases where we have been indoctrinated or fall under another’s sway, that person is better placed to predict our behavior. He or she becomes the agent. All of these considerations are outside of the free will versus determinism debate. They show, however, that the interpretative stance allows us to determine agency compatible with either free will or determinism.

Collective Agents Collective agents such as firms, political parties, or governments have rules and procedures for making decisions. Here, the meaningful propositions by which we can view their agency are observable. The more rule-bound an organization is, the more predictable its behavior is and the more it seems to be an agent in its own right. For example, an organization whose chief executive could overturn any decision made at a lower level seems to be an agent only in the sense that the chief executive is. (Though if we have a chief executive who never overturned decisions, then the organization would gain collective agency again.) For that reason, organized collectives seem more like collective agents than unorganized ones such as social classes. Indeed the latter are only collective agents in the sense that individual agents work as one. The explanation of how a social class will act in concert is also the explanation of how each of its members acts. With organized collectives, the explanation of each individual member’s behavior adds to the collective agency together with the rules and procedures by which the collective makes decisions and so acts. In that sense, collective agency is easier to comprehend than is individual agency because its internal rules are more observable. Nevertheless, because individual human agents act through socially meaningful avenues, our behavior is structured, through roles, through habitus. However, that does not detract from our agency; indeed, socially meaningful activity adds sense to our agency. For completely random, uninterpretable behavior could not be agential. Keith Dowding

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Agency–Structure Problem

See also Agency–Structure Problem; Autonomy; Bourdieu, Pierre; Free Will; Freedom; Interests; Parsons, Talcott; Power To and Power Over; Rationality

Further Readings Dennett, D. C. (2003). Freedom evolves. London: Allen Lane. Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? American Sociological Review, 1003, 962–1023.

AGENCY–STRUCTURE PROBLEM Most theories of power either assign power to agents—which could be individuals, collectives such as classes or groups, or organizations—or see power as a pervasive element of the structure of society that operates outside the control of agents. The agency–structure problem concerns how we assign power to one or the other, or how much importance we place on either agency or structure. Agents act. Indeed, part of the very definition of agency is that it is carried out by agents. The most obvious agent is the individual. If we assign power to an individual, we are asserting that, with regard to the scope of the power claim, the agent can bring about some outcome. In some definitions, that power is the power to do some x; in others, it is the power of the agent over some other agent. In some definitions, power is simply seen as what an agent can do; in others, it is what an agent can do despite the resistance of others. Essentially, assigning some power to an agent is to claim that the agent could be causally efficacious in bringing about some result. In that sense, the power seems to be a property of the agent. However, people do not act in a vacuum; they act for reasons, and those reasons might be determined by external forces that act on them. What people attempt to do is constrained by what they see as feasible and enabled by what they want to do. Indeed, what people want is constrained by what they see as feasible. Hence, we do not need to reject any claim that (only) agents act to see that the ultimate cause of some outcome might be external to the agent himself or herself. If the

external constraints fully determine the individual’s wants, for example, we can tell a completely deterministic story about the way in which the social world operates that needs mention the individual agent as barely more than some causal bearer of structural features of society. What is a structure? There are many different definitions. Structures can be seen as recursively organized sets of rules and resources that enable and constrain people. Structures enter into people, so to speak, by conditioning their thought processes through conventional activity, by copying others, and through belief systems engendered through interacting with other agents and the external world. A simple definition of structure is the relationship of the constituent parts of something. So the structure of a bridge is the relationship between bricks, mortar, and girders. The structure of society is the relationship between individuals and organizations. The same bricks, mortar, and girders could build different bridges as defined by the structure. The same genetic individuals could bear different social relationships constituting very different social structures. In the latter case, however, those different relationships might have a very different effect on the individuals. Indeed, different relations will affect the very matter of genetic individuals. A society with high social mobility will enable different sets of people to marry and bear children than will one with low social mobility. The very physical nature of people will thus be conditioned by social structure. Other agents such as organizations or classes are also defined by the structure itself. Again, structure enters into the very fabric of agents and thus seems to dominate our account of power. One way of viewing the agency–structure problem is to note that we can still maintain that power is a property of agents without denying the structural conditioning we have been describing. Agents act, but one agent’s actions are part of another agent’s structure. The overall interaction of agents constitutes the social structure. A shallower form of structural power explanation states that the environment around actors affects their strategies. A deeper form argues that the environment around people not only suggests strategies to actors given their aims, but gives them their aims in the first place. The customs, habits, beliefs, and so on of

Agenda Power

the community we live in decide our beliefs and desires for us even as these customs suggest the strategies we need to adopt to promote our aims. Where we have little or no choice in our aims as well as our strategies, we might be subject to a system of domination. We are dominated in our lives. This, though, might simply be the claim that there is no individual autonomy and our very thoughts are dominated. This brings to mind the idea of memes that infect our minds and cause us to take on attitudes. Concentrating on individual agents’ (whether these are people or organizations) power for some types of questions—such as whether the developers or local voters dominate in a particular conflict over development—can lead to focusing on the actors concerned. However, a more complete explanation of why developers might dominate more often than do voters would examine the structural factors that enable and constrain both the actions and the interests of the agents concerned. This explanation suggests why people might take on the interests of others in their actions, even though to an external observer the interests of each side seem to be in conflict. Such an approach does not assign part of the power we examine to agents and part to structure; rather, it assigns power to agents so they can answer some questions, but recognizes that those powers can be explained at another level by examining the structures that engender, constrain, and even define the powers of those agents. Keith Dowding See also Determinism; False Consciousness; Habitus; Miliband–Poulantzas Debate; Non Decision Making; Structural Power; Structural Suggestion; Structuration; Structure-Induced Equilibrium; Substructure and Superstructure; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power

Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dowding, K. (2008). Agency and structure: Interpreting power relationships. Journal of Power, 1(1), 21–36. Foucault, M. (1977). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8, 777–795. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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AGENDA POWER Formally, agenda power is the capability of an agenda setter to manipulate the specific order in which N voters will consider J alternatives being offered. Contingent on the particular preferences of the voters, this facilitates indirect control over the outcome of the votes, the alternative(s) actually chosen by the decision process. Agenda power is typically discussed in the context of majority rule and pairwise comparisons. More generally, it refers to the ability to organize legislative business in parliamentary settings. A (classic) example is as follows. Consider three voters voting on three alternatives x, y, and z. Suppose that voter 1 has preference xP1yP1z, voter 2 has preference zP2xP2y, and voter 3 has preference yP3zP3x (where “P” stands for “strictly prefers to”). This produces a Condorcet paradox: x is majority preferred to y, y is majority preferred to z, and z is majority preferred to x. Suppose now that an individual—say voter 2—has agenda power in that he or she can decide the order in which the alternatives will be considered. By making the first vote between x and y (x wins) and the second vote between x and z (z wins), voter 2 can attain his or her preferred outcome. This example holds, with changes made, for x and y as first preferences too. Notice that voting cycles are necessary but not sufficient for agenda power. Consider the following example, devised by Peter Ordeshook: suppose that there are N  3 voters with preferences over J  8 alternatives denoted a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h given by Table 1. For the preferences described in Table 1, there is a cycle through the alternatives {a, b, c} and a cycle through the alternatives {d, e, f, g, h}, and any alternative from the first set would beat any alternative from the second. So someone with agenda power could obtain a, b, or c, but could not obtain, say, g. Technically, we say that {a, b, c} are in the top cycle. Agenda power as described exists only when there is no Condorcet winner. A Condorcet winner is an alternative that can beat every other alternative in a pairwise vote. If a Condorcet winner exists, the voting cannot be ordered such that the social preference moves away from it. The almost certain absence of a Condorcet winner in an alternative space of three or more dimensions or in a

12

Agenda Power

Table 1

Not all cyclical social orders facilitate agenda power

Preferences

Voters

1st

2nd

3rd

4th

5th

6th

7th

8th

1

a

d

b

f

c

e

g

h

2

c

e

a

h

b

g

d

f

3

b

g

c

h

a

d

f

e

continuous space (as demonstrated in Richard D. McKelvey’s chaos theorem) implies that whoever controls the order of voting can achieve any point in the space as a final voting outcome. McKelvey’s result (like the previous examples) requires that voters vote sincerely, but they might vote in a strategic fashion. If voters know each other’s preferences (or at least the majority preference between every pair of alternatives), they can “look down the agenda tree and reason back” to see which alternatives will be paired later in the voting process and decide how to vote at the outset. They can vote strategically to defeat any attempt at agenda manipulation. As an example, suppose that there are two stages to voting: first, on an amendment to a bill, versus the original text of the bill; second, on the bill versus the status quo. The comparison to the status quo in the last stage is actually the method used in the U.S. Congress. Assume that a legislator prefers the amended bill to the unamended bill, and prefers the unamended bill to the status quo. Suppose the legislator is also aware that the amended bill would lose to the status quo, but that the original bill would win against it. Then he or she has a strategic incentive to vote against the amendment when it faces the original bill, but for the original bill when it subsequently faces the status quo. Hence, the legislator does not vote sincerely when considering the amendment. A seeming exception to this logic is presented by the case of “killer amendments.” Killer amendments are added to bills that would otherwise pass to ensure that they will now fail in a majority vote. Though hardly common, their very existence is puzzling precisely because the majority of (rational) voters who support the unamended bill should also reject the attempt to amend it. The art of crafting successful killers is part of a more general concept

of political manipulation denoted heresthetics by William Riker. Successful killers require that herestheticians find an important second dimension such that voting on the amendment is sincere (for at least some legislators). In the U.S. context, this dimension has often been race. In any case, the dictatorial power that the chaos theorem implies is rarely enjoyed by agenda setters in practice. In the study of U.S. politics, scholars have investigated agenda power empirically, especially for the U.S. House of Representatives. Much work has focused on the power of the majority party, which selects organizational leaders such as the speaker and committee chairs and timetables legislation. Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins argue that the majority party’s agenda power is of two different kinds: first, the party has negative agenda power that allows the party to keep issues away from the House floor that would generally displease its members, and hence, the majority party can preserve its past gains. This power is said to be unconditional in the sense that it does not depend on the unity of the party members’ views of public policy. By contrast, positive agenda power is the ability to propose changes to existing policy but requires some similarity among the preferences of the party. Cox and McCubbins construct a cartel agenda model and show that the key personnel of the majority party possess agenda power. In a parallel to literature on industrial organization, the authors contend that the busy world of legislating compels the majority party to institutionalize its central authority and that this cartel is generally responsive to its members. This theory and finding contrast starkly with earlier accounts that posited that the legislator who is the floor median enjoys direct or indirect agenda power. This power is used in two ways: first for the bills that are actually

Agenda Setters

considered during the legislative session; second, for the debate and amendments to those bills. Arthur Spirling See also Agenda Setters; Heresthetics; Leadership; Riker, William H.

Further Readings Cox, G. W., & McCubbins, M. D. (2002). Agenda power in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1877–1986. In D. W. Brady & M. D. McCubbins (Eds.), Party, process, and political change in Congress: New perspectives on the history of Congress. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Ordeshook, P. C. (1995). Game theory and political theory: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Riker, W. H. (1982). Liberalism against populism. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

AGENDA SETTERS Formally, agenda setters are actors who control which alternatives (in addition to the status quo) other players may vote for and (if there is more than one) the order in which these votes will take place. Depending on the extent of their control, and contingent on the preferences and behavior of the other players, agenda setters may possess agenda power. In political science, the identity, role, and power of agenda setters have been investigated in at least two scenarios: legislative voting and approval of agency budgets, either by (local) public referenda or by executive branch “sponsors.” We illustrate the role of agenda setters with examples from the second. William Niskanen argued that senior bureaucrats have goals that are functions of their agency’s budget: therefore, they seek to maximize their budgets. They are in a strong position to do so because the bureau is a monopoly supplier of its output (such as national defense or education); officials have an informational advantage over their sponsors (they know more about the agency’s internal costs, and direct monitoring of the quantity/quality of its output is difficult); and,

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crucially, the bureaucrat can make a take-it-orleave-it budget proposal. The bureaucrat here is an agenda setter with a binary agenda presenting a choice between his or her preferred budget proposal and some other budget reduced to some inappropriate or unacceptable level to politicians. Thomas Romer and Howard Rosenthal posited a model (which they later tested) based on this logic. The empirical case in point is the Oregon school budget process. In that state, each school has a maximum budget fixed by law but can expand the upper limit by a referendum at an annual meeting. If the new budget fails to be approved by at least 50% of voters, then the budget reverts to that of the previous year. Consider Figure 1, which displays the utility as a function of budget level for the median voter who will be decisive in the electorate for the referendum. The curve is centered at Bmed, which is the median voter’s preferred level of school spending. When the reversion point is Brev1, the voter—and thus the electorate—will accept anything in the reflection of Brev1 about Bmed. So, for example, they will approve anything up to Bprop1. Notice though, that an

Brev1

Bmed

Brev2

Figure 1

Bmed

Bprop1

Bprop2

Agenda setter’s power is contingent on reversion point

14

Alliances

agenda setter does best in terms of maximizing his or her budget when the reversion level is most threatening. When the reversion level is higher, such as at, for example, Brev2, the reflection allows less expansion: only up to Bprop2 will be approved. Romer and Rosenthal find empirical evidence in Oregon that is consistent with their theoretical model. It is possible to reframe the Romer and Rosenthal model for any bureaucrat–sponsor relationship, although evidence is more difficult to come by. In general, weakening the ability of the agenda setter to make take-it-or-leave-it offers significantly reduces the agenda setter’s power relative to the sponsor. Arthur Spirling See also Agenda Power; Budget-Maximizing Bureaucrats; Bureaucratic Power

Further Readings Niskanen, W., Jr. (1971). Bureaucracy and representative government. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton. Romer, T., & Rosenthal, H. (1978). Political resource allocation, controlled agendas, and the status quo. Public Choice, 33(4), 27.

ALLIANCES Premier among strategies in a state’s arsenal to advance its policy agenda is the capacity to form a military alliance with one or more other states. A military alliance may be defined as a formal or informal agreement between two or more states that is intended to advance militarily the national security of the participating states. It is a continuing security association among member states with an element of forward planning and understanding to aid member states militarily or, at a minimum, through benevolent neutrality. These security arrangements may take several forms, with varying degrees of institutionalization and commitment levels. For example, one of the most significant military alliances in the world today is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which has a high degree of integration regarding its command

structure, and a high degree of commitment by the allies, via Article V, which deems an attack on one signatory shall be deemed an attack on all members. Other military alliances might call for less concerted action in the event of casus foederis being met, perhaps merely the observation of benevolent neutrality in the event that one of the signatories finds itself at war with a third party.

Alliance Motivations Military alliances are conventionally understood as an important avenue for states to augment their power capabilities. In other words, states are motivated to join alliances to add the power of other states to that of their own. This will help them counter threats they might face in the international system. Kenneth Waltz described this motivation for forming an alliance as balancing—states form alliances to balance the capabilities or threats facing them in the international system. Stephen Walt later argued that states do indeed balance, but against threats, not power capabilities alone. From this perspective, NATO was formed by its original signatories to counter the capabilities and threats posed by the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc powers. Although capability aggrandizement is indeed a central role alliances play, it is by no means the only one. Scholars such as Paul Schroeder sought to understand the conflict management role of these institutions. Elaborating on this perspective, Patricia Weitsman argued that another motivation for a military alliance to be forged might contain an adversarial relationship, that is, states tether their enemies to them to neutralize the threat. From this point of view, alliances function as other international institutions do, to enhance transparency, increase the costs of defection, and make cooperation cheaper, and, therefore, more likely. Viewing alliances as institutions generates insights into the ways in which threats within an alliance are managed. Thus, in the words of its first secretary general, Lord Ismay, NATO was originally formed “to keep the Soviets out, the United States in, and the Germans down.” Examining NATO purely as a balancing response to the Soviet Union misses the important dynamics that exist within the alliance. Both Greece and Turkey are members of the NATO alliance even though they are mutual enemies; they do not add the other’s

Alliances

power to their own within the context of the alliance. Nonetheless, they might gain important institutional advantages from being allied adversaries, in transparency and conflict management functions. One unintended consequence, however, of effective tethering alliances is that although they are formed to manage conflicts among signatories, they might appear threatening to nonmembers, heightening the level of threat and uncertainty in the international system. Weitsman calls this dynamic the alliance paradox and argues that it culminates in an overall higher probability of war. A third motivation for states seeking to form an alliance is to protect themselves from a powerful and threatening enemy. Here, states bargain with the threatening state, capitulating to it to ensure survival. Randall Schweller argues that “bandwagoning” behavior may be viewed as what small states do for strategic gain, given their inability to counter the power capabilities of a strong state. Although bargaining behavior occurs more rarely than balancing, the logic is used often to explain or justify certain foreign policy objectives. For example, the fear of “dominoes falling” uses bandwagoning logic—the belief that a hostile state will reap allies through victory culminating in a snowball effect. A final motivation for states seeking to ally under conditions of threat is hedging. Weitsman describes this as low-commitment-level alliances with states to draw them into one’s sphere of influence to allow the initiating state to consolidate its power, shut off avenues of expansion to potential adversaries, but not prove overly provocative to rivals. Hedging alliances allow states more freedom of action in the international system and may set the stage for enhanced cooperation among signatories in the future. As Michael Jacobson has written, one such alliance of note in the current international system is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China and Russia among its signatories. In seeking to enhance power capabilities in the international system, states might seek to arm themselves or form alliances. How states select their alliance partners is an important question. Although some scholars argue that regime type and ideology matter, others write that geostrategic concerns dominate. If states seek to ally, they face the dilemma of a fear of abandonment by their

15

partners versus a fear of entrapment in a conflict in which they do not want to be involved. This is what Glenn Snyder has termed the alliance security dilemma. Furthermore, states seeking to ally face a trade-off between their heightened security and their autonomy in action in the system. The extent to which this is true, however, depends on the commitment level of the alliance, and the type of alliance it is: balancing, bargaining, tethering, or hedging. The higher the commitment is, the more restricting the commitment is for autonomy. Alliances can be bilateral or multilateral. The number of states in the alliance has an important effect, too, on the autonomy of the partners. In multilateral alliances, such as NATO, the alliance must be reduced to its dyads to understand the motivations that coexist within it. Such analysis also helps explain the autonomy of the signatories in projecting their influence in the system.

Alliance Cohesion The ability of states in an alliance to agree on common goals and strategies is an indication of its cohesion. The ability of signatories to coordinate strategies and tactics will be a critical determinant of its effectiveness. Effectiveness is essential for a military alliance to manifest power. For example, the cohesion of the Central Powers—Germany and Austria–Hungary—during World War I was quite limited. As a consequence, its military effectiveness was inadequate. In contrast, the Triple Entente was relatively cohesive; as such, it was able to prevail militarily over its adversarial counterpart. Maintaining the cohesion of an alliance is essential to advancing the objectives of the signatories. It is also necessary for the successful exercise of power. Alliance cohesion is most often a derivative of threat levels. Threats may emanate from outside the alliance to the signatories in a symmetrical way. In this case, states will have an important unifying cause that will facilitate their coordination of goals and strategies. Thus, balancing alliances will have the highest cohesion levels of any type of alliance. If threats emanate from outside the alliance, but not in a symmetrical or uniform way, it will be harder for states to agree on goals and strategies. Some threats may be complementary; others may be divisive. When states are

16

Alliances

driven to ally with one another because of the threats they face from each other, then the principal threat to the alliance exists within it. Here cohesion is almost impossible to maintain. Tethering alliances, therefore, will be the least cohesive.

Peacetime Versus Wartime Alliances Military alliances are often concluded to deter or counter aggression from hostile states. Consequently, alliances must be examined during both peace and war. During peacetime, alliances serve principally as deterrents and conflict management devices. Power capabilities are an important component of alliances, but during peacetime that power is usually employed coercively, to compel or deter. States in an alliance will use their collective power to try to compel an adversary to do something or stop doing something or to prevent an encroachment on core values. During wartime, however, the requirements for effectiveness are dramatically different. States must coordinate goals and strategies even more carefully. During wartime, for military operations to be successful, joint planning, coordination, and communication are critical. Asymmetries in power capabilities that might not matter for effective peacetime alliance operations might become a source of tension during wartime as burden-sharing concerns become paramount. Acting in concert in an alliance presents the same collective action problems that dominate other spheres of activity in international relations. Furthermore, although alliances tend to be more cohesive when there is a shared external threat during peacetime, during wartime the relationship between external threats and cohesion is more complex. Alliances that are losing a war confront greater threat levels than do those that are winning, and yet alliances that are losing wars do not experience an upswing in cohesion as a consequence of this heightened threat environment. Alliance politics during wartime are closely related to the dynamics of coalition warfare. Analytically, coalitions differ only slightly from alliances. Coalitions are generally defined as collections of states that come together to implement specific military operations. Examples include the Desert Storm coalition in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, which included more than 23 nation-states, and the Operation Iraqi Freedom

(OIF) multinational operation that began in 2003 to remove Saddam Hussein from power and stabilize Iraq politically in the aftermath of regime change. The OIF coalition comprised 34 countries, including 11 NATO members. These ad hoc coalitions were forged with precise missions in mind. Their cohesion rested on the ability of the signatories to agree on the goals of the mission as well as on strategies to attain those goals. The Desert Storm coalition had more limited objectives than did the OIF coalition, but had a coordinated strategy to achieve those objectives. The primary goal was to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The strategy was implemented through an integrated force structure for U.S., U.K., and French troops, and integrated Arab forces under the Saudi commander of the joint forces theater of operations, with the two structures linked in the Coalition Coordination, Communication and Integration Center. Its cohesion, as a consequence, was quite high. In the OIF coalition, divisions within the coalition about its continued mission rendered the coalition less effective and less cohesive than its predecessors. Several countries dropped out of the coalition after the operation began in 2003. Coalition warfare has a long history. States frequently opt to embark on war with other states at their side rather than on their own. In other words, states frequently choose to resolve their military conflicts by force multilaterally rather than unilaterally. This is especially true in the present day. The United States, in particular, has increasingly sought to forge coalitions in advance of pressing forward with military operations in the post–cold war era. The United States embarked on 12 multilateral operations between 1900 and 1982 and 12 operations from 1991 to 2005. In addition, the size of these coalitions has been on the rise. Part of this is because there are more states in the international system now than there ever have been, and part of this is the diminishing legitimacy of unilateral military operations. As coalition size grows, traditional problems of alliance management, such as burden sharing and the alliance security dilemma, grow as well. Intra-alliance dynamics are always important for optimal performance, but this becomes especially important during wartime. Command, control, and communication failures during joint wartime operations have potentially lethal effects.

Althusser, Louis

Collective Defense Versus Collective Security Although most alliances function as collective defense organizations—that is, they provide mutual defense arrangements for the signatories—some security institutions may be put into place to provide collective security. Collective security agreements are pacts among all states to counter aggression whenever and wherever it occurs. The point of a collective security arrangement is not to defend any one state but to defend the order of the system as a whole. The distinction between collective defense and collective security is an important one; a true collective security arrangement would actually mean the end of competing alliances. All states would, in essence, be allied together to defend the order of the system. Historically, collective security has been difficult to achieve. The most important attempts have followed major power wars of some significance: the Concert of Europe following the Napoleonic Wars; the League of Nations following the World War I; and the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II. In design, the League of Nations was the closest to a true collective security organization, and that played a significant role in the organization’s paralysis and subsequent demise. The United Nations has been more successful as an organization, but does not truly operate as a collective security institution. This is why in the event that defense of the system is required, coalitions must be put into place in an ad hoc fashion, as was done during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Alliances are a key component of the workings of the international system. They play an important role in determining systemic stability and the frequency of major power war. They play an essential role in determining who prevails in military conflict. They also are an essential component of the foreign-policy-making tools in the arsenal of any state. Alliances are a powerful tool of statecraft, both historically and in the present day. Patricia A. Weitsman See also Anarchy in International Relations; Balance of Power; Coalition Theory; Hegemonic War; Realism in International Relations; Riker, William H.; Security; Waltz, Kenneth; War

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Further Readings Schroeder, P. W. (1976). Alliances, 1815–1945: Weapons of power and tools of management. In K. Knorr (Ed.), Historical dimensions of national security problems (pp. 227–262). Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Schweller, R. (1994). Bandwagoning for profit: Bringing the revisionist state back in. International Security, 19(1), 72–107. Snyder, G. H (1984). The security dilemma in alliance politics. World Politics, 36(4), 461–495. Walt, S. (1987). The origins of alliances. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Weitsman, P. A. (2003). Alliance cohesion and coalition warfare: The Central Powers and the Triple Entente. Security Studies, 12(3), 79–113.

ALTHUSSER, LOUIS (1918–1990) Louis Althusser was a French structural Marxist and professor of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. His work evolved over time, especially because he was subject to the dictates of the Communist Party, of which he was a lifelong member. He defended a version of Marxism that opposed the humanist turn in Marxist thought that came about, especially in France, after the death of Joseph Stalin. Althusser’s work is most relevant to the concept of power in his account of ideology. In Althusser’s account, ideology represents an artificial or illusory relationship between individuals and the real conditions of their existence. Ideology also has a material existence beyond ideas that exist within human minds. The first part or “thesis” is a version of the familiar Marxist claim that human exploitation is hidden from people by the ideology under which they live. In Althusser’s hands, the relationship between individuals and the real conditions of their existence is complex. Rather than claiming that there is a real material existence, and then there is our representation of that existence—the latter perverted by ideology— he argues that our existence is a consequence of social practices such that individuals are created in the image of the society in which they live. People take on roles determined by their place in the socioeconomic structure and behave in these roles

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as they are expected to, given the nature or function of the role. Our broader values and desires, however, are implanted in us by ideology that creates people as subjects. The entire ideology is a collection of institutions Althusser calls ideological state apparatuses, which include the family, religious organizations, social networks, the media, and the educational establishment. Different societies have different ideological state apparatuses, but they all create individuals as “subjects.” He illustrates this by suggesting we become subjects when we react to how others treat us. Our total reaction to social practices is what creates us as a subject. In this sense, it is not that we misperceive a reality: what we perceive of our society is what it is. However, through that perception we do not notice the exploitation and true relations between agents. Althusser believes that this represents the true account of Marx’s later vision of the dialectic that breaks the distinction between subject and object. The second aspect or thesis of ideology is its material existence. The first aspect is designed to privilege structure over agency by making agents— individuals—the creation of society or structures. The second is to take ideology out of the minds of the individuals whose perceptions it perverts and place it into the structure of society itself. Ideology in the material form is composed of the actions of people governed by the state apparatus. In that sense Althusser is a strong determinist: our actions are caused by the structure of society and are then interpreted by us through the roles we are called on to play. Sometimes individuals or classes pose threats to the dominant structures of society; at such times, what Althusser calls the repressive state apparatus comes into play through systems of law and order, which become increasingly repressive as people attempt to break out of the ideological state apparatus through social disorder and revolution. Althusser was very influential in continental philosophy, influencing Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, among others. Keith Dowding See also Agency; Agency–Structure Problem; Bourdieu, Pierre; Determinism; False Consciousness; Ideology; Marx, Karl; Marxist Accounts of Power; Structural Power

Further Readings Althusser, L. (2010). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation). In I. Szeman & T. Kaposy (Eds.), Cultural theory: An anthology. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Elliott, G. (1987). Althusser: The detour of theory. London: Verso.

ANARCHISM, POWER

IN

Power is a central issue in modern anarchist thought. Whereas anarchism was traditionally linked to authority—or its rejection—anarchists now talk in terms of power and counterpower. The change in emphasis is linked to the emergence of “postanarchist” theory: anarchism that draws on postmodern and poststructuralist thought, associated with Todd May, Lewis Call, and Saul Newman. The leading figures of 19th- and early 20thcentury anarchism—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin—were not unconcerned with power. On the contrary, even Proudhon, often regarded as the most individualist of the three, talked enthusiastically about the collective power of the workers. And many others defined anarchism as the abolition of power. But the concept was not made subject to sustained analysis—in contrast to law, authority, God, and science, for example. When they talked about power, 19th-century writers usually had one of two things in mind: the repressive machinery of the state or the liberating potential of collective actions. These two aspects of power were typically counterposed such that collective actions were believed to hold the key to the destruction of the state’s capacity to repress. What was important in this analysis was the image of power that it captured. On this account, power was about struggle against physical force (or as Max Weber would put it, the state’s monopoly of physical violence). Thus, the power of the state was typically equated with police, armed forces, prisons, torture, corporal and capital punishment—later on, surveillance—and the power of the oppressed was variously identified with barricades, terrorist or guerrilla actions, spontaneous revolt, the organization of peasants and workers in syndicates, ethical change, and the development of other nonhierarchical grassroots

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organizations. In the 1870s and 1880s, when memories of the Paris Commune were still very fresh and optimism about the prospects for European revolution high, the association between power and physical force was strong (though Tolstoyan anarchists always rejected the necessity and justifiability of this link). The same was true in the early 20th century, when anarchists were again engaged in revolutionary war. Nestor Makhno, who led anarchist resistance against counterrevolutionaries and Bolsheviks in the Ukraine during the civil war, characterized revolutionary action as a capacity to conquer or exterminate oppressors. The power of revolutionaries depended on overt coercion. In the latter part of the 19th century and again after the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, the emphasis shifted to the ethical and communitarian aspects of collective power: the ability of oppressed groups to find ways of living, organizing, and behaving—often explicitly nonviolent—that did not mimic the repressive practices of the state. This way of thinking about power was resurgent in the 1960s in the work of such anarchists as Colin Ward, George Woodcock, and Paul Goodman. Capturing the change, Woodcock described the old-style anarchists as “bellicose barricaders.” The new anarchists, he suggested, “had forgotten Spain and had no use for the romanticism of the dynamitero. . . . They were militant pacifists” (Woodcock, 1992, 45–46). One of the premises of postanarchist thinking is that classical anarchism (Woodcock’s old and new anarchists) has a narrowly structural idea of power and wrongly considers that power can and must be abolished. May distinguishes between “strategic” and “tactical” philosophical approaches to power. The first—which captures the classical anarchist position—assumes that power refers to the central problematic, that it derives essentially or for the most part from the site on which that problematic focuses (the economic system, the state, etc.). In contrast, tactical political philosophy suggests, “there is no center within which power is to be located.” Power might conglomerate around particular sites, but these points of concentration are not points of origin, and power extends to multiple sites as well as to the interplay between them. Like May, Call draws on Michel Foucault to elaborate his idea. Finding classical anarchists guilty of an obsession with

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capital and the state, Call rejects the simplistic top-down model of power to argue that it is present in any social relation. Power, he adds, always implies resistance. But resistance, counterpower, or antipower is nothing like the struggle of the classical anarchist, which was motivated by ideas of emancipation and wrongly assumed the existence of a human subject with free will. Why? Because on the one hand, postanarchists characterize the repressive nature of capitalism in novel ways, taking their lead from surrealists and situationists, and on the other hand, they deny the possibility of achieving a condition of liberation. Resistance, then, is about experimentation in everyday life and escaping the deadening discourses and consciousness of bourgeois capitalism through permanent resistance or, following Gilles Deleuze, rhizomatic action. The difference between the classical and the postanarchist positions should not be exaggerated. Although postanarchists challenge the rationalist epistemology of much 19th- and 20th-century anarchist thought, the political significance of the revision is not as great as sometimes claimed. Insofar as arguments about power are concerned, the comparison between the two positions is misleading. Postanarchists have accurately characterized the 19th-century conception of power, but overlooked the analyses of related concepts—notably authority— in which the relational issues so central to contemporary thought were first probed. Ruth Kinna See also Bakunin, Mikhail; Collective Action Problem; Foucault, Michel; Kropotkin, Peter; Revolution; Revolutionary Cell Structure

Further Readings Call, L. (2002). Postmodern anarchism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. May, T. (1994). The political philosophy of poststructuralist anarchism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Newman, S. (2001). From Bakunin to Lacan: Antiauthoritarianism and the dislocation of power. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Woodcock, G. (1992). Anarchism revisited. In Anarchism and anarchists (pp. 41–58). Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Quarry Press.

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Anarchy in International Relations

ANARCHY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Anarchy—from the Greek a (no) and archè (dominion/authority)—in international relations refers to the situation that the international system lacks an agency that if necessary can force the members of the system, even the most powerful ones, to abide by the rules and keep their promises. Like all anarchical systems, the international system is a self-help system: it does not have bailiffs.

Anarchy and Sovereignty Although circles of friends or gangs of criminals are also examples of anarchical systems, the presentday system of states is without doubt the bestknown example of such a system. This system originated on the European continent and is the outcome of an evolutionary process that took about 500 years. It started at the end of the 13th century, with the conflict between King Philip IV (the Fair) of France and Pope Boniface VIII concerning the right claimed by Philip to impose taxes on the churches in his kingdom without the pope’s prior consent, and symbolically ended with the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The old, medieval order under the spiritual and secular authority of the pope and the emperor was gradually replaced by a new one that was based on territorially separate units that recognized one another as sovereign equals. Sovereignty means that the states do not attempt to exercise authority on another state’s territory and do not recognize any authority above them. This latter “external” aspect of sovereignty implies that anarchy and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin. They are mutually constitutive. Sovereignty as a property of the state cannot exist without anarchy as a property of the structure of the system of states. An anarchical system is therefore necessarily identical with a self-help system—a system, that is, in which no authority exists that can bring redress where one party has been wronged by another party. It has become part of the “unproblematic background knowledge” in the study of international relations that the ground rules of the states system were laid down in the Peace of Westphalia of October 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War.

For this reason, the states system is very often referred to as the Westphalian system. Andreas Osiander has quite recently exposed this as a myth. The peace consisted of two treaties, the Treaty of Münster between the French king and the German emperor, and the Treaty of Osnabrück between the queen of Sweden and the German emperor. These treaties settled many questions, but they did not constitute a break with the past or establish a new international order based on the principle of sovereignty. Rather, they confirmed the ancient rights and liberties of the estates of the empire—including their right to conclude alliances with “strangers” for their preservation, provided these were not directed against the emperor or the empire—but made no mention of the estates being sovereign or having sovereign rights.

Anarchy and the State of Nature Anarchy constitutes what John Ruggie has called the “deep structure” of the states system. Many students of international relations have concluded that the absence of a central authority must therefore explain why wars are endemic in the international system. But anarchy never can be the only factor that explains why states go to war because states can also coexist peacefully in anarchy. The history of the states system shows that states can be unreliable partners, continuously engaged in war or the preparation for war, as well as faithful allies cooperating with one another quite extensively. The European integration process since the 1950s moreover makes clear how far cooperation can go between states, the anarchical nature of the states system notwithstanding. One should also realize that organized acts of violence in the form of civil wars are a recurrent feature of hierarchical systems. Nevertheless, it can hardly be claimed that anarchy increases the chances of successful cooperation between actors in a system. In an anarchical system, conflict is more likely to lead to violence to settle the issue than in a hierarchical system where actors can appeal to an agency that can adjudicate between them and enforce a settlement. As a result, the anarchical structure of the states system has led many authors to describe life in that system in the gloomiest terms. The image they evoke of the situation the states find themselves in largely corresponds with Thomas Hobbes’s famous depiction of

Anarchy in International Relations

the state of nature in his Leviathan. Like Hobbes, these authors argue that anarchy implies that every state is the potential enemy of every other state and therefore must lead to a relentless security competition, that a division of labor—and consequently, prosperity—is impossible to realize, and that the life of states can be no more than “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” No matter how much this depiction appeals to the imagination, or how strongly it appears to be confirmed by the horrors of the countless wars the international system has experienced since its inception—particularly those of the two world wars in the last century—it is not correct. As Alexander Wendt has pointed out, states in the Westphalian system do not see one another as Hobbesian enemies, but as Lockean rivals. A division of labor is also possible in the states system, and the states that are part of it are able to cooperate with one another in all kinds of projects. Moreover, both Louis Henkin and Hans Morgenthau have emphasized that, although violation attracts attention, the scrupulous observance of the law and of obligations has been the rule in the system of states. Two factors in particular help explain why the Hobbesian logic of the state of nature does not apply to the states system. The first is that states need to protect their credibility. States are very anxious to prevent a situation in which one state can establish hegemony over the others. To avoid such hegemony, states enter alliances with other states to form a counterbalance against the potential hegemon. Such alliances can only form to the extent that the states have the reputation of keeping their promises and carrying out their threats. The reputational element in the states system enables cooperation even though the states system lacks an agency to enforce cooperation. Hobbes might actually have agreed with this, considering his refutation of the so-called argument of the fool. The fool argues that, in the state of nature, every person is concerned only with his or her own conservation, and therefore, that it is not against reason for a person not to keep his or her part of a covenant if this is to the person’s benefit, even though the other party has performed already. According to Hobbes, however, reason dictates that this person should fulfill his or her part, because in the state of nature no person has any hope of defending himself or herself without the

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help of others and therefore should not deceive those on which his or her survival depends. Hobbes seems, however, not to have realized that this understanding would have made life in the state of nature less miserable and hopeless than he himself thought. Other things being equal, the more credible the commitment that states can make, the stronger the alliances they can form. Consequently, more credible states will be stronger and survive more easily than will less credible ones. Thus, the more weight a state attaches to its credibility, the greater the probability it will act in accordance with the rule that constitutes the basis of all international law, namely pacta sunt servanda (“agreements must be kept”). This holds true even when states, for whatever reason, regret having entered into an agreement and would be very glad to get out of it. In this way, the states’ desire for credibility ensures a level of predictability in their mutual relations, which increases the possibilities for cooperation and lays the foundation for regulation of their relations. The more importance the states attach to their credibility, the more the international system will have in common with Hedley Bull’s anarchical society: a society of states in which they recognize that they have common interests, and accept that in their dealings with one another they are bound by certain rules, even when they exercise force against one another. The proposition that the individuals who find themselves in the state of nature are more or less equal in strength is of vital importance for Hobbes’s characterization of this situation, where “every man is enemy to every man.” This proposition fortunately does not apply to the states in the states system because great differences in power exist between them. This is the second factor that helps explain why anarchy should not be equated with the state of nature. The more powerful one state is compared with the other states, the more prudent those other states will be in their dealings with it. And thus, the less necessary it will be for that state to consider how the other states will behave. On the one hand, this makes life in the states system simpler. The interests of the great powers are the ones that count—those of the smaller powers can be ignored. This is what the Athenian representatives try to make clear to the council of the Melians when, according to Thucydides, they argue that the stronger power

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does what it can while the weaker one suffers what it must. On the other hand, this observation implies that the states falling within the reach of power of one of the most powerful states in the states system will think twice before deciding to break a promise, whether it be to one another or to the great power in question, out of fear of incurring the latter’s displeasure. Just like any other state, a great power tries as much as possible to organize the states system according to its own wishes. To the extent that it succeeds—which is naturally a direct function of the power preponderance of the great power relative to the other states—a great power may feel more responsible for the way things run within the states system. It will be anxious to stop being dragged into a conflict with some other great power by the actions of the less powerful states within its sphere of influence. The great powers devise the rules to be followed by the lesser states and may have both the capabilities and the will to maintain these rules. An important implication of this is that the fewer the great powers and the greater their influence, the more the great powers will act as managers of the states system. Most authors who equate anarchy with Hobbes’s state of nature are of the opinion that there exists only one method to banish war from the international system, and that is by establishing a world government. Immanuel Kant is one of them. In his Perpetual Peace, he agrees with Hobbes that states, because of their independent status, find themselves in a state of war and that this situation can only be remedied if the states merge into one under a central authority. Kant nevertheless prefers a situation of anarchy to one of “universal monarchy” because the remedy may be worse than the disease. A world government will lead to ossification, and possibly tyranny. Moreover, a world government will not be able to prevent civil war. In line with the argument developed here, Barry Buzan has emphasized that the choice between anarchy and world government is not one between insecurity and security. Anarchy and hierarchy provide different types of security, where the anarchical type of security has much to recommend it. World government may achieve more order and security, but liberty is more secure in anarchy. Robert H. Lieshout

See also Bull, Hedley; Realism in International Relations; Sovereignty; Waltz, Kenneth; War

Further Readings Bull, H. (1977). The anarchical society: A study of order in world politics. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan. Buzan, B. (1991). People, states and fear: An agenda for international security studies in the post–cold war era. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lieshout, R. H. (1995). Between anarchy and hierarchy. A theory of international politics and foreign policy. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Wendt, A. (1999). Social theory of international politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

ANIMAL GROUPS, POWER

IN

Power processes in animal groups are strikingly similar to those in human groups. In both animal and human contexts, power is an individual’s relative capacity to modify others’ states by providing or withholding resources or administering punishments. Power is contingent on the actual resources and punishments an individual can deliver to others but is also much more. Social species vary with regard to the complexity of power relationships. In many higher mammals, individuals have the cognitive capacity to recognize one another as individuals and to remember relative power differentials between group members. These animal groups can consist of 30 or more members. Thus, cognitive resources are directed toward the negotiation of power relationships. Dominance motivation is defined by the drive to gain power. Dominance relationships build on information gathering about the power of opponents. It is important to distinguish power, dominance motivation, and dominance behavior. Individuals with high dominance motivation are sensitive to cues of rank, seek out opportunities to influence others, and engage in more behaviors aimed at gaining and maintaining power, including ingratiating, competitive, and agonistic behavior and alliance formation. Such behaviors, though, may vary in their success in achieving power. Thus, although distinct, dominance motivation often predicts dominance behaviors,

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which in turn predicts attaining power if used effectively. Dominance behavior is distinct from aggressive behavior, which is defined by intent to inflict harm. Dominance behaviors can involve aggressive strategies for taking resources and threatening subordinates, and so dominance motivation and aggressive behavior often co-occur. Nonetheless, prosocial strategies, such as reciprocity and cooperation, can also reflect dominance motives. Indeed, in primates, prosocial strategies, such as trading favors and allocating resources justly, appear to be necessary for establishing power. Dominant individuals have species-specific strategies for signaling their power to other group members. Group members are influenced by these signals and by their prior interactions with each other.

Resources and Power Power is defined by the ability to control resources. But, what kinds of resources do animals seek to control? Resources are the substrates of survival for both the individual and the species. Important resources include territory, food, water, and shelter. However, several resources are social in nature. The group itself is a resource that tends to benefit higher-ranking individuals more. It is therefore incumbent on dominants to act in ways that encourage other group members to stay in the group because defecting individuals could become rivals. Influence in the group or social attention is a sought-after resource, as is political support and the opportunity to mate. Dominant animals are the focus of attention in social groups and have privileged access to mates. In cooperatively breeding animals, reproduction is skewed markedly in favor of dominant animals that monopolize reproductive resources. In these societies, harsh environmental contingencies make group participation advantageous to subordinates even in the face of reproductive skew. In human economies, resources are exchanged based on their perceived value. Rhesus macaques will trade rewards for being able to view images of high-status troop members, but insist on compensation for viewing images of low-status individuals. Power therefore is indexed by the ability to gain both social attention and material resources. Chimpanzees have been observed to trade mating

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opportunities for political support. Grooming is another commodity traded for food, mating, and political support in various species. Selection has favored individuals with the intelligence and memory capacity required to negotiate the power dynamics of the social world.

The Basis of Power in Animal Groups Six bases of power have been defined in human organizations. Individual recognition and advanced cognition are required for these bases of power, which are 1. Informational—power based on provisioning of information that causes an individual to decide to adopt a particular behavior 2. Reward—power that stems from the ability of an individual to offer a resource 3. Coercion—power that stems from threats of punishment 4. Legitimate—power based on others just accepting the right of another to control a resource 5. Expertise—power based on others accepting that an individual has some superior insight or knowledge 6. Referent—power that stems from others identifying with an individual, or using that individual as a model

All six bases of power are seen in animal societies. Reward and coercive power are the most commonly discussed and are unique in the requirement for policing or surveillance by the powerful. Deception is common in societies with this surveillance, and policing can become difficult in large groups. Mothers especially wield informational, expertise, and referential power. Leadership in animal groups (e.g., elephants) is usually the prerogative of older dominant individuals who have knowledge of resources and travel routes that others do not possess. Legitimate power is seen in many hunting predators where individuals often retain the right to their own kill and the decision to share is at the discretion of that individual

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regardless of rank. (Legitimacy is common in chimpanzee society.)

Alliances as Bases for Power An alliance is a joint effort by two or more individuals. Alliances are common in social mammals and are theorized to have evolved from group hunting practices in species such as wolves, lions, and hyenas. However, alliances in agonistic interactions occur in species such as monkeys with no history of group hunting. Agonistic alliances are potentially costly to individuals, who expend energy and risk injury when they intervene to support another, and are potentially beneficial to recipients, who obtain valuable support against opponents. In primate groups, support is primarily but not completely limited to kin. In the social economy, support may be exchanged for other resources. Researchers have used statistical models to predict alliances within groups. Several interesting findings have emerged from these models that also have been substantiated by direct observation of alliance behavior in many species. These models assume that an individual’s probability of future wins and losses is influenced by the outcome of past interactions; for example, that “winner” and “loser” effects are in operation. Winning tends to beget winning and losing tends to beget losing as winner effects enhance the probability of winning, whereas loser effects enhance the probability of losing. Under certain conditions, winner and loser effects both favor coalition formation as they factor into the equation that determines the risks and benefits of an agonistic encounter. Because dominants benefit most from the status quo, they are likely to intervene to maintain it. Many studies have also found that subordinates are often the victims of agonistic alliances. This is because of an increased probability of winning against an individual who has previously demonstrated weakness. Similarly, third-party intervention on the behalf of dominants is common as dominants are more likely to win. There are conditions under which subordinates will gang up on and usurp a dominant. Dominants who win later retaliate, so subordinates rarely act against a dominant unless victory is certain, as is the case if the dominant has been injured and is

disabled. Homicide at the hands of an individual’s own group members is an important cause of death in adult males of many primate species. Such homicides nearly always happen when one male is outnumbered by an alliance. Homicide by alliance also occurs in the context of animal warfare as discussed later. Alliance behavior is not strictly the purview of males. Females in a number of species do participate in agonistic alliances against other females and against males. Females may also participate with males in an agonistic alliance. Females who are members of losing parties can expect to be physically punished by dominant males. However, dominant males have an interest in keeping breeding females in the group and garnering their favor. Decisions about punishing subordinates are therefore calculated.

Animal Warfare In animal species, power may be held by individuals and by groups of individuals as resources are held by both individuals and the collective. When resources are held and defended by a collective, the stage is set for war or agonistic encounters between groups. The laws that govern agonistic encounters within a group also govern agonistic encounters between groups. These encounters are more likely when one group perceives itself to be relatively more powerful than another. Groups therefore may advertise their presence to each other visually and vocally as a way of deterring costly attacks. Warfare is most likely when one group has a numerical advantage over another. Wolves, lions, hyenas, and primates are most likely to attack when they encounter a lone member of another group. Coalitions may patrol the boundary of the group’s territory in search of rivals to attack. If enough members of a rival group are killed, the offensive troop can take possession of another group’s territory.

Correlates and Consequences of Power in Animal Groups The correlates of power in animal groups are essentially the correlates of dominance. Dominant males often have higher testosterone and may have lower glucocorticoid levels, depending on the species and

Appeasement

the stability of the hierarchy. Higher glucocorticoid levels in subordinates may contribute toward a dominant’s basis for power (legitimacy) because high hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity may physiologically facilitate an individual’s acceptance of the submissive role. Dominant males have more mating opportunity and reproductive success, especially when elevated HPA activity in subordinates inhibits reproduction (e.g., some cooperative breeders). Dominant females have greater fecundity and greater offspring survival. Dominants signal their status and willingness to defend it with both visual and auditory displays. Dominants are sought-after partners for social interactions and are more frequently groomed by and tend to do less grooming of other individuals. Power emboldens animals that possess it because powerful individuals are free to act without punishment from other group members. The behavior of the powerful is, however, checked by the need to maintain favor with subordinates to prevent their participation in coalitions and by the need to keep subordinates in the group. Small groups are subject to attack by other, larger groups; in many species, it can take years to replace an adult male group member. The need to have a critical number of males places constraints on the practice of homicide in species where males stay in their native groups and cannot be recruited from outside.

Conclusion Power is defined similarly in animal and human groups. Strategies for achieving power are also similar in animals and humans. There is support for the notion that negotiating power dynamics is cognitively demanding and may have contributed to the evolution of intelligence. The correlates and consequences of power are no less prominent in animal societies. Animals commit murder and go to war in the service of power. These activities are a significant part of group life for the species that engage in them. Through studying power dynamics in animal societies, we learn that these dynamics are not part of what make humans uniquely Homo sapiens. Liane J. Leedom See also Bases of Power; Female Leadership Among Mammals; Raven, Bertram

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Further Readings Bergmüller, R., Johnstone, R. A., Russell, A. F., & Bshary, R. (2007). Integrating cooperative breeding into theoretical concepts of cooperation. Behavioural Processes, 76(2), 61–72. Byrne, R. W. (2007). Ape society: Trading favours. Current Biology, 17(17), R775–776. Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284. Raven, B. H. (2008). The bases of power and the power/ interaction model of interpersonal influence. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 8(1), 1–22. Wrangham, R. W. (1999). Evolution of coalitionary killing. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Suppl 29, 1–30.

APPARATUS See Dispositif

APPEASEMENT The term appeasement still carries negative connotations associated with the failure of Britain and France to contain Adolf Hitler’s Germany and stop the onset of war. Appeasement was a respectable term almost until the outbreak of World War II, signifying the pursuit of peace. Many believed World War I had been an avoidable conflict caused by an arms buildup and lack of understanding between nations of their grievances. Accordingly, appeasement was the policy of the British and French governments with respect to German and Italian territorial ambitions. Italy aimed to take over Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in Africa; Germany laid claim initially to the demilitarized Rhineland, then to Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Many believed that Germany had been harshly treated in the Versailles Treaty and, though they did not trust Hitler, felt that German claims over the Rhineland were reasonable. When Hitler’s troops entered (under orders to withdraw if France responded), he was asked to negotiate, and he proposed a nonaggression pact, though no such pact was ever signed. The Sudetenland had a

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large German population and Sudetenland Nazis demanded autonomy that was virtually granted by the Czech government. However, this did not satisfy the Nazis, and Germany began to demand that the Sudetenland be incorporated into Germany. In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated directly with Hitler in a meeting in Munich with the leaders of France (Édouard Daladier) and Italy (Benito Mussolini). A peace treaty was signed between Britain and Germany, allowing Chamberlain on his return a famous photo opportunity, flourishing a paper and claiming “peace for our time.” After more concessions to Germany, Britain finally declared war on September 3, 1939, after Germany had entered Poland 2 days earlier. The fate of the term appeasement was sealed. The appeasement of Germany has been blamed on Chamberlain personally, but the policy was popular at the time, and historians now argue that there was little other course for Britain than to try to contain Hitler, though France and the United Kingdom could have taken a stronger line at certain times. Britain did rearm during the 2 years before the outbreak of war, so alongside appeasement went the policy of preparing for war. Modern historians thus look much more favorably on Chamberlain and his policies than did those in the immediate postwar period, though appeasement as a concept will probably never regain its once positive connotations. Keith Dowding See also Balance of Power; Defensive Realism; Extended Deterrence; Fascism; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Neville, P. (2006). Hitler and appeasement: The British attempt to prevent the Second World War. London: Continuum. Taylor, A. J. P. (1961). The origins of the Second World War. London: Hamilton.

ARENDT, HANNAH (1906–1975) The political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s conception of power is distinctive. It is rooted in a

political philosophy that celebrates the public realm of freedom that emerges when people act with others as citizens or political equals. Arendt believed power is actualized where people act together to sustain or to change the world they share with one another. Her fundamental claim is that power is consensual, referring to humans acting in concert. Power is never the property of an individual but of the groups acting together. Arendt is quite self-conscious in rejecting standard assumptions about power, arguing that political scientists and theorists have obscured its nature ever since Plato. Regardless of political orientation, thinkers have assumed that the first question of politics is, “Who rules whom?” Arendt’s rejection of this assumption may seem idealistic, utopian, or simply incredible. It is, however, offered by an author whose first major work was a three-volume study of totalitarianism, a work that entertains no illusions about violence, terror, and domination and that remains one of the landmarks of 20th-century political science. Nevertheless, in developing her account of power, Arendt firmly insists on James Madison’s maxim, “All governments rest on opinion”—and not, therefore, on qualities that we more often associate with power, such as rulership or coercion. She even claims that violence is a “marginal phenomenon” in the political realm, which may look like a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that “opinion” forms the basis of government. Though seemingly eccentric, these claims are based on profound reflections about the nature of politics. Arendt’s basic criticism of the political science of her day concerned its failure to make distinctions. Accordingly, she distinguishes power from a series of concepts that political science often refers to under that name—violence, rulership, and authority (not to mention force and sheer strength). Although these concepts may appear functionally alike, inasmuch as each may involve one person doing something that another wants or expects that person to do, Arendt nonetheless discerns crucial differences. The next part of this entry considers her thoughts on power rather than violence, before turning to the more elusive notion of authority. (More elusive partly because Arendt’s most obvious discussion of authority [“What is Authority?”] is largely historical and fits awkwardly with her later comments in “On Violence.” This entry touches only on the latter.)

Arendt, Hannah

Arendt draws two main contrasts between power and violence. Although power is, in a sense that we will return to, “an end-in-itself,” violence is primarily instrumental. That is, violence is justified in human relations as a means to secure particular ends, and it is more justifiable as a means, the nearer and more certain those ends are. However, Arendt continually underlines the unpredictability of political action, violent and nonviolent, and the role played by sheer accident in human affairs. Thinking of Plato’s metaphors of rulership—the philosopherking who “makes” the ideal republic as the craftsperson makes a table—she writes, “Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals” (1972, p. 106). Thus, Arendt does not deny that violence may have many effects on the political realm, but trenchantly observes that the most likely change violence makes is to a world where the exercise of violence becomes more usual. No matter how limited, strategic, or effective violence may be, its instrumentality sharply marks it off from power. “Far from being the means to an end, [power] is actually the very condition enabling a group of people to think and act in terms of the means-end category” (1972, p. 150). That is, there is power wherever people cooperate to pursue shared ends and wherever they address the question, What ends will we act in concert to pursue? As Arendt contends, any answer to the question, “To what end is power a means?” will either be vacuous (“to enable men to live together”) or dangerously utopian (“to promote happiness or to realise a classless society”—1972, p. 150f). Thus for Arendt, power does not call for any justification because it is bound up with the very existence of political communities. A second key contrast: Arendt argues that power cannot be centralized whereas violence must be, if it is to be effective. Again, the point is easier to see with regard to violence. Unless it is to spell mayhem or warfare, violence requires a relatively small number of people to be tightly organized, who may then dominate others. Power, by contrast, arises where many people broadly share political goals, or invest authority in shared institutions, laws, or holders of political office. Of course, even the community that is most powerful in

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Arendt’s terms—for instance, where government is seen as legitimate, where institutions remain alive through the combined initiative of many persons— employs violence. But this is as a sanction against lawbreakers, understood as criminals who enjoy no support among their fellow citizens. (Of course, violence also remains as a strategic means that may be used against those outside the community’s boundaries.) In this way, we can see why Arendt claims that violence is marginal to a political realm. Such limited uses of coercion are a far cry from systematic violence against those who are courageous or foolhardy enough to challenge a more or less tyrannical government—one that most subjects obey only for fear of coercive sanctions. This second contrast has an important corollary. Violence will be the more necessary, the less a government enjoys the real consent of those governed. Arendt argues that violence becomes more tempting to rulers, the more they feel that support is ebbing away from their regimes and the less ready their “subjects” are to cooperate in their rule: “rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost” (1972, p. 152). Although obedience may be obtained from the barrel of a gun, power—active support for a mode of government, its laws, and officeholders—cannot. Further, Arendt emphasizes that massive technological developments in the means of violence did not prevent the revolutions of the 20th century (nor did they decide the outcome of a war such as that in Vietnam). Rather, increasingly powerless rulers found that the arms changed hands and that armies and police forces no longer acted on their behalf. (Nicolae Ceauescu’s fall in 1989 is exemplary here.) Power in Arendt’s sense does not require unanimity of opinion—as she stresses, that is never to be found in human affairs. But it does require a consensus on certain goals, aims, or principles of organization, and the latter may give rise to authority. Despite the suspicion of utopianism sometimes felt by her readers, Arendt’s own examples of concerted action are entirely familiar to political science (and indeed, often involve the exercise or threat of violence): revolutionary uprisings (e.g., Hungary, 1956, and Czechoslovakia, 1968), the U.S. civil rights movement and the student movements of the 1960s, even the French resistance against the Nazis. Such movements are relatively short-lived, however. Consensus on constitutional

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Argument, Power of

principles and modes of organization is a more durable and equally important source of power. In this case, common support invests laws and institutions with authority. Arendt stresses that such power and authority are compatible with a “division of powers”; indeed dividing power by checks and balances can actually be a source of power. Think, for instance, of the role a loyal opposition plays within representative democracy: power is kept alive through differences of opinion mediated by shared institutions that embody political authority. Arendt reinterprets the idea of a social contract—where political communities are understood as based on a contract among citizens—to stress the power that arises from mutual promise. Thus, a group of people may bind themselves to a constitution and associated institutions, as in one of her favorite examples from the American Revolution where she claimed power was understood consensually as reciprocity and mutuality rather than the power used by princes or aristocrats that is based on coercion. In conclusion, recall the slogan that Arendt appropriates from Madison, “All governments rest on opinion.” This may, indeed, be the “opinion” of a small, well-organized minority or elite that uses systematic coercion to dominate others—in particular, to prevent others from acting together and hence gaining power to challenge the existing power structure. But concerted action and organization remain essential preconditions for the effective use of political violence. Thus, Arendt is adamant that although violence may destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it. At this fundamental level, even tyranny and totalitarianism rely on the power that arises from joint action—for example, by the apparatus of a secret police. Despite enormous variations in kind and degree, then, all forms of political community have the same basic requirements of power—which rests on shared opinion— and authority—which resides in shared institutions. Garrath Williams See also Coercion and Power; Consensual Power, Theories of; Cooperation; Freedom

Further Readings Arendt, H. (1965). On revolution (Rev. ed.). New York: Viking.

Arendt, H. (1972). On violence. In Crises of the republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Arendt, H. (2004). The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. (Original work published 1951) Issac, J. (1998). Oases in the desert: Hannah Arendt on democratic politics. In G. Williams (Ed.), Hannah Arendt: Critical assessments of leading political philosophers (Vol. 2, pp. 130–154). London: Routledge. Kateb, G. (2000). Political action: Its nature and advantages. In D. Villa (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt (pp. 130–148). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, P. (2006). Power and violence (Trans. R. Hausheer). In G. Williams (Ed.), Hannah Arendt: Critical assessments of leading political philosophers (Vol. 3, pp. 389–407). London: Routledge. Waldron, J. (2000). Arendt’s constitutional politics. In G. Williams (Ed.), Hannah Arendt: Critical assessments of leading political philosophers (Vol. 3, pp. 135–153). London: Routledge.

ARGUMENT, POWER

OF

Argument is the provision of reasons to justify a conclusion. One alternative is bargaining where the interested parties “cut a deal” so that they all satisfy at least some of their interests. Another alternative is assertion, where willfulness is sufficient justification for proposed action. Assertion goes straight to the conclusion, bypassing the process of justification. Why is justification important? The answer takes us to the power of argument: justification disconnects judgments of the legitimacy of the proposal from the quantum of power of the proposer (“do it or else”) and reconnects them to the qualitative merits of the proposal (“I accept your reasons”). This entry deals mainly with the public power of argument in managing social and political conflict, but says little about the pure power of logic or the framework of fallacies of bad argument treated in philosophical analysis. Argument involves claims about evidence and usually stops short of conclusive demonstration. Argument is usually part of a process of debate with different sides contending for different propositions. The frequency of references to “a good argument” conveys this debating dimension to argument, with different sides contending “for” or

Argument, Power of

“against” the main propositions or even the very agenda of business. As a result, many “good arguments” are inconclusive; at the end of the day, there is no agreement among contending parties about the right conclusion or sometimes even the right debating process. So why bother with argument if the prospect of agreement is low? Belief in the value of argument rests on two sets of views of the power of argument. The first set relates to the power of argument “in theory” and the second set relates to this power “in practice.” The former deals with the capacity of argument to contribute to philosophical debate, whereas the latter deals with the contribution of argument to practical debate over political and social affairs. These two sets of theory and practice are related in the same ways that theoretical and practical reasoning are related. Theoretical reasoning can be seen as the primary form of argument and practical reasoning the secondary form. Thus, the power of argument in theoretical discourse provides one venerable standard for assessing the available powers of argument found in practical discussion. The more open public decision making can be made to the norms of argument, the more likely it is that conflict will be resolved impartially through due processes of decision making—that is, with decisions based on the merits of the argument as distinct from decisions reflecting the interests of those engaged in argument. Democracy is historically associated with the belief in the power of argument. Classical Athens had its moment of high democracy, and Thucydides’ History provides portraits of decent public argument marshaled by rare leaders such as Pericles (e.g., Thucydides II, 34–46) and case studies of moving public debate involving contending arguments by such rhetorically gifted speakers as Cleon and Diodotus (e.g., Thucydides III, 36–50). The best case for this inspiring world of democratic argument is probably that left by Aristotle, whose Politics pays due respect to public reason but whose Rhetoric lays out the real power of argument in the public sphere. And here we see the limited nature of practical argument when compared with the philosophy standard. Political argument is an exercise in rhetorical as well as philosophical power, adapting theory to the demands of rhetoric to get the required assent. Think of this as a theory of the second best: the power of argument in public

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affairs is less than the ideal available in pure theory, but the ideal is not practically feasible. The lesson from Aristotle is that the operational power of practical argument comes down to the blend of three elements: the ethos or perceived character of the argument maker, the pathos or mood of the audience, and finally (and perhaps least powerfully), the merits of the logos or core reasoning of the argument. Aristotle occupies only one end of the political spectrum. For every Aristotelian realist, there are many other democratic idealists with greater hopes for the power of argument. But can the imperfect world of practical affairs really be modeled on the rigors of impartial philosophical argument? Plato’s Republic sketches one famous answer, with its thesis that philosophers must become kings. But what about the real world as we know it, where political power is exercised by nonphilosophers: how can the potential power of argument be realized? Believers in the pure power of argument often become despondent in the face of persistent social conflict. If only those engaged in conflict would lay down their arms and instead take up arguments and agree to abide by an impartial arbitration of the issues on the merits. The everyday realities of power seem to imply that argument might be pure but it is powerless if left to itself. Argument needs friends, notably a friend at court where real power rests in the hands of those who rule, typically without any obligation to rule impartially or engage in open argument. Among those who have championed the power of argument in practical affairs are some of the most influential makers of modernity, particularly the architects of liberal constitutionalism such as Benedict Spinoza, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. Their constitutional design principles included many devices that protect the power of argument by dispersing political power away from traditional concentrations (such as unlimited monarchies) in favor of the rule of law through a formal separation of ruling powers into several distinct branches of government. The separation of powers strives to promote argument in political life through checks and balances to blunt the power of assertion and willfulness in ways that promote open argument over the use and abuse of public power. Two examples can round out this discussion. Contemporary democracy honors the power of

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argument in two important ways. First, democratic theory celebrates “deliberative democracy” as a regulatory ideal where equality of opportunity to engage in political argument is matched to procedural norms of engagement inspired by an “ideal speech situation” of honest argument, as though all must now meet the high standard of argument set by Pericles. A deliberative democracy reinforces argument through fair discussion processes. Second, over recent decades, the practical world of public policy analysis has taken “an argumentative turn” and embraced the power of argument, with the result that policy analysis itself has become part of the wider argument about ends and not simply an instrument of policy delivery. Democratic policy analysts are thus encouraged to inject themselves into the deliberative domain through analysis about argument as well as argument about analysis. In both these developments, argument has become central to the action of contemporary democracy. John Uhr See also Aristotle; Authority; Bargaining; Discourse; Persuasion

Further Readings Barry, B. (1965). Political argument. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Garver, E. (2004). For the sake of argument: Practical reasoning, character and the ethics of belief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Majone, G. (1989). Evidence, argument and persuasion in the policy process. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

ARISTOTLE (384–322 BCE) Aristotle was a Greek philosopher of Macedonian descent. His studies of physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, logic, rhetoric, poetics, economics, and other subjects made him the most outstanding thinker of his age, if not of all time. His ideas about power, especially about political power, have influenced thinkers up to the present day.

In ontology, Aristotelian power is synonymous with potency, which has three aspects: as a source of change, as a capacity for performance, or as a condition making a thing unchangeable. His thinking on this matter was standard fare until the Enlightenment, when Thomas Hobbes rejected the latter two criteria and redefined the first, to see power only as the source of motion. In psychology, Aristotle thought of power in terms of capacity for performance, defining, for example, talent in rhetoric as the power (dynamis) to discern what will be persuasive in each domain. Psychological powers can be active or passive, operative or receptive, and immediate or remote. Hobbes altered this definition, so that psychological power or faculty was a capacity to make or receive change. Like his teacher, Plato, Aristotle took politics to be the most important subject in human life. The art of statecraft is the highest art because it affects the entire social environment, including every art practiced within it. As a subject matter, politics is the study of humans in groups, whereas ethics is the study of the individual in isolation. Only “a beast or a god” can actually live in isolation, and thus humans are social animals. They are also rational animals, and their rationality chooses ends from among possible ends and in doing so attempts to realize a share of human nature by choosing the best or the better from among any set of proposals. Political studies are the most important studies partly because they can improve the art of statecraft, and partly because they enable us to realize our natures as choosers of the better in the highest and weightiest affairs. The only kind of state Aristotle discusses at length was the city-state or polis. Nation-states, that is, states having more than one population center, were too large for their members to be addressed by a single herald in a single assembly and, hence, were too large to be effectively governed. In addition, the population centers were bound to differ in their religious observances, leading to strife. The polis is a natural result of human association. The basic unit of association is the family. Families associate together to form villages, and the polis results from the association of villages. Each association aims at achieving some end thought of as good, and thus, the polis is an

Arms Race

association aiming at a good. This definition has always left open the question of whether Aristotle is more conventionalist or contractarian. It has also allowed his thinking to influence both schools. The fact that the chief goods for which the polis aims are self-sufficiency and stability—two cognates of power—allows his thinking to influence other theorists, such as Niccolò Machiavelli, who see the accumulation of power as the aim of the state. Political power corresponds to the position of command in a command–obey relationship. The command–obey relationship is a natural phenomenon, likely to emerge wherever two or more persons join in a common endeavor. Hence, any association, no matter how temporary, might feature it. The position of command can be used in two ways: either in the interests of the whole, which accords with justice; or in the interests of those who rule, which accords with despotism. Although there are two ways to rule, there are three forms of rule according to Aristotle. The forms are rule by one, by a few, or by all. Each form of rule realizes a better or worse result depending on how often its agents exercise power justly or despotically. Hence, the good form of rule by one is monarchy, in which the ruler frequently takes action, or is perceived as taking action, for the sake of all. The degenerate form of rule by one is tyranny, in which the ruler acts despotically. The good form of rule by the few is aristocracy; its degenerate form is oligarchy, in which the ruling class acts despotically in its own interests. The good form of rule by the whole is called polity, in which the demos (the whole population) acts in the interests of the whole. The degenerate form is called democracy, in which the mob rules in favor of itself, which usually means stripping the rich of their wealth and the better of their honors. The polis is an imitation of the family and village, and so, because they are monarchic, it too was originally monarchic. However, it soon became susceptible to all forms of rule. Degenerate forms of rule are unstable because they create opponents of the state. States are defined by their constitutions. Regardless of the form of rule, the chief causes of instability are inequality and injustice. In either case, a segment of the population feels it is not receiving from the state what it deserves. Radical change of constitution, that is, revolution, could proceed from two

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likely sources, from a despotic administration, or from a segment of the population anxious to change the state for its own sake, or both. The classes most likely to seek revolution were the rich and the poor. The rich feel that existing laws hold them back. The poor feel that existing laws hold them down. Only the middle class feels that existing rules work to its advantage and are worth preserving. Hence, the secret of stability, a variety of power, was a large middle class able to collectively resist resentment of the state whether it emanated from the rich or the poor. Bryan Finken See also Ability; Authority; Hobbes, Thomas; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Persuasion; Power To and Power Over; Rationality; Rhetoric

Further Readings Aristotle. (1984). Politics. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The complete works of Aristotle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kraut, R., & Skultety, S. (Eds.). (2005). Aristotle’s politics: Critical essays. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

ARMS RACE The term arms race can be used to describe any competitive situation where the goal of each competitor is to stay ahead of the others. The phrase came into common parlance in descriptions of the causes of World War I, where it has been suggested that the major European protagonists— Austria–Hungary, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom—increased their armed forces to match what they saw their rivals doing. It has been argued that the massive increase in those forces and the tensions between the states over trade and empire inevitably led to war. In more recent times, during the cold war, a nuclear arms race developed between the two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—as each eyed the other’s nuclear weapons, and both increased their first-strike capabilities. Similar arms races with both conventional and

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nuclear weapons can be seen in different parts of the world: between India and Pakistan, between Israel and Arab nations in the Middle East, between North and South Korea, and at various times between neighboring African and South American countries. Lewis F. Richardson mathematically modeled arms races. He suggested three motives led nations in peacetime to increase or decrease their armaments. First, revenge or hostility to another nation; second, fear; and third, working in the opposite direction to reduce weapons to economize. Tension and past hostility obviously increase the probability of an arms race. Richardson’s work has been studied extensively by mathematicians, economists, and others and applied to arms races between nations and to firms in competitive markets. The term arms race is now also extensively used in evolutionary contexts to describe the dynamic evolution of aspects of plants and animals. For any two species that compete in a given environment, any improvement in one species will lead it to have an evolutionary advantage over its rival. Thus, if the rival species is not to decline to extinction, it must also improve in some respect. Thus, two different grass-grazing animals must each increase their ability to drive off the other from scarce grassland. The prey must match an increase in the speed or agility of a predator. Over time, a species might lose some of the features that made it more competitive: it might become less agile, but expend its resources on other features, perhaps stronger bones or warmer coats, that advantage it in other ways. The evolution of reproduction is an important consequence of arms races and enables species to evolve more swiftly. In evolutionary biology, this has been termed the red queen hypothesis, after the Red Queen’s dictum (in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass) that one must keep running to stay in the same place. In evolutionary terms, this translates to finding that the probability of any species surviving over geological time remains constant (outside of major environmental changes) despite its constant improvement in its members’ ability to compete. Coevolutionary processes are not arms races, but can improve “cooperating species” against other species. The evolutionary finding can then be applied back to markets where firms must keep improving products to give themselves the same chance of

surviving, and countries must keep improving their weapons to keep the same probability of winning future battles. As with coevolutionary processes, cooperation between firms can enable them to keep their market positions without improving, whereas countries might tie their futures together through trade, thus reducing the probability of future conflict and, consequently, of arms races. Thus, we can see arms races have both advantages and disadvantages. Keith Dowding See also Conventional Deterrence; Deterrence Theory; Deterrent Threats; Spiral Model

Further Readings Richardson, L. F. (1960). Arms and insecurity: A mathematical study of the origins and causes of war. Pittsburgh, PA: Boxwood Press. Ridley, M. (1996). The red queen: Sex and the evolution of human nature. New York: Penguin.

AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY The term authoritarian personality was first coined during the early 1940s as a means of describing such individuals as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini—that is, a specific set of behavioral characteristics was mapped out for people with political beliefs that were both extremist and antidemocratic. Abraham Maslow, the famed humanistic psychologist, first used the term, but Erich Fromm, the German psychoanalyst, wrote about the “authoritarian character.” However, the seminal The Authoritarian Personality, by Theodor W. Adorno and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, put the term into the lexicon of everyday use. In 1950, the Nazi Holocaust had only been public knowledge for 5 years, and many in academia and government wanted to understand how such a tragedy could have occurred. Many felt that if one could quantify the psychological basis for antiSemitism, it might be possible to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. Freudian psychoanalysis was, during that era, the primary

Authoritarian Personality

tool used in explaining the dynamics of the human personality. Some of the key qualities of the authoritarian personality included the following: 1. Conventionalism—a personality construct where one tended to accept and obey all social norms, especially the rules of authority figures. 2. Aggression—the exhibition of aggression toward groups or individuals the state did not like. This is especially true for specific groups that threatened the state’s values and morals. In addition, it is an aggressive attitude toward people or organizations that the state finds particularly noxious. 3. Submission—when one submits to those in authority. 4. Anti-Intraception—when an individual thinks that subjective attitudes are bad, and “public” and “objective” are exalted. 5. Substitution—instead of rational beliefs, superstition and fatalistic determinism are the norm. 6. Power and Toughness—a heavy identification with those in power, as well as an excessive emphasis on citizens acting in a “tough” manner. 7. Destructiveness and Cynicism—one should not feel compassion or empathy toward individuals or groups considered enemies by the state. 8. Projection—the tendency to believe in the existence of evil in the world and to project unconscious emotional impulses outward, especially to individuals demonized by the state, for example, the Jews in Germany, the intellectuals in China, or the Kulaks in the Soviet Union. 9. Excessive Conformity—the belief that one should comport oneself in a manner that never diverges from the socially accepted norm. 10. Insecurity—the fear that if one ever shows any “weakness,” then one is compromised; thus, one must remain strong at all times. 11. Sex—exaggerated concerns regarding “appropriate” sexuality.

According to Adorno, individuals who admire fascist ideologies tend to think and act in a manner

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highlighting their dysfunctional views. This often results in a close match between thought and behavior, with anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism standing in close connection with this particular personality structure. For instance, Nazis saw Jews as subhuman, and thus, Jews were treated as beneath contempt and, though not to the same extent, so were homosexuals, Slavs, and Gypsies and those regarded as “enemies” of the state. If this theory is accepted, then fascistic behavior is nothing more than the expression of personality structure; that is, if an individual with authoritarian personality lives in a “right-wing” society, then the government usually supports his or her racist behavior. Generally speaking, authoritarian personality has usually referred to right-wing thought and behavior; however, after the fall of communism in 1991, the term was also used to encompass such individuals as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tsetung. Their absolute lack of empathy for others, and their cruelty and spite toward anyone not agreeing with their political views were strikingly similar to the behavior exhibited by Hitler. On average, authoritarian personality is still used primarily for ultraconservatives such as religious fundamentalists, military dictators, theocrats, and so on. Adorno felt that two distinctive behavior patterns coexisted within each authoritarian personality: submissiveness and aggression. At first glance, the two are diametrically opposed, but they actually work together. The authoritarian wants to fit into a chain of command and to be told what to do (submissive to a superior), and similarly, will accept no discussion when giving orders to those in the hierarchy below. At the same time, he or she is often highly aggressive toward others, especially those considered lesser in some way (not as intelligent, not as strong, not as cultured). For instance, individuals from a different race or ethnicity and individuals professing a different religious faith (or atheism) are often considered subhuman. Authoritarians also enjoy being bossed (think of Heinrich Himmler’s devotion to Hitler) as much as they enjoy telling others what to do (Himmler with his adjutant Reinhard Heydrich). One primary factor thought to be needed for the formation of the authoritarian personality was a pattern of strict and rigid parenting, in which obedience is instilled through physical punishment and harsh verbal discipline (as found in both Hitler’s

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Authoritarian Personality

and Stalin’s lives). In this scenario, almost no parental praise or affection is shown, independence is discouraged (the child should seek the parent’s permission for most things), and the child’s behavior is expected to meet a set standard (if it does not, punishment may result). Significantly, such parents instill in their children obedience to their parents but also a sense of loyalty to a social hierarchy, entailing obedience to all persons of higher status (once again, Hitler with Paul von Hindenburg, and Stalin with Lenin). Once adulthood is reached, authoritarian individuals tend to exhibit their accumulated hostility and anger by forming negative stereotypes and discriminating against or overtly persecuting any group or individual thought to be beneath them; for instance, showing prejudice against those from a lower socioeconomic status, education, or family background. The use of projection (placing one’s own perceived or actual weaknesses on a group or individual that is less likely to fight back) is also considered a primary trait in the authoritarian personality. Other traits include depending on authority and rigid rules, with little to no deviation from social values and admiring individuals in power. Robert Altemeyer developed the Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, an assessment instrument based on Adorno’s conception of authoritarian personality. Altemeyer proposed that just 3 facets of the authoritarian personality (not 10 as originally conceptualized by Adorno) were significant (in a statistical sense): conventionalism, authoritarian aggression, and authoritarian submission. Conventionalism is defined as one accepting and obeying social conventions and laws espoused by those in power, whereas authoritarian aggression is aggression aimed at anyone or anything disliked by the authorities. In essence, the RWA scale gauges the following: 1. Faulty reasoning—RWAs are more likely to c c c c

Make many incorrect inferences from evidence. Hold contradictory ideas leading them to “speak out of both sides of their mouths.” Uncritically accept that many problems are “our most serious problem.” Uncritically accept insufficient evidence to support their beliefs.

c c

Uncritically trust people who tell them what they want to hear. Use many double standards in their thinking and judgments.

2. Hostility toward out-groups—RWAs are more likely to c c c c c c c

Weaken constitutional guarantees of liberty such as the Bill of Rights. Show harsh punishment toward “common” criminals in a role-playing situation. Admit they obtain personal pleasure from punishing such people. Be prejudiced against racial, ethnic, nationalistic, and linguistic minorities. Be hostile toward homosexuals. Volunteer to help the government persecute almost anyone. Be mean-spirited toward those who have made mistakes and suffered.

3. Profound character attributes—RWAs are more likely to c c c c c c c

Be dogmatic. Be zealots. Be hypocrites. Be absolutists. Be bullies when they have power over others. Help cause and inflame intergroup conflict. Seek dominance over others by exhibiting competitive destructiveness in situations requiring cooperation.

4. Blindness to their own failings and to the failings of authority figures whom they respect—RWAs are more likely to c c c c

Believe that they are right in almost everything. Never learn anything helpful from past failings. Exhibit a self-righteous attitude. Use religion to take away any feelings of pity toward others, that is, doing what God wants.

The etiology of authoritarian personality begins in childhood. Sigmund Freud felt that one’s personality values came primarily from the father (it should be remembered that in psychoanalysis, most workings of the mind are unconscious), and that these social norms and mores were internalized

Authoritarian Personality

during the child’s development. As the child attempts to understand his or her ultra-strict father by behaving in a manner pleasing to the parent, the superego is produced. In essence, Freudian theory states that the child realizes that one’s desires and wishes must be submerged and continually held in abeyance; otherwise, the child will face the crushing punishment from a very unforgiving father. In other words, we can never show our true feelings because they are at odds with society. In addition, Freud felt that an individual with unresolved unconscious conflicts would ease his or her personality problems by projecting fears, drives, and aggression onto other people. Two examples illustrate this principle: someone with latent homosexuality projects his or her yearnings onto confirmed homosexuals, stating they are wicked and immoral. A person who feels that he or she may have the “blood” of a hated minority feels that minority members are “dirty,” “racially impure,” or “unfit for life.” In general, ethnic, political, or religious minorities are selected as a screen for these projections because they are members of a class of social undesirables; thus, one need not fear any social sanctions, such as the need to worry about criminal charges if one beats up a member of a minority group. On the other hand, if charges are filed, there is little need to fear a prison sentence. Another psychoanalytic perspective comes from Alfred Adler. Adlerian therapy is concerned primarily with the individual gaining superiority over his or her environment, and in an authoritarian personality, this striving for transcendence over others is a neurosis, usually emerging as an aggressive need to overcome one’s neuroses (“I must be cold and hard to that person for if I am not, people will know how weak I am”). Authoritarians need to keep control and prove their innate ability over others is rooted in a mental world full of enemies, no equality or empathy, and no mutual benefit. Wilhelm Reich, another renowned psychoanalyst, postulated that middle-class fathers may have had to accept abuse from the ruling class, but at home, the fathers were the kings and masters, forcing their families to exhibit the obedience they showed in the workplace. In essence, this social structure yielded generations of individuals who never questioned why they were subservient to an

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entire class of people; that is, it was natural to show submission to one’s “betters.” Within the family, the father held the same position that his boss held over him in the production process, and he reproduced this subservient attitude toward authority in his children, particularly in his sons. From such social conditions, allegiance to the “leader” became standard behavior, that is, showing passivity and servility to authority figures. Hence, it was hypothesized an authoritarian personality arose in a family where the father ruled everyone with an iron hand, and the mother exhibited deference toward her husband. The father was very strict, punishing the child at the slightest transgression of the rules the father had established. In this environment, children learned that they could not fight those in power because they were too strong. Instead, the children quickly realized that it was smarter to express their aggression toward weak individuals, or those who were also victims of their father’s heavy-handedness. Possible victims were usually individuals or groups that the father hated; thus, aggression against them was both tolerated and sanctioned. Scholars quit using psychoanalysis as a means of plumbing the depths of authoritarian personality decades ago, primarily because it is impossible to verify Freud’s notions regarding the conscious and unconscious. Authoritarianism may also be described as a government emphasizing social control that is exemplified by strict obedience to the state’s authority, with control being maintained by the harsh use of oppressive measures. Authoritarian regimes are renowned for being hierarchical. In other words, citizens must obey state authority in different areas in their lives, and if they do not, they run the risk of facing trouble. For instance, being able to move to a new city within one’s state or country, without conferring with authorities, is a right taken for granted in the West. However, relocating without permission within some countries is a grave offense—with the offending individual receiving hefty fines or worse. It has been shown that a link exists between authoritarianism and collectivism (in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China under Mao, and other communist states). In both cases, individual rights and goals are subjugated to group goals, expectations, and conformities. Individuals with authoritarian personality are attracted to these types of governments.

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Authority

Instead of focusing on a specific personality type or syndrome, some scholars feel that authoritarianism occurs in specific situations and that the authoritarian personality has two primary facets: the desire for life to remain the same, and a strong dislike for change or difference. Conformity, respect for tradition (though not in all cases), and the use of coercion when necessary to ensure conformity are important values to those with authoritarian personality. Perceiving potential threats triggers this trait, though accounts vary regarding what causes fear in authoritarians. Scholars wonder whether authoritarianism is a type of personality or a trait/disposition, with both having implications. If authoritarianism is a static personality type, its effect should remain constant over time (or if changing, negligibly). Conversely, if authoritarianism is a situational-sensitive phenomenon, a premise more consistent with a disposition, its effect might differ depending on the circumstances. That is, the impact of authoritarianism on individuals tends to wax and wane depending on the specific context or situation, especially levels of threat—not just any threat, but one that unconsciously triggers authoritarianism. Cary Stacy Smith and Li-Ching Hung See also Adorno, Theodor; Power, Cognition, and Behavior; Right-Wing Authoritarianism

Further Readings Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper & Row. Altemeyer, R. (2007). The authoritarian specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

AUTHORITY The concept of authority is closely related to that of power. However, many writers suggest that it is possible for an agent to have power without authority or, conversely, authority without power. Thus, power and authority are two entirely different concepts. Authority, unlike power, is usually thought to have greater normative force. That is, if someone

is in authority, this gives that person some legal or normative right to issue commands and be obeyed. Those under the authority of another have a duty to obey the authoritative commands of the person in authority. Of course, those with legal authority might overstep their rights in issuing commands or issue commands that are immoral. Furthermore, if a legal system is itself immoral, then we might not consider the legal authorities to be legitimate in issuing commands. However, neither of these points detracts from the point that the idea of authority itself gives normative force, and the concept is one imbued with rights and duties. The central question concerning the concept of authority is why people should subordinate themselves to it. The question itself presupposes some liberal notion that people are free and relinquishing that freedom requires justification, but this does not make the central question any less important. A distinction often made in the literature is between a person in a position of authority and a person who is an authority. Someone who is an authority is a person considered knowledgeable or expert in some area. We consult people who are authorities in this sense to gain advice and information. Thus, one academic might consult another on a subject about which the latter is deemed particularly knowledgeable. We turn to doctors for advice regarding medical conditions or to lawyers for legal advice. These people can be considered authorities in their particular areas. And they too can recognize other actors as more authoritative than they: so doctors and lawyers refer patients and clients to specialist practitioners. We take the advice of those who are authorities in this sense because we believe they know better than we do in the areas in which we consult them. However, we are not obliged legally or morally to follow it through, though in most cases we choose to do so because we believe it in our best interests to do so. We might recognize that advice to be sage—good doctors and lawyers will explain why we should follow their advice— but even when we do not understand the reasoning behind it, we might choose to follow the advice of an expert. When we act in this way, we are said to act for “content-independent” reasons. That is, although we feel justified in carrying out those actions because we trust the expert has good reasons for directing us thus, we do not understand what those good reasons are. Our own reason with

Authority

regard to the justification of the action itself is “contentless”: “because the expert said so.” We shall see that the concept of content-independent reasons is important for understanding the moral force of authority. Max Weber’s views on authority have been influential in the social sciences. Weber made a distinction between three different types of authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational– legal. Traditional authority is bestowed on an agent because of some convention or long and hallowed tradition that this person is the authority. Kingships traditionally follow the male line, and in many communities, figures such as witch doctors or religious leaders derive their authority hereditarily. Conventions and ways of behaving or documents handed down through the generations might be seen as authoritative simply by tradition. Charismatic authority occurs where the exceptional abilities of a person cause members of a community to obey or follow that person as their leader. Those abilities are not simply some superior physical size, which means that others follow by force or simple fear of the consequences, but rather they perceive it right that the charismatic person leads. The right to lead, or some legitimacy bestowed on an agent, really distinguishes authority either as some subset of power or as a separate component. This is seen more clearly in Weber’s final category, which he defines as characteristic of modern societies. The rational–legal authority of an agent gives that person a right to command and expect compliance because of the office or role the person fills in society. People might be chosen for those roles because of their personal characteristics, but the role or office they hold, rather than those characteristics, defines their authority. Rational–legal authority simply follows the rights bestowed on the holder to make authoritative judgments in given cases. We could see this authority as being bestowed merely because it is efficient for a modern society to have people fulfilling certain roles. However, Weber’s legal–rational category also needs to be placed in the context of his arguments that bureaucrats need to be chosen on merit and to be educated and trained in the role. In that sense, we can see legal–rational authority as being “an” as well as “in” authority. The important element, however, is that the holders are constrained

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by the rules and principles of their office. Perfect rational–legal authority would leave no room for discretion. In practice, of course, discretion is required for reasons of efficiency. Understanding the importance of the office or role in rational–legal authority also leads us to distinguish different concepts of authority. Someone might have the rights of some role, but not be effective in that role. Teachers at a school have the authority over their pupils given to their position. However, if the teachers do not command the respect of their pupils, either in a disciplinary sense or as enlightening pedagogues, then the teachers may have no authority in another sense. Lacking the respect of their pupils means pupils do not legitimate the teachers’ commands and do not respect their knowledge. Thus, the teachers will have little influence over the pupils. We can make the distinction between de jure authority—one has the right to command—and de facto authority—one actually commands. The important difference between de facto authority and power is that the former is based on reasons for obeying or following the authority. Power might include de facto authority but is a broader concept that encompasses coercion. The distinction between de jure and de facto authority is similar but not identical to that between being an authority and being in authority. We can see that the content-independence of authority also extends to those in authority. Accepting tradition, one might follow the advice of the oracle or the witch doctor even though one does not understand it (perhaps it is not understandable!). One follows the charismatic leader even if one does not know the leader’s plans. The general expects his or her soldiers to follow orders even when they do not know the general’s battle plans. The football coach expects his or her players to follow his or her instructions even if they do not understand his or her tactics. Followers of Islam do not need to know why they are forbidden pork: it is enough to know that they are. We follow conventions and traditions even though we may have no understanding of why we should follow them. The content-independence of authoritative commands is probably its defining feature though enduring authorities are likely to endure because the commands can be justified. One is not likely to continue to follow the advice of a lawyer or a

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doctor if one sees that others do better following the advice of other doctors or lawyers. We tend to look askance at witch doctors today, but they are unlikely to endure as authorities in their fields if they do not confer some advantage or at least confer no disadvantage over others or over those who never consult them. Conventional forms of behavior are not likely to endure if those communities that follow those conventions or traditions fare less well than communities following different ones. The general who wins battles and the coach who wins matches will command more de facto authority over those below them than will similar generals or coaches who tend to lose. Thus, we define those who are in authority de jure by the rights and duties they derive from their role; we define de facto authority and the authority of the laws and rules governing de jure authority by the content-independence of the rules and the content-independence of the commands given by those in authority. Similarly, we recognize as an authority someone whose views we respect content-independently of our own opinions of those views. But in all cases, the continued respect and legitimacy we place on the authority is liable to be affected by its overall contribution to our interests. We might finally see this in the case of a coordination or collective action problem. We might all recognize that it is best if we all pull in one direction— if we all coordinate our actions toward some specified end rather than following our individual wishes. Imagine cooking a dinner for a large group of people. It might not be advisable for us each to put in the pot our favorite foods and spices; that is the recipe for culinary disaster. However, we find we cannot agree on our precise aim—what dish we should cook—or how to achieve it—which particular recipe we should follow for the dish we do decide on. In such a case, we might all agree that it is best that one person decide what dish should be cooked and allow that person to choose the precise recipe. Even if we all think our own dish is preferable to the one cooked, we can agree that the one cooked is preferable to the dish that would follow from all trying to cook their favorite dishes in the same pot. In choosing one chef, we have given that person authority over our meal for that evening. There need be nothing special about that person— he or she is not charismatic, nor a notably good

cook—but there is a role, that of the chef, that we have bestowed on that person. We can rationally give authority to a specific agent, be that an individual or an organization, and follow their commands because we believe that it is in our best interests to do so. Where we believe that an agent is an authority, we might simply feel that they are better suited to making decisions in the agent is that field of authority than we are. We trust our doctor, or lawyer, or the chef because we feel that in the area of decisions that we have given to them, they will be better judges, overall, than we are. In other situations, we might not consider the agent to be more expert or particularly better placed to make decisions than ourselves, but we realize that there needs to be a decision maker. Coordination and collective action problems arise because groups of people need information on what others are doing and might have different ideas about what should happen, even given common aims. Or they might have some conflicting aims that make collective action problematic. Giving authority to an agent to direct the group facilitates coordination and collective action. Thomas Hobbes justified an authoritarian state on the grounds that in anarchy, where there is no authority, each will fight all others. People, he suggests, are roughly equal, and each must fear the others. Each person could be killed by another, and nobody can expect others to abide by agreements made because they have incentives to cheat if they can. “Covenants, without the Sword,” he writes, “are but words, and are of no strength to secure a man at all.” In other words, without some authority to back up a contract, people might cheat. I pay you today to provide goods tomorrow, but tomorrow you can keep my money and your goods. All I can do is take to the sword to try to force you to keep your agreement. Knowing I might do this, you have an incentive to try to kill me before I take to the sword. But I can work out that you might do that, so I will not want to contract with you in the first place. And so on. Hence, Hobbes characterized life with no authority as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” If all authority is given to the state, the state can ensure that each person will abide by the contracts they make. If any person should unjustly renege on a deal made, the injured party can appeal to the state, and the state with a monopoly of force can ensure compensation.

Autonomy

Knowing that the state has this power, each will abide by the contracts made. Of course, if we give all power to the state, then we cannot be assured that the state will not exploit us. We can see how a community might all agree that some central organs are required to keep all particular contracts as made. However, does the need for a central authority mean that we need one with absolute power? If Leviathan—Hobbes’s name for the central authority—is given absolute power, then why would it retain its role as arbiter of disputes? It might use that absolute power to exploit the citizens. In other words, the final authority of the state does not imply absolute power for the state. Two elements are normally thought to emerge from the lack of Hobbesian justification for absolute authority of the state. The first is the need for checks and balances. Rather than allow one agent to have absolute power, several agents are given powers in separate domains, allowing each agent to be able to check the power of the others. The powers are constrained by constitutional requirements that give each legitimate authority within its domain. Each is given certain powers by law and the powers they are given are justified by the need for solutions to collective action problems. The second is that before we can justify sets of state powers, we need reasons for accepting authority within those domains. Thus, we do not simply allow the state to impose laws for our safety or to protect our property but require justifications for specific laws. Similarly, when we give distributional powers to the state, we do not allow it to have complete authoritative allocation over property rights but, rather, demand justification for the specific rules that are adopted. Keith Dowding See also Consent; Hobbes, Thomas; Interests; Justice; Legitimation; Weber, Max

Further Readings Green, L. (1984). The authority of the state. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Raz, J. (Ed.). (1973). Authority. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. (1968). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. New York: Bedminster Press.

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AUTONOMY The English word autonomy stems from two Greek words: autos, meaning “self,” and nomos, meaning “law,” or “rule.” To be autonomous, then, is to be self-ruled. This term was unproblematic in its early usage, when it was applied to self-governing, autonomous city-states. In contemporary philosophy, however, the term autonomy is usually applied to persons, with a person being held to be autonomous if the person rules himself or herself. This use of the term is an important one, for the concept of autonomy so understood is central to many debates within both applied and theoretical ethics and political philosophy. However, this extension of the term to persons has led to some confusion concerning how the term is to be used, which arises because the term autonomy plays a major role in two different philosophical traditions: the Kantian tradition and the personal autonomy tradition. There are also several different accounts of what it is for a person to be autonomous within the personal autonomy tradition alone: the hierarchical account of autonomy, the attitudinal-historicist account of autonomy, the coherentist account of autonomy, and substantive accounts of autonomy.

The Importance of Autonomy Since the 1970s, the concept of autonomy has risen to prominence within both contemporary moral philosophy (especially applied ethics) and contemporary political philosophy. The question of whether a person is autonomous with respect to his or her actions has, for example, been taken to be closely related to the question of whether the person is morally responsible for those actions. Similarly, the question of whether a person is autonomous, or, alternatively, has the capacity for autonomy, has been taken to be closely related to the question of whether the person should be afforded participation within a liberal democracy, as well as the question of whether he or she is a full member of the moral community. Autonomy is also held to be of great value in many debates within applied ethics. In bioethics, for example, the value of autonomy is held to ground the importance of securing informed consent from

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Autonomy

patients. It is also often used to justify acceding to a patient’s request to be euthanized, or to be allowed to sell his or her body parts for transplantation to others. Similarly, in business ethics, the value of autonomy is used to ground discussions concerning the morality of attempting to persuade persons to buy products by advertising them, as well as the morality of employing people in sweatshops. The value of autonomy is also central to many other debates within ethics and political philosophy, ranging from those that concern the ethics of allowing plea bargaining within a criminal justice system, to the status of freedom of speech.

Kantian Autonomy The first philosophical tradition in which autonomy plays a major role stems from the ethical work of Immanuel Kant. Kant believed a person is autonomous if he or she is selfdirected, where this self consists of those aspects of the person that are essential to him or her. Thus, people will not be acting autonomously if they are moved to act by their desires, for a person’s desires are only contingent aspects of his or her self, rather than necessary parts of it. A person might, for example, have had desires other than he or she did, and yet would still be the same person. Thus, a person will act autonomously, his or her actions will be directed by the person’s essential self, only when he or she acts rationally. Kant has already denied that people will act autonomously if they act to satisfy their own desires, so a person will not be acting autonomously if he or she acts in accord only with instrumental rationality. Rather, Kant believed people will act autonomously only when they act on those maxims of action that they can consistently will to be universal law, and so act because they recognize that the maxims on which they are acting could be so willed. Thus, for example, people would act autonomously when they told the truth if they did so because they believed that the maxim of their actions “tell the truth” could be consistently willed to be a universal law (i.e., one that everyone could follow without contradiction). A person who acts on maxims that could not be consistently willed to be universal law would

fail to act autonomously and would fail to act morally, also. This is because, Kant believed, actions whose covering maxims could not be consistently willed to be universal law are immoral actions. Consider, for example, the maxim “lie when it is to your advantage.” This maxim could not be consistently willed to be a universal law. Were everyone to lie when it was to their advantage (i.e., were the maxim to be a universal law), no one would trust the word of another person because it would be known that everyone lies when it is to his or her advantage. As such, then, lying would become inefficacious, for no one would believe any claim that could be a lie uttered to secure the advantage of the person uttering it. Thus, autonomous action and moral action are linked.

Personal Autonomy: The Early Hierarchical Account Partly as a reaction to the Kantian emphasis on autonomous action as rational, moral, action, an alternative philosophical tradition arose in the 1970s that focused on a person’s desires when assessing whether he or she was autonomous with respect to the actions that the person performed when he or she was motivated to act by them. The two primary proponents of this alternative understanding of autonomy as personal, rather than moral, autonomy were Harry Frankfurt and Gerald Dworkin, who independently developed hierarchical analyses of personal autonomy. Frankfurt believes a person is autonomous with respect to an effective first-order desire (i.e., that desire that actually moves the person to act, or to refrain from acting) if the person both wants to have it and wants it to move him or her to act. If both of these conditions are met, then the person in question will “volitionally endorse” that firstorder desire that moves the person to act, and thus will be autonomous with respect to it. Dworkin believes a person will be autonomous with respect to his or her actions if the person is moved to perform them by desires that are authentically the person’s, and with respect to which he or she enjoys both procedural and substantive independence. A person’s desires are authentically the person’s if they are desires

Autonomy

by which the person endorses being moved—in this way, Dworkin’s account of autonomy is similar to Frankfurt’s. A person enjoys procedural independence with respect to his or her desires if the person has not come to have them as a result of deception, manipulation, brainwashing, or other procedures that would undermine the person’s self-direction were he or she to be moved to act by them. A person enjoys substantive independence with respect to his or her desires if the person has them as a result of failing to renounce his or her independence of thought and action with respect to them.

Objections to the Early Hierarchical Account of Autonomy The initial hierarchical account of autonomy was subject to three serious objections. Focusing on Frankfurt’s account of what it is for a person to be autonomous with respect to the person’s effective first-order desires, the critics of this account charged that it was subject to the problem of manipulation. Thus, all that is required for a person to be autonomous with respect to a first-order desire of his or hers is that it meets certain structural conditions; that he or she wants to have it and to be moved by it. But, argue Frankfurt’s critics, a person who is clearly non-autonomous with respect to an effective first-order desire could readily satisfy these conditions. For example, people who have implanted into them an effective first-order desire, and, at the same time, have implanted into them a desire for that first-order desire and a desire that it move them to act (i.e., a volitional endorsement of the desire in question) would, on Frankfurt’s account, be autonomous with respect to the first-order desire that was implanted into them. But this is implausible. The second objection to which Frankfurt’s early hierarchical account was subject was the regress problem. The proponents of this problem begin by asking what makes people autonomous with respect to their secondorder volitional endorsements of their effective first-order desires? If the answer is that these desires are themselves endorsed by a yet higher ranked desire, then a regress ensues, for why are the people in question autonomous with respect

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to that higher-order desire? If, however, the answer is that the people in question are autonomous with respect to these higher-order endorsing desires for some other reason, then Frankfurt’s account of autonomy is incomplete until an account of what this “other way” is, is provided. Finally, Frankfurt’s hierarchical account of autonomy is subject to the problem of authority. This problem is simple: why is it that a person’s higher-order desires have authority over his or her lower-order desires in the way that Frankfurt envisages? After all, they too are simply desires. To see the force of this objection, consider the case of a woman who has been brought up in a sexist society, and all her life she has been taught that a woman’s place is in the home. Despite her upbringing, this woman still occasionally desires to leave her domestic prison and pursue a career. Because of her socialization, however, whenever she experiences these desires, she quashes them as being unworthy of her femininity. In this case, it seems that this woman would be more autonomous were she to act on her first-order desires to pursue a career, even though she repudiates, rather than endorses, these desires at the higher conative level.

Alternative Accounts of Autonomy Proceduralist Accounts

These three criticisms are widely taken to be serious objections to Frankfurt’s original hierarchical account of personal autonomy. Given this, several alternative accounts of what conditions must be met for a person to be autonomous with respect to his or her effective first-order desires have been developed. On a historical approach to analyzing autonomy, what matters in assessing whether a person is autonomous with respect to his or her effective first-order desires is not the attitude that the person now takes toward them, but their history. On an attitudinal–historical approach (such as that developed by John Christman), people will be autonomous with respect to their effective first-order desires if they would, under conditions when they were able to reflect on their desires rationally and without external interference, not repudiate their development. Alternatively, on a coherentist model of autonomy (such as that developed by Laura Waddell

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Autonomy

Ekstrom), people will be autonomous with respect to their effective first-order desires if those desires cohere in appropriate ways with their preexisting desires. This last approach to analyzing autonomy has an advantage over those that are based on an agent’s attitudes toward his or her desires, for it avoids all three of the problems that Frankfurt’s early account faced. It avoids the problem of manipulation because the coherence conditions can be specified in such a way that no implanted desires could fulfill them. It avoids the regress problem because people’s autonomy with respect to their effective firstorder desires does not rest on the attitude that they take toward those desires. Finally, it avoids the problem of authority because a person’s preexisting coherent set of desires has authority for him or her relative to any particular desire that would be in question when asking whether he or she was autonomous with respect to it. Substantive Accounts

So far, all of the accounts of personal autonomy that have been outlined have been procedural accounts. That is, they have been accounts of autonomy on which a person is held to be autonomous with respect to his or her effective first-order desires if they meet certain procedural conditions, such as being endorsed by him or her, having the process by which they came about endorsed by the person, or cohering in certain ways with the person’s preexisting desires. On such accounts of autonomy, persons could be held to be autonomous with respect to any desires, irrespective of their content, provided that they met the specified procedural conditions. Such a procedural approach to analyzing autonomy has, however, been challenged by autonomy theorists who believe that persons could never be autonomous with respect to certain desires or, conversely, that persons must possess certain desires or values if they are to be autonomous. Many feminist autonomy theorists, for example, hold that persons cannot be autonomous with respect to desires or values that would lead to their possessors’ debasement. Similarly, many also hold that persons can only be autonomous if they value themselves as autonomous agents—a self-evaluation that

would of necessity preclude any self-debasing desires or values. These substantive, or valueladen, accounts of autonomy vary in the degree to which they specify the values that persons must accept to be autonomous, and, as such, their proponents are faced with a dilemma. The more values that they require autonomous persons to accept, the narrower the range of persons that proponents consider to be autonomous will be—and the narrower this range is, the more implausible their theory looks. This is because such robustly substantive theories of autonomy would start to exclude persons who would normally be thought to be self-directing, autonomous persons, even though they do not endorse the values that the proponents of the more substantive accounts of autonomy require them to. However, the fewer particular values that the proponents of these substantive theories of autonomy require persons to have, the more these appear to be modifications of procedural accounts, rather than alternatives to them. This is because the proponents of many procedural accounts implicitly require persons to adopt some values, such as the value of critical reflection, to meet the procedural conditions to be autonomous with respect to their effective firstorder desires.

Conclusion Although the value of autonomy is held to be of great importance in many debates within contemporary moral and political philosophy, there is a great deal of disagreement about precisely what conditions must be met for a person to be considered autonomous. Although the disagreement between the proponents of Kantian accounts of autonomy and the proponents of various accounts of personal autonomy concerning what the proper scope of this term is, given the significant dissimilarities between these two conceptions of this concept, easy to identify, the disagreements between the proponents of the various accounts of personal autonomy is often less obvious, for they are working within the same tradition as each other. As such, discussions that draw on this concept should begin by clarifying exactly what is meant by it, and then, if there is disagreement about this, it will be more focused and productive than were it to occur

Autonomy of the State

without an explicit recognition that disagreement is at hand. James Stacey Taylor

Frankfurt, H. (1988). The importance of what we care about. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, J. S. (2005). Personal autonomy: New essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

See also Agency; Determinism; Free Will

Further Readings

AUTONOMY

Christman, J. (1989). The inner citadel: Essays on individual autonomy. New York: Oxford University Press.

See Relative Autonomy of the State

OF THE

STATE

43

B BACHRACH, PETER, MORTON

AND

empirically. How can one study something that has not happened? But non decision making was not about processes that had not yet occurred. Rather, Bachrach and Baratz showed that examining the media to discover important issues was a flawed technique, potentially overlooking issues that elites either were not interested in or were attempting to ignore or remove from the agenda. In that sense, the idea is about agenda setting and how to surface important issues that elites and the mass media are not discussing. Bachrach and Baratz’s work was later criticized from the Left for ignoring the processes of interest formation. Writers such as Steven Lukes argued that non decision making was only concerned with actual struggle, albeit a struggle that is submerged. However, important power issues are involved in preference formation and the dominated agents may not realize that what they take to be in their own best interests are, in reality, the interests of the dominant. Bachrach and Baratz argued that, although preference formation was important, emphasis should still be placed on examining empirically the struggles in which agents wanted to engage. Their later work was less influential, and ironically, Bachrach’s later book Power and Empowerment (coauthored with Aryeh Botwinick) argued for participatory democracy through the workplace, in an account of democracy bearing striking similarities to that of Dahl from the latter’s doctoral thesis through to his later writings.

BARATZ,

Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz are neo-Marxists who made important contributions to the community power debate in the 1960s and 1970s. In a series of articles culminating in a short book, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice, they introduced the concept of non decision making. Criticizing the pluralist accounts of power in communities, notably Robert Dahl’s in his Who Governs?, Bachrach and Baratz argued that pluralists only looked at the surface of conflict. Bachrach and Baratz suggest that there is a second face (or dimension) of power that concerns the way in which some issues are organized into politics and other issues are organized out. Thus, they argued, some issues do not come to the surface in democratic politics because elites ensure that these issues stay buried. One example of such a buried issue is race and poverty (in the late 1950s). In Who Governs?, a study of power in New Haven, Connecticut, Dahl and his researchers identified important political issues by examining what was being discussed in the local newspapers. They then explored who was influential in policy making for those issues. Neither race relations nor poverty were discussed in the local media and so were not studied by the New Haven pluralists. However, as Who Governs? was published, race riots tore across U.S. cities, including New Haven. Race was an important issue, but one that was simply not discussed by the media until the riots. Some writers, such as Raymond Wolfinger, have argued that non decision making cannot be studied

Keith Dowding See also Community Power Debate; Dahl, Robert A.; Lukes, Steven; Pluralism; Second Face 45

46

Bakunin, Mikhail

Further Readings Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1970). Power and poverty: Theory and practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.

BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL (1814–1876) Mikhail Bakunin understands power as an exercise of the will. His analysis is largely critical, and he conceptualizes power in relation to authority. In this context, power might be thought of as the will of those claiming a right of command or those who by virtue of their resources (wealth, talents, breeding, etc.) are in a position to dominate others. Where power is institutionalized, as it is in the state, it gives rise to certain habits, breeding paternalism and hubris in the elite and servility and diffidence in the masses. The idea—power corrupts the best—is similar to Lord Acton’s. In 1867 Bakunin argued, Nothing is more dangerous for man’s private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one’s own merits. (Power Corrupts The Best, retrieved from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ anarchist_archives/bakunin/bakuninpower.html)

Bakunin neither celebrates this tendency nor regards it an inevitable feature of government. On the contrary, returning to the idea of will, he argues that elite power is open to challenge and that it is possible to neutralize its effects by abolishing the existing institutional frameworks. For as long as the downtrodden do not seek to use statist frameworks to overcome oppression, power can be exercised without the attendant corruption. This argument forms the crux of Bakunin’s disagreement with Karl Marx, which came to a head in 1871 after protracted arguments in the First International. Although he shares Marx’s view that the function of the state is to safeguard the

interests of the economically dominant class, Bakunin also argues that it is too reductive and fails to consider the structures through which elites—economic, cultural, religious—exert their power. Marx’s solution, to capture political power in the state and use it to further the interests of the working class, would only result in the domination of a new proletarian elite, leaving other forms of oppression unchecked and the principle of command intact. Bakunin’s solution, to encourage workers and peasants to take direct control of the means of production, is designed to make state structures redundant and offer a new way of organizing in which elitism would be overcome. Bakunin sees no contradiction between his critique of elitism and his advocacy of conspiratorial organization. Though critics often accuse him of vanguardism, his position is that dedicated revolutionaries provide an important catalyst for social revolution, encouraging the oppressed to combat through rebellion the servility that centuries of elitism have engendered. In this, he was closer to François-Noël Babeuf than to Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechaev and Pyotr Nikitich Tkachev. Ruth Kinna See also Anarchism, Power in; Elite Theories; Revolutionary Cell Structure

Further Readings Bakunin, M. A. (1867). Power corrupts the best. Retrieved September 26, 2007, from http://dwardmac .pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/bakuninpower .html Bakunin, M. A. (1984). Marxism, freedom and the state (K. J. Kenafick, Ed.). Retrieved from http://www .marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/ mf-state/index.htm Lehning, A. (1974). Bakunin’s conceptions of revolutionary organisations and their role: A study of his “Secret Societies.” In C. Abramsky (Ed.), Essays in honour of E. H. Carr (pp. 57–8). London: Macmillan.

BALANCE

OF

POWER

The balance of power is a central concept in international relations that first came into widespread

Balance of Power

use in the 16th and 17th centuries. Though many different meanings have been associated with this concept, it refers generally to the principle that powerful states in an anarchic international environment will respond to one state’s increase in power by striving to increase their own levels of power. The result of this self-interested action by states is thought to be a general power equilibrium among the most powerful states in the system. Because of the interaction of states’ self-interested strategies, no one state is able to dominate the international system. This concept is thus held to explain why there has never been—nor is there likely to be—an overarching world government. Scholars of international relations have often remarked disparagingly on the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of the term balance of power. Richard Cobden once declared scathingly, “The theory of a balance of power is a mere chimera—a creation of the politician’s brain—a phantasm, without definite form or tangible existence.” In a noteworthy critique, Inis Claude identifies the contradictory manners in which scholars have referred to the concept: descriptively as a situation that inheres among states, prescriptively as a policy that statesmen should follow, and analytically as a system that regulates conduct among states and limits the range of possible international political outcomes. Within each category, there remains considerable variation in the way that the term is used. When referring to the balance of power as a situation, for instance, scholars sometimes use it to describe a situation of equilibrium, sometimes to describe its opposite, a situation of imbalance, and sometimes as a synonym for any distribution of power. Similarly, discussions of the balance of power as a policy sometimes refer to a policy of maintaining an equilibrium with other states and other times to a policy of maintaining a favorable balance of power—that is, a preponderance of power. Because of this confusion about the concept’s meaning, and because of many scholars’ tendency to slip between conflicting meanings of the concept with relatively little awareness, readers must take care to ascertain which meaning of the concept an author is employing at a particular time. Despite these sources of disagreement, scholars of the balance of power share many assumptions. These assumptions are also held in general by realist scholars of international relations, making the

47

balance of power a central realist concept. The state is viewed as the central unit of international politics in a system that is described as anarchical, a term that refers simply to the absence in the international context of an overarching world sovereign—anarchy in this context neither means nor implies chaos. Yet, because there is no international equivalent to Thomas Hobbes’s domestic Leviathan, states— which are assumed to desire, at a very minimum, survival—must jealously guard their own security. They must be ever circumspect, as the inherent uncertainty of the international system means that even states that seem benign today might become threatening tomorrow. In such a situation, states that see an emerging power on the horizon should attempt to counteract this new power. They have two primary means at their disposal as they attempt to balance against a rising potential threat: (1) they may increase their own military strength through such efforts as armament or (2) they may form alliances with other states against the potential threat. The first is known as internal balancing and the second as external balancing.

Assessing the Balance of Power as System Of the various ways of viewing the balance of power discussed, the view of the balance of power as system is the one most relevant to analytical theories of international relations. The claim is that the balance of power imposes a degree of order on the international system that has some positive consequences. Two questions in particular are the subjects of debate in this realm: (1) the automatic or manual nature of the balance of power and (2) the specific outcomes the balance of power is expected to produce.

Is the Balance of Power a Law? One claim made by some scholars of the balance of power draws on an analogy to laissez-faire economics and the “invisible hand” thought to bring about a positive collective outcome, the efficient operation of the market, from the self-interested action of individuals. Just as individual producers and consumers do not intend to produce the market but merely intend to achieve individual profit, individual states do not intend to produce equilibrium. Rather, each individual state aims to achieve

48

Balance of Power

the preponderant power that will ensure its own security. Yet, as each state attempts to achieve this goal, the collective outcome is a rough balance of power, at least among the major states, because no state is able to achieve preponderance when other states simultaneously seek the same goal. Thus, the general security of the system, and the survival of the major state units, is ensured. To some scholars, then, the balance of power expresses a general law of how the international system operates regardless of the intentions of the individual states. No balance of power policy, in this view, is necessary to produce the outcome of equilibrium. In contrast, however, some scholars view the balance of power as semi-automatic or manual rather than fully automatic. In the semi-automatic view, a specific country able and willing to play the role of “holder of the balance” is needed for the balance of power system to operate. This country has sufficient strength that, by switching allegiance from one set of countries to another, it can alter the balance of power within a particular area. This state is usually in a unique position relative to the other states, possessing some distance from the other states but nevertheless being close enough to affect and be affected by these states. This state, unlike the others, also makes a conscious decision to undertake the role of balancer. The paradigmatic example of such a state is 19th-century Britain, the geographic position and military power of which made it an able holder of the balance. Finally, some scholars view the balance of power as being fully manual, able to function only by the careful and deliberate manipulation of skillful statespeople. In these latter two views, in contrast to the view of the balance of power as automatic, the balance of power can sometimes fail to operate effectively. The failure of states to balance appropriately can perhaps be partially explained by the concept of a collective action problem. Although it may be in the interest of a group of states to balance against the power of a rising threat, each individual state might prefer that the other states undertake the burden of doing so. Such behavior is known as buck passing, and the result might be that no state mobilizes against the rising power until it is too late. Such an explanation might explain why a coalition formed against Adolf Hitler only at such a late date. Similarly, states may possess options

other than balancing in their attempt to maintain security. These options, which may be particularly tempting for weak states, include allying with the rising threat, or simply hiding. Awareness of the potential of the collective action problem to thwart effective balancing behavior led to Kenneth Waltz’s claim in his seminal Theory of International Politics that a bipolar distribution of power is more stable than is a multipolar distribution of power. When only two superpowers exist, according to Waltz, there is less uncertainty than in a multipolar world—each state knows who the potential enemy is and is able to respond via internal balancing rather than rely on external balancing, which is easily prone to miscalculation and war. Waltz thus provides a parsimonious account of one variable likely to affect how automatically—and effectively—the balance of power operates.

What Are the Consequences of the Balance of Power System? A second important debate concerns precisely what desirable consequences the balance of power is expected to produce. Some theories view the balance of power system as one that helps bring about peace, but others dispute that this is a primary outcome of the balance of power. The balance of power is thought to contribute to relative—if not absolute—peace among major powers by ensuring that no state possesses sufficient power to conquer all other states. Thus, it is thought, the balance of power constitutes a disincentive to extreme aggression. However, as Claude perceptively notes, equilibrium is unlikely to be as much of a deterrent to aggressive behavior as would be a preponderance of power vested in a countervailing coalition. Abramo Fimo Kenneth Organski and the power transition school similarly cast doubt on the supposed relationship between balance and peace. They argue that, far from causing peace, relative stability or balance between two powers is a quite unstable and bellicose situation. A significant disparity of power between two states, they argue, is likely to result in peace because there is no doubt which state would prevail in a war. The weaker state is thus cognizant of its limitations and defers appropriately to the stronger power. War is most likely once the weaker state begins to approach

Balance of Power

parity with the stronger state because both the weaker and stronger parties then possess incentives to fight, the weaker to improve its power position and the stronger to prevent the emergence of the weaker as an equal contender. Balance of power partisans respond to these critiques in a number of ways. First, they assert that, though preponderance in a specific context might indeed be the best deterrent to aggression, this is not a generalizable rule for system-level international politics because one cannot determine a priori which states should possess a preponderance of power in the service of peace. The balance of power system is thus more appropriate in this regard. Furthermore, balance of power scholars take issue with Organski’s claim that disparity contributes to peace because disparity and the unequal treatment that occurs under it creates the motivation for war in Organski’s theory, even if war can only occur once relative parity is reached. Furthermore, such a war is more likely to be a major, systemic catastrophe, what Robert Gilpin calls a “hegemonic war,” than is a war that occurs between two relatively balanced states to rectify a slight imbalance perceived to exist between the two. Finally, balance of power theorists may assert that although the system does not succeed in completely eradicating war, it does achieve other arguably desirable outcomes. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that the balance of power system maintains the status quo. Yet, one notable feature of the balance of power system has been the occasional sacrifice of smaller powers in order to create a more desirable distribution of power among the major powers. Historically, the partitions of Poland provide an illuminating example of such a dynamic. Thus, it seems that the balance of power does not maintain the status quo in its entirety, though it may succeed most of the time in preserving the independence of the major units of the international system. At a very minimum, though, the balance of power system is thought to prevent any one state from achieving world domination, even if war may occasionally be a necessary means of achieving this end. How one assesses the outcomes produced by the balance of power system may depend partly on what one conceives of as the alternative systems of power management. One major ideological competitor to the balance of power system has been the

49

system of collective security. Collective security systems seek to provide a radical alternative to the self-help system that undergirds the balance of power. States that are members of the collective security community declare that a threat to any member state constitutes a threat to the whole. In theory, such a threat, once it emerges, is met with the united force of the community. Collective security thus aims to achieve a universal and automatic response to international aggression, something akin to the role of law enforcement in the domestic context. However, scholars have noted that many problems plague collective security even in theory, and it has yet to prove itself successful in practice. The failure of the League of Nations as a collective security organization is viewed as evidence of fatal flaws in collective security as a tool of power management, most notably because collective security theorists fail to detail how the collective action problem discussed earlier might be overcome. Thus, though the balance of power may not be ideal as a system of power management, it is often viewed as operating via a more consistent logic than is the collective security alternative.

The Balance of Power and the Empirical Record The historical record of state behavior is relevant to assessing balance of power theory. Realist scholars often cite the “long century” from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the outbreak of World War I as evidence of the relative peace and order that the balance of power provides, as well as of the general propensity of states to balance. However, the idea that balancing accurately describes state behavior in general has been challenged by recent scholarship. Historian Paul Schroeder has argued that states have historically engaged in a wide range of behaviors in response to threats, behaviors not at all limited to balancing. Likewise, some scholars have argued that the balance of power is a rather Eurocentric concept, and that the history of the world outside Europe provides numerous examples of hierarchical systems in which states did not effectively balance against overweening power. China during the Warring States period is a notable example of such a system. Post–cold war developments in international politics have also caused some to question basic

50

Balance of Power

balance of power arguments. Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, realist scholars such as Waltz and John Mearsheimer predicted that a rival to U.S. power would soon emerge because it was contra balance of power theory for such a superpower to remain long unchecked. However, a decade and a half later, a clear rival to the United States still had not emerged. Two amendments of balance of power theory have been used to explain this apparent anomaly. First, Stephen Walt argued that states do not simply balance against material power, but against threat. Thus, states should not balance against a powerful state viewed as having benign intentions. The explanation for the failure of other states to balance against the United States, then, lies in the U.S. ability to convince others that the United States does not pose an actual threat to other states’ security. U.S. democracy or its involvement in the post–World War II liberal international order might explain why the United States is able to convince others of its benign intentions. One should note that balance of threat theory represents a significant departure from the traditional realist skepticism of reliance on estimates of other states’ intentions to ensure one’s own security. Precisely because state intentions can so easily change, a conservative statesperson should balance against power, rather than against estimations of threat. Likewise, evaluating other states’ intentions is an extremely difficult task and one that, as standard histories of both world wars reveal, statespeople often do not do well. The second attempt to explain the purported failure of other states to balance argues that what constitutes balancing has changed in recent decades. States may not be engaging in traditional forms of balancing behavior, but they are, some argue, engaging in “soft balancing.” This refers to political, rather than military, efforts to restrain the actions of states possessing disproportionate power; the refusal of many European states to support the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003, for example, might be viewed as “soft balancing.” Finally, some argue that changes occurred in the 20th century made it more difficult for the balance of power system to operate. Democracy has proliferated in many regions of the world, arguably making it difficult for states to make the rapid adjustments in foreign policy loyalties that the balance of power requires. Likewise, technological

changes in warfare, particularly nuclear developments, may have changed the meaning of the distribution of power, making it more difficult to estimate, and may have likewise increased the costs of using war as a means of correcting power asymmetries.

Alternative Views of the Balance of Power Though the balance of power is a traditionally realist concept, liberal and constructivist interpretations of the balance of power do exist. Hedley Bull and other scholars of the English School of international relations emphasize the way in which the balance of power, rooted in understandings about the possibility for mutual advantage among states, provides order and predictability to the international system. Others have called this the “associational” view of the balance of power, in contrast to the “adversarial” view that is traditionally realist. Departing even further from the realist position, constructivists highlight the contextual and social aspects of the ideas of balance and power. Richard Little, for instance, has argued that the prevalence of the metaphor of the balance of power in discussions of international politics contributed to a shift in mainstream views of power from hierarchical and agent-based to structural and relational. This constructivist critique relates to a broader critique of the balance of power—the difficulty of defining, and thus measuring, power. The typical realist response to such a critique is that although assessing the distribution of power, a necessary enterprise if the balance of power is to function, is by nature an art and not a science, statespeople are accustomed to making such estimations and are usually in broad agreement about which states constitute the most powerful states in the system at any given point in time. Brooke C. Greene See also Collective Action Problem; Power Transition Theory; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Claude, I. (1967). Power and international relations. New York: Random House. Jervis, R. (1997). System effects: Complexity in political and social life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Banks Little, R. (2007). The balance of power in international relations: Metaphors, myths, and models. New York: Cambridge University Press. Morgenthau, H. (1949). Politics among nations: The struggle for power and peace. New York: Knopf. Walt, S. (1987). The origins of alliances. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of international politics. New York: Random House.

BANKS Banks, in their most basic function, act as financial intermediary institutions in an economy. They tend to act as conduits for capital and credit allocation between individuals, corporations, and the state. Banks also function as institutions of financial deepening—that is, they contribute to the monetization of the economy. Generically, banks are incorporated into the financial services industry. Despite the importance of banks in modern economic systems, the relationship between power and banks themselves has not been fully evaluated. A useful departing point from which to analyze the power of banks may be traced to Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). In this influential work, Lenin defined imperialism as “the monopoly stage of capitalism.” Lenin added that such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.

In the Leninist critique of the power of banks, three of the critical ingredients of the last stage of capitalism (i.e., imperialism) include the merging of bank capital with industrial capital and the creation of finance capital, the increasing importance of the export of capital, and the fusion of the capitalist state with banks and industry.

51

Other recent analytical work has also tended to view the role of banks from a negative perspective, largely from the premise that they accelerate the growth of noxious corporate power. In this critical framework, the perception that banks hold growing power is based on the view that the income of many international banks is growing both absolutely and as a proportion of the world’s total gross domestic product (GDP). Viewed in absolute terms, as output from services becomes more central in emerging and transition economies, the potential economic power of banks is staggering. For instance, according to The Banker magazine’s annual index of the world’s largest banks, the top 10 banks—in total assets—include those shown in Table 1. By virtue of holding assets on behalf of individuals and corporations, the analysis of the power that banks may exert begins with an assessment of their aggregate assets, whereby it is imputed that banks with large asset holdings are likely to exert more power than do those with lesser asset holdings. However, empirical analyses of the relationship between a bank’s size and political power suggest that there is no apparent correlation between bank concentration and political power. The potential economic power exerted by banks Table 1

World’s top 10 banks by total assets, 2006 ($ million)

Bank

Total assets, 2006 ($ million)

Barclays Bank

1,591,524

UBS

1,567,564

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group

1,508,541

HSBC Holdings

1,501,970

Citigroup

1,493,987

BNP Paribas

1,484,109

Crédit Agricole Groupe

1,380,617

Royal Bank of Scotland

1,337,512

Bank of America Corporation

1,291,795

Mizuho Financial Group

1,226,627

Source: The Banker (July 2006).

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Banks

could be considerable, if one equates revenues with GDP. For instance, in 2006, world GDP was $60.7 trillion, of which assets of the 10 largest banks, listed in Table 1, equaled about 14.3 trillion, about 23.5% of world GDP. Although the aggregate economic strength of the world’s largest banks is considerable, it would be simplistic to argue that aggregate assets themselves equal political power. First, total assets (or any other aggregate measure, such as sales or revenues) would not be comparable to GDP because it excludes liabilities. If one uses other widely used industry measures of bank strength, such as market capitalization or Tier 1 capital, the potential economic power is far more modest. Also, although some banks enhance their market share through merger, it would be erroneous to assume that banks act in unison for a defined political goal. Although many banks may prefer to operate in a deregulated environment, at times they prefer regulatory barriers to entry for their competitors. This suggests that the relationship between banks and political power is complex. In this sense, one also ought to consider that most banks worldwide are regulated, sometimes excessively so. Even in comparatively deregulated business environments, such as most advanced capitalist economies, banks are subject to regulatory controls by a central bank and by other related government regulators (such as the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom, the China Banking Regulatory Commission in the People’s Republic of China, etc.). A contemporary analysis of the power exercised by banks would have to differentiate between the actual functions that banks perform in an economy and the likely magnitude of their effects. Perhaps a useful way to differentiate these functions and effects is by looking at banks through a threedimensional typology. Banks can be classified according to the following: 1. Business type classification 2. Ownership structure

Most banks perform specific functions. Typically, as a result of performing these functions, banks are classified as being retail or commercial banks (i.e., institutions that hold consumer deposits and transact with these deposits in the form of loans) or investment banks (institutions that help corporations raise capital, in the form of both debt and equity). The first type of bank may exercise power over individual depositors and small businesses, whereas the latter may have larger macroeconomic effects on financial markets. In addition, many transition economies also have development banks, which act as instruments of the state for various developmental and planning purposes. In this latter form, a potential linkage between banks and politically well-connected enterprises, whereby capital is diverted to favored enterprises by the state, could be assessed. Over the centuries, the complexity of bank structures has grown. To determine the capacity of banks to exercise power, it is worthwhile to determine their ownership structure—specifically, whether a bank is wholly or majority owned by the private sector or by government entities. The power potentially exercised by banks will vary considerably based on ownership structure. Private sector banks are accountable solely to their shareholders, whereas state-owned banks are accountable to the state. In this sense, the power exercised by private sector banks will be to the benefit of their shareholders, whereas state-owned banks are instruments of state power. Finally, it is important to determine a bank’s degree of transnationality. Banks may conduct their operations exclusively within their country’s territorial boundaries. Alternatively, banks may have a transnational or international character, often determined by the proportion of banking assets held abroad as a proportion of the bank’s total assets or by the proportion of the banking staff working abroad as a percentage of the bank’s total employment. In this context, international banks may have a widespread presence worldwide, but their presence in any given individual country may be small compared with domestic competitors.

3. Degree of transnationality

Lawrence Sáez The power potentially exercised by banks can be determined by their business type classification.

See also Business and Power; Globalization; Neoliberalism

Banzhaf Value

Further Readings Anderson, S., & Cavanagh, J. (2000). Top 200: The rise of corporate global power. Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies. Retrieved November 6, 2006, from http://www.ips-dc.org/downloads/Top_200.pdf Glassman, C. (1981). The impact of banks’ statewide economic power on their political power: An empirical analysis. Atlantic Economic Journal, 9(2 July), 53–56.

BANZHAF See Banzhaf Voting Power Measure

BANZHAF VALUE The Banzhaf value is one of the most widely known solution concepts of cooperative game theory. It presents a reasonable expectation of the share-out of the global winnings among players and a fair division in normative contexts. It was initially introduced by Lionel Sharples Penrose in 1946 as a power index for voting games and later rediscovered by John Banzhaf in 1965 and James S. Coleman in 1971. Since then, the Banzhaf value has been extended to arbitrary (nonsimple) cooperative games (thus being converted from a power index to game value) by Guillermo Owen, Pradeep Dubey, Lloyd Stowell Shapley, and others. A definition of this value, in absolute and normalized versions, is given here, followed by an illustrative example. Let N5f1; 2; . . . ; ng be a set of players. A cooperative game v on N is expressed in characteristic function form if a function v (the characteristic function) is given that assigns a value v(S) to every coalition S  N such that vðØÞ50 . For each coalition S of N and for each player i belonging to S the “marginal contribution” of such a player to S is the difference between the winning of S and the winning of S without player i—that is, v(S)  v(S{i}). 0 The absolute Banzhaf value ðb ðvÞÞ assigns to each player i the average of the marginal contributions to all coalitions to which the player belongs: 1

0

bi ðvÞ5

2

n21

+ ðvðSÞ 2 vðS/figÞÞ: SN ði2SÞ

53

In this definition, all coalitions are considered equally probable and each player is equally likely to enter any coalition. The absolute Banzhaf value does not satisfy the efficiency property—that is, the sum of the values assigned to all players 0

+ bi ðvÞ is not generally equal to the total worth of i2N

the grand coalition vðNÞ . The normalized Banzhaf value ðbðvÞÞ assigns to each player i a quota of the total win v(N) proportional to the sum of all h players’ marginal contributions to all coalitions: bi ðvÞ5K + ½vðSÞ 2 vðS/ figÞ; SN

where K is the quotient between v(N) and the total of marginal contributions of all players; h is the index of players; the first summation in the denominator is over all players h in N K5

vðNÞ : + + ½vðSÞ 2 vðS/ f hgÞ h2N SN

The restriction of the (absolute or normalized) Banzhaf value to simple games is known as the (absolute or normalized) Penrose, Banzhaf, or Penrose–Banzhaf–Coleman measure of voting power.

An Example Consider the three-person game v({1})  v({2})  v({3})  0, v({1, 2})  v({2, 3})  1, v({1, 3})  2, v({1, 2, 3})  3. Let us compute the absolute Banzhaf value of player 1. There are four coalitions containing player 1: {1}, {1, 2}, {1, 3} and {1, 2, 3}. The marginal contributions of player 1 to these coalitions are v({1}) – v(Ø)  0, v({1, 2}) – v(2)  1, v({1, 3}) – v({3})  2, v({1, 2, 3}) – v({2,3})  2. 0111212 5 5 . 4 4 Let us compute the absolute Banzhaf value of player 2. There are four coalitions containing player 2: {2}, {1, 2}, {2, 3} and {1, 2, 3}. The marginal contributions of player 2 to these coalitions are 0, 1, 1, 1. 0111111 3 Thus b02 ðvÞ5 5 . Then for player 3: 4 4 0 Thus b1 ðvÞ5

b03 ðvÞ5

0121112 5 5 . 4 4

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Banzhaf Voting Power Measure

To calculate the normalized Banzhaf values, we divide the absolute Banzhaf values by the coef3 3 5 . This gives b1 ðvÞ515/13, ficient K5 51315 13 b2 ðvÞ59/13, b3 ðvÞ515/13 . Note that the sum of these values gives exactly vðf1; 2; 3gÞ53 . Gianfranco Gambarelli See also Coleman Index; Shapley Value; Value of a Game

Further Readings Banzhaf, J. F. (1965). Weighted voting doesn’t work: A mathematical analysis. Rutgers Law Review, 19, 317–343. Coleman, J. S. (1971). Control of collectivities and the power of collectivity act. In B. Lieberman (Ed.), Social choice (pp. 269–300). New York: Gordon and Breach. Reprinted in J. S. Coleman (1986). Individual interest and collective action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dubey, P., & Shapley, L. S. (1979). Mathematical properties of the Banzhaf power index. Mathematics of Operations Research, 4, 99–131. Penrose, L. S. (1946). The elementary statistics of majority voting. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 109, 53–57. Van den Brink, R., & van der Laan, G. (1998). Axiomatizations of the normalized Banzhaf value and the Shapley value. Social Choice and Welfare, 15, 567–582.

BANZHAF VOTING POWER MEASURE 0

The Banzhaf voting power measure (b ) is one of the best known and most widely applied measures of a priori voting power. Although introduced in 1946 by Lionel Sharples Penrose, it was unknowingly and more famously reinvented by John Banzhaf in 1965. Moreover, James S. Coleman reinvented it once again in 1971. Thus, it is known variously as the Banzhaf, Penrose, Penrose–Banzhaf, or Banzhaf–Coleman–Penrose measure (or index). It is also known as the absolute Banzhaf measure to distinguish it from the normalized Banzhaf index (b) introduced by subsequent authors.

The definitions of the absolute and normalized versions of the Banzhaf measure will be presented, links with the previously mentioned indices will be illustrated, and some axiomatizations and algorithms will be noted. An example will be presented in conclusion. The essential element in the construction of both the absolute and the normalized Banzhaf measures is the concept of “swing.” Let N5f1; 2; . . . ; ng be the set of members of a collectivity. A swing for member i of N is a pair of coalitions ðS; S/figÞ such that S is a winning coalition and S/fig is not winning. The number of swings for each member i is called his Banzhaf score and is denoted by ci. For each voter i, the absolute Ban0 zhaf measure (b ) is the quotient between his Banzhaf score and the number of pairs of complementary coalitions (or bipartitions), that is, ci 0 n21 2 . Thus bi 5 n21 . 2 In 1979, Pradeep Dubey and Lloyd Stowell Shapley developed an axiomatization of the Banzhaf index using four axioms. Guillermo Owen and others have proposed successive axiomatizations. As noted at the outset, the absolute Banzhaf 0 measure b is essentially identical to the measure r previously proposed by Penrose. (Specifically, 0 b 52r .) Furthermore, the measures of the power to  prevent action g and the power to initiate action g subsequently introduced by J. S. Coleman are both 0 0 rescalings of b (and r). In particular, b and both Coleman measures are equal if every coalition or its complement is winning (i.e., there are no blocking coalitions), otherwise b is the harmonic mean  of g and g . The normalized Banzhaf index b is the rescaling 0 of b such that the power of all voters sums to 1. That is, for each voter i, this index is the ratio between his Banzhaf score and the sum of Banzhaf scores across all voters. Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover have  classified b0 and b , as well as g and g , in the group of the I-power indices (power as influence). A key problem with the Banzhaf index regards 0 monotonicity. Both b and b are locally monotonic— that is, if a member has greater weight than another, the member’s index is not less. But only b0 is globally monotonic, that is, if the weight of the i-th member increases and the weights of all other members decrease or remain unchanged, then b0 of

Bargaining

the member i does not decrease, but this is not generally true for b . Numerous algorithms have been introduced to calculate Banzhaf values given a large number of voters. In 1962, Irwin Mann and L. S. Shapley proposed a method of calculating the Shapley–Shubik index that uses generating functions. This method was extended to the Banzhaf index by Steven J. Brams and Paul J. Affuso in 1976 and was subsequently implemented by Jesús Mario Bilbao, and others. Another algorithm, developed by Gianfranco Gambarelli in 1996, can be applied to weighted majority games and supplies a method for the direct calculation of the measure’s variations in response to variations of weight distribution among the players.

An Example Assume that a parliament is composed of three parties (labeled 1, 2, 3). Let (2, 1, 1) be their respective seats. Suppose that a rule can be approved only if the votes in favor are equal to or greater than 3 (i.e., a simple majority). In this case, the winning coalitions are {1, 2}, {1, 3} and {1, 2, 3}. Party 1 has a swing for each of these three coalitions, because each of them, without it, becomes a losing coalition; parties 2 and 3 have swings only for {1, 2} and {1, 3} respectively. Thus c1 53, c2 51, n21 c3 51 , S cj 55, and 2 54 . The voting powers j2N

measured by the non normalized Banzhaf index are b01 53/4 , b02 5b03 51/4 , whereas the powers measured by the normalized Banzhaf index are b1 53/5 , b2 5b3 51/5 . Cesarino Bertini and Izabella Stach See also Coleman Index; I-Power; Penrose Voting Power Measure; Voting Power

Further Readings Banzhaf, J. F. (1965). Weighted voting doesn’t work: A mathematical analysis. Rutgers Law Review, 19, 317–343. Banzhaf, J. F. (1966). Multi-member electoral districts: Do they violate the “one man, one vote” principle? Yale Law Journal, 75, 1309–1338. Banzhaf, J. F. (1968). One man, 3.312 votes: A mathematical analysis of the Electoral College. Villanova Law Review, 13, 304–332.

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Dubey, P., & Shapley, L. S. (1979). Mathematical properties of the Banzhaf power index. Mathematics of Operation Research, 4, 99–131. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

BARGAINING Bargaining is a process by which a voluntary agreement on the division of a good or the terms of a trade or exchange is reached. The object of the exchange can be a physical object (e.g., a commodity), a right, or a change of behavior. Bargaining is a ubiquitous feature of social interactions. Bargaining takes place, for example, among businesspeople on the price of commodities, among political parties on the formation of a government, among legislators on the contents of a law, among nations on the resolution of a conflict, among trade unions and employer associations on working conditions, or between an individual employer and employee on working hours and salary. The term negotiating is often used synonymously. We can distinguish between bargaining situations along several dimensions. Bargaining can be formal or informal, bilateral or multilateral, repeated or limited to one instance. Furthermore, it can take place in a more or less institutionalized context. Bargaining in a legislature, for example, is governed by an elaborate set of rules concerning the process in which proposals are put forward, amendments (counterproposals) are made, and a decision is reached. This is not the case with bargaining at a bazaar where the interaction is structured only (if at all) by custom. In settings where decisions are made by a formal vote, agreement can be reached by a simple majority, qualified majority, or unanimity. Bargaining on treaties is usually based on the consent of all bargaining partners: thus, the decision rule is unanimity. This gives all parties involved veto power. Bargaining in legislatures, on the other hand, often uses majority rule, with qualified majorities (e.g., two-thirds majority) for particularly important bills (e.g., constitutional amendments). Consequently, some

56

Bargaining

members of the legislative body can be overruled by the majority. Furthermore, some members might enjoy procedural privileges such as agendasetting power. Finally, we can distinguish among bargaining situations based on the nature of the issue(s) at hand. Bargaining can be limited to one issue or involve several. The good may or may not be divisible. In the legislative context, policies can allocate funding ([re-]distributive) or set rules (regulatory). The outcome of a bargaining process can be evaluated for its efficiency and the distribution of benefits. Efficiency refers to the minimization of the costs of the bargaining process (transaction and opportunity costs) and the realization of maximum surplus. The latter includes the avoidance of non-agreement when a trade would have been mutually beneficial (bargaining failure). Distribution refers to the division of the surplus gained from cooperation or coordination (in contrast to unilateral action). The distributive consequences of an agreement are influenced by the bargaining power of the actors involved.

The Negotiator’s Dilemma Bargaining is typically characterized as a mixedmotive situation. Bargaining partners can create value by changing the current situation in a mutually beneficial way, but have divergent interests regarding the exact terms of the agreement. For example, a potential buyer of a commodity might value an object more than its owner does. In other words, the reserve price of the seller (the minimum price at which the seller is willing to sell an object) is lower than the reserve price of the buyer (the maximum price he or she is willing to pay). The difference between the two is the potential joint surplus from a trade. If this value is positive, both have an interest in reaching agreement to realize this joint surplus. However, the buyer would like to keep the price as low as possible, whereas the opposite is true for the seller. In other words, buyer and seller have a common interest in the production of a surplus but diametrically opposed interests with regard to its distribution. The tension between the desire to find an agreement to create value and to maximize the individual share of its distribution is referred to as the negotiator’s dilemma. Tactics aimed at furthering the latter

goal (e.g., misrepresentation of preferences, threats, etc.) might jeopardize the former. This also implies that bargaining tends to be inefficient in the sense that valuable time and resources are spent on a “dance of concessions” (in Raiffa’s phrase) rather than reaching agreement instantaneously. Bargaining success is also threatened if the involved parties cannot credibly commit to keeping their side of the deal. Recourse to third parties (e.g., a judicial system) can ameliorate this problem. In some instances, third parties can also facilitate reaching an agreement by mediating between the bargaining partners.

The Bargaining Space Bargaining can only be successful if a common interest exists. Figure 1 illustrates the basic bargaining setting for two actors, A and B, whose consent is necessary for joint or coordinated action. The horizontal axis denotes the utility B would derive from an agreement and the vertical axis denotes A’s utility. Thus, any given point shows the utility A and B would derive from a particular agreement. A prefers agreements toward the top of the graph whereas B would like to see an agreement as far as possible to the right. The crosshatched area represents all feasible agreements. Some agreements might be highly desirable but are simply out of the reach of the actors. For example, the quantity of a good a firm can possibly produce and thus sell to an interested party is limited because the resources used in the production of the good are finite. Similarly, the price a buyer can pay is limited by the buyer’s budget and credit line. Another example would be logistical difficulties that limit the speed with which armies can be withdrawn from a territory as part of a ceasefire agreement. Note that the utility an actor associates with any given agreement can depend on a number of factors. For example, a buyer’s utility from a purchase depends on the price, quantity, and quality of a good. Similarly, the evaluation by a government of a disarmament treaty could depend among other things on the number and type of arms being reduced, the time frame, and the verification procedure. A widely shared assumption is that bargaining is effectively limited to agreements that make both bargaining

Bargaining

A’s utility

57

B’s reserve level

Zone of possible agreement

Nash bargaining solution Pareto frontier

A’s reserve level

Non-agreement B’s utility

Feasible agreements

Figure 1

A bilateral bargaining situation and the Nash bargaining solution

partners better off relative to the Best Alternative To Non-Agreement (BATNA). This could simply be the continuation of the present situation (status quo). The broken lines represent the utility each actor would receive in the absence of an agreement, for example, from acting unilaterally (reserve level). The zone of possible agreement (or bargaining space) is the subset of feasible agreements that gives all the actors whose consent is necessary a higher utility than they could achieve in the absence of an agreement. This is the crosshatched area in Figure 1. A subset of the zone of possible agreements is the so-called Pareto frontier. This is the set of agreements that is Pareto-optimal. An agreement is Pareto-optimal if any change would make at least one of the involved actors worse off. Movements toward the Pareto frontier create value for both parties (although possibly to different degrees), whereas

a movement along the Pareto frontier would only redistribute value.

Models of Bargaining and Bargaining Power Several game-theoretic models of bargaining have been proposed to capture the strategic aspect of negotiations. The Nash bargaining solution (NBS) is based on cooperative game theory. The NBS derives a unique solution for a bilateral bargaining situation based on a set of axioms. These axioms imply that the actors strive to reach the Pareto frontier and disregard irrelevant alternatives (e.g., additions to the feasible set that are Pareto-inferior). It is also assumed that the utilities completely reflect the evaluation of various options by the actors (e.g., attitude toward risk). The NBS is the maximum of the product of the gains in utility (relative to the

58

Bargaining

security level) for both actors, possibly weighted by the actor’s bargaining power. If both actors have equal bargaining power, they effectively split the difference of the surplus. This equal division of created surplus is represented in Figure 2 with the dotted diagonal starting at the point of no agreement. The 45-degree angle indicates that each move toward the Pareto frontier gives an equal share of the surplus to both parties. The point where this line crosses the Pareto frontier is the NBS. If A has more bargaining power than B, then the line would slope upward, and vice versa. Note that an equal split of the surplus relative to the point of no agreement does not necessarily imply equal utility in absolute terms. John Harsanyi has shown that the NBS is equivalent to the outcome of a bargaining model suggested by F. Zeuthen. In this model, both players make proposals until one of them accepts the proposal of the other. If neither makes a concession (i.e., moves his or her proposal toward the last proposal of the other player), bargaining breaks down, and conflict ensues. According to the Zeuthen–Harsanyi model, the player whose cost of accepting the opponent’s suggestion is lower (rather than insisting on his or her own suggestion) relative to the cost of conflict, makes a concession. Harsanyi offers a psychological interpretation of this bargaining behavior. A seminal bargaining model based on noncooperative game theory is Ariel Rubinstein’s alternating offer model. The bargaining partners alternate in making offers to each other. Actors are assumed to be impatient; the value of later agreements is discounted relative to earlier ones. If impatience is sufficiently small, the solution of this game approaches the NBS. David Baron and John Ferejohn have proposed an influential model of multilateral bargaining in which the probability that an actor is recognized to make a proposal differs. Several determinants of the distribution of the surplus have been derived from these and related game-theoretical models. In general, the share of the surplus one actor receives increases as his or her eagerness for striking a deal decreases. Thus, an actor who is patient can stick to maximal demands whereas an impatient actor is more willing to make concessions to reach agreement early. Similarly, a bargaining partner is stronger if he or she enjoys a valuable inside option. Inside options refer to the benefits an actor receives during the

bargaining while the current situation prevails. The distributive properties of bargaining outcomes are not just affected by the valuation the actors attach to various agreements but also to events outside of the negotiations. For example, the less an actor is concerned about exogenous factors that would end the negotiations (bargaining breakdown), the stronger the actor’s bargaining position is. Also, new outside options might become available. For example, while a buyer and a seller are bargaining, a new customer may make an offer. The position of the bargaining partner is strengthened if the value of the outside option (i.e., the new offer) is higher than the previous best alternative to non-agreement (i.e., no deal). This is illustrated in Figure 2 where the new outside option increases the value of non-agreement (NA) for B. Subsequently, the outcome as determined by the NBS would change. Relative to the original solution B benefits whereas A loses. Similarly, an actor could gain a bargaining advantage by decreasing the reserve level of the other actor (e.g., by foreclosing its outside option). Thomas Schelling has highlighted the use of commitment strategies to influence the distribution of the potential bargaining surplus (“paradox of weakness”). If an actor can eliminate some possible agreements that are unfavorable to him or her as principally “unacceptable” or unfeasible, the actor can restrict the bargaining space in favor of his or her position. In international negotiations, for example, a government might credibly commit itself to certain demands relative to its domestic constituency to tie its hands and gain an advantage at the international stage. This is related to the notion of two-level games in international relations. Typically, bargaining partners do not know each other’s reserve level. This gives an incentive to misrepresent it to gain a bargaining advantage. Player B in Figure 2 might, for example, just pretend that there was an alternative offer from a third party that led to a shift in his or her reserve level. As previously discussed, this would probably increase B’s share of the surplus. So far, we have assumed that no deals are possible unless they represent utility gains relative to the point of no agreement for both bargaining partners. Side payments and issue linkage are two mechanisms to allow bargaining partners to increase their welfare even

Bargaining

A’s utility

59

B’s new reserve level

B’s original reserve level

Original NBS

New NBS

Pareto frontier NA

New NA

A’s reserve level B’s utility

Figure 2

The distributive consequences of outside options

when this is not the case. Consider the scenario in Figure 3 where only two agreements (x, y) are feasible. UCA denotes the change in A’s utility if y is adopted, UCB is the equivalent utility change for B. In this scenario, A would not support y because it would make A worse off than would non-agreement. However, B’s utility gain from adopting y exceeds A’s loss (|UCB||UCA|). Thus, B could get A’s approval by compensating A sufficiently via a side payment. The dotted diagonal represents the welfare boundary. Agreements on this line give the same utility to both bargaining partners jointly as non-agreement. For any agreement to the top and right of the welfare boundary, the joint utility exceeds the joint utility of non-agreement and an agreement could be struck with the help of side payments. Similarly, A and B could agree on both x and y (issue-linkage), which would result in the outcome of z for their utility. The utility gain of B from y would offset B’s utility loss from x. In the same manner, the utility gain of A from x would offset A’s utility

loss from y. Logrolling (or vote trading) has the same effect. It is based on the idea that two bargaining partners might value two issues differently and hence are willing to make concessions on one issue in return for the other party’s concession on the other issue. Bargaining involving several bargaining partners (multilateral negotiations) encompasses the same issues. In contrast to bilateral bargaining, though, the bargaining space tends to be smaller and the transaction costs of bargaining tend to be higher. Furthermore, the formation of a bargaining coalition is thought of as a crucial step in multilateral negotiations, but is not relevant in bilateral bargaining. The literature on bargaining in the field of social psychology points out that humans are not perfectly rational decision makers who form the basis of game-theoretical models. Several cognitive biases have been identified that can influence bargaining behavior. For example, bargaining

60

Bargaining

A’s utility

B’s reserve level

x

z

A’s reserve level

Non-agreement UCA

B’s utility UCB y

Welfare boundary

Figure 3

Side payments and issue linkage

partners are biased by their own position and value self-serving information more highly than they objectively should (egocentrism). Furthermore, humans seem to behave differently toward risk depending on whether they perceive the bargaining object as entailing gains or losses (framing effect). In addition, negotiators tend to be unduly influenced by the early phases of bargaining (anchoring effect) and do not adjust their perception and behavior in a completely rational manner. Finally, negotiators can be too focused on the competitive dimension of bargaining (fixed-pie perception) and subsequently fail to realize mutually beneficial outcomes. Psychologists also argue that the relationship between bargaining partners and the social context influences the bargaining process. Other work addresses the medium of bargaining and cross-cultural differences. Andreas Warntjen See also Bargaining in International Relations

Further Readings Bazerman, N., Curhan, J. D., Moore, D. A., & Valley, K. L. (2000). Negotiation. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 279–314. Brams, S. (2003). Negotiation games. London: Routledge. Hopmann, P. T. (1998). The negotiation process and the resolution of international conflict. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Muthoo, A. (1999). Bargaining theory with applications. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Raiffa, H. (2002). Negotiation analysis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Scharpf, F. (1997). Games real actors play: Actor-centered institutionalism in policy research. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Schelling, T. (1960). The strategy of conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomson, L., & Loewenstein, J. (2003). Mental models of negotiation. In M. A. Hogg & J. Cooper (Eds.), The Sage handbook of social psychology (pp. 494–511). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Young, H. P. (1991). Negotiation analysis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Bargaining in International Relations

BARGAINING RELATIONS

IN INTERNATIONAL

Bargaining—whether over arms control, the terms of a peace settlement, exchange rate coordination, alliances, or trade agreements—is a central feature of international relations. In the past decades, the literature on bargaining in international relations has seen much interesting research and has been at the forefront of formal work in international relations. Because bargaining is an activity in which the strategic interdependence of decision making is central, much of the literature is based on gametheoretic modeling. Bargaining is the negotiation over the terms of an agreement. Although often more than one agreement exists that two or more actors would prefer to no agreement, the actors disagree regarding their ranking of the mutually preferable agreement. Moreover, bargaining involves interdependent actions. In other words, the decisions made by one actor will depend largely on the actual or likely decisions made by another actor. In addition, bargaining often has “rules of the game.” For example, actors can make demands or offers simultaneously, one actor could make a demand or offer and the other accepts or rejects (a so-called take-it-orleave-it game), or the actors can make demands or offers sequentially. This brings us to another feature of bargaining: it is often dynamic. Finally, bargaining typically involves uncertainty about the other actor’s preferences. In sum, the process of bargaining in international relations is complex, and the literature on the topic spans the fields of history, economics, political science, and international relations. As we will see, conventional measures of power (physical strength or financial resources) are an important, but certainly not the only determinant of bargaining power. Issues such as credibility, multiple bargaining levels, enforcement possibilities, asymmetric information, indivisibility, commitment problems, political bias, and the social context all affect the bargaining outcome in important ways.

Bargaining and Credibility Thomas Schelling’s 1960 book, The Strategy of Conflict, remains the classic work on bargaining in international relations. He argues that bargaining power

61

depends largely on the credibility of threats and promises. Greater physical power or more financial resources are by no means the only advantages in bargaining situations. On the contrary, Schelling argues that in some situations, restricting one’s options may be beneficial. Weakness may be strength because it can force others to make concessions. Schelling illustrates this concept through the example of a union bargaining with management. If the union insists on, say, $2 and expects the management to counter with $1.60, persuading the management to pay $2 is not the only option available to the union. Schelling argues that the union should lead the management to believe that it could not accept less than $2 even if it wished to. The union may, for example, argue that it no longer controls its members. By portraying its own weakness and confronting management with the threat of a strike the union itself cannot avert, the threat is made credible. The paradoxical result is that in bargaining, weakness is often strength. We also find this dynamic in international relations. In a seminal 1994 article, James D. Fearon illustrates how audience costs, the cost statespeople suffer among their constituency of backing down after escalating a conflict, can make actions such as troop mobilization and other forms of escalation credible signals. As we shall see later, states can often deliberately restrict their options in order to achieve better bargaining outcomes.

Bargaining at Multiple Levels As the last example demonstrates, bargaining in international relations often occurs at more than one level. At the international level, a statesperson may bargain over an agreement with fellow statespeople, while bargaining with domestic constituents over the ratification of such an agreement. Thus, the statesperson must consider the interests of international actors, while considering pressures from different domestic actors, each pressuring the statesperson to adopt policies favorable to its interests. Robert Putnam labeled this the two-level game. The introduction of the domestic level of bargaining made an important contribution to the literature on bargaining in international relations. It also challenged the state-centered approach of realism and neorealism, which conceive states as unitary rational actors. Conceiving bargaining as a multilevel game enriches the level of strategic interaction,

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Bargaining in International Relations

which Putnam analyzed using win-sets, which are the sets of possible agreements at the international level that would find the necessary approval at the domestic level. In other words, larger win-sets make agreements more likely because they leave more room for agreement. Conversely, if the winsets of two negotiators do not overlap, no agreement will be reached. The less “powerful” a negotiator is, the more bargaining power he or she may have. That is, being under severe domestic constraints, and therefore having a small domestic win-set, can be a bargaining advantage to a statesperson because it limits what he or she can promise at the international level. Similarly, just as domestic constraints can improve statespeople’s international bargaining power, international constraints can enhance the bargaining power of the statespeople at home. Indeed, international negotiations sometimes enable government leaders to do what they privately wish to do, but would otherwise be powerless to do domestically. Finally, negotiators have a strong interest in the domestic support of their bargaining counterpart. If the domestic support of bargaining partners increases, so does the size of their win-set, thereby increasing the likelihood of reaching an agreement, and the relative bargaining leverage of the other state. Negotiators in international relations are therefore to be expected to try to reinforce one another’s standing with their respective constituents.

Bargaining and International Cooperation Bargaining over an agreement is often only a first step. States need to look at the future monitoring and enforcement of any agreement reached. An agreement reached in principle is not worth the paper it is written on if it cannot be enforced in practice. This second stage of bargaining is addressed by cooperation theory. Compliance with agreements, according to cooperation theory, is akin to the prisoner’s dilemma. States may have an incentive to keep their end of the bargain, but only if the other side is likely to do so as well. Cooperation under the security dilemma can be sustained if states interact over a long span of time. States can deter defection from a bargain through conditional retaliation such as tit-for-tat. A key condition for such mechanisms to work is that states should care sufficiently about future payoffs. This is often

described as “the shadow of the future.” If the utility of future cooperation is greater than the utility of immediate defection and subsequent punishment, cooperation can be sustained. In an important 1998 article, Fearon explains how the shadow of the future can affect international bargaining. First, in cases where effective monitoring of an agreement is not possible, statespeople know that no bargaining agreement will be enforceable. Consequently, it is possible to observe nonserious bargaining in which states will only commit to vague agreements for various political purposes, or there will be no bargaining at all. Second, and more interestingly, although better monitoring and a long shadow of the future may make enforcing an international agreement easier, it also gives states an incentive to bargain harder, delaying agreement in hopes of getting a better deal. That is, the more the future is valued, the greater are the incentives for states to bargain hard for favorable terms. It is therefore possible to observe costly, noncooperative standoffs in precisely those situations where cooperation theorists predict cooperation—that is, in situations where the shadow of the future is long and there are potential mutual gains from an agreement.

Bargaining and War A great deal of work on international relations bargaining has dealt with war. This topic is also at the forefront of game-theoretic modeling in international relations. In a seminal 1995 article, Fearon illustrates the central puzzle about war. When a war is costly to its parties, each side would have been better off if they could have achieved the same outcome without suffering the costs. Consequently, war should be considered as a bargaining breakdown. Figure 1 illustrates. States A and B compete over a piece of territory that covers 0 to 1. Initially, state A (B) owns part 0 to x (x to 1). If country A fights, it wins the whole territory (0 to 1) with probability p. However, fighting results in a cost equal to cA (cB) to state A (B). Accordingly, the payoff for fighting for country A (B) is given by 0 to p – cA (p  cB to 1). The central puzzle about war is this ex post inefficiency because any settlement between p – cA and p  cB is preferred by both parties over fighting. Why then does war, as a bargaining breakdown, occur? Fearon suggests

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that there can be only three rationalist explanations for war: asymmetric information, indivisibility, and commitment problems. Asymmetric Information

Asymmetric information occurs when one state knows more about its capabilities than does the other. According to Fearon, asymmetric information can lead to war. Indeed, if both sides knew who was going to win a war, they would not bother fighting it. But to know which side would win the war, there must be symmetric information between potential belligerents. For example, suppose state A makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer, which B can accept or reject by fighting. If the states have complete information, then A will make the largest demand that B will accept (p  cB). B will accept because it can’t do better by fighting. However, if A is unsure about B’s cost of fighting (cB), A no longer knows what to ask without provoking war. There is now a trade-off for state A between obtaining better terms and a higher probability that war will occur. Conversely, in misperceiving the capabilities of its opponent, B may mistakenly opt for war. Most tragically, information asymmetries are difficult to overcome because states have incentives to misrepresent their capabilities to achieve better bargaining outcomes. Thus, although states may want to avoid war, they often choose not to be completely transparent.

finer graded divisions or compromise—then there may not be any feasible outcome that both states prefer to fighting. If the issue allows only a finite number of resolutions, it might be that none falls within the bargaining range (p – cA and p  cB). However, although this is a potential reason why rational states may go to war, Fearon does not find this explanation compelling. The issues over which states bargain typically are multidimensional. Side payments or linkages with other issues typically are possible. Also, states could alternate or randomize among a fixed number of possible solutions to a dispute. Empirically, therefore, all issues can be divided. Commitment Problems

Finally, war may occur if states cannot credibly commit themselves to follow through on a negotiated agreement. That is, mutually preferable bargains may be unattainable because one or more states has an incentive to renege on the terms. The prisoner’s dilemma is the classic example of this problem. Although both actors prefer the cooperative outcome to mutual defection, both have an incentive to renege. Commitment problems are usually illustrated in a dynamic bargaining setting. If state B is expected to decline in military power (p2  p1), and if state A cannot commit itself not to exploit the greater bargaining leverage it will have starting in the second period, a preventive attack may be rational for state B.

Indivisibility

Political Bias

The indivisibility of issues can also lead to war. If states A and B bargain over an issue that is indivisible—some issues maybe do not admit

Recently, Matthew O. Jackson and Massimo Morelli argued that political bias may also lead to war. It is possible that a pivotal decision

0

x

A’s status quo payoff

A’s payoff from fighting Figure 1

The bargaining range

Source: Adapted from Fearon (1995).

p  cA

p

p  cB

1

B’s status quo payoff

B’s payoff from fighting

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maker—whether an executive, a monarch, the median member of an oligarchy, or the median voter—might have relative benefits or costs of war that are different from the state at large. In an authoritarian regime, for example, a leader might keep a disproportionate share of the gains of war. Jackson and Morelli show that, given sufficient bias by one or both countries, war cannot be prevented by any transfer payment. Interestingly, they also show that a country may choose a biased leader because it will lead to a stronger bargaining position.

Social Context and Bargaining Most of the literature on bargaining in international relations takes relations among states as a function of the material capabilities and interests of nations. However, interstate relations are often embedded in socially constructed norms. This social context can play a role in shaping international bargaining outcomes. In an important article, Leonard Schoppa introduces the social context in the field of international bargaining and argues how issues such as identity, trust, and norms influence bargaining. The amount of trust among bargaining parties, for example, can dramatically affect the likelihood of achieving cooperative agreements. In addition, in the context of bargaining, threats that are perceived as “fair” (e.g., in accord with procedural rules stipulated under an international regime) are more likely to be effective in extracting concessions. These examples illustrate how the social context might have an effect on bargaining in international relations, independent of the power and interests of the players.

Conclusion Bargaining in international relations is at the forefront of (formal) research in international relations. Bargaining can take place in different policy dimensions, with two or more players, at more than two levels, with single or repeated interactions, with perfect or asymmetric information, social context, and so on. Great insights have been generated by the literature on bargaining in international relations. These insights have also paved the way for future potential empirical work. Peter van der Windt

See also Bargaining; Cooperation; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Nash Equilibrium; Neorealism; Prisoner’s Dilemma; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Fearon, J. D. (1994). Domestic political audiences and the escalation of international disputes. American Political Science Review, 88(3), 577–592. Fearon, J. D. (1995). Rationalist explanations for war. International Organization, 49(3), 379–414. Fearon, J. D. (1998). Bargaining, enforcement, and international cooperation. International Organization, 52(2), 269–305. Jackson, M. O., & Morelli. M. (2007). Political bias and war. American Economic Review, 97(4), 1353–1373. Putnam, R. D. (1988). Diplomacy and domestic politics: The logic of two-level games. International Organization, 42(3), 427–460. Schelling, T. C. (1960). The strategy of conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

BARRY, BRIAN (1936–2009) Brian Barry is one of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years and in 2001 was made the seventh recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize in political science. In addition to his work on justice, rational choice theory, and multiculturalism, Barry wrote several essays on political power—a number of which have been reprinted in Democracy, Power and Justice: Essays in Political Theory (1989). Barry’s first contribution to the study of power was a methodological one. In the 1970s, he was one of the first political scientists to apply to the study of political power some of the analytical tools used by economists to study markets and exchange. In “Power: An Economic Analysis” (1975), he poses a series of questions about the nature of power and the relationship between having and exercising power. He says that it is his intention to “dissolve the puzzlement that such questions reflect” not through the “orthodox” linguistic approach of grappling with the nuances of meaning but through the construction of a “model designed to give insight into the processes involved.” This model, which makes use of such concepts as ordinal and cardinal utility and equilibrium, is presented for the reader through a series of 15

Barry, Brian

diagrams. Looked at today, the essay appears unexceptional because a number of rational choice theorists apply the methods of economics to the study of power. Barry was, however, one of the first to appreciate both the possibilities and limitations of this economic approach. Barry’s other principal contribution revolves around the distinction between power and luck. People are successful to the extent that they get the outcomes that correspond to their preferences. People are lucky to the extent that they are successful without having to do anything. The difference between people’s success and their luck is their decisiveness (luck  decisiveness  success). When it is expressed in this way, decisiveness appears to be a property of individuals. Yet, Barry is also clear that there may be situations in which a group collectively brings about an outcome though no one person is decisive. If a bloc of voters always agree with each other and together constitute substantially more than a majority, then as long as each of them votes, no one member of the bloc will make any difference to the overall result even though each member of the group will always be successful. What of political power? Power is related to but is not the same as decisiveness. The difference between the two is that although decisiveness is a probability, power is a capacity. An actor’s power is his or her ability to overcome resistance—not the actor’s probability of encountering and overcoming resistance. To see what is at stake here, consider the position of an omnipotent dictator. We would want to say that the dictator is powerful. But imagine a situation in which the dictator happens to live in a society in which everyone else already wants what it is that the dictator also happens to want. In such a situation, the dictator would be very lucky but completely indecisive because his or her luck would be entirely responsible for the dictator’s success. If we were to equate power with decisiveness, we would then be forced to conclude that the dictator is powerless. What is missing here is the relevant counterfactual. The dictator is powerful because, even if every other person in the society had the opposite set of preferences, the dictator could still bring about the outcome he or she wanted. The important lesson to be drawn is that power is an “inherently counterfactual notion.” Is it better to be powerful or lucky? Given any amount of luck, it is always better to be more

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powerful than less because the more powerful you are, the better your chances are of being decisive and so being successful. But unless the possession of power is to be valued as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end, is there any necessary reason why it is better to be powerful than lucky? The answer is that it is better to be powerful than lucky if you are unsure whether your preferences will continue to be the same as those of the people on whom you currently rely. Someone who is successful today because he or she is lucky may well be unlucky and unsuccessful tomorrow. People who are successful today because they are powerful need not depend on their luck holding. In a more recent essay, Barry (2002) argues that capitalists are powerful rather than lucky. The definition of power Barry employs here is similar to that used in the earlier article. Power is “the ability to bring about desired states of the world . . . by acting in such a way as to overcome the resistance of others.” When power is defined in this way, it is plausible to argue that the option of voting for another party gives voters power over a democratically elected government and that the option of buying a product from another firm (or not buying it at all) gives consumers power over firms. This is pretty much standard liberal fare. The interesting argument is that for much the same reasons capitalists are not simply lucky in wanting what it is that governments want but that they also have power over governments. If it makes sense to argue that consumers are powerful even if they do not formally have to write to a firm to say that they are going withdraw their custom unless the firm lowers its price or raises its quality, it also makes sense to argue that capitalists are powerful even if they do not have to threaten to withhold their investments unless offered some policy concessions. Furthermore, if it makes sense to argue that voters are powerful even if no single person’s vote can make any difference to an election result, it also makes sense to say that capitalists are collectively powerful even if no single firm acting alone can change the course of government policy. Andrew Hindmoor See also Banzhof Value; Distributive Justice; Dowding, Keith; Luck; Systematic Luck

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Further Readings Barry, B. (1989). Democracy, power and justice: Essays in political theory. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Barry, B. (2002). Capitalists rule OK? Some puzzles about power. Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 1, 155–184.

BASES

OF

POWER

The ability to get others to do one’s will is known as social power. Social power consists of the available tools one person has to exert influence over another. It is the potential resources (which may or may not be used) that one has at one’s command that can lead to an actual change (or deliberate maintenance) in the beliefs, attitudes, behavior, emotions, and so on in another person. Much of human interaction involves attempts to change or maintain beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors in another, so this topic has long been of interest to social psychologists. Because of this, there have been a number of investigations using different definitions of social power, and investigations using different ways of measuring power. However, the approach most commonly used in the social psychological and industrial/organizational literature was proposed by John R. P. French Jr. and Bertram H. Raven in the 1950s. French and Raven identified specific social resources that people might possess that they could use to influence others; French and Raven called these resources the bases of power: informational, reward, coercion, legitimacy, expertise, and referent. Based on an early paper, some researchers omit informational, which was later listed as a base of power. With additional research, there has been continual development of the bases of power. Now the bases of power include the original six resources as a broad framework, but some of these resources have been further differentiated.

Origins of the Bases of Power The bases of power concept was developed at the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s. Raven was a graduate student there working closely with Leon Festinger, who was Raven’s PhD dissertation advisor at the time. During this period, Festinger wrote an article concerning some of the reasons

people agree to do things. In the article, he observed that when offered a reward or threatened with punishment, people will often change their behavior, but only when those trying to influence them can observe them—when not being observed, the requested behavior stops. However, Festinger also found that sometimes the new behavior continued whether or not someone was being observed. In this case, it appeared that personal beliefs as well as behavior had changed. Raven’s dissertation (completed with French as his advisor when Festinger left for the University of Minnesota) was, in part, based on factors that distinguished behavior change requiring continued observation from change that did not. After Festinger left Michigan, Raven and French began to look at additional factors that affected changes in personal beliefs from those that only affected observable behavior. With the leadership of Dorwin Cartwright, at this point most of the members of the Research Center for Group Dynamics began to study social power. As members of the group, French and Raven continued their investigations into social power. Because of French’s extensive background in industrial and organizational psychology, they concentrated on the relationship between supervisors and subordinates in a work environment. Using the work environment as a guide while examining both the experimental literature and their own experiences, they developed the bases of power model.

Bases of Power Defined and Explained In the power literature, the person who is the source of influence is commonly known as the influencing agent, and the object of the attempted or successful influence is commonly known the target (of influence). Thus, influencing agents have social power, which are the means they may use to influence targets. As discussed, six bases of power were included in French and Raven’s original statement. Additional research led to continued development of the typology, and these original bases were further differentiated. Socially Independent and Socially Dependent Change

The base (or bases) of power chosen for an influence attempt can have a number of effects on

Bases of Power

the target in addition to the intended effect to persuade. One such effect that French and Raven described is in the difference between socially independent and socially dependent change. A successful socially independent influence attempt leads to a change in the beliefs of the target, and as such, the change that occurs in the target does not require the target to refer, remember, or necessarily think about the agent of change. By contrast, socially dependent change does require the target to connect the change to the influencing agent in some way. To illustrate: some people wear motorcycle helmets because at some point in the past, they were convinced that wearing a helmet is a good thing to do. Because these people believe that helmets make riding safer, they wear them because they want to. Thus, their change is socially independent; they do not need continued outside influence to compel them to wear a helmet. But other motorcyclists do not believe helmets make riding safer, and they may believe that helmets are dangerous. Yet in states where a police officer has the legitimate authority to require motorcyclists to wear a helmet, they will do so. As long as the police have that authority, these motorcyclists will wear their helmets while riding. Take the authority of the police to require helmets away (as in states that do not require helmets), and the helmet comes off. In this case, the change (wearing a helmet) is connected to the police (and the authority they have), thus it is socially dependent. Power That Leads to Socially Independent Change Informational Power

Informational power has the property of being a socially independent source of influence. Informational power, or persuasion, is based on the information or logical argument that the agent can present to the target. Information can be presented directly by the agent, indirectly through a third party, or by the agent suggesting that he or she overheard someone else giving such an argument. Evidence indicates that in certain cases, information presented indirectly as an overheard conversation may be more effective than is information presented directly. In the latter case, the target may show reactance (which is resisting influence because the influence attempt may

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threaten the target’s sense of independence). Presenting information indirectly avoids the possibility of reactance. No matter how it is presented, however, if successful, informational power has advantages because it leads to more a permanent cognitive change, a personal acceptance of the changed behavior by the target. Power That Leads to Socially Dependent Change With Surveillance Necessary Coercive Power

The threat of punishment is the basis of coercive power. The influencing agent brings about a change in the target by threatening the target with some sort of negative or undesirable consequences for not doing what the influencing agent wants. Though it can be very effective, coercive power carries with it certain problems and dangers. It depends on the target expecting that his or her compliance will be monitored or observed by the agent. If the threat of being observed is removed, the behavior itself may also cease. Another negative effect of coercion is that the target will generally resent and dislike such threats and the agent who might use them. Reward Power

Reward power stems from the agent’s ability to grant some reward to the target, such as a promise of promotion or offering of certain privileges for complying with a request. Reward power also requires surveillance of the target, but surveillance is usually less difficult than with coercion. Here, the target will generally attempt to let the agent know that compliance has occurred and the reward is due. Reward power also may lead to more positive feelings toward the agent. In French and Raven’s original statement, both reward and coercive power were defined in terms of tangible physical rewards and real physical threats such as being fired or fined, monetary rewards, and job bonuses or promotion. Later, it became clear that both reward and coercion may have more personal forms, and these personal forms could also serve as powerful tools for influence. Thus, potential approval and liking can be seen as very rewarding; disapproval and personal rejection can be very punishing. So both reward power and coercive power were later distinguished

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along the lines of impersonal coercion and impersonal reward, which concern tangible physical matters, and personal coercion and personal reward, which involve intangible personal concerns such as liking. Considering personal as well as impersonal rewards and punishments helped researchers better understand certain forms of influence where surveillance was important, but that had previously been confused with referent power (referent power is discussed below). Power That Leads to Socially Dependent Change With Surveillance Unnecessary

As discussed, coercive power and reward power are distinguished in that their effectiveness requires that the target feel that the degree of his or her compliance with the influencing agent’s request will be discernible to the agent. Thus, surveillance or observability of the target becomes critical. For the bases of power to be discussed (expert, legitimate, and referent), surveillance by the influencing agent is not important. However, even though surveillance is not necessary for expert and referent and legitimate power, it is still important that the target relate the changed behavior to the agent in some way. Using expert power as an example: if your uncle asks you to drive your new car gently until it is broken in, and if you trust your uncle (and you care about your car), you will comply with his request. However, if you later hear differently from someone you trust more (such as your longtime mechanic), you will probably just drive your new car normally. In the preceding example, surveillance is not necessary because, with respect to the influencing agent, there is no reward or punishment involved. However, the success of the influence attempt (by the uncle or mechanic) is socially dependent because it depends on qualities that the influencing agent is perceived to possess (in this case trustworthiness, credibility, and perceived automotive expertise). Expert Power

This form of power (as it was used in the earlier example) shares some of the positive qualities of informational power in that it can result in a transformation of a person’s beliefs, with the resulting personal acceptance of the change. However, it

differs from informational power in that the target does not need to be convinced by argument or rationale for the change per se. Indeed, with effective use of expert power, no argument or rational is necessary. Instead, the target accepts on faith the accuracy and propriety of the suggestions or advice, trusting in the superior knowledge or ability and truthfulness of the influencing agent: it is if targets are saying to themselves, “He or she knows best, even if I don’t entirely understand why, but because they are the experts I’ll do what they say.” Referent Power

Referent power is based on the target of influence positively identifying with the influencing agent. If the influencing agent possesses referent power, this leads the target to have a sense of “oneness” and mutuality, or a desire for such a relationship. So if the influencing agent is someone that the target likes, admires, or feels very positive about, this gives the influencing agent referent power with respect to that target. The target wants to do what the influencing agent wants, because of its feelings of oneness, mutuality, or a desire to feel a sense of oneness or mutuality. For example, it is not uncommon for movie, music, sports, and political stars to be able to influence their fans simply because their fans admire these people. Because of this admiration, fans may do what the star requests (or what they think the star might request), even if it would be impossible for the star to know what the fan did (thus no possibility of reward or punishment from the influencing agent). Overview of Legitimate Power

Legitimate power is based on social norms, such that the target feels an obligation to comply with the requests by the agent. Legitimate power depends on the target’s acceptance of the right of the influencing agent to require the changed behavior, and the target’s sense of obligation to comply. Essentially, the influencing agent says, “I have a right to ask you to do this and you have an obligation to comply.” Terms such as obliged to, should, ought to, and required to generally imply legitimate power. There are four delineations of legitimate power within the bases of power typology: position, reciprocity, equity, and responsibility.

Bases of Power

Legitimate Position Power

Legitimate position power is perhaps the most obvious form of legitimate power. Position power is tied to a certain position in an organization, society, or group, and the power that comes with that position. This form of power often (but not always) depends on a formal hierarchy in an organization, or cultural norms relating power to a hierarchy in society. So, in organizations such as the military, this is the power that a superior officer has over a subordinate officer or enlisted person; in companies, it is the power that a supervisor has over a subordinate worker; and in hospitals, it is the power that a doctor has over a nurse. Other examples that reflect specific cultural norms might be the right of elders to make tribal decisions, royalty to influence commoners, parents to influence children, professors to influence students, and traffic cops to direct traffic. The specific context in which position power is exercised often matters, so, for example, although professors have legitimate position power in their classrooms, they do not have it at a ballgame with friends. However, other less-obvious social norms dictate such obligatory compliance. Legitimate Power of Reciprocity

Legitimate power of reciprocity is the type of influence that essentially says, “I did this good thing for you and so, in return, you should be ready to grant my request.” For example, if, while waiting for the bus, one accepts a ride home, one would feel obligated to help the person who gave you the ride in the future. Reciprocity is a basic social norm, so basic that many respond automatically without thinking when the legitimate power of reciprocity is invoked. Thus, many will automatically repay small debts unwillingly incurred to others and find it hard to resist the repayment of even large debts. Some will resist by avoiding the receipt of “free” gifts so as not to incur the psychological debt associated with reciprocity. Legitimate Power of Equity

The legitimate power of equity is based on the social norm that people should get what they deserve. So if the agent has worked hard, and suffered for a target, the social norm is that the target

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should make things more equitable by doing what the influencing agent requests. Some might refer to this as the compensatory norm because the agent might legitimately say, “What you have done in the past has been harmful or painful for me, so now you should make up (compensate me) for it by doing as I ask.” To invoke the legitimate power of equity, the agent must have done something for the target that affected the agent in a negative way, or the target must have done something that has had a negative effect on the agent. This gives the agent the social power to ask the target to compensate the agent to make things right. Legitimate Power of Responsibility

This last named form of legitimacy has also been called the power of dependence, or the legitimate power of the powerless. This is based on the social norm of the responsibility, which is that society expects individuals to help those who cannot help themselves. Examples might include children asking for help with tasks they cannot do themselves (such as tying their shoes), a stranger asking for directions, or a homeless person asking for a handout. Note that these last two forms of legitimate power (equity and responsibility) seem to rely heavily on the target’s feelings of guilt, either for what he or she has done or not done in the past, or the anticipation of guilt in the future for not having complied.

The Power/Interaction Model of Interpersonal Influence Recent developments concerning the bases of power have put the bases of power discussed earlier into a larger context through the development of the power/interaction model of interpersonal influence. As in the original statement by French and Raven, the power/interaction model first considers the obvious fact that people often change their behaviors, their beliefs, attitudes, or emotions. Often such changes occur without the involvement of others—they are responses to the changes in the environmental conditions, to new insights from personal observation, and so forth. In the model, social influence is defined as (a) a change in the belief, attitude, or behavior of a target of influence

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that has its origin in an influencing agent, or (b) stability or lack of change that is similarly attributable to an influencing agent. The latter point recognizes that sometimes people may be ready to change in response to the environment or because of new intellectual insights, but such change may be mitigated through the influence of others. Social power is defined as potential influence. The influencing agent has various bases of power, which are resources he or she may draw on to bring about such change. These bases of power, in turn, have important implications for the effectiveness of influence, whether the influence depends on the agent socially, whether surveillance by the influencing agent is important for the change to be maintained, and on the future interpersonal relationship between agent and target. The power/ interaction model assumes that when making an influence attempt, rational influencing agents will tend to choose the base or bases of power they use because of their projected efficacy and anticipated side effects. However, other considerations also enter into the choice: considerations of time and energy involved, views of third parties, moral or ethical considerations, personal preference for influence style, and so on. To avoid negative side effects during an influence attempt, an influencing agent may adopt any number of tactics known as ameliorative strategies. In addition, the power/ interaction model examines preparatory or stagesetting devices that an agent must often use to strengthen the bases of power that he or she may plan to use. Choice of Power Strategy

Motivations may play an important role as the agent determines what bases of power and influence strategies he or she might use. There may be considerations other than making sure that the influence attempt is successful. The rational agent would examine each available influence strategy relative to the target and the situation. Which influence strategy would effectively bring about the desired change? At what cost and how much effort? How much time would it take to implement the change with that strategy? Would the influence strategy be consistent with the agent’s norms and values? Would the strategy lead to

long-term change? Would continued surveillance be necessary? The effects of motivation in influencing the choice of influence strategy becomes more clear when we consider that sometimes the agent could influence the target very readily through the use of informational power (logical persuasion), but other motivations would make such a choice less likely. For example, in certain instances, influencing agents might want to emphasize their superior position in a hierarchy when influencing a target. In this case, they could rely on coercion or reward to emphasize to the target that the influencing agent is in a position to punish or reward the target, thus reminding the target that the agent is more powerful than the target. In other cases, the influencing agent might not feel that he or she alone has sufficient power resources to produce an effect in the target. Here, the agent might invoke what is called the power of third parties—for example, a mother telling children that if they do not behave, wait till their father gets home, or a minister invoking the power of God. Preparing for Influence

In planning an influence strategy, an agent will often decide that a particular strategy might be best, but that some preparation is needed. Research has described the various preparatory strategies used by a former president of the United States, Harry Truman, and the former chancellor of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. For example, attempting to establish his expert power with five star general Douglas MacArthur, Truman spoke of his inside intelligence information concerning China, about military preparedness, and the likelihood of diplomatic losses for the United States. In preparing for the use of referent power Truman emphasized to MacArthur their mutual military background, and that they essentially had the same goals. To prepare for coercive power, Hitler sometimes behaved like a madman who would not be restrained by the usual protocol in dealing with Austria. He also showed that he had excellent information about what was going on in Austria, thus demonstrating the power of his intelligence services. By the use of these preparatory strategies, when it came time for the actual use of power, the effectiveness of the tactic(s) was enhanced.

Bicameral Legislature

Assessing the Effects and Reassessing Strategies

Once influence has been attempted, the agent then reviews the success of the attempt, as well as positive and negative side effects. He or she then might also reexamine the motivation for influence, reexamine the choice of influence strategies, and renew the influence process. If an influence attempt is effective in obtaining the desirable effect, the influencing agent need only examine what costs were involved, whether the target might resent the influence and the agent, and how to remedy these side effects. If the influence attempt is unsuccessful, or only partially successful, the agent must then carefully assess why it might not have succeeded, monitor any changes in the relationship positive or negative, and then determine whether the influence attempt should be abandoned or a change in strategy is called for. Clever influencing agents will monitor the effects of their influencing strategies on the target, and reconsider and change tactics as needed. Sometimes they will use personal observation, but often it is necessary to use third parties or other means. For example, during World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill relied heavily on the British Ambassador Lord Lothian to keep him informed about the effects of Churchill’s attempts to influence the United States to enter the war. Lothian reported changes in the attitudes and beliefs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Congress, and other important figures on the U.S. scene, thus enabling Churchill to better calibrate his influence strategies. Power/Interaction From the Target’s Perspective

Finally, within the power/interaction model, social influence is a dynamic interactive process. Thus, although the focus to this point has been on the behavior of the influencing agent, it is also worthwhile to examine the process from the target’s perspective. The target also has extrinsic and intrinsic motivations to comply with or resist influence. There will be cases when the target will not be particularly opposed to the requested change, or when the change, when properly described, will even be desirable. In other cases, the change would be particularly undesirable for the target, whose resistance to change will be all the greater. The target’s perspective will depend on his or her attitudes toward the agent, concern about internal

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constructs of self-image, and how compliance or noncompliance would affect how other persons would view the target. As noted previously, resistance to change, and even change in a direction opposite to that desired by the agent, will sometimes result from what has been called “reactance,” concern that one’s independence or freedom of choice may be threatened by compliance. In anticipation of influence, the target may also develop a series of counterstrategies and would then review the effects of such compliance or noncompliance on subsequent relationships with the influencing agent. Gregg J. Gold See also French, John R. P., Jr.; Influence; Raven, Bertram; Social Power

Further Readings French, J. R. P., Jr., & Raven, B. H. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research. Mintzberg, H. (1983). Power in and around organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Raven, B. H. (1992). A power/interaction model of interpersonal influence: French and Raven thirty years later. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 7, 217–244. Raven, B. H. (2001). Power/interaction and interpersonal influence: Experimental investigations and case studies. In A. Y. Lee-Chai & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The use and abuse of power (pp. 217–240). Ann Arbor, MI: Sheridan Books.

BICAMERAL LEGISLATURE Bicameral legislatures are law-making institutions of a country with two chambers or houses—a lower house representing the democratic interests of the common people and an upper house to represent specific classes, regions, or people of experience. The term bicameral was coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1832, and bicameralism gained popularity in the 18th century, even though the concept was adopted in Britain much earlier, in the 14th century. Bicameral legislatures provide an institutionalized veto power that aims to prevent tyranny of the majority

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as described by Alexander Hamilton and others, as well as tyranny of the minority. In most bicameral legislatures, members of the lower house are directly elected, whereas those in upper house are indirectly or directly elected, or appointed based on criteria such as regional representation, heredity, and expertise in a particular field. In many countries, members of directly elected local, provincial, or state governments elect the members of upper house. About two thirds of democratic national legislatures are bicameral, with one third of these located in federal polities. Examples of upper and lower houses include the Senate and the House of Representatives in the United States and the House of Lords and House of Commons in the United Kingdom. Different political parties can dominate in lower and upper houses, so bicameralism can lead to power struggles to influence legislation and policy making. The upper house can delay, oppose, or in some cases even veto a legislation, thus acting as a check on the powers of the lower house. However, in most polities, the lower house has the ultimate power to legislate and can overrule the objections of the upper house. Arend Lijphart categorizes bicameral legislatures by congruence of the political composition and symmetry of power of the two houses. Thus, bicameral legislatures can be strong (incongruent and symmetric), weak (congruent and symmetric, or incongruent and asymmetric), and insignificant (congruent and asymmetric). Under symmetric bicameralism, both chambers have equal power—for example, in polities with federal units or presidential systems, such as the United States— whereas in asymmetric bicameralism, the lower house has more power, as in parliamentary democracies and unitary systems such as Britain. An upper house that has veto power increases the number of veto players and can thus result in higher policy stability. For example, in the United States, the Senate as a veto-player can shift the legislative status quo. However, this can also lead to unnecessary deadlocks, delays, and hindrance to policy making. Powers and practices of the upper house have come under review in many countries. Britain, for example, partially abolished hereditary peerage in the House of Lords in 1999 with a view to making it more democratic. Rekha Diwakar

See also Bargaining; Legislative Power; Unicameral Legislature; Veto Players

Further Readings Riker, W. (1992). The justification of bicameralism. International Political Science Review, 12(1), 101–116. Tsebelis, G., & Money, J. (1997). Bicameralism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

BIOPOWER Michel Foucault coined the term biopower to refer to the administration of human life both collectively and individually. Biopower involves the production and reproduction of life and is evident in such things as public health, welfare policy, regulation of fertility and heredity, population control and eugenics, racial ordering, the regulation of sexuality, and modern biotechnologies. Biopower emerged in the 18th century, but had its ascendancy in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries.

Foucault and Biopower Foucault introduced the notion of biopower, and a related term, bio-politics, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Here, the concept biopower builds on his earlier reconceptualization of power as omnipresent capillaries and as productive. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault contrasts the productive nature of the power of discipline with the restrictive nature of sovereign power. Foucault later explains that the disciplinary power that emerged in the 17th century operates on the body, reflecting an “anatomo-politics,” whereas biopower emerged in the following century and involves the regulation of the population, or species body. At the beginning of his lecture series, Security, Territory, Population, Foucault describes biopower as those mechanisms through which human biological features became the target of political strategies. Foucault examines the emergence of this governmental interest in the population through liberalism, the technologies of statistics, and the social sciences, such as political economy, demography and sociology. Although the emphasis of biopower is on

Blackmail

enhancing the productive aspects of the population, and contrasts with the sovereign power’s right to take, biopower also involves the capacity to take, or withhold, life.

Other Authors In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben has used Foucault’s notion of biopower as part of his argument that sovereign power is not eclipsed by biopower. Rather, Agamben argues that sovereign power and biopower come together in the formation of “The Camp,” a zone in which the state of exception is permanent, and “in which power confronts nothing but pure life.” In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri use the concept of biopower in their neo-Marxist account of contemporary globalized power, denoted as “Empire.” They argue that biopolitical production has become the centerpiece of contemporary power. Indeed, “Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower.” More recently, Nikolas Rose examined the role of biopower in the operation of contemporary biotechnologies. He argues that emerging biotechnologies link biopower increasing to the liberal formation of selves, with their associated questions of ethics, risk, and responsibility. Paul Henman See also Discipline; Foucault, Michel; Governmentality; Postmodern View of Power in International Relations; Sovereignty

Further Readings Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, N. (2007). The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

BLACKMAIL Blackmail occurs when one person threatens another that unless the latter carries out some act, such as paying money or providing some favor for

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the blackmailer, the blackmailer will reveal information to other people such as family members, friends, or the general public. This information need not concern any criminal act by the person being blackmailed, but will usually be of an embarrassing or socially damaging nature. To succeed, the blackmailer will need information that is substantially true about the blackmailed person and some evidence that the blackmailer can reveal to others, such as tapes, letters, photographs, or video. The wrongness of blackmail and its criminal nature are normally thought to rest on the demand for payment in order not to reveal the information. Criminal prosecutions might themselves end up revealing the information, if not publicly then to the close family or associates of the person blackmailed, and this gives blackmailers advantages insofar as their victims might prefer to pay to keep the blackmailer quiet. In many ways, formally speaking, blackmail looks like many other contracts. One party asks for payment from another for services rendered—in this case to keep information that one has to oneself. There is nothing necessarily wrong with revealing the information itself unless it is considered that revealing the information is done merely to spite or hurt others. And there certainly may be nothing criminally wrong in revealing the information to others. What is paradoxical about blackmail is that it concerns two acts, neither of which is illegal, that combine to make a wrong. Revealing damaging information about a person is not necessarily wrong. Asking payment for services rendered is not necessarily wrong. Why then is the combination of the two wrong? The moral wrongness seems to stem from at least two sources. First, if the person has no reason to reveal the information, then promising not to do so for payment seems to be a form of exploitation. Second, if the person does have a reason to reveal the information—say an individual or the public ought to know this fact—then demanding payment to keep quiet seems wrong. Where the information about the blackmailed person concerns some criminal activity, then blackmail becomes a form of extortion. Here, the blackmailer is also committing a criminal offence in not bringing the information to the authorities and being paid not to do so increases the crime. One form of blackmail is emotional blackmail. This occurs when the blackmailer understands the

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vulnerabilities of the victim and plays on these to get what the blackmailer wants. Emotional blackmail might occur unconsciously on both sides; might involve close family members, lovers, or friends; and often involves withholding love or affection, or threatening to do so if the victim does not act as the emotional blackmailer desires. Emotional blackmail is a form of manipulation, and it is often argued that people with weak personalities or psychological problems are most likely to suffer emotional blackmail and therefore require greater recourse to the law.

votes. By looking at the relative frequency of possible blocking coalitions, one can estimate a priori how likely indecision is for any given combination of these two factors. The possibility of a blocking coalition might be the result of procedural rules other than the voting rule. For example, in the United States, Senate decisions are made by simple majority. However, the rule that allows filibusters means that a higher voting threshold may be required to bring a bill to a vote in the first place. Andreas Warntjen

Keith Dowding See also Simple Games See also Exploitation; Manipulation

Further Readings Further Readings Forward, S., & Frazier, D. (1998). Emotional blackmail: When the people in your life use fear, obligation, and guilt to manipulate you. New York: HarperCollins. Lindgren, J. (1984). Unraveling the paradox of blackmail. Columbia Law Review, 84(3), 670–717.

BLOCKING COALITION A blocking coalition comprises a group of voters that collectively can prevent the passage of a proposal. Thus, a blocking coalition exerts negative power. The term is often used in a narrower sense to denote a coalition that can prevent a measure from being passed but cannot muster sufficient votes to pass a proposal. Whether blocking coalitions exist depends on the voting rule. Simple voting games without blocking coalitions are called strong. Under simple majority rule with an odd number of voters, a coalition is either winning or losing but cannot be blocking. In contrast, blocking coalitions can occur if a tie is possible or if a qualified majority is required. For example, the Council of the European Union decides on legislation using a qualified majority or unanimity. In the case of unanimity, any single member state can form a blocking coalition consisting just of itself. Under qualified majority, the number of possible blocking coalitions depends on the voting threshold and the distribution of

Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Ordeshook, P. C. (1986). Game theory and political theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

BOURDIEU, PIERRE (1930–2002) Power, particularly in the form of domination, stands at the core of the work of one of the most important sociologists of the late 20th century, Pierre Bourdieu. Widely recognized for his original contributions to the ethnology of Algeria; to the sociology of education, literature and art, taste, class, language, science, politics, and religion; and to social theory, Bourdieu authored more than 25 books and more than another 30 edited collections of his more than 400 articles, many of which have been translated into more than two dozen languages. He established a network of highly productive scholars around his Center for European Sociology; founded and directed an innovative journal, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales; and was elected to the chair of sociology at the scholarly prestigious Collège de France in 1981. An International Sociological Association survey ranked Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) as the sixth most important social scientific work of the 20th century. Bourdieu is arguably the most influential and

Bourdieu, Pierre

original French sociologist since Émile Durkheim, and at the time of his death, Bourdieu was a leading European public intellectual. For Bourdieu, the analysis of and debunking of power relations should be the central goals of sociology. Bourdieu analyzes power in three overlapping but analytically distinct ways: (1) power in valued resources (capitals), (2) power in specific spheres of struggle (fields), and (3) power in legitimation (symbolic violence). Bourdieu conceptualizes valued resources as capital when they function as social relations of power by becoming objects of struggle. Capitals can be created, accumulated, exchanged, and consumed. His concept of cultural capital is most widely known—particularly in the sociology of education and culture—but his work includes a wide array of capitals, such as social capital, economic capital, academic capital, and statist capital. His view of capital extends the analysis of power to more subtle expressions beyond that of material advantage and physical coercion. Capitals as forms of power exist not in isolation but relationally in what Bourdieu calls fields. Fields denote arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize different kinds of capital. Field struggle, for Bourdieu, has two distinct dimensions: struggle over the distribution of capitals (i.e., struggle to accumulate the more valued forms of capital or to convert one form into another more valued form) and struggle over the very definition of the most legitimate form of capital for a particular field. One particular power arena Bourdieu emphasizes in his sociology of modern societies is the field of power, which is that arena of struggle among the different power fields (particularly the economic field and the cultural field) for the right to dominate throughout the social order. Bourdieu identifies different subfields within the field of power, such as the artistic field, the administrative field, the university field, the political field, and the economic field. Leaders of particular subfields compete to impose their particular type of capital as the most legitimate claim to authority. For example, artists, writers, and professors compete in the field of power against business leaders to impose their respective capitals

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(cultural capital vs. economic capital) as the most legitimate. Central to but not synonymous with the field of power is the state, which assumes the key role of regulating the struggle within the field of power. Bourdieu believed the state consists of bureaucratic agencies, authorities, ritual, and ceremony but also official classifications that regulate group relations. The state regulates the classification struggle among social groups by giving some classifications and categories official legitimation and rejecting others. In this regulatory function, the state institutionalizes its own specific form of capital, statist capital, a kind of meta-capital that consecrates and renders official the most legitimate forms of powers. Bourdieu uses the conceptual language of symbolic power, violence, and capital to talk about a third kind of power, a power that legitimates the stratified social order. Following the thought of Max Weber, Bourdieu argues that neither brute force nor material possession is sufficient for the effective exercise of power. Power requires legitimation. The language of symbolic power and violence stresses that legitimate understandings of the social world are imposed by dominant groups and deeply internalized by subordinate groups in the form of practical taken-for-granted understandings. Symbolic power finds expression in everyday classifications, labels, meanings, and categorizations that subtly implement a social as well as symbolic logic of inclusion and exclusion. Symbolic power also finds expression through body language, comportment, self-presentation, bodily care, and adornment. Symbolic violence takes the forms of embodied dispositions—what Bourdieu calls the habitus—that generate a “practical sense” for organizing perceptions of and actions in the social world. The dispositions of habitus incorporate a sense of place in the social order, an understanding of inclusion and exclusion in the various social hierarchies. And symbolic capital designates the social authority that individuals and groups can accumulate through public recognition of their capital holdings and positions occupied in social hierarchies. Two key properties of symbolic power are its naturalization and misrecognition. Bourdieu’s symbolic power does not suggest “consent” but “practical adaptation” to existing hierarchies. The “practical adaptation” occurs pre-reflectively, as if it were the “thing to do,” the “natural” response in existing

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circumstances. The dominated misperceive the real origins and interests of symbolic power when they adopt the dominant view of the dominant and of themselves. They therefore accept definitions of social reality that do not correspond to their best interests. Those “misrecognized” definitions go unchallenged as appearing natural and justified. These properties of symbolic power help explain how inegalitarian social systems are able to perpetuate without powerful resistance and transformation. Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic power sensitizes us to the more subtle and influential forms of power that operate through cultural resources and symbolic classifications that interweave everyday life with prevailing institutional arrangements. He identifies a wide variety of valued resources (capitals) beyond sheer economic interests that function as power resources. And his concept of field offers a conceptual language that encourages examination of interrelationships across levels of analysis and analytical units that usually are isolated for specialized focus in empirical research. David L. Swartz See also Agency–Structure Problem; Habitus; Structural Power; Symbolic Power and Violence

Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979) Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1989) Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

BRIBE INDEX A bribe index is an idea introduced by Peter Morriss, following a remark made by Brian Barry that the powerful people in a society must include those whom the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency

(CIA) would want to bribe. The intuitive idea is that the extent of their power can be gauged by the amount that they can demand as a bribe. Morriss applied this idea to the development of power indices measuring the power of votes. This discussion abstracts from any consideration the morality or immorality of taking or accepting bribes; all it considers is how much one could charge for one’s vote if votes were for sale. The same idea has been applied to considering what the market value would be of shares in a company, if shares were bought and sold only for purposes of altering the policies of that company. Consider, then, voters who each have different numbers of votes—such as parties in a parliament, states in the U.S. Electoral College, or shareholders at an annual general meeting who each have one vote per share. They are about to make a decision on some matter of public policy. You do not have a vote, but stand to gain $100 if policy X is chosen over the voters’ own preferred outcome. If you know that voter A by himself or herself could deliver policy X, then you would be willing to pay voter A as much as $100 to vote for it. If voter B could increase the probability of policy X being chosen from nothing to 50%, then you would be willing to pay B as much as $50. That shows that A’s votes have twice the value to you that B’s have, which is an indication of A’s greater voting power. Morriss showed how some of the standard power indices can be understood as bribe indices. The Banzhaf index is produced under the constraint that you can bribe any, but only one, voter. But that is only part of the story: for, if you had bribed B first, then you would still want to raise your 50% to 100% by buying up the votes of some others. When you can bribe as many voters as you wish, until your preferred outcome is guaranteed, we get the Shapley–Shubik index. So the Shapley–Shubik index measures the relative worth of votes, and hence their relative power. This has subsequently been shown mathematically by Dan Felsenthal and Moshé Machover. They define P-power as the proportion of a fixed purse (the spoils of victory) each voter could obtain for himself or herself. This is the same as what the voter could deliver to an outside briber and is represented by the Shapley–Shubik index. Peter Morriss

Bull, Hedley See also Banzhaf Value; Barry, Brian; Morriss, Peter; P-Power; Shapley–Shubik Index; Voting Power

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A philosophical analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

BUDGET-MAXIMIZING BUREAUCRATS Budget maximization is put forward as an aim and practice of bureaucrats operating in a nonmarket context who are often able to exert informational or agenda-setting power. Sometimes these practices result in oversupply or other undesirable outcomes. Whereas Gordon Tullock and Anthony Downs had previously discussed aspects of budget maximization, it was most comprehensively developed by William Niskanen in 1971. In Niskanen’s model, a bilateral monopoly exists between a sponsor and a bureau. He famously claims, Among the several variables that may enter the bureaucrat’s utility function are the following: salary, prerequisites of the office, public reputation, power, patronage, output of the bureau, ease of making changes and ease of managing the bureau. All of these variables except the last two, I contend, are a positive monotonic function of the total budget of the bureau during the bureaucrat’s tenure in office. (Niskanen, 1971, p. 38)

However, Niskanen also states that officials are able to push up budgets only through the production of more output for the sponsor, making the model one of budget/output maximization rather than just budget maximization. In the context of the bureau being able to offer take-it-or-leave-it outcomes for the sponsor, the budget tends to be expanded beyond the point where marginal public benefits equal marginal costs to a point where all the consumer surplus gains are balanced by the

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excess of marginal cost over marginal benefits. This “oversupply” result has been an influential critique of bureaucratic supply of services, especially in the late 1970s given concerns about the growth of the public sector. Keith Dowding, however, has noted the difficulty of comparing outputs from markets and political processes, using a common framework that potentially limits the force of the critique. The concept of budget-maximizing has been extended and altered in many ways, and there have been many empirical tests of this family of models. Taking some examples: the take-it-or-leave-it agenda-setting power of the bureau has been replaced with a unit price or price schedule. Alternative behavioral assumptions have been posited, notably budget-slack maximization rather than budget/output maximization. A trade-off between benefits from spending time managing a budget and undertaking alternative, and desirable, policy work activity has been suggested—resulting in bureau-shaping as well as budget-maximizing activity. Overall, the literature suggests that the agenda-setting power of bureaucrats can facilitate budget maximization and that sponsors are often able to use better monitoring and competitive pressures to limit its extent. Oliver James See also Bureaucratic Power; Public Goods

Further Readings Dowding, K. M. (1995). The civil service. London: Routledge. Dunleavy, P. (1991). Democracy, bureaucracy and public choice. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. James, O. (2003). The executive agency revolution in Whitehall: Public interest versus bureau-shaping strategies. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Niskanen, W. A. (1971). Bureaucracy and representative government. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.

BULL, HEDLEY (1932–1985) Hedley Bull was one of most acute and originalminded of the Australian scholars who have

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worked in the field of international theory and strategic analysis. He came from a reasonably comfortable Sydney family, and his high intellectual capacity was recognized early in his life. He was admitted as a student to the University of Sydney at the age of 16 in 1949. While there, he concentrated on philosophy and history and was strongly influenced by the most controversial of his professors at the time, John Anderson. Bull remained an “Andersonian” all his life. He was also influenced by one of his history professors, Ernest Bramstead, whose vision of world history was largely focused on Europe. Hedley Bull graduated with first-class honors in philosophy and second-class honors in history in 1952, and was accorded a scholarship to Oxford University. There, he continued to pursue those subjects, eventually to a master of philosophy degree. Quite unexpectedly, because he had taken no courses in the subject, he was offered an assistant lectureship at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in international relations. The professor at the time, Charles Manning, looked for original minds in his young appointees, and Hedley Bull certainly offered that. At LSE, Bull found the second great intellectual influence of his life in Martin Wight, then reader in the International Relations department. Wight was an immensely charismatic teacher, remarkable for the depth of his learning and the elegance of his analysis. Moreover, London in the mid-1950s offered an immense stimulus to someone of Bull’s originality of mind. Policy makers, even at the level of prime minister, were beginning to understand the immensity of the dangers that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by several powers represented for the whole world. So the old interest in disarmament reappeared, and Hedley Bull was invited to assist one of its stalwarts from the 1930s, Philip Noel-Baker, to produce a new book on the subject. During his research on that project, however, Bull found himself convinced the earlier approach to the subject was mistaken and unproductive, and in due course, he produced a book of his own, The Control of the Arms Race, which suggested a new approach to the overall objective of keeping the peace. The English authorities in the field, such as Michael Howard, had recently founded a new institute, the Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS)

and were instantly impressed when the book was produced for its 1960 conference at Oxford University. So when Harold Wilson became prime minister in 1964 and was looking for a new mind to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit at the Foreign Office, Bull was appointed. He stayed in that appointment until 1967, then accepted a chair in international relations at Australian National University (ANU). By that time, Bull’s main intellectual interests had focused on the general theory of international politics. In Canberra, he wrote his best-known and most influential book, The Anarchical Society. In that book, he continued his English School realist analysis of international relations, likening the international scene to a Hobbesian state of nature where anarchy prevails, kept in check by alliances and reciprocal agreements. States form a system when they interact in this manner to form a society with some common organizations where they see common interests. One can see in that notable work the influence of two associations, the ISS, and a much smaller group, the British Association for International Theory. In the years at ANU, Hedley’s interests also expanded further, to be concerned particularly with the relationship between the old established powers of the West and the rising powers of Asia, especially China and India. That subject was central to his last two works, The Expansion of International Society, and Intervention in World Politics. In 1977, he was appointed to a chair in International Relations at Oxford and would have continued to pursue that line of analysis, had he lived longer. But he died early, at 52, much mourned by friends and colleagues. Coral Bell See also Anarchism, Power in; Hobbes, Thomas; Realism in International Relations; Wight, Martin

Further Readings Bull, H. (1977). The anarchical society. London: Macmillan. Miller, J. D. B., & Vincent, R. J. (Eds.). (1990). Order and violence: Hedley Bull and international relations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Business and Power

BUREAUCRACY See Bureaucratic Power

BUREAUCRATIC POWER Bureaucracy, defined as “rule by the bureau,” entails the power of career officials in large organizations and can be considered a form of government. Max Weber defined the bureaucratic organizational form as allocation of competencies within a hierarchical body, continuity of office, impersonality of treatment, working according to rules, and expertise entailing selection by merit and training. Bureaucratic power comes from authority vested in particular positions and technical expertise acquired through training and official sources of information available only through administrative channels. A further form of ideational power arises from the domination of a bureaucratic mind-set, an “iron cage” of reason, permeating from the bureaucracy across society. Bureaucratic power limits political elites’ capacity for control, and limits individuals’ freedom in society. Weber saw multiple sources of power in society, oversight by Parliament, and effective political leadership as ways of curbing bureaucratic power, and his work contains a critique of socialism as empowering bureaucracy both by creating more of it and removing countervailing forces. In contrast, Marxists see bureaucratic power emanating primarily from class power. In contemporary research on public organizations within the liberal democratic state, most attention focuses on power relations between the bureaucracy and elected politicians, citizens, interest groups, and others, and on the blurred boundaries between “politics” and “administration.” Bureaucrats exercise discretion in implementing laws, make secondary laws in areas delegated to them, and exert influence through advice—particularly to politicians. Multiple stakeholders are variously seen as constraining bureaucracies’ autonomy or enabling bureaucrats to use conflicting demands to exercise greater autonomy. Policy development often involves complex learning in networks across public and private boundaries,

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with bureaucrats sharing power with other actors. Research has examined political control and delegation to bureaucracies, including the role legislatures play in this activity and bureaucratic “regulatory” oversight of other parts of the bureaucracy. Sources of power from personal and professional positions, as well as from formal bureaucratic posts, have been noted, especially the discretion of street-level bureaucrats in public services involving direct contact with citizens. Challenges to bureaucratic power from the use of competitive quasi-markets, private sector contractors, and target regimes have been a focus of recent research. Oliver James See also Budget-Maximizing Bureaucrats; Public Goods

Further Readings Beetham, D. (1987). Bureaucracy. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society (Vols. 1 & 2; G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.) Berkeley: University of California Press.

BUSINESS

AND

POWER

When people think about the power of business or “big business,” they often think of the way in which business in the form of major companies, corporations, and major firms dominate the lives of their employees, the communities in which they are located, and government. Business power in this sense comes in several different, though often subtly related, forms. We consider each in turn. Obviously business affects the lives of employees and their families. The livelihood of the workforce and their families depends on their employers. This immediately makes for a complex relationship between employees and the business that employs them. On the one hand, the managers of the firm, following the interests of the owners or shareholders, want to get as much from each employee as possible for as little as possible to maximize profits. This does not necessarily mean paying as low a wage as possible for the job to be done; managers

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can realize that giving incentives to workers in the form of better pay and working conditions can maximize output and revenue. Nevertheless, the workers have an interest in higher wages and less control, whereas their managers have an interest in reducing the overall wage bill and getting as much output at possible. On the other hand, the workers also should have an interest in the business being profitable. Otherwise, it might go out of business, leaving them unemployed; so workers do share interests with stockholders. It is not enough merely for a firm to keep in profit. Listed companies can be subject to hostile takeover bids where other businesses believe that their profits are not being maximized. Hostile takeovers often lead to reductions in the workforce, the closure of some factories or offices, harsher terms of employment, and so forth, in the attempt to get more profit from the capital stock than the current company manages. At this level, the interests of stockholders and workers diverge, or at least the interests of some of the workers and stockholders diverge. In some communities, interest in the firm staying in business goes beyond the workforce and workers’ immediate families. In some “company towns” the entire economy is dominated by the local business. Here, the livelihood of everyone is at stake if the firm goes out of business. Other local companies’ business depends on the company’s contracts, and the entire local economy of shops, service agencies, and so on, depends on the company’s employees spending their money locally. And the local government depends on the business for taxes both directly and through any local income tax or sales tax that is generated by that business. This gives the company enormous influence over the lives of everyone. This local power comes in various forms. First, local power comes about directly. Because the firm is vital to the welfare of everyone, if its managers state that certain local policies are important to its continued existence—whether they claim competitive pressures or pressures from some corporate headquarters elsewhere, even in another country—then local politicians are likely to acquiesce. Thus, if a company wants some land rezoned to allow it to build a factory extension, the local community is likely to facilitate this. Or if company owners are concerned with local environmental

laws affecting the company’s profit line, the company might be able to have the laws changed. In a classic book from the 1970s, The Unpolitics of Air Pollution, Matthew Crenson was able to demonstrate that towns dominated by a single business had lower environmental controls than did similar towns less dominated by one company. It is not simply that firms can force their interests on recalcitrant local communities; rather, the power relationship is more subtle. The local community also sees these policies in their interests in the sense that the company sustains the local economy. If it is true that the company “must leave” without the rezoning or relaxing of environmental controls, then it is true that those policies are in the community’s interests too, even if, in some sense, the community wants clean air, does not want the land rezoned, and so on. Such issues sometimes take the form of collective action problems. The power of local business can stand as a metaphor for the power of business more broadly both at the national level and in the international arena. Here the power of business can take at least five forms: to define the agenda; to gain disproportionate benefits from the political process; for elected and civil officials to pander to the interests of business; the superior ability of business to mobilize political resources; and finally, underlying the first four types, the overarching system of capitalism that privileges business interests above others. Business can define the agenda of government. With free-flowing international capital, governments are severely constrained in how they can regulate business over tax policy and even over social or welfare legislation. Politicians fear the effects of their announced policies on share prices; they fear businesses relocating to countries with more favorable regulatory and tax policies. With corporate business deciding what is best for the politicians, corporations define the very agenda by which national governments operate. Business can gain disproportionate benefits from the democratic process. Beyond their privileged or systematically lucky situation, big businesses can threaten governments. Politicians fear disinvestment and design policy accordingly, but businesspeople can also ask for tax breaks, for relaxation of regulatory controls, or directly or

Business and Power

indirectly threaten that some proposed laws would make them reconsider their investment in a given location. In doing so, businesses can gain much more from the democratic legislative process than the votes they command. Business can also capture regulatory bodies. Often health and safety legislation comes from business itself, rather than from consumer or health groups’ demands. Stricter legislation can make current products obsolete, forcing consumers to buy the latest products, while making it more difficult for new entrants to the market. In an important article, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrated that the structural power or systematic luck of business is not a constant. Although companies’ influence depends on the fear of disinvestment, that fear can be reduced at certain times. Hacker and Pierson show that the Great Depression of the 1930s enabled government to bring in welfare reform as the power of business momentarily waned. The global financial crisis

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that began in late 2008 demonstrated the power of the financial sector as governments rushed to bail out major investment banks deemed too big to fail, and it provided a window of opportunity for governments to introduce stricter regulation of financial institutions. Keith Dowding See also Capture Theory of Regulation; Free Market; Globalization; Growth Coalitions; Neoliberalism; Relative Autonomy of the State; Structural Power; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power

Further Readings Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2002). Business and social policy: Employers and the formation of the American welfare state. Policy and Politics, 30, 277–325. Vogel, D. (1989). Fluctuating fortunes: The political power of business in America. New York: Basic Books.

C they are remembered. They were united only because they all signed the Treaty of Dover of 1670 and its renewal in 1672 (a pact to support French policy to subjugate the Netherlands in return for a subsidy that helped free Charles from financial dependence on parliament); only Clifford and Arlington knew of the Secret Treaty of Dover (concerned with converting England to Roman Catholicism). Parliament did not like these secret advisors and eventually pressed for the whole Privy Council to meet, which did not happen until the end of the 1670s.

CABAL A cabal is a private meeting of a group of people, usually to conspire against someone or something, and normally carrying a sinister interpretation. Thus, intrigues against the monarch or the state are termed cabals. Sometimes the leaders of parties will denounce some faction or group as a cabal secretly conspiring against the leadership. The term carries far more negative connotations than do faction, coalition, or party. The word cabal derives originally from cabbala or kabbalah, a Hebrew word denoting a centuriesold esoteric tradition of Jewish biblical interpretation associated with “secret” learning or mystical interpretations of Hebrew scripture. Thus, the term cabal carries anti-Semitic overtones of a “Jewish conspiracy” against the state or against current orthodox (Christian or moral) doctrines. The term cabal also came to prominence politically because of the so-called CABAL ministry of Charles II of England, deriving from the names of five privy councilors: Sir Thomas Clifford, Lord Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord AshleyCooper, and Lord Lauderdale. Charles II was known to pursue his own ends while appearing to defer to parliament, and only a few trusted members of the Privy Council—the body of parliament that advised the king—might be aware of these inner machinations. The five members of the CABAL were the most famous of this inner circle of ministers, though the fact that their initial letters could be arranged to spell cabal is probably why

Keith Dowding See also Coalition Theory

Further Readings Macintosh, J. P. (1977). The British cabinet (3rd ed.). London: Stevens and Sons.

CAPABILITY Capability is the core concept of the capability approach, which is a broad normative framework for the evaluation of individual well-being and social arrangements, and the development of policies and social change. The central claim of the capability approach is that these evaluations and proposals should rely on an analysis of the (expected) changes in the capabilities of individuals 83

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or groups. Although the precise terminology has changed a little over time, the most widely used description of capability is the real opportunity or freedom to be the person one wants to be and do the things one wants to do. These beings and doings are called functionings. The expansion of people’s capabilities is the central normative goal of the human development approach, which is best known from the human development reports that are published annually by the United Nations Development Programme. The concept of power is relevant for the capability approach in two ways. The first is at the ontological level: the concept of capability refers to human power. In ordinary language, capability refers to an undeveloped or unused faculty of a human being, without reference to his or her environment. In this sense, capability is a human power. However, this is not how “capability” is conceptualized in the capability approach. Martha Nussbaum explains that the philosophical–technical “capability” has three components: (1) the innate capabilities such as the capability for speech and language, (2) the internal capabilities that are the developed states of the person himself or herself, and (3) the external conditions that are needed for the exercise of the functioning. If all three components are present, a person is said to have a capability. Having a capability thus implies having the necessary internal powers, but goes beyond them by stressing the external conditions too. If we rephrase this in terms of the concepts of ability and ableness, then the notion of capability corresponds to the notion of ableness because it is not just about our abilities to do what we can do and be the person we can be, but also about the right external conditions that enable us to fulfill our abilities should we wish to do so. Power plays a second, and rather different, role in the capability approach. Structures and relations of power in society, organizations, and human interactions influence the capability sets of individuals. Yet, some argue that by shifting the focus of analysis from the determinants of people’s quality of life to a discussion of what precisely entails that quality of life, a capability analysis is insufficiently able to analyze these power structures. Stated differently, critics assert that the capability approach would focus too much on conceptualizing, evaluating, and measuring people’s well-being,

thereby losing sight of the political and economic analysis of the causal factors that determine wellbeing, including structures of power. Ingrid Robeyns See also Ability; Ableness; Distributive Justice; Freedom; Opportunity

Further Readings Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and human development: The capabilities approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York: Knopf.

CAPITAL, MARXIST Generally speaking, capital is any asset that can potentially be used as a source of income. In academic literature, it has been categorized far more extensively, especially in Karl Marx’s economic writings. Marx does not see capital as a thing, that is, as an inanimate object, but rather as a series of socioeconomic relations that appear thing-like. Along with capitalism’s key features of the private ownership of the means of production, wagelabor, and a market economy, Marx insists that capitalism, as a finite mode of production, is characterized chiefly by the production and exchange of commodities. Central to his class-based inquiry into political economy is an analysis of the valueextending process, the role of constant and variable capital, an account of concrete and abstract labor, the crucial distinction between socially necessary labor and surplus labor, and the circulation of capital. For Marx, value is a social relation that assumes a particular material form. Capitalist social relations exhibit value relations in the form of commodities. Commodities are intended to be exchanged, so they have an exchangeability feature that he argues is its value. In quantitative terms, use values of various kinds are exchanged for each other. Commodities therefore are bearers of use and exchange values. As each particular product can be differentiated from others, the use

Capital, Marxist

values of commodities are qualitatively distinct. Yet the values of commodities are equal in qualitative terms; they vary in the magnitude of value they embody. So in one key respect they must possess an identical magnitude. The homogeneous property that commodities share is that they are all produced by labor. On this analysis, value is the objectification of labor, and this value appears as the exchange value of commodities. That is, value is expressed as exchange value. So for Marx, the magnitude of exchange value is not determined quantitatively by use value. He held that the time workers spend creating value, measured by hours in the working day, has two parts: necessary labor, time at work in which workers produce an equivalent in the wages needed to meet personal consumption; and surplus labor, where the remaining hours are worked for the benefit of the capitalist. The measure of value is accounted for by establishing the amount of labor, calculated through hours of the day, that is required to produce a given commodity. To summarize, the substance of value is objectified (abstract) labor, and the measure of value is socially necessary labor. Marx draws a distinction between constant and variable capital. The former is the value of the means of production embodied in the product during the process of production; it is termed constant because it does not engender any quantitative alteration of value in the process of production. The latter is capital used to hire labor power, it is termed variable because it alone holds the capacity to create value; its quantity changes during the productive process—from the value of labor power to the value it produces, and the difference between the two is surplus value. Commodities have use value as well as exchange value, so the labor that produces them must also have a twofold character. The labor with a “definite aim” (Capital, vol. 1, ch. 1) is concrete labor, which is of a particular kind and produces a use value. The labor analyzed without its particular attributes, as simply the expenditure of labor power in general, is termed abstract labor—this labor is the source of the value of commodities. With these points in mind, it can now be appreciated how Marx tries to capture the flow of capital by contrasting two sequences of market transactions. First, at the most immediate level, exchange is commodity circulation, C (commodities)—M

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(money)—C (commodities) (Capital, vol. 1, ch. 3, sec. 2a): commodities exchanged for money that is used to buy other commodities. Second, where commodities are brought to be sold, M—C—M¹ (general formula of capital, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 4), the intention being that M¹ is a greater amount than M. Marx argues that because value is not actually created in the sphere of exchange, there must be a factor of production that has a use value capable of adding extra value to its initial expenditure. This particular commodity is labor power. Labor power is not just labor, but the capacity to labor. The labor increases the value of commodities. Labor power does, therefore, have a use value—its unique capability to create new value when consumed in the productive process. Marx believes the distinction he made between labor and labor power is vital to the understanding of capitalist political economy. Capitalism, he infers, is based on the unstated yet omnipresent reality that labor power produces more, in value terms, than the cost of reproducing labor power. To elaborate, labor power is exchanged for a wage, and the commodities it produces are then sold for a value that exceeds the overall value of inputs. These total inputs are the value of labor power combined with the value of the materials consumed in the process of production. The series of transactions in C—M—C captures the selling of labor power for a paid wage, by which the necessary commodities are brought to reproduce workers. The series of relations in M—C—M¹ constitutes the capitalists’ inputs that are transformed into outputs of greater value. As M¹ is money plus surplus value, the full formula of capital is M[C & LP & MP] . . . P . . . C¹—M¹ M and M¹ are money capital; C is productive capital, in the form of labor power (LP) and the means of production (MP); C¹ represents commodity capital; and P is the actual process of production in which the inputs (LP & MP) are transformed into outputs, which by now have a greater value (C¹). Marx distinguishes between the productive sphere, in which surplus value is created, and the financial sphere within which commodities are exchanged. These two spheres of activity represent the circulation of capital, within which the value of capital is subject to a series of transformations

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through which it expands, assuming different forms at various stages. As the sphere of circulation creates no value, an analysis of value expansion in production, capital’s essence, must precede a consideration of the circulation of value, capital’s appearance. Crucially, the assets that expand capital stem from propertied relations in which only a minority own the accumulated wealth embodied in productive resources; therefore, this class holds real power. As non-owners of the means of production, the workers cannot make use of labor power’s value, they possess no such power; only by selling their labor power can workers gain access to the means of production. Here, in the sphere of production, capital exploits labor through the extraction of surplus value. The rate of surplus value/exploitation is the amount of surplus produced over the variable capital laid out. So for Marx, workers create a relation that exploits them, they create the capital that fundamentally shapes the labor process and reproduces the capital/labor relation. In sum, capital for Marx is value in motion, a social relation attached to things such as money and commodities. Marx’s critical analysis of capital has been the subject of prolonged critical appraisals. Most notably, it has been suggested that value as embodied labor has an insufficient treatment of demand. Further, if value is not labor exclusively, the labor theory of value cannot adequately explain empirical prices. Further still, as even Marxist sympathizers such as John Elster have acknowledged, if only some labor is irreducibly heterogeneous, then the labor theory of value is seriously impaired. In response, although labor may not be the only variable, it remains analytically unique because it alone is required for all systems of production. As such, no account of value can ignore labor. Also, wherever there is an unequal ownership of productive assets, labor values remain a powerful tool in considerations of exploitation. In either of these cases, all the time capital as inherent self-expanding tendency exists; Marx’s economic writings will continue to provide, for both critics and proponents, a focal reference point. Chris Wyatt See also Exploitation; False Consciousness; Ideology; Marx, Karl; Marxist Accounts of Power; Substructure and Superstructure

Further Readings Eldred, M., & Roth, M. (1978). Guide to Marx’s Capital. London: CSE Books. Elster, J. (1985). Making sense of Marx. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fine, B. (1975). Marx’s Capital. London: Macmillan. Howard, M., & King, J. (1975). The political economy of Marx. London: Longman. Marx, K. (1967). Capital (3 vols.). New York: International Publishers.

CAPITAL, NEOCLASSICAL In the neoclassical tradition of economics, capital simply means any human-made means of production. Capital goods are products that are made to be used in the productive process. The term includes natural assets but their worth or value is given in terms of the use that might be made of them in a productive process. Thus, the capital value of a piece of land might increase as the potential for its use changes (through new techniques or legal arrangements, for example). Most firms will monitor capital consumption (i.e., the amount of capital that is used up in the productive process) and capital investment (investment in new means of production that might increase output and profits). An important difference between capital as ordinarily understood and human capital and social capital is that the latter two cannot be bought and sold in the same way. Human capital is the value of a person within production. The amount of capital that resides in a person is usually thought to depend on the amount of education and training the person has received. The more experienced a person and the more transferable his or her skills, the higher the person’s capital value and the greater the rewards he or she should be able to command in the employment market. However, wages and salaries often depend on noncapital assets such as gender, ethnicity, or contacts. Social capital has several meanings, but in this context, it usually means the amount of value inherent in a person given his or her contacts. If one has a set of friends or relatives who can help secure employment, then one’s social capital is higher than that of others lacking such contacts.

Capture Theory of Regulation

Sometimes being a member of a particular ethnic group might bring contacts within a specific industry where that group is heavily represented. Again, education might increase an individual’s capital through the networks he or she has made. Here, it might not be the precise level of education that is important but the school or university one has attended. This might create a set of networks both through contemporaries at the school and through alumni. The more capital a person has the more powerful the person might be; he or she is able to bargain for or buy more. Similarly, we might expect the greater the capital holdings of a firm relative to its debts and commitments, the more powerful it might be in relation to other firms and organizations. However, in neoclassical economics, the term power is rarely used. In contexts where power might be used, it is replaced by the resources of the agent. In other words, power is reduced to the agent’s capital in the three forms mentioned here. In that sense, within economics, capital is a measure of an agent’s (a person, a firm, or other collective entity) power (or power to). Or at least, capital is the measure of what an agent can bring to any contractual or bargaining situation. A second important meaning of the term capital is in terms of financial stocks. The stocks can provide an income through interest payments. In this sense, the capital of a firm is the initial amount of money with which it started plus the profits it has retained subsequently. This capital can be spent on future capital goods, held as balances, or used for credit. The capital market is the system through which firms gain capital in this financial sense. Firms sell shares to investors who may be paid dividends, perhaps annually, or can sell those shares for profit as the reputation of the firm increases their value. This capital appreciation is simply the increase in the value of the firm’s capital. Keith Dowding See also Capital, Marxist; Small Worlds, Power in; Social Capital

Further Readings Becker, G. (1975). Human capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Colman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology: Supplementary Volume, 94, S95–S120.

CAPTURE THEORY REGULATION

OF

The capture theory of regulation was first developed by the economist and 1982 Nobel laureate George Stigler. Regulation of industry is generally thought to be a government function designed to protect consumers by setting safety standards and ensuring good practice in production processes and sometimes through price regulation. Stigler and the public choice school suggest that regulators are often “captured” by the firms and industry they regulate and produce regulatory practices that are in the interests of the industry rather than the consumer. Although consumers want safe products and low cost, firms also have an interest in regulation, first to keep out competitors and second to build obsolescence into their products. If firms within an industry are protected from competition from new entrants, then they can charge higher prices. Firms have an incentive to lobby regulators to write regulations that will discourage new entrants into the industry, thus allowing established firms to act as a cartel. One way of discouraging new entrants is to have complex regulations. Furthermore, if the safety standards of products, such as gas boilers or cars, are continually being upgraded then the industry builds obsolescence into its products, ensuring a continual demand for new versions. Sam Peltzman’s model for capture theory reflects the competition between firms and consumers for the attention of politicians and state regulators. Consumers have voting power, and can demand the type of regulations they desire through the ballot box. Firms within an industry have a concentrated and high financial stake. Thus, they are prepared to spend large amounts of money lobbying regulators and politicians. Firms are also a source of expertise for the bureaucrats. Politicians will support consumer demands to the extent of their vote power, but financial contributions from industry to politicians can also buy vote power. Furthermore, consumer interests are diffuse—they

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make many demands on politicians—whereas the industry interests are concentrated. Thus, consumers face a greater collective action problem than do producers. This can lead to industry capture. Examples of capture found in the literature include the commercial airline industry in the United States. The Civil Aeronautics Board controlled price competition but allowed airlines to compete on non-price frills such as in-flight entertainment. After deregulation in the 1970s, the Federal Aviation Administration was also accused of aiding airlines rather than consumers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been accused of acting in the interests of pharmaceutical, agricultural, and health industries at the expense of consumers. The European Union is also accused of acting in the interests of industry rather than consumers. There has been a great deal of headline deregulation, which seems to undermine capture theory. However, bureaucracies do continue to regulate in quiet and unspectacular ways. It is difficult to judge how far these regulations really work in the interests of consumers and how far in those of the industries regulated. However, given the greater bargaining power of industry, the suspicion will always be that regulations exist for industry rather than consumers. Keith Dowding See also Business and Power; Collective Action Problem

Further Readings Peltzman. S. (1976). Towards a more general theory of regulation. Journal of Law and Economics, 19, 211–240. Stigler, G. R. (1971). The theory of economic regulation. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 2, 137–146.

CARR, E. H. (1892–1992) Edward Hallett (E. H.) Carr was one of the most brilliant British international relations scholars of the 20th century, and his strident views caused much controversy. He began his career as a diplomat in

1916, resigning in 1936 to become Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Relations at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Carr became interested in the Soviet Union as a diplomat, having been assigned in 1917 to the Northern desk that included dealings with Russia. He became convinced in 1919 that the Bolsheviks would win the Russian civil war and believed that for reasons of realpolitik Britain should not support anti-Bolshevik forces. At this time, he had little sympathy with Marxism or the Bolsheviks. One of his early books, Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (1931), was, as its title suggests, so far from being an apologia for Marxism as to cause him some later embarrassment; though from the depths of the 1930s Depression he thought it difficult to completely dismiss Marx’s view that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. Also during the early 1930s, Carr started to sympathize with the Soviet Union, largely because he admired Soviet efforts to industrialize and become a modern civilization. Carr started writing about Soviet and other international affairs in the 1930s, reviewing books and contributing articles to various journals. He argued that the Nazi regime was caused by the Treaty of Versailles and the intractable attitude of France and the other Western powers. His book The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (1939) defended appeasement as the only realistic policy. He attacked utopians who believed the League of Nations could provide a new international order. For these views, Carr became known as a realist thinker, though he also recognized that realism lacks goals and grounds for action. In Carr’s work, we can discern three important differences between realism and utopianism. First, utopians want a world of peace but do not consider the constraints on action properly. The realists understand that the world we live in is the product of a long chain of causation. Second, utopians derive their conclusions about what should be done from theory; realists from practice. For the realists, theory is derived from reality. Third, utopians tend to be intellectuals with book learning; realists tend to be diplomats and those who actually operate in the world of international relations. Finally, the utopian believes that ethics should guide policy, the realist that ethics is derived from power relations as they currently stand.

Cartwright, Dorwin

Making these distinctions, one can see how Marxism came to appeal to Carr, given his views on realism. Carr argued that the troubled times of the mid20th century were caused by structural political– economic problems and should not be blamed on individual people who lacked morals. He believed that differences between nations were best traced to the “haves” and “have-nots,” those with power in international affairs and those without, and not to democracies and nondemocracies. During World War II, Carr’s ideological views shifted to the left and his interest in the Soviet Union became admiration, reflected in leader columns he wrote for The Times. Immediately after the war, he argued that Western civilization was a sham and that totalitarian societies were more likely to succeed. Communist totalitarianism was the most successful and had the most progressive social and economic policies. His interest in communism and the Soviet Union led him to start his monumental 14-volume history of the Soviet Union, the first volume of which appeared in 1950 and the last in 1978. It still stands as an important work in Sovietology, though many commentators argue that Carr takes at face value far too many claims from Soviet sources that do not bear closer empirical scrutiny. These days Carr is best remembered for his short book derived from a series of Cambridge lectures entitled What Is History? that has become a key text in historiography. It is relativist in that it argues both that our morality has changed over time and that history is understood in terms of our own morality. Carr also argues against the idea of contingency in historical understanding, arguing instead for a strong form of determinism. Keith Dowding See also Agency; Agency–Structure Problem; Appeasement; League of Nations; Marx, Karl; Marxist Accounts of Power; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Cox, M. (Ed.). (2000). E. H. Carr: A critical appraisal. London: Palgrave. Jones, C. (1998). E. H. Carr and international relations: A duty to lie. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Dorwin Cartwright, in his presidential address to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, noted that social power, long the prerogative of political scientists and philosophers, was a sadly neglected variable in social psychology. As director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics, he encouraged and coordinated his colleagues and other social psychologists in clarifying and exploring the dynamics of social power. On completing his doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1940, Cartwright accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Iowa State University with Kurt Lewin, who was well known for his work in field theory. When the United States became an active participant in World War II, Cartwright accepted an appointment from Rensis Likert to move to Washington, D.C., to join Likert’s research program in evaluating opinions, attitudes, and behavior related to the war effort. Cartwright’s first major assignment was to conduct a series of national surveys evaluating the effectiveness of war bond drives. Related studies of group discussion and group decision indicated that, beyond informational appeals, the power of the group could play an important role in changing food habits, such as encouraging housewives to serve nutritious but less popular cuts of meat to help alleviate the wartime meat shortage. Later research indicated that in similar fashion, work group productivity could also be increased. After Lewin’s untimely death in 1947, Cartwright assumed directorship of the Research Center for Group Dynamics, which Lewin had established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and coordinated its relocation to the University of Michigan. There, Cartwright edited Field Theory in Social Science, a collection of important articles by Kurt Lewin. Cartwright also edited Studies in Social Power, which opened with his presidential address to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and included a series of theoretical works and experiments. His concluding chapter proposed a field theoretical conception of social power. Though the term social power was indeed neglected by social psychologists, many relevant

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variables had been investigated. This became more clear once social power was defined as the ability or potential of an influencing agent (O) to influence a change in a target (P). A substantial body of research on social influence on attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and behavior could now be examined in terms of the potential for such influence—social power. The studies of group norms and group decisions, as in the studies of food habits, or group decisions affecting level of worker productivity (John R. P. French and Lester Coch), represented the power of the group. Leadership could then be considered in terms of social power—the manner in which a leader might use his or her available resources to affect the beliefs and behavior of followers. Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph White illustrated this conception of power in experiments on effectiveness of democratic, autocratic, and laissez-faire leadership. Field studies of the way behavior patterns spread among boys in a camp setting (Ronald Lippitt, Norman Polanski, and Sidney Rosen) could be also be understood in terms of social power relationships. John R. P. French and Bertram Raven, as part of the Research Center for Group Dynamics program coordinated by Cartwright, developed their widely cited analysis of the bases of social power. Though Cartwright’s research and theory on social power were important in their own right, he is even better known for his significant role as an integrating force for social psychologists and others working in disparate areas, encouraging rigor in research and theory with applications to important social problems and issues. Bertram H. Raven See also Bases of Power; French, John R. P., Jr.; Lewin, Kurt, and Power; Raven, Bertram

Further Readings Cartwright, D. (1959). A field theoretical conception of power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 183–220). Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research. Cartwright, D. (1959). Power: A neglected variable in social psychology. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 1–14). Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research.

CASTE SYSTEM (INDIA) The traditional view of caste system in India is largely associated with the rituals and practices of Hindus, wherein social stratification is explained and justified in terms of purity and pollution. The concepts of purity and pollution are complex, but in general are interpreted in terms of deeds, occupation, language, dress patterns, and food habits. One can also distinguish between timed pollution—at birth and death—and internal and external pollution, which originates from either a polluting action or an object, and thus, there is a connection between ritual purity and matters of hygiene and sanitation. The caste system is an ancient institution with its origin in religious ideology; the social, economic, and political organization of the village; and rituals and traditions that evolved over centuries. The system is usually used to describe the whole varna-jati system where varna is a design to organize society, and jati refers to communities and subcommunities often identified with their respective job functions. There are four varnas—Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra—which represent the functional hierarchy among Hindus within the caste system. D. L. Sheth cites a 16th-century empirical work of Portuguese writer and trader Duarte Barbosa who identified caste in India as a hierarchy with the ritually purest Brahmans at the top and Shudras (untouchables) at the bottom; untouchability as linked to the idea of pollution; separation of castes by endogamy, occupation, and commensality; application of sanctions by castes to maintain customs and rules; and relationship of caste with the political organization. Although the traditional varna hierarchy has diminished over the years, and untouchability was abolished after India’s independence in 1947, a large number of jatis, despite having undergone changes over time, continue to have an important place and identity in the social structure of India. During British colonial rule in India, caste was seen in terms of local hierarchies that were embedded in the religious and cultural context of a region. By the end of British rule, the caste system had undergone many changes in the horizontal organization of castes occupying a similar location in different local hierarchies, and development of a

Caste System (India)

collective identity among lower castes that led them to question the traditional caste hierarchy through the modern ideas of justice and equality. During the first two decades after India’s independence, the Congress Party evolved a stable electoral base across castes by expressing political issues in terms of common priorities of economic development and national integration. A key factor in the success of the Congress Party was its strategy of forming a vertical link between the upper-caste national elite and the numerically strong but traditionally lower-caste landowning peasants who were typically located in the rural areas. Since the mid-1970s, the lower castes of peasants, artisans, and the ex-untouchables began to challenge the political domination of the Congress Party, which found it increasingly difficult to manage the aspirations and demand of these castes. This development was helped by the affirmative action policy of the state that provided quotas for government jobs and education seats for selected lower castes—scheduled castes (SCs)— and tribal communities—schedule tribes (STs)—as well as by the escalation of appeals made by many non-Congress parties that mobilized their support primarily on the basis of caste. Caste became highly politicized at the beginning of the 1980s with the extension of the benefits of affirmative action policy to other backward classes (OBCs). OBCs comprised a large number of backward castes that could organize themselves outside the Congress influence because of their numerical strength. In this changed scenario, Congress and other Indian national parties had to negotiate with the OBCs, SCs (and STs), or with the parties constituted by them for electoral alliances and support. This trend strengthened in the 1990s with the fragmentation of the Indian party system and the emergence of coalition politics that increased the political importance of caste and caste-based parties. Some scholars have described the rise of caste politics during this period as the second democratic upsurge that brought political leaders from lower and backward castes to the forefront of Indian politics. Increasingly, politicians in India tend to calculate along caste lines, and caste is an important criterion in choosing electoral candidates. The growth and modernization of the Indian economy in the 1990s has further weakened the traditional caste hierarchy that has been

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superimposed by the power system created by closely fought elections, a growing middle class, and the policies of affirmative action of the state. The net result of all these changes is that the ritually determined vertical social hierarchy has been overlaid by horizontally competing power blocs comprising heterogeneous castes that occupy different status across traditional hierarchies. An important feature of the current lower-caste agenda is the belief that the real improvement in their lives can come only through pursuit of political power. Thus, although the caste system in India was traditionally a graded hierarchy based on a purity– pollution scale, it has undergone many changes over the years. After India’s independence, there has been a de-ritualization of caste, and it has moved toward being a community based on affinity or kinship rather than representing a fixed hierarchy. The association of each caste with a distinct occupation has weakened considerably, and intercaste marriages across different ritual strata, even crossing the varna boundaries, are not uncommon. According to Depankar Gupta, the task of defining caste is not an easy one because many fundamental features of the caste system such as a uniform hierarchical ideology, occupational specialization, and the concepts of purity and pollution have greatly diminished in the contemporary Indian situation. Accordingly, his view is that caste should be described as discrete categories that incorporate multiple hierarchies that overlap and share many commonalities. In the current phase of coalition governments in India, the pursuit of social and political power dominates the caste agenda, and therefore, traditionally opposed caste groups find it possible to engage in opportunistic alliances and power-sharing arrangements in a volatile political situation. Rekha Diwakar See also Hierarchy; Ideology; Religious Power

Further Readings Dumont, L. (1980). Homo hierarchicus: The caste system and its implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1966) Gupta, D. (2000). Interrogating caste. New Delhi, India: Penguin.

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Sheth, D. L. (1999). Secularisation of caste and making of new middle class. Economic and Political Weekly, 34 (34/35, August 21–September 3), 2502–2510.

CASTELLS, MANUEL (1942– ) Manuel Castells is a Spanish sociologist who has worked in Spain, France, and the United States. His early work was a form of Marxist urban sociology that concentrated on the conception of collective consumption, and how that defines the needs of the urban masses and displaces conflict in society from its original Marxist productive site to the site of consumption. He pioneered the idea that social struggle concerned these welfare needs via state intervention in consumption. Castells saw that social movements within broad networks were the key to understanding the potential power of the underclass. His interest in networks led him in his later work to concentrate on information. Castells has a straightforward understanding of power: the ability of a social actor to impose his or her will over other social actors. Social actors are not individual human beings; their abilities are structural: that is, they lie in relational forces between actors. In Castell’s later work, these forces reside in new information technologies that have restructured the economy and society. He sees three sociological dimensions as important to understanding the structure of society: power, production, and experience. These create the organization of the economy and of society, which in turn define the ways in which people create their own identities through their work and through their consumption. Castells has always seen a struggle between individual identity and that of the collective—the manner in which individuals identify themselves with collective processes. In his later work, he sees this dichotomy as between the biological individual human being and the “Net,” the set of organizations that have transcended the traditional hierarchies of the state. In a radically changing cultural environment, people find it more difficult to affirm their individual identities in relation to a social identity. The media provide the social space where power is formulated. The development of interactive and horizontal forms of communication, notably through the Internet, has

created a form of mass individual communication as opposed to mass communication through institutional actors such as newspapers or TV channels. Castells sees this as a way in which social movements are able to gain power against the traditional forms of capitalist and state forces. He claims that the mass media and horizontal communication are converging, creating a historically new space of communication that can transform society. Castells’s work is bound up with traditional notions of power through interests and identity, through the importance of collective action through networks of social movements (which themselves bring individual identity), and by the possibilities of transforming society through those social movements. He has been an extremely influential sociologist in both the urban and communication literatures. Keith Dowding See also Globalization; Governmentality; Marxist Accounts of Power; Relational Power

Further Readings Castells, M. (1977). The urban question: A Marxist approach. London: Edward Arnold. Stalder, F. (2006). Manuel Castells and the theory of the network society. Oxford, UK: Polity Press.

CAUSAL THEORIES

OF

POWER

There are key similarities between what is ordinarily considered an ascription of social power and that which is considered under the more general rubric of a “cause.” At one end of the historical scale, Thomas Hobbes asserted, “Power and Cause are the same thing.” At the other end, Herbert Simon asserted that we can substitute the locution “i has power over j” with “i’s behavior causes j’s behavior,” and William Riker argued that power and causality are really two sides of the same coin, so that we can delete the concept of power from the vocabulary of social science and political philosophy. These claims are not surprising because in social contexts we generally use the terms power and

Causal Theories of Power

cause to refer to circumstances related to the potential or actual “inducement of change” or of “making things happen” by some agent or group of agents against a set of known background conditions and regularities. That is, we are concerned with an asymmetric relation between two distinct events in the same time series, in which one ancestral event, an action on the part of some agent (or group of agents) has the efficacy to produce, or be part of the production, of another, the effect (which may or may not be the response of another agent or group of agents). If a chairperson of a committee has a casting vote and breaks a tie that leads to the acceptance of a new policy, we can say that the chair “induced a change” or “made things happen” and thus “exercised his or her power” or “was a causal factor” for the outcome. If there are good reasons to believe that the committee vote will be tied, we say that the chairperson has the power to force the outcome in which the policy is approved. Similarly, if j alters his or her course of action of getting into his or her car by instead handing the keys to i who is pointing a gun at j’s head, we say that i had power over j because the latter did something he or she would not have otherwise done. We say i had power over j if he or she caused j to act in a particular manner; we can rewrite this as i “induced a change” (of j’s behavior) or could be said to have “made things happen” (the change of j’s behavior or j’s performance or nonperformance of some specific action).

The Equivalence Thesis In very broad terms, then, when we say that an agent was causal for some state-of-affair x or an agent has, had, or exercised his power with respect to x, we are suggesting some form of dependence between the agent’s behavior and x. Causal theories of power are those theories that take the dependency relations of “power’” to be equivalent to, or a subset of, “causal” relations. It is straightforward to show that the equivalence thesis is untenable. First, we need to be clear about the general nature of the causal relation that a causal theory of power refers to. When we say that c is a cause of e, we mean one of two things. We may be referring to a regularity that exemplifies a “covering law” and takes the form of “drinking a gallon of wine causes drunkenness.”

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This says that whenever a specific quantity of wine is consumed, drunkenness will follow, given a set of background conditions. Alternatively, by a cause, we may be referring to a particular or singular event, such as “Mack’s drinking a gallon of wine was a cause of his drunkenness.” Here, no “covering law” is implied, but rather, the term cause is used to refer to a particular contingency, the occurrence of which is a departure from the normal or expected course of events. A causal theory of power refers to this second sense of cause. Not every piece of behavior that can be said to be a cause of some event can be said to be an exercise of power. If I accidentally slipped on the ice and knocked you over with the result that you are injured, we would say that I caused the injury, but not that I exercised my power to bring about your injury or that I exercised my power over you. A defender of the equivalence thesis could reply here that although this is true, equivalence could be restored for a subclass of events that captures the way in which we ordinarily use the term power. Slipping on the ice lacks a defining feature of power: “getting what you want.” The natural move here is to constrain power to potential or actual causal relations that exhibit some further behavioral characteristic. One route is to take Bertrand Russell’s famous dictum that power is the “production of intended effects”—which is loosely the idea of “getting what you want”—and say that power and cause are equivalents if the agent had intended the state of affairs and was a causal factor for it.

Contingent Dependency: The “But For” Test But this move will also run into difficulties for reasons related to the precise nature of the causal relation for singular events, never mind the problems of intentionality. To see this, we need to add some precision to the dependency relation that is used to define singular causation. For the sake of argument, let us adopt a very general theory of theory of singular causation that is used in law, known as the NESS test (it has the advantage of getting around the quandaries of overdetermination). This test is a form of “contingent dependency” and says that c is a cause or causal factor of e if c is at least a necessary element of a sufficient set of conditions for e. It is a nested version

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of the more standard “but for test” for singular causation, which says that c is a cause or causal factor of e if, “but for” the occurrence of c, e would not have occurred. That is, the NESS test says that but for the presence of c, the particular set of conditions containing c would not be sufficient for e. To reject the equivalence thesis for intended effects we need to find a simple and intuitive example where an agent’s behavior can be said to be a causal factor by the NESS test but we would not say that the agent exercised any power in bringing about the outcome. Consider the following scenario. Victim is held up in his or her car by Assassin1, who ties Victim up and locks Victim in his or her car. Together with Assassin2, Assassin1 pushes the car over the cliff, killing Victim. Assassin1 is sufficient for holding up Victim and pushing the car over the cliff. Assassin2 cannot prevent Assassin1 killing Victim. To make matters more concrete, suppose that it requires at least 2 units of force to push Victim’s car over the cliff. Suppose further that Assassin1 has the physical strength to push with 0, 1, 2, or 3 units of force, while Assassin2 can only push with 0 or 1 unit of force. Finally, suppose Assassin1 and Assassin2 push the car over the cliff with 3 units and 1 unit of force, respectively. Now, supposing that the force of Assassin1 can be disaggregated into 0, 1, 2, and 3 units, then there exists a set of events such that Assassin2’s actual action of pushing with 1 unit of force is a NESS condition, namely, the combination with Assassin1’s 1 unit of force. For this argument, we can say that Assassin2 made a causal contribution to Victim’s death, which Assassin2 intended, but it would be inappropriate to say that Assassin2 exercised any power, either with respect to Victim’s death or over Victim. Power clearly requires more: Assassin1 would seem to be powerful because he or she can force Victim’s death and can prevent it. In contrast, Assassin2 can neither force Victim’s death nor prevent it. Power appears to require that the agent has an action that can contribute to x and to not-x.

Power and Causation The question, then, is what is the appropriate causal relation for describing social power in a generic sense (power to x or power over x) that

picks up the idea of being able to “get what you want” as well as “forcing” (x and not-x). Some writers have suggested that with respect to x, power requires that an agent have an action that is necessary condition for x, that is, the agent can force not-x but not x itself; others suggest that the agent have an action that is a sufficient condition, that is, the agent can force x but not necessarily not-x; and others postulate necessity and sufficiency, that is, the agent can force x and not-x. Each of these is too strong. Necessity fails because it means that two assassins, each of whom could kill their common victim, have no power over the victim or the power to realize his or her death because the other assassin could do it; the same holds true for necessity and sufficiency. Sufficiency fails because it says that a committee member with a veto has no power even though he or she can block x, that is, force not-x. The solution would seem to lie with a subset of NESS conditions. Max Weber’s definition of power gives the hint. In his now canonical definition, “power is the chance of a man or number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action.” Consider a three-member simple-majority committee and suppose that for some proposal x all three members vote in favor. The NESS test attributes a causal contribution for x to all three members on the grounds that the set of three “yes” votes can be decomposed into sets of two “yes” votes in which each “yes” is necessary for the set of votes to be sufficient for x. But there is also an additional property, given the actions of voting “yes” and “no”—any two-member coalition could force either x or not-x. In other words, the voters have power and have exercised this power because they have the chance to force their desired outcome in a communal action with others—a coalition—against the resistance of others participating in the action (in this case, committee voting). Note that to have power in this Weberian sense means that the agent must have an action that is necessary for the coalition to be able to force an outcome; the agent does not have to be in a position to contribute to forcing all outcomes. The difference from the assassin example should be clear. In the committee case, each voter is a necessary member of a coalition that can force an outcome; in that sense, they have an action that is

Causal Theories of Power

a necessary causal condition for a coalition of agents to be able to force an outcome. This is why we would say they have power, even if it is contingent. In the assassin case, Assassin2 has no such ability: Assassin2 can only perform an action that is necessary for a set of conditions to be causally efficacious but does not have an action or set of actions that would make him or her an indispensable member of a coalition that can force a particular outcome. Only Assassin1 has this. If an agent is an indispensable member of a coalition that has power, that agent has either made a causal impact on the state of affairs or has the potential to do so. But as the assassin example shows, having a causal impact does not imply power. So a causal theory of power must build on a subset of causal relations. A theory of power that matches this structure is Alvin Goldman’s. Although he expressed the view that causal terminology is likely to obscure the crucial questions of power, he presented a framework that is implicitly based on the NESS test. Goldman distinguishes between three categories of power: individual, collective, and social. In rough outline, an individual i has individual power with respect to x if and only if i has an action (or sequence of actions) such that the performance of this action (or sequence of actions) under the stated or implied conditions would result in x but would not so result if i had not performed this action (or sequence of actions). This definition states that individual power is equivalent to the case of an agent performing an action that is a sufficient condition for x. A collection of individuals T (a coalition) has collective power with respect to x if the members of T each have an action (or sequence of actions) such that if the performance of these actions (or sequence of actions) under the stated or implied conditions would result in x, but would not if any member of T did not perform this action (or sequence of actions). An individual i has social power with respect to x if i is a member of T that has social power with respect to x. In the NESS structure, i has individual power with respect to x if i has an action that is a NESS condition on its own (and is a one-member coalition that can force x), and i has social power with respect to x if i has an action such that i is an indispensable member of a coalition that can force x, which means that i is a NESS condition for x.

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Causal theories of power not only come in terms of dependency relations. They can also be framed probabilistically. Robert Dahl’s theory of power is the prime example. Starting from the intuitive idea that “i has power over j to the extent that he can get j to do something that j would not otherwise do,” he then fleshes this out in probabilistic terms: i’s power is the difference in the probability of an event, given certain actions by i, and its probability given no such action by i. That is, i has power with respect to x to the extent that i can perform an action that raises the probability of x. This is Patrick Suppe’s well-known definition of a cause as a probability-raising event. Despite the intuitive appeal of this approach to causation, it suffers a fundamental weakness: not all probability-raising events should count as causes because it is possible to raise the probability of an event via an unactualized event. Consider two terrorists A and B fighting for the same cause who each plant an indeterministic bomb (a and b) on two different airplanes. Bomb a goes off, but bomb b does not. As a result, a government that is affected by the disaster changes its policy. Even though bomb b raised the probability of the policy change, it certainly did not cause the policy change. Can it be said that terrorist B exercised power with respect to the policy change? If yes, then we break the link between power and actual causation; if no, then we break the link to potential causal effects. It is probably not far off the mark to say that any theory of power entails a theory of causation in some form. To name a few: classical voting power indices such as the Banzhaf Index or the Shapley– Shubik Index can be defined in terms of NESS conditions or in terms of probability raising. This is not surprising: we use the concepts of power and cause to capture the generic phenomena of differencemaking in social interactions. Here a cautionary remark is in order: although power clearly requires a form of difference making, not all difference making that falls under the rubric of causality is power. Causes as difference makers can also be functional relationships between two variables as in the sense of causation as a regularity expressing a covering law. In these cases, if some social variable x, is very sensitive to movements in some other variable y, this does not by itself express the power of y to move x or the power of y over x in a social sense. This is a “marginality” conception of causation and

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has been implicitly used recently by some formal theorists of power, but it is not clear that “power” is what is expressed in the models if by power we mean some idea of “getting what you want” in the face of a “clash of wills.” Matthew Braham See also Causation; Dahl, Robert A.

Strict necessity C is necessary for the occurrence of x whenever x occurs. Strong necessity C was necessary for x on the particular occasion. Weak necessity C was a necessary element of some set of existing conditions that was sufficient for the occurrence of x.

For sufficiency: Further Readings Braham, M. (2007). Social power and social causation: Towards a formal synthesis. In M. Braham & F. Steffen (Eds.), Power: Conceptual, formal, and applied dimensions. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. Braham, M., & van Hees, M. (2009). Degrees of causation. Erkenntnis, 73, 323–343. Dahl, R. A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioral Science, 2, 201–215. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

CAUSATION Causation is a concept that is at the heart of the subject of social power, of social relations more generally, and of questions of legal and moral responsibility and prediction in the social and natural sciences. In very general terms, to ask for the cause of some particular event is to ask what brought it about. That is, a cause is a relation between events, processes, or entities in the same time series, in which one event, process, or entity, C, has the efficacy to produce or be part of the production of another, the effect (or outcome) x. C is causal for x if C somehow makes a difference to the occurrence of x. In social contexts, C is an action performed by a person. Arguments among philosophers about what actually constitutes this efficacy—or “making a difference”—are often concerned with whether the efficacy is a necessity requirement (if x occurred, then C preceded it) or sufficiency requirement (if C occurs, then x will follow) or both. There are three senses for each of these. In descending order of stringency, for necessity we have

Strict sufficiency occurrence of x.

C is sufficient by itself for the

Strong sufficiency C was a necessary element of some set of existing conditions that was sufficient for the occurrence of x. Weak sufficiency C was an element of some set of existing conditions that was sufficient for the occurrence of x.

There are three remarks to be made here. First, we can instantly dispense with the concept of weak sufficiency for the simple reason that it is trivially satisfied by any condition C by simply adding C to an already existing set of conditions that is sufficient for x, although C is irrelevant as regards x. That is, weak sufficiency can fail to satisfy the simple counterfactual test of efficacy known as the “but for” test in a very unacceptable way. According to this test, C was a cause of some result x only if but for the occurrence of C, then x would not have occurred. Second, if C is strictly necessary for x, then C should be ascribed causal status for x, and if C is strongly necessary for x, then C should also be ascribed causal status for x. In both cases, C satisfies the “but for” test. Yet strict necessity is inadequate to cover causal relations in general because it will often not be fulfilled. It would mean that evidence of an electrical short-circuit that combined with other conditions and resulted in a house burning down would not qualify for causal status given that it is not true that for all instances of a house burning down there must have been an electrical short-circuit. Strict sufficiency is also inadequate because it too may fail to exist: it is rare that a single condition C is sufficient for x. Strict sufficiency also rules out ascribing the electrical short-circuit causal status for the house

Causation

burning down given that it alone cannot lead to the fire; the presence of flammable material, and so forth, is also called for. Moreover, that C may be strictly sufficient for x and was present on the occasion of x’s occurrence does not imply that C actually caused x; x may have brought about by another strictly sufficient condition that was also present on the occasion. Third, although strong necessity is ostensibly an attractive candidate for ascribing causality, it too can easily crumble in cases of causal overdetermination. These are those circumstances in which the causes of an event are cumulatively more than sufficient to generate the effect. That is, there exist situations in which a strongly necessary condition will fail to exist. Causal overdetermination comes in two broad types: duplicative and preemptive causation. A case of duplicative causation is one in which two similar and independent causal processes C1 and C2, each of which is sufficient for the same effect x, may culminate in x at the same time. It will be best to turn quickly to some examples of human action. Assassin case 1. Assassin1 and Assassin2 independently and simultaneously aim and shoot at Victim such that each shot is sufficient to kill Victim at exactly the same moment.

Thus, neither assassin was strongly necessary for Victim’s death because, other things being equal, if either had not fired his shot, Victim would have died anyway from the shot fired by the other assassin. Although one could argue that this example is intuitively resolved by saying that a cause is either strictly sufficient, strictly necessary, or strongly necessary, this will not work for the following case.

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of Victim’s car by any assassin alone is neither strictly necessary nor strictly sufficient nor strongly necessary for Victim’s death. The absence of strict sufficiency and necessity is obvious: no assassin pushing alone can kill Victim, and no particular assassin must push together with another assassin to have Victim’s car shoved over the cliff. To determine strong necessity, we again apply the but for test by holding the pushing by the other assassins constant and ask whether the car would have gone over the cliff killing Victim had the third assassin not been pushing. The answer is affirmative because it takes the pushing of at least two assassins for this to happen, and because under the circumstance this is true, then the car would have gone over the cliff and killed Victim. Thus, the pushing by the third assassin cannot be attributed as having causal status for Victim’s death. The same holds true for the pushing by the other two assassins. We can now turn to preemptive causation. This is the case in which an effect x is brought about by some actual sufficient condition(s) C1 such that had C1 not occurred, then x would have been brought about by some alternative sufficient condition(s) C2. There are two subcases of preemptive causation: (1) The alternative set of conditions C2 emerged after C1 brought about x. (2) The alternative set of conditions C2 did not emerge because C1 emerged and brought about x. The canonical example of type (i) preemptive causation is Assassin case 3. Assassin1 shoots and kills Victim who is embarking on a trek across the desert just as Victim was about to take a swig from his water bottle, which was poisoned by Assassin2.

Assassin case 2. Victim is held up in Victim’s car by Assassin1, Assassin2, and Assassin3, who together tie Victim up and lock Victim in his or her car and then push the car over a cliff, killing Victim. It is sufficient for Victim’s death that only two assassins hold up Victim and push the car over the cliff.

Here strong necessity is not correct given the failure of the but for test to allocate causal status to either assassin: Assassin1 cannot be said to have caused Victim’s death on the occasion in question because had Assassin1 not shot and killed Victim, Assassin2’s poisoning would have, given that Victim was just about to take a swig from his water bottle, and Assassin2 cannot be said to have caused Victim’s death because it was in fact Assassin1’s shot that did it and not Assassin2’s poisoning of Victim’s water. A type (2) case is

To simplify matters, we need only focus on the pushing of Victim’s car over the cliff. The pushing

Assassin case 4. Assassin1 shoots and kills Victim, and Assassin2 decides not to poison Victim’s

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water bottle (but would have had Assassin1 not shot Victim).

Here strong necessity is not required because Assassin1 cannot be considered as having caused Victim’s death on the occasion in question because had Assassin1 not shot and killed Victim, then Assassin2 would have poisoned Victim’s water; yet Assassin2 cannot be attributed as causal for Victim’s death because Assassin2 did not in fact poison the water; he or she only would have done if Assassin1 had not shot Victim. From the six criteria, we have still to deal with the equivalent criteria of weak necessity and strong sufficiency. These were introduced by H. L. A. Hart, A. M. Honoré, John Mackie, and Richard Wright in various different forms to deal with causal ascriptions when an outcome is a result of a complex of conditions. The idea behind the weak necessity/strong sufficiency requirement is that to be ascribed causal status for an event x, a prior event C need not be the cause as in the sense of it being the single sufficient condition present on the occasion or a cause in the senses of strict or strong necessity, but merely shown to be a “causally relevant condition” of x. That is, weak necessity/strong sufficiency drops what can actually be considered a deeply rooted presupposition that to be ascribed causal status for x C must be directly related to x in that any state of affairs is brought about by some singularly identifiable prior event. In its place comes a conception of causality that allows for an indirect relation between a prior event C and its consequence x; but the indirect relation still requires a necessity requirement. This is obtained by combining a sufficiency and a necessity requirement in a set-based framework. That is, weak necessity/strong sufficiency means it need not be the case that a single condition is sufficient for x but that a set of conditions be sufficient (strict sufficiency is then the special case of a singleton set) on this occasion and combines this with a necessity requirement in that the members of this set are necessary for the set to be sufficient—that is, the set of conditions is minimally sufficient (MSS). Mackie denoted a test of weak necessity/strong sufficiency by the acronym INUS: “an insufficient but necessary part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the result.” In

Wright’s simpler mnemonic: “a necessary element of a sufficient set” or NESS. The attractive feature of weak necessity/strong sufficiency is that it is general enough to cover strict and strong necessity and strict sufficiency: (a) if C is a member of every MSS for any instance of x, then C is strictly necessary for x; (b) if C was a member of every MSS for a given instance of x then C is strongly necessary for x; and (c) if C is sufficient for one MSS, then C is strictly sufficient for x. To see how NESS works in cases of duplicative causation the idea is to resolve the excess sufficient set into its component MSSs. Consider again Assassin case 1. Each assassin’s act of shooting is a necessary element of some minimally sufficient set and therefore the behavior of each marksperson can be attributed causal status for Victim’s death because the behavior of each marksperson was necessary to complete a set of conditions sufficient for Victim to die, and each of these conditions was present on the occasion in question. In Assassin case 2, we see that given that it is true that the pushing of the car by each of the three assassins belongs to at least one MSS consisting of pushing by two assassins and each of these MSSs was present on the occasion, then the pushing by each assassin qualifies for causal status for Victim’s death. It is similarly easy to disentangle the cases of preemptive causation. Here, the idea is to check if a particular act is an element of an MSS that forms a preempting cause. In Assassin case 3, Assassin1’s act of shooting is a necessary element of some MSS and therefore a cause, although Assassin2’s poisoning of the water is not because although poisoned water would be sufficient for killing Victim, in the circumstances it cannot be an actual sufficient condition because Victim has already been killed by Assassin1’s shot. In Assassin case 4, Assassin1’s act of shooting is a cause of Victim’s death, but Assassin2’s intention to poison Victim’s water is not. What the NESS condition does in cases of preemptive causation is to evaluate the claim that C1 could not be a causal factor of x because of the existence of an alternative cause C2 that either emerged or could have emerged subsequent to the occurrence of C1. According to the NESS test, this fact does not vitiate the causal status of C1. Note that the NESS test only passes a judgment about the causal status of an agent’s action and not its moral status.

Central Intelligence Agency

Finally, we should consider the important question of how a power ascription is related to causation. Here, there is a fair amount of debate but little is settled. One strand of thought, going back to Thomas Hobbes, considers an ascription of power and cause as being one and the same; a second strand of thought considers a power ascription to be a subset of causal ascriptions; and a third strand considers power and causal ascriptions to be merely overlapping categories. Probably the most accurate position is the second one. This can be seen with another example: Assassin case 5. Victim is held up in Victim’s car by Assassin1 who ties and locks Victim up in his or her car. Together with Assassin2, Assassin1 pushes the car over the cliff killing Victim. Assassin1 is sufficient for holding up Victim and pushing the car over the cliff. Assassin2 cannot prevent Assassin1 from killing Victim.

To make this case more concrete, suppose that it requires at least 2 units of force to push Victim’s car over the cliff. Suppose further that Assassin1 has the physical strength to push with 0, 1, 2, or 3 units of force, whereas Assassin2 can only push with 0 or 1 unit of force. Finally, suppose both assassins each apply 1 unit of force. In this circumstance, each assassin can be said to have made a causal contribution to Victim’s death because each contributed an action to an MSS and therefore each action satisfies the NESS test. However, Assassin1 clearly possesses a characteristic that Assassin2 does not: Assassin1 possesses an action that satisfies the Weberian definition of power in that Assassin1 can force the outcome that Victim lives or dies despite any resistance that Assassin2 may put up. Hence, the difference between an ascription of power and one of causal contribution lies in that power demands reference to the potential of overcoming resistance, but a causal ascription does not. Thus, we can say that if a person exercised power then the person was a causal condition for an outcome but the converse is not true. Game-theoretically, the difference between an ascription of causal contribution and power lies in the objects of analysis. To say that an agent made a causal contribution to some outcome is to say that an agent performed an action that was a necessary element of an event, the action profile, that

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was sufficient for the outcome; whereas to say that an agent had power with respect to some outcome is to say that the agent was a necessary member of a coalition that is sufficient for the outcome. The set-inclusion proposition goes through because if a coalition is sufficient for an outcome it means that the members of the coalition have an action profile that is sufficient for the outcome: however, the fact that an agent contributes an action to a minimally sufficient action profile does not imply that this agent is necessary for some subset of agents that can form an action profile to bring about the outcome. Matthew Braham See also Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Weber, Max

Further Readings Braham, M. (2007). Social power and social causation: Towards a formal synthesis. In M. Braham & F. Steffen (Eds.), Power: Conceptual, formal, and applied dimensions. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. Hart, H. L. A., & Honoré, A. M. (1959). Causation in the law. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mackie, J. L. (1974). The cement of the universe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wright, R. (1985). Causation in tort law. California Law Review, 73, 1735–1828.

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established under the 1947 National Security Act in response to the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Its statutory functions were to advise the National Security Council (NSC) on intelligence matters, to “correlate and evaluate” intelligence information from across the U.S. government, and to perform unspecified other tasks that the NSC judged could be “more effectively accomplished centrally.” Before the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, the CIA was headed by the director of Central Intelligence (DCI), who was also responsible for coordinating the intelligence community (IC), that is, all of the various departmental intelligence agencies.

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Under the 2004 Act, which was prompted by the failure of the intelligence community to detect the impending 9/11 terrorist attacks, the “community” role was delegated to a new director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the CIA is now headed by a director, appointed by the president. The CIA, and its short-lived predecessor, the 1946 Central Intelligence Group (CIG), were originally intended to be administrative and analytical staff organizations. Covert operational capability developed as something of an afterthought when CIG took on the residual elements of the wartime Office of Strategic Services because of a lack of viable alternatives. In 1952, the CIA’s covert capability was consolidated as the Directorate of Plans (DP), redesignated the Directorate of Operations (DO) in 1972 and the National Clandestine Service (NCS) in 2005. The analytical components became the Directorate of Intelligence in 1952 and have remained that since. Despite the DO’s improvised origins, the 1976 Church inquiry noted that between 1962 and 1970, the DO alone accounted for 52% of the CIA’s budget and 55% of its personnel. Most of this was, however, human intelligence rather than special activities, although public and press attention over the years has typically focused on the latter. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, the CIA placed steadily less emphasis on large covert actions and, as documentary releases clearly show (albeit contrary to conventional wisdom), had no role in the coup that toppled the regime of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1972. During the 1970s, the DO lost about one third of its staff with the end of the Vietnam conflict and an increased emphasis on analysis and technical collection methods, although numbers were partially restored during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. After the cold war, the CIA experienced another sharp reduction of approximately 25% in overall funds and humanpower. Contrary to popular perceptions, the CIA does not produce national intelligence estimates such as that on Iraqi nonconventional weapons in October 2002. These are generated by an interagency body involving all 14 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community called the National Intelligence Council. Philip H. J. Davies See also Espionage; Intelligence

Further Readings Andrew, C. (1995). For the president’s eyes only: Secret intelligence and the American presidency from Washington to Bush. London: HarperCollins. Darling, A. B. (1990). The Central Intelligence Agency: An instrument of government, to 1950. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Richelson, J. T. (2008). The U.S. intelligence community (5th ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

CHICKEN GAMES The game of chicken refers to (a) a stylized conflict situation, (b) a 2  2 game matrix that provides a simplified representation of this conflict situation, and (c) a class of real-world conflict situations for which both (a) and (b) provide oversimplified but perhaps enlightening models. In the stylized conflict situation, two juvenile delinquents position their cars at opposite ends of a deserted stretch of road. With their respective gang members and girlfriends looking on, they drive toward each other at high speed, each straddling the center line. The first driver to lose his nerve and swerve into his own lane to avoid a crash is revealed to be “chicken” and loses the game, and the driver with stronger nerves is victorious. If both swerve, the outcome is a draw. If both drive straight, the outcome is mutual disaster. The game matrix for this specific stylized conflict is shown on the left in Figure 1. Many real-world conflict situations in which each side has a general choice between “standing firm” or “giving in”—for example, international crises, hostage-holding negotiations, industrial conflicts, and bargaining situations generally— have characteristics of the game of chicken, as shown in the more generic matrix on the right in Figure 1, in which P ([Mutual] Punishment) > L (Lose)  C (Compromise)  W (Win). Chicken, probably the most famous 2  2 game other than prisoner’s dilemma, has the following properties. Neither player has a dominant strategy; for each player, the best choice is to do the opposite of what the other player does, and each asymmetric pair of choices is a (Nash) equilibrium. But each equilibrium is a victory for one player over the other, with the victory going to the more reckless

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Game matrix for chicken: (a) specific; (b) generic

player. Finally, although compromise is the symmetric outcome best for both players, it is not an equilibrium, and the apparent willingness of one player to compromise encourages the other to stand firm. In short, chicken is a particularly nasty game. Various signals, tactics, and strategic moves can enhance the bargaining power of a player and his or her probability of victory. If one player can make an absolutely credible commitment to stand firm, the other is compelled to give in. Likewise, if one player can convey the impression that he or she is crazy, reckless, stumble-down drunk, and so on (perhaps by actually being so), the other may likewise be compelled to give in. Conversely, if one player publicly attributes rationality, caution, or cowardice to the other, or if the former claims that he or she believes that his or her car is crash-proof (or that martyrdom is a ticket to heaven), that player thereby conveys to the other player that the first player believes he or she can safely stand firm. More perversely, if a player takes some visible action that actually increases the player’s cost of giving in, he or she thereby makes it more likely that the other player must give in. For example, hostage holders can kill one or a few hostages, so that they must expect a worse penalty if they give in and are captured. Real-world conflicts play out through a chronological sequence of moves not represented in the 2  2 chicken matrix. In such a sequence, each player can try to displace onto the other the “last clear chance” to avoid mutual disaster, forcing the other player either to give in or “start the shooting,” anticipating that the other player will be unwilling to do the latter and will therefore give in. Finally, a player can explicitly stake his or her future reputation on standing firm in the present conflict. Thus, although the repeated play of a prisoner’s dilemma can induce mutual cooperation, the expectation of

repeated play of the game of chicken increases the incentive for each player to stand firm to gain a reputation that will intimidate later opponents. Nicholas R. Miller See also Bargaining; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Prisoner’s Dilemma

Further Readings Kahn, H. (1965). On escalation: Metaphors and scenarios. New York: Praeger. Schelling, T. C. (1966). Arms and influence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Snyder, G. H. (1971). “Prisoner’s dilemma” and “chicken” models in international politics. International Studies Quarterly, 4, 66–103.

CIVIL WAR Civil wars occur between different groups within a nation-state so that one group can take control of the apparatus of the state. Sometimes groups that want to secede part of the country from the nation-state also fight conflicts described as civil war. To distinguish civil wars from other disputes, conflicts, or terrorism within a state, most academics recognize that at least 1,000 casualties are required for a conflict to be termed a civil war. The number of conflicts deemed civil wars in the 20th century is much higher than in the preceding century, almost certainly because of the increase in the number of nation-states and because of the end of colonial empires in Africa and Asia. The cold war has also been a factor. Academics studying civil wars have examined factors that are correlated with their onset and

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duration. These factors include aspects of the society in which civil war occurs and factors external to the country. Generally, we might see these factors as incentives to fight or not: the greater the costs of war, the lower the likelihood they will occur; the greater the benefits, both to participants and to outsiders, the more likely they are. Internal factors include levels of education, per capita income, and economic growth. The first two factors are related to the potential costs of civil war to participants. Better-off people have more to lose in conflict than do poorer people. Education, especially higher secondary school enrolment for boys, has been shown to be significantly related to civil war. Most soldiers are young men: those with higher levels of education have greater economic prospects and are less likely to be prepared to fight. Higher economic growth also increases future expectations, thus lowering the probability of conflict. Lower per capita income and lower growth might also be signs of grievance leading to higher probabilities of conflict. However, measures of economic inequality do not correlate with the probability of civil war, which suggests grievance over inequalities is not a straightforward cause. Another cause of grievance is ethnic conflict, especially if one ethnic group feels it is being exploited by another. Again, economic growth might alleviate this tension, but not necessarily. The findings here are complex. Ethnic heterogeneity is not itself correlated with the probability of civil war; ethnic dominance, however, is. If one ethnic group comprises more than 50% of the population and there are large ethnic minorities, then civil war is more likely. There have to be two sides in a civil war, and forming coalitions of smaller groups against a dominant one can be problematic, as the dominant group can make side payments to keep some groups on its side. Furthermore, it is not always the largest ethnic group that is the dominant group controlling the state, which increases the risk of civil war further. The size of the population also increases the risk of civil war, though the smaller the population is, the less the likelihood of any conflict reaching the 1,000-casualty threshold. There is also a heritage effect, in that the longer since the last civil war, the lower the probability is of another one. Past grievance, especially from the losers, increases the probability of armed conflict occurring again.

Outside factors include large numbers of one ethnic group living outside the country. Such a diaspora can fuel discontent and form both a source of money and organization to fund armies. Sometimes disaffected peoples live in a country and plot destabilization from bases outside it. It has also been found that a high proportion of primary commodities in national exports increase the risk of civil war. The likely explanation is that it is easier to take control of primary industries than of manufacturing industry, and war creates less disruption of production. Furthermore, sourcing primary commodities means that outside interests, both countries and, at times, business interests, can fund and support one side or another in a civil conflict. The cold war also exacerbated civil wars, particularly because it coincided with countries gaining self-rule from colonial empires. In civil conflicts, both sides gained support from either the West or the Soviet bloc and received funding, arms, and training. This encouraged the onset of civil wars and increased the wars’ duration. The average number of civil wars per year increased dramatically from 1945 to the late 1990s from 2 or 3 to more than 40, though the number has fallen since the end of the cold war to around 30 per year in the new century. However, the average duration of civil wars has continued to rise from about a year to about 16 years by the beginning of the 21st century. In addition to outside forces backing the two sides, their abilities to self-fund through trade is important, so again each side being able to control mineral or agricultural (often illicit drugs) commodities is important to a civil conflict’s duration. In contrast, in the 19th century, the major European powers tended to quell civil conflict (in Europe at least) by all backing one side, almost always the government in power at the time. Nineteenth-century civil wars lasted longer in Latin America (though they did not always result in the 1,000 deaths needed to enter the statistics). Keith Dowding See also Coalition Theory; Military in Government

Further Readings Collier, P., & Sambukas, N. (Eds.). (2005). Understanding civil war. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Clegg, Stewart Fearon, J. D. (2004). Why do some civil wars last longer than others? Journal of Peace Research, 41, 275–301.

CLAUSEWITZ, CARL (1780–1831)

VON

Prussian general and military thinker, whose posthumous book On War has become the most respected military classic, Carl von Clausewitz’s ideas were shaped by the coming together of two revolutions that dominated his life and times: the French Revolution and the Romantic reaction against the ideas of the Enlightenment. Joining the Prussian army at the age of 12, he took part in the invasion of France in 1793 and participated in Prussia’s disastrous defeat before Napoleon at Jena-Auerstädt (1806). Then, in an effort to rescue Prussia from the verge of extinction, he became one of the young members of the Prussian reform movement, headed in the army by his mentor, war minister Gerhard von Scharnhorst. The reformers traced the roots of French military power to the political and social revolution that had given the French state the legitimacy and means to harness the whole nation—fired with civic and patriotic energies—to the cause of war. In the teeth of oligarchic opposition, they worked for a social and political reform of Prussia as the only means for reviving its great-power status in the age of mass social participation. A fervent German nationalist and Prussian patriot, Clausewitz shared Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s admiration for Niccolò Machiavelli’s elevation of the patriotic cause above all else, the concept of power as the paramount political factor, and rejection of moral considerations in the anarchic international arena. Resigning the Prussian service for a while to join the Russian army to fight Napoleon in 1812, Clausewitz and his fellow-reformers saw their aspirations fulfilled with Napoleon’s downfall (1813– 1815). However, once the danger had gone, their program faced even greater resistance than before, as reaction set in. Clausewitz’s main efforts were now channeled to the writing of a great work on war. Deeply impressed by Napoleon’s crushing strategy that completely overwhelmed the armies of the ancien régime, Clausewitz rejected the limited

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warfare of the 18th century. He believed that the “nature,” “essence,” “concept,” or “spirit” of war required mobilization of all available forces to be thrown against the enemy’s main army with the aim of destroying it in a major battle in pursuit of ambitious political aims. These notions, cultivated by the reformers during the heroic struggle against Napoleon, were systematized in On War. However, after drafting the first six books (of eight) that make up On War, Clausewitz realized, contrary to his lifelong views, that limited war was as legitimate as all-out war because “war is nothing but the continuation of state policy by the admixture of other means.” He developed these fundamental new insights in writing Books 7 and 8 of On War, and in revising Chapter 1 of Book 1, but he died before completing the revision of the rest of the work. The posthumous work thus conserves two different, and conflicting, layers of Clausewitz’s thought—the cause of much confusion among later readers. Clausewitz became a man for all seasons: the people of the 19th century canonized his work for its emphasis on the decisive clash of forces, whereas in the nuclear age he has been celebrated for postulating the supremacy of the political aim and for his concept of limited war. Azar Gat See also Anarchy in International Relations; Realism in International Relations; War

Further Readings Gat, A. (1989). The origins of military thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Incorporated in Gat, A. (2001). A history of military thought: From the Enlightenment to the cold war. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

CLEGG, STEWART (1947– ) The Anglo-Australian Stewart Clegg has established himself as one of the important figures in contemporary social theory as a result of his contribution to the study of social power and organization. Although his theory is well informed by

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modern theories, Clegg’s recent focus has taken a postmodern turn. As noted in his 2005 Vita Contemplativa, a clear theoretical thread runs through his work: 1. Power is a “relation of flows,” rather than an obdurate reality out there that avails itself to positivistic analysis. 2. Power is always countered; hence, a theory of power that disregards the “dialectics of control” between authority and resistance is deeply flawed. 3. Resources and surveillance are important, but a social theory that undermines the role of other factors in the understanding of power and organizational dynamics is wanting. 4. The study of power needs to be premised on the idea that there is no one grand rationality but disparate rationalities that are embedded in social history.

Born in Bradford, United Kingdom, Clegg got his bachelor’s degree in 1971 from Aston University and his PhD in 1974 from Bradford University. After working briefly for Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, and the European Group for Organization Studies as a postdoctoral research fellow, he was hired by Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, in 1976. At this time, he was re-socialized as Australian, “slowly losing [his] pining and allegiance to the other country, the other continent.” Later he worked at the Universities of New England, St. Andrews, and Western Sydney. Currently, he is professor of management at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Director of the Innovative Collaborations, Alliance, and Networks Research Center. He has authored or coauthored 30 books and has published more than 90 journal articles. Clegg’s first book, Power, Rule and Domination (1975), deals with the social phenomenology of power. In this work, he investigated a sociological topic but relied on assumptions formulated both in and outside the field of sociology. From sociology, the concepts of power, rule, and domination, as spelled out by Max Weber and Georg Simmel, are used. Conversely, Clegg borrows Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concepts of “language game” and “forms of

life” to help him understand the grammar of power dynamics. Furthermore, Clegg used an ethnomethodological approach to examine the nature of power in organizations. This was unconventional for its time because sociologists of organization hardly examined organizational dynamics as a process in which “practical theorists” are actively engaged. Ultimately, Clegg’s study of a construction site in Northern England provided a nuanced relational and contextual analysis of power in which “deep rules” and “‘iconic’ systems of domination” are critical. Accordingly, he was able to avoid the flaws of previous theories that have limited themselves to the surface reality of power. In his later study of power and organizations, Clegg further extends his position on the need to transcend a surface analysis of power. This time, the subjects of his critical exegesis were theories that dealt with the behavioral dimensions of power and organizations. Because of their exclusive focus on the manifest operations involved in the decision-making processes and portrayed organizations in a pluralist fashion, these theories gave scant attention to the structural basis of power. According to Clegg, the analysis of power in organizations requires more than understanding which group has control over which resources. Rather, emphasis needs to be placed on structural arrangements that constrain social behavior. Yet his structural approach is based on a reconceptualized notion of structure. Structure is not viewed as a prearranged social relation. Instead, it is regarded as “sedimented selection rules,” the understanding of which entails historical analysis. In his Frameworks of Power (1989), Clegg further examines the relation between power and structure. Here, he takes seriously the insights of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose views on power are at odds with those of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was interested in legislating a grand narrative of power that acts as a political instrument that, by way of perpetuating sovereignty, brings together multiple social institutions. Machiavelli instead was focused on the interpretation of power that perceives it as a set of contingent practices that do not easily lend themselves to generalization. Accordingly, whereas theories that have followed the Hobbesian tradition portrayed power as a negative force, theories that followed the Machiavellian tradition, the most explicit of which is Michel Foucault’s theory,

Coalition Theory

consider the productive dimensions of power. Following the latter tradition, Clegg notes that power is not a zero-sum game; rather, it involves a set of practices that produce needs and impute interests. Consequently, Clegg has spelled out a novel theory of power that is multidimensional in its orientation. Where others see episodic, dispositional, and facilitative facets of power as disparate, Clegg, in his theory of “circuits of power,” sees them as interconnected. Episodic power is the most visible form of power in which rules, relations, and resources are translated, fixed, reproduced, and transformed. Yet episodic power is not a free-floating level, nor does it serve as a foundation for other forms of power. The strategies espoused in episodic power require that the “substantive rational conditions” need to be secured and reproduced. Two other macro circumstances, accordingly, are salient for its existence, social integration, and system integration, involving both subjective and material conditions for dispositional and facilitative levels of power, respectively. Whereas dispositional power mainly deals with the social construction of meaning and membership, facilitative power is concerned with “the empowerment and disempowerment of agencies’ capacities.” Clegg’s theory has the advantage of providing a micro–macro link between the diverse manifestations of power, although, as some critics have indicated, his theory tends to be too abstract to be labeled as postmodern. Alem S. Kebede See also Giddens, Anthony

Further Readings Clegg, S. (1989). Frameworks of power. London: Sage. Clegg, S. (2005). “Vita contemplativa”: A life in part. Organization Studies, 26(2), 291–309.

COALITION THEORY Politics can be seen as the art of coalition formation. Any political leader needs supporters that he or she must reward in some way and any opponent can only challenge if he or she allies.

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Machiavelli himself understood this process, and every successful leader has applied it whether consciously or unconsciously. Coalition theory is normally applied to parties within a democratic legislature but can be applied to any political process, and it can be seen as the fundamental basis of the power of all political leaders and governments.

The Model Coalition theory tries to provide answers to two basic problems: which coalition will form and what will be the outcome. If applied to an abstract setting that more or less ignores historical facts and institutional arrangements and also assumes rational agents, there seems to be a fundamental tension between the issues of coalition formation and outcome determination: the more definitely we can answer the one question, the less definitively we can answer the other. Both problems can be described with respect to a society—that is, a set of agents N, and a value function v that assigns a value v(S) to each subset S of N. We call S a coalition. This implies that the members of A can concert their actions such that v(S) can be achieved. S is a winning (or effective) coalition if it determines the outcome of (N,v). To accomplish this, S either selects an element x or a subset Y in the set of alternatives, that is, set of possible outcomes. The pair (N,v) describes a social decision problem with coalition formation: a coalition game. There can be a unique winning coalition for (N,v). Then N\S, that is, the complement of S, is a losing coalition. This often applies if (N,v) is a political game and the winning coalition S represents the ruling government. More generally, the underlying situation can be modeled as a simple game such that, for every coalition S, either v(S)  1 or v(S)  0, and S is called either winning or losing, respectively. In general, voting bodies such as parliaments and committees can be portrayed by simple games. However, an economy is formed by many coalitions that have an impact on the overall outcome so that each of them determines a component of the vector x that describes the selected alternative; so an economy is not a simple game. For instance, an individual firm can be modeled as a coalition.

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Coalition S and its complement N\S form a coalition structure. More generally, a coalition structure is a finite partition P of N such that the (disjoint) sets Sk and St are elements of P (and the intersection of Sk and St is empty) and subsets of N. Thus, P  {S1, . . . , Sm} such that Sk  St  , k,t  1, . . . , m (and k t), where k and t are members of coalitions. A third question is often relevant for coalition formation: the distribution problem, that is, how to distribute v(S). The members of N are assumed to have preferences with respect to the alternatives in X, which can be summarized by a payoff profile u  (u1, . . . , un). Here ui is the payoff function of member i of N and i  1, . . . , n such that n is the cardinality of N. It is not obvious whether the value v(S) is a utility or a potential such as power; however, if utilities are transferable, then we have (a) v(N)  ui for i  1, . . . , n, and outcome u can be interpreted as the evaluation of the distribution of some divisible private good—money, patronage, porkbarrel benefits, and so forth. Correspondingly, coalition S can guarantee its members payoffs such that (b) v(S) ui for all members i in S. A payoff vector x dominates a payoff vector y if S can ensure that x prevails and xi  yi for all members i in S. A minimum requirement such that i supports coalition S is that (c) ui(S) v({i}). Here ui(S) is the utility that i achieves as a member of S and v({i}) is the value of i if i “stands alone.” If ui satisfies (a) and (c) for all i in N, then u  (u1, . . . , un) is an imputation.

Solutions and Solution Concepts Now that we have a model for n-person games that allows for, or presupposes, the forming of coalitions, we can try to answer the questions of which, what, and how. We make use of alternative solution concepts that serve as shorthand to describe possible expectations of rational agents with respect to coalitions and payoffs in n-person games. The core is the most prominent solution concept that considers coalition formation. The concept gives conditions such that the grand coalition N is stable. For transferable utility games, the imputation u  (u1, . . . , un) is in the core of a game G if there are no coalitions S (subset of N) such that v(S)  ui. If the latter holds true, then u is coalitionally rational: the forming of S is not profitable

for the members of S if S is a strict subset of N. More generally, the core is the set of allocations u such that u is (a) Pareto efficient, (b) individually rational, and (c) coalitionally rational. (Note that an imputation is an allocation that satisfies [a] and [b].) In general, the set of allocations u that satisfies (a), (b), and (c) is large and the outcome is subject to bargaining among the members of N, or the set that defines the core is empty. To illustrate the second case, assume that agents 1, 2, and 3 vote on the distribution of a (payoff) cake that is normalized to 1. Each agent has one vote and a simple majority of votes determines the wining coalition. The core of this three-person simple majority game v* is empty. For every imputation x, there is an imputation y such that a majority of agents prefers x to y. A plausible expectation is that a coalition of two agents will form and these agents will divide the coalition value in equal shares. However, there are three candidates of winning coalitions and the corresponding set of payoffs under the equal share assumption is V  {(1 2,1 2,0), (1 2,0,1 2), (0,1 2,1 2)}. Note that the elements of V do not dominate each other (internal stability), but for every imputation x not in V there is an imputation y in V that dominates x (external stability). The multiplicity of coalition possibilities gives stability to the outcomes in V that describes a von Neumann–Morgenstern solution for the given voting game; hence, V is called a stable set. According to V, we expect equal sharing, but we cannot tell which coalition will prevail. However, V is not the only stable set of this game: there is an infinite number of triples of asymmetric payoff vectors satisfying internal and external stability—for example, V*  {(x, 1  x  c, c): 0  x  1} such that c is a constant smaller 1/2. The median voter solution for the case of singlepeaked preferences and two candidates can be interpreted as a stable set. The outcome is well defined by the median voter position but we do not know which coalition will form, that is, which candidate will win a majority and who are the voters in the majority coalition. The multiplicity of coalition possibilities gives stability to the outcome. Alternative coalitions can reduce the leeway of bargaining within coalitions to zero such that there is a unique outcome even if the core is empty. If x is a payoff vector and the core is empty, then

Coalition Theory

e(S,x)  v(S)  xi  0 where the sum is over all members i in S and e(S,x) is the excess of S with respect to x. The surplus of i against j is defined by sij(x)  max e(S,x) where the maximum is taken over all coalitions S such that i is in S and j is not in S. Thus, sij(x) expresses the maximum possibilities of i to gain payoffs in coalitions that do not have j as a member: v(S) does not guarantee that i gets this value as payoff. The payoff vector x and coalition structure P are meant to be stable if, with respect to any coalition S in P, sij(x)  sji(x) for all i, j in S. The set of combinations of x and P that satisfy this property describe the kernel K of a coalition game v. The kernel is a solution concept that both (a) helps select an element from the outcome set if the core is large and (b) determines an outcome if the core is empty. Consider the previous three-person simple majority voting game v*. If P  {{1,2},{3}} then x  (1 2,1 2,0) is the only payoff vector such that the payoff configuration 具x,P典 is in K(v*). If P  {N}, then y  (1 3,1 3,1 3) is the only payoff vector such that 具y,P典 is in K(v*). A comparison of these two examples illustrates the impact of the—exogenously given—coalition structure. Now consider the three-person game v° in which coalitions {1,2},{1,3}, and N win. Given P  {{1,2},{3}},冓x,P冔 is in K only if x  (1,0,0). Despite the given coalition structure, {1,3} is still feasible and player 1 can propose a counter-objection 具z,P典(with z1  1 and P  {{1,3},{2}}) to any objection 具y,P典 with y1  1. The effect of this threat becomes obvious if we assume that 3 is ineligible for coalition membership, perhaps because of an extremist political ideology. Then we can predict that coalition {1,2} will form, but the outcome is indeterminate, that is, subject to bargaining. The “potential to object” a payoff configuration 具x,P典 is minimized, and thus the corresponding outcome “relatively stable,” if the excess e(S,x) is minimal. The application of this principle defines the nucleolus. For a given coalition structure P, the nucleolus is an element of the kernel. If the kernel is a singleton, the kernel and the nucleolus are identical. If the core is nonempty, the nucleolus is an element of the core. The possibility of objecting and counter-objecting defines the so-called bargaining sets. Their characteristic feature is that a payoff configuration 具x,P典 is

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stable (and therefore a likely result of coalition formation) if for any objection 具y,P,典 there is a counter objection 具z,P*典 such that 具y,P典 is not profitable to the members of the objecting coalition. The bargaining sets can be distinguished by the alternative conditions that objections and counter objections have to satisfy. By minimizing the “potential for objecting,” the nucleolus endogenizes the forming of a coalition structure. More explicitly, S. Hart and M. Kurz propose a model that addresses the problem of why coalition structures form and predicts endogenously which one will indeed form. They assume that all coalitions bargain for the division of the total, which is the worth of the grand coalition. A coalition structure is stable if no group of players can reorganize itself in a way that is profitable for all. A reduction of the “potential for objecting” suggests that only minimal winning coalitions (MWC) will form, that is, winning coalitions that contain no surplus players. If the members of a coalition are meant to share the coalition value per capita, coalitions with fewest members are likely candidates. William H. Riker’s size principle proposes the forming of MWCs for an environment that can be described by an n-person zero-sum game and symmetry. The latter implies that the value of a coalition is a function of the number of its members only. Such a setting seems highly unlikely in the political arena; however, there are even logical problems with it. Russell Hardin proposes a five-person zero-sum game with possible outcomes x  (20,20,20,10,50) or y  (20,20,20,10,50) allocated to players A, B, C, D, and E, respectively. Let us assume coalition {A,B,C,D} has formed and payoffs are z  (26,26,26,28,50). First, note that the security level of player D is 50 if coalition {A,B,C} forms and x or y apply. Thus, D could prefer side payments of 6 to A, B, and C each to ensure outcome x. Second, despite v({A,B,C})  v({A,B,C,D}), it does not pay for players A, B, and C to eject D from coalition {A,B,C,D} if z can be achieved with the help of D. However, if the outcome vector x is predetermined, then D has no incentive to bribe A, B, and C, and the MWC {A,B,C} will gain a total of 60, only. What outcome and coalition structure do we expect if no constraints are given on the imputations that describe the outcome? The answer depends on the choice of the solution concept that we apply.

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It seems that Riker’s size principle is relevant only for zero-sum games. However, this does not imply that MWCs are irrelevant for coalition formation. In simple games, the forming of MWCs ensures some stability because all members of a MWC are crucial for its success. In the political arena, however, political programs are often highly relevant cases and coalitions are connected with respect to an ideological space, which can imply that the winning coalition is not minimal. A number of corresponding coalition models have been developed with respect to the spatial model and should be discussed in this context. Manfred J. Holler See also Core of a Game; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Minimal Winning Coalition; Public Goods Index; Simple Games

every constituent feature of coercion that has been proposed. One reason why coercion is a matter of concern to many authors is because it means that someone is being made to do something against his or her will. This formulation, however, is somewhat misleading because in many cases it can still be said that, in a very basic sense, it is still the coerced who chooses to undertake that particular course of action. Certainly, in a case of coercion, the coercer has influenced this choice, but exactly what kind of influence has to be exercised for the influence to constitute coercion is a matter of vehement debate. This formulation does explain, however, why coercion is often regarded as the opposite of freedom— which is the traditional view—and why some others have favored presenting it primarily as the antipode of autonomy.

The Concept of Coercion Further Readings Holler, M. J. (Ed.). (1997). The logic of multiparty systems. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. Holler, M. J., & Widgrén, M. (1999). The value of a coalition is power. Homo Oeconomicus, 15, 485–501. Reprinted in Notizie di Politeia (2000), 59, 14–28. Leiserson, M. (1968). Factions and coalitions in one-party Japan: An interpretation based on the theory of games. American Political Science Review, 62, 770–787. Miller, N. R. (1984). Coalition formation and political outcomes: A critical note. In M. J. Holler (Ed.), Coalitions and collective action (pp. 259–265). Wuerzburg, Germany: Physica-Verlag. Riker, W. H. (1962). The theory of political coalitions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

COERCION, ANALYTIC The concept of coercion plays an important role in many political, moral, and legal theories. Since Robert Nozick’s 1969 paper “Coercion,” the concept has become an important object of study in its own right, whereas before then, coercion was mainly analyzed as part of broader philosophical theories. There seems to be little consensus about the proper analysis of the concept at present because disagreement persists about practically

The Social Nature of Coercion

Coercion is a phenomenon that only occurs in a social, political, or interpersonal setting. In a case of coercion, a certain person, A, coerces another person, B, to perform a specific action, X. Both actors in this relation are generally deemed to be persons or collectives. Other entities such as animals or natural disasters may force or perhaps compel a person to do something, but this is generally not referred to as coercion. Similarly, animals (and perhaps even inanimate objects) can be forced, but not coerced. To coerce someone is to exercise power over him or her. This is clearly exemplified by the paradigm exemplar of coercion: the highwayman A threatens to shoot his victim B unless B hands over B’s purse. One of the less-contested features of coercion is that it is necessarily successful. A can only have coerced B if B actually performs the action A wanted B to perform. In the case of a threat (as in the highwayman example), A gets B to perform action X by negatively influencing the attractiveness of all other courses of action open to B. Threats, Offers, and Physical Coercion

Some have argued that this is the essential feature of coercion, and that therefore only threats can coerce. The main problem for those who limit

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the scope of coercion to threats is to determine the appropriate definition of what constitutes a threat. The standard way of tackling this question is to argue for some kind of baseline. If, as a result of the threat, B’s alternatives to X fall below this baseline, B is said to be coerced, whereas otherwise B is said to have chosen to do X freely or voluntarily. A large number of such baselines are possible, such as the course of events in which A did nothing, the course of events in which A did what A normally does, the course of events in which A acted as A may be expected to act, or the course of events in which A acted as A should have acted. The idea that coercion always (either implicitly or explicitly) implies a threat is challenged from two sides. Some wish to accommodate cases of what is sometimes called physical coercion, too; others argue that certain kinds of offers can be just as coercive as threats. Physical coercion covers cases where A makes it physically impossible for B not to do X. This may be achieved by direct application of physical force or by other means that make actions physically impossible, such as imprisonment. Opponents of this view often argue that in such cases B does not really do X. The position that offers may also constitute coercion is popular among those who regard B’s ability to resist A’s effort to make B perform X as the central feature of coercion. One way to address the issue of inability to resist is to focus on the effect of A’s efforts on B’s will; another is to analyze the nature of the options open to B. In this latter approach, the unavailability of (acceptable) alternatives is regarded as a fundamental feature of coercion. If B is in a deplorable situation and A offers B a way to alleviate B’s plight, then B may have just as little choice but to do X as B would in the situation where the unacceptability of the alternatives to X is the result of a threat by A. Usually, however, the unavailability of (acceptable) alternatives is merely regarded as a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. A central problem for this approach, which relies on the availability of alternatives, is to satisfactorily determine what constitutes a genuine or acceptable alternative. Moralized Versus Nonmoralized Accounts of Coercion

A particularly prominent issue within the debate about the proper description of coercion centers

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around the question whether it is possible to determine if someone is coerced without referring to a specific moral theory. Those who claim this is impossible thus advocate a moralized account of coercion. Moralized theories of coercion may be primarily concerned with B’s situation, arguing that B is coerced if it cannot be morally expected of B that he or she will bear the consequences of not doing X. Alternatively, theorists may focus on A, appealing to the immorality of A’s putting B in such a position, or of A’s taking advantage of the position B is in. However, a number of philosophers strongly oppose the idea of invoking a specific normative theory to identify cases of coercion, claiming that this is a purely factual matter or that it has to be a purely factual matter if coercion is to play any significant role in moral, political, or legal theories. One of the main challenges faced by advocates of moralized accounts of coercion is to accommodate cases of justified coercion in their theory, whereas those arguing in favor of a nonmoralized theory of coercion are more hardpressed by the challenge of adequately distinguishing coercing someone from other kinds of forcing or compelling.

The Relevance of Coercion Coercion and Responsibility

One of the main interests in coercion, in both moral and legal theory, stems from its alleged effects on a person’s responsibility for his or her actions. A person who is coerced is often regarded as not being responsible for the actions the person thus performs. This feature especially interested a considerable number of the earlier philosophers working on coercion. More recently, however, this relation between coercion and responsibility has been increasingly questioned. When analyzing coercion and its alleged responsibility negating effects, much depends on how “not being responsible for one’s actions” is interpreted. In the strictest sense of the term, coercion is regarded as a ground for excusing a person for his or her actions. The person’s actions are still considered wrong, but no personal blame is to be ascribed to the person. However, except for extreme cases, as when shock causes a person to lose control over his or her actions, it is unclear why coercion would have this effect on a person’s

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responsibility. As long as a person’s deliberative capacities remain intact, there seems to be little of special relevance in the presence of coercion that would explain why the person cannot be held accountable for the choice he or she makes, constrained though the person’s range of choices may be. A less rigid interpretation of not being responsible regards coercion as having a justificatory effect on a person’s actions, rather than an exculpatory one. Whereas it would normally be regarded as wrong to act in a certain way, the presence of coercion now makes it morally or legally acceptable to act that way. This implies that the “normal” moral or legal consequences are no longer to be applied to the person who performed the action, so some authors claim that this amounts to the person not being held responsible. The Wrongfulness of Coercion

Although most authors agree that a certain level of coercion is often unavoidable, it is often deemed a necessary evil at best. Advocates of a moralized conception of coercion capitalize on this negative connotation of the term, using the fact that it can be seen as one of the features by which being coerced can be distinguished from merely being forced as support for their claim that this negative moral content is inherent to the concept of coercion. Whereas being forced to do something applies to many instances of human life, being coerced is immediately associated with some kind of injustice or wrongfulness. Some have described coercion as hostile to the individual, emphasizing that a coerced person is made to do something that does not suit the person’s own goals, but rather those of the coercer. In Kantian terms, the coercer uses the coerced purely as a means and fails to regard the coerced as a being with purposes of his or her own. In a perverted way, however, many kinds of coercion use precisely this fact that the coerced is a rational being who pursues his or her own interests by providing the coerced with practical imperatives that make him or her choose to act in accordance with the interests of the coercer. Another issue that is sometimes used to explain the wrongfulness of coercion is that it harms the coerced by taking away his or her freedom. This concerns not so much freedom understood as the (immediate) range of options for actions open to

the individual—because those do not have to be affected by coercion—as freedom understood as the things the coerced can achieve by his or her choices of action. When confronted with a robber requesting one’s purse, for example, one can choose to give the robber the money or not. This range of options would be the same had the robber requested it without the presence of a gun; the (probable) results of the respective actions are very much affected by the gun’s presence, though. The coerced can no longer achieve the results or goals that were open to him or her before the coercer interfered, and the coerced must now subordinate the execution of his or her previous plans to the demands of the coercer. Because the coerced can no longer attain what he or she could before, the welfare of the coerced is typically reduced by coercion. Although this decline in welfare may be obvious in many cases of coercion, it remains problematic to explain the questionable morality of coercion purely by reference to its effect on the coerced’s welfare or well-being. Many cases of paternalism, for example, are also instances of coercion, and whatever the merits or demerits of paternalistic intervention, it need not be the case that either the immediate welfare or the long-term prospects of executing his or her own plans are diminished by the coerced being subjected to coercion of this kind at present; they might well be furthered by it. Given these problems, some have argued that coercion is not to be regarded as something that is absolutely wrong, but merely as prima facie wrong. As shown earlier, coercion often has negative effects on a person’s welfare or tends to harm his or her prospects, and it often signifies a lack of respect for the autonomy of the coerced, which provides us with a prima facie reason not to engage in it. Only when specific justifications can be given is it permissible to use coercive means. Despite having a certain initial degree of plausibility, the problem with this approach is that it merely postpones the question about the wrongfulness of coercion, focusing exclusively on first impressions. Furthermore, the prima facie approach only considers the instrumental qualities of coercion and disregards the possibility that the wrongness of coercion is to be found in its intrinsic value. According to this latter view, part of the moral significance of coercion is related to its inherent qualities, so that its wrongness may

Coercion and Power

be more fundamental than is a mere tendency to lead to morally undesirable results. The Coerciveness of the Law

Laws are often regarded as coercive. Laws are designed to ensure that people exhibit a certain behavior, and they aim to achieve this compliance irrespective of the person’s agreement to that behavior or willingness to so comply. That laws are backed by sanctions indicates their coercive nature. Whether laws are necessarily coercive is debated, but in many instances, the law coerces those who are unwilling to abide by the rules to obey them nonetheless. The coerciveness of law is often unavoidable. Without the level of compliance ensured by the sanctions attached to breaking the law, it would be impossible for a society to function properly. Actually, the law often reduces the number of instances of coercion between individual citizens, protecting the weaker members of society from would-be aggressors. Most approaches to coercion have little difficulty in showing the coercive nature of unjust laws; however, when laws are just, problems often arise, especially for those advocating a moralized concept of coercion because they are bound to maintain both that something immoral is happening (otherwise it cannot be coercion under such a conception) and that it is moral at the same time (because it is just). Some appeal to other morally relevant factors outweighing the moral wrongness of the coercive act to explain this apparent contradiction, claiming that the lesser of two evils remains an evil nonetheless. This solution, however, remains open to the criticism that it cannot be morally wrong to do the best thing possible, and hence, that in such cases, coercion is not wrong. Others have denied that just laws are coercive at all. Just laws are in accordance with morality, so those individuals who are constrained by just laws remain fully free and uncoerced because none of their rights have been violated or because the just laws are the laws they would have willingly abided by had they known better. This position is highly problematic, however, and not just because it seems to presuppose an objective morality. Those who object to certain laws and in no way wish to abide by them, but do so nonetheless purely for fear of reprisal, seem to be

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coerced by them, independently of whether or not such institutions can be justified. The thus-silenced political activist seems to be coerced, for instance, whether sufficient reason can be given to justify restrictions on his freedom of speech. Jan-Willem van der Rijt See also Coercion and Power; Domination; Threat; Throffer

Further Readings Pennock, J. R., & Chapman, J. W. (Eds.). (1972). Nomos XIV: Coercion. Chicago: Aldine Atherton. Wertheimer, A. (1987). Coercion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

COERCION

AND

POWER

Coercion can be thought of as a subset of power, but it is an important subset. We frequently think about the power of some agents over others as coercive. Weberian definitions of power often take the form, “Agent A has power over agent B to the extent that A can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” Such definitions of power can be seen as synonyms for coercion. Agent A gets B to do something B otherwise would not do through some kind of coercion. However, the definition as it stands allows for the possibility that A persuades B to do something B would not otherwise do, and persuasion is not necessarily coercive. Agent A might provide some information for B that leads B to want to do something for B’s own interests, or for the interests of everyone including A. Indeed Agent A might give B a reason for doing something by making it advantageous for B to take that action. In other words, Agent A might pay B to take that action, or reward B in some other way. Agents might have powers simply because they are rich and can pay people to do things for them. The problem for consideration of coercion in this regard is distinguishing coercion from market exchange or persuasion. We shall examine this problem first before widening the discussion to other areas of coercive activity and the relations between coercion, power, and other social concepts.

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Incentive Structures Generally speaking, we can say that one agent, agent A, can get another, agent B, to do something that B would not otherwise do by changing B’s incentive structure. Thus, the power, or social power, of one agent A over another agent B is the ability of A to deliberately alter the incentive structure of B. We say deliberately because A might alter the incentive structure of B without intending to do so. Indeed, to a minor extent we can do all sorts of things that change the incentive structures of others without intending to. Buying the last cake in a shop means the next person has to buy something else instead, but we do not ordinarily consider such market activity to be acts of power, let alone coercion. Incentive structures can be altered in four main ways. First, persuasion: agent A might persuade B that an option in B’s opportunity set is not what it might appear, so raising or lowering it in B’s estimation. Second, A might make a side payment to B, thus making one alternative more valuable because it also comes with an extra reward. In the literature, this is usually called an offer. Third, A might make a negative side payment to B, thus lowering an alternative in the estimation of B. Here, A will ensure that if B makes a particular choice B must also suffer a cost. In the literature, this is usually called a threat. Finally, agent A might combine an offer with a threat, simultaneously lowering one alternative and raising another alternative. In the literature, this fourth possibility is usually called a throffer—a combination of a threat and an offer. We can see how these work by considering B’s opportunity set, represented here as three alternatives within a set {N}. First, consider that B’s opportunity set is {x  y  z} (where the symbol “” is read as “prefers to”). Persuasion simply means that at least one of the items has changed places with another, thus if agent A persuades B that x is in fact a poor option, then it might sink to the bottom of order, thus {y  z  x}. This might come about because of information given about x or about any of the two other items. However, we can also represent this change in the preference ordering in the opportunity set by breaking down the alternatives into their component parts. If we take the original ordering and suggest that new information leads us to, say, believe there are other consequences of

choosing the preferred alternative, we can leave the original ordering intact, but new alternatives come into play because of that new information. Thus information about item x might move it down the order because it is associated with some other consequence: {x  y  z} becomes (x  y  z  x  }, and because we now believe that x must come with  then the choice becomes y, as we saw earlier. Similarly, if agent B is persuaded that y is a better option because it comes with addition , then y becomes the preferred option because it is y  : {y    x  y  z); or we could combine both types of persuasion to give us {y    x  y  z  x  }. This might appear an odd way of representing the changed ordering of alternatives within an opportunity set, rather than simply switching the order originally shown. However, it demonstrates the problem of distinguishing coercion from other ways of changing opportunity sets. Consider the following three ways of representing the changing of the ordering of B’s preferences from the original {x  y  z}. Threat: (x  y  z  x  } Offer: {y    x  y  z) Throffer: {y    x  y  z  x }.

We can see here that the representation of threats, offers, and throffers simply looks like different sorts of persuasion; normally, however, we would think there is an important difference. In terms of persuasion, agent A would simply be pointing out the consequences of choosing item x or item y (with associated costs  or rewards ); in the case of threats, offers, and throffers, we would think that these associated costs and benefits are brought about by agent A because of the choice of agent B. In other words, persuasion is a prediction about consequences that convinces agent B, but threats, offers, and throffers are more than mere predictions, they are consequences that agent A will causally bring about contingent on the choice of B. To be able to convince B to choose differently, agent A must provide convincing evidence of the consequences of the potential choices. Similarly, Agent A’s threats and offers must credible. Credibility places constraints on how good offers can be or how dire threats can be. If agent B simply does not believe that A will do what he or she says—the

Coercion and Power

reward is too costly for A, or the threat unrealistically dire, then B will not be persuaded to act differently.

Offers Versus Threats There is an important asymmetry between threats and offers. Offers cost more when they succeed— agent A must pay B when B complies with what A wants; threats cost more when they fail—agent A only needs to carry out his threat when B fails to comply with what A wants. Again, this points up the importance of making threats and offers credible. If this were not the case, there would always be the incentive to make them as high as possible; there would be no limit on the cost of reward or threat. We can illustrate the credibility of threats with the example of punishment in modern states. We might think that the strongest incentives for citizens to obey the law would be to make the punishment for breaking the law as severe as possible. However, if the penalties are too great, then juries might be reluctant to find guilty those charged with crimes. This proved the case in the 19th century where juries were reluctant to find guilty defendants charged with minor crimes such as stealing apples because the penalties were so high. The asymmetry between threats and offers has certain behavioral consequences. If the cost of a threat or an offer to A is the same, then which is made depends on the likelihood of compliance. The higher the probability that B will comply with the incentive, the more likely it will be in form of a threat. The higher the likelihood is that B will not comply, the more likely the incentive will be in form of an offer. This is so because if A’s threat is successful, A will not actually bear any further costs, whereas A must pay if an offer is accepted. Thus, it is always in B’s interests to indicate that he or she will not back down to threats but will comply with offers of much lower cost to A. In that sense, it can be rational to be stubborn, even when threats of noncompliance seem to bear high costs for B—as long as those costs are also high for A.

The Coercive Offer Some claim that capitalism is a power system that consists of coercive offers. The idea is that under

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capitalism workers are offered contracts through which they sell their labor power. Here employers get workers to do something they would not otherwise do, namely work for the employers, by making an offer, namely a wage or salary. However, Karl Marx suggested that workers are exploited wage slaves and the offers they receive in compensation for working are really a form of coercion. How can this be? We can approach the idea by thinking of the notion contained in The Godfather where Don Corleone says, “Make him an offer he can’t refuse.” The amusing irony of the phrase is precisely that offers are, by their very nature, things that one can refuse. Slavery is a condition that an agent cannot get out of (except through death): the slave has no freedom. Wage slavery is an extension, in that although one might refuse any simple offer of a job, one cannot refuse all offers (unless one accepts death through starvation). So any offer of a wage might be refused with regard to other offers, but wage offers overall are coercive. A wage offer is coercive if and only if (a) an alternative “pre-proposal” state of affairs that the worker would prefer to the actual one in which the employer has made the offer is feasible, and (b) the employer (together with others) prevents this feasible pre-proposal state of affairs from obtaining. In other words, capitalists maintain capitalism, high profits, and great inequality by ensuring that the situation where workers could be paid more and profits kept reasonable is not allowed to occur. Two elements of this analysis are important: first, that there is a feasible alternative and second, that the feasible alternative is being blocked by capitalists. One might think that the coercion involved in a coercive offer, as described here, is being coerced into the situation of having to accept at least one job offer. We can compare this to the slave, who might be offered the choice of jobs by his master, but still has to perform some task. The slave cannot walk away from the master nor can the worker avoid ever having to work. The important element in both cases is that it is the slave-master—or capitalists—that ensure it is impossible for the agent (the slave or the worker) to alter the situation. Some argue that coercive offers cannot exist. They cannot exist precisely because the idea of an offer one cannot refuse is ironic. The meaning of an offer is something that one can turn down.

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Coercion is being forced into something. This leads us to an important aspect of coercion—its relationship to liberty. Jeremy Bentham defined liberty as the absence of coercion, defining the latter as being compelled or constrained in one’s actions. One is free to the extent that one is not coerced. A coercive offer—if “offer” does indeed entail that one has a choice whether or not to accept is meaningless in the same sense as “being forced to be free”—is meaningless. Importantly, some people deny the meaninglessness of both phrases. We can approach this issue by considering a paradigm example of coercion much discussed in the literature: the highwayman demanding “your money or your life.” Is this demand an offer or a threat? When the highwayman says “your money or your life,” is the highwayman altering one of the alternatives in your opportunity set or adding to them? Some would say the highwayman has altered them. Before the highwayman, you can keep your money and live; after the highwayman has uttered his cry, you have two alternatives: either hand over the money and live or keep the money and die. In other words, one highly valued alternative has been replaced by two low-value ones. Now one is coerced into handing over one’s money to survive. One has lost the freedom to keep the money and live. Others offer a different analysis. Assuming one can give away one’s money (that is what owning it means) and one could commit suicide, the person has, before the highwayman intervention, the alternatives of keeping-your-money-and-your-life; notkeeping-your-money-and-keeping-your-life; keeping-your-money-and-not-keeping-your-life; and notkeeping-your-money-and-not-keeping-your-life. The highwayman’s arrival on the scene, according to this second analysis, causes the first alternative to disappear, while the others remain.

Dominant Strategies and Coercion Actually, both the standard analyses are misleading. The reality of the highwayman situation is you have “no choice,” in the sense that you have a dominant strategy of handing over your money. A dominant strategy in game theory is defined as any strategy that is preferable to all other strategies. If you do not hand over your money on his demand, the highwayman takes it after killing you. In other

words, all the alternatives where you keep your money disappear after his intervention. Hence, you do have only two alternatives: “hand over your money” or “not hand over your money”— which is equivalent to “not die” or “die” because they are conjunctives. Handing over your money dominates not handing it over because you lose it anyway; by handing it over, you get to keep your life (which we assume is preferable to dying). The dominant strategy determines coercion. We might say that in any threatening situation a person could stand up to the threats, but if one has a dominant strategy forced on one then one is coerced. So we define coercion as occurring in any situation created by the coercer, where the coerced agent has a dominant strategy that is to the advantage of the coercer but to the coerced agent’s disadvantage relative to the status quo ante. This way of thinking about coercion as being in a situation where one has a dominant strategy to do as the coercer wishes, and where that situation has been created by the coercer, fits with modern republican ideas about the nature of freedom as being non-domination. The slave example is key for republicans. A slave might have a great deal of personal freedom allowed to him or her by the slave’s master. However, that freedom only exists because of the latter’s grace and whim and can be arbitrarily removed at any time. In that sense, doing what the master wishes is a dominant strategy for the slave because not obeying has dire consequences. When the master is indifferent to what the slave does, the slave does then have a freedom, within the constraints of the master’s indifference. But all this freedom means is that the slave’s dominant strategy gives the slave a great deal of leeway. And this leeway exists only through the grace and whim of the master. There are many means by which coercion might be obtained. We have mostly been considering physical coercion, such as the highwayman forcing one to hand over one’s money at gunpoint, or where the state has a monopoly of legitimate force to ensure people pay taxes, abide by the laws, and so on. Here, the state creates a situation where the dominant strategy (for most people most of the time) is to obey the law. Coercion might be psychological, however. Blackmail plays on the fears of the person being blackmailed and “emotional

Coercion and Power

blackmail” plays on people’s fears of being rejected by others. This might occur in friendships or emotional relationships where one person threatens to withdraw his or her love, kindness, or friendship unless the other person accedes to the first person’s demands. The threat of disapproval from one’s compatriots or close companions, as in denouncing people as traitors, is also a form of emotional blackmail. States can create such coercion through propaganda, most obviously seen in the Soviet Union and China. The Soviet Union held show trials where psychological pressures were placed on (often high-ranking) communist officials to admit to crimes; in China during the “Thought Reform” campaign (1951–1952) and the “Cultural Revolution” (1966) people were denounced by others, often children, to make them think in terms of communist strategy. In the latter case, this might be thought to be ideological coercion, and in that the situation was deliberately set up by the authorities, it does seem to deserve the title of coercion. However, ideological coercion is often used in contexts where it is not clear there is a coercer. Marx described religion as the opium of the people. The idea is that by concentrating on rewards in heaven people accept hell on earth. We accept the conditions of capitalism and wage slavery because we accept that there is no alternative. We live by an ideology that colors our thoughts and leads us not to recognize that we are being coerced. However, as we saw in the discussion of coercive wage offers, unless there are clearly agents who set up the situation that leads to an ideology that causes our dominant strategies to be to obey the rules of capitalism, it is not clear that the situation is coercive. A similar analysis can be offered of “cultural coercion” where people try to conform to their identity group—dressing and behaving in prescribed ways become dominant strategies. However, if I choose to dress like others, am I really coerced? Probably the most conformist humans are teenagers in Western societies (despite their reputation for being rebels): they tend to dress, talk, and behave similarly to those in their peer group. And if teenagers move from one area to another, they usually mix with those whom they resemble or soon take on the mores and conventions of the group they join. Is this coercion? It is not clear how coercive cultural coercion really is. Without an agent—the coercer—who sets up the

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coercive situation, can we really speak of these situations as coercive ones? We might see teenagers as having dominant strategies to dress alike, but there is no particular person who has forced the situation they are in. Without such a person, there is no coercion. In that sense, ideological, cultural, and even economic coercion should be seen as no more than metaphors and not a correct analytic reading of the situation. Seen as the opposite of liberty, coercion is almost universally regarded as normatively bad. However, the coercive nature of the state is not necessarily seen as bad. In that sense, coercion is not intrinsically wrongful. One way of considering the matter is whether coercion is a violation of someone’s rights. The coercive powers of the state would not be wrongful if they do not abrogate citizen’s rights; indeed quite the reverse is true, as the justification of the state having a monopoly on legitimate violence, or coercion, is to protect rights. To the extent that laws are backed by the coercive forces of the state, and to the extent those laws are designed to protect individual rights to liberty, property, and the person, then the coercive force of the state is not wrongful. We might extend this analysis of coercion to other legitimate uses. Parents might use threats of loss of privileges, even some emotional blackmail, in the interests of their children. Such coercive practices might be considered legitimate. To be sure, one might argue it would be better if parents use not coercive force but other means to encourage their children to act in their best interest, but most parents would recognize that some degree of threats and coercion, however mild, is often required. In other relationships too, coercion might be justified on the grounds of the well-being and interests of the person being coerced. Again, we might recognize that coercion does involve a loss of liberty, but liberty is only one good among others and sometime a loss of liberty might be justified by another gain in well-being or interests.

Conclusion Coercion occurs at many different levels. Seeing it as the obverse of liberty, we can see it anywhere we see lack of liberty: we can see it in coercive personal relationships; and we can see it in social and economic relationships within the state and at the international

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level. Threats such as those posed by terrorism or by one state threatening another are more obvious examples of coercion, but coercion can be seen in a more diffuse and dispersed manner through all types of relationship. It is best seen in terms of the deliberate creating of a situation by one agent to ensure another has a dominant strategy to do as the first wishes. Thus, the highwayman example (as explained here rather than as is usually discussed) provides the paradigm situation of coercion. Keith Dowding See also Blackmail; Coercion, Analytic; Domination; Exploitation; Freedom; Subjugation; Threats; Throffers

Further Readings Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar Wertheimer, A. (2004). Coercion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zimmerman, D. (1981). Coercive wage offers. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10(2), 121–145.

COLEMAN, JAMES S. (1926–1995) James Coleman is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest empirical sociologists of the 20th century. His great work was Foundations of Sociological Theory (1990), but his work on education was very influential, if controversial. He pioneered the use of formal theorizing in sociology, publishing An Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964) and Mathematics of Collective Action (1973), formed the Rational Actor group within the International Sociological Association, and founded the associated journal Rationality and Society in 1988. Coleman’s work intersects with the concept of power in a number of interrelated ways. As well as a formal approach to power with the index named after him, he recognized that power was a concept of immense social importance. His first book, Community Conflict (1957), is a series of case studies examining conflict at the local level. He saw that crosscutting cleavages within the social structure help ameliorate conflict, a process that is

also aided by stable social structures and organizations. In a sense, he was a traditional normative pluralist, believing that multiple centers of power enable efficiency. He also saw structured competition within markets, governments, and the state as promoting efficiency. He believed competition within education was a good thing, though he strongly believed in equality of opportunity in education. He was commissioned to write a report on educational equality in the United States, which was published in 700 pages in 1966. He argued that educational attainment had more to do with the socioeconomic status of children than with the differences in school funding then existing. This led the statistically incompetent to misunderstand his argument that differences in school do not matter to educational attainment—hence the controversy. He also argued that black students would benefit from racially mixed schooling, which led to bussing, though he later controversially argued that bussing had failed because white parents removed their children from schools where blacks were sent. Coleman’s other early work included an important study on medical diffusion. A central plank of his pluralism was that efficiency requires multiple sources of information. He found that doctors who were well connected into local medical networks adopted new drugs more swiftly than did those who were not. The idea of diffusion here has been enormously influential in later network studies, globalization, and organizational analysis. Coleman was interested in the unintended consequences of social policy, such as the white flight caused by bussing. He used formal mathematics in his social theorizing (he had been trained in chemical engineering). His formal work led him to considering the cooperative game-theoretic ways of measuring power, and he created the Coleman Index for measuring the power of coalitions. His later work was informed by rational choice theory and the methodology of microeconomics. He saw collective action as the key problem for social theory, perceiving that people working together can achieve more than can those working alone. Thus, he had an interest in measuring the power of individuals as collectives or coalitions. In both Introduction to Mathematical Sociology and The Mathematics of Collective Action, he uses mathematical models to theorize about attitude change, diffusion, voting

Coleman Index

behavior, group contagion, and other social processes. The ways in which social structures affect human behavior led him to use rational choice methods of interpreting human behavior under constraint. His Foundations of Sociological Theory applies rational choice theory to social behavior, demonstrating how individual choices create social outcomes and how those choices are affected by social norms and the pressures of interpersonal relationships. He first models social exchanges where individuals interact in ways that resemble contracting for personal gain. So, for example, he sees norms as a form of rights allocation where the norm-induced behavior of one actor is controlled by others. Here, the norms benefit those other than the actor himself or herself (though overall the actor may gain as well), the norm-controlled behavior cannot be governed by contractual social exchange, and a system of sanctions exists to keep norms in place. In that way, norm-induced behavior is rationalized. Coleman sees trust as a form of social credit that exists especially when mutual rewards are high and is kept in place when there is a strong third-party “guarantor” in place. His work has been extended by network analysis and game theory. Coleman is perhaps best known for his insights on social capital, though somewhat ironically given its use because Coleman believes social capital is only a metaphor that covers various other processes analyzed in Foundations. He defines social capital by its function of facilitating individual action within the social structure. Like other forms of capital, social capital is something that makes other things unachievable without it. Unlike capital, social capital inheres in the structure of relations between persons and among persons and is not fungible. Coleman first used the concept in his work on education. His emphasis on the significance of social background led him to suggest that social capital was an important resource. For Coleman, social capital is the networks of relationships that people have, bringing benefits in helping people overcome barriers to action. The great advantage that the higher social classes have is simply the networks they have as a class. But ethnic and other groups can develop social capital as they help each other. A poor urban black will have greater social capital within his or her community than will a richer white person who found himself or herself in the neighborhood.

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Coleman saw that the collective action problem was the key problem for society and the key issue in understanding lack of personal powers. Many elements go into overcoming collective action problems, including information, network resources, and reciprocal bargaining contracts. Keith Dowding See also Bargaining; Capital, Neoclassical; Coalition Theory; Coleman Index; Collective Action Problem; Coordination; Exchange Theory; Power Indices; Social Capital; Unintended Consequences

Further Readings Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of sociological theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marsden, P. V. (2005). The sociology of James S. Coleman. Annual Reviews of Sociology, 31, 1–24.

COLEMAN INDEX In 1971, three indices of a priori voting power were introduced by James S. Coleman: the Prevent  Action index (g ), the Initiate Action index (g ), and the Index of Collectivity to Act (A). The first two indices, suitably normalized, coincide with both the normalized Banzhaf index and the normalized Penrose index (see Banzhaf Voting Power Measure, Penrose Voting Power Measure). However, the Coleman indices have a greater conceptual value because they measure different aspects of the power to make decisions and to veto. The definitions of the three Coleman indices (in absolute and normalized versions) are presented here and illustrate the links between the other previously mentioned indices. An example follows. The Index of Collectivity to Act (A) measures the ability of a given collectivity to make decisions, that is, the potentiality that an act or bill has of being passed. In the collectivity of n members, there are 2n possible coalitions. The Index of Collectivity to Act is the quotient between the number of winning coalitions  (i.e., the number of voting outcomes that lead to a decision) and 2n: v A5 n . 2

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Coleman Index

The essential element in the construction of the other two indices is the concept of “swing.” A swing for the i-th member of the collectivity is a pair of coalitions ðS; S\figÞ such that S is a winning coalition and S\fig is losing. The number of swings of each member i is denoted by ci. The Prevent Action index (g ) is a measure of the blocking power of each member in the given collectivity. For each member i, the Prevent Action Index g i is the quotient between the number of the member’s swings ci and the number  of the winning coalitions of the collectivity: ci gi5 . v 

The Initiate Action index (g ) is a measure of the power of each member to have his proposals accepted by the collectivity. For each member I, the  Initiate Action index gi is the quotient between the number of the member’s swings ci and the number n l52 2v of the losing coalitions of the collectivity, that is, of the outcomes that do not produce a decision: ci  gi 5 . l The absolute Banzhaf index  coincides with the Penrose index r. Both the prevent action and the initiate action indices can be regarded as rescalings of  (and then of r). In fact, 0

gi 5 

gi 5

b i ri , 5 2A A

indices of Banzhaf and Penrose, in the group of the I-power indices (power as influence).  For both  g and g , the  sum extended to all the n members

S gj ; S gj

j2N

j2N

one. Then the normalized indices are considered g i , gi . S gj S gj

j2N

j2N

The normalized indices coincide with one another and with the normalized Banzhaf (–Penrose) index. However, the absolute indices offer more information than normalized ones do because the latter are leveled, much as is a drawing compared with a three-dimensional form.

An Example Assume a parliament is composed of three parties (labeled 1, 2, 3), which have neither prejudice against forming, nor inclination to form, a coalition between them. Let (2, 1, 1) be the respective seats. Suppose that an act can be approved only if the favorable votes are equal to or greater than 3 (simple majority). In this case, the winning coalitions are {1, 2}, {1, 3} and {1, 2, 3}, so v53 . Party 1 is decisive for all winning coalitions (without party 1, all these coalitions become losing) so it has three swings. Parties 2 and 3 are decisive only for one coalition ({1, 2} and {1, 3}), respectively, so they have only one swing each. Thus c1 53 , c2 51, c3 51, and

0

bi ri . 5 2ð12AÞ ð12AÞ

A¼

3 3, 3 ¼ 8 2

g1 51 , g2 5g3 51=3 ,



In particular, both g and g coincide with (and then with r) if the number of winning coalitions is equal to the number of the loosing coalitions (i.e., v5l52n21 ) because in this case there is no difference between the power to prevent action and the power to initiate action. Moreover, the absolute Banzhaf index  (and then r) coincides with the harmonic mean of g  and g :   1 1 1 . 0 bi 52ri 5 1  2 . gi gi

in general is greater than



g1 5

1 1 3 3   5 . 5 , g2 5g3 5 3 2 3 5 2 3 5 3

Cesarino Bertini and Izabella Stach See also Banzhaf Value; Coleman, James S.; I-Power; Power Indices; Power to Initiate Action and Power to Prevent Action; P-Power; Voting Paradoxes; Voting Power; Weighted Majority Game

Further Readings

Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover classi fied A, g , and g as well as the (not normalized)

Banzhaf, J. F. (1965). Weighted voting doesn’t work: A mathematical analysis. Rutgers Law Review, 19, 317–343.

Collective Action Problem

Coleman, J. S. (1971). Control of collectivities and the power of collectivity to act. In B. Lieberman (Ed.), Social choice (pp. 269–300). New York: Gordon and Breach. Felsenthal, D., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (2005). Voting power measurement: A story of misreinvention. Social Choice and Welfare, 25(2–3), 485–506. Penrose, L. S. (1946). The elementary statistics of majority voting. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 109, 53–57.

COLLECTIVE ACTION PROBLEM To further their interests, individuals must sometimes act collectively. It is easy to assume that individuals with shared—that is, collective—interests will jointly pursue those interests: that workers will form unions and lobby for higher wages, that states will agree to cut carbon dioxide emissions to preserve the environment, and that commuters will use public transport to reduce traffic congestion. Yet as each of these examples shows, collective action can actually be quite problematic. Workers do form unions and states do sometimes sign environmental treaties, but it cannot simply be assumed that collective action will occur. Free riding is one particular problem that can stymie collective action. In situations where the benefits of collective action accrue to all the members of the group regardless of who contributed to its provision, individuals may reason that they are better off not contributing to the collective cause and instead free riding on the efforts of others. The problem is that if everyone in a group reasons in this way, then no collective action will occur, and all the members of the group may end up worse off relative to when they share the costs of collective action. The collective action problem was clearly stated by Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action: Any group or organization, large or small, works for some collective benefit that by its very nature will benefit all the members of that group in question. Though all the members of a group

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therefore have a common interest in obtaining this collective benefit, they have no common interest in paying the cost of providing that collective good. Each would prefer that the others pay the entire cost, and ordinarily would get any benefit provided whether he had borne part of the cost or not. (Olson, 1965, p. 21)

Free riding is a particularly important source of collective action problems. There are, however, other reasons why collective action might or might not occur. Just a few will be mentioned here: Recognition of Interests. Groups will fail to act collectively if, for whatever reason, they fail to recognize that they have a shared set of interests that require collective action. Group Homogeneity. The more homogeneous a group is, the more likely it is that the members of the group will recognize any shared interests and overcome disputes about how to distribute the costs of collective action. Group Interactiveness. If the members of a group already interact frequently, it will be easier to monitor and so punish free riding. The members of a group who interact frequently may also already trust each other to act fairly in the absence of any monitoring. Opposition. The existence of a rival group can sometimes spur a group to act collectively. Alternatively, an opposition group may be able to undermine attempts at collective action.

Collective Action, Power, and Luck Power is often defined as the ability to overcome resistance. Explicit collective action is not always required for an individual to exercise power and secure his or her goals. The owner of a large corporation who is considering whether to invest in a country may, for example, be able to secure, through direct negotiations with the government, a series of favorable tax concessions without having to form any explicit coalitions. However, such actions are a form of coalition with the government. Often, however, individuals can only acquire power by acting in explicit coalitions. Individually, farmers do not have any great power. Yet collectively, they have often been able to extract from

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governments a range of economic privileges including subsidies, export credits, import restrictions, and price controls. There may well have been a time when governments supported farmers because the government wanted to reduce the country’s dependence on imports. Yet, more recently, it is perhaps the ability of farmers to operate collectively through such well-connected and lavishly funded groups as the National Farmers Union in the United Kingdom, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and the Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles (FNSEA) in France that best explains their success. Finally, there are individuals whose powerlessness might be explained in terms of their failure to overcome collective action problems. Consider the situation of those living under a dictatorship. As successful revolutions in the Philippines (1986), Eastern Europe (1989), Serbia (2000), and Ukraine (2004–2005) have shown, only a small fraction of a country’s population needs to act collectively to topple a government. Yet, many dictatorships survive. One reason why they do so is the existence of the collective action problem. It is, as already noted, easy to assume that individuals with shared interests will act collectively in pursuit of those interests. It is also easy to assume that if a group of individuals is powerless that the group is powerless because powerful people are thwarting the group. In questioning this “blame fallacy,” Keith Dowding suggests that the powerless may sometimes be powerless because they are unlucky and that they may be unlucky because to achieve their goals they need to but are unable to act collectively. At the same time, however, one way in which people can both exercise and maintain their power is by undermining the efforts of others to act collectively. It is, in other words, an open empirical question whether the powerless are powerless because they are unlucky or whether they are powerless because powerful people are thwarting them. To see how the powerful might undermine attempts at collective action, consider, once again, the example of a dictatorship: Free Riding. Dictators can exacerbate an existing collective action problem by making it clear that they will punish those who attempt to act collectively and

that they will reward those who betray the plans of others. Recognition of Interests. A dictator may also try to prevent people from recognizing that they share a collective interest in toppling the government. One way in which dictators can do so is by pursuing a policy of “divide and rule” in which the dictators use their control of the media to encourage individuals to believe that their interests are threatened by those living in different parts of the country or those who practice a different religion. Group Interactiveness. Groups that interact frequently with each other are more likely to be able to overcome a collective action problem. By either closely regulating or even dissolving institutions and spaces in which people are likely to come together— churches, sports associations, or even the family— dictators can therefore make it harder for a group to act collectively. Opposition. Finally, and most obviously, dictators can bolster their position by destroying any groups that do form. As the purges conducted by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s also showed, dictators can strengthen their reputation for ruthlessness by persecuting loyal government supporters.

Acting Collectively by Creating Power

One way in which individuals can overcome collective action problems is by either creating or giving to an existing third party the power to punish free riding. Writing in the 17th century, during the midst of the constitutional upheavals wrought by the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes famously argued that, when caught in a state of nature, every person would be better off if each respected each other’s property, but that everyone would be tempted to renege on any agreements reached. As a result of what we could now describe as this collective action problem, the life of a person, Hobbes concluded, would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Hobbes argued that people could eventually escape this dystopia by agreeing to establish a sovereign political authority, the Leviathan, with sufficient power to force individuals to respect each other’s property and lives. By forfeiting some of their own freedoms, or powers, and creating a

Collective Action Problem

body that could exercise a monopoly on the exercise of legitimate violence, individuals would be better able to achieve their interests. It is not hard to see why many people continue to proclaim the relevance of Hobbes’s analysis. In many states— Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo being, perhaps, the most obvious examples—the absence of a government that can command a monopoly on the use of violence has been associated with civil wars that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Yet it is worth briefly noting that actors other than the state can sometimes use their power to solve collective action problems. Diego Gambetta argues that weakness of the state in southern Italy during the 19th and early 20th centuries allowed the Mafia and other organized crime groups to acquire a great deal of power. This is, in one sense, obvious. The weakness of the state meant that the police and judiciary lacked the resources necessary to crush these groups. Yet there is more to Gambetta’s argument than this. The absence of a strong state in Italy was economically damaging because it raised the “transaction costs” of exchange. Because the state could not be relied on to enforce the terms of any deals, markets were paralyzed. In these circumstances, the Mafia fulfilled an important economic function by guaranteeing market trades in return for a share of the resulting profits.

Collective Action and the Exploitation of the Powerful There are some groups that Olson calls “privileged,” in which one member of the group so values the collective good in which the group has a shared interest that that member is prepared to bear the entire costs of providing it himself or herself. Consider the example of a shared student apartment. Keeping the apartment clean or at least tolerably hygienic poses a potential collective action problem in that each resident has an incentive to free ride on any cleaning efforts. But if one student has a pathological hatred of squalor, that student may be willing to clean the apartment without any help from the others. The theory of hegemonic stability developed by international relations theorists in the 1980s provides a more substantive example of this basic idea

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and allows us to link the existence of a privileged group to power. Proponents of this theory argue that a secure and prosperous international order requires the provision of collective goods such as a free-trading regime, a stable international currency, and a sense of security from invasion. In an anarchic international system in which there is no Leviathan to enforce order, the provision of these goods provides a serious collective action problem. Historically, this problem has often been resolved when a hegemonic power—once Britain but now the United States—so benefits from the existence of a stable international order that the power is prepared to bear the costs of enforcing free trade agreements, maintaining an international currency, and protecting state boundaries. The theory of hegemonic stability is, it almost goes without saying, a controversial one. Many would argue that far from providing a set of collective goods, Britain and the United States used their power to exploit the international system for their own advantage. In the context of this discussion of the relationship between collective action and power, the argument for hegemonic stability does, however, have some particularly interesting implications. First, it suggests that all the members of a group—in this case, the states in the international system—might benefit from the presence of an extremely powerful, hegemonic, state. Second, the theory suggests that, in at least this one respect, the powerless might be able to exploit the powerful by making the powerful bear most, if not all, of the costs of providing collective goods. Collective Action and Empowerment

In studying collective action, political scientists are likely to focus on the circumstances in which collective action takes place and the extent to which the existence of the collective action problem disadvantages particular groups. Psychologists are more likely to focus on the distinctive personality traits exhibited by those engaged in high-intensity collective action and the effects participation has on them. One recent line of argument here is that collective action is, for many people, an empowering experience. In acting collectively, and, crucially, in acting against some other group, individuals achieve a greater sense of social identity, become more aware of the existence of other people who

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Community Power Debate

share that identity, and come to believe that they can, in however small a way, make a political difference. Consider, for example, the following statement made by a participant in the Reclaim the Streets demonstration, talking here about how the group overcame police resistance: That felt really brilliant, cos it was just . . . I don’t know, there’s something about overcoming opposition. Like if we’d just walked out of the tube station and walked straight onto the road, it wouldn’t have been as good, as having to have got round the police lines first. So it was that kind of, you know, makes you feel more like you’ve achieved something . . . if you’re left completely free to do whatever you want, it doesn’t feel as way-hey! Exciting as, the whole crowd, pulling together against some opposition and then achieving what it wants, cos you all feel this sense of unity, and purpose. (Drury, Cocking, Beale, Hanson, & Rapley, 2005, p. 316)

Because those who act collectively are more likely to achieve a sense of empowerment and because those who feel empowered are more likely to engage in collective action, there is a potentially virtuous circle here. The sense of empowerment described by psychologists is, however, only likely to arise in situations where the collective action is considered by the participants themselves to have been successful. Andrew Hindmoor See also Chicken Games; Cooperation; Coordination; Dowding, Keith; Luck; Networks, Power in; Pluralism; Public Goods; Systematic Luck

Further Readings Dowding, K. (1996). Power. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Drury, J., Cocking, C., Beale, J., Hanson, C., & Rapley, F. (2005). The phenomenology of empowerment in collective action. British Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 309–328. Gambetta, D. (1993). The Sicilian Mafia: The business of private protection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kindleberger, C. (1981). Dominance and leadership in the international economy: Exploitation, public goods and

free rides. International Studies Quarterly, 25, 242–254. Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

COLLECTIVE GOODS See Public Goods

COMMUNITY POWER DEBATE The community power debate set the scene for several generations of scholarly research around the nature of power in society. In many ways, all of the central issues that continue to be discussed and debated in mainstream analyses of power were first set by the community power debate. That debate was probably first labeled as such toward the end of its first phase, in the early 1970s.

First Phase In the interwar period, a number of sociological studies of small-town life in the United States were conducted. They did not, however, address questions of power directly; nevertheless, they usually identified key figures in communities, often bankers and leading businesspeople around whom much of the social and political life of communities revolved. The book that might be thought to have started the community power debate is Floyd Hunter’s Community Power Structure, published in 1953. Using a reputational method, he argued that there was a clear power elite in Atlanta (which he called “Regional City”). He argued that members of this relatively small power elite were socially and economically linked and included important businesspeople, corporate lawyers, and politicians. He viewed power as a set of interlinked power pyramids; although the same people dominated within different pyramids or issueareas, different people might be found at the head of each pyramid. At about the same time C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite (1956), arguing that the United States was dominated by a

Community Power Debate

political–industrial–military complex whose membership all came from the same social (and often also family) backgrounds, having attended the same schools and universities and belonging to the same clubs. Together, these two books created “elite theory” and provided the first side in the community power debate. The second side emerged through the work of Robert Dahl, whose book Who Governs?, published in 1961, examined the power structure of Dahl’s home university town of New Haven, Connecticut. Dahl and his researchers had a number of criticisms of Floyd Hunter’s methods and conclusions. The critique was that reputational methods were bound to produce lists of power elites and people who view some actors as more important than others; selecting people from those lists would simply reinforce the assumption that their colleagues and acquaintances were also powerful. Instead, Dahl chose a set of issues to study from what was being reported in the local newspapers and interviewed sets of people at all levels within those issue areas. For all the heat of the subsequent debate, Dahl’s conclusions were not that different from Hunter’s, though the manner in which they were expressed differed. Dahl also found that there were important elites who figured in different issue areas. However, he emphasized their differences rather than the fact they came from similar backgrounds. He suggested that power diffused among different competing elites in different issue areas. His pluralist view, despite similar evidence, contrasted sharply with the elite views expressed by Hunter, Mills, and others. This first stage in the community power debate differed both in methods—the reputational versus the behavioral methods—and in their conclusions, one emphasizing the elite domination and the other the plurality of centers of power.

Second Phase The second stage of the debate centered around methods. Early critics of Dahl suggested that his methods were bound to miss important aspects of the power structure. Examining issues brought up in the newspapers would ignore those issues that were underground, off-message, or were, in E. E. Schattsneider’s phrase, “organized out” of political debate. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz suggested that

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what they called the “decisional” method of Dahl ignored “nondecisions.” These are decisions that are taken behind closed doors out of the purview of the media and public, ensuring that some interests are not represented. A second critique emerged from the neo-Marxist writer William Domhoff, who reanalyzed all the evidence collected and maintained by Dahl. Domhoff argued that Dahl’s team had identified elites who came from the same social backgrounds, belonged to the same clubs, and attended the same schools and universities; Dahl simply had not reported his elite findings. Dahl and his one-time research associates, Raymond Wolfinger and Nelson Polsby, responded by defending their behavioral and decisionist methods. They renewed their attack on reputational methods and suggested that we cannot study issues for which there is no evidence. Dahl expressed some surprise at the way his findings had been interpreted. Some textbooks still assert that pluralists claimed that power was equally dispersed among different groups of people. Dahl was clear that power was unequally dispersed, clear that an elite did exist, and that this elite included politicians around the mayor and businesspeople. However, he maintained that these elites were competitive and did not act as a single entity. He also maintained that although an elite governed in the interests of the majority of citizens, that the latter were less powerful did not show there was anything wrong with democracy. Indeed, in a short book After the Revolution? (1970), he poured scorn on those who felt that power could somehow be equally dispersed.

Structural Accounts and Theoretical Critiques In the 1970s and 1980s, the power debate moved in two contrary directions. There were those who continued Hunter’s elite and structuralist line, alongside a more Marxist structural-functionalist account— both of which maintained a firm empirical base— and those who moved away from empirical studies to more theoretical critiques that ultimately seem to suggest that power cannot be studied empirically, at least in part because it is an essentially contested concept. The structural accounts begin with Matthew Crenson’s The Unpolitics of Air Pollution (1972),

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Community Power Debate

which demonstrates how structural factors affect the nature of power within communities. Examining two steel towns, he shows how one enacted air pollution ordinances earlier than others did because vested interests had more bargaining power and because the local population also had more invested in the steel companies. Although everyone can see the benefits of clean air, they were less keen on enacting ordinances in one city because of the costs of the ordinances, especially given the propaganda and threats of the steel corporations. In an award-winning book, Regime Politics (1989), Clarence Stone returned to Hunter’s original site of study, Atlanta, to defend the structural account of power—what he termed systemic power—he identified in Hunter’s book. Stone suggested that city government is formed through coalitions that take on governing principles that dominate decision making even when new elites take over. Thus, he argued that even when the African American community managed to wrest control of Atlanta’s governing structure, African American leaders soon took on the interests of the business elite (albeit with a black subsection) in development issues. The underlying idea is that within a democracy, politicians need reelection and they improve their reelection chances by forming a coalition with different groups. They need the support of local business for direct monetary support for their campaigns and to ensure that capitalists do not disinvest in their community. Part of the bargain will involve allowing businesspeople to create new development and ensuring that the local economy runs smoothly. Thus, political elites need to compromise their welfare objectives even if these serve the interests of their core supporters. Hunter also followed up his study of Atlanta with another, in which he reaffirmed his original findings albeit with the addition of a new black elite. The growth-machine model is a neo-Marxist variant of this elite story. Here, the argument is that developers want to maximize the exchange value of the properties they build or improve. Although this might bring some real value to a community, much of this value will be invested or spent in other communities. The local community wants to maximize the use value of its property: the use and exchange value do not always coincide. Hence, although development might be good for a community, the nature of the (local) capitalist

state ensures that developers do not work in the best interests of the community. This is called the growth machine because local growth is created for its own sake and not for the benefit of the community. Again, the mechanism underlying the machine is that politicians need to support capital to promote the local economy for their own reelection chances. The second strand of the post-behavioralist examination turned away from empirical community studies. A key book, at least in Europe, was Steven Lukes’s Power: A Radical View, which suggested there were three faces or dimensions of power. These constituted the behaviorialist/decisionist view of Dahl, the nondecisions of Bachrach and Baratz, and a third dimension that recognized the importance of objective interests. One of the issues at the heart of the elite–pluralist divide is whether elites rule in their own interests or in the interests of the community as a whole. Both pluralists and elitists recognize that there are policy elites: the real question is to how far they govern in their own interests and how far they govern in the interests of the community as a whole. To the extent that nondecisions are taken out of the view of the media and the public, one would think that elites are conspiring in their own interests. However, simply because a given development brings great gains to the entrepreneur who risked his money on the venture and the building contractor and businesspeople who worked on it does not show that it was not also in the interests of the local community. Furthermore, we can judge whether elites rule in the interests of the many by how the many respond. In a democracy, if we are not relatively satisfied with decisions made in local government, then we can vote out the politicians and bring in those who suggest alternative courses of action. Thus, although elites might not do exactly what we wish, we may judge that generally they are ruling in the interests of the many. Contrary to this view, however, Lukes argues that both sides ignore the essentially contested view of what constitutes interests in the case. He suggests that people have objective interests of which they themselves might not be aware. Thus, even if we do not overturn our rulers, we cannot be sure they represent our interests because they might fool us about what truly constitutes our real

Community Power Debate

interests. Taking Crenson’s example of the two steel towns, Lukes suggests that people might think that air pollution ordinances are not a good idea because they will reduce profits for the company and put jobs at risk. However, it would be in their objective interests for health reasons to ensure all towns had similar ordinances so that that competition remained fair and such ordinances would not threaten jobs. He suggests that although we might think that development is in our interests, unaware of our real or objective interests, we can be wrong. Of course, once one has rejected any empirical process by which we judge the importance of issues—such as Dahl’s surfacing of newspaper reports or surveys asking people what is important to them—in judging interests, all we are left with is competing moral views. This lies at the heart of claims that the concepts of interest, and therefore power, are essentially contested. In the second edition of his book, Lukes goes even further and suggests that power is ubiquitous; following Michel Foucault, Lukes depicts the structures and systems of power ensuring a domination that does not allow people to recognize their own interests but ensures we are locked into a system of domination. In a late essay, Lukes quotes dialogue from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where a farmer being driven off his land is persuaded not to shoot the tractor driver who is just doing his job, having lost his own farm too. The farmer realizes that there is no point shooting the guy who gave the tractor driver the orders, nor in shooting the local banker, because he took orders from the east. The conclusion is that perhaps there is no one to shoot. Like Foucault, we might conclude that everyone in the machine of life, those at the top and the bottom, are all dominated by the power system. Such conclusions lead some to suggest that we cannot empirically study power; rather, its study is a normative exercise. In Rational Choice and Political Power, Keith Dowding argues that this view arises from a misunderstanding of the collective action problem. The pluralists are wrong that we can read interests separate from action because the collective action problem shows that people might not act in their own interests, even when they know what those interests are. However, Lukes is wrong in thinking that lack of action shows people do not understand

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their own interests. Dowding recognizes that there might be objective interests—in the sense that we do not always recognize them—but argues that we can model objective interests by exploring what is good for the health and well-being of people and by examining the ways in which people make poor judgments between their needs and their desires. He argues that we can model situations to make empirical judgments about the relative powers of different agents. He suggests that the best way of measuring power is by examining relative resources and how these can be used in bargaining situations. Dowding argues against the idea of structural or systemic power, suggesting that the term power is best reserved for what agents can do. However, he develops the idea of “systematic luck,” which is very similar to that of Stone’s notion of systemic power. Based on Brian Barry’s notion of luck, which is getting what you want without trying, he suggests that the difference between the power of agents based on what they could achieve given their situation and resources, and how much they get of what they want, is a measure of their luck. If one systematically shares preferences with more powerful actors, then one gets a lot of what one wants without actually being powerful. Thus, the extent to which development takes place despite the wishes of the local community and the extent to which it is actually in the interests of the community is a measure of the luck of the community. The extent to which developers share the interests of politicians given that both want development— the latter for reelection, the former for personal gain—is the systematic luck of the developers. The idea of systematic luck has proved highly controversial: writers such as Lukes and Barry believe it downplays the extent to which capitalists and developers hold sway over communities at local, national, and international levels.

Conclusion The community power debate has probably run its course. All sides seem content that they have won a victory and now show little enthusiasm to continue the debate. Key issues such as the nature of interests, how best to measure power (if it can be measured at all), and how far “power” is empirically demonstrable remain contested. Mainstream political science and urban politics tend to avoid

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Complex Equality (Walzer)

direct power study. One reason might be that empirical research now examines models of specific situations and specific coalitions. Although these are studies of power battles, they are not studies of power in the broad sense. The power of an actor, according to most definitions, is what the actor could attain, not what he or she does attain. Mainstream political science and urban studies tend to examine what people have obtained, and so concentrate on the actual narratives or the potential ones. Mainstream power debates, as represented in the newly established Journal of Power, concentrate more on theories of power and much less on direct empirical studies of power. So in that sense, too, the community power debate, which began with specific empirical power studies, has been left behind. Keith Dowding See also Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton; Collective Action Problem; Dahl, Robert A.; Domhoff, G. William; Dowding, Keith; Essentially Contested Concept; Foucault, Michel; Growth Coalitions; Hunter, Floyd; Interests; Lukes, Steven; Mills, C. Wright; Mobilization of Bias; Pluralism; Regime Theory in Urban Politics; Reputational Analysis; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power; Third Face; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Dahl, R. A. (1961). Who governs? Democracy and power in an American city. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Hunter, F. (1953). Community power structure: A study of decision makers. New York: Anchor Books. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Stone, C. N. (1989). Regime politics: Governing Atlanta 1946–1988. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

COMPLEX EQUALITY (WALZER) Michael Walzer in his book Spheres of Justice suggests that power and domination can be avoided if a society promotes complex equality. His definition

of complex equality states: no social good x should be distributed to men and to women who possess some other good y merely because they possess y and without regard to the meaning of x. Complex equality does not mean that people have the same holdings of any good, so people will not have the same amount of money, status, position, or political power. But their holdings in any one social sphere should not give them advantage regarding their holdings in another social sphere. So, for example, a person holding some political office should not because of that office have greater access to some other social good such as health care. This account of equality in social goods is pluralistic. It has some affinities with Robert A. Dahl’s argument that power is pluralist when it is not concentrated into the hands of a single power elite. Walzer’s account of complex equality is much more radical than is Dahl’s account of pluralism in political power and influence. Underlying the idea of complex equality is that different spheres of life—the market, politics, the arts, and so on—have different social meanings. The just distribution of goods within each sphere will therefore use different principles of distribution. The principles of distribution within one sphere, and the distribution itself, should contaminate neither the principles nor the distribution in another sphere. Walzer’s account, if taken literally, means that people should not gain better health care simply because they have gained better education. Or, that someone should not receive more social status simply because they have more money. It is not clear, however, what this entails for political and economic practice. The unequal holding of monetary resources, for example, is bound to give greater access to many social goods, unless they are not distributed by a market. Greater education is almost bound to lead to greater access to health care because the more educated are better able to articulate their health needs and more confident in their dealings with doctors. It is hard to see how to persuade people not to give more respect to the leading lights of the arts world than to accountants or dentists. A less radical reading would be simply that political power should not lead to greater access to jobs or position. Such a reading is merely saying that politicians and civil servants should not be corrupt. Or that leading capitalists should not

Compliance (International)

have greater influence over politicians, or over administrative decisions, or have access to other resources provided by the state such as national health care and state education. The less radical reading makes more sense, but is simply part and parcel of constitutional liberalism. Keith Dowding See also Dahl, Robert A.; Justice

Further Readings Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of justice: A defence of pluralism and equality. Oxford, UK: Martin Robertson.

COMPLIANCE (INTERNATIONAL) Power is a key concept in international politics, not only in realist thinking. Although power-based theories of international relations stress the relevance of power in explaining war and stability in the international system, institutionalist approaches focus on the exercise of power in both the formation and maintenance of institutions, and through institutions and within and among institutions. Recently, the legalization literature has triggered a debate about the extent to which international institutions mitigate the influence of powerful states. Irrespective of their theoretical approach, most scholars tend to treat power as a property focusing on a particular type of power resource, such as gross domestic product (GDP), demography, or military force. Compliance, defined as rule-consistent behavior, by contrast, lends itself to a more relational concept of power. Following Max Weber, power can be understood as the probability of getting an actor to comply against his or her resistance. Compliance is then a manifestation of power. Conversely, power becomes a major prerequisite to ensure compliance with international institutions. The so-called enforcement school in international compliance research assumes that states violate international norms and rules because they are not willing to bear the costs of compliance. This is particularly the case if international norms

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and rules are not compatible with national arrangements, as a result of which compliance requires substantial changes at the domestic level. From this rationalist perspective, noncompliance can only be prevented by increasing the costs of noncompliance. Realist approaches point to hegemonic states, which in the absence of an international monopoly of legitimate force are the only actors with sufficient power to effectively sanction noncompliant behavior. Institutionalist approaches, by contrast, emphasize that international institutions can serve as substitutes for the enforcement powers of hegemonic states. Noncompliance or free riding becomes less attractive to states if they are likely to be caught and punished. International institutions can then provide mechanisms for monitoring compliance and for coordinating sanctions against free riders. Several studies have confirmed the importance of enforcement power, both of states and thirdparty authorities, for ensuring compliance with international institutions. At the same time, the original power-based argument of the enforcement school has been differentiated by various strands of the international relations literature. First, liberal theories draw attention to the domestic power of states to legally ratify and enforce international agreements. Domestic veto players can create problems of “involuntary defection” where states are willing to comply but lack the power to overcome domestic resistance against required legal and political changes. For instance, the U.S. president had signed the Kyoto Protocol but could not get the required two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate to ratify it. Overall, however, compliance studies have found little support for the relevance of institutional veto players in explaining compliance. Second, powerful states do more than enforce compliance; they may also be less sensitive to costs imposed by sanctions and, hence, more resistant to external enforcement pressures. This can be called the power of recalcitrance. The United States is simply more capable of coping with punitive tariffs authorized by the dispute settlement procedure of the World Trade Organization (WTO) than are Kenya and Austria. The same applies to reputational costs caused by a loss of credibility (or social sanctioning). Weak states can hardly afford to exclude powerful states from international agreements, even if the latter have the reputation of being unreliable partners.

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Third, principal–agent theory draws attention to the relation between noncompliant states and those actors seeking enforcement. States (principals) delegate monitoring and sanctioning powers to an enforcement authority (agent), which, however, remains dependent on the former because the states can always renounce the power of the enforcement authority. This asymmetrical relation may induce the enforcement authority to act strategically and be reluctant to impose sanctions on powerful states. The latter can use their economic and political power to deter enforcement authorities but also use other states to sanction their noncompliant behavior (power of deterrence). Although the threat of financial penalties by the European Union (EU) brought smaller states, such as Portugal and the Netherlands, into compliance with the EU Stability and Growth Pact, Germany and France successfully prevented the adoption of punitive measures in the council. Fourth, negotiation theories point to a power variant that increases rather than decreases the propensity of powerful states to comply with international norms. Although some have argued that (strong) states are unlikely to enter international agreements that impose high compliance costs, powerful states may be able to shape international institutions according to their preferences. The extent to which a state has managed to impose its preferences during the decision-making process determines the costs of compliance and, thereby, the state’s willingness to comply with the decision (power of assertiveness). Studies on EU policy making confirm that some states are more successful in shaping EU legal acts than others are. However, shaping does not necessarily depend on the economic and political power of a member state. Bureaucratic efficiency and negotiation skills are more important both in the shaping of and passing EU policies. Nor do powerful member states deter the Commission and the European Court of Justice from prosecuting them for violations of EU law. But they are more likely to resist the enforcement pressure of the European Commission (though not the European Court of Justice). Other things being equal, member states such as France, Italy, and Germany, which yield greater (voting) power, violate European law more frequently than do weak member states, such as Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Even highly legalized institutions, such as the EU

or the WTO, where monitoring and sanctioning powers are delegated to third parties, do not fully mitigate power differences between states. Although power (of recalcitrance) is a key variable in explaining (non-)compliance with international institutions, it is by no means the only one. First, strong states may be able to do what they want. If they choose not to comply, there is little other states and international enforcement authorities can do. However, the management school reminds us that compliance is not necessarily a strategic choice. Even states that choose to comply may be prevented from doing so if the very preconditions that enable states to comply are absent. The literature has identified three sources of involuntary noncompliance: lacking or insufficient state capacities, ambiguous definitions of norms, and inadequate timetables during which compliance has to be achieved. Empirical studies have found the lack of administrative capacity or bureaucratic efficiency as a particular source of noncompliance (see earlier). This may explain why Greece and Portugal are as poor compliers with EU law as France and Italy are. Second, even if we conceive of compliance as a strategic choice, how do we explain that some powerful states are more compliant than others? Germany and the United Kingdom comply much better with EU law than do France and Italy. Likewise, powerful states choose to comply in some cases but defect in others. Other factors than the costs of compliance and the power to avoid them also influence the choice of (powerful) states to comply. Unlike the enforcement and the management schools, constructivist compliance approaches stress that states follow a logic of appropriateness rather than instrumental consequentialism. They are socialized into the norms and rules of international institutions through processes of social learning and persuasion. Consequently, states comply because of a normative belief that a rule or institution ought to be obeyed rather than because it suits their instrumental self-interests. This sense of moral obligation is a function of the legitimacy of the rules themselves or their sources. Legitimacy can be generated in several ways. The rule is embedded in an underlying institution or a legal system, which is generally characterized by a high level of legitimacy (acceptance of the rule-setting institution). Or, a critical number of states are already complying with an international rule. As a result, other states are “pulled” into compliance

Computer Algorithms for Power Indices

because they want to demonstrate that they conform to the group of states to which they want to belong and whose esteem they care about. Some refer to this form of peer pressure as normative or discursive power. Finally, legitimacy can also result from certain procedures that include those actors in the rule making that are potentially affected and who engage in processes of persuasion and mutual learning (procedural legitimacy). Both procedural legitimacy and peer pressure focus more on compliance with individual rules (exactly those that result from “fair” decision-making processes or those with which other states already comply). The acceptance of the rule-setting institution, in turn, is more country specific because voluntary compliance is generated by diffuse support for and general acceptance of the rule-setting institutions and the constitutive principles of the law making and standing (support for rule of law). Compliance studies on the EU find that member states with a strong rule-of-law legal culture are the best compliers, and the support for the EU appears to be inversely related with compliance—the more antiEU a member state is, the better it complies with EU law, irrespective of its power. To conclude, power is key in explaining international compliance. However, its effect is mitigated by other factors, such as capacity and legitimacy. Empirical studies support explanations based on power, capacity, and legitimacy. Likewise, the EU and many international organizations use a combination of management, enforcement, and legitimacy mechanisms to induce member state compliance. Combining specific power-based explanations with other theoretical approaches might prove more fruitful than pitching the theories against each other. Tanja A. Börzel See also Anarchy in International Relations; Coercion and Power; Hegemony

Further Readings Chayes, A., & Chayes, A. H. (1995). The new sovereignty: Compliance with international regulatory agreements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Franck, T. M. (1990). The power of legitimacy among nations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Hurd, I. (1999). Legitimacy and authority in international politics. International Organization, 53(2), 379–408. Martin, L. L. (1992). Coercive cooperation: Explaining multilateral economic sanctions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tallberg, J. (2003). European governance and supranational institutions: Making states comply. London: Routledge.

COMPUTER ALGORITHMS FOR POWER INDICES The calculation of power indices is a substantial computational task because it requires that each possible voting outcome be examined. For voting bodies with a small number of members, indices can be found with a computer by directly applying the definitions. But when the number of voters is larger, this is not feasible and another algorithm is required. Approximation methods such as Monte Carlo simulation and probabilistic voting assumptions work well and can be very accurate. For voting systems in which the voting weights are integers, the method of generating functions is an almost ideal algorithm that is very fast and completely accurate. To develop these points requires formal mathematical notation.

Notation and Definitions A legislature that uses weighted voting and has n members is represented by a set N  {1, 2, . . . , n} whose voting weights are w1, w2, . . . , wn . Members vote for or against an action. The combined weight of a subset of members voting “for,” and represented by the subset T  (N), is denoted by wðTÞ ¼ S wi. The decision rule is defined in terms i2T

of a quota, q, by which T is winning if w(T) q and losing if w(T)  q. The weights and the quota are real numbers in general; although in most applications they are integers, this is not essential to the theory, but it is relevant to certain methods of computation, particularly the method of generating functions. Frequently a voting body is represented using the notation {q; w1, w2, . . . , wn}. In this definition, there is a single decision rule and one set of weights. In some applications, it is necessary to generalize this:

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for example, the system of qualified majority voting in the European Union (EU) Council is formally a triple-majority rule in which three conditions must be satisfied in weighted votes, population, and number of member countries. But allowing for multiple majority rules is a minor complication that we can ignore for the present purpose of discussing algorithms. Each member has a power index measuring the relative number of times that member can be the “swing” member. Formally, a swing for member i can be defined as a pair of subsets, (Ti, Ti  {i}), where Ti  N  {i}, such that Ti is losing, but Ti  {i} is winning, that is, q  wi  w(Ti)  q. The Penrose–Banzhaf power index for member i, i, is the number of swings, i, expressed as a fraction of the total number of subsets of N, which is equal to 2n–1. It measures the probability of i being the swing voter assuming all swings Ti to be equiprobable.

i  i 2n–1

(1)

The normalized Banzhaf index, i uses the total number of swings for all players as the denominator to measure relative voting power among players,

i  i i,  i i

(2)

This is a trivial normalization, so it is necessary to consider only the details of computing equation (1). James S. Coleman’s power indices are related to the Penrose–Banzhaf indices and require, in addition, the number of voting outcomes that lead to a positive decision, , that is, the number of subsets S (S  N) where w(S) q. This imposes an extra computing requirement but enables us to calculate the three indices: v n 2

Power of the voting body to act:

A¼

Power of member i to prevent action:

PPAi 5

Power of member i to initiate action:

PIAi 5

(3) hi v

(4)

hi n 2 v

(5)

Neither (4) nor (5) have meaningful normalized versions because they are both linear

transformations of i and therefore normalizing would reduce them both to i. The Shapley–Shubik index (SSI) is the probability that i is the swing member if all orderings of players is equally likely. For a given swing, the number of orderings of the members of the subset Ti and its complement (apart from player i), N  Ti  {i}, is t!(n  t  1)! where t is the number of members of Ti and n is the total number of voters, members of N. The index, i, is this number as a proportion of the number of orderings of all players in N, fi 5 + Ti

t!ðn  t  1Þ! . n!

(6)

The Method of Direct Enumeration The simplest algorithm is direct enumeration, that is, computing the indices directly from their definitions. This requires the use of an algorithm to find each subset of members, S  N, exactly once. Thus, for each (proper) subset of N, the algorithm finds all swings and updates expressions i, for I  1, 2, . . . , n, and w repeatedly; for the SSI, the algorithm updates (6). Begin by setting i  0, i  0 for all i, and   0. Choose S. For each i  1, 2, . .. , n, the algorithm tests for a swing and updates as follows: If i 2 N  S and q  wi  w(S)  q then: Set i  i  1. (Alternatively I  I  21–n.) Set i  i  s!(n  s  1)!/n! (for the SSI). If w(S) q then set     1.

Then move to the next subset S and repeat. When all subsets have been searched, the indices (1) to (6) are found. The number of subsets of N that have to be searched is 2n. Therefore, computation time doubles each time n increases by one member and the algorithm becomes infeasible for large voting bodies. Despite this severe limitation, it is a practical method to analyze qualified majority voting in the European Council with about 27 members, though it is too slow for legislatures much larger than that. This method is not at all feasible, for example, for a voting body as big as the States game in the U.S. presidential Electoral College with 51 members, let

Computer Algorithms for Power Indices

alone the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank with 184 members. The advantages of direct enumeration are its simplicity, its generality in that it can be used for any problem, that its results are exact, and that it does not require excessive storage of data in the computer’s memory. The disadvantage is its exponential time complexity that severely limits its application to voting bodies with small numbers of voters. These problems have been overcome in various ways. One of the earliest alternatives to be proposed was Monte Carlo simulation, which does not search all subsets of voters but instead selects a large random sample of them. With modern computing power, this method is capable of giving results that are very accurate, although they are still approximations.

The Method of Multilinear Extensions A second approximation is based on the method of multilinear extensions proposed by Guillermo Owen. Although this approach involves formally modeling the voting body as a cooperative game, the essential idea behind the approximation reduces to probabilistic voting and treating the power indices as probabilities. For the Penrose–Banzhaf index, each member is assumed to vote for or against with equal probability. Hence, the mean and variance of the total number of votes “for” an action are known for any subset S. It is then a simple matter to approximate the swing probabilities using the normal distribution. This method does not involve the calculation of the i s or  directly. The generalization required to get the SSI is that the voting probabilities are different, say the probability that member i votes “for” is equal to t and the probability that i votes “against” is (1  t). The means and variances of the total number of votes “for” (hence, the swing probabilities) now depend on t. The SSIs are obtained by integrating out t from the swing probabilities, using numerical quadrature. The accuracy of Owen’s method depends on how good an approximation the normal distribution is. In some cases, this is a problem—for example, where there is a voter (or voters) with a very large weight relative to the others, so that the distribution of the total vote “for” is quite “lumpy.” A modification to deal with this problem has been suggested by

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Dennis Leech in the form of an algorithm that achieves greater accuracy by combining direct enumeration with probabilistic voting: the normal approximation is taken to apply only to the (large number of) voters with relatively small weight, and direct enumeration is used for the (manageably small number of) voters with large weights. These methods are feasible for computing resources and can be applied to any voting body.

The Method of Generating Functions In the event that the weights are integers, the method of generating functions provides algorithms for computing power indices exactly. It is extremely efficient in computing time and capable of giving results almost instantaneously for voting bodies with any number of members, although it can be demanding of storage capacity if w(N) is large. This is therefore an almost ideal algorithm. It is also one of the oldest approaches, having been first used for the SSI for the States game (with n  51) in a 1962 Rand Corporation working paper by Irving Mann and Lloyd Shapley after a suggestion by David G. Cantor, although it was little used until recently. Consider first how the approach can be used for the Banzhaf and Coleman indices. We need the number of swings for each member, i, and the total number of winning votes, . This requires first finding the number of subsets, S, for each possible size, w(S)  0, 1, 2, . . . , w(N). These numbers can be found using the generating function: n Y   wj f ðxÞ5 11x (7) j51

where x is a dummy variable that has no significance of its own in the sense of measuring something, but whose role is to define the coefficients, which have an important meaning. Expanding the product in equation (7) gives a polynomial of degree w(N), in which the powers are the weights of possible subsets. The function ƒ(x) may be written in general as, wðNÞ

j

f ðxÞ5Sj50 aj x :

(8)

Comparing (8) with (7), it is easily seen that each of the coefficients aj gives us the number of

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subsets with a given weight. That is, aj is equal to the number of subsets, S, such that wðSÞ5j , for j  0, 1, 2, . . . , w(N). Because only the empty set has zero weight, a0  1. Now the question arises of how to evaluate the coefficients in (8) from (7). Henceforth, we will use the notation w to represent w(N) for brevity. A simple rule can be found for numerically finding the coefficients aj by building up the generating function (7) by successive multiplications. n  Y Thus, (7), f ðxÞ5 1 1 xwj j51

n  Y w wj 5 ½11x 1  11x , j52 i h w1 w w 1w 5 11x 1x 2 1x 1 2 n  Y w 11x j ; etc: j53

Let the successive polynomials inside the square brackets be denoted, in general, ðrÞ

ðrÞ 2

at the rth stage, where r 1, 2, . . . , n. The final stage of this process gives the required coefficients: ðnÞ aj 5aj for all j. Analogously, f(x) can be built up recursively as follows: h i ð1Þ ð1Þ w ð1Þ f ðxÞ5 11 a1 x1 a2 1 . . . 1aw x n  Y w 11x j j52

n  h i Y ð2Þ ð2Þ w ð2Þ 11xwj 5 11a1 x1a2 . . . 1aw x j53

ð0Þ

ð Þ It can be seen that, letting a00 51 and aj 50 for all j  0 , and applying the rule: ðr21Þ

ðr21Þ

1aj2wr

The coefficients aj can then be used to find the number of swings for each member, i, which depends also on the member’s weight, wi. This can be obtained by finding, for each j, such that q – wi  j  q, the number, cj, of subsets not containing i, then summing over j. Coefficients cj can be obtained by dividing the w generating function (8) by the factor ð11x i Þ. Thus, writing   v wi f ðxÞ 5 11c1 x1c2 x1 . . . 1cv x Þ 11x 511a1 x1 . . . aw xw , where v5w2wi , gives the rule: (10)

where a coefficient with a negative subscript is zero. Then the number of swings for member i, i, is q21

hi 5Sj5q2wi cj .

This process is then repeated for each member I, and the indices are calculated in the usual way. For the Shapley–Shubik index, we use the generating function, n  Y wj (11) f ðxÞ5 11x y with two dummy arguments, x and y, which can be written in general as,

ðnÞ w

511a1 x1 . . . 1aw x .

ðrÞ

j$q

j51

...

aj 5aj

w

v5 S aj :

cj 5 aj 2 cj2wi for j  1, 2, . . . , v,

ðrÞ w

11a1 x1a2 x 1 . . . 1aw x

ðnÞ

gives the required coefficients, aj, equal to the number of subsets with voting weight j. The total number of winning votes, , is the number of subsets of members with combined weight equal to or greater than the quota. Thus,

(9)

for j  wr, . . . , Sr, and aðj rÞ 5aðj r21Þ otherwise, where sr 5wðf1; 2; 3; . . . ; rgÞ , after n iterations, this

w

n

j k

f ðx; yÞ5 S S djk x y , j50 k50

where djk is the number of k-member subsets with combined voting weight j. The (w  1)(n  1) matrix D is computed iteratively, as before, by the rule, ðrÞ

ðr1Þ

djk 5djk

ðr1Þ

1djwr ;k21 :

Consensual Power, Theories of

The required matrix is D  D(n). The index for member i is found by calculating the number of swings with k members with votes equal to j, cjk, using the rule, derived in the same way as before, cjk 5djk 2cjwi ;k1.

(12)

Then the index (1) is obtained from the expression, k!ðn212kÞ! q21 + cjk : n! j5q2wi k50 n21

fi 5 +

(13)

Then (12) and (13) are repeated for each member. Dennis Leech See also Power Indices

Further Readings Leech, D. (n.d.) Computer algorithms for voting power analysis. Retrieved from http://www.warwick.ac.uk/~ecaae Owen, G. (1995). Game theory. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

CONSENSUAL POWER, THEORIES

OF

Contrary to the commonsense everyday view of power, in which power is thought of in terms of coercion or the threat of violence, most routine political and social power is based on some level of consent. To make sense of this consensual base, it is necessary to analyze power both from a sociological empirical stance and a normative philosophical one.

The Concept The literature on power is essentially scalar regarding consensus and conflict. At one end of the scale, theorists such as Max Weber, Michael Mann, Robert Dahl, and Steven Lukes view power purely in terms of conflict. At the other end, Hannah Arendt, Talcott Parsons, and Barry Barnes represent the consensual end of the spectrum. Theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Stewart Clegg, Keith Dowding, Mark Haugaard, Peter Morriss, and

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Michel Foucault encompass both consensual and conflictual aspects of power. In thinking about consensual power, two aspects have to be clearly distinguished. First, consensus can be defined in terms of outcomes or goals pursued, which gives a fairly narrow conceptualization of consensual power. In this case, any exercise of consensual power is directed toward an objective that is shared by all involved. Thus conceived, consensual power is a form of empowerment that entails only power to. The typical manifestation of this would be a group of like-minded people coming together to create an organization for a common purpose. Second, consensual power can be seen in terms of power over. Many exercises of power over others and acts of domination rest on some deep form of consensus. This can take two forms: on the one hand, conflict can be structured within a shared framework of consensus, in which case, consensus with regard to the rules of the game are a form of constraint whereby power over is managed. In this case, the consensus is not in itself part of a system of relations of domination. On the other hand, the other form of consensual power is where the consent is intrinsic to domination and thus considered somehow normatively problematic. In the Marxist tradition, hegemony, and in Foucault’s work, epistemes or discourse, are considered forms of domination that are built on the consent by less powerful or subaltern actors. To make sense of these more complex, compound forms of power, where a consensus and conflict are combined, we should distinguish between empirical sociological observations and normative claims appropriate to political theory. When there is de facto consent; in the Marxist, Foucauldian, and feminist positions, it is thought that there is potential, but as yet unmanifested, conflict. However, this hypothesis can only be justified based on a normative evaluation to the effect that weaker consenting social actors should not consent. When we assert that a given class suffers from “false consciousness” (three-dimensional power) or is subservient to a “hegemonic” discourse, the less powerful actor B consents to the power relations in question and the observing social scientist or theorists thinks (possibly for good reasons) that the actor should not be consenting, thus designating the situation as one of conflict,

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despite the empirical fact of consent. Here we have sociological consent, which is labeled conflictual for normative reasons. To justify such an evaluation, the observer/theorist must develop clear normative criteria for making such a judgment call.

Perspectives on Consensual Power From a sociological perspective, the first serious attempt to theorize the consensual base of power was made by Parsons. Using a structural-functionalist paradigm, he proposed that power is a capacity for action, which is derived from consensus with regard to system goals. Aside from the fact that structural-functionalism is out of favor in sociology, the problem with this theorization was that the scope of power was unduly narrow, excluding most forms of power over, thus avoiding the interesting phenomenon of conflictual power with a consensual base. In The Nature of Power, Barry Barnes suggests a more plausible basis than system goals as a consensual base for power. He proposes that power relations are based on shared cognitions. Derived from Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms, Barnes suggests that common interpretative frameworks give actors a shared base for collective behavior. Knowledge of the regularities of nature gives humans natural power; similarly, knowledge of the predictabilities of other actors facilitates shared social projects, thus social power. Imagine a “target” as a social object: what makes a target a target is not inherent in its shape (there are many circles that are not targets) but that people throw darts at it. All social objects are like targets in that what makes them what they are is purely a reflection of a shared socially constructed interpretative horizon or culture—for instance, what makes a cup a cup? The same applies to actors in authority, what makes the “leader” of a group, the leader is that others perceive the person to be a leader. Thus, what distinguishes the actual Napoleon from the “napoleons” in psychiatric institutions is how others perceive them as meaning-given entities. Although Barnes’s perspective is a substantial improvement over Parsons’, in that it provides a more plausible account of the consensual basis for empowerment, power over is theorized within a separate rational choice argument, which sidesteps the phenomenon of power conflict based on consent.

The idea of cognitive consensus as the basis of social order is also found in sociological theory that is influenced by the phenomenological tradition. In The Constitution of Society, Giddens argues that our knowledge of social structures is based on “practical consciousness” knowledge, which is tacit knowledge. We also have “discursive consciousness” knowledge, which is knowledge that we readily know how to put into words. For Giddens, practical consciousness knowledge is the key to an actor’s ability to reproduce social structure, which he views as the basic ordering mechanism of social life, including the microroutines of everyday interaction. So, for instance, in an interaction between two socially competent actors from the same culture, they know how far apart to stand, when to interject, and to take turns in a conversation, and in speaking the same language, they share a structured system of sounds. This knowledge is largely tacit knowledge, which they do not reflect on discursively, although they do have the capacity to do so. The use of practical consciousness knowledge for structural reproduction enables them to use their discursive knowledge to focus on the desired outcome of their interaction, which can either be a practical goal or some kind of politeness aimed at mutual recognition of the other as a social agent. Thus, practical consciousness knowledge is inherently empowering. Every interaction that exhibits structured form (which all social action does) gains its structuredness because both actors follow the norms of structuration. If, in everyday interaction, one of the actors decides to disregard the norms of appropriate space (e.g., a relative stranger decides to hug the other), turn taking (continual interruption), and all grammatical norms (gibberish), no joint goals could be realized. Thus, following the norms of structuration enables these actors to do things that they could not otherwise accomplish, and in that sense, structural constraint is empowering. Giddens argues that the basis of structuration is a set of norms and rules that constrain social actors. However, I would argue this is not entirely correct. Although norms and rules are the only means available to actors to discursively express their disapproval of others who violate “normal” structuration practice, these structures exist more like cognitive categories that actors use to order the world. These categories are not universal but are particular to specific cultures that vary across time

Consensual Power, Theories of

and space. Following Foucault in The Order of Things, they are the tacit interpretative horizon that constitutes the particularities of a specific culture as an interpretative framework that is used to make sense of the world. Foucault used the terms episteme or discursive formation for this practical consciousness knowledge and argued that they are a kind of historical a priori. It is “a priori” in the sense that it constitutes a prerequisite for interpretation, and it is “historical” in that it is particular to a specific society in historical time. Space should be added to this to the extent to which cultures differ geographically, which is the basis of anthropology. This shared practical consciousness knowledge exists as a deep consensus on which social order is built. The shared internalization of this knowledge is what makes collective endeavor possible as a form of empowerment and constitutes the basis of our ability to act “in concert.” Because this ability is based on tacit knowledge, and it is central to the social construction of who we are, it is so taken for granted that theorists (including Foucault) usually do not reflect on this relative miracle of mutual empowerment. Because this knowledge is inextricably bound up with our ontology, or being-in-theworld, it is actually relatively stable, which is why it is not usually experienced as constraint or as norms and rules. This massive consent is the basis of power to and is the most effective basis (more effective than the threat of violence) of managing power conflict, or power over. This process can be paradigmatically seen in the democratic process. When parties contest an election, they engage in conflict with regard to outcomes or goals—both parties wish to win. Yet, this contest is premised on a massively complex epistemic system, with attendant norms that can be mobilized in the instance of their breach. “Standing” for election as a “candidate” and “voting,” are acts of structuration that are given meaning. Part of the meaning is a prior acceptance that whichever party, or coalition of parties, obtains the largest number of those socially constructed entities that we call votes (which are merely bits of paper with an “x” on them or an electric pulse generated by pressing a button, in the case of electronic voting) “wins” the election. In other words, engaging in “voting” entails a prior commitment to accepting defeat based on shared interpretation of a “vote.” Of course, there are instances when this consent

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does not come automatically, if at all, as for instance in the U.S. presidential election of 2000, which is an exception that proves the rule. Similarly, in some instances, where democracy is unstable, coercion may be required as a substitute. The point remains, however, that the routine functioning of power conflict within modern democracies is based on a shared consent to structural reproduction, which is an extraordinary fact that is so taken for granted (or so part of our practical consciousness) that most social scientists who write about power ignore this phenomenon entirely. In Foucault’s work, we find a distinction between “deep conflict” and “shallow conflict.” A shallow conflict presupposes the “rules of the game,” whereas a deep conflict entails their contestation. In his genealogies of knowledge, Foucault describes how conflicts within systems of thought act as a shared basis of consent, and how social actors resist this taken-for-granted interpretative framework in deeper conflicts. Within this, what may appear like a substantive conflict is really based on consensus, and thus constitutes a shallow conflict. For instance, the conflict between Karl Marx and many of the bourgeois economists was a shallow conflict because the parties involved shared common perceptual categories, including the labor theory of value. Shallow conflict is a way of taming conflict. In several of his writings, Foucault refers to power as war by other means or as re-inscription of the rules of war through politics— which, within the present framework, means the use of social structure to facilitate an ordered exercise of power over. In this imagery, war is like a Hobbesian state of nature in which there are no rules to constrain conflict, whereas politics constitutes a shared interpretative horizon that tames conflict by making it predictable. This use of Foucault subverts Foucault’s intent in the sense that Foucault took for granted that this continuation of war through power was normatively reprehensible. However, in the instance in the democratic process or reasoned debate, these constraints are actually desirable, thus normatively unproblematic.

Normative Implication In his critique, Foucault shares with Antonio Gramsci and Lukes the implicit judgment that

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certain social actors should not consent to the structures that routinely constrain conflict, thus creating power. In the case of Gramsci on hegemony, the proletariat has internalized a bourgeois worldview that makes members of the proletariat consent to capitalism in their routine social practices. In three-dimensional power, the actors consent because they do not know what their real interests are and, in the case of Foucault, because they mistakenly believe that their interpretative horizon represents the “truth” and the “natural order of things.” To be defensible, however, this critique of consent requires a robust normative theory to justify it. Otherwise, such a position is inherently condescending toward the social subjects because it entails an implicit assertion to the effect that they do not know what their real interests are or that they suffer from some kind of cognitive deficiency. However, most social theorists do not confront this need for normative justification. Rather, they give descriptive accounts of the creation of consent and use the reader to supply the normative content. For instance, the critical edge of Foucault’s analysis hinges on a two-stage move in which he begins by demonstrating, through a historical account of the differences between epistemes, that our interpretative horizons are essentially arbitrary social constructs particular to specific historical periods. This is followed by an account of how, in the modern period, this arbitrariness is disguised by a strategic use of truth to reify our taken-for-granted episteme. Such a strategic use of truth violates the reader’s taken-forgranted norms concerning the use of truth in social interaction. Thus, the normative base for Foucault’s critique is supplied, externally, by the reader. Once we recognize that the consensual basis of power conflict is not always normatively wrong or unjust, we are confronted with a problematic that neither Foucault nor those following Gramsci were. The problem of power becomes how to distinguish consent to power that is just and fair from consent that we disapprove of? This is particularly thorny if we take the view that actors who are empirically observed to give their consent to power may be mistaken in doing so. To give a comprehensive answer to this question is outside the scope of this entry. However, in broad outline, the answer entails two elements: it includes a sociological account of the process

whereby consent is created and a normative theory that demonstrates why the empirical process of consent creation violates the norms of justice. Two instances illustrate the point: three-dimensional power and epistemes. In three-dimensional power, as theorized by Lukes, the actors suffer from “false consciousness,” which is theoretically unsatisfactory because it presupposes that Lukes has “true consciousness.” However, let us redescribe this phenomenon using some of the sociological vocabulary already outlined. We have already observed that the consent involved in most power conflict is part of practical consciousness knowledge. Practical consciousness knowledge and discursive consciousness knowledge are not entirely separate entities. It is possible to convert practical consciousness into discursive consciousness and vice versa. When we learn a language as a second language, we are moving discursive consciousness into practical consciousness knowledge. To reverse this, when, for instance we read Foucault’s description of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, in Discipline and Punish, we recognize our old school or current place of employment and, in so doing, convert practical consciousness knowledge into discursive consciousness. If we look at the normative tradition of social contract, it can be argued that a “tacit” contract is not the same as a discursive contract. So, if instead of thinking in terms of true and false consciousness, we think in terms of a process of consciousness raising whereby the social critic (whether Marxist, feminist, or Foucauldian) is making practical consciousness into discursive knowledge, one could argue that three-dimensional power is a case in which actors give tacit consent to social contract, which is not a valid normative consent unless it also holds when it is made discursive. With regard to epistemes, Foucault in essence argues that epistemes are arbitrary ways of ordering the world that are made to appear other than arbitrary through the use of truth to reify the world. Truth is effective in this task because it is considered to be beyond convention. If something is “true,” then it is no longer considered a reflection of convention. So truth is used to make something appear other than it is (reification), which implies some level of deceit. Using a normative theory (e.g., Jürgen Habermas’s theory of “communicative

Consent

action”), one can show that when such a strategic use of truth takes place the consent that results is not a sound basis for justice. Contra Foucault, not all taming of war, and its institutionalization in a regime of politics, is inherently wrong. In this case, the use of truth is only reprehensible if it can be demonstrated that it is strategic and obscuring a deeper truth, which is that our interpretative horizons are social constructs. Indeed, this recognition is necessary to protect Foucauldian analysis from the accusation that it is inherently self-refuting—if all truth is domination, then Foucault’s critique is just another mode of domination. In conclusion, consent is central to power relations. At one end of the spectrum, we have pure consent where the structures and outcomes are agreed. Then we have conflict, which is managed through consent. This is central to ordered politics and is not inherently normatively reprehensible— routine democratic politics works this way. At the more conflictual level, there is also empirical sociological consent, which, as social critics, we consider morally reprehensible. To justify such a claim, however, the theorist in question must have both a clear sociological account of consent creation and a normative theory for critiquing this process. Mark Haugaard See also Arendt, Hannah; Clegg, Stewart; Dahl, Robert A.; Discourse; Dowding, Keith; Foucault, Michel; Giddens, Anthony; Haugaard, Mark; Hegemony; Legitimation; Lukes, Steven; Mann, Michael; Morriss, Peter; Power To and Power Over; Structuration; Weber, Max

Further Readings Barnes, B. (1988). The nature of power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended. London: Penguin. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Haugaard, M. (2003). Reflections on seven ways of creating power. European Journal of Social Theory, 6, 78–114.

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CONSENT When one is affected by the actions of others that one might either approve or disapprove of, what is sometimes more important is whether one has agreed to be subject to the actions of others. If one has so agreed, then one has consented. Consent is important in a society because often events occur that disadvantage us. Whether we are entitled to compensation depends on the degree of consent. One might agree to medical procedures that are designed to make life easier but pose risks of a poorer quality of life, or even death. However, in agreeing to those procedures, one is consenting to the risk of those actions. Consent need not be explicitly expressed but can be implied. Many sports activities carry risks of injury as do fairgrounds, children’s playgrounds, and so on. As long as the authorities running these activities are judged to have taken reasonable care and have not broken explicit health and safety regulations, then using facilities or taking part in activities is considered consent. At times, people who are considered not competent to understand the implications of their actions are considered not to be able to give informed consent—that is, they are not capable of consenting to the activity because they are not capable of understanding the risks. In different legal systems, understandings of informed consent vary. In the United Kingdom, for example, as long as a medical practitioner can demonstrate a recognized standard of care, then it is understood that the patient has had sufficient or informed consent to the procedure. In the United States or Australia, for example, the medical practitioner has to demonstrate that he or she has specified the risks involved to the patient so that the law can judge whether the patient has given informed consent. The two different interpretations underlie different views of informed consent. One is more paternalistic and suggests that although due care has been taken according to professionally agreed practices, the subjects can be considered to have given consent because when they go to a doctor what they desire is the best treatment as suggested by that authority. The second view is more libertarian and suggests that people need to be given sufficient information so they can make their own judgments rather than leave this up to their agents.

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Contractual theories of the state assume that citizens have given implicit consent to the law and governing authorities because they have not explicitly dissented through revolt or, in democracies, through the democratic process. Contract theories of the state are subject to the same interpretations as is informed consent in the medical case. More paternalistic analysts are content to accept that people can be considered to have consented to the authority of the state as long as it behaves reasonably. Libertarians give less authority to the state and demand that state actions have actual and not just tacit content. In that sense, the two sides are more or less demanding the discretion that should be allowed to the state in making laws without explicitly inquiring of the people. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent specifies this libertarian doctrine by requiring the contract to aspire to universal consent that can only be assumed when a state of affairs is Paretopreferred to all others—that is, when there is no state of affairs that would be chosen by one person to the actual one. Keith Dowding See also Authority; Hobbes, Thomas; Legitimation; Paternalism

Further Readings Buchanan, J. R., & Tullock, G. (1982). The calculus of consent. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

CONSTRUCTIVIST VIEW OF POWER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS In the 1980s, constructivism appeared as a new turn in the theorizing of international relations (IR). Its success was helped by the unexpected end of the cold war. Although the Soviet Union was militarily not less powerful than before—including even the early post-1945 period until the 1960s— it decided to peacefully retrench from its positions in Eastern Europe. If the balance of power was to be the main theory of IR, it met an anomaly here, not because IR theories did not predict the event, but because, according to their tenets, such an

event was not going to happen in the first place. For constructivists, the end of the cold war shows that a materialist understanding of power, and balance of power theories that are part of it, are woefully insufficient, because outcomes in international politics could not be explained by shifting balances of capabilities. By criticizing the explanatory role of power, constructivism aimed at the core of established IR theories To more precisely establish the constructivist view of power, it is necessary first to introduce constructivism and develop its implications for understanding and conceptualizing power.

Constructivism Constructivism can be understood as a meta-theoretical commitment that is based on three characteristics. First, it makes the epistemological claim that meaning, and hence knowledge, is socially constructed. It is constructed because concepts are the condition for the possibility of knowledge. Our senses are not passive receptors of “given” facts. The very identification of facts out of the ongoing noise depends on preexisting notions that guide our view of the world. This knowledge is moreover socially or intersubjectively constructed. Concepts are part of language. Language is not reducible to something entirely subjective or objective. Language is not subjective because it exists independently of us to the extent that language is always more than its individual usages and before them. Language is not objective because it does not exist independently of our minds and our usage (language exists and changes through our use). Language is intersubjective. Second, constructivism makes the ontological claim that the social world is constructed. As in John Searle’s famous example about a money bill, this piece of paper is “money” only because of our shared beliefs. As all people who have had to go through periods of hyperinflation recognize, the moment that this shared belief ceases to exist, the bill is literally no more than a piece of paper. This assumption does not entail that everything is constructed, but it covers that part of reality in which the social sciences are usually interested. Hence, the physical type of support for money (paper, plastic, etc.) is usually not the most relevant for

Constructivist View of Power in International Relations

social analysis. What is most relevant is the social or institutional fact—the ontological result of “our making.” Third, since constructivism clearly distinguishes and problematizes the relationship between the levels of observation and action, it is finally defined by stressing the reflexive relationship between the social construction of knowledge and the construction of social reality. In other words, it focuses on reflexivity. On the microlevel, reflexivity has to do with what Ian Hacking calls the looping effect. Categories we use for classifying/naming people interact with the self-conception of those people. Whereas it makes no difference to stones how we classify them, it can make a difference to people and affect their self-understanding and behavior: identity thus becomes a crucial term for constructivism. On the macrolevel, reflexivity refers to self-fulfilling prophecies. The concern in the response to Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilization thesis had much to do with this reflexive relationship between knowledge and the social world. Whether the main fault lines of conflict really have to be thought in this way, if all people assume they do, and act accordingly, the world would indeed become one of inevitable clashes of civilizations. Assuming the claim to be true, our actions would tend to produce the very reality the claim was only supposed to describe. But the relationship between social reality and the social construction of knowledge also works from social facts to knowledge, a component perhaps less touched on in constructivist writings.

Constructivist Conceptualizations of Power This metatheoretical commitment has implications for the type of social theories that would be compatible with constructivism. And those theories, in turn, have implications for the types of power that can be conceived therein. Constructivism is part of the interpretivist family of social theories. As such, it cannot conceive of power in terms of resources alone. People act toward objects based on the meaning people give these objects: objects themselves do not determine their meaning. Nuclear missiles might be mighty weapons; small Luxemburg does not fear its huge French neighbor because of them. Thus, constructivism is not prone to repeat what Robert Dahl

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once called the lump fallacy of power, where all possible power resources would be mixed and added. Such an aggregate power (resource) assessment, independent of the actor’s understandings and the contingent situational setting, would be wrong, and conceptually impossible. This makes constructivism more receptive to a relational understanding of power. Often confused with a relative understanding of power—one’s power resources are always to be seen in relation to the other’s power resources—such an understanding sees power defined by the specific relation between actors. Here, power lies not with given (re)sources, but can be established only once we know the precise scope and domain of the relation— that is, one must state who is being influenced and in what way. Hence, it includes an interaction and person-specific component. If, for instance, power is defined as the capacity to get B to do something he or she had not planned to do, then this implies knowing the specific plans of B before being able to assess whether A’s action had any effect. Yet, constructivist theorizing would give a communicative twist to this, insisting on the role of open or tacit recognition, which, in turn, relies on a wider social or cultural context. Such recognition is typically based on conventions because, as mentioned earlier, resources are given weight not by themselves, but by shared understandings in social relations and because the recognition of a general power status is social. Just as individual communications are part of and make sense within the context of a language at large, the relational aspect of power is conceived in this wider manner to allow social norms to become visible in their role for the assessment of power as authority. As a corollary of the interpretivist and communicative setting, constructivists will not use power as an efficient cause. Power is part of constitutive relations and effects (see also later): a master does not “cause” a slave, but both, and their respective powers, are constituted through master–slave relations. For the same reason, constructivism will view power in an often impersonal and, hence, not necessarily intentional way. Invoking certain metaphors or historical analogies can be very influential, whether intended or not, because they mobilize a pre-given understanding. The particular way issues are framed empowers certain arguments

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and actors at the expense of others. If a situation is understood in terms of the lessons of Munich, pleading for negotiations becomes an indefensible act of appeasement; an understanding in terms of the lessons of World War I would make negotiations an act of prudence to preempt a further escalation nobody wanted. This power of existing biases is impersonal to the extent that it is done through a set of common understandings or discourses, rather than reducible to the interpretation of one person; it is intersubjective rather than subjective. But, just as with language, power requires persons mobilizing it to be effective. Finally, constructivism is interested in the power aspects of performativity, where constructivism relies mainly on speech act theories and Foucauldian approaches. If the categories with which we order the world are themselves part of, and can significantly affect, the order in the (social!) world, then they are a crucial element for understanding power in any society. So does, for instance, the category failed states interact with some states in their self-understanding and subjectivity and therefore describes the social world and changes it? Our categories and ways of understanding the world also prompt and legitimate certain actions, which would not have been legitimated by other categorizations, such as international interventions that overrule the otherwise fundamental norm of sovereignty. Applied to the concept of power itself, such a performative analysis can also look at the way the analysis of power affects power: the “power politics of power analysis.”

Constructivism-Inspired Analyses of Power in IR Constructivism redefines power at the systemic and at the agent level in IR. Constructivists’ systemic analysis of power often looks at the origins of consent in terms of power relations—that is, at issues of tacit legitimacy. It is therefore close to power concepts of the family of authority. But rather than looking at formal or institutional authority, constructivism is interested in the intersubjective practices of power—not in the position of authority, but rather in what “authorizes,” “legitimates,” or “empowers.” Moreover, constructivists do not necessarily look at intentional or agent power, but rather at the impersonal effects of discourses or

habits for the production and reproduction of order—particularly where they seem natural or go without notice. These discourses perhaps constitute the most effective power relations. At the actor level, such a view implies an emphasis on the process of interest formation as a primary locus for power relations. Constructivism insists in making this interest formation part of the analysis—and not just simply assumed—something that cannot be derived outside of the specific interaction and the wider culture or shared understandings within which it takes place (from relational to communicative, see earlier). And for constructivists, interests cannot be understood outside of such cultures in terms of shared constitutive norms, of shared knowledge and understandings, and through the effects practices have on self-understandings or identity. For constructivists, what we want follows from who we are. Such a view informs constructivists’ views of power, although they may not always be openly framed as power analyses. One larger research agenda is about the background knowledge or constitutive rules of the game that define the competent player and the effective moves. This has been applied both to the world of diplomats and to the world of experts. Richard Ashley in particular has analyzed how the “authorized” expertise most often defined through tenets of the realist school in IR systematically enacts conceptual blackmails and biases that marginalize other practices. Anna Leander has analyzed the “epistemic power” of private military companies when they shape the understanding of security and the self-understanding of their actors, as well as their structural power in reproducing a field of security characterized by experts that authorize an increasingly technical and military understanding of the field—just when the security sector had started to be demilitarized—and are, in turn, authorized through it. With regard to their focus on identity, constructivist scholars have looked at the impersonal effect of discourses or practices on self-understandings and on the power politics of identity. If identity is crucial for interest formation, then it is only a small step to analyze how diplomatic practices, sometimes intended, can try to blackmail actors by taking profit from contradictions in another actor’s self-understandings or between its action and self-representation. Janice Bially Mattern calls

Control

this process one of representational force. As her study on U.S.–U.K. relations during the Suez crisis in 1956 shows, the United States could exploit such tensions to make the British government change its behavior to conform to a certain selfunderstanding of what it stood for. Finally, performative or reflexive analyses of power study the conventions of power definitions, the definitional struggles, and their effects on the social world. As mentioned earlier, constructivists would reject any power index based on some resource aggregate as basically meaningless. Because different types of power resources are not commensurable and depend for their actual value on the meanings attached to them, their ranking and measure is but the effect of a shared convention that establishes their efficacy, their status, and the status of actors. This convention informs the type of interests and, hence, most rational policies. Before diplomats can start counting, they must first agree on what counts. If all diplomatic actors agree that the authority given by cultural attraction, but not by military resources, weighs much in our times of globalization, this shared idea will strongly influence the status and privileges of particular actors in world affairs. Less ambitiously and applied to one country only: if a certain understanding of power becomes predominant in one country, it redirects the foreign policy of that country, as can be seen in definitions that stress “soft power” (thus demilitarizing foreign policy) and other attempts to resist it. Given their conventional status, there is a power politics of power analysis. As a result, some of the constructivist research agendas converge with Foucauldian approaches in their understanding of order as diffused practices of rule, rather than as clear or formal hierarchies. Such convergence can be seen, for instance, in the analysis of how international standards, invented often by private actors, are practices of rule once they become accepted convention and interact with the actors and issues they were supposedly only neutrally measuring (e.g., credit rating). Similarly, to give a last example, Ole Jakob Sending and Iver Neumann analyze the role of nonstate actors not that much in opposition to the political power of states, but as part of a decentralized and self-disciplining logic of global order. Stefano Guzzini

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See also Balance of Power; Bourdieu, Pierre; Consensual Power, Theories of; Diplomacy; Foucault, Michel; Fungibility of Power Resources; Governmentality; Knowledge and Power; Language and Power; Legitimation

Further Readings Barnett, M., & Duvall, R. (Eds.). (2005). Power in global governance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bially Mattern, J. (2005). Ordering international politics: Identity, crisis, and representational force. New York: Routledge. Guzzini, S. (2000). A reconstruction of constructivism in international relations. European Journal of International Relations, 6(2), 147–182. Guzzini, S. (2005). The concept of power: A constructivist analysis. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 33(3), 495–522. Leander, A. (2005). The power to construct international security: On the significance of private military companies. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 33(3), 803–826. Onuf, N. G. (1989). World of our making: Rules and rule in social theory and international relations. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

CONTROL If one is in complete control of some object or state of being, then one can be said to have complete power over that object or state of being. In some sense, therefore, control and power could be thought to be synonyms. However, often when we think of ourselves as in control of something, we do not have complete power with regard to that thing. Thus, although I can be legally considered to be in complete control of my car when driving down the road, I am not completely powerful with regard to the car. For example, I must rely on the car engine working properly for it to continue under my control. Being in control is also closely associated with freedom. One might be considered to be free to the extent that one is in control of one’s actions. Freedom as control can be reduced either internally, a loss of autonomy leading to a loss of control, or

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externally through outside constraints. Thus, if one loses control of bodily limbs through injury then one has lost some freedom of movement. If psychological problems lead one to be unable to control one’s temper or desires, then one might be thought to lose freedom. Addiction can lead one to carry out actions one does not, in some sense, wish to perform, the craving leading to actions one regrets. Thus, drug and other addictions can lead to a loss of control and thereby freedom. External constraints mean that one cannot control events around one. Physical constraints mean that one cannot affect the world in the way one would desire. The extent to which events occur outside of one’s control can be thought to lead to a loss of freedom. In surveys, the degree to which people say they are free is largely determined by how much they feel they are in control of their lives and the world around them, demonstrating that freedom and control seem to be directly linked in people’s minds. Some writers, such as Amartya Sen, have denied the link between freedom and control. While recognizing the psychological link, Sen argues that freedom goes beyond personal control. He suggests that state action, such as enforcing vaccination, can reduce the incidence of disease. Thus, we are made free of disease, even though that freedom is outside of our control. He calls such freedom well-being freedom, and it is an aspect of his capability approach. A person’s capability is the degree to which the person is able to carry out his or her desires, and these abilities are enhanced by state actions that enable us. Some writers, such as Peter Morriss, have argued that Sen’s capability approach is simple power as ability. We can see, therefore, that control, power, freedom, and capability are four very closely linked concepts. Keith Dowding See also Ability; Capability; Freedom; Morriss, Peter

Further Readings Dowding, K. (2006). Can capabilities reconcile freedom and equality? Journal of Political Philosophy, 14, 323–336. Sen, A. (1982). Liberty as control: An appraisal. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 7, 207–221.

CONVENTIONAL DETERRENCE Deterrence is a strategy by which one actor, such as a government or state, attempts to prevent another actor from taking a particular course of action. Deterrence has been most closely associated with so-called weapons of mass destruction: one state has threatened another state to deter that state from taking a particular course of action by threatening to inflict great damage as a consequence. This was most clearly demonstrated in the cold war with the adoption of mutually assured destruction (MAD) where both sides developed a sufficiently large nuclear arsenal to prevent them from going into direct conflict with one another. However, deterrence is a far older concept and is not solely the preserve of weapons of mass destruction or, indeed, the preserve of states and their governments. States can develop deterrent relationships with nonstate actors, and such actors can also develop deterrent relationships with one another, thus resulting in the emergence of a code of conduct and a ceiling on the level of violence between them. Conventional deterrence covers the various forms of deterrence using conventional weapons. Here, conventional weapons are deemed to be those that exclude weapons of mass destruction—that is, not nuclear, chemical, biological, or radiological weapons. Like forms of deterrence involving weapons of mass destruction, conventional deterrence can be subdivided into two forms: deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial. Deterrence by punishment threatens an opponent that if that opponent embarks on a particular course of action, the opponent will suffer from some form of attack that will lead to damage being inflicted on the opponent or its interests. Thus, the targeting focuses on the opponent and what level of pain needs to be threatened to prevent the opponent from taking a particular course of action. Deterrence by denial involves threatening the gain from a particular course of action: in other words, preventing the opponent from taking control of the very thing they want. Success is measured by an opponent’s deciding not to embark on the opponent’s intended course of action—that is, nothing happening, rather than by some form of gain. For example, a state may

Cooperation

create its own air defense capability that threatens any incursion of its air space by another. Success would be evidenced by a lack of incursions, not by the number of aircraft shot down while infringing the air space. For deterrence to successfully work, a number of factors need to be in play. First, there need to be two parties who acknowledge that they are in a deterrent relationship—a deterrer and a deterree. Failure to appreciate that there is a deterrent relationship will ensure that deterrence will fail. Thus, when asked why Britain failed to deter the Argentinean military from invading the Falklands in 1982, Britain’s Defense Secretary John Nott stated that he was unaware such a relationship existed. There needs to be a clear objective—the deterrer wants to stop the deterree from taking a particular course of action. There then needs to be some form of mechanism to persuade a deterree from taking the proposed course of action, such as a threat or series of threats. To undertake a deterrent relationship, there first needs to be some form of communication between the two parties so that each is aware that there may be consequences if a particular course of action is taken. The degree to which this needs to be opaque is debated, with some scholars arguing that a lack of clarity can add to the value of the threat. Second, both deterrer and deterree need to be able to conduct some form of cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the relative pros and cons of taking the proposed course of action. Third, deterrence in general assumes rationality—that in making this calculation the relevant decision makers will make a rational decision and that they define rationality along similar lines. Not surprisingly, deterrence theory has been criticized for its assumptions about rationality on three bases. First, it has been argued that suicidal or psychotic opponents may not be deterred by either form of deterrence. More generally, if rationality defined by cultural norms and practice is sufficiently different between the two parties, deterrence may easily fail. Second, there is plenty of scope for misunderstanding. The role of diplomacy is important here but can lead to errors. Third, the most logical way to undermine deterrence is to be irrational and become unpredictable. The results of such errors can be an escalation of mutual perceptions of threat leading to an arms

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race, thus increasing the risk of actual war. Moreover, there is no agreement that such relationships should remain at the conventional level, and thus, a failure in conventional deterrence may lead to an escalation toward weapons of mass destruction. In fact, during the cold war NATO adopted the policy of flexible response, which began with conventional deterrence and proposed to escalate to strategic nuclear deterrence. Andrew M. Dorman See also Appeasement; Coercion and Power; Deterrent Threats; Diplomacy; Legitimation; Offense/Defense Dominance; Realism in International Relations; Strategic Power Index

Further Readings Freedman, L. (2004). Deterrence. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Morgan, P. M. (1983). Deterrence: A conceptual analysis. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

COOPERATION At least since Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (published in 1965), cooperation between human agents has generated an enormous academic literature, almost an industry in itself. In a famous phrase, Olson said that unless a group is small or there is some other coercive mechanism, self-interested people will not act to achieve their common or group interests. This particular problem of cooperation to which Olson refers has become known as the collective action or free-rider problem. The problem of cooperation had been recognized by others, of course. David Hume suggested that although two farmers might agree to dig a drainage channel between two fields and would be confident that each would turn up on the allotted day to help dig the channel, 100 people would not turn up to drain a field. Although it is in everyone’s interests to have the field drained, it is also in everyone’s interest not to contribute. Where many people are involved, each person can figure that if he or she does not turn up (a) no one will notice,

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and (b) there will still be enough others to successfully carry out the collective act. However, if everyone thinks like that, no one will turn up, and then everyone will be worse off. When there are only a few people involved, neither condition will hold and cooperation can occur. Of course, cooperation does occur between large numbers of people, and this “puzzle” has generated the large literature. First, we note that Olson makes clear that the problem occurs for selfinterested people; other-oriented people might still turn up (we consider that below), but first let us see how cooperation might occur even if people are fully self-interested.

The Collective Action Problem The collective action problem is a problem, but not an insurmountable one. Olson himself provides solutions. Selective incentives can be offered to self-interested people. These might be side payments given to those who turn up, or they might consist of nonmaterial benefits, such as reciprocal friendliness. The degree of interaction between group members is also as important as small size. Although smaller numbers of people find it easier to cooperate than do large numbers, large groups can consist of smaller groups. Often in collective enterprises, groups of friends agree to meet and go along to the event together. Collective organizations are created with subgroups; armies consist of regiments, broken down into units or platoons. It is often said that soldiers do not fight for their country but for their comrades, and armies try to instill a sense of mission and loyalty within their constituent units for precisely that reason. Hence, interaction is more important than group size in itself. Face-to-face interaction among a small group of people may lead to subgroup mobilization no matter how large the wider group, thus overcoming the perceptibility problem mentioned earlier. Often, coordinating activities is a key issue. To overcome coordination difficulties, some actor or set of actors may need to step in. These coordinators provide a key role in ensuring both that individuals work together and that subunits within larger groups also cooperate. It is often easier to get people to work together to provide a one-off or so-called step public good because all can work

toward a specific aim—such as digging a drainage ditch. But often tasks are ongoing—the field might need constant work to keep it drained—and getting people to cooperate in the long run is harder. Here, reciprocity is the key. If I act to help you, and then you act to help me, I am more likely to reciprocate next time round. For long-term tasks, people often create rosters so that each person knows when he or she is expected to contribute, each person can see that everyone else is doing their turn, and there are no free riders. In that way, cooperation is ensured. These sorts of processes help cooperation in face-to-face interaction with people one knows and can interact with in the future. But what about cooperation in societies with large numbers of people that we do not know and may not expect to interact with again? Car drivers know the problems of moving into heavy traffic, where one needs someone to slow slightly to let one in. In most societies, drivers do allow other drivers to join slow-moving heavy traffic. Here conventions emerge. Where two lanes of traffic merge into one, the convention is often for one car in the left lane to proceed followed by one car from the right lane, so that some form of equity exists between the two lanes of traffic. If one driver tries to cheat and get into line out of turn or an excessively generous driver lets several cars in, other drivers get annoyed because the convention they accept is broken. Standing in lines or queues is also conventional and can cause problems across cultures if the convention varies. In many Western cultures, the convention is to queue in turn as one arrives, but elsewhere men may take precedence over women or the old over the young, and so on. If people from different cultures have different understandings of the convention then cooperation breaks down, and anarchy can occur. Jon Elster has called such conventions the cement of society. The idea is that we need a point or understanding on which we can all focus so we cooperate smoothly when such collective action problems arise. In game-theoretic terms, these conventions are equilibriums of games. The equilibrium strategy is such that although all others play that strategy, each person has an incentive to abide by that strategy. (In practice, as in the previous examples, people can have incentives to depart, especially when there is no direct face-to-face

Cooperation

interaction as in the car examples.) However, complex games have multiple equilibriums (the different queuing conventions in different cultures, for example) and the convention adopted might not be the optimal one. In the example of two lanes of cars merging into one, for example, the optimal strategy for both lanes would be to drive right to the end of the lane and then join. In that way, new cars joining the two queues could see which lane was shorter and join that for efficiency and equity. However, car drivers tend to move into one lane long before the other gives out. They might join it at different points, confusing the equitable convention and making it hard for the late-coming cars to judge which lane to join. Changing from suboptimal to optimal conventions can be problematic. Many of the conventions and ways of behaving that we adopt cannot really be sustained by fully self-interested people. There are too many ways in which we could cheat without being detected, but we tend not to. However, that is not to say there are not mechanisms that lead us to cooperate where we could cheat. The most obvious one is the internal feelings of guilt and shame that we have if we were to cheat. These feelings seem to be an evolutionary response to the problem of selfinterested behavior.

Natural Selection and Selfish Genes In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins first suggested that we can view our genes as selfish, which can help explain why we are not. Natural selection is the evolutionary process by which genes are replicated. The “selfish” aspect of the gene is the metaphor that it exists to self-replicate. Associated with genes are phenotypes, body shapes, and behaviors that enable the gene vehicle—plants and animals—to reproduce themselves and, hence, the genes themselves. In extended phenotypes, the genes manipulate the behavior of other vehicles to enhance the ability of their vehicle to thrive and survive and pass on its genes through sexual reproduction. Genes can be thought of as adopting game-theoretic strategies that will increase their chances of being reproduced; in that sense, genes can be thought of as equilibrium selection devices. They will select reciprocal cooperation when playing with another vehicle if that is in the interests of both. In some circumstances, gene

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vehicles will cooperate altruistically, especially with kin, because those vehicles will also contain genes hosted by their own vehicle. William Hamilton produced the idea of kin selection where some behavior will be replicated more often if it considers the reproductive opportunities that behavior provides for its own vehicle and the extra reproductive opportunities it provides for other vehicles that are related. Illustrating this, J. B. S. Haldane, asked if he would give his life for another, joked that he would if he saved two brothers or eight cousins. In our cultural heritage, we often lived in small kin-related groups. Many of our reactions in cooperative situations that lead us to behave altruistically are based on internal incentives to cooperate derived from the reciprocity we expect from small groups and kinship. Cooperative behavior in animals has been documented in thousands of case studies that show that the degree of cooperation between different types and groups of animals is highly related to their degree of kinship. The complete social behavior of hymenoptera such as ants and bees, who share (almost) completely the same genetic structure is the most stark example. The genetic story can help tell us why we are not completely self-interested and how aspects of our individual makeup are social in character. However, it would be wrong to immediately conclude that humans are simply stimulus–response gene-vehicles. People do have beliefs and desires and do consciously strategize, sometimes for their own benefit and sometimes for the benefit of others to whom they are neither kin-related nor reciprocally interacting. Many of our beliefs about how to behave cooperatively with others are taught to us by our parents, teachers, and clergy. We also learn the conventions of our society unconsciously by watching and interacting with others. We are natural imitators (indeed the neural mechanisms that led to imitation have been identified). We learn our cooperative behaviors, and sometimes have to learn them anew when we move from one community to another with different conventions. As part of this cooperative enterprise, our own beliefs about cooperation can become important, whether they be “looking after Number One” or “do unto others as you would be done by.” These beliefs are learned, in part through the conventions and general morality of our own society, but then become enforced through behavior. Some of these

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Coordination

behaviors are acquired from a very early age. It has been suggested that the amount of trust displayed by people is related to how quickly they were attended to when crying as babies and that children whose families are highly geographically mobile are less trusting than are those who have always lived in the same community. But certainly adults can learn to become more or less trusting through the experiences they have as adults. A single traumatic event can cause someone to be less trusting and cooperative. Conventions might be the cement of society, but cooperation beyond conventions and norms ensures that people have much greater powers to gain more of what they want than they could attain on their own. Our evolutionary heritage has ensured that we can cooperate, but we also learn to cooperate through interacting with others around us, and because we can recognize that cooperation is good for us all in the long run. It is important that people are not too trusting, or they can be exploited, but cooperation is best attained through reciprocal action both directly and indirectly through learned norms.

free-rider problem exists. In situations of pure coordination, there is no free-rider problem but, rather, a problem of agreeing on the mutually beneficial strategies. A simple coordination game is the decision about which side of the road to drive on. Two drivers meeting on a two-lane highway would sooner both drive on the left or both drive on the right so they can pass each other without problem. We can represent this as a simple two-by-two normal form game, shown below. Here, we can see there are two equilibriums, Left-Left and Right-Right. The coordination problem is for each to agree which of the equilibrium strategies to choose. Once one of the strategies is chosen, there is no problem in each maintaining that equilibrium strategy because neither has any incentive to depart from them.

1,1

0,0

0,0

1,1

Keith Dowding See also Alliances; Collective Action Problem; Coordination; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Noncooperative Games; Public Goods

Further Readings Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Dawkins, R. (1978). The selfish gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Elster, J. (1989). The cement of society: A study of social order. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, W. (1963). The evolution of altruistic behavior. American Naturalist, 97, 354–356.

COORDINATION Where each agent can realize mutual gains through making mutually consistent decisions, the problem is one of coordination—a simpler problem to solve than a collective action problem where the

Often there might be no reason why we choose particular solutions to coordination problems, or the reasons are lost in history. It has been suggested that driving on the left-hand side in the United Kingdom was based on a convention that knights would pass each other with the sword hand (right-handedness being dominant) on the side toward the other, but this claim might be apocryphal (and does not explain the opposite convention in other countries). Thomas Schelling introduced the notion of a focal point that many people would regard as a good coordinating device, such as Times Square if they were meeting in New York but had not agreed a meeting place. When faced with this matrix, for example, most subjects in experiments opt for the top left-hand box rather than the lower right, suggesting that somehow that is the focal point where people can coordinate their actions. Keith Dowding See also Collective Action Problem; Cooperation

Core Parties

Further Readings Cooper, R. W. (1998). Coordination games. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schelling, T. C. (1960). The strategy of conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CORE

OF A

GAME

The core of a game is a central concept in cooperative game theory. Core of a game refers to situations in which individuals can gain from cooperating in groups, but there is conflict over the allocation of the gains from cooperation. An allocation is in the core if no subgroup of individuals can unilaterally improve the position of all its members. An allocation in the core is presumably stable: once achieved, there is no incentive to move away from it. It is also efficient in the sense that no other allocation makes all individuals better off. The power of an individual can be measured by how favorably the individual is treated by the allocations in the core in comparison with other feasible allocations. Allocations in the core can be very extreme. For example, suppose a group of three voters must decide on the division of a resource. Three votes are needed to pass a proposal, with one voter controlling two votes and two voters controlling one vote each. The first voter has veto power because no proposal can be passed without that person’s votes. The core allocates the entire resource to the veto voter. Given any other allocation (say, one that gives a positive share to the second voter), the first and third voter together can pass a proposal that divides the second voter’s share between them. The core does not consider the possibility of forming voting blocs. In this example, the two nonveto voters together have as many votes as the veto voter. If these two voters are able to act together as a single unit, there is no compelling reason why the veto voter must obtain the whole resource. There may be more than one outcome in the core. If there are two voters that must agree on the division of a resource, any division that exhausts the resource is in the core because no voter can change the division unilaterally and it is not possible to make both voters better off.

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The core may also be empty. Suppose a voting body with three voters must divide a resource by simple majority. Given any allocation, there are always two voters that would do better by dividing the third voter’s share between them. If the core is empty, the situation is potentially unstable because given any outcome, there is a subgroup that has the ability and motivation to enforce a different one. More generally, assuming that voters decide on the division of a fixed resource, the core is either empty (in the absence of veto voters) or distributes everything between the veto voters. Thus, the veto voters have all the power in the group according to the core. When voters are voting over a choice of policy or any other issue, the core is defined in the same way: a policy is in the core if no group of voters prefers another policy and can enforce it. If policies can be unambiguously ranked along some dimension, the core corresponds to the outcome preferred by the median voter. The core has been criticized as being a myopic stability concept: the existence of a profitable deviation automatically disqualifies an outcome as stable. However, even if a profitable deviation exists, individuals may abstain from deviating, fearing that whatever improvement they agree on may itself be overturned by subsequent deviations by other subgroups, with the ultimate result of making some of them worse off than they originally were. Maria Montero See also Coalition Theory; Shapley Value; Veto Players; Weighted Majority Game

Further Readings Kahan, J. P., & Rapoport, A. (1984). Theories of coalition formation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Myerson, R. B. (1991). Game theory: Analysis of conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CORE PARTIES In spatial voting games, the Condorcet winner is any policy or candidate that defeats all other

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policies or candidates in pairwise votes. However, what can we say about potential outcomes if there is no Condorcet winner? Let us define a set X as the set of feasible outcomes corresponding to vectors that denote the utility u of each player (ui, u2, u3,) to be a specific vector (i.e., point) in X. Assume that a coalition C prefers u to u if and only if ui  u’I for all individuals I in C. Define the coalition of individuals C to be effective for u in X if the members of C can coordinate their actions sufficiently to ensure that each member i of C receives a payoff of at least ui. Let v(C) denote the set of all utility n-tuples for which C is effective. Now we say that u dominates u if there exists at least one coalition that is effective for u and that prefers u to u. A cooperative game’s core is then defined as the set of undominated elements of X. A core party is then defined as any party that in a voting game occupies the core of the game. In coalition theory, core parties will always form the government or be an element in a coalition government. Formal coalition theory has demonstrated that majority voting rules always generate a core in one-dimensional policy space, which means that there will always be a core party where politics is dominated by one dimension— such as a left–right ideological dimension. However, if we assume that the preferences of players are randomly assigned, then a core is generated only unusually in two dimensions and rarely if ever in three or more dimensions. It is usually assumed that under such circumstances voting cycles will be generated. However, if the public’s preferences are not randomly generated, but rather are socially determined to bunch together in policy space, then a core is more likely to form, and so will core parties. Empirically, in many systems, some parties are usually members of coalition governments, and such parties are core parties within those systems. Keith Dowding See also Coalition Theory; Core of a Game; Dominant Parties; Grand Coalition

Further Readings Laver, M., & Schofield, N. (1990). Multiparty government. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

CORPORATISM The core meaning of corporatism is an institutional relationship between governing authorities and the representation of interests, notably capital and labor, with the central organs of the state. In this sense, corporatism is closely associated with fascist ideology, notably in Italy and Germany, which promoted capitalist enterprise but directed it into specific works and, with strong links to labor movements, ensured a harmony of control between the major interest groups in society. After World War II, sometimes with the prefix neo-, corporatism became associated with a dominant state that mediated, usually through formal tripartite agreements, macroeconomic conditions between employers and labor unions. During the late 1970s and 1980s, corporatism or neocorporatism was lauded by many academics as providing a high level of macroeconomic performance, both controlling inflation and maintaining relatively low levels of unemployment. At that time, corporatism was associated with Keynesianism. However, the precise form of corporatism and its relationship to state power structures has been much debated. Interest in corporatism revived among political scientists in the 1970s with Philippe Schmitter’s 1974 Review of Politics article, “Still the Century of Corporatism?” He contrasted corporatism (or neocorporatism) as a form of interest representation that differed from other state forms such as pluralism, statism, and syndicalism. He saw it as a distinct system of political power relations that affected macroeconomic and social forces within states. Within the literature were those who concentrated on corporatism as an institutional form through which interests are represented and by which contestation between different sides of the capital divide was contained and those who saw it more as a form of policy making that did not necessarily include specific institutional structures. In the first, specific formal institutional structures included social pacts made between government and the overarching capital and labor organizations, peak organizations that represented employers and workers within those pacts, tripartite negotiations led by government, and regulatory functions accorded to nonstate organizations such

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as employers’ groups or major trade unions. Within the second, it was recognized that not all (or even any) of these formal institutional structures were necessary for corporatism to hold at least at times within a country. All that was needed was coordination by the state to guide agreements between different interests with a degree of integration into the state of organized groups. Within these structures, a host of types of corporatism were identified, such as mesocorporatism, which concerned clusters of groups around specific interests such as industrial or professional sectors, or private interest government concerning the selfregulation of professional groups. The central theoretical concern was how corporate states handled issues of public goods, statelevel collective action problems, and the national economy. In the 1970s, states were recovering from oil price rises, raging inflation, and higher unemployment, which were challenging the Keynesian orthodoxy of the postwar period. Many writers argued that corporatist states fared better than did more free market or pluralist ones. Under pluralism, the forces of capital and labor were ranged against each other as unions strived to bring about inflation-proof wage rises and resisted new work practices to maintain employment levels while firms struggled to contain labor unrest. The mix was not conducive to controlling inflation or enabling growth through capital investment. However, tripartite corporatist arrangements were thought to help overcome these problems. Through the facilitation of government, peak-level organizations on both the employer and labor sides could negotiate to ensure longer-term strategies over wages and work conditions, allowing government to manage the economy in Keynesian fashion, enabling growth to promote future profit, wages rises, and job security. Various comparative analyses of economies suggested that on issues such as inflation, employment, and investment, the nations that seemed more corporatist were doing better than were those that were more pluralist. It would seem that corporatist arrangements did enable the state to overcome state-level collective action problems to promote the public goods of low inflation, high employment, and economic growth, making everyone better off. Both the models of corporatism and the politicaleconomic analyses were not uncontroversial, not

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least because identifying which countries were most corporatist was not straightforward, and how well countries were doing over a range of indicators was subject to the time frames of the econometric analyses that were conducted. Furthermore, by the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, countries that were pluralist were perceived to be doing better, especially where the more informal corporatist relationships were replaced. Many of the formal corporatist nations such as Austria and Finland were not doing so well on the macroeconomic indicators in comparison with some pluralist nations such as the United States and United Kingdom. Analysts suggested that corporatism was not suited to the changing nature of capitalism, with the demise of heavy industry and manufacturing and the rise of the service industry (post-Fordism) in the developed world. New technology required faster reorganization and entrepreneurial activity flourished better in less regulated societies. Keynesianism was going out of fashion and the ability of countries to protect their economies from worldwide market forces reduced as globalization took off. Even in the heartland of corporatism, Sweden, centralized wage bargaining ended in the late 1980s. This seemed to be the death knell of corporatism as a distinct form of state organization, both empirically as a description of some states, and normatively as more pluralist states did better economically, suggesting that corporatism was also bankrupt as an ideal form of interest mediation able to supply important social and public goods. Some have argued that corporatism did not disappear but rather evolved into new forms of political exchange. To be sure, interest mediation involving the state still exists in many countries, albeit at more local rather than overarching national levels. Also the recognition of new social movements that represent interests outside of the capital– labor divide, such as environmental, feminist, and others, entered into the realm of interest mediation. However, these claims about corporatism becoming a state form where the central state authorities accept a role for interest groups as social partners in social, political, and economic exchange can hardly be termed a new form of corporatism because such a specification does not differ from the pluralism that corporatism or neocorporatism was supposed to rival. Corporatist arrangements

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might once more come into fashion as states start to reregulate after the global financial crisis at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Furthermore, the state-directed capitalist arrangement of Asian states such as South Korea and China has elements of corporatism contained within it. These states have managed to sustain growth and growing employment as capitalism takes off. In such semi-democratic and nondemocratic countries, especially in post-communist China, corporatism looks more like its original prewar form in Europe and might herald a more corporatist organization in developed democratic countries. Keith Dowding See also Collective Action Problem; Fascism; Globalization; Post-Fordism; Public Goods

Further Readings Iverson, T. (1999). Contested economic institutions: The politics of macroeconomics and wage bargaining. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schmitter, P. (1974). Still the century of corporatism? Review of Politics, 36, 85–131. Williamson, P. (1985). Varieties of corporatism: Theory and practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

CORRUPTION The general understanding of corruption involves the corrupt actor occupying a position that vests in him or her power, authority, or trust within a public institution or office. When the actor engages in an act that abuses this power, authority, or trust, the act is said to be corrupt. In some jurisdictions, the abuse of office is itself a criminal act. However, the act itself need not be criminal to be classified as corrupt. Thus, an employee of a private company who engages in embezzlement is guilty of fraud but does not, in the general understanding of the term, engage in corruption. However, if the organization were a government organization, the fraud may be considered corruption. Conversely, where a senior bureaucrat in a private firm uses his or her authority to sway

potential voters, the act would be unlikely to be criminal in itself. If the firm were public, however, the act may be considered corrupt and, in certain jurisdictions, attract criminal sanctions. The difficulty of distinguishing between the legal and conceptual definition of corruption has led some theorists to define corruption as a purely legal issue. In this account, a corrupt act only occurs where formal laws or guidelines are breached. The rationale for this is that such formal definitions are stable and precise. One of the most prominent examples of this kind of definitions is that from J. S. Nye, who defines corruption as “behaviour which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains); or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence” (1967, p. 418). This type of narrow definition has been contested. Michael Johnston, for example, rejects the idea that corruption must be defined in formal terms. He also rejects the idea that corruption can only take place in the context of public office but does say that it generally involves “public power” or public resources. Johnston holds that corruption is the abuse of public roles or resources for private benefit where public, private, and benefit are contentions and ambiguous. This definition makes it difficult to classify any particular action as corrupt, so Johnston takes a view that systemic corruption problems are the proper subject of study rather than the attempt to forensically define the concept of corruption. The idea is that systemic corruption exists where wealth and power are used to weaken, prevent, or delay the development of participative economic or political institutions. As Johnston points out, this definition of corruption can include actions that are legal and therefore opens the way for a conceptualization that takes far more account of the cultural context than the strictly legal approach does. In this vein, Georg Cremer points out that the concept of corruption can only apply when the behavior of an official contradicts the norms of his or her society. Similarly, Carl Friedrich and Philip Jos hold that laws and codes of conduct are not nearly as important for the definition of corruption as is the extent to which an actor in a public role violates standards and expectations associated with that role.

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The notion that corruption entails the abuse of power has been challenged by some who downplay the perceived negative aspects of corruption in favor of the positive ability of corruption to “grease the wheels” of an inefficient bureaucratic system. For example, Cremer points out that bribery of public officials may be a way of circumventing highly intrusive bureaucratic practices as well as enabling competition where the government has attempted to restrict competition. Bribery has also been seen as an efficient means of speeding up bureaucratic decision making, particularly where public officials can threaten those waiting on their decisions with delays unless a bribe is paid. Detractors of this view point out that the empirical evidence indicates that higher levels of corruption are associated with lower levels of economic performance. Although this may be true for corruption in aggregate, there seems to be a curvilinear relationship between corruption and economic performance. Thus, at certain levels of corruption, high levels of economic growth are possible. Oskar Kurer gives the example of Thailand and Italy to illustrate such a situation and contrasts these countries with those of sub-Saharan Africa in which corruption has exceeded the “critical” level and has resulted in a collapse in public infrastructure. In the latter cases, the putative power of the briber to offer a bribe has been subverted by the power of the official to demand a bribe. Critics of the curvilinear account of corruption point out that there are actually very few countries that prosper with high levels of corruption and conclude that there is an alternative explanation for their success. Mushtaq H. Khan, for example, holds that economically successful countries with high levels of corruption prosper because they use “patrimonial” rather than “clientelist” networks as media for the flow of influence. The idea here is that the phenomenon of corruption depends on semiformal patron–client networks. There are two broad categories of such networks. Patrimonial networks enable state-based agents to protect their access to gains from corruption. These are usually extant in countries that have a long history of the division of access to property “rights” (as, for example, in Thailand, Italy, and South Korea). In such countries, the state has more power than any other individual interested party and can therefore allocate rights on the basis of economic considerations as the political

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questions are largely determined. In contrast, clientelist networks are characterized by weakly defined access to gains and require state and nonstate parties to compete. These are the norm in developing countries because they tend to occur in countries without a long history of defined allocations of rights. Developing countries tend to have underdeveloped civic institutions supporting them, so it is therefore difficult for state officials to monopolize rents from newly emerging resources. Significant efficiency costs are incurred in the clientelist network because state officials are likely to award rights to resources more on the basis of political concerns than on prospects for value adding. Michael Dalvean See also Blackmail; Bribe Index; Fungibility of Power Resources

Further Readings Cremer, G. (2008). Corruption and development aid. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Johnston, M. (2005). Syndromes of corruption. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Khan, M. H. (1996). The efficiency implications of corruption. Journal of International Development, 8(5), 683–696. Kurer, O. (2001). Why do voters support corrupt politicians? In A. K. Jain (Ed.), The political economy of corruption. London: Routledge. Nye, J. S. (1967). Corruption and political development: A cost-benefit analysis. American Political Science Review, 61(2), 417–427.

COUP D’ÉTAT A coup d’état is an illegal change of government speedily effected by a group based within the machinery of state through the threat or actual use of violence. Coups d’état are important to the study of power in three ways. In being a means for overthrowing governments, they highlight the critical point of regime change and the implications that follow for the transfer of power under conditions of illegality. In using the threat or

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actual use of violence, coups also direct interest to the debates about power and force as separate concepts. In being carried out by a group from within the state, coups also draw attention to the locus of power beyond the formal holders of political office. As a particular means for overthrowing government, coups feature similar techniques and the military is usually involved. Explanations for coups d’état vary, essentially depending on whether reasons for the military to intervene are sought or their general underlying causes are investigated.

The Nature of Coups The ideal coup d’état is swift, impeccably planned, and perfectly executed. To avoid detection at the planning stage conspiracy is essential. By virtue of the similarities between the institutions of governments, the techniques employed usually include the capturing of the telecommunications center and other key points, such as police and military headquarters and the presidential palace and, of course, the arrest of the most powerful state personnel. Given the state’s monopoly of coercion, the active or passive support of at least some of the armed forces would also be sought at the planning stage. Because of the military’s particularly advantageous qualifications for staging coups—being within the state apparatus and possessing the means for threatening violence—the military is normally involved. Coups can be staged entirely by the military, though the involvement of both military and civilian personnel is more usually the case and sometimes entirely civilian governments are installed.

Explaining Coups A number of explanations have been offered for why coups occur, including some concentrating on personal or military grievances. Following the spate of coups in the new nations of Africa and Asia in the 1960s, coups came to be seen as the agents of economic and political development with the military viewed as a modernizing force intent, eventually, on handing back power to democratically elected government. This does sometimes happen, and in more recent years, coups have become less frequent and democratic institutions,

such as elections, have been more commonly used. By the 1970s, however, it became clear that coups could also result in repressive dictatorships. The growing numbers of subsequent coups within new nations also undermined the view of coups as agents of modernization. These also showed that the military could be in conflict within itself, a finding in line with the longer history of coups in Latin America and coups that occurred in Greece in 1967 and 1973 and in Portugal in 1974. More compatible with repeat coups, an alternative explanation focused on the effects of colonialism in creating ethnic and social cleavages through the drawing of artificial state boundaries and establishing economies to serve capitalist world markets. In this line of argument, attention has also been drawn to the role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in assisting coups that protect capitalist markets against left-leaning governments. Class analysis, too, has been employed— with the high-ranking members of the military viewed as the sons of the middle class and the taking of political power interpreted as the means to acquire economic power. Although the reasons why coups are staged may vary, some general underlying conditions can be identified. This is helped by their frequency: more than half of third world countries have had one or more coups d’état. Their general underlying conditions follow from the importance of the economy to government’s responsibilities: the types of economies that are especially vulnerable to economic instability and general uncertainty are likely, therefore, to lead to accusations of incompetence and corruption of even the most competent and least corrupt governments. These economic conditions are typical of countries whose economic sector is producing primary goods for export, trading them on the world market, with the government highly dependent on the revenues from these exports. Primary goods—coffee, bananas, copper, and the like—are highly susceptible to large fluctuations in their world market prices and vulnerable to variations in production. Of such countries, the most vulnerable to coups are those that are specialized in their exports: for where a single major export forms a large percentage of all exports, fluctuations in prices, production, and government revenues are especially likely to generate economic instability. Because of a lack of resources to alleviate the social

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and economic repercussions, poorer such countries have an added vulnerability to coups. A coup is most likely to be staged at the height of the government’s loss of support, the culmination of export-induced economic instability, but in the conspirators’ calculations of success, other factors should be considered. The presence of foreign troops is one factor: they may intervene to reverse a coup attempt. Governments may be given some time in office before being apportioned blame for incompetence or corruption in managing the economy, and the conspirators are more likely to be apprehensive about staging the first coup. As a strategy based on careful planning in which conspiracy is of the essence, mistakes may also be made. A coup attempt offers no guarantee of success, but the presence of underlying conditions ensures that further opportunities will arise. It also follows from those conditions generating economic instability largely out of government control, that new governments installed by coups, too, will face the same accusations of incompetence and corruption. It follows also, therefore, that once a country has had a coup d’état, further coups are likely. Rosemary H. T. O’Kane See also Dictatorship; Legitimation; Military in Government; Right-Wing Authoritarianism; Terror Regimes

Further Readings Jackman, R. W. (1978). The predictability of coups d’état. American Political Science Review, 72, 1262–1275. Luttwak, E. (1969). Coup d’état: A practical handbook. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. O’Kane, R. H. T. (1987). The likelihood of coups. Aldershot, UK: Gower. O’Kane, R. H. T. (1993). Coups d’état in Africa. Journal of Peace Research, 30, 251–270.

COX, ROBERT W. (1926– ) Robert W. Cox was born in Canada in 1926 and was educated at McGill University where he

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completed a BA (1946) and an MA (1948) in history. Before embarking on an academic career, Cox spent 25 years at the International Labour Organization (ILO) from which he retired in August 1972 after serving as executive assistant to the director general, chief of the Research and Planning Department, and director of the International Institute for Labour Studies. After leaving the UN system, he held various professorial positions at the Graduate Institute of International Studies; Columbia University; University of Toronto; Yale University; and the Australian National University. Currently, he is emeritus professor of political science at York University, Toronto. Cox’s earlier scholarly contribution primarily reflected an interest in the study of the processes of international organization grounded in utopian functionalism and in a desire to contribute to the development of methods and approaches that would generate more scientific and nonnormative perspectives. However, the contributions for which Cox is best known are those that he develops influenced by Giambattista Vico, Antonio Gramsci, and Fernand Braudel and that form the basis of the neo-Gramscian perspective in international relations. Since the 1980s, unlike his prior scholarly contributions, Cox’s work detaches itself from positivism to embrace the method of historical structures or critical historicisms, namely a postpositivist approach primarily concerned with understanding the emergence of world orders within which dominant norms, institutions, and practices become established. Critical historicism, however, is not simply a theory of history concerned with the past but is also an “emancipatory” approach intending to identify which social forces could challenge the prevailing distribution of power at any given time. Cox’s method of historical structures is conceived as an interdependent and dialectical configuration of changing forces—material capabilities, ideas, and institutions—that create opportunities and impose constraints on human activity and social practices. This configuration of forces is said by Cox to create pressure across three interrelated levels, namely the basic level of production, state– civil society complexes, and world orders. Cox’s complex ontology serves the purpose of explaining relative stability (as opposed to equilibrium) within

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a historical juncture or world order; stability is equated to the concepts of hegemonic and nonhegemonic historical structures that underpin Cox’s conceptualizations of power in international affairs. Unlike neorealists, Cox argues that relationships of dominance and control cannot rest on the preponderance of military and economic capabilities of a single state but ought to be understood as a configuration of material power, prevalent images of world order, and a set of institutions that administer that order; this particular kind of dominance would need to be based on a broad measure of consent while offering some prospects of satisfaction to the less powerful. Hence, this conceptualization presupposes that power emerges from social processes rather than being located within the result of relations of production; accordingly, at particular historical junctures, changing social relations of production give rise to particular social forces, leading states or social classes that become the base of power and can engender transformation within and across states and within a specific world order. As Timothy Sinclair and Michael Schechter illustrate, Cox’s approach has invariably been criticized for his ontological and epistemological eclecticism; the neglect of issues of importance such as security, gender, and ecology; and his shifting pessimism and utopianism. Nonetheless, he is generally recognized, even by his critics, as the first major scholar to use critical theory in international relations. Catia Gregoratti See also Gramsci, Antonio; Neorealism; Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations

Further Readings Cox, R. W. (1969). International organisation: World politics. London: Macmillan. Cox, R. W., & Jacobson, H. (1973). The anatomy of influence: Decision making in international organization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cox, R. W., & Schechter, M. G. (2002). The political economy of a plural world: Critical reflections on power, morals and civilization. London: Routledge. Cox, R. W., & Sinclair, T. J. (1996). Approaches to world order. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

CRITICAL THEORY A critical theory is a theory of society that aims to emancipate those subjected to relations of domination or power. In contrast to the contemplative model of knowledge implicit in the Greek etymology of theory—which comes from the word theǀros or “a spectator”—critical theory regards the pursuit of knowledge as a politically engaged activity. In part, this is because social power involves more than just manipulative resources or force. Relations of power and domination also depend on particular attitudes and beliefs, or purported knowledge. It follows that by confirming or refuting beliefs or attitudes, theory has implications for corresponding patterns of domination. Whether explicitly or implicitly, knowingly or unknowingly, theory always “takes sides,” whether in defense or in defiance of power. For critical theory, this political commitment is explicit and self-conscious.

The Frankfurt School Critical theory in this sense is associated primarily with the influential branch of Western Marxism known as the Frankfurt School. This name derives from its association with the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, which was founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt. The institute’s associates have included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Carl Grünberg, Erich Fromm, Otto Kirchheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Henryk Grossmann, and Walter Benjamin. It was originally set up for the pursuit of Marxist studies with the support of the wealthy philanthropist Felix Weil. However, under the leadership of its second director, Max Horkheimer, the institute’s most prominent members increasingly moved away from Marxist orthodoxy. Frankfurt theorists were disillusioned by the increasingly authoritarian course of the Russian Revolution after 1917. In the West, sporadic communist uprisings in Germany, following its defeat in World War I and the abdication of the kaiser, were short-lived. Later events only confirmed the need to rethink Marxist orthodoxy. Marxist revolutionary parties either drifted toward reformist social democracy or maintained a theoretically

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pure but practically ineffectual isolation. The prospects for genuine socialist revolution declined further with the cataclysm of German fascism and the Holocaust. After World War II, an affluent consumer society in the West ensured a mostly quiescent working class. By the end of the 20th century, communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe had collapsed and China was reverting to an authoritarian variant of capitalism. “Revisionist” social democracy, which originally promised a gradual advance toward socialism, had abandoned the socialist ideal altogether. Despite such gloomy historical prospects for socialism, the writings of Karl Marx remained an inspiring beacon of rigorous intellectual activity, pursued on behalf of the exploited masses of capitalism. Frankfurt theorists followed the lead of the Hungarian communist intellectual, Georg Lukács who, in “What Is Orthodox Marxism,” sets out to rescue the critical method embodied in Marx’s writings from what had become the unquestionable dogmas of the Third International. The valuable kernel of Marx’s method should not be sought in his detailed economic and sociological predictions, which had proved eminently fallible, but rather in his revolutionary understanding of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, between philosophy and political action. In the famous words of Marx’s 11th “Thesis on Feuerbach,” until now “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” A concrete example of Marx’s ideal of an engaged and activist philosophy is his “critique of political economy.” Marx became convinced that the ultimate basis of human alienation and oppression— most visible in the impoverished working classes but everywhere in evidence in 19th-century industrial society—was capitalism. His extensive studies of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other political economists convinced him, however, that “bourgeois” political economy would never penetrate beneath the surface of capitalism because it failed to recognize the historical contingency and exploitative nature of the capitalist mode of production. The political economists could not see either that the industrial proletariat would eventually become capitalism’s “grave digger.” Worse, by obscuring the exploitative reality and revolutionary possibilities of capitalism, the supposedly eternal and

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objective truths of political economy—the prototype of contemporary economic science—only perpetuated this exploitative system. Bourgeois political economy, in other words, is not science but ideology. An ideology in Marx’s sense is a body of ideas masquerading as neutral and objective theory but, in effect if not intentionally, serving as the “ruling ideas” of the ruling class. Marx’s critique of ideology, conversely, uncovers concealed relations of power and so makes it possible to transform them. Marx reveals an otherwise hidden path of social development— the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the construction of communism—and corresponding political choices. In that sense, following Jürgen Habermas, we can see the critique identifying a “crisis” (krisis) in its original Greek sense of “judgment” or “decision.” The Frankfurt School’s further pursuit of critical theory has two major dimensions. In the first place, these researchers draw from Marx’s method a philosophical critique of traditional” (as opposed to critical) theory. What they often refer to as positivism derives from the term used by Auguste Comte in the 1830s to describe the final stage of modern, scientific civilization. After stages dominated by religious and metaphysical thinking, humanity finally attains to genuine science, which is based only on the observation of positive facts. The extension of the methods of natural science to the behavioral and social sciences, however, constitutes positivism in the Frankfurt School sense. Already in the 18th century, David Hume had proposed that the empirical method so successfully applied in natural sciences such as physics and astronomy should be applied to the “sciences of man.” But according to Frankfurt theorists, the positivist social sciences of the 20th century, like the bourgeois political economy criticized by Marx, are implicitly ideological. By representing society as a quasi-natural system whose patterns and regularities can be observed and predicted, these theorists obscure the possibility of transformative political action. Although the Frankfurt School’s critique of positivism ultimately derives from Marx, it can also be applied to the renewal of Marxism. This is because, after Marx’s death, the communist movement was itself drawn into the orbit of positivism, largely under the influence of Marx’s long-time

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collaborator Friedrich Engels. The systematization of “scientific socialism” was, according to Frankfurt theorists, a retreat from genuinely critical philosophy with dire consequences for the socialist project. “Iron laws” guarantee that communism is the foreseeable goal or telos of history. It was correspondingly easier for Bolsheviks and Stalinists to dismiss merely “bourgeois” moral scruples because morally dubious means could never threaten the utopian outcome guaranteed by “science.” Assumptions about the inevitable course of historical development sit uneasily with V. I. Lenin’s “voluntarist” insistence on the essential role of political will. Revolution will only occur through the decisive and timely intervention of a militant party, whose authority is ultimately based on Marxism’s scientific knowledge of capitalism. Positivism, in other words, deforms the socialist project at the same time as it insulates capitalist power relations from renewed critique. The second, more constructive dimension of the Frankfurt School’s project involves members’ own contributions to the renewal of critical theory under the changed conditions of 20th-century, “advanced” capitalism. They also take advantage of intellectual developments since Marx’s time, including the iconoclastic writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had shaken complacent 19thcentury convictions: belief in God and the “lies” of idealist metaphysics, as well as Hegelian and Marxist assumptions about the advancing dialectic of history. Under the influence of both Nietzsche and the sociologist Max Weber—who was himself influenced by Nietzsche—Adorno and Horkheimer sketched the history of the West’s “overcoming of myth and superstition” as a contradictory and ultimately destructive “dialectic of Enlightenment.” A later product of rationalization of Western society is the positivist faith in instrumental rationality. Instrumental rationality is confined to the calculation of efficient means to given ends, but is indifferent to the intrinsic moral worth of the ends in question. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, this limited conception of rationality is implicated in the Marquis de Sade’s cruel and calculating fantasies as well as in the ruthless efficiency of Nazi Germany’s genocidal bureaucracy. Another important influence was Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, which had unsettled the West’s self-confident rationalism in a different way,

even though Freud tended to see his own psychoanalytic insights in conventional scientific terms. Freud drew examples from art and literature and based his theories on individual case histories, dreams, and slips of the tongue rather than any systematic empirical observation. His theory of the unconscious mind, with its defense mechanisms and self-deceiving rationalizations, dispelled any illusions—prevalent at least since René Descartes— of the self’s rationality and transparency. The emphasis on the unconscious and often irrational roots of belief and action helped explain popular support for National Socialism, Stalinism, and other oppressive regimes. Other studies suggested—for example, the work of Marcuse—that liberal values of autonomy, self-reliance, and responsibility were under threat from the social conformity and “organization” mentality of advanced capitalism. The condition of art and culture is a further factor, identified by Frankfurt theorists, crucial for the fate of relations of domination in contemporary society. Frankfurt theorists were dismissive of crudely determinist applications of Marx’s materialist approach, which saw art and literature as merely “superstructural” results of developments in the economic “base.” By implication, bourgeois art was dismissed as little more than a passive reflection of the realities of capitalist exploitation. In the Soviet Union, artists and writers were forced to abandon the “elitist” aspirations of artistic modernism for the sake of the more accessible and proletarian aesthetics of socialist realism. Adorno and other Frankfurt theorists insisted instead on the critical potential of genuine art and its at least relative autonomy from prevailing social conditions. Even bourgeois works of art could challenge the alienated social conditions of capitalism, albeit implicitly and indirectly. Marx himself was an enthusiastic reader of Homer and Shakespeare. He also appreciated such writers as Charles Dickens and Honoré Balzac who, though they frequently betrayed their middle-class origins, nonetheless gave acute and insightful accounts of commercial society. Trained as a musicologist, Adorno praised the demanding but rigorous musical compositions of Gustav Mahler, Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg, and Alban Berg, which expressed the alienated condition of modern existence more effectively than the self-consciously

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political art of the communist movement. In a different way, the beauty of classical art—for example, the music of Franz Joseph Haydn or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—intimates a sense of harmony and freedom that makes us more aware of the drabness and aesthetic poverty of contemporary life. But the critical potential of genuine art is threatened by the emergence in the 20th century of what Adorno and Horkheimer term the culture industry— the systematic application of the capitalist profit motive and industrial techniques to the products of intellectual culture. Mass-market books, recorded popular music, Hollywood films, and later television are all products designed specifically to appeal to a mass of consumers. Ignoring the aesthetic standards of the cultural tradition, works of entertainment and escapism make few demands on workers who are exhausted by their daily toil. Genuinely free time is gradually eliminated, as the culture industry organizes our leisure to ensure a contented, productive, and, above all, uncritical labor-force. Such effects are reinforced by industrial techniques providing fatalistic messages or easily assimilated images of rebellion in standardized and saleable formats. In these ways, critical theory provides a sophisticated analysis of the obstacles facing the socialist project—not just the power of the capitalist class but also philosophical assumptions and psychological, sociological, and cultural factors. But its very success in depicting these obstacles presents a problem for critical theory. Its ability to account for the longevity of capitalism tends, paradoxically, to reinforce political pessimism and withdrawn quietism rather than engaged action to transform society. The relentlessly negative, critical, and often abstruse nature of these theorists’ writings has also led to accusations of elitism. For those closer to orthodox Marxism, elitism and quietism are the result of the Frankfurt School’s distance from Marxist political economy, communist militancy, and the working class (Marcuse is a partial exception who, at least in more optimistic moods during the 1960s and 1970s, recognized the radical potential from a variety of sources beyond the working class).

Second-Generation Theorists More recently, a second generation of theorists, including such figures as Albrecht Wellmer and

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Axel Honneth, has sought to renew the Frankfurt School’s approach to critical theory. Most influential, however, is the work of Jürgen Habermas who, in contrast to the aphoristic style and exclusively critical emphasis of some earlier figures, provides a highly systematic and constructive account of critical theory. Although Habermas’s position has evolved, his early attempt to define a secure epistemological position for critical theory reflects his enduring concern, characteristic of pragmatism, with the grounding of human experience, knowledge, and values in distinct modes of action and interaction. Our attempts to control external reality are formalized and refined within empirical-analytical natural sciences such as chemistry, physics, or engineering. Although for Habermas this essentially instrumental relationship to the physical world is legitimate, positivism theorists make the mistake of extending this model to relationships between human subjects. Human interaction or communicative action demands a different approach, which is reflected in the emphasis of so-called hermeneutic disciplines such as history, literature, and art criticism on the interpretation of meanings rather than on causal explanation and prediction. However, despite Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claims for the universality of hermeneutic understanding, even this approach has only limited validity. An exclusively hermeneutic approach cannot grasp the ways in which social meanings and traditions are distorted by relations of power. A hermeneutic approach is unable, in other words, to detect ideological beliefs, attitudes, and values. A genuinely critical theory must combine causal analysis of the mechanisms of social power with hermeneutic understanding of their ideological effects. Prominent examples of critical theory are, once again, Freud’s psychoanalytic investigation of mental disorders and Marx’s critique of political economy. Critical theory is all the more important because, in common with earlier Frankfurt theorists, Habermas rejects Marxist historical materialism’s positivist tendency to posit deterministic laws of history. In particular, it was a mistake to assume that technological development of the forces of production would result in a revolutionary transformation of society’s relations of production. Habermas insists on the independent (if not completely autonomous) developmental logic of the superstructural level of

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legal, moral, and social relations or, in other words, at the level of “interaction” or “communication.” The independence logic of communicative action accounts for the failure of historical materialism’s predictions of revolution and for the onesided modernization of Western societies. The rapid growth of our technological ability to control natural processes does not necessarily lead to greater rationalization of our social relationships— our moral, cultural, and political life. It may, in the absence of a corresponding communicative rationalization of society, only reinforce existing relations of domination. Any challenge to the one-sided rationality of modernity requires, according to Habermas, normative standards grounded in a theory of communicative action. In the modern world, absolute religious or metaphysical guarantees for moral values are no longer convincing. Scientific or instrumental rationality delivers technological advances but is morally empty. We must rely instead, Habermas maintains, on procedural norms of discussion or discourse. Moral values are ultimately grounded in the agreement or consensus of human subjects. But as Marx’s critique of ideology has shown, belief systems, cultural values, and traditions may be distorted by power. So it is essential that agreement is reached through processes of communication that are undistorted by the power of some participants. Participants in communicative action reach agreement subject only to legitimate forms of argument, or what Habermas refers to as the “peculiarly constraint-free force of the better argument.” Habermas’s characterization of an “ideal speech situation” undistorted by power relies on the claim that particular moral values are presupposed in all our acts of communication—a claim fleshed out in his theory of universal pragmatics. Not surprisingly, the universalism of this account has been subject to considerable skepticism. In addition, because Habermas’s discourse ethics emphasizes the importance of reaching a universal consensus, he has been accused by Jean-François Lyotard of an insensitivity to “difference” and “otherness.” In this context, Habermas insists that nothing can ever guarantee the validity of our existing beliefs. If that were possible, it would indeed tend to encourage dogmatism. For Habermas, as for Karl Popper, scientific theories are never more than provisional

hypotheses, always vulnerable to unanticipated counterexamples. Our moral principles and values are similarly vulnerable to the unexpected realization that they were imposed by power. Habermas develops his account of the intersubjective basis of values and norms into a manyfaceted theory of discourse ethics, law, and democracy. Of more direct political relevance, however, is his diagnosis of the pathologies of advanced capitalism. Modern society, according to this account, is deformed by the incursions of the bureaucratic state and capitalist economy into the domain of moral and cultural meanings. What Habermas describes as the “invasion of the lifeworld” by the systems of power and money substitutes instrumentally rationalized social subsystems (i.e., the modern state and capitalism) for what should be the communicative reproduction of human social existence. But the disruption of inherited cultural traditions also presents an opportunity for progressive reform according to the norms of communicative rationality. For example, the inherited tradition of patriarchy—a constellation of social meanings and values distorted by the power of men—can now be recognized as an ideological formation. This is reflected in the emergence of new “potentials for protest” in the new social movements of feminism, sexual liberation, ecology, and environmentalism, which are potentially progressive responses “from the lifeworld” to the invasive power of capitalism and the state (Habermas, 1987, pp. 391 ff).

Radical Skepticism and the Renewal of Critical Theory In the last decades of the 20th century, the Frankfurt School of critical theory was overshadowed by more skeptical theorists espousing postmodernism and poststructuralism—also sometimes, confusingly, described as critical theory. Crucially, however, these theorists’ radical critique of philosophical notions of objectivity, universality, and truth implies a corresponding denial of the objectivity of power and power relations, removing them from the scope of critical theory in the sense considered here. Michel Foucault, for example, conceives relations of power as omnipresent and inescapable. There is no “outside” of power. The omnipresence of power may correspond to an equivalent omnipresence of

Critical Theory

“resistance,” but resistance in Foucault’s sense does not imply liberation (whether partial or complete) from relations of power. The radically skeptical and seemingly apolitical currents of poststructuralism and postmodernism have, more recently, been challenged by theorists who, though they diverge in significant respects, are much closer in spirit to the Frankfurt School’s brand of critical theory. With a renewed appreciation of Marx and the importance of capitalism as well as a strong concern with fascism and other varieties of authoritarian populism, theorists such as Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek share, in addition, the Frankfurt School’s positive evaluation of Freudian psychoanalysis, albeit as interpreted by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. These theorists reject postmodernism’s unqualified commitment to pluralism, “difference,” the “Other,” and the fragmentary struggles of identity politics and multiculturalism. Maintaining an uneasy truce between postmodern difference and Marxist universality, Laclau and Butler see the striving for unity and universality—whether in theory and ideology or in political organization and practice—as an unavoidable but always unattainable goal (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek). Žižek is most explicit in wishing to translate this relentlessly paradoxical stance into something like a revival of Marxist political economy and Leninist politics. Whatever their ultimate merits, the sometimes fascinating but theoretically strenuous writings of Žižek, Laclau, and Butler cannot avoid one of the perennial questions of critical theory, namely how such difficult and frequently obscure texts are supposed to relate to widespread and effective political action for the transformation of society. The self-conscious difficulty of Adorno’s work similarly provides endless scope for intellectual debate, but little obvious or direct inspiration to political action. For critical theory, which is defined by its anticipated role in social transformation, this is surely no trivial problem. A related concern is that critical theory will only ever exert influence on an intellectual elite and that, contrary to their best intentions, critical theorists are, after all, just proponents of an ideology for intellectuals. A further problem must also be resolved. A critical theory needs to diagnose and propose remedies for the pathologies of contemporary society, but it must also motivate political actors to undertake

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difficult and sometimes dangerous actions. But intellectual theory seems ill equipped to inspire the kind of widespread political mobilization required for a genuinely emancipatory transformation of society. It is not obvious, for example, how the calmly dispassionate rationality embodied in Habermas’s exhaustively systematic project might contribute to the motivation of political agents. Critical theory in this style seems to assume an unlikely degree of rationality in its readers. Marx’s vitriolic outbursts against capitalism and Adorno’s passionate commitment to suffering humanity are perhaps more likely to motivate action—even if Adorno’s relationship to concrete political practice otherwise seems remote, and revolutionary Marxism’s practical difficulties made critical theory necessary in the first place. Similarly unpromising are attempts to revise or update Marxism’s identification of the industrial proletariat as the designated grave digger of capitalism. Marcuse saw new agents of revolutionary change in the “outcasts and outsiders” of Western societies as well as in these societies’ colonial and neocolonial victims in the developing world. Some theories of new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s extended this approach to movements of women, lesbian and gays, and greens and environmentalists, which were seen as the new agents of global social transformation. But such approaches, with their tendency to posit a foreseeable course of social development and predictable cast of historical actors, sit uneasily with critical theory’s criticisms of positivist social science and deterministic laws of historical development. Critical theory’s best hope for further renewal may lie in the more concrete and discrete critical discourses that emerged in association with the liberation politics and social movements of the late 20th century. Like critical theory, discourses of ecology, feminism, anti-racism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory combine factual claims with normative ideals and political proposals. But all of these are less systematic and less totalizing than is critical theory in classic mode. They rely not on some overarching philosophy of history or what Lyotard calls a “grand meta-narrative,” but on looser assemblages of historical and empirical findings, moral ideals, and practical recommendations. In that sense, they are closer in spirit to Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault than to either

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Marx or Habermas. They do resemble Marxism, however, insofar as they have emerged in the context of already engaged social movements that, like the 19th-century working class, have gone on to achieve substantial social and political change. Like workers’ movements, too, these movements and discourses have inaugurated new and distinctive modes of political action. Anti-racist, gay, and feminist practices of consciousness raising and identity politics testify to a direct and fruitful intersection of “theory” and “practice.” Culture, symbolism, and imagery have proved to be equally effective—and often less counterproductive—than are the sometimes intimidatory and coercive (let alone violent) political tactics of socialist politics. The role of critical theory, in these terms, is more akin to that of a political toolbox than to an architectural master plan, providing specific conceptual tools for particular political purposes. Indeed, it would be a misunderstanding to expect any critical theory to be resolved, or to resolve itself into a stable and selfsufficient discursive domain. The origins of critical theory lie, precisely, in the recognition that the permanence and stability of theoretical knowledge is achieved only at the cost of perpetuating existing relations of power. David West See also Adorno, Theodor; Foucault, Michel; Habermas, Jürgen; Knowledge and Power; Lukes, Steven

Further Readings Bottomore, T. (2002). The Frankfurt School and its critics (Rev. ed.). London: Routledge. Geuss, R. (1981). The idea of a critical theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. New York: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action: Vol. 2. The critique of functionalist reason (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Holub, R. C. (1991). Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the public sphere. London: Routledge. Honneth, A. (1991). The critique of power: Reflective stages in a critical social theory (K. Baynes, Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. West, D. (1987). Power and formation. Inquiry, 30(1), 137–154.

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS The events of October 1962 are commonly regarded as the most dangerous moment in human history when, had all-out nuclear war occurred, hundreds of millions of people would have been killed. Indeed, the environmental and climatic consequences could have led to the extinction of human life in the northern hemisphere. Yet the crisis is also commonly seen as a turning point in the cold war that helped bring detente between the superpowers, cooperation in arms control, and reduction in the risk of nuclear war. Over many decades, a vast amount of historical research has been undertaken into the crisis. Yet debate remains about the interpretation of events and the implications for understanding the role and power of nuclear weapons in international politics. The crisis began on October 16, 1962, after U.S. spy planes discovered the construction of Soviet nuclear missile bases in Cuba. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had promised U.S. President John F. Kennedy that the Soviets would not place offensive weapons on the island. After a week’s deliberation, on October 22, Kennedy announced the imposition of a partial naval blockade and threatened a “full retaliatory response” against the Soviet Union (USSR) if missiles were fired from Cuba. On the morning of October 24, U.S. warships stood ready to intercept Soviet ships. When these stopped or turned around, Secretary of State Dean Rusk quipped, “We’re eyeball to eyeball and I guess the other fella just blinked.” The crisis reached its climax on the weekend of October 26, when both leaders maneuvered to reach a diplomatic settlement. A framework was agreed in which the United States would not invade Cuba if the Soviets removed their missiles. Kennedy also provided a secret assurance that he would withdraw U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy. By then, however, Khrushchev had already decided to take the missiles out of Cuba, and on the morning of October 28, Moscow Radio broadcast the news. Final agreement was not reached until November 20 as the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, was not consulted by Khrushchev and objected that Cuban interests were ignored. The reasons why Khrushchev deployed missiles in Cuba and why he withdrew them have attracted

Cuban Missile Crisis

much debate over many decades. In 1962, the United States enjoyed massive nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. Missiles in Cuba would have reduced but not fundamentally altered U.S. nuclear superiority. Putting missiles into Cuba was also intended to deter a U.S. attack, though instead it provoked the United States into preparations for an invasion. During the last few decades, various incidents and circumstances have become known that suggest the risk of nuclear war was greater than recognized. These include near-accidents and failures of U.S. command and control, the revelation that the Soviets had deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba unbeknownst to Washington, evidence that U.S. fighters sent to support a U.S. aircraft straying into Soviet airspace were armed with nuclear ordnance, and details of encounters between nuclear-armed Soviet submarines and the

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U.S. Navy. As the crisis reached its climax, political leaders were increasingly determined to avoid conflict. Yet the risk of inadvertent nuclear war may well have been very real. Len Scott See also Chicken Games; Mutually Assured Destruction; War

Further Readings Fursenko, A., & Naftali, T. (1997). “One hell of a gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis 1958–1964. London: John Murray. May, E., & Zelikow, P. (Eds.). (1997). The Kennedy tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban missile crisis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

D between agents, whether these agents are individuals, groups, governments, or nation-states. Dahl suggests any complete understanding of A’s power over B must include references to the base from which A’s power emanates, the means by which A exerts this power, and the scope and amount of A’s power. A power base is an inert cache of resources held by A that may include, for example, a country’s ability to wage war or a politician’s capacity to bestow patronage, veto legislation, or gain media attention. Means mediate between A’s power base and B’s response and include threats and promises by A to marshal base resources for or against B. Scope pertains to whether A’s power extends to all, many, or a few spheres of influence within the domain in which A operates. Finally, Dahl calculates A’s amount of power as the difference between the probability of an event occurring given a certain action by A, and the probability of the given event given no such action by A. Thus, A has power over B to the extent that A can engage a particular tactic to increase the probability that B will do what A wants. This reference to the amount of power and probability is most critical to understanding Dahl’s take on power relations. Dahl consistently backs his theories with empirical research. Following his definitional discussions of power, Dahl moved to empirical power assessments. This empirical work began as a critique of the work of community power theorists such as Floyd Hunter, whose reputational studies of local notables concludes power is unequally distributed in Atlanta, and C. Wright Mills, whose 1956 book The Power Elite posits all decisions of national

DAHL, ROBERT A. (1915– ) After almost 70 years of publishing, Robert Dahl is one of the most venerable and influential modern political scholars. Born in 1915, Dahl is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University and former president of the American Political Science Association. Dahl published his first article in 1940, and is widely credited with initiating the modern theoretical debate about power and undertaking one of the most thorough early empirical investigations of the topic with his 1961 book Who Governs? Integrally connected to his notion of power, Dahl’s theoretical and empirical work on democracy is also widely cited, including his 1989 book Democracy and Its Critics and On Political Equality, published in 2006. Dahl’s first major contribution to discussions of power appears in his 1957 Behavioral Science article “The Concept of Power,” in which he builds and operationalizes a definition of power that forms the basis of his later empirical studies. Though criticized, Dahl’s concept of power is still frequently cited as a relevant starting point from which to understand power. For example, in a 2008 review of Dahl’s 1957 work, Philip Pettit states Dahl’s work is still an effective and valuable tool by which to understand other concepts such as freedom, albeit with some minor adjustments. In “The Concept of Power,” Dahl famously states, “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” Thus, Dahl understands power as relation 163

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consequence in the United States are controlled by a small group of 400 people sharing a common culture. Built on his earlier developed concept of power, Dahl’s 1958 article “A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model” highlights what he sees as methodological flaws in Mills’s and Hunter’s studies and elaborates on these flaws to discredit their conclusions. Following his criticism of elite theorists, Dahl then produced arguably the most comprehensive empirical community power study ever undertaken. In Who Governs? Dahl tests whether New Haven, Connecticut, is run by a single elite group. To do so, he longitudinally examines the role of various local actors in areas where important public decisions are made, including nominations in two local political parties, urban redevelopment, and public education. Although he finds an unequal distribution of resources in the city, his data suggest no single elite group dominates local policy making, with only the democratically elected mayor having influence in all three issue areas. Thus, Dahl argues that power in New Haven is pluralistic in that it is dispersed among a number of different and competing groups rather than exclusively commanded by one elite group. With Who Governs?, Dahl became the de facto champion of pluralism, a position that has brought considerable criticism from authors such as Peter Bacharach and Morton Baratz, Steven Lukes, and G. William Domhoff. Despite criticisms from these elite and Marxist theorists, Dahl steadfastly defends his claim that the United States is a pluralist state and that power is dispersed rather than concentrated in the hands of a few elite members of society. This is not to say that Dahl is not critical of pluralism. In his later works, such as “Pluralism Revisited,” Dahl acknowledges that inequality of resources and political knowledge and strong differences in personal motivations sometimes enable some groups to more frequently dominate group decision making—a concession that underlines the work of modern neopluralist writers. For Dahl, however, these inequalities still do not refute pluralism: although pluralist states might demonstrate inequality, unequal states are not necessarily elitist. Kennedy Stewart See also Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton; Elite Theories; Lukes, Steven; Pluralism

Further Readings Dahl, R. A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioral Science, 2(3), 201–215. Dahl, R. A. (1958). A critique of the ruling elite model. The American Political Science Review, 52(2), 463–469. Dahl, R. A. (1961). Who governs?: Democracy and power in an American city. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, R. A. (1978). Pluralism revisited. Comparative Politics, 10(2), 191–203. Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A radical view. London: Macmillan. Pettit, P. (2008). Dahl’s power and republican freedom. Journal of Power, 1(1), 67–74.

DECENTERING (OF SUBJECT, OF STRUCTURE) Postmodernist or poststructuralist writers in general argue that political theory and other discourses have reified people as particular types of monads: rational, instrumental, self-centered, and autonomous agents. In the Enlightenment discourse, these rational instrumental beings choose their actions given the environments in which they find themselves. These rational beings are the agents fashioning the world around them and reacting to that environment in terms of their objects and desires. The agents are the subjects of history and explanation revolves around them. Decentering the subject is a process of recognition that what separates the physical form of a person and that person as a subject of inquiry is the linguistic cover that constitutes discourse. Different discourses about people constitute them as different subjects. People define their own beings within these different discourses, as mothers, as consumers, as workers, as political activists. There is no reason to suppose that these different discourses are complementary; they may contain many contradictions belying the person as a rational coherent agent. Rather, agents are fashioned by the dominant discourses in different domains. Predicating power to individual agents is an example of the centering of people as subjects: we need to decenter the subject to see the way in which discourses dominate human lives.

Defensive Realism

Decentering does not have to be applied to subjects, however. Rationalist approaches recognize that there is an interrelationship between agents as subjects and the structures around them. Structuralists make the opposite error of centering attention on structure and reifying that to give it rationality and coherence. In the same way that we must understand agents as subjects of discourse, so we must understand structures. The way in which we see environments, social processes, and interactions as constraints on the actions of rational beings can also be subject to decentering. Seeing social structure in terms of class relationships, networks of families or work colleagues, or institutions as conventions and norms are all also specific discourses, and we can decenter structures to recognize that these processes are themselves contradictory and self-defeating. In that sense, we should not see power in a structural manner, but rather as a process of discourse that leads us and the world into ways of behaving that have no center or focal point of rationality. Keith Dowding See also Discourse; Foucault, Michel

Further Readings Nicholson, L. (1995). Social postmodernism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

DEFENSIVE REALISM Defensive realism follows the basic neorealist assumptions that the anarchic nature of the international system compels states to seek self-help for survival. The impulse to survive is thus the primary factor that conditions state behavior. This line of thought is consistent with Kenneth Waltz’s theory of international politics, which posits the dominance of the “third image” (international system) in explaining the behavior between and among states. Anarchy and survival are thus the animating factors that privilege security over power. Unlike classical realism in which international politics is a struggle for power, in neorealism, power is just a means to an end, and thus the

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ultimate objective is to maximize security to enhance survival. To highlight the central features of defensive realism, it is important to distinguish the differences between the more traditional (defensive) orientation and offensive realism. Although both variants maintain the central objective of states seeking security for survival, the debate between relative gain and relative loss and the appropriate strategies reveals fundamental differences in how states pursue their goals in conditions of anarchy. Defensive realism is driven by human behavioral assumptions that preventing loss takes precedence over pursuing gains and the risks associated with it. By constantly guarding their positions in the international system, states could pursue a cost-effective security strategy. Hence, it is a status quo–oriented theory predicated on maintaining an international equilibrium conducive for states to pursue minimal security strategies for maximum survival. Why would states want to challenge their positions in the international system when doing so would trigger a counterbalancing coalition, thus compelling the challengers to expend more on security while intensifying the security dilemma that may in effect reduce survival? Thus, pursuing a minimal security strategy precludes any ambition of improving its international standing until the basics are ensured— mainly staying alive in an anarchic world. There are rare opportunities for expansion because the hope of improving security through such provocative strategies may actually result in the opposite—endangering a state’s survivability. Although defensive realists envision a world in which security is abundant, offensive realists posit that security, like any other resource, is subject to competition. The competitive nature of international politics tends to intensify the security dilemma, thereby precluding the possibility for cooperation and drastically reducing the ability for states to maintain their positions. Offensive realism is thus a theory predicated on international political change in which the central goal is to maximize offensive capabilities to pursue relative gains. Survival is never certain until a state achieves regional hegemonic status, and therefore it is necessary to contain the aspirations of peer competitors, possibly resorting to preemptive war, to prevent the hegemon from being dethroned.

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Defensive realism promotes a more optimistic outlook on international relations. If all states maintain their positions and achieve a consensual cost-effective security strategy, then cooperation is possible. However, anarchy also exacerbates the ever-present security dilemma, increasing the likelihood of conflicts and misperceptions, questioning the prudence of international cooperation, and strengthening the concept of self-reliance in seeking security. The criticism of defensive realism is that the bias toward the status-quo deviates from international reality. If states are so well behaved and maintain their respective positions, why do states feel threatened, and why is it so difficult to mitigate the security dilemma? The sense of insecurity and the everpresent danger of military conflicts compel states to seek international political change to enhance survival. The rise and fall of great powers continues to capture the essence of international politics. The intra-neorealist debate therefore underscores the variety of strategies states pursues to maximize survival in an anarchic international system. Johnson Y. K. Louie See also Hegemony; Neorealism; Realism in International Relations; Security Dilemma; Waltz, Kenneth

Further Readings Taliaferro, J. W. (2000/2001). Security seeking under anarchy: Defensive realism revisited. International Security, 25(3), 128–161. Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

DEFLECTED WANTS Deflected wants may be described as the things such as fame, success, happiness, or power that a person wants for him- or herself, but the path toward achieving them has changed course. History is full of examples. Quite possibly the most famous illustration during the 20th century was Adolf Hitler. He was, without doubt, a troubled individual, but his desire to be an artist, starting as a young boy in Austria, stayed with him until the

moment he committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin, as the victorious Russian troops approached. He himself said that anyone who wanted to understand him should realize that he was an artist, first and foremost, and that being chancellor of Germany took him away from his true desire—painting. Hitler’s wants and desires to be an artist were deflected onto politics and in his crazed manner of thinking, his actions as “Der Führer,” were indicative of his artistic nature, such as the plans for the building of Germania and his mania to rid Germany of all modern art (Cubism, Dadaism, etc.). A contemporary of Hitler, and his arch nemesis, was Winston Churchill. As a child, he strove greatly to win his father’s love, but in vain as the elder Churchill (Randolph, the chancellor of the Exchequer at the time) openly disliked his son and found him a great disappointment. Winston wrote numerous letters, begging his father to visit, but Randolph usually ignored the requests. Churchill was incredibly lonely, a feeling that stayed with him the rest of his life; likewise, the heartfelt wish to earn his father’s love never left. His desire for a loving relationship with his father was deflected onto politics, where he cultivated the image of ultramasculinity (smoking up to nine cigars throughout the day, his frequent imbibing of Johnny Walker Red whisky, etc.) in the hope that he was the type of man his father would admire. During his first few years as a politician, and again during the 1920s, Churchill used the phrase first coined by his father, “Tory Democracy,” as a means of describing his political beliefs. Significantly, many of his colleagues saw young Winston as being obsessed with his father and were amazed at his drive to further his father’s legacy. Another example concerns quite possibly the greatest artist, as well as one of the preeminent thinkers, produced by Western civilization—Leonardo da Vinci. According to Sigmund Freud, Leonardo’s wants and desires for homosexual contact were deflected first to his art, and second to his intellectual investigations. The key to understanding Leonardo (and other homosexuals), Freud wrote, was the relationship Leonardo had with his mother. Because of his mother’s doting and his father’s neglect, Leonardo experienced a powerful Oedipal conflict and saw women as dominant,

Deliberation

“causing” him to become homosexual. In essence, Leonardo’s strong desire for men was deflected and turned toward art and science. It has been argued that the personal power and determination of such individuals in their new fields develops from the strength of the their deflected wants. Cary Stacy Smith and Li-Ching Hung See also False Consciousness; Interests; Symbolic Power and Violence

Further Readings Fest, J. (1974). Hitler. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Freud, S. (1989). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. New York: W. W. Norton. Manchester, W. (1983). The last lion: Winston Spencer Churchill—Vision of glory 1874–1932. Boston: Little, Brown.

DELIBERATION Deliberation refers to a process of reflection undertaken by individuals or groups to reach reasoned and considered decisions. Deliberation has an epistemic function to improve decisions and uncover the best argument. It is often assumed that because of deliberation, individuals’ beliefs and judgments are transformed as they consider new facts, arguments, and points of view. In individual deliberation, the deliberator weighs and evaluates each possible solution and then arrives at a decision. Group deliberation consists of reasoned discussion. When groups deliberate, the process acquires a dimension of power. Deliberation can be either formal or informal. Examples of formalized deliberating groups are juries or legislatures. An example of informal deliberation is the ongoing discussion between different groups in civil society, but discussions within families and civic organizations are also examples of informal deliberation. Group deliberation is characterized by communication aimed at persuasion. Ideal deliberative processes should be reasoned, equal, and open

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discussions where participants are prepared to change their views as a result of the arguments presented. In reality, deliberation does not live up to such a high standard. Some members of the group will be more powerful than others, and some arguments will be more persuasive than others, regardless of their merits. Although deliberation could ideally be aimed at reaching a common good for the group, in practice, the private interests of group members will be powerful forces. Inequality within the group leads to differences in the power each group member possesses. The socioeconomic background of participants can define their roles in the discussion. As an example, jury deliberations tend to be dominated by welleducated white males. Actors who are powerful outside of deliberation will be powerful in deliberative settings as well. In deliberations between states, the most powerful nation will wield more power. Inequalities also exist with regard to the ability of deliberators. Good orators are more likely to convince others, regardless of the merit of their arguments. There is a danger that intelligent and persuasive individuals could manipulate deliberation to serve their own interests. Other resources, such as time, information, or the respect of other members of the community, will also make some deliberators more influential than others. Arguments themselves will have different power. Although some place hope in the power of the best argument to defeat all others, this is not necessarily the argument that will resonate most with deliberators. Arguments that appeal to strong background beliefs and feelings will be more powerful. Arguments that support the views deliberators already hold will also be more persuasive. Deliberation is seen as a good way of increasing citizen involvement and participation in politics. In political theory, deliberative democracy has engendered a new interest in increasing deliberation in politics, as current democratic systems focus more on elections than on decision making through reasoned debate. Deliberative experiments and meetings are organized to increase citizen involvement in public policy making. Zsuzsanna Chappell See also Argument, Power of; Deliberative Democracy; Persuasion

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Further Readings Dryzek, J. S. (2000). Deliberative democracy and beyond: Liberals, critics, contestations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY During the last 20 years, democratic theory has taken a deliberative turn. An increasing number of political philosophers are arguing for deliberative democracy, a political process where decisions are reached through reasoned debate. This is usually contrasted with aggregative democracy, where decisions are reached through voting. Definitions of deliberative democracy vary considerably across the literature, but they do share some common characteristics. One of the aims of the deliberative project is to empower both individuals and arguments by providing a forum that facilitates equal respect. According to different authors, deliberative democracy can promote equal respect, empower underprivileged groups, and give power to the best argument. Some authors consider the problems that power inequalities pose for deliberation. Deliberation is also meant to yield other benefits, such as increased legitimacy or epistemically better outcomes.

Democracy as Dialogue Deliberative democracy is based on open and uncoerced dialogue characterized by reason giving. Joshua Cohen defines its characteristics as free, reasoned, equal, and aiming for a consensus. Deliberators present arguments that justify their judgments and preferences. Others are expected to listen to these arguments and adjust their beliefs, judgments, and preferences as a result. This reciprocity of justifying arguments and listening to the arguments of others is a key feature of deliberative democracy. Deliberation is democratic if it is equal in that each individual has equal opportunity to speak and each point of view and argument has an equal opportunity to be put forward. Deliberative democracy is a theory of democracy that gives power to arguments through the introduction of a number of different viewpoints and beliefs. Thus, it is not brute numbers, but

well-argued cases that lead to the selection of policies. If participants scrutinize the reasons for judgments and preferences, then it is more likely that genuinely good policies will be adopted. Proponents of deliberative democracy believe that because of the transformative power of deliberation, deliberators will be convinced by good arguments and eventually the majority of citizens will come to believe in them. Deliberation also empowers all citizens to advance their arguments as equals in the political forum. In the ideal form of deliberation, each deliberator has equal opportunity and power to advance his or her argument and influence the beliefs, judgments, and preferences of others. Deliberative democracy is assumed to give more weight to other-regarding than to selfish arguments. The reason for this is that deliberators will have to convince others to adopt their position and this is more difficult to achieve if arguments are put in terms of what would benefit them, rather than what would benefit everyone. In the long run, this is assumed to lead to a genuine orientation toward the common good. To exclude discriminatory or otherwise offensive arguments from deliberation, it is required that deliberators launder their preferences. This means that deliberators use generally other-regarding arguments and that they would cease using arguments that discriminate against others. In practice, who would block such arguments and how this would be achieved is problematic. Thus, it is possible that arguments that discriminate against some group in society would become dominant through deliberation. Alternatively, some reasonable arguments may be laundered out through such a process. Deliberative democracy and aggregative democracy can be located on a continuum. Purely aggregative democracy would consist solely of citizens voting in isolation, whereas purely deliberative democracy would arrive at decisions purely through deliberation. Current liberal representative democracies fall somewhere between these two extremes. Actually, all empirically feasible democratic systems would be located somewhere among these extremes.

Habermas’s Model One of the earliest and most important philosophers to endorse deliberative democracy was

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Jürgen Habermas. His discourse ethics had a great impact on the literature, and many authors refer to his ideas of deliberation and communicative rationality to support their own arguments. Thus, the deliberative model has some of its roots in critical theory’s challenge to existing power structures. Habermas sets out his model of deliberative democracy most clearly in Between Facts and Norms. For him, ideal deliberation takes place in an ideal speech situation and is governed by communicative rationality. This consists of communicative action that is aimed at developing understanding between individuals. According to his model, informal deliberation takes place in the public sphere, which is followed by an election and leads to further deliberation between legislators. This leads to the implementation of laws that give deliberative decisions legal power. Habermas’s theory of deliberation is highly normative and addresses the way in which deliberation could increase legitimacy and communicative rationality in political decision-making.

Contemporary Democratic Theorists The current literature on deliberative democracy encompasses a wide range of authors, some of whom emphasize the role of deliberative democracy to empower minorities and challenge existing power structures. Some democratic theorists who advocate deliberate democracy, often called difference democrats, argue that the deliberative processes described by much of the literature are too exclusive and that they tend to favor dispassionate, logical argumentation as it is practiced by educated white men. This leads to power inequalities between different deliberators, where women and minorities are not fully included. These ideas are strongly influenced by feminist theory and critical theory. This argument is set out most clearly in Iris Marion Young’s Democracy and Inclusion. According to her, deliberative theories are based on logical reasoning that leaves little space for emotions and is not sympathetic toward the norms of other cultures. For participants to become truly equal in deliberation, the arguments of women, minorities, and those with relatively little education should be given a voice as well. This could be achieved through including emotional talk, narratives, rhetoric, and other nonargumentative utterances, such as greetings in deliberative discourse. Young argues

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that deliberation cannot always be calm and dispassionate, but should also be a forum where political protest can be expressed. Thus, deliberation should increase the legitimacy of democratic decisions and lead to better choices through requiring reasoned arguments and justifications for judgments, and it should serve as a tool to empower minorities through giving them more voice and influence in the policy-making process. Deliberation could allow the perspectives and narratives of hitherto less privileged groups to enter the political forum and, as a result, would make democracy more inclusive and equal. These theories also had considerable effect on the way in which the success of local level deliberative reforms is evaluated. Deliberative democracy is often portrayed as a normative or ideal theory of democracy. It describes an ideal decision-making procedure. But recent research is moving deliberative democracy out of the realm of the purely theoretical. There are an increasing number of empirical studies and quasiexperiments. Real-world deliberation will need to sacrifice some of the characteristics, benefits, and advantages of ideal deliberation, but is still seen as a goal worth aspiring to. The most obvious deliberative forums in current liberal democracies are legislatures. As the form of debate practiced here often falls short of the ideals of deliberative democracy, the primary focus of the literature is on new deliberative institutions.

Practice and Problems There are two broad ways of imagining deliberative democracy in practice. The first is face-to-face deliberation between a defined set of participants, based roughly on the model of a town hall meeting. The second is deliberation diffused among a wider public sphere, as it is portrayed by Habermas. This is the ongoing informal deliberation that takes place between citizens, in the media, and in civil society. Face-to-face deliberation that follows the town hall format is more formalized, and the number of people taking part and the issues to be debated are well defined. Many deliberative projects emphasize that the deliberative group should be representative of the wider population. There are a number of ideas for larger-scale deliberative reform in the literature. One of the

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most well-known and ambitious is the concept of deliberation day, developed by Bruce Ackermann and James Fishkin. Deliberation day would be held a few weeks before presidential elections and would require U.S. citizens to come together to deliberate on candidates and issues. This would allow them to make more informed decisions on the day of the election, as well as encouraging day-to-day informal deliberation. This model is significant because large-scale deliberative quasiexperiments called deliberative polls have been based on it all around the world, from the United States to China. These experiments provide a rich source of data for empirical analysis. During these deliberative polls, participants often change their preferences in the way in which the model predicts. Other practical models of deliberation include citizen juries, which are groups of citizens getting together over time to reach a judgment on an issue, or deliberative juries, which serve the same role for policies that traditional juries do for legal cases. Participatory budgeting is one of the major reallife examples of deliberation in practice. It was first adopted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and other cities have followed suit in that country. Traditional town hall meetings and online deliberation are also discussed in the literature. These mechanisms could also encourage informal deliberation within the public sphere in the form of increased participation by citizens in reasoned political discussions. Many of these deliberative policy-making mechanisms can empower underprivileged groups that would normally have only limited access to the policy-making process. In Porto Alegre, residents from poorer districts gained a voice in municipal matters through a system of participatory budgeting. In Chicago, local schools and police departments involved residents in deciding priorities and policies. These policies were intended to improve education and policing, especially in poorer areas. But even in well-off localities, this form of deliberative participation transfers power from local or central government to citizens. Research on real-life deliberative meetings reports mixed results. There are cases of success where deliberators appear to change their mind as a result of the arguments put forward during debate. There is, however, relatively little research about the effect of power and inequality on the results of deliberation.

Deliberative democracy can suffer from a number of problems or pathologies. It is unlikely that deliberators will be genuinely equal. It is more likely that the deliberative group will be made up of individuals of differing abilities and backgrounds. Those who are more powerful outside of the deliberative process are likely to be more powerful in deliberation as well. Individuals also have differing natural abilities to express themselves and convince others. This gives those with better abilities to reason coherently and convincingly more power. Thus, it is not guaranteed that deliberative democracy will give power to the best argument because the best argument may not be the most persuasive argument. It is also argued that deliberation could favor vivid theories that are easy to understand and where the role of individuals is easily identifiable, rather than more complex theories using invisible hand explanations. Cass Sunstein identifies two mechanisms that lead to problems in deliberation. First, deliberative groups can become polarized. Within-group polarization means that if similar arguments are advanced most of the time, those arguments reinforce each other and the position of the group as a whole becomes more extreme. Second, informational cascades can develop that lead large groups of people to assume something is true simply because everyone else seems to think it is true. Although these mechanisms will not always be necessarily present during deliberation, they could lead to the adoption of suboptimal policies.

Conclusion Deliberation is a time- and resource-consuming activity that not everyone will find enjoyable, so we cannot assume that all will participate on equal terms. Those with less time and opportunities to participate will be at a disadvantage. Even if deliberation becomes a dominant mode of decision making in politics, many are unlikely to participate because of a lack of motivation, just as many citizens are not motivated to turn out to vote. The problem is likely to be larger than in the case of voting, because genuine deliberation is very resource-intensive, regarding both acquiring information and the actual process of deliberation. This will lead to a bias regarding who participates in

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deliberation. Those who do not participate in politics will have less power than those who do. This bias might also reduce the legitimacy of any decisions reached through deliberation. Deliberative democracy gives individuals the power to voice their arguments and can possibly empower underprivileged groups. Some also argue that it gives power to the best argument by requiring clear justifications for beliefs and reasoned arguments. However, it will be difficult to keep existing power relationships out of deliberation, which can make the process less equal. This could potentially undermine the legitimacy of decisions made through deliberative procedures. Despite these potential problems, deliberative democracy continues to be one of the most influential theories of democracy because it offers an attractive theory of democratic decision making. Zsuzsanna Chappell See also Argument, Power of; Critical Theory; Deliberation; Democracy

Further Readings Ackermann, B. A., & Fishkin, J. S. (2004). Deliberation day. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cohen, J. (1997). Deliberation and democratic legitimacy. In J. Bohman & W. Rehg (Eds.), Deliberative politics: Essays on reason and politics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Dryzek, J. S. (2000). Deliberative democracy and beyond: Liberals, critics, contestations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Sunstein, C. R. (2003). Why societies need dissent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

DEMOCRACY Democracy refers to (a) a political system, (b) a political aspiration, and (c) a key term of political rhetoric. As a name for a political system, it refers to the fact that power to rule is invested in the people themselves in some tangible or formal sense (in the modern period, indirectly, through elected representatives). As an aspiration, democracy stands for the desire to deepen and extend the ideals of political equality and popular control, including in systems that are already regarded

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as democracies. These two approaches are often in tension. Contemporary representative democracy, for example, is sometimes criticized as remote and bureaucratic, granting power only minimally and episodically to ordinary citizens. This criticism has given rise to aspirations for forms of more direct citizen empowerment, or more participatory institutions. Democracy is also a term of political rhetoric. It is a word that signifies, at the most general level, a good, if not the best and most desirable, constitution and allocation of political power. Leaders, writers, and people of varied political persuasions will want to be classed as “democrats” by their audiences. The standard definition of democracy is “rule by the people,” from the ancient Greek (demos  kratia). Today, a people normally means citizens of a nation-state or country. But in an age of globalization and the revival of local and secessionist movements, it has become evident that there is no obvious democratic way to decide who constitutes “a people.” In what sense can the people rule? In an influential account, Jack Lively set out a sliding scale of possibilities. Rule by the people could mean that all should be involved in deciding and administering policy, or that all should be involved in crucial decisions. Perhaps democratic rule can involve only a select minority, normally elected representatives, in ruling? Is it enough if these representatives are chosen by, or accountable to, the people as a whole? If rulers are chosen by the representatives of the ruled, is that too distant from any substantial sense of the people ruling to be classed properly as democratic? There is wide scope for specifying democracy’s meaning and requirements, and therefore too wide a scope for scholarly and political debate about the proper character and demands of democracy. Some observers regard democracy as having universal value, but just why it has value is a matter of some contestation. Is it because democracy produces beneficial outcomes in stability and relative social peace? Is it because democracy embodies intrinsic values, such as equality? Or is it because democratic participation produces more educated and confident citizens? It seems reasonably clear that adequate answers will involve a range of these and other concerns, and further, that the ways in which democracy is defined and justified bear a close link to each other.

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Debates about democracy’s meaning and value are often conducted as timeless philosophical debates, but such debates draw on a long history of institutional and theoretical innovation. Ancient Greek democracy, most notably in Athens from around 500 BCE, was practiced in city-states rather than in nations or empires. This democracy featured direct citizen participation in a face-toface assembly making decisions for the community, rather than representation (though there were representative elements). However, women, slaves, and resident foreigners were not “citizens” and so were excluded from the public political life of the city. Only a minority of male citizens actually took part in the direct democratic assemblies and were eligible to be chosen (by lot, or random selection) for public offices. Aspects of democratic practice were evident in ancient Rome and in Renaissance Italian citystates. Several ideas, such as the separation of powers between executive, legislature, and judiciary, which are evident in many of today’s democratic systems, grew out of the experiences of both. But national and representative democracy as we know it today awaited what Robert A. Dahl calls democracy’s “second transformation” in Europe around the mid-18th century. This second transformation involved a shift in the basic scale of political organization from the city to the nation. The increase in political scale created political communities that were much more heavily populated, territorially large, and diverse than were ancient or renaissance city-states. Most observers at the time, and subsequently, understood that in these circumstances direct participation was no longer feasible and that it needed to be replaced by representation. Although historically democracy preceded liberalism, liberalism has preceded democracy for all intents and purposes in the modern era. The idea of the universal franchise, for example, emerged fitfully throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, in the West at least, on the back of developing liberal ideas about individual responsibility, autonomy, and freedom. Liberal ideas about protecting individual rights and limiting the scope of government are not intrinsically democratic ideas, and what we now call representative democracy emerged from liberal ideas as much, if not more than, from specifically democratic ones. The idea and the practice

of representation arguably kept the apparatus of government at some distance from the power of the people themselves, thus creating an institutional space in which more timeless and universal rights could be protected against populist and democratic vagaries. Liberal values, not least the inviolability of legitimate property rights, strongly limits the scope for legitimate government intervention in society. In the early 21st century, more than half of the countries in the world can reasonably be classed as democratic, in the sense of minimal electoral democracy at least. This historically unprecedented spread of popular government came about because of the rapid (though often difficult and halting) spread of democracy across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa toward the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. The practice of democracy varies according to region, culture, and degree of economic development. In sum, democracy is a rich set of practices that embody the idea that political power should be held, and used, in a way that derives from the ongoing consent of the governed, and with formal accountability of the governors to the governed. Michael Saward See also Dahl, Robert A.; Deliberative Democracy; Elections; Voting

Further Readings Dahl, R. A. (1998). On democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Saward, M. (2003). Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Policy Press.

DEPENDENCY THEORY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Dependency theory is a school of thought that explains underdevelopment as the result of the processes by which poor countries and regions are incorporated into the capitalist world economy. Emerging in Latin American writing during the 1960s as a response to concerns about inequalities in economic power both between and within

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nations, dependency theory claims that features of the global capitalist economy produce a metropolitanperiphery system of unequal relations between developed and underdeveloped states. Theorists also claim that such inequalities condition the social formations and political processes internal to underdeveloped states. According to this account, the economic preponderance of metropolitan capitalist states creates structural asymmetries in power over peripheral societies, limits the sovereignty of dependent states, and conditions their social structures in line with global capitalist imperatives. Starting from the Marxian premise that capitalism is an expanding global system in which national economies constitute subsystems, dependency writers emphasize the importance of the process by which the developing world was brought into this system by European capitalist powers. In this process, colonial relations based on economic extraction and penetration by foreign capital established a set of metropole–periphery relations. These relations are seen as creating a pattern of dependency in the international system, in which metropolitan predominance in processes of technology, capital, and commerce ensures that development of peripheral states is conditioned by, and occurs as a reflection of, the development and expansion of capitalist metropoles. Both development and underdevelopment are therefore seen as processes simultaneously constituted by global capitalism. This dependence is seen not merely as an external economic condition, but as a political phenomenon encompassing the entire institutional framework embodied in the economic, social, political, and cultural formations of the periphery. The international economic relations produced by global capitalism provide the structural cause for power asymmetries in the dependency approach. Impelled by the expansion of European capitalism from the 17th century, penetration by metropolitan capitals in the colonial period saw the economies of peripheral societies reoriented toward the needs of the metropole, through the production of primary commodities in exchange for Western manufactures. This is argued to lead to unequal exchange in trade between low-value resources and high-value manufactured exports, resulting in a cross-border appropriation of value by the metropole. “Dual economies” form in the

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periphery as a result, where expanding export sectors tied to the needs of the metropole exist alongside stagnant traditional industries serving local markets. Control of these industries by metropolitan capitals siphons off what economic surplus is produced in the foreign-dominated export sectors, which Andre Gunder Frank labels the development of underdevelopment by global capitalist relations of dependency. However, the specific forms of economic dependence are said to vary according to the period in which parts of the periphery were incorporated into the global capitalist system. Fernando Cardoso stresses the contrast between a colonial form of economic dependence based on the exchange of raw materials for manufactures under European imperialism that produces “underdevelopment,” and a neocolonial system based on the exchange of labor-intensive manufactures for technological and capital goods in the postcolonial period, characterized as “dependent development.” However, the economic basis of dependency relations extends to constitute an internal conditioning factor for the entirety of the dependent society. Dominant groups in dependent societies clustering around economic interchanges with metropoles form transnational class alliances with international capitalists. This produces a class structure based on “comprador” capitalist domination of the state over local interests. Social formations also become fragmented between groups associated with the respective dual economies, and the political, legal, and cultural institutions of dependent societies become strongly influenced by those of the core through its influence over peripheral elites. A political structure of foreign rule results, reinforced at the interstate level through formal colonial relations during European imperialism and informally in the postcolonial period through relations based on the dominance of an internationally connected clientele bourgeoisie whose interests correspond to those of the capitalist class in dominant nations. Today, this political asymmetry manifests at the level of the international system as neocolonialism, where peripheral states have formal sovereignty but remain structurally unequal and subject to control by capitalist cores. Thus, dependency theorists argue that underdevelopment in the periphery can only be overcome by a qualitative change in both external

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(economic) and internal (political) systems, leading to national development autonomous from the conditioning international capitalist structure. In stressing an explanatory connection between international capitalism and domestic social formations, dependency theorists critique state-centric analyses of international relations. The penetration of international class structures into peripheral societies and the ensuing fragmentation of social formations along class lines challenges the notion that the state can be considered as either a unitary actor, or the core unit of analysis in international relations. Instead, the state is considered as an institution that articulates international class processes into domestic political settlements, with its form constituted externally by global capitalist imperatives. Furthermore, the presence of dependency relations questions concepts of state sovereignty and interdependence by drawing attention to structural asymmetries in power between states, owing to the economic and political domination of the periphery by metropoles. This implies differentiated economic functions for states in the international system, and redefines the concept of dependence from its traditional usage in international relations as reliance, to instead entail the determination of the social structures and development paths of peripheral states by imperatives emanating from the capitalist core. This position was later adopted and extended in Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems approach, in which the expansion of capitalism was argued to partition the world into core, semi-periphery and periphery, impelling differential development processes within, and unequal power relations between, each region. Jeffrey D. Wilson See also Imperialism; Marxist Accounts of Power; Structural Power

Further Readings Amin, S. (1976). Unequal development: An essay on the social formations of peripheral capitalism. Hassocks, Sussex, UK: Harvester Press. Cardoso, F. H. (1972). Dependency and development in Latin America. New Left Review, 74, 83–95. Frank, A. G. (1967). Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press.

DETERMINACY Determinacy belongs to a set of interrelated concepts concerned with causation and causal relations in the natural or social worlds—a set that includes determination, contingency, dominance, overdetermination, determinability, and undecidability. For the social world, determinacy also raises questions about event and structural causation, the agency–structure problem, and issues of free will. This entry focuses on (1) causation, (2) social agency, (3) the relation between structural and agent causality, (4) the attribution of responsibility for events, and (5) ecological dominance as a type of structural causality that escapes one-sided structural determinism.

Causation and Agency Causation is no more, but certainly no less, than the production (or, better, coproduction) of effects and, as such, occurs throughout the natural and social world. Causation is always relational. The capacity of a given force (or set of forces) to produce effects depends on its own causal powers and on the liabilities of the substance(s) or forces on which it acts and the circumstances in which it does so. Capacities and liabilities always exist in the first instance as potentials: they may remain latent and, if activated, may be reinforced, countered, or modified, intentionally or not, by other causal powers and liabilities. This suggests that power can be defined as a specific form of causation that entails the production of effects that would not otherwise happen. Of particular interest in the social sciences is the connection between power and agency, that is, the issue of whether and how agents’ conduct makes a difference. This raises difficult questions about intention and the unintended, mediated effects of its exercise. Empirically, it is often hard, sometimes impossible, to identify unambiguously, let alone uncontroversially, which, if any, agent(s) made a—let alone the—decisive difference to the occurrence of a given event. This is partly because events lack natural boundaries and can be defined in different ways for different purposes. This is especially true in complex conjunctures with multiple time horizons and temporalities, with a complex interweaving of

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scales of action and spatialities, with interaction among many mechanisms, processes, and events, and with many types of agency and social force on the stage and behind the scenes. Identifying the agent(s) that made a decisive difference involves the selection, from many possible causal linkages, of those judged causally effective for a given result. Given that agents always act in specific circumstances, with distinctive constraints and opportunities that condition and mediate the exercise of power, one can attribute responsibility to circumstances, non-agential mechanisms, or actors. Any attribution will in turn relieve, in whole or part, other contributing circumstances, mechanisms, or actors of responsibility. However, because all actions occur in a continuing flow of actions, one can always redefine responsibility by redefining the event, extending timelines backward or forward, or looking at the origins of circumstances previously bracketed out. Redefining the event to be explained (i.e., the explanandum), extending its spatiotemporal context, and identifying a wider range of relevant causal factors would all change the attribution. Further complications can be introduced by inquiring into the origins of identities, preferences, modes of calculation, and so on, rather than taking these too as given. This may prove especially important when explaining events, processes, and outcomes that involve relations of power and domination or where the nature, causes, and solutions of major crises or analogous events are at issue. Such complexities generate debates about the one-, two-, or three-dimensional nature of power (see, classically, Steven Lukes). There is a risk of a manifold, infinite regress here, such that attributing responsibility so far, and no further, can be seen as a “political” act with its own social consequences.

Determinacy and Contingent Necessity Whereas determination refers to the process of causation, determinacy involves the probability that a given effect will occur through the actualization of different sets of causal chains. This bears critically on structure and agency. Where a given causal effect is highly constrained structurally, it is strongly determinate. Moreover, where many structural forces interact to generate these constraints, the

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effect is causally overdetermined. Where the constraints are loosely coupled and many outcomes are possible, structural determinacy is correspondingly looser. This increases the scope for the actions or interactions of particular social agents to make a difference. The same point can be made in terms of the dialectic of path dependency and path shaping. Loose coupling confronts actors with multiple choices. If no set of decision-making rules unambiguously determines the single correct course of action for actors when they assess relevant circumstances, the situation can be described as (algorithmically) undecidable. This forces actors to exercise free will. In such contexts, choice, however interpreted, becomes a key part of the explanation. This analysis points to the importance of contingent necessity. This apparently self-contradictory concept highlights the fact that, whereas the combination or interaction of different causal chains produces a determinate outcome (necessity), no single theory can predict or determine how or when such causal chains converge or interact (contingency). This is one feature of the asymmetrical nature of causation. We must analyze the many determinations in a concrete conjuncture and show how they interact as necessary or sufficient conditions in a contingent pattern of causation. This excludes all pretence to construct the theory of power and instead shows the need for theoretical and empirical tools to examine specific conjunctures. Exploring contingent necessities (or, better, contingently realized interactive causal necessities) requires one to combine concepts, assumptions, and principles of analysis from different theoretical domains and to link them to a given, theoretically defined explanandum. An explanation is only more or less satisfactory relative to a given explanandum that has been isolated (hence, “constructed”) by an observer from inexhaustible complexity. Max Weber spoke here of the practical impossibility (and, in many cases, theoretical redundancy) of following causal relationships down to the microscopic level of necessary links among the elementary constituents of reality. This applies regardless of the relatively macro–micro nature of the problem or the generality of the historical developments and outcomes to be explained. So it is vital to explain specific events in terms of specific causal antecedents, noting how

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specific causal processes or causal intersections from among many possible intersections intervened to produce an event that would not otherwise have occurred. The more macroscopic the explanandum and the greater its spatiotemporal reach, the more likely that structural rather than agential choice causation will be privileged in the explanation. This is where questions of determinacy invoke the specter of determinism. This involves offering one-sided causal explanations for complex, contingently necessary events, processes, or outcomes. Notorious social science examples allegedly occur within Marxism, including technological determinism, economic determinism, class reductionism, politicism (an exaggerated emphasis on political class domination and struggle), and ideologism or idealism (an overemphasis on ideological or more general ideational factors, respectively). But similar forms of one-sidedness occur in other modes of social explanation. Thus, technological determinism characterizes declarations that one cannot “halt the march of progress.” Economic reductionism is common in muckraking and attempts to identify the material interests at stake in any decision, enduring structure, or continuing process. Class reductionism occurs whenever actions are explained in terms of location in the relations of production, opportunities for profit in the market, levels of income or accumulated wealth, housing status, lifestyle, self-identification, or social status. Politicism is common in realism in international relations, in state-centered analyses of politics that emphasize the special logics, identities, and interests of states, state managers, parties, and political movements, and in theories that prioritize war, preparation for war, and its impact. Finally, idealism occurs when analysts focus one-sidedly on the role of ideas in history and disregard structural and conjunctural factors that select among ideas with the result that no idea is as powerful as one whose time is “ripe.”

Economic Determinacy The complexity of causal relations precludes such one-sided causation and excludes “determination in the last instance” by a single set of causal forces, however tempting this might be for simplifying (the presentation of) an explanation or, for practical purposes at least, holding some factors/forces

responsible. This problem can be exemplified through the historical materialist approach to economic determinacy. This may involve no more than strategic essentialism (privileging some causes or forces over others as a basis for decisive strategic action) but it may also (and often does) involve definite ontological claims about the relative importance of causal forces. Typically at stake here is the relationship between the logic of a profitoriented, market-mediated economy and the development or roles of other institutional orders or everyday consciousness and action. This directly touches the circumstances, if any, in which onesided explanations can be legitimately deployed. First, following Weber, we should distinguish among the directly economic moments of social relations, extra-economic moments that affect economic performance, and moments liable to economic causation. Neglecting this distinction leads to conclusion that the economic is determinant in the last instance because almost everything belongs to at least one of these categories so that the “economic” will figure somehow in every event and its explanation. Second, surveying work on economic determinacy proper, we can distinguish among economic determination in the first instance, economic domination, bourgeois hegemony, and ecological dominance. These involve quite different forms of economic determination. Economic determination in the first instance refers, legitimately, to the primacy of production inside the economy. In short, wealth must first be produced before it can be distributed or, in more Marxist terms, value must first be produced before it can be realized, redistributed, and reallocated. The more that profit-oriented, market-mediated exchange invades new areas, such economic determination will be greater, whether other types of exchange existed there before. This is a feature of contemporary neoliberalism but has no immediate bearing on the primacy of the economy in relation to residual extra-economic institutional orders or social life more generally. Economic domination rests on the capacity of those controlling strategic resources vital for a given branch of production or the economy as a whole to influence economic decisions or performance through the exercise of veto, strike, or blackmail power. Such domination may also affect other social relations insofar as the operations of

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public or private institutions, organizations, or agents require access to such resources. Note here that economic bodies may depend in turn on access to resources that are generated outside the economy. Bourgeois hegemony also has a dual significance. It can refer to the capacity of specific economic forces to win hegemony for their techno-economic paradigm, business model, or broader economic strategy within the wider economy, or to the capacity to win such hegemony within the wider society, so that the hegemonic economic imaginary enters the assumptions and operations of other institutional orders and becomes part of common sense. Ecological dominance is the most interesting, and least explored, dimension of economic determinacy. It refers to the capacity of the profitoriented, market-mediated capitalist economic order—including its extra-economic supports—to influence the performance and, hence, evolution of other societal subsystems or institutional orders more than they can influence it. Originating in biology, this concept does not refer to the influence of the natural environment but to relations of dominance within a given social ecosystem. As such, the concept does not imply that the economy will inevitably become the ecologically dominant system in a given ecosystem. Ecological dominance is a property of the interaction among different systems and ways of life rather than one possessed by a given system considered in isolation. Thus, a given system can be more or less ecologically dominant; its dominance will vary across systems, institutional orders, and spheres of everyday life; and the extent and form of its dominance will depend on the overall development of the relevant social ecosystem. This implies in turn that the development of any ecologically dominant system will be shaped by the operation of other systems or the attempts by specific social forces to reverse, brake, or guide that dominance to advance their own logics or modes of understanding. Thus, as Edgar Morin argued, ecological dominance is an ecological relation in which one system becomes dominant in a complex, co-evolving situation; it does not entail a one-sided relation of domination whereby one system unilaterally imposes its logic or will on other systems. There is no last instance in relations of ecological dominance; they are

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always contingent. So there is no economic determination in the last instance in this regard if the profit-oriented, market-mediated capitalist economy is, as Marxism indicates, more likely to become ecologically dominant. This suggests new ways to study economic determination as well as other forms of determinacy in a complex social world. Economic determination was always problematic for historical materialism as the economy lacks the autonomy (in the sense of being “a cause without cause”) to fully determine the extra-economic in the first, middle, or last instance. Indeed, as many theorists (including Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Karl Polanyi, Joseph Schumpeter, or Friedrich von Hayek) have noted, the market economy has important extraeconomic conditions and operates best when embedded within an appropriate form of market society. Conversely, a theory of internal relations, in which everything is related to everything else in a unified totality, cannot explain the causal asymmetries in interactions within and among institutional orders and everyday life. Ecological dominance is a third option. It highlights the scope for asymmetrical causal relations based on differential capacities and liabilities in a social ecosystem, such that, although one system may be ecologically dominant, it will nonetheless be differentially influenced in turn by its specific relations of reciprocal interdependence with other systems. Where the coevolution of interdependent institutional orders and social life occurs in the always contingent shadow of the ecological dominance of capital accumulation, however, a certain coherence is likely between what Marxism often, albeit misleadingly, describes as the economic base and its superstructure (see the entry on superstructure and substructure). Such structured coherence is particularly clear in the tight coupling among the economic, juridical, and political systems as operationally autonomous but materially interdependent institutional ensembles within capitalist societies.

Conclusion Determinacy is a crucial aspect of power and domination. It is best explored in terms of the nature of causation, causal powers, and causality; the complexity of the natural and social worlds and the problem of contingent necessity; the need

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to engage in complexity reduction; the contingent nature of attributions of responsibility—to circumstances, structures, or agency—in a given situation; and the range of theoretical approaches to social inquiry and their differential privileging of particular variables and entry points. This entry has focused on economic determination and determinacy in historical materialist explanation. But the arguments are easily generalized to other forms of domination, such as patriarchy, institutional racism, uneven development, or center–periphery relations, where one-sided explanations may prove tempting. The notion of ecological dominance is especially useful in exploring determinacy because it entails no commitment to one-sided causation or explanation. Bob Jessop See also Agency–Structure Problem; Causation; Domination; Free Will; Lukes, Steven; Marx, Karl; Racism, Role of Power in; Substructure and Superstructure; Weber, Max

Further Readings Hausman, D. M. (1998). Causal asymmetries. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jessop, B. (2007). State power: A strategic-relational approach. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Teubner, G. (1983). Law as an autopoietic system. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

DETERMINISM Determinism is the thesis that historical processes occur following scientific laws that ensure that all constituent events and states of the world are necessary and inevitable. Every event is caused by a previous event, all the way back to the Big Bang at the start of the universe. The way things are now could not have been otherwise. The deterministic thesis is developed in various ways, but the important aspect for the consideration of power is how this affects our attitudes toward agency: that is, how it affects the power of individuals to influence the world. If everything is caused, then everything I do is caused, and I have

no independent causal powers. Thus, the correct explanation of any event in which I am involved must include previous events that caused everything I did. Agents can then be dropped from historical explanations. Such a thesis has obvious implications for theories of freedom and free will because our usual notion of free will is that we do have independent causal powers. When we act, we have choices, and “having choices” means that we could have chosen differently. This has to be a necessary feature of free will and independent human action. We consider here whether determinism and free will are compatible, and whether, even if determinism is true in some sense, we can still talk about humans having causal powers. A view that suggests both determinism and the meaningfulness of claims that humans have independent causal powers is usually called compatibilism. We note that the determinism versus free will issue is separate from or at least orthogonal to debates about structure and agency. Structure is, to some extent, the sets of social relations of agents acting, so if we act as we do because of structural constraints, we are not discussing determinism in the usual sense. Determinism as it is usually considered would mean that structures are created through historical inevitability just as human agency is so caused. Both agency and structure are caused by past events, so how agents and structure interact will not affect the fundamental causal story. Thus, if determinism is true, then either we have to consider the structure–agency debate otiose or we have to conclude that our compatibilist stance might have little effect, in itself, on our attitude to the relationship between structure and agency.

Certainty and Probability We should get one issue out of the way before proceeding further. One way of construing the world is that nothing occurs with certainty. At the subatomic level, events seem probabilistic in the sense that we can only say with some probability what has occurred. One way of thinking about the universe is that one event does not follow another precisely with a probability of 1, but rather a probability that might approach 1 but never actually attains 1. Thus, a billiard ball striking another at a given angle and speed on a baize surface of given

Determinism

qualities under specific atmospheric conditions will lead the other to move at given speed and angle, not with certainty, but only with very high probability. The universe might very well be like that. However, this is of little comfort to those who worry that a fully determined universe leaves no room for free will. After all, what is the difference whether my actions are determined with probability 1 or with a probability approaching 1, when the difference between the probabilities has something to with things going on at the subatomic level and nothing to do with me? The issue is whether I can have any effect. To what extent am I in control or being determined? Whatever I do, with a probability approaching 1 or with a probability approaching zero, all that matters is whether these were determined (at the relevant probabilities) by events that went before.

Causation In much of modern physics, the notion of causation has been jettisoned. The fundamental mathematics of physical processes do not include any causal arrows. Physicists usually consider that our notion of cause is simply a psychological imprint on the universe, given entropy. We see the causal arrow where entropy is greatest—that is, where there is least disorder in the sense that energy is more dissipated. One way of thinking about this is that the universe can be described by sets of mathematical equations, none of which involve any notion of causation (each side of an equivalence can be thought to describe or explain the other), but that we impose a notion of causation by the way in which we view the order of events. Causation is thus an imposition on the physical universe by us as living creatures. This is important because it might help us understand what we mean when we suggest that the events we have witnessed were inevitable or that they could have been otherwise. Taking an example of Daniel Dennett, was the assassination of John F. Kennedy determined at the time of the Big Bang? Let us assume determinism is true, and thus, given the precise conditions at the time of the Big Bang, every event in the universe followed its course until the moment Kennedy was shot. Do we consider that a full causal account of President Kennedy’s assassination must include the entire history of events that led from the Big Bang

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to that moment? Did the Big Bang ultimately cause Kennedy’s death? Well, only in the sense that it caused everyone’s death. That is, the Big Bang was necessary for the assassination of Kennedy, but it was not sufficient. Imagine Kennedy was assassinated much as he was but that Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet entered Kennedy at a slightly different angle and stopped his heart faster than it did in the actual world. In the deterministic universe, if we run the story back we must find that the Big Bang had to have been slightly different in some way. Hence, it is not true that the Big Bang as it actually occurred was necessary and sufficient for the assassination of Kennedy. It is these sorts of counterfactual notions by which we ordinarily think of the contingency of events such as the assassination of Kennedy. So we consider issues such as, “had I left the house slightly later, then I would have been on the road at that time, and thus would not have reached the junction at the same time as the motorbike.” We know the world has to be the way it is in the sense that once it is that way, it has to be that way. But we consider how the world could have been had we acted differently. Thus, our sense of something not being inevitable is in a counterfactual sense. But how could this reassure us about our independent powers in a deterministic world?

Reactions and Addictions Consider certain actions that are reactions, things we do automatically, not unconsciously but quickly almost without conscious thought, such as braking hard to avoid hitting a motorbike at a junction. Your actions were caused because your car was going to hit the motorbike. It was caused by whatever causes our desires not to kill people on motorbikes. It was caused by the learned behavior of driving and stopping cars. And the evolutionary pressures led humans to have fast reactions, so fast we act almost without conscious thought to avoid danger. We know all of these facts—determinism does not teach us anything here—but we also know that we could have hit the motorbike: we might not have braked in time. But we do not worry that our reactions are outside of our control and not subject to free will. The latter consideration might be a little too fast. After all, we do worry about things we do

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that we do not want to do. We want to lose weight, but have the chocolate cake and the extra biscuit. We might want to lie to our partner, but know that when we do we will blush or stammer or give something away so the partner knows we are lying. We are aware that we are not fully in control of our desires and our behavior. And often when we describe these behaviors we use the language of determinism. Addicts talk about being driven to drink or to gamble; we talk about “not being able to resist” the cake or the biscuit; or knowing that we are not in control of our blushes or “tells” that give us away when we are lying. Nevertheless, we do not consider that these facts mean that everything we do is determined. These facts do not lead us to think we do not have free will. After all, we use them to contrast with the other actions to which we are not driven. We might think about such activities that we are driven to as being ones where the incentives to act differently are just too high. If we have really strong incentives to lose weight—to fit into the wedding dress—then we might overcome the chocolate temptations when otherwise we could not. It has been shown that the brain states of addicts demonstrate pleasurable highs just before indulging in the addictive behavior (taking the drug, pulling the arm of the slot machine). Here the temptations are too great to resist in part, for the addict, because the pleasure comes about through the temptation rather than the actions in themselves. What is the difference then between the driven behavior and other behaviors where we do not feel driven? The actual outcomes, the actual behavior, cannot be changed: whatever happens, happens. However, where the temptations were not so great, we can imagine not doing the actions we actually did do. In the car example, we probably could not have avoided braking: our evolutionary heritage gave us the reactions and the training did the rest. We do not mind that; indeed we are pleased that our reactions and training were so good, and we do not worry about the deterministic universe. After all, what we did was what we wanted to do. In most of our actions, even those we regret, we say we did what we wanted to do. Only when we do not want to do what we do, in some sense, at the moment we take the actions do we feel driven. But here the distinction is not between one sort of

action and another, but our attitude to that action even as we are doing it. Something is inevitable for a person if that person can do nothing about it. Once driving the car, hitting the motorcycle is inevitable if it pulls out too close for me to be able to brake in time. In that case, I might say that it was inevitable that I knocked down the motorcyclist given my speed and his or her actions. What I mean by that is that there is nothing (reasonable) that I could have done to avoid that collision. Indeed, the unexpected leads us to say there is nothing we could have done. We expect cars to pull out from junctions if they have priority, so we slow down or stop to see if there are any cars that are going to do so. In such a case, it is no excuse to say, “Given the speed I was traveling and given how he pulled out, it was inevitable I was going to hit him.” Any such excuse leads to the response, “Then why were you traveling at that speed?” The more predictable or, if you like, the more determined the environment the more control we can have over our actions with regard to it.

Feeling and Being Braking quickly to avoid hitting the motorbike is a result of reactions created during our evolutionary history and the driver training we received. Nevertheless, we feel as though we are in control, and indeed, we are. Even if the reaction occurred faster than I can consciously think about braking, I still braked. Indeed driving a well-functioning car might give the strongest sense of control that one can have. Paradigmatic examples of making choices might actually lead to feelings of being in less control. I might be faced with a tough decision: do I hire or let go a probationary employee? I might take a long time weighing the pros and cons, and reluctantly decide to let him or her go, thinking it best for the company and for the person, who might always struggle in that role. Surely this is a paradigm example of choice, yet I might feel in less control because I like the person and would like to have him or her continue, but feel in the end it would be best not to hire that person. It seems out of my control because it is the nature of the role the person is being asked to perform and his or her fitness to carry out that role that have forced my hand. So feeling in control is not anything to do with the nature of the decision making as such. Whether

Deterrence Theory

one’s actions are reactions or behavior that occurs after careful consideration one might feel more or less in control of the situation. However, how one feels, it might be objected, is not the same as whether one is really in control. And that is the issue with regard to determinism. But is it? In a fully determined world as perceived by modern physics, causation has no role except as measured by entropy. For most physicists, causation has no role in fundamental physics so it is best described as a psychological imposition on the universe by creatures like us. And we have that psychological impetus because it is to our advantage. The reactions that we have developed through evolution have fitted us well in this world, and these reactions, like our way of viewing the world, are part of our psychology. Thus, to the extent that causation in the universe is a psychological imputation, then our feeling of being in control in those situations where we impute a causal role for ourselves is the causal role in those situations. Determinism and our view of ourselves as agents are completely compatible.

Independent Power Agents have independent powers because they are part of the fabric of the universe and act and react in relation to structures and the environment around them. Those powers are independent in the same way that anything is independent. They can be described without reference to anything else. The extent to which nothing can be described without reference to anything else gives the limit to that independence. Even if all processes are historically determined, agents still have independent powers, and the extent to which they feel in control is the extent of that control because it is the extent to which their actions can be described without reference to anything else outside of them. Keith Dowding See also Agency; Agency–Structure Problem; Autonomy; Control; Free Will; Freedom

Further Readings Benci, V., Cerrai, P., Freguglia, P., Israel, G., & Pellegrini, C. (Eds.). (2003). Determinism, holism and complexity. New York: Kluwer.

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Dennett, D. C. (2003). Freedom evolves. London: Allen Lane.

DETERRENCE THEORY Deterrence theory in international relations concerns the conditions under which a state i is able to prevent another state j from attacking i by convincing j that it runs the risk that this attack will be answered by a retaliatory strike that will inflict catastrophic damage. The theory has primarily been developed by U.S. strategic thinkers—most notably Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Thomas Schelling—since the 1940s against the background of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lasted until the end of the 1980s. Given this background, deterrence theory in international relations has particularly focused on the requirements and implications of a “stable balance of terror,” a situation, that is, in which each of the states involved has acquired the capability, in case it is the victim of a surprise attack, to launch a counterattack that will severely punish the aggressor. Until the beginning of the 1930s, there existed only two ways to make sure by military means that an adversary refrained from armed aggression. One way meant that a state, with or without the assistance of allies, attempted to dissuade the opponent from attacking by building a defense strong enough to convince the opponent that it would not be worth its while to attack. The other way was aimed at compelling the adversary, again with or without the help of allies, to disarm. Thanks to a successful surprise attack on the adversary’s territory (or by threatening to carry out such a preemptive strike), a state could compel its enemy to reduce its weapons arsenal or its military forces. Note that a credible defense means that the adversary is prevented from behaving in a certain way, though in the case of successful “compellence,” the adversary is forced to behave in a particular manner. For this reason, it is easier to prevent aggression through defense than through compellence. The preparations for war by the opponents were furthermore geared to fighting a war on the ground. Everything turned on the conquest of territory, or, conversely, on the prevention

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of the conquest of territory. The development of long-range bomber aircraft added a third method for preventing an adversary from attacking: deterrence. This means that a state threatens to punish its opponent in case of attack by “strategic bombardments” of the attacker’s population and industries, rather than fighting it out on the ground. The aim of deterrence, just like defense, is to discourage a potential aggressor from attacking. Here, however, a state does so not by ensuring that the state’s defense is so strong that it would never pay the aggressor to attack, but by seeing to it that an attack will be severely punished with the large-scale destruction of the aggressor’s resources. Defense is a strategy based on denial, and deterrence is based on punishment. To explore the relationship between defense and deterrence still further, if a state succeeded in building a perfect defense, so that it was completely invulnerable to whatever offensive weapons a possible attacker might employ against it, then this state could no longer be deterred by any other state. The crucial chain in the theory’s line of argument must be that a nuclear surprise attack will elicit a nuclear counterattack that will wreak havoc on the attacker’s cities and population. As many have pointed out, it is highly problematic whether this will happen in fact. It may be rational to threaten with Armageddon to prevent an attack, but is it rational to carry out this threat when the deterrent has failed and the dreaded attack has started? Deterrence theory is apparently based on the assumption that the leader of a state that becomes the victim of a nuclear attack will act like an envious individual: that she or he will prefer the outcome that both states are destroyed to the outcome of defeat. But surely we can imagine that the leader who has to take the fatal decision to launch a retaliatory strike will not always be capable of willingly ordering the destruction of the lives of tens of millions of people out of revenge? A retaliatory nuclear strike therefore can never be a certainty, only a possibility. But if this is correct, then the credibility of the deterrent is undermined in advance and has thereby lost any effectiveness it might have had. Schelling recognized this problem and argued that the threat of inadvertent war and its consequent horrors—the suggestion that a disastrous all-out war can be the result of an accident, panic, or misapprehension, that there might be no time to reflect coolly on the fatal decision to

launch the retaliatory strike—will lend the deterrent its credibility and convince the potential aggressor not to attack. In view of the possible terrible consequences, a “threat that leaves something to chance” will be credible, when in other circumstances it would fail. Accepting Schelling’s argument, a state i will be successful in deterring another state j from attacking i, if i has been able to convince j that a surprise attack or a preemptive strike on i might lead to a devastating counterattack. In this situation, state i must have succeeded in convincing state j, first that the latter will never be able to destroy in a first strike i’s capability to strike back and inflict unacceptable damage on j, and second that j can never be sure that i will not use this second-strike capability in retaliation. If state j for its part has also succeeded in acquiring a second-strike capability, as well as in convincing i of the possibility that it might be used in retaliation, then both states find themselves in a situation of what has come to be known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). The term and its acronym were introduced in 1964. Originally, the concept was to be known as assured retaliation, but as Lawrence Freedman has pointed out, “this was felt to be too bland. The harshness of the term and the inescapable tragedy described in its definition were intentional.” Later, the term mutual or common deterrence was also introduced to emphasize that states that find themselves in this situation have a common interest in avoiding their annihilation. A balance of deterrence can only work if it is stable. This means that the retaliatory capacity of the states must remain more or less invulnerable to a surprise attack. The states will therefore constantly worry about the consequences of possible technological advances that may increase the effectiveness of the other’s first-strike weapons and thereby the vulnerability of its own second-strike force. This susceptibility to technological innovation is one of the reasons that induced Wohlstetter to speak of a “delicate” balance of terror. Were one of the states able to steal a march on the other in greatly strengthening its first-strike forces as a result of a technological breakthrough, then this would have a highly destabilizing effect on the balance, and increase the chances of nuclear war. The more vulnerable the second-strike capability of the one state becomes, the more that will be tempted

Deterrence Theory

to use the capability before the state is destroyed by the other state’s superior first-strike forces. Common deterrence can only work if the states involved, even in case of an all-out surprise attack, will always have the capability of destroying the cities, industries, and the population of the attacker. Second-strike weapons must be not precision weapons, but weapons of indiscriminate destruction. Seen from this perspective, a stable balance of terror, in Schelling’s words, “is simply a massive and modern version of an ancient institution: the exchange of hostages . . . a tacit understanding backed by a total exchange of all conceivable hostages.” Although this analogy, as Michael Walzer has shown, is not fully correct, because hostages are kept under restraint, whereas the peoples of the states that mutually deter one another are able to lead normal lives (in the case of the United States, they were even free to emigrate), it has to be admitted that mutual deterrence can only work if both parties accept that their societies should not be protected against a second strike. For this reason, the attempts by the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s to build an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system to protect cities from the effects of an enemy attack, as well as the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the 1980s to develop a system to detect, track, and shoot down incoming rockets, apart from being not feasible, flatly contradicted the logic of common deterrence. Although it is perfectly understandable that states finding themselves in a situation of mutual deterrence will want to protect their populations as much as possible against the disastrous consequences of a nuclear war that may be the result of miscalculation or accident, mutual deterrence can only be effective if they refrain from taking such measures. Strategic thinkers or “defense intellectuals” may stoically resign themselves to this unpalatable truth, but one can readily understand why this is too much to ask from the leaders and the general populace of the states that face MAD. Already in the early 1950s, in the wake of the launch of the “New Look” by the Eisenhower administration in an attempt to get defense spending under control by cutting conventional forces and relying more on the U.S. capacity for “massive retaliation,” U.S. defense analysts came to realize that an exclusive reliance on vast thermonuclear

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forces to deter acts of aggression would be untenable. In view of the terrifying consequences, the use of nuclear weapons is only conceivable in situations where the vital interests of the state are at stake, which means that a state possessing only an arsenal of nuclear weapons would be powerless to deal with minor acts of aggression, in particular when the latter were committed by an adversary that possesses a second-strike capacity. To counter limited aggression, a state must have the capability to fight with success a defensive war on the lower rungs of the escalation ladder with conventional and perhaps even battlefield nuclear weapons. This is the doctrine of graduate deterrence. A state that possesses nuclear weapons must have at the same time the weapons that enable it to repel aggression at any level lower than all-out nuclear war. Many have noted with Hans Morgenthau that this doctrine seems to spell disaster. Does it not follow that nuclear states will be more prepared to get involved in low-level armed conflicts, which subsequently escalate to higher and higher levels, thereby increasing the chances of a thermonuclear war, the prevention of which was the purpose of the enterprise in the first place? The conclusion therefore can be no other than that the same rule applies to these conventional and tactical nuclear weapons as to the nuclear weapons making up a state’s second-strike capability—they are there to deter but not to use. The understanding that a state possessing nuclear weapons will only use these weapons in situations where its vital interests are at stake is highly relevant in the case where a nuclear state has not excluded the possibility that it will use its nuclear weapons to punish an attack on a nonnuclear ally, again particularly when that ally is attacked by a state that also has a second-strike capacity. Is this “extended deterrence” credible? This question lay at the heart of many disputes between the United States and its West European allies during the cold war, once it had become clear that U.S. territory had become vulnerable to a Soviet nuclear attack, at first with long-range bombers and later on with missiles. Was Western Europe vital enough to the United States for it to use nuclear weapons to punish Soviet aggression, thereby risking a nuclear counterattack on its own territory? Seen from this angle, the primary function of the U.S. troops and weapons stationed on

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West European soil was not so much that they could contribute to a successful defense were Soviet troops to cross the Elbe River, but that they acted as a threat that leaves something to chance. They were hostages, this time in the true sense of the word, to the U.S. commitment to Western Europe, and the Soviet Union could never be sure that U.S. anxiety and anger about their fate following a Soviet invasion might not trigger a fatal nuclear response. Edward Carr observed in 1939 that war “lurks in the background of international politics,” and it should be added that war has retreated even further into the background after World War II, at least as far as the relationships between the nuclear powers are concerned. In a situation of common deterrence, strategy is no longer necessarily related to the actual use of the means of violence. For these powers, the distinction between strategy and politics (diplomacy) has disappeared. In the nuclear age, arms are for influencing potential opponents rather than for defeating them, and this perception led Kenneth Waltz to the conclusion that, as far as the spread of nuclear arms is concerned, “more may be better.” Robert H. Lieshout See also Extended Deterrence; Mutually Assured Destruction

Further Readings Freedman, L. (1989). The evolution of nuclear strategy. London: Macmillan. Schelling, T. C. (1980). The strategy of conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waltz, K. N. (1981). The spread of nuclear weapons: More may be better. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies. Wohlstetter, A. (1959). The delicate balance of terror. Foreign Affairs, 37(2), 21–33.

DETERRENT THREATS The fundamental idea of deterrence is simple enough. A party is deterred from some action when it decides against the action to avoid a

response threatened by a second party. Note the two conditions: (1) the threat by the second party must be explicit and contingent on the initial action and (2) absent the threat, the first party must prefer to carry out the action. Deterrence has long played a role in human life—for instance in law enforcement systems designed to deter crime, in the efforts of parents to deter children from misbehaving, and in policies of empires aimed at deterring attacks on their possessions and client states. Also common is the two-sided variant of deterrence, in which two sides reciprocally deter each other, as in an armed standoff. Deterrence has always been a fundamental component of international politics. But at the end of World War II, the demonstrated power of nuclear weapons persuaded many thinkers that the success of deterrence was now of ultimate priority: the proper aim of deterrence based on the threat of nuclear retaliation seemed to be to ensure that the threat never had to be implemented. Success in deterrence was declared to be the keystone of U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. military strategist Bernard Brodie famously suggested that the main purpose of the military had been to win wars, but from now on its main purpose is to avert them. But deterrence based on a threat that cannot be carried out seemed problematic. The debate about rationality and deterrence began in the decade immediately following World War II when the rapidly developing field of game theory was exploring the concept of rational choice, defined as choosing alternatives that are most in the chooser’s own interest. To see the terms of the debate, represent unilateral deterrence as an extensive-form game shown in Figure 1, where the first party is called Initiator and the second Defender. Deterrence occurs when the Initiator chooses Do Not Act, and the outcome is Status Quo (SQ). Other possible outcomes are Revision (Rev), if Initiator acts but Defender does not respond, and Confrontation (Conf), if Initiator acts and then Defender responds. To understand deterrence, one must understand when each possible sequence of actions will be selected. Before addressing the conditions for the success of deterrence, we make the assumptions that (A1) Initiator prefers Revision to Status Quo. (A2) Defender prefers Status Quo to Revision.

Deterrent Threats

Confrontation

Respond Act

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Defender

Initiator Do not act

Do not respond

Revision Status Quo

Figure 1

Unilateral Deterrence

Without (A1), there is nothing to deter. Without (A2), there is no reason to deter it. Consistent with these assumptions, Initiator is a revisionist state and Defender a status-quo power. For games such as unilateral deterrence, game theory recommends a solution concept called subgame perfect equilibrium, which models each player (party) as making choices to achieve its most preferred available outcome, on the assumption that any subsequent choices will be made according to this same principle. Assuming rationality and full information, choices depend solely on each player’s relative preferences over the three possible outcomes: barring ties, Initiator has three preference orderings consistent with (A1), and Defender has three consistent with (A2). As it happens, there is always a unique subgame perfect equilibrium, which is shown in Table 1. In particular, the outcome is Status Quo when Defender prefers Confrontation to Revision and Initiator prefers Status Quo to Confrontation. Thus, for deterrence to succeed, Defender’s threat must satisfy two conditions: (C1) Credibility: Defender prefers Confrontation to Revision. (C2) Capability: Initiator prefers Status Quo to Confrontation.

Here, credibility means that, should the situation actually arise, Defender would prefer to execute the threat, and capability means that Initiator prefers that the threat not be carried out; in other words, the threatened response would hurt Initiator. For the unilateral deterrence game, game theory has a second, weaker solution concept. A Nash equilibrium is a pattern of planned choices (a “strategy profile”) that, if anticipated by all parties, motivates each party to choose according to the pattern, in its own interest. The pattern (Do Not Act, Respond) is a Nash equilibrium if condition

Table 1

Unilateral deterrence (Figure 1) outcomes consistent with (A1) and (A2)

Initiator’s Preference

Defender’s Preference

Outcome

Conf  Rev  SQ

Conf  SQ  Rev

Conf

Conf  Rev  SQ

SQ  Conf  Rev

Conf

Conf  Rev  SQ

SQ  Rev  Conf

Rev

Rev  Conf  SQ

Conf  SQ  Rev

Conf

Rev  Conf  SQ

SQ  Conf  Rev

Conf

Rev  Conf  SQ

SQ  Rev  Conf

Rev

Rev  SQ  Conf

Conf  SQ  Rev

SQ

Rev  SQ  Conf

SQ  Conf  Rev

SQ

Rev  SQ  Conf

SQ  Rev  Conf

Rev

(C2) holds, and does not depend on (C1). Thus, the Nash equilibrium analysis says that deterrence works as long as the threat is capable, without regard to credibility. The crucial idea is that, if Initiator believes Defender’s threat, then its capability is sufficient to deter Initiator. For nuclear deterrence immediately after World War II, and throughout the cold war, that was exactly the issue. Many arguments were advanced to explain the remarkable stability of deterrence despite the lack of credibility of the threat of nuclear retaliation. Structural theorists argued that broad structural parameters, such as the bipolar nature of the system and the nuclear retaliatory threat, were responsible. The missile war model essentially sidestepped the credibility issue, deriving stability conditions from the balance of offensive and defensive capabilities. The simultaneous 2  2 chicken game was posited as the fundamental model of bilateral deterrence, combining actions and threats; the decision-theory approach considered a continuous

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sequence of these games, and calculated optimal choices based on a model of the opponent’s decision making (rather than the assumption of rationality). Thomas Schelling, in particular, was the first to emphasize the non–zero-sum nature of the chicken model, and his ideas of making threats credible were developed into so-called manipulative bargaining theory, which included such strategies as manipulating one’s own payoffs (to make a threat more credible), and even feigning irrationality. Schelling also proposed the threat-that-leavessomething-to-chance, an idea that was eventually incorporated into game-theoretic analyses of deterrence as probabilistic beliefs that a threat is beyond control and may therefore be executed. These game models showed that deterrence is an outcome that rational players might attain, though they did not explain why the players might construct such a situation. Finally, perfect deterrence theory offered a new and unified model of all deterrence, making it fully rational and replacing the credibility requirement with uncertainty about the other side’s true preferences. Deterrence, Frank Zagare and Marc Kilgour argued, is based on the Initiator’s probabilistic belief that the Defender prefers to execute the threat; nuclear deterrence is different in degree but not in kind. Marc Kilgour See also Chicken Games; Conventional Deterrence; Deterrence Theory; Extended Deterrence; Mutually Assured Destruction; Rationality; Threats

Further Readings Schelling, T. C. (1980). The strategy of conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zagare, F. C., & Kilgour, D. M. (2000). Perfect deterrence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

DEUTSCH, KARL (1912–1992) One of the foremost U.S. political scientists of the post–World War II period was Karl Deutsch, whose work helped expand the frontiers of knowledge of politics and political development. The

creation of a network of scholars, a lifelong dedication to teaching, a commitment to data-based research, and the publication of numerous academic works were among Deutsch’s major contributions to the field of social sciences. Karl Wolfgang Deutsch was born on July 21, 1912, to Maria Scharf Deutsch and Martin Deutsch in Prague. Karl had a brilliant academic record from German Staatsrealgymnasium, the German University, and Charles University in Prague, where he took a law degree. An outspoken opponent of Nazism, he and his wife Ruth Slonitz could not remain in Nazi-dominated Czechoslovakia of the post-Munich era, so they emigrated to the United States in 1938. Deutsch enrolled at Harvard for further studies and joined government service after the U.S. entry into World War II. As a member of the International Secretariat of the San Francisco Conference of 1945, he participated in the creation of the United Nations. He began his teaching career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Deutsch also worked on his doctoral dissertation, Nationalism and Social Communication, at Harvard and published scholarly articles. In 1952, he was appointed a full professor of history and political science at MIT. His teaching assignments spanned reputed institutions and universities in the United States and abroad. Deutsch was with the Center for Research on World Political Institutions at Princeton University; the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California; the University of Chicago; and Yale University before becoming Stanfield Professor of International Peace at Harvard. Deutsch’s first major academic work was an empirical study of West Germany’s revival after 1945. He used quantitative methods to try to test hypotheses in the social sciences. His book Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Nationality, based on his doctoral dissertation, was truly interdisciplinary. His model of nationalism was valuable for research on nation building and international integration. Deutsch collaborated widely with colleagues from many disciplines. In Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, Deutsch explained how the interaction between the elites and masses in the form of communications was vital in development of nationalism. His emphasis was more on community formation than on union of separate units.

Dictatorship

Deustch is best known as a systems theorist popular in political science in the 1950s and 1960s. More mathematical than many other systems theorists, he applied cybernetics and the study of communications and controls to politics using simulation models and system dynamics in verifying different propositions pertaining to social, political, and economic problems. The application of mathematical analysis opened new ground in the study of politics. His best-known work is The Nerves of Government, which examined communication and control in political systems. Patit Paban Mishra See also Nationalism

Further Readings Deutsch, K. W. (1963). The nerves of government: Models of political communication and control. London: Free Press of Glencoe. Deutsch, K. W. (1966). Nationalism and social communication: An inquiry into the foundations of nationality. Cambridge: MIT Press. Merritt, R. L., Russett, B. M., & Dahl, R. A. (2001). Karl Wolfgang Deutsch: July 21, 1912–November 1, 1992. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

DICTATORSHIP Dictatorship is an autocratic form of governance under which the ruling authority is responsible to no one for his or her deeds. The term is used synonymously (although not necessarily accurately) with the terms totalitarianism, tyranny, despotism, and absolutism. Dictatorial regimes have historically been responsible for some of the most malevolent, socially injurious actions ever perpetrated by humankind. This entry highlights some of the characteristics of dictatorships, how they have historically manifested themselves, and the implications for the evolution of human rights. The term dictatorship refers to an autocratic style of rule or governance. It is distinguished from the term totalitarianism in that the latter term includes reference to the degree of control (namely, over the totality of social existence), which typically

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includes the means of production and labor. The etymology of the term dictatorship locates its origin in the early Roman constitution, which provided for a temporary office of exceptional power for use in emergencies. When considered in its original Roman context, Juan J. Linz notes that dictatorships cannot be identified until they have disbanded, because the classification of a dictatorship is contingent on its temporary status. A less restrictive definition is provided in the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines a dictator as “a ruler or governor whose word is law; an absolute ruler of a state.” Perhaps the quintessential example of a modern dictator in this context was Adolf Hitler, whose word was given the full force of codified law subsequent to the German Reichstag’s passage of the Enabling Act in 1933. Scholars have recognized that there are varying degrees of dictatorship and usually classify them according to the extent of control they maintain over the daily affairs of their citizenry. Jeanne Kirkpatrick identified one end of the continuum as representing “totalitarian dictatorships,” which are characterized as regimes that are focused on massive intervention in all areas of social and economic life. These are typically motivated by some underlying utopian goal and are exemplified by the dictatorial regimes of the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. At the opposite end of the spectrum of dictatorships are less repressive traditional autocracies. These regimes interfere minimally with conventional social relations, typically doing so only to the extent that it helps ruling elites capitalize on the fruits of their status, often by draining state financial reserves to increase their personal wealth. Consequently, they are sometimes referred to as “tin-pot” regimes. Traditional autocracies are also relatively politically unstable in comparison with more repressive dictatorial regimes, which is unfortunate considering that they have historically been less antagonistic toward nations founded on democratic ideals. Traditional autocracies flourished in the Middle East during the late 20th century, and are exemplified in the dictatorial regimes of Ferdinand Marcos and Manuel Noriega. Some scholars have noted that the economic motivations underlying political decision making in democratic regimes is qualitatively similar to the decision-making process that occurs under

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dictatorship. These scholars note that dictators do not repress merely for the sake of repression, but to maintain and increase their political power. All governments provide services, including dictatorships, in the form of protection from potentially hostile regimes as well as funding public works projects (e.g., roadway construction). Ronald Wintrobe found that the type of dictatorial regime affected how it responded to improving economic conditions, whereby traditional autocracies reduced their level of repression whereas totalitarian regimes acted contrarily. One of the distinguishing features of a dictatorship is the degree to which power is monolithically located in the hands of few ruling elites. Even where there exists a proliferation of government institutions, within dictatorships they derive their power from central authorities. Another characteristic of dictatorships involves their use of complex ideologies that justify the historic legitimacy of the regime and are used to interpret and understand contemporary events. Within a dictatorship, political participation is usually possible only to the degree that one joins the party ideologically favored by the regime. Another hallmark of dictatorship is the emphasis leaders place on controlling dissenting and contrary political perspectives. The degree of control can range from supervision and control of media outlets to outright suppression, with potentially dire consequences for nonconforming individuals. Dictatorships maintain elaborate police forces whose duties typically include the monitoring and censorship of dissidents seen as potentially challenging to the legitimacy of the regime. The consequences for those who criticize dictatorial regimes from within can be dreadful and include torture, confinement in concentration camps, forced labor, and outright murder. In cases where dissidents have been prosecuted via judicial proceedings for their alleged misdeeds, dictatorial regimes have occasionally concealed their intent by facilitating elaborate “show trials.” These procedures involve the forgery of an actual judicial procedure to produce the foregone conclusion of guilt. Of recent international interest is the trend toward making dissidents (and their families) disappear. These cases only garner attention by virtue of their unusual lack of fanfare coupled with the stifled suffering and questioning of confused acquaintances.

Dictators are historically responsible to no domestic or international entities for their actions and policies, ruling with the absolute authority of functional deities. When considered as a class, dictators have been responsible for instigating, promoting, and participating in many of the most socially injurious actions ever committed. Douglas J. Dallier See also Absolutism; Arendt, Hannah; Authority; Exploitation; Fascism; Ideology; Military in Government; Responsibility; Totalitarianism

Further Readings Arendt, H. (1958). The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Meridian. Friedrich, C. J., & Brzezinski, Z. K. (1965). Totalitarian dictatorship and autocracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kirkpatrick, J. J. (1982). Dictatorship and double standards: Rationalism and realism in politics. New York: Simon & Schuster. Linz, J. (1975). Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. In F. Greenstein & N. Polsby (Eds.), Handbook of political science. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Wintrobe, R. (1990). The tinpot and the totalitarian: An economic theory of dictatorship. American Political Science Review, 84(September), 849–872.

DIPLOMACY Diplomacy is not an unequivocal concept and can be simply defined as the conduct of international relations by negotiation. Alternately, diplomacy is characterized as the communication system of the international society, the peaceful conduct of relations among political entities, or, in more existential terms, mediation between estranged individuals, groups, or entities. Whereas the very word diplomacy might be imprecise, one might distinguish two different perspectives on diplomacy in the scholarly literature, both of which relate to power—yet in contradictory ways. One perspective, closely associated with classic realism, is to regard diplomacy as an asset of states. Diplomacy then becomes a component, or reflection, of state power. Another perspective

Diplomacy

views diplomacy as an international institution, that is, a relatively stable collection of norms and rules that prescribe behavioral roles, constrain activity, and shape expectations. Diplomacy is then located at the level of international society rather than of individual states, and is seen to temper, rather than reflect, state power. Hans Morgenthau is emblematic of the first perspective. In his Politics Among Nations, he includes “the quality of diplomacy” among elements of national power. Considering all the other factors that determine national power as the raw material of power, Morgenthau argues that the quality of a nation’s diplomacy combines these different factors into an integrated whole, turning potentialities into actual power. To Morgenthau, the conduct of a nation’s foreign affairs by its diplomats is for national power in peace what military strategy and tactics by its military leaders are for national power in war. Diplomacy, in this view, is included among, and depends on, other, more material capabilities; hence, it reflects state power. However, the quality of diplomacy may modify the value of other elements of state power. Thus, skillful diplomacy can increase the power of a nation beyond what one would expect it to be in view of other, material factors. Conversely, poor diplomacy may prevent otherwise powerful states from making full use of their power potentials. As an example of an outclassed state in material terms wielding power chiefly by virtue of its brilliant diplomacy, Morgenthau cites France from 1890 to 1914. Furthermore, he argues that British power covaried with the quality of British diplomacy, and that the first decades of skillful U.S. diplomacy were followed by a long period of mediocrity, or even ineptitude. Raymond Aron, another classic realist, expresses a similar dual understanding of diplomacy as an element of state power. On the one hand, diplomacy implies the use of economic, psycho-political, and violent means and the choice of appropriate means among them; on the other hand, “pure” diplomacy relies on persuasion alone, without economic and political pressure or violence. Yet, Aron doubts that pure diplomacy exists. To be sure, states may make every effort to convince both adversaries and onlookers that they want to persuade or convince, not to constrain, and adversaries may have the illusion of freedom, even when

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they are in fact yielding to force. Yet, persuasion that is not backed up by power has little chance of success, according to Aron. The other, institutionalist perspective on diplomacy is primarily associated with the so-called English School. Adherents of this school argue, in opposition to realists, that beyond an international system, however anarchic, there exists an international society, reflected in certain international institutions with concomitant norms, rules, and practices. Diplomacy is seen as one of these institutions. Martin Wight characterizes diplomacy as “the master-institution” of international relations, and other authors in the English School tradition count diplomacy among the central international institutions along with sovereignty, war, and international law. As one of the major institutions of the society of states, diplomacy is seen to have a moderating influence on state power, “taming the sovereigns,” in Kalevi Holsti’s words. Diplomacy is one crucial component in the set of institutional arrangements that for the most part allows states to coexist peacefully and to interact in rule-bound environments that enhance the opportunities for mutual communication, trade, and flows of people and ideas. By providing links of communication and representation between states and regulating their day-to-day intercourse, diplomacy sets limits on the unrestricted use of state power. If diplomacy is viewed as a “thin” international institution, involving merely rules of coexistence, allowing political units “to live and let live,” an institutionalist perspective can be combined with the realist conceptualization of diplomacy as a reflection of state power. However, if diplomacy is viewed as a “thick” institution, involving a shared commitment to peace among diplomats, guided by raison d’état and by raison de système, it serves as a restriction on state power. At issue is the relationship between diplomacy and the use of force. Whereas diplomacy has been characterized as the art of convincing without using force, some students of contemporary international relations have coined the phrase coercive diplomacy to denote the use of threats or limited force to persuade opponents not to change the status quo in their favor or to call off or undo an encroachment. In this view, the use of military power can be an integral part of

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diplomacy. In one sense, therefore, diplomacy and war can be seen as complementary rather than contrary institutions. Historically, symbolic power, or precedence, has played a prominent role in diplomacy. Early European diplomacy was full of endless struggles for precedence and crises caused by intended or unintended slights between diplomats. In the 19th century, diplomatic rules that neutralized the issue of precedence were initiated and gradually institutionalized. Thus, precedence among envoys is now established according to the date they have presented their credentials, disregarding the power of the state they represent, and alphabetical order is used by international organizations and conferences to avoid precedence issues in seating arrangements, treaty signatures, and the like. Christer Jönsson See also Anarchy in International Relations; Gunboat Diplomacy

Further Readings George, A. L. (1991). Forceful persuasion: Coercive diplomacy as an alternative to war. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. Holsti, K. (2004). Taming the sovereigns: Institutional change in international politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jönsson, C., & Hall, M. (2005). Essence of diplomacy. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Raymond, A. (1966). Peace and war: A theory of international relations. New York: Praeger.

DISCIPLINE Discipline is a cognate of power related primarily to self-control, or power over oneself. Whoever has power over his or her self has discipline. By extension, discipline relates to power over others in the sense of training or having instilled training in others such that one is able to successfully command them. An army that obeys has discipline. Although they are distinct, obedience is sometimes confused with discipline. The sort of discipline exhibited by armies involves a command–obey

structure containing two distinct parties and a hierarchical arrangement of some sort. In its wider senses, for example when scholarship or the sciences are referred to as disciplines, discipline implies obedience to rules and expectations, but need not imply two parties nor any sort of hierarchy. Self-control has usually been understood as the ability to command and obey oneself. Another understanding takes self-control as the ability to make oneself fully submit to an authority, such as a leader, community, or scripture. The latter has been common among military and religious orders, whereas the former has been a prime area of concern for philosophers. For many philosophers, such as Aristotle and Niccolò Machiavelli, self-control is a prerequisite for attaining and maintaining power over others. For Aristotle, it is required for gaining mental and physical skills in general, but is especially crucial for acquiring a virtuous, well-rounded character. The virtues are conceived as a set of habits, and Aristotle believed it was possible to train oneself to have virtuous habits. For example, if one talks too much or too little, then to achieve the virtuous mean between them requires restraint from speaking in the first case and motivation to speak in the second. Repeated application of the proper principle will yield the habit of speaking a moderate, virtuous amount. For other thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, independence of mind requires selfdiscipline, because “he who cannot obey himself will obey someone else.” For Machiavelli, the first task of a would-be sovereign is to raise and discipline a militia. The militia will tend to reflect the character of its sovereign even more than will the populace at large, and thus an obedient militia requires a leader who publicly exhibits exquisite selfcontrol, even if he or she privately lacks it. Similarly, leaders of monastic orders must exhibit a high degree of self-control in the sense of total submission to monastic principles, even if they privately lack it. Bryan Finken See also Ability; Aristotle; Capability; Control; Hierarchy; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Power To and Power Over; Religious Power; Submissive; Subordination

Discourse

Further Readings Aristotle. (1984). Ethics. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The complete works of Aristotle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Machiavelli, N. (2005). The prince. (P. Bondanella, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press.

DISCOURSE The notion and analysis of discourse has gained increasing prominence within the social sciences. The linguistic turn that took place in the 1960s and 1970s reflected and spurred a growing scientific interest in the role of language beyond its function as a means of expression or representation. The structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure showed how our use of language in daily interactions (parôle) is formed by underlying language structures (langue). The theory of speech acts advanced by John Austin claimed that the utterance of particular statements, under certain circumstances, can be seen as a way of acting and doing things. Following these lines of argument, it was increasingly recognized that language and social action are intertwined in what Ludwig Wittgenstein termed language games. Actions and language are interrelated in a multiplicity of ways, and our actions are meaningful and shaped by language-mediated conceptions of ourselves and the world we live in. In the 1980s, the linguistic turn was further deepened by poststructuralist theories emphasizing the constitutive role of incompletely structured systems of signs, psychoanalytic theories claiming that the unconscious is structured like a language, and post-Marxist theories interested in the ways power and domination are exercised and sustained through ideological discourse. The underlying assumption of the new theories of discourse is that meaning and identity are not determined by an underlying essence such as God, reason, human nature, or the laws of capital accumulation. Rather, social meanings and political identities are constructed within discourses defined as more or less sedimented systems of rules, relations, and articulations that are shaped and reshaped in and through power struggles. Hence, it becomes important to analyze how particular discourses structure the

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terrain of social and political action, how these discourses are created, and how they can be transformed. How, for instance, can it be that the NATO campaign in Kosovo was referred to as a “humanitarian intervention” rather than as “military aggression”? How can it be that “welfare” has increasingly been seen as a “problem” and an “expenditure” rather than as a “policy goal”? How can it be that social clients and psychiatric patients tend to be conceived as “self-responsible citizens in need of empowerment” rather than as “objects of paternalistic governance and therapeutic treatment”? Discourse analysis aims to answer these sorts of questions. The analysis of discourse reveals a “fourth face of power” added to the three faces of power identified by Steven Lukes. Hence, power is not merely exercised by strong and resourceful actors who are capable of prevailing in an open conflict, suppressing conflicts by controlling the political agenda, or manipulating the other actors’ perceptions of their interests so as to avoid conflicts altogether. There is also a structural power that cannot be led back to a conscious, willful, and self-interested actor. Rather than being masterminded by strategic actors, structural power defines how the actors perceive themselves, each other, and the entire terrain in which they are operating. Structural power defines the conceptual framework, the rules of the game, and the identity of the actors, but that does not mean that the actors are reduced to passive bearers of the discursive structure. The structural, or discursive, notion of power does not eliminate autonomous agency. In contrast, the notion of power aims to mobilize the free action of social and political actors within a discursive framework that shapes their action in certain ways and thereby ensures conformity. The Latinate root of discourse refers to the practice of running here and there (dis  “in different directions” and currere  “to run”). That is precisely what we do in conversation, dissertation, and textual practices, which today constitute the common meaning of discourse. We cover a certain ground, topic, or issue by moving back and forth and combining old and new contents and expressions. We cover the world with text. In linguistics, discourse is defined as a textual fragment larger than the sentence. But as a result of Louis Hjelmslev’s and Roland Barthes’ formalization of structural linguistic, which purged it of

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all reference to phonetic or semantic substance, everything from military parades and TV commercials to political demonstrations and public administration reforms can be analyzed in terms of the construction of particular discursive forms. The expansion of the notion of discourse to include all kinds of social practices led to a growing appreciation of the formative role of power and politics. For whereas specific language systems tend to be quite stable over time because the individual speakers have no interest in changing the meaning of words, the broader discursive systems of language-mediated practice will be subject to ruptures and transformations caused by political conflicts and struggles.

Theories of Discourse Discourse theory developed as a cross-disciplinary attempt to combine and integrate central insights from linguistics and psychology with central insights from social and political science. Hence, there were linguists and psychologists who aimed to analyze the social causes and impact of a particular language usage and there were social and political scientists who sought to analyze how language was used to create ideological misrepresentations of social reality. The first group of linguistic discourse analysts includes different kinds of sociolinguistics, content analysis, conversation analysis, and discourse psychology. Sociolinguistics analyzes the relation between our socioeconomic status and our vocabulary and linguistic code. Content analysis analyzes our usage of particular words, word classes, and word combinations in order to identify particular patterns. Conversation analysis focuses on the organization of linguistic interaction in formal or informal settings. Finally, discourse psychology analyzes the strategies of the speakers and how they aim to achieve particular objectives by producing a shift in the framing of the conversation and in the style in which it is deployed. Although they clearly offer fruitful tools for analyzing spoken and written language, the linguistic theories of discourse generally fail to relate the linguistic analysis to questions about politics, ideology, and power. The second group of critical linguists and Marxist ideology theorists depart from linguistic discourse analysis by claiming that language cannot be analyzed independently of its social and political

function. The analytical focus is on how discourse, through its combination of different concepts, phrases, and images, produces a particular representation of social reality. The aim is to show how language is used to produce ideological misrepresentations that help sustain the power of the ruling elite. However, despite the explicit attempt to ground the critique of ideology in a linguistic analysis of concrete discourses (newspaper articles, political speeches, etc.), the attempt of the critical linguists and ideology theorists to develop a theory of discourse failed because it remained trapped within a Marxist theory of ideology that presupposed a privileged access to the objective reality that is hidden by ideological misrepresentations. Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA), as developed most consistently by Norman Fairclough, is far more successful than its predecessors in balancing linguistic analysis with the analysis of power and ideology. CDA expands the notion of discourse to include all linguistically mediated practices. Social practice is discursive insofar as it contributes to a semiotic production or interpretation of text. Discursive practices are ideological to the extent that they contain linguistic expressions that we take for granted and that, therefore, contribute to naturalizing social relations. Social and political actors use ideological discourse to sustain their own power or to challenge the hegemonic power of other actors. Hence, ideological discourse plays a key role in maintaining and transforming societal relations of power. However, whereas CDA clearly demonstrates the power effects of discourse, it remains unclear how we should understand the relation between discursive practices and the nondiscursive context. Actually, there is a tendency to reduce discourse to a linguistic mediation of causal powers embedded in socioeconomic structures. This significantly reduces the explanatory power of discourse analysis. Foucault

The distinction between the discursive and the nondiscursive comes from the early works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. However,

Discourse

Foucault advances a theory of discourse that is quite different from the one developed by CDA. Whereas CDA defines discourse as an empirical collection of social practices with a semiotic content, Foucault defines discourse as the conditions of possibility for producing particular statements. As such, Foucault does not focus on the form and content of particular utterances, but rather on the rules of formation guiding and regulating the production of statements. His archaeological analysis aims to reveal the discursive rules that regulate what we can talk about; from which position we can talk about it; which concepts we can use when talking; and which strategies, in terms of themes and theories, it is possible to advance in a particular discursive context. Foucault later modified this quasi-structuralist approach, when, as a part of his genealogical analysis, he insisted on viewing the sedimented forms of discourse as both a medium and outcome of a myriad of power struggles that take place at all levels of society. To account for how discourses are produced in and through power, Foucault developed a new notion of discursive power that transgresses the classical sovereignjuridical notion of power epitomized by Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Power is not exercised by a centralized authority that represses the subjects by means of laws, juridical sanctions, prohibitions, and taboos. Rather, power is exercised through a decentered network of mobile forces that aim to produce particular meanings, identities, and forms of knowledge. Laclau and Mouffe

Foucault’s works are one of the main sources of inspiration for Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their development of a post-Marxist and poststructuralist theory of discourse. Laclau and Mouffe agree with Foucault’s insistence on the internal relation between discourse and power, and they adopt Foucault’s quasi-transcendental approach to the analysis of discourse. Discourse is defined as a relational totality of signifying sequences that provides the conditions of emergence for any meaningful object. Hence, like Kantian transcendentalism, discourse analysis focuses on the conditions of possibility for our perceptions, utterances, and social actions rather than on the factual immediacy or hidden meaning of social

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phenomena. However, there are two important differences between classical transcendentalism and poststructuralist discourse theory. The first difference is that discourse theory does not conceive the conditions of possibility as ahistorical and universal, but emphasizes their historical variability and the impossibility of completely separating the conditions of possibility from what they make possible. The second difference is that discourse theory does not locate the conditions of possibility in a subjective mind, but rather sees them as a part of an incomplete discursive structure that is constantly destabilized by empirical events and political struggles. Laclau and Mouffe take issue with, and finally abandon, Foucault’s distinction between the discursive and the nondiscursive. The distinction is theoretically unsustainable because it can be shown that all the examples of apparently nondiscursive phenomena—such as institutions, architecture, techniques, production organization, and so on— are differential orders and therefore discursive. The distinction between the discursive and the nondiscursive only occurs in Foucault’s earlier work. But it is a very unfortunate distinction because it has permitted discourse theorists with a Marxist origin to reduce discourse to a regional instance of ideological articulation, which is somehow determined by extra-discursive structures. This possibility is eliminated by Laclau and Mouffe, who argue that discourse, ultimately, is coextensive with the social. All social relations are discursive and all discursive relations are power relations. The assertion of the discursive character of the social does not—as some might believe—dispense with the realist claim concerning the independent existence of a world external to our thoughts, consciousness, and language. However, the only way we can have access to this existing matter is by articulating it as a meaningful object with a particular discourse. Matter can be constructed in different ways within different discursive systems and the discursive construction of its being will not put its existence into question. For example, the head scarf of a young Turkish girl might be constructed as a symbol of religious faith, a fashion product, or a sign of rebellion against her secularized parents. No matter how the particular textile is constructed, it is still the same physical object.

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Derrida, Lacan, and Žižek

Laclau and Mouffe combine and synthesize insights from Foucault’s power analytics with insights from Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Derrida’s deconstruction of the notion of centered and totalizing structures leads us straight to the notion of discourse. The classical notion of structures depicts a complex totality in which meaning and identity are determined by a privileged center. As Derrida shows, however, the idea of a determining center is contradictorily coherent because it assumes that the center structures the entire structure while escaping any kind of structuration. By giving up the idea of a determining center, which is given in its full presence beyond the reach of the play of meaning, the process of signification extends almost infinitely. In this situation, everything becomes discourse in the sense of being constituted within relational ensembles of signifying sequences that in the absence of an ultimate center are structured by a multiplicity of mutually substituting centers that fail to invoke a totalizing closure. Meaning and identity are partially fixed within discourses that tend to construct a binary textual hierarchy between a privileged inside and an inferior and threatening outside. The binary hierarchies are results of decisions taken in an undecidable terrain in which the constant oscillation between determinate options cannot be arrested by any pregiven rule or rationality, but requires a constitutive, contingent, and political intervention that tends to realize one particular option at the expense of other options. There might be good reasons for choosing this option, but it is impossible to provide an ultimate ground for the decision, which will always be marked by a certain undecidability. The undecidable character of the social meaning and identity is revealed by deconstruction that shows that the inferior outside of a privileged essence is constitutive of the inside. For example, it can be demonstrated that the celebrated reign of the free market requires heavy state intervention to create and sustain a more or less free market. Whereas Derrida’s works can help us understand the contingent construction of discourse, Slavoj Žižek’s version of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory can help us understand the discursive construction of subjectivity. The subject is internal to the discursive structures, but it should not be reduced to a decentered assemblage of relatively

fixed subject positions whereby the subject is hailed as a “woman,” “immigrant,” “consumer” and “student.” Žižek urges us to account for the subject before its subjectivation. The subject aims to find a way of representing itself within the symbolic structure of discourse. However, the symbolic structure is constantly disrupted by the real, which is defined as the traumatic kernel of social life that resists symbolization. The disruption of the symbolic order prevents the reduction of the subject to yet another structural position within a particular discourse. The subject emerges as a split subject in the cracks and fissures of the incomplete structure. As such, the subject has neither a fully achieved structural identity nor a complete lack of identity, but rather has a failed structural identity. In this situation, the split subject can either lapse into paralyzing self-denial or attempt to reinvent himself or herself by establishing an illusionary full identity in and through acts of identification. Hence, instead of giving in to a self-destructive alcoholism, an unemployed party functionary from the former Soviet Union may find comfort, and the promise of a new order and a fully achieved identity, by means of identifying with the Orthodox Church, Russian Nationalism, or some other populist cause. Viewed through this analytical lens, identity is not the cause of the subject’s political identifications, but rather the result of the split subject’s identification with an available and credible political imaginary. Social and political imaginaries are structured around tendentially empty signifiers such as progress, modernization, freedom, the people, and so on, which because of their conceptual vagueness and ambiguity are capable of representing different political identities that have become unified by their common experience of being negated by disruptive events or enemy forces.

The Role of Hegemony, Social Antagonism, and Dislocation Discourses are relational systems of meaning and identity. According to Laclau and Mouffe, social identities can be linked either through relations of difference or through relations of equivalence. The differential construction of identity stresses the difference between a particular identity and other identities, whereas as the equivalential construction of identity emphasizes the “sameness” of different

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identities that can be constructed through either metonymy or metaphor. Sometimes the differential logic prevails as in the modern welfare state that constructs different social, political, and economic groups as legitimate differences within an organic whole. This contrasts with other situations such as wars, revolutions, and big political upheavals where the social and political space tends to become divided into two opposed camps and there is no place for a middle ground. Discourses tend to become unified by nodal points that are defined as tendentially empty signifiers that are not attached to a particular signified and, therefore, can function to construct a knot of meaning that partially fixes the meaning of different floating signifiers that are proliferating in the wake of disruption and crisis. For example, floating signifiers such as regulation, competitiveness, and state might be partially fixed by being referred to the master signifier of globalization that tends to reformulate regulation in terms of liberalization and market regulation, competitiveness in terms of structural competitiveness, and the state in terms of a facilitating state that aims to govern selforganizing actors and networks. Discourse is a result of articulation that is defined as a practice that establishes an internal relation among dissimilar elements such that their identities are mutually modified. When, for example, liberalism became articulated with democracy, the result was that the liberal state was democratized and democracy was restricted to the public sphere, thus exempting the capitalist economy and the patriarchal family, which were both located in the private sphere, from the democratic demands for equality. Articulations that involve the production of political frontiers between friends and enemies are defined as hegemonic articulations. Hegemony is an articulatory practice that aims to construct a political as well as moral intellectual leadership and thus engages in the struggle for our hearts and minds. According to Antonio Gramsci, a hegemonic force must transgress its own narrowly defined interest and construct a collective will with a national and popular character. Vladimir Lenin saw hegemony as merely the working class’s political leadership of a tactical alliance of workers, soldiers, and peasants. The social classes should strike together, but march separately. By contrast, Gramsci claimed that the social classes

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must develop a common political project that blurs and modifies the original class interests. The hegemonic force must articulate a variety of interests and demands in a collective will that provides a particular reading of the sociopolitical problems and offers a way of solving them in accordance with cherished norms and values. Gramsci’s attempt to transgress the class reductionist scheme of Marxism is hampered by his insistence that only the fundamental classes—that is, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—are capable of exercising hegemony. This economistic attempt to anchor the contingent logic of hegemonic articulation in the economic structures is abandoned by Laclau and Mouffe, who insist that the economy is an institutionalized discursive terrain that is crisscrossed by political struggles and power strategies. Foucault has convincingly demonstrated that the limits and unity of a hegemonic discourse cannot be constituted with reference to its style, vocabulary, or objects that are often shared with other discourses. Neither can it be constituted in relation to an external element that is different from the moments within the discourse because in that case the outside is reduced to being simply one more difference within the discourse. Therefore, the construction of the limits and unity of a hegemonic discourse must involve the construction of a constitutive outside that has no common measure with the discourse in question, but poses a threat to its differential order. The construction of a radical and threatening otherness is a result of the exclusion of discursive elements that are articulated in a chain of equivalence that collapses their differential character. The chain of equivalence emphasizes the “sameness” of the excluded elements. But as the number of elements expands, it becomes clear that the only thing they have in common is that they constitute a threat to the discursive order from which they are excluded. The unification and delimitation of a hegemonic discourse through the construction of a radical and threatening outside is captured by Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of social antagonism. Social antagonism is neither a “real opposition” where one physical object clashes with another object; nor is it a “logical opposition” in which A is contradicted by non-A. Rather, in both cases, A remains fully A, whereas in social antagonism A is negated by antiA. In other words, social antagonism unifies a

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hegemonic discourse by constructing an external enemy that prevents the closure of the discursive system. A hegemonic discourse that is unified by a social antagonism separating the discursive system from its constitutive and threatening outside can be very stable over time because it might be able to integrate new events by turning them into legitimate discursive differences. But precisely because discourses only manage to produce a partial fixation of meaning and identity, they are bound to come up against events that they fail to inscribe in their symbolic order. The failure to integrate, domesticate, and inscribe new and emerging events will lead to a complete or partial breakdown of the discursive system and the proliferation of floating signifiers. Thus, when faced with the unrepresentable kernel of social life, the finite and contingent discourses are dislocated. A good example of dislocation is the stagflation crisis that hit most of the Western economies in the beginning of the 1970s. The so-called Keynesian doctrines of economic crisis management were dislocated by the joint occurrence of rising unemployment and mounting inflation. Dislocation reveals the undecidability of the social and opens a political terrain for hegemonic struggles about how to heal the rift in the dislocated structure. As such, dislocation is the condition of possibility for articulation, hegemony, and political transformation. Discourse is formed by hegemonic articulations, unified by social antagonisms, and transformed by political interventions facilitated by structural dislocation. The attempt to suture a dislocated discourse by advancing a new hegemonic project will always involve some kind of ideological totalization. Ideology does not hide or misrepresent an objective social reality because social reality is always already constructed in and through discourse. Rather, what ideology systematically hides and misrecognizes is the precarious and contingent character of social meaning and identity that is rooted in the ultimate undecidability of the social. Ideology is a totalizing gesture within hegemonic discourses that aims to present the discursively constructed meanings and identities as natural, objective, and given and denies the presence of a constitutive outside. As such, ideology aims to efface the traces of power from the social fabric. Ideology constructs myths that function as simplifying reading principles that aim to make a

complex, chaotic, and dislocated terrain intelligible. Ideological myths are sometimes transformed into social imaginaries that provide a totalizing horizon that permits a limitless inscription of social and political demands into the promise of a new order. In this sense, the Enlightenment, the communist dream of a classless society, and the welfare state project can all be seen as examples of social imaginaries, whereas neoliberalism, the Third Way project, and right-wing populism can be seen as myths aspiring to become social imaginaries. The power of ideological totalization derives from the fact that we do not necessarily abandon the myths and social imaginaries that we ascribe to when their totalizing and reductive ploys are revealed. We are often prepared to “act as if” the totalizing ideological fantasy provides an adequate account of the social world—not because it is rational to do so, but because it gives us a certain enjoyment to mask the failure of ideological totalization. We are freed from facing the undecidable and antagonistic character of the social, and we are permitted to displace our self-blockage to an imaginary enemy who is held responsible for the corruption of the social. As such, the enjoyment attached to ideological fantasy explains the strong grip of ideology and, therefore, why it is so difficult to escape the structural power of discourse. Jacob Torfing See also Foucault, Michel; Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemonic Power; Hegemony; Ideology; Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal; Lukes, Steven; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. London: Longman. Laclau, E. (1993). Discourse. In R. E. Goodin & P. Petitt (Eds.), Contemporary political philosophy (pp. 431–437). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Torfing, J. (1999). New theories of discourse. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

DISPOSITIF Apparatus, dispositif, and machine are three terms that figure significantly in French theorizations of

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different forms of power. In English, apparatus (derived from Latin) translates as both appareil (apparatus, machine, device, camera) and dispositif (arrangement, disposition, device, or apparatus). The notion of state apparatus (or appareil d’état) is especially associated with Louis Althusser, a French structural Marxist, and his followers. Dispositif was first used in the study of the cinema but for present purposes is more often associated with Michel Foucault’s analyses of power/knowledge relations. Machine is a broader term with many connotations, ranging from the machinery of state power to the desiring machine. The term has a key, albeit often loosely metaphorical, role in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, such as their 1972 work Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism et Schizophrenia. In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser supplements Karl Marx’s theory by identifying the state’s key ideological as well as repressive functions in reproducing class domination. He distinguished a relatively unified repressive state apparatus (RSA) from a plurality of relatively autonomous ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). Although the former comprises the core of the state (executive, legislature, judiciary, and police– military apparatus), the ISAs include diverse institutions such as the family, education, organized religion, and the media. RSAs and ISAs operate in different ways to secure class power and social cohesion. Although the RSA relies more on coercion, it has an important ideological moment, and, although ISAs rely more on ideology, coercion remains in the background. Subsequent work has explored the changing articulation of the RSA and ISAs in different kinds of political systems, whether “normal” bourgeois democratic regimes or exceptional regimes such as military dictatorships, fascism, developmental states, or new forms of authoritarian rule (see, for example, Nicos Poulantzas’s 1972 work, Fascism and Dictatorship). Foucault introduced dispositif in an interview after Surveiller et punir (translated as Discipline and Punish) appeared in 1975; it also figured in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976) and, more prominently, in his studies of governmentality between 1976 and 1979. His most elaborate account presented dispositif as a general network or web of relations among a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble” of linguistic and nonlinguistic

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relations, discourses and institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements, philosophical and moral propositions, and so forth. More important for Foucault than a given dispositif’s individual elements were (a) how their articulation in games of power, knowledge, and truth served strategic functions in addressing an urgent need; and (b) how the dispositif produced appropriate subjects for specific types of power/knowledge relations. In their very different ways, the arguments of these leading French scholars have influenced studies of power across many disciplines and regarding the most varied topics. The main theoretical and methodological interest in apparatus, dispositif, and machine concerns how relatively heterogeneous elements are combined to generate specific strategic effects in power relations across different sites and scales. Bob Jessop See also Althusser, Louis; Foucault, Michel; Marx, Karl; Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations

Further Readings Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. London: Verso. Foucault, M. (1980). The confession of the flesh. In Power/knowledge (C. Gordon, Ed. & Trans., pp. 194–228). New York: Pantheon.

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE Justice is often taken to hold over two domains: the distributive and the corrective. The latter is concerned with questions of punishment and rectifications of injustices. The former concerns the just distribution of the benefits and (nonpunitive) burdens of social life. These include civil and political rights as well as income, wealth, health care, and so on. Debates about distributive justice are critical to contemporary politics. In this entry, we consider arguments that justice requires promoting welfare; an equal distribution of holdings; a distribution that benefits the worst off; and a distribution that merely respects the rights of property holders. Finally, we ask whether justice

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should have the central place accorded it in contemporary political thinking. Justice is a matter of each person receiving what is due to him or her. In the liberal tradition, this ties it closely to the formal idea of equality that requires that things that are relevantly alike should be treated alike. In the absence of relevant differences between people, justice requires that each be treated as an equal. Of course, without an account of “relevant differences” and of what it is to be “treated as an equal,” this does not tell us very much. Indeed, one way to characterize many of the debates in distributive justice is as being about the characteristics or properties that might count in distinguishing persons and over the meaning of the demand to treat persons as equals. These debates have tended to focus on the distribution of income, wealth, and the goods of economic activity generally (and that will be the focus here). In the matter of civil and political rights, there is a broad consensus that has held since the end of World War II that there are no relevant differences between sane, adult, citizens and that each is entitled to an equal share of such rights in recognition of his or her status as a citizen (although even here there are debates about the scope of justice—whether it applies only to citizens, or to everyone, or to everyone in a territory including migrants and children, etc.; this entry will not consider these questions).

Utilitarian Theories of Justice Perhaps the most obvious way to justify some or other distribution of goods—or to justify principles that ought to govern the institutions that together determine that distribution—is by reference to whether what results advances the overall or average welfare of those affected by it. This is the case made by utilitarians who hold that the right principles of distributive justice are those that will bring about greatest future utility (i.e., the greatest future good for persons, however that is defined). This means that the right content of the principles of justice is an empirical matter. Although most utilitarians agree that having equal civil and political rights will maximize utility, there is no similar agreement on the economic arrangements (socialist, capitalist, mixed, etc.) that will achieve that goal.

Although utilitarian theories are attractively simple and appeal to an intuitively plausible criterion for thinking about just institutions (surely one consideration in thinking about the institutions we have ought to be their consequences for human welfare?), they are widely criticized for failing to respect the rights of persons. Consider, for example, a distribution in which some have an abundance of goods and others are kept in abject misery and yet which is utility maximizing (the utility gained by the rich being greater than the disutility suffered by the poor). According to utilitarianism, this is acceptable, and it is just. Utilitarians commonly reply to this objection that in “the real world” scenarios such as this one are very unlikely to occur. As noted, this is also the account they give of the egalitarian distribution of civil and political rights (in the real world, distributing these rights equally is utility maximizing). As an empirical matter, the utilitarian claim can be disputed, but even if it is granted, it seems to deliver the right answers for the wrong reasons. We think that adult sane citizens have equal rights as a reflection of their equal standing, not because giving them those rights equally has good consequences.

Egalitarian Theories of Justice The principle that governs the distribution of civil and political rights, then, is one of strict egalitarianism. The goods in question are allocated equally to (almost) all members of society on the basis that that everyone is owed equal respect and that an equal distribution of these goods best reflects this ideal. This raises the question of why we do not simply extend the same principle of strict egalitarianism to other (economic) goods? The idea of a strict egalitarian distribution of all benefits and burdens of social cooperation can be criticized on both theoretical and technical grounds. Those who press theoretical objections contrast the case of civil and political rights with economic entitlements. When it comes to the former, all adult sane citizens are relevantly alike and an equal distribution of these rights reflects their equal status. However, when it comes to economic goods, some critics of egalitarianism claim that citizens are not all relevantly alike. For example, some are talented and hardworking and thus more deserving. Other critics argue that an inegalitarian distribution

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could make everyone better off, and so egalitarianism is inefficient. Finally, others argue that maintaining an equal set of holdings would involve continuous interference in the freedom that citizens have to transfer their goods to one another in gifts or exchanges. The most pressing technical problem with (although not limited to) strict egalitarianism is that it needs to specify what it is that ought to be distributed equally to treat citizens as equals. One answer is to distribute resources equally. However, different people will gain very different levels of benefit from similar bundles of resources and the outcome in terms of welfare of an egalitarian distribution of resources may be very inegalitarian (e.g., a disabled person may need considerably more resources than would an able-bodied person to derive similar levels of satisfaction from life).

Justice as Fairness The most famous contemporary attempt to respond to these problems—and the theory of distributive justice that has become the starting point for all recent discussions of the topic—is found in John Rawls’s idea of justice as fairness. Rawls accepts the criticism advanced against strict egalitarianism that everyone can be materially better off if incomes are not maintained at a strictly equal level (a criticism that reflects the experience of industrialized countries during the last few centuries: the wealth of an economy is not fixed and the most common way of producing more wealth is a system that rewards the more productive with greater incomes). In addition, he sees the need to provide an “index” of goods to be distributed. He argues that persons in an original position—a social contract—would agree to a distribution of primary social goods (including civil and political rights and income and wealth) governed by two principles of justice that must be satisfied in turn. The first principle requires strict equality in civil and political rights. The second principle specifies, first, that social and economic inequalities must be attached to positions that are open to all under fair equality of opportunity and, second (in what is called the difference principle), that any social and economic inequalities must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. This deviation from strict equality in holdings is justifiable as long as

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the inequality results in the least well off being better off than they would be under strict equality. Advocates of desert-based principles argue that the difference principle ignores claims that people deserve economic benefits given their contribution to social products and the effort they expend in their work. For the desert theorist, distributive systems are just insofar as they distribute incomes according to the different levels earned or deserved by the individuals for their productive efforts or contributions in that society. It may be objected that desert-based theories require extremely difficult measures to isolate contribution and effort, particularly in a complex economy. Moreover, they make economic benefits dependent on factors over which people have little or no control—for example, someone may be more or less productive depending on inherited talents or because his or her particular skills are in great demand given other people’s tastes.

Responsibility-Sensitive Egalitarian Principles So-called responsibility-sensitive egalitarian principles inhabit a middle ground between these two positions. Theorists regard the difference principle as flawed because it is insufficiently “ambitionsensitive” (because it does not ensure people live with the consequences of their free choices) but they also emphasize the necessity of “endowmentinsensitivity” (that people’s holdings should not be determined by [dis]advantageous natural abilities or brute bad luck). Thus, rather than a distribution governed by the difference principle, responsibility-sensitive egalitarians argue for a principle that people should be entitled to the outcomes (good and bad) of their choices, but should be compensated for the operations of luck. Responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism has generated a great deal of discussion. Those who favor it think that it incorporates the idea of deserts into traditional egalitarianism. Critics, though, argue that how responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism could actually be implemented in a real economy is unclear because a distinction between natural and developed talents would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify. Others think that it has deflected traditional egalitarianism away from its core concern with the plight of

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the disadvantaged and the effects of relative inequalities in societies.

Libertarian Theories For all their differences, what all the theories considered so far have in common is that they conceive of a just distribution as being one that fits some pattern (a pattern in which utility is maximized, the worst off are as well off as possible, or people have the results of their choices and not the results of luck). Libertarians characteristically object to any patterned distributive ideal, regardless of whether material goods or welfare are at stake. The basis of the objection is as follows. Surely, they argue, the point of giving people holdings (income, wealth, etc.) is to allow those people to use their holdings as they see fit in living their lives. Thus, given some initial just set of holdings, people will freely trade, bargain, bet, transfer, and so on, with one another. The result of all this freedom will be to upset the pattern. Yet, if the initial holdings were just, and people freely interacted with one another (no one stole from, or coerced, another), then how can the result be unjust? Thus, the only way that the pattern can be restored is by an illegitimate use of state power in violation of people’s freedoms. Thus, rather than developing some pattern theory of distributive justice, libertarians favor rules that establish and protect the rights of individuals (particularly rights of property in their own person and in things justly acquired). Whatever then results from the use of those rights is just, and interference by the state (e.g., in the form of redistributive taxation) is unjust. Critics of the libertarian position have typically focused on three difficulties the theory faces. First, it is not clear how one gives an account of, let alone establishes, a set of just initial holdings. To whom, for example, does the land of the United States belong: to the descendents (however that is to be established) of those who first found it; of those who first colonized and farmed—made use of—it; or of those who purchased it from Native American tribes? Second, the argument depends on the idea that injustice cannot arise from the accumulation of many individual, isolated acts, each of which is just. But there is no reason to think that. Finally, the theory depends on citizens

being granted property rights, and being granted such rights absolutely. However, we can surely believe that we have a conditional right to, say, our monthly salaries. The condition being precisely that those salaries can be subject to just taxation. The foregoing discussion has proceeded on the basis that justice is not merely one virtue among others, but that it is the most important virtue of social institutions. Some or other distribution might be more efficient, more benevolent, more likely to promote artistic endeavor (or whatever), but these things do not matter in the face of the charge that they are unjust.

The Theories Critiqued This view has been challenged. In a less radical form, some feminists argue that liberal theories of distributive justice are blind to the oppression that occurs in the private sphere. Enduring inequalities for women arise especially because women often have primary responsibility for child rearing and, as a result, retain substantial disadvantages when competing in the market. As a consequence, feminists argue, all theories that rely on market mechanisms will yield a distribution of wealth in which women will systematically have less income and wealth than men. This is a less radical challenge in that it offers a critique of the traditional liberal boundaries of political authority, but in the name of securing a just distributive outcome. The more radical version of the critique requires that justice itself is displaced as the core virtue of distributive schemes. For some feminists and communitarians, justice “colonizes” spheres in which it has no place—destroying valuable social relationships that are maintained by friendship, love, care, or fraternity. Theorists of justice might agree, at least in the sense that they think that certain circumstances make justice necessary. These circumstances include moderate scarcity and the conflicting demands of persons for their “fair share.” The response of those who would favor justice, then, is that the absence of care and community is precisely what makes justice so important. Matt Matravers and Alex Bavister-Gould See also Democracy; Fair Division; Freedom; Liberalism

Domhoff, G. William

Further Readings Barry, B. (1995). A treatise on social Justice: Vol. 2. Justice as impartiality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, R. (2000). Sovereign virtue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goodin, R. (1995). Utilitarianism as a public philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, W. (2002). Contemporary political philosophy: An introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as fairness: A restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

DOMAIN The domain of power or influence refers to the persons whose policies are affected. When power is exercised, it must be with respect to some person or group. The person or group affected is the domain of power. In potential power relationships, the domain refers to those persons potentially affected. The term domain was introduced by Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan in Power and Society to specify one of the basic dimensions of power. The other two dimensions were weight and scope. Weight refers to the amount of power or the degree to which the policies of others are affected. Scope refers to the kinds of policies affected. Robert Dahl has also emphasized the importance of specifying scope and domain in specifying a power relationship. The observation that a person has a lot of power may not be meaningless, but it is not very meaningful. It begs the questions of “With respect to whom?” and “With respect to which issues?” Thus, specification of domain and scope is important for clear communication. Specifying domain and scope also has important implications for the measurement of power. If the power of an actor varies with respect to different scopes and domains, it is difficult to determine an actor’s total power. A sea captain may have a great deal of power with respect to the members of his or her crew and passengers but very little power with respect to other people. A powerful legislator

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may have much power with respect to how his or her fellow legislators vote but very little power with respect to whom they marry, how many children they have, what they eat, or where they take their vacations. Although one might say that someone who has power with respect to a large number of people has more power than does someone who has power over a small number of people, one might not want to do so. It could be argued that power over a large number of weak people constitutes less power than power over a small number of very powerful people. Variations in the scope and domain of power do not make it impossible to measure the total power of and actor or to compare the power of actors, but they do make it difficult to do so. David A. Baldwin See also Capability; Community Power Debate; Dahl, Robert A.; Domination; Hegemony; Influence; Lasswell, Harold; Power Indices; Scope; Social Power

Further Readings Dahl, R. A., & Stinebrickner, B. (2003). Modern political analysis (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lasswell, H. D., & Kaplan, A. (1950). Power and society: A framework for political inquiry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

DOMHOFF, G. WILLIAM (1936– ) G. William Domhoff is a research professor in psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published many books and articles dealing with the power structure in the United States. A leading power elitist and neo-Marxist analyst of power, he has been highly influential in urban studies and sociological studies of power in the United States. His first best-selling book, Who Rules America? (published in 1967), is a detailed description and analysis of the links between political elites in business, politics, and the military in the United States. Five further editions under the title Who Rules America Now? were published between 1983 and

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2009, updating the list of elites and their links. The argument of the books is that class and corporate finance dominate U.S. politics, though Domhoff also offers some hope that activists can operate within a democracy to break the class structure and offer a better future. Domhoff argues that the structure of U.S. society is dominated by class and capitalism. The neoMarxist line is that the structure of capitalist society provides easier access for businesspeople into the political system, but he is not a determinist in any sense. Rather, he sees the power structure operating through personal and social networks that enable the elite to dominate. He does see these elites as competing, largely through the two-party system, but at the end of the day that struggle is simply for which circles will dominate U.S. politics, and not for any distributional struggle that will benefit the U.S. people as a whole. Domhoff argues that although the democratic system allows ordinary people to have a route into the political process, access is much easier for the wealthy. The relative costs of taking part in politics are lower and they have links through personal networks. He believes that the facts of class domination are overshadowed in most academic writing because analysts concentrate far too much on institutional processes and do not examine outcomes to the extent they should. That the outcomes benefit the rich so much demonstrates their domination. In 1978, Domhoff published Who Really Rules?, a reexamination of the materials that Robert Dahl and his associates collected in writing their classic Who Governs? Here Domhoff argues that, rather than supporting a pluralist view of power in New Haven, Connecticut, Dahl and his associates had actually collected material demonstrating elite dominance. Domhoff has also been closely associated with the growth machine or growth coalition argument that urban politics is dominated by development and that development is skewed toward exchangevalue rather than use-value and, hence, benefits capitalists rather than local people. Keith Dowding See also Dahl, Robert A.; Elite Theories; Growth Coalitions; Marxist Accounts of Power; Pluralism

Further Readings Domhoff, G. W. (1990). The power elite and the state: How policy is made in America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Domhoff, G. W. (2010). Who rules America? Boston: McGraw-Hill.

DOMINANT PARTIES Parties are considered dominant if they achieve electoral dominance both vertically and horizontally. Vertical electoral dominance is achieved when a party surpasses a threshold of vote or seat shares. In the literature, the demarcation of this threshold varies from a majority of at least 40% to 70% of raw votes or lower-house seats. Horizontal electoral dominance requires such a majority to be sustained longitudinally—usually over a generation. For example, Italy’s Christian Democratic Party, an archetypal dominant party, controlled the parliamentary executive for 36 years (1945–1981). Dominant parties often amount to an infraction on the “alternation rule” that requires meaningful democracies to have regular and intermittent exchanges of power between major political parties. As such, dominant parties emerge frequently in so-called partial democracies where electoral competition is ostensibly open but less than fair. A number of obvious explanations account for the rise and persistence of dominant parties in illiberal democracies: electoral fraud, corruption, oligopoly, control by the dominant party of public finances and its usurpation of the national mythology, or a submissive attitude to authority among citizens. In advanced democracies, however, the emergence of dominant parties is perplexing. By definition, a healthy democracy should contain a vigorous culture of opposition politics. Moreover, the dominant party phenomenon hardly squares with studies in organizational behavior that illustrate how these kinds of bodies should be particularly arthritic in adapting to change over time. Hence, a robust understanding of the emergence, persistence, and breakdown of dominant party systems depends on advances in the theory of political competition. Attempts to explain dominant-party systems have focused on either the demand side of the problem by studying electoral behavior, the

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supply side of the problem by examining party behavior, or by investigating the role of structure. Some approaches from electoral behavior argue that dominant parties are sustained either by a lack of social cleavages that would stimulate greater political competition or by the absence of voter dealignment from the dominant party. These approaches have found limited empirical corroboration. In cross-polity analysis, the number of political parties does not seem to correlate with social cleavages when political competition is measured against ethno-linguistic fractionalization. Meanwhile, dealignment explains little when one observes how negative retrospective voting often fails to translate into positive prospective voting for the opposition. Structural approaches have argued that the number of major competitors in a party system is shaped by institutional factors such as district magnitude or the choice of electoral formula. However, the explanatory power of this argument is weak because the collection of electoral systems within the population of dominant party systems is heterogeneous. Supply-side models have attempted to explain the number of competitors in a party system by calculating when it is rational for parties to be formed. Although such models have demonstrated high internal validity, they tend to assume a neutral political market, where parties enter with the same relative advantage and voter preferences are accurately distributed across a left–right spectrum. Other approaches have attempted to advance theories of party behavior via a more realistic account of the asymmetries in resources between opposition and incumbent parties. Single-party dominance may also be attributed to the shortcomings of opposition performance. Some suggest that dominant-party systems place centrifugal ideological pressure on opposition parties, framing them as antiestablishment, niche parties that subsequently fail to attract the support of the median voter. Adam Packer

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Pempel, T. J. (Ed.). (1990). Uncommon democracies: The one-party dominant regimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

DOMINATION When we talk about power, often what we mean more specifically is domination. Domination refers to a situation where an agent exercises relatively stable, ongoing control over the actions of other agents (“agents” taken broadly to mean anything from individual persons, to social groups, to organizations and institutions). Domination is not episodic. Relations of domination are, by definition, firmly established, and often naturalized and taken for granted. Even specified to this degree, the concept of domination is used to cover a wide range of social relations. To unpack it further, we need to look at several key aspects of this idea. First, domination can be taken as a neutral description of certain kinds of relationships, but it also tends to have strongly negative evaluative connotations. For many, domination is by definition morally wrong. Second, paradigmatic understandings of domination often portray it as a process of which the dominated are unconscious, or only partially conscious. But domination can also be quite explicit and recognized by all involved. Third, the idea of domination shades into more general social processes of socialization that regulate human behavior, without being clearly authored by any dominant agent. This raises difficulties for defining the boundaries of domination. Fourth, the modern state, as potentially the most powerful form of social organization, is routinely involved in domination. Finally, although we primarily use the concept of domination to describe large-scale structural social relationships (e.g., between social classes), it also gets used regarding patterns of interpersonal interactions, indicating the scope of a concept ranging from macro- to microlevels of analysis.

See also Core Parties; Democracy; Political Parties

Further Readings Greene, K. F. (2007). Why dominant parties lose: Mexico’s democratization in comparative perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Descriptive Versus Normative Senses Of Domination It sounds strange to suggest that domination might be a normatively neutral concept, neither good nor bad. We tend to regard domination as implying

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harm and unjust treatment. But it can be argued that, to be useful for social analysis, a purely descriptive, normatively neutral concept is precisely what is needed. If relationships of domination are common features of our social landscape, then we need to be able to describe, analyze, and comparatively study these, dispassionately, before any normative evaluation of the relationships in question. Such a view seems to have informed one of the most influential figures on the social analysis of domination, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber used the German word Herrschaft to identify relationships in which one actor can routinely expect his or her commands, whether explicit or implicit, to be obeyed, and even internalized as principles of action, by those they are directed at. Herrschaft has manifold connotations (domination, dominion, rule, authority, leadership) that are not easily translated into a single English word. Anglophone scholarship tends to vacillate between the terms domination and authority when translating from Weber, perhaps betraying ambivalence toward Weber’s normatively neutral use of Herrschaft. The key point is that for Weber, the influence of a charismatic teacher on his or her pupils, conventions of deference between tenants and landlords in agrarian societies, the ability of an established democratic government to rule, or the cultivation of widespread nationalist fervor by a dictator were all equally instances of domination (Herrschaft), phenomena of the same type, regardless of how we might morally judge them. In keeping with this principle, Weber described most forms of domination as “legitimate,” meaning not that they should be approved of, but that those subject to domination frequently found that situation justifiable on some grounds, and that this was basic to the operation of domination. Thus, Weber spoke of legitimate domination, a phrase that has an oxymoronic ring for most English speakers. This linking of domination and legitimacy leads many to prefer the translation “authority” for Herrschaft, because we think of authority as inherently involving legitimacy.

Consciousness of Domination by the Dominated Many kinds of social relationships unambiguously exemplify domination. Slavery rests on slave owners

having a legal right to command the actions of their slaves, and the knowledge that extreme force may be brought to bear on slaves who resist commands or the claim of ownership itself. Populations conquered in war are subjected to the rule of the victors, through military occupation and martial law. Prisoners live under the rigid regimes of their keepers. In all these cases, force and its threat overtly underwrite the claims to domination, tending to make the nature of the power relationship explicit for both sides. But even in these kinds of relationships, the dominated will sometimes accommodate themselves to their situation, regarding rights to dominate as legitimate, and personal conditions of subordination as natural. However, such unambiguous forms of domination, perhaps because they are so apparent, have not featured prominently in recent social scientific explorations of domination. Instead, the greatest attention is paid to those forms of domination that seem to operate beyond the awareness, or at least the full awareness, of the dominated. Domination is often thought to quintessentially involve the ideological manipulation and mystification of the dominated, not mere material subjugation. Thus, Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) elaborated the term habitus especially to describe the way class domination becomes encoded in different class-based sensibilities and criteria of “taste,” which are learned and embodied at a preconscious level, thus reinforcing the general class structure of a society. Another highly influential figure, Michel Foucault (1926–1984), argued that human subjectivity itself is a historical creation, shaped by wider societal patterns of power. For him, the modern period was characterized by the rise of institutions and practices (e.g., criminology, medicine, psychiatry) that make enforceable claims to superior knowledge, thereby compelling subjects to participate in selfunderstandings suitable to their domination by these institutions and practices. And Steven Lukes (b. 1941), in a celebrated critique of political analysis, argued that social power is not just a matter of how manifest conflicts of interest get decided, but also of how and why conflicts of interest remain latent, and unarticulated, and how the very desires, preferences, and motives of the less powerful get formed in the first instance to suit the interests of the dominant. In all these approaches, there is an emphasis on how domination intervenes

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in the very formation of the self-understandings of the dominated. Acknowledging the insights of these approaches, we need to bear in mind that familiar modes of domination often fall in between the extremes of explicitness and implicitness outlined previously. For instance, in colonial contexts, one often finds complex and socially stratified attitudes toward the colonizers among the members of the colonized society, as some in the upper strata see opportunities in accommodating themselves to the values and mores of the colonizing society, whereas those further down, or embedded in social institutions marginalized by colonization, more often experience only the condition of subjugation. In assessing such intermediate cases, we must ask whether relations of domination are encoded in laws and backed by state-sanctioned force, versus more diffusely embedded in social institutions and attitudes. We also must appreciate that multiple modes of domination attached to ethnicity, race, class, gender (among others) can operate as a more complex interacting system of domination, reinforcing or eroding each other, according to specific circumstances. More generally what these observations suggest is that the awareness of domination by the dominated varies according to the degree of explicitness of the mode of domination, and within any societal relationship of domination, understandings of that relationship will vary between members of the dominated group.

Domination Versus Socialization These observations raise another problem. To the degree we can define a relationship of domination between one individual or group and another, we can identify, at least theoretically, an axis of competing claims on the nature of that relationship and its legitimacy. But when we consider the individual’s relationship with the wider society and its demands on the individual, talk of domination becomes more problematic because societies are processes, not agents in any significant sense. The coordination of individual with group behavior though social conventions, norms, and values is in our nature. We are evolutionarily designed to have our behavior shaped and constrained by the larger social groups we are part of, through formal and informal processes of social learning beginning at

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birth. In this sense, through socialization, societies exhibit a great deal of stable, ongoing control over their members, but no one is really doing the controlling. However, this is not to say that this wider process of socialization does not interact with processes of domination between social groups. Although there must be some forms of generalized social control, the actual forms they take are likely to be inflected by societal patterns of domination. Thus although it is natural to feel shame in the face of strong disapproval from peers, because one engages in behavior widely deemed inappropriate to one’s gender, or because one’s speech patterns betray working-class origins, this indicates a historically specific pattern of social relations, one that encodes aspects of domination. This congruence between necessary processes of socialization, and more contingent processes of domination, facilitates the naturalization of domination for both the dominant and the dominated. Correspondingly, in regard to the critical social analysis of domination, the congruence can also encourage analytic slippage, from more targeted critiques of specific relations of domination, to less focused and more totalizing critiques of society in general.

Domination and States Modern states however, perhaps by definition, exercise stable, ongoing control over populations, issuing myriad commands that are followed on a daily basis. Although the state is not an agent per se, it is the instrument of the groups that control it, and exhibits institutional logics that steer the commands and actions of those that occupy it. Allowing for this quasi-agentic status, let us say that states normally engage in domination over their citizens. However, that domination may be biased against the interests of some sectors of the population, and in favor of others, and has particular latitude regarding aliens without legal status within state’s territories. A state that does not dominate, in Weber’s broad nonevaluative sense, is hardly worth the name; the question is, how is domination rendered legitimate for those subject to it? Antonio Gramsci’s (1891–1937) concept of hegemony, a position of dominance in a given sociopolitical setting, is relevant here. Gramsci analyzed early 20th-century Italian politics in terms of the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, achieved

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by creating alliances (a “historic bloc”) with subordinate groups (such as peasants and workers in key industries) and core institutions such as the Catholic Church. Thus, state domination was a manifestation of the successful historical alliance around shared interests by certain groups operating within it. In addition to dominating their citizens, states can dominate each other geopolitically, thus specialists in international relations sometime use hegemony to mean an alliance, or transnational historic bloc, between a dominant state (or set of states) and other transnational actors such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the UN Security Council, and multinational corporations. The general image is the same, but on a global scale. Both senses of hegemony imply the possibility of counter-hegemonies, that is, alliances of subordinated groups within specific state contexts, or of sets of subordinated countries and transnational actors, around shared interests attempting to dislodge the power of an existing historic bloc. For Gramsci, as a Marxist, this approach to historical political analysis assumed that class struggle within capitalism was the core process of contemporary human history. However, the general idea of analyzing strategic alliances does not logically entail privileging the economic sphere and is compatible with approaches that have more heterogeneous, less economistic understandings of the institutionalization of power.

From Macro to Micro Dimensions Small-scale, interpersonal relations can also be understood in terms of domination. Again, this runs from relatively coercive forms, such as a patriarch controlling household resources and thus its members, to willing subordination, motivated by love, admiration, moral commitment, or some other legitimating rationale. And again, we are more likely to recognize interpersonal domination when it appears pathological. The classic example is when a charismatic individual becomes the center of a cult of believers, as did the Reverend Jim Jones who eventually led a group of 909 followers into group suicide when their utopian community in rural Guyana was falsely perceived to be under mortal threat in 1978. Personal accounts suggest Jones elicited from his followers a complex combination of inspiration, devotion,

emotional dependence, and psychic insecurity—all contributing to the tragic end. This example is extreme—charismatic-centered communities do not necessarily go this way. But the general sociological type of the small, tightly knit community of uncritically devoted followers focused on the leadership and message of a single individual is well established. Uncomfortable as it is to consider, such extremes of human behavior have correlates in more routine interpersonal dynamics. Small social groups are always susceptible to the leadership, explicit or implicit, of individuals with commanding personalities, and even everyday friendships often exhibit modest dominant–subordinate dynamics. Indeed, such imbalances may have positive effects, both practical and psychic, for those involved. Finally, the micro points back to the macro, to the “gearing up” of dynamics of interpersonal domination to the macrosocietal level, by means of mass communication and symbolic representation. Charismatic leaders have clearly dominated mass societies (e.g., Hitler), but how this works is not obvious, it being very difficult to analytically disentangle psychic devotion to the person of the leader from the various modes of ideological suasion and material coercion at the disposal of the modern state. Conversely, the legitimacy of bureaucratic organizations in complex societies often hinges on personalistic perceptions of a leading figure, be it a head of a state, church, or corporation. Where the power of an organization is a matter of explicit public scrutiny, “faceless bureaucracy” often just is not tenable. Jonathan Hearn See also Authority; Bourdieu, Pierre; Gramsci, Antonio; Habitus; Hegemony; Leadership; Legitimation; Lukes, Steven; Structural Power; Weber, Max

Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1989). Social space and symbolic power. Sociological Theory, 7(1), 14–25. Foucault, M. (1980). Two lectures. In Power/knowledge (C. Gordon, Ed., pp. 78–109). New York: Pantheon. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Eds. & Trans.). New York: International Publishers.

Dowding, Keith Hearn, J. (2008). What’s wrong with domination? Journal of Power, 1(1), 37–49. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weber, M. (1978). Domination and legitimacy. In Economy and society (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds., pp. 941–948). Berkeley: University of California Press.

DOWDING, KEITH (1960– ) Keith Dowding has made two key contributions to understanding political power: demonstrating the importance of the collective action problem for our understanding of power and demonstrating the interplay of agency and structure with his concept of “systematic luck.” Collective action problems show that a group of actors might seem powerless even if there is no other group acting against them. Dowding claims that both pluralists and structural approaches fail to grasp this simple idea. Systematic luck is almost the converse, how one group can get what it wants even though the group does not act. Building from Brian Barry’s idea of luck as “getting what you want without trying,” Dowding claims luck is not randomly distributed, but often tied to a person’s location in the social structure or “system” the person inhabits. First developed in Rational Choice and Political Power, then in the more accessible Power, Dowding explains that although the systematically lucky might have access to resources that make them powerful, they often want what they get (as opposed to get what they want) because their interests noncontingently coincide with policy makers. The concept of systematic luck is often misunderstood by those who think Dowding is arguing that, for example, capitalists are lucky rather than powerful. He argues they are both, but luck can explain why the powerful often do not seem to act yet attain the outcomes they want.

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Dowding has applied these notions to traditional debates in urban theory, arguing that growth coalitions and regime theory can be illuminated by the idea of systematic luck. Indeed, this idea is very close to Clarence Stone’s systemic power that underpins his original regime concept. The difference is that Dowding predicates power to agents (individuals, parties, groups, organizations) and not to structure itself, though his accounts of both what the collective action problem and systematic luck mean for analysis of power in society are highly structural. Dowding is also widely known for his theoretical work about, and promotion of, rational choice theory, testing Charles Tiebout’s hypothesis regarding efficient service-provision, exploring why government ministers resign, and latterly turning to the measurement of rights and freedoms. Awarded a doctorate from Oxford in 1987 for his dissertation Collective Action, Group Organization and Pluralist Democracy, Dowding joined the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1993 after teaching at Oxford and Brunel Universities. An editor of the highly regarded Journal of Theoretical Politics since 1995, he is now research professor at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Kennedy Stewart See also Agency; Barry, Brian; Collective Action Problem; Growth Coalitions; Luck; Lukes, Steven; Morriss, Peter; Structuration; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power

Further Readings Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Dowding, K. (1996). Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dowding, K. (2003). Resources, power and systematic luck: A response to Barry. Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 2(3), 305–322.

E to explain why men have been more likely to attain social dominance. Their theory suggests that the declining importance of male size and strength within high-status occupations combined with lower birth rates and shared child rearing underlie the erosion of men’s social dominance in postindustrial societies. Eagly has also initiated discussions of the political dimensions of research on sex differences, urging scientists to resist both simplistic “just-so” stories of evolutionary sex differences and liberal “political correctness” in favor of openness to the data. Eagly and her colleagues were the first to notice, in contradiction to prevailing views of sexism as antipathy toward women, that women are actually stereotyped more favorably than men. At the same time, she noted that this favorability occurs because stereotypical female traits (e.g., nurturance) suit women for traditional, lowerstatus feminine roles. These findings challenged the notion that prejudice is an undifferentiated antipathy and sparked important advances in understanding the nature of sexism. Eagly has also been a strong advocate and practitioner of meta-analysis (which allows for statistically sophisticated averaging of effects across studies). For example, Eagly and colleagues’ meta-analysis of studies on reactions to women leaders revealed that women are disliked when they adopt a masculine leadership style. These findings inspired Eagly and Karau’s role congruity theory, which suggests that prejudice is not a simple antipathy toward a group, but a relatively lower evaluation of group members when evaluated for

EAGLY, ALICE (1938– ) Why do men possess more power than women in so many cultures? Does this reflect evolved differences in aptitudes or socially imposed strictures that favor men and discourage women from obtaining positions of power? Few have made as significant theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding these questions as has Alice Hendrickson Eagly. Eagly’s early interests in attitudes led her (in the 1970s) to a critical examination of findings that women are more easily influenced than men. Her review suggested that social status rather than inherent sex differences (the previously accepted explanation) accounted for these effects. These insights led Eagly to further explorations of sex stereotypes, culminating in social role theory, which explains how a gendered division of labor (and the gender hierarchy it reflects) creates sex differences in behavior and corresponding sex stereotypes (e.g., women are more likely to enact the nurturing behavior the homemaker role demands). By relating social structure (roles) to prescriptions for behavior, Eagly’s theory accounted for the origins of sex differences. In response to evolutionary psychologists, Eagly and Wendy Wood expanded the social role approach. Their biosocial theory incorporates the interaction of biological sex differences, such as men’s greater size and strength and women’s reproductive role, with social factors (e.g., the development of agriculture) 209

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roles that do not match the group’s perceived traits. Peter Glick See also Sexism, Role of Power in

Further Readings Eagly, A. H. (1995). The science and politics of comparing women and men. American Psychologist, 50, 145–158. Eagly, A. H., & Wood, W. (1999). The origins of sex differences in human behavior: Evolved dispositions versus social roles. American Psychologist, 54, 408–423.

E-GOVERNANCE E-governance is the use of the Internet and related information technologies by governmental organizations internally and to interact with citizens, firms, nongovernmental organizations, and other governments. Defined so, e-governance offers the potential to reshape power relationships between governments and citizens, particularly in those countries with widespread use of the Internet. For citizens, the Internet opens new ways to seek and find information from government but also from a proliferation of other information sources. The Internet gives citizens access to expertise—for example, on health and education—that can rebalance information asymmetries in their interactions with public sector professionals. The Internet also reduces the costs of political mobilization and organization, strengthening civil society in ways that may increase the influence of interest groups on public policy issues in liberal democratic states. Less benignly, the usefulness of the Internet for a wide range of criminal and fraudulent activities puts pressure on states to develop further their surveillance techniques. In authoritarian states, the Internet may offer new ways in which citizens and groups can challenge state authority, for example by disseminating information about the regime across global networks or using social media to coordinate protests and demonstrations. Conversely, e-governance may also increase the power of governmental organizations in relation

to citizens. Governments in most developed nations spend around 1% of gross domestic product (GDP) on their own information systems and electronic presence. The capacity of such technologies to collect, store, and analyze personal information about citizens increases the state’s ability to influence societal behavior and control citizens, with new potential for state intrusion into individual privacy even in democratic states. Authoritarian states can use Internetrelated technologies to strengthen their authority over citizens through surveillance of online activity. The challenges to authoritarian regimes posed by citizen use of the Internet has led to widespread censorship and filtering of the Internet across China and most Arab states and prohibition of its use in North Korea, for example. Some states have also used the Internet to challenge the authority of other states, attacking the electronic capability of another government and waging “cyberwar.” The extent to which power relations are rebalanced through use of the Internet will rely partly on the relative capacity of governments and citizens to innovate with technology. The Internet is perhaps the first information technology that has been used more extensively by citizens and civil society than by governments, and for this reason, there is a greater chance of citizen empowerment than from earlier technological developments, such as mainframe computer systems, the personal computer, or databases. Convergence with other popular technologies, such as mobile telephones and mainstream media outlets, accentuates this pattern, as do so-called Web 2.0 technologies, which allow users to generate their own content and to participate in large-scale collaborative networks or forums such as blogs, video-sharing sites (such as YouTube), Wikipedia, social networking sites, and so on. Governmental organizations, in contrast, have been slower to adopt these innovations, sometimes struggling to manage large information technology investments and unwieldy databases and being reluctant to embrace the informality of social networking technologies and the part-authenticated nature of the information that Web 2.0 applications provide. For this reason, e-governance may, ultimately, empower citizens relative to government. Helen Margetts

Elections See also Globalization; Governmentality; Internet and Power

Further Readings Dunleavy, P., Margetts, H., Bastow, S., & Tinkler, J. (2006). Digital-era governance: IT corporations, the state and e-government. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

ELECTIONS Elections are the process by which people are voted in and out of positions of power. In representative democracies, elections determine who is able to exercise power and who is not and in this way grant politicians and parties power to enact their policies. Elections give power to ordinary citizens who may have few other ways to voice their preferences in the political world. For many, elections are the only means by which they participate in politics. Elections commonly receive widespread coverage in the media and concentrate the public’s attention on political matters. They are meant as a peaceful way in which the people can have their voices heard and usually involve a coordinated and peaceful transition of power. In this way, elections bring order and stability to the political world. The outcome of elections depends on the nature of the political system, which determines how political power is configured. Elections can vary from “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) elections where a party is often able to govern with a majority in the legislature to proportional representation (PR) elections where parties form government coalitions that share power and work together. For example, in FPTP parliamentary systems such as Australia, a party can have a majority in the lower and upper houses, giving the governing party effective control over what legislation is passed. Conversely, PR systems (which operate, for example, in many European countries) often involve coalitions and a great deal of negotiation between parties, thus spreading power across the parties. There are also parliamentary and presidential elections, which have very different outcomes and consequences for political power. There are other variations in how elections are conducted in various countries. In some countries,

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elections are held on fixed dates, whereas in other countries they can be held (often within certain time periods) at the discretion of the party in power. The way in which electoral districts are laid out can dramatically affect the outcome of election. Gerrymandering is a process by which a ruling group can bias electoral districts in its own favor. Electoral proportionality is also important. In some countries, parties can win an election without securing the majority of the vote. Electoral systems can therefore produce disproportional outcomes. For example, in the 1992 British general election, the Liberal Democrats won 17.9% of the vote but only 3.1% of seats in the House of Commons. Elections are now a common feature of contemporary society. The number of electoral democracies greatly expanded throughout the 20th century. According to Freedom House in 2009, there are 121 electoral democracies in the world. It remains to be seen whether the number of electoral democracies will contract or expand over time. Freedom House has expressed concerns that a “democratic recession” is setting in. The 19th century saw the development and extension of the party system around which elections continue to be based today. Whereas before elections involved parties representing capital or labor, in recent elections a much larger array of parties represents a much larger array of interests. The spectrum of parties has broadened considerably in the last few decades. Parties such as green or disarmament parties have come to represent the new issues and interests of the public. Absent effective opposition parties, however, elections are often not held in “free and fair” conditions. Elections often involve opposition parties making the argument that they are a better alternative than the governing party. However, in places where there are no effective opposition parties, electoral legitimacy is questioned. In this sense, elections are not always synonymous with democracy. In many countries, voters are presented with very little choice and elections occur under suspicious conditions. Holding elections is a necessary but not sufficient condition for citizens to live in freedom and have a say over their country’s future. Foremost among these other conditions are civil and political rights and a free media. Absent these conditions, elections can lack any substantive meaning. In frustration with this, some citizens

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may adopt other means of having their voices heard, such as protests or sit-ins. In authoritarian countries, however, these efforts are often stymied. Elections are often used in authoritarian states to give the perception of legitimacy to those who want to maintain power. Modern elections in advanced democracies occur in a very different environment from that in the past. Television and the Internet have greatly altered the nature of elections by exposing politicians to greater scrutiny and sometimes reducing politics to entertainment. Opinion polls have also changed elections by changing the strategy of parties and politicians by giving them access to information about voter’s preferences and opinions in between elections. Parties also conduct internal polling to find out more about the popularity of leaders and policy. Whereas before the electorate voiced its views through elections predominantly, now opinion polls can provide a snapshot of the public mood at any given time. There is also much greater volatility in vote choice with social class playing a smaller influence than it did before with partisan loyalty and identification decreasing and “swing voters” often determining the outcome of elections. In some cases, radical parties have appealed to these new “floating” voters by making populist appeals, further creating instability in the political world. Aaron Martin See also Democracy; Legislative Power; Political Parties; Referendums; Voting

Further Readings Colomer, J. M. (Ed.). (2004). Handbook of electoral system choice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gallagher, M., & Mitchell, P. (Eds.). (2005). The politics of electoral systems. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

ELITE THEORIES Elite theories of power hold that power is primarily concentrated in hands of a few, or the elite. The first and perhaps the most famous proponent of an

elite theory was noted American sociologist C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (1956). As Alan Wolfe notes in his afterword of the republication of The Power Elite in 2000, Mills took aim at two prevailing views of U.S. society at the time, namely, pluralism and the end of ideology thesis. Pluralism is the view that power is not concentrated in the hands of the few but rather spread out among different groups. The “end of ideology” thesis holds that the debate about any ideological differences was over and that any problems that remain could be solved with technical expertise. Mills argued instead that power in U.S. society is not spread out evenly, but is instead concentrated in the hands of few that are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. . . . They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and celebrity which they enjoy. (Mills, 1956, p. 3)

In contrast with the end of ideology thesis, Mills argues that the debate over ideas is not truly exhausted, but instead it is merely being silenced. Mills felt that democratic politics ideally should be an arena where different viewpoints and opinions should be debated freely and openly. However, Mills felt that the concentration of power allowed the debate to be skewed to favor the viewpoints of the power elite. This, according to Mills, has led to the degradation of public discourse and the erosion of democracy, which in turn has led to power being shifted away from elected representatives. This is why Mills says at the beginning of The Power Elite that the powers of ordinary citizens often seem to be driven by forces that they cannot see. Floyd Hunter in Community Power Structure makes a similar case. His study focused on control at the local level in the United States. Although he is not as confrontational as Mills is, Hunter’s conclusions are nonetheless scathing. He found a small group in control of most of the social structures in “Regional City” with most citizens simply acquiescing to the decisions made by those in power. The social and political structures, Hunter claims, “are controlled by men who use their influence in devious ways . . . to keep down public discussion

Empire

on all issues except those that have the stamp of approval of the power group” (Hunter, 1953, p. 249). The one thing common to proponents of elite theories of power is that they do not think that the concentration of the power in the hands of elites is a good thing for society. First, elite concentration of power ensures that certain viewpoints do not make it into the public discourse. Second, and as a result of the first point, most citizens will have no information or knowledge about how power is being used to affect their lives. Although the accusations made by elite theorists are certainly scathing and impassioned, they have been criticized for not sustaining their theoretical criticisms with empirical verification. Early elite theorists used reputational analysis to empirically base their claims. Reputational analysis proceeds by asking people who they think are powerful, and then triangulating responses by questioning those names as powerful. Modern elite theory, as represented by William Domhoff, uses many techniques to analyze the elites, including examining the schools they attended, the clubs they belong to, and so on. Modern network analysis generates similar ways of examining links between elites. The growth coalition literature expands elite theory into a more structural direction by suggesting that it is the structures of power that lead developers at the local level and capital at the national and multinational level to have greater power. Another direction, also more structural than elite theory has taken, is through the work of Clarence Stone who, like Hunter, bases his empirical work on Atlanta. Regime theory and its associated idea of systemic power suggests that elites tend to dominate through sharing specific ideas. Elite versions of these analyses concentrate on the personnel involved and their family backgrounds as part of the structures of power in society. Joseph Angolano See also Domhoff, G. William; Growth Coalitions; Hunter, Floyd; Mills, C. Wright; Regime Theory in Urban Politics; Reputational Analysis

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Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, A. (2000). Afterword. In C. W. Mills, The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

EMPIRE An empire is a regime of domination, created when a powerful state (the “core”) imposes its rule on a number of weaker territories and peoples (the “periphery”), controlling or strongly influencing the internal and external affairs of those countries. The imperial power exercises ultimate sovereignty over core and periphery, but the two parts are run on divergent principles. Empires were not formed because the core state wished to assume responsibility for administering outside territories; there were usually more salient reasons for acquiring an empire, such as economic or strategic imperatives. Running empires required a delicate power balance: on the one hand, empires were vehicles for strong states to increase or consolidate their power resources, through acquiring land, raw materials, military forces, and cheap labor; on the other hand, coercive control of outside territories could exhaust a state’s resources and bring an end to its empire. Empire building involved high costs for the core state, so acquired territories were expected to yield an adequate return on investment. To maximize returns, empires were generally run “on the cheap” unless more expensive strategies became necessary. Empires crumbled when the core state became weak and a stronger state took over, or when the costs of maintaining an empire became so prohibitive that dismantling was the only rational option. Most analysts believe that empires are now a thing of the past and have been replaced by hegemonic relationships. But recent authors have argued that empires still exist, controlled by powerful coalitions rather than individual states.

Historical Background Further Readings Hunter, F. (1953). Community power structure: A study of decision makers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Empires have existed since ancient times, at least since Sargon of Akkad formed the first Mesopotamian empire in 2300 BCE. Early empires were continental, with core territories located in the

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Middle East, Asia, North Africa, South America, and Europe. Some ancient empires, notably Rome, controlled far-flung territories, but their mode of expansion was overland rather than by sea. From the 15th century on, advances in seaborne technologies meant that maritime empires could form. Land empires continued to exist—the Ottoman, Russian, Chinese, and Austro-Hungarian empires survived into the 20th century—but overseas imperialism became the dominant form of territorial expansion, and the center of geopolitical power shifted to Western Europe. During the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain were the main imperial powers, extending their rule to the New World, Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. By the end of the 16th century, other imperial rivals— namely, France, England, and Holland—began to emerge, acquiring territories in the Americas, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Thereafter, the global power balance became multipolar, with different countries assuming the lead position and wars between imperial rivals resulting in territorial transfers between empires. In the late 19th century, three new European powers—Belgium, Italy, and Germany—joined the race for empires, as did two countries from outside the region, the United States and Japan, which expanded overland as well as overseas. European territorial annexations in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific between 1880 and 1900 resulted in 80% of the world’s land being run by empires.

Systems of Coercion and Control Empires combine coercive force with political control. The dual character of empires is contained in the word itself. Empire derives from the Latin imperium, which in ancient Rome meant “sovereignty,” or the legal authority to make and enforce laws and to wage war. During the reign of Augustus, the term gained a territorial dimension and the Imperium Romanum referred to Rome and its newly acquired dependencies as a single entity. The imperator or “emperor” was the new unit’s head of state and military commander-inchief. These words and their dual meanings were appropriated by later empires: in 1876, Queen Victoria declared herself “Empress of India,” whereas the highest official in most British colonies was the governor-general.

Coercive force was necessary both for acquiring and running empires. Military theorists have estimated that the ratio of power required for a superior state to regularly exercise control over an external territory and defend its position is about three to one. Hence, core states needed to be significantly more powerful than are the territories they conquered if their empires were to survive. Of course, not all peripheries were acquired by force, although most were. Michael Doyle has flagged three instances when groups in weaker polities invited core powers to extend their rule into the weaker polities: Cameroonian kings Bell and Acqua to British Prime Minister Gladstone, factions within Corcyra to the Athenian empire, and elites within Greece and Britain to the Roman Empire. The military played a key role in taming rebellions and defending territorial borders against attack by rival powers. Peripheral populations could often be controlled through subtle threats of military action, so brute force was not always required. But in some cases—for example, the Spanish invasion in the Americas and the westward expansion of the United States—indigenous groups were exterminated. In maritime empires, a strong navy was necessary for quickly transporting military forces across the globe and providing security for the smooth flow of trade. Subject populations were often recruited as troops to form the lower echelons of the imperial military forces, for deployment locally as well as across the empire. Core state officials had ultimate authority over all parts of the empire, core and periphery. The same set of people determined policy for both parts, but each was governed according to divergent principles. Core state institutions operated in the interests of their citizens, or at least a large enough proportion to command legitimacy. Meanwhile, rule in the peripheries took place without the explicit consent of local populations and served the interests of the core state. Peripheral policies had two main purposes: to maintain the territories within the empire and to generate income and other benefits for the core. The bulk of peripheral revenues not remitted to the core was spent on military and police activities, in effect forcing peripheral populations to fund their own subjection. Because empires are large entities incorporating diverse populations, political control of the periphery was not possible without the

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cooperation of local elites. These “collaborators” were given power, status, and a small portion of peripheral revenues in exchange for keeping the peace, securing imperial trade, collecting taxes, and, where possible, supplying the empire with troops and cheap labor. These collaborators helped keep administration costs low and reduce chances of popular rebellion. Specific systems of peripheral rule varied depending on the time period, the availability of local elites capable of commanding legitimacy, and the structure of the international system. Most ancient empires before Rome lacked the political capacities and infrastructures to directly govern the territories they conquered. Hence, they ruled their peripheries informally: territories were legally independent, and local clients governed their jurisdictions unhindered as long as they kept trade routes open and passed on a large proportion of the taxes they collected to the core. The core maintained sovereign control of certain key areas, however, including finance, military, diplomacy, trade, and political succession. An alternative method of informal rule employed by England, Holland, and France during the 17th and 18th centuries, and by England during the 19th century, was quasi-government through chartered companies: private trading firms were authorized to acquire territories and administer them on behalf of the core, and were provided with monopoly powers and naval support in exchange for a share of the profits. The Roman Empire was the first to rule formally by annexing territories and assigning a governor to them to directly implement imperial policies. The governor represented the core state and carried out functions on its behalf, such as levying tax, administering justice, and controlling police forces. However, the core state retained sovereign powers for trade, defense, and external affairs and could overturn any decision made by the governor. Local elites formed the lower echelons of government, supervised by the governor. All empires after Rome used some combination of formal and informal rule. However, informal rule was preferred because it generated revenues for the core at low cost and without the responsibilities of formal, direct rule. Conversely, multipolarity in the international system after the 16th century rendered formal rule necessary for deterring imperial rivals from forming alliances with peripheral elites.

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But some modern empires discovered a route around the problem: peripheries could be ruled formally, with core-appointed “residents” overseeing independently functioning local elites who administered large provinces rather than small localities. This was the “indirect rule” system employed in many British colonies since the late 19th century.

Benefits of Empire The main benefits generated by an empire were economic. In some cases, territorial extension preserved economic advantages already gained: Sargon conquered neighboring areas in Mesopotamia to protect existing trade routes and surpluses. In other cases, expansionism occurred to promote economic growth in core states: the Roman empire spread to obtain slaves to overcome labor shortages in domestic agriculture, whereas late Victorian empires were constructed to secure cheap raw materials and new markets to feed industrialism at home. Coercion and control mechanisms were used to obtain maximum economic gains. In many European empires, peripheral populations were forced off fertile lands to make way for settlers from the core who wanted to exploit agricultural and commercial opportunities there. The state assisted settlers by providing them with imported slave or indentured labor or by forcing indigenous populations to work on their plantations or mines. Settlers were also given monopoly production rights, precluding peripheral populations from developing industries of their own. Empires were run as economic enclaves: peripheries were permitted to produce only the few commodities that the core required, and raw materials were transported from periphery to core, manufactured, and then forcibly sold back to peripheral groups at a profit. From the 15th to the 18th centuries, imperial powers applied mercantilist principles to monopolize the benefits of trade from peripheries. Peripheries were thus tied to the core in economic dependence, creating a gap between European growth economies and peripheral economies, which persisted even after free trade replaced mercantilism. Technological innovations, particularly in weaponry, transportation, and communications, enhanced the core’s abilities to coerce and control the periphery. In early empires, innovations such as

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the chariot and iron weapons allowed more technologically advanced powers to dominate less advanced groups. In modern times, military technologies such as the repeating rifle, the Maxim machine gun, and armored steamships allowed European empires to impose their rule on tribal societies. Effective control of peripheral populations was not possible before animal-powered vehicles, paved roads, and sailing ships enabled the flow of movement and communication across large surfaces. Empires require infrastructures connecting core and periphery, as well as routes into and through the periphery. Railways, roads, and ports enabled the rapid transport of officials and military forces, as well as commercial goods, across and between territories. Innovations in communications, such as the telegraph, enabled the core state to more directly influence policies in distant peripheries and helped lower the costs of imperial control. But coercion and control could not be too oppressive or overbearing; otherwise, there was the risk of rebellion. Revolts were costly and diverted military and police forces from other duties—for example, defending territorial borders against invasion by rival powers. Additionally, resistance could sometimes be successful, resulting in loss of prestige or even an empire. The Roman Empire collapsed partly because it placed too many tax, military, and other demands on its subject populations. Overtaxation without political representation was the prime reason American revolutionaries fought for, and won, independence from the British Empire. Slave uprisings against the French in Haiti were also ultimately successful. Successful revolts and independence movements had observation and demonstration effects, increasing the likelihood that other peripheries would follow suit. Resistance could be subverted, and the costs of coercion and control reduced, by assimilating peripheral populations into the culture of the core territory. In some early empires, cultural diffusion was achieved through intermarriage between rulers and ruled. Some later empires, such as the Roman and the French, believed that assimilation could dissolve cultural differences and strengthen peripheral bonds of loyalty to the empire. Hence, they extended citizenship rights to peripheral groups that adopted their customs and values. Most modern European empires relied on missionaries from the core to transmit their culture to peripheral

populations. The relationship between religious and imperial state institutions was symbiotic: missions benefited from military protection and state financial support, and imperial control was facilitated by church teachings that state authorities should be obeyed. In the Spanish and Portuguese empires, powerful papal bulls authorized imperial expansion. Cultural diffusion was a two-way process in all empires, affecting rulers and ruled and producing a hybrid culture. The ideas, customs, and habits of many empires lasted well beyond their regimes. Ideas and lessons from the Roman Empire were applied by succeeding empires.

Decolonization and After All empires crumble eventually, under the strain of ruling other territories or because stronger challengers emerge and wrest the empires from their rulers. The two processes are interlinked: whereas peripheries initially enhance a core state’s power, at some point they become more expensive than the benefits they provide, and the core becomes weakened trying to maintain control of them. Most core states devised strategies to stem losses—for example, gradually granting self-government to peripheries. This happened in the Roman Empire under Augustus and in the 20th-century British Empire. In modern empires, the spread of Western ideas and education alerted peripheral populations to inherent inequalities in imperial policies and the different rules applied to core and periphery. Post–17thcentury Europe had rejected monarchical rule in favor of popular representation, yet continued to autocratically govern its overseas peripheries. Political consciousness gave rise to demands for equal treatment and political representation, then to nationalist struggles for self-determination and independence. Ideas also traveled between empires: hence, the U.S. war of independence inspired French revolutionary ideas, which in turn stimulated Latin American independence movements. Wars among powerful polities also weakened core states and produced imperial challengers, who took control of defeated countries’ empires or demanded that they dismantle them. Early empires, such as the Persian and Mughal, lost their empires for the former reason, and 20th-century European empires were pressured to decolonize by the new world powers, the United States and Soviet Union.

Entrepreneurs

With near-complete decolonization of European maritime empires by the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, most analysts agreed that the era of formal empires had come to an end. However, many claimed that the United States still operates an informal empire, using its international dominance, overseas military bases, control of international political and financial institutions, and all-encompassing cultural and technological influence to force other countries to act according to its wishes. Some have termed U.S.–led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq formal imperialism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri contend that globalization processes, which began during the imperial era, have created a new empire: the core is no longer a single state but a transnational network of powers comprising states and economic actors that dominates and exploits a periphery that is not territorially bounded but progressively incorporates the entire globe. Gita Subrahmanyam See also Domination; Globalization; Imperial Power; Imperialism

Further Readings Abernethy, D. B. (2000). The dynamics of global dominance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Doyle, M. W. (1986). Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howe, S. (2002). Empire: A very short introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

ENTREPRENEURS Entrepreneurs are the economic actors who, in competitive markets, make decisions about which goods to produce and at what price to market them. Entrepreneurial activity is understood here to include both innovation, the introduction of new goods and new methods of production, and market making, attempts to find new customers for existing products or to sell to new customers at a more profitable price. Traditionally, and in

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both popular discourse and economic theory, entrepreneurs have been pictured as the buccaneering, larger-than-life owners of individual businesses. Indeed many would still argue that it is a defining feature of entrepreneurs that they risk their own resources in the pursuit of profit. At the same time, however, it has become conventional to distinguish between entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial function and to argue that the latter can be performed by appointed managers. Do entrepreneurs possess power? Economists such as Israel Kirzner who belong to the Austrian School argue that they do not. Entrepreneurs are the “Prime Mover[s] of [economic] Progress” and routinely make decisions that can affect the lives of millions of people. In doing so, however, they are simply responding to and so are the servants of consumer preferences. Entrepreneurs, in themselves, have no power to change those preferences and if they chose to ignore them would soon be driven out of business. What if, through an astute reading of the market, an entrepreneur is able to acquire a degree of monopoly power? Would he or she then be able to exercise this power by exploiting consumers? Kirzner would argue that entrepreneurs could not. Because it is always open to other entrepreneurs to enter a market if they feel that there are profits to be made, apparent monopolies when measured in current market share are, in practice, always contestable and this means that entrepreneurs cannot exploit consumers. Much the same argument might be made in relation to the powers exercised by entrepreneurs over their workforces. Entrepreneurs might, subject to minimal government standards, be able to set workers’ wages and working conditions, and this might be said to give them a degree of power. They must, however, exercise this power in the context of a competitive market. If entrepreneurs were to abuse their power, this would simply encourage their workers to seek alternative employment. Very different accounts of the role of the entrepreneur are offered by Joseph Schumpeter (1883– 1950) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006). Schumpeter argued that entrepreneurs acquire “spectacular prizes” to the extent that they are able to anticipate what consumers might want and what they can be persuaded to want. He also argued that successful entrepreneurs do often acquire, in the short term at least, a degree of

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monopoly power over consumers, although he cautioned that the existence of monopoly should be regarded as a sign of economic vitality rather than of inefficiency. In The New Industrial State, Galbraith argued that the entrepreneur no longer exists as an individual person, and that, within the modern economy, the entrepreneurial function is instead exercised by a large group of anonymous specialists who work within giant corporations where ownership is divorced from economic decision making. Galbraith views the rise of the giant corporation with ambivalence. On the one hand, he recognizes that corporations have accelerated the rate of innovation. On the other hand, he argues that corporations are able to anticipate and manipulate consumer preferences to “create the wants they seek to satisfy.” In this respect and at least in the tone he adopts, Galbraith appears to go farther than Schumpeter. Schumpeter indicates that consumers’ preferences are malleable but leaves the impression that entrepreneurs must nevertheless at least engage with them. Galbraith seems to suggest that “product planners . . . advertising and sales executives [and] public relations men” can create preferences out of thin air. He also maintains that corporations have routinely hijacked the democratic political process and extracted policy concessions from government. In each of these respects, Galbraith would argue that entrepreneurs working within corporations possess a measure of power. In recent decades, the concept of entrepreneurs and of entrepreneurship has been borrowed by political scientists. There are three common applications here. First, those writing about the process of party competition have often likened votemaximizing party leaders to profit-maximizing business entrepreneurs. Second, policy analysts such as John Kingdon have identified a crucial role for entrepreneurs within the policy process in discovering and repackaging innovative policy proposals, identifying previously unnoticed policy problems, and coupling these two streams by brokering coalitions of support for a new policy initiative. Finally, a more applied literature within social policy has sought to account for the success of particular community-based voluntary organizations in terms of the activities of “social” entrepreneurs who can acquire funding, energize workers, and overcome bureaucratic obstacles.

The impression left in each of these cases is that entrepreneurs must be alert to and exploit previously unrecognized opportunities by gaining the support of either voters or political leaders but that entrepreneurs do not themselves possess any political power. Against this, it might be argued that political entrepreneurs do possess considerable power insofar as they are able to set policy agendas and shape political leaders’ preferences. In these respects, the power exercised by political entrepreneurs might be likened to that attributed to economic entrepreneurs by Schumpeter and, less benignly, Galbraith. Andrew Hindmoor See also Policy Entrepreneurs

Further Readings Galbraith, J. K. (1967). The new industrial state. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Kingdon, J. (1994). Agendas, alternatives and public policies. Boston: Little, Brown. Kirzner, I. (1980). The prime mover of progress: The entrepreneur in capitalism and socialism. London: Institute of Economic Affairs.

ENVIRONMENTAL TREATIES Environmental treaties are binding international agreements designed to address issues of natural resource management, pollution, and other ecological concerns that are not contained within political boundaries of states. Treaties symbolize states’ intent to engage in cooperative action to address an existing problem or take precautionary action to prevent ecological deterioration. Both state and nonstate actors may attempt to use environmental treaties to promote their own interests and influence the actions of others. In this way, environmental treaties can become mechanisms by which actors may wield varying degrees of power over others.

History of Environmental Treaties The first multilateral environmental treaty was recorded in 1868. Since then, more that 450

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multilateral and 900 regional agreements have entered into force. Most of these have been adopted since 1972, when the UN Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm, Sweden. This landmark meeting was the first mega-conference convened to discuss international environmental issues in a systematic and comprehensive way. To date, three subsequent mega-conferences have been held and a plethora of environmental agreements have been concluded internationally, regionally, and globally. Although cooperative environmental agreements are often hailed as positive steps toward managing resources, protecting fragile ecosystems, or preventing harm to human health, the UN Environment Programme has noted that parties often find it difficult to meet the numerous obligations conferred on them by these agreements.

Key Actors Both state and nonstate actors are involved in the development and implementation of environmental treaties. State actors may include both bureaucrats, or government-designated policy experts, and scientific advisers appointed by states to assist policy makers in their analysis of technically complex issues. Nonstate actors may include representatives of corporations, industry associations, and civil society advocacy groups. These actors participate in treaty development and implementation by lobbying decision makers, contributing ideas to policy discussions, and providing evidence that may influence policy choices.

The Role of Science in Environmental Policy Making Science plays an important role in the formulation of environmental treaties. The complexity of environmental problems and lack of certainty about hazards posed by various technologies and activities have led policy makers to rely increasingly on scientists for advice about appropriate policy responses. As advances in technology (e.g., chemical production and use) have changed the way humans interact with the environment, new issues relating to environmental and human health degradation have arisen. The risks associated with these technologies are often poorly understood, and

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evaluation of these hazards often requires individuals with scientific expertise to predict possible outcomes under conditions of great uncertainty. Policy makers have called on scientists to interpret complex technical information, assess the risks posed by various activities, and help devise appropriate policy responses to problems. Thus, scientists have become key actors in the formulation of many international environmental agreements. Governments, corporations, and advocacy groups all employ scientists to analyze problems and represent their interests during the stages of policy making in which scientific evaluation of environmental problems is carried out. Thus, although science is often regarded as separate from politics, in reality economic and social interests are often promoted during the earliest, supposedly politically neutral, stages of policy making. The technical complexity of many contemporary environmental problems can create opportunities for stakeholders to promote their political agendas by emphasizing knowledge gaps or scientific uncertainty. Parties on all sides of an issue can use scientific evidence (or the lack thereof) to argue in favor of their own policy preferences. Exaggeration of scientific uncertainty or strategic framing of issues are two examples of the way in which power can play an important role in the formulation and implementation of environmental treaties.

Enforcement Enforcing the rules established by international environmental treaties is very difficult. Most treaties rely on what can be summed up as peer pressure to encourage parties to abide by the terms of the agreements. Theoretically, environmental treaties are voluntary contracts that states sign and ratify only if they support the treaties’ objectives and are willing to implement any subsequent measures. In practice, nations may have difficulty abiding by the tenets of a treaty, or their interests change in ways that create incentives for noncooperation. Formal punishment (e.g., sanctions) for failure to abide by such agreements is virtually nonexistent. Although disincentives for noncooperation may appeal to members of civil society, policy makers often prefer to encourage a spirit of cooperation, in hopes that such support will lead to future opportunities for the advancement of an

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international environmental agenda. Punitive measures such as sanctions may discourage countries from engaging in policy-making discussions from the start. To encourage cooperation, some treaties (particularly those involving nations from both developed and developing nations) include financial or technical support mechanisms to help countries abide by the treaty’s requirements. Some observers have argued that offering more incentives for nations to sign and implement treaties would improve both the scope and effectiveness of environmental treaties. Such incentives could take the form of financial assistance, technological development, special trade agreements, and so forth. Jessica Templeton See also Agenda Setters; Coordination; Elite Theories; Framing; Global Governance; Knowledge and Power

Further Readings Andresen, S., Skodvin, T., Underdal, A., & Wettestad, J. (2000). Science and politics in international environmental regimes: Between integrity and involvement. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). (1996–2001). Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators (ENTRI). Palisades, NY: CIESIN. Retrieved from http://sedac.ciesin. columbia.edu/entri/ Conca, K., & Dabelko, G. D. (Eds.). (2004). Green planet blues: Environmental politics from Stockholm to Johannesburg. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Susskind, L., Moomaw, W., & Gallagher, K. (Eds.). (2002). Transboundary environmental negotiation: New approaches to global cooperation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

ESPIONAGE Literally the conduct of spying (from the French espion meaning “spy”), espionage is usually referred to as “covert collection” by the intelligence community, as opposed to the gathering and processing of information from publicly available open sources. Covert collection is broadly grouped into five collection methods, known in U.S. parlance as

“collection disciplines”: (1) human intelligence, (2) signals intelligence, (3) imagery intelligence, (4) measurements intelligence, and (5) signatures intelligence. Human intelligence (HUMINT) is the receipt of information from human sources or agents (career employees of intelligence services are always designated intelligence officers). This can include highly sensitive reporting from informants active within a target group or government known as penetration agents; defectors who are former members of the target groups who have changed sides and fled their home community; information provided by escaping servicemen or gleaned from the interrogation of prisoners of war; and less sensitive materials by debriefing refugees and business travelers. Human intelligence requires very careful evaluation or validation to establish what the information does or does not indicate, and whether the information can be trusted or not. Agents can be mistaken or captured and “played back” on their controllers to feed deceptive information, a practice known as doubling an agent. Agents may also be sincerely mistaken or exaggerate claims to curry favor with the intelligence officer to whom they report. In their favor, human sources can provide unique insight into the intentions, personalities, and methods of a target organization or government. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) comprises the interception and interpretation of (mainly) electromagnetic signals. SIGINT is divided into the interception and interpretation of communications (COMINT) and the monitoring of noncommunicative signals such as radar or telemetry transmissions or electromagnetic leakage from the operation of various electronic systems grouped together as electronic intelligence (ELINT). Signals can be intercepted from ground-level facilities such as mobile units of the army or air force on land or ships at sea and at fixed scale monitoring stations (known colloquially as “antenna farms”). Signals can also be monitored either by staffed or unstaffed aircraft operating in the atmosphere (known as air breathing platforms) or from Earth orbit by reconnaissance satellites (termed non-air-breathing platforms). Most communications, even over targeted channels, are of little or no intelligence value. Consequently, a distinction is drawn between the overall body of intercepted traffic or take and that which is actually of intelligence use, which is

Essentially Contested Concept

termed product. Product is typically as little as 10% or less of the take. Intercepted communications are generally divided between encrypted, which are in code, and clear traffic, which is not, whether in the form of voice or text. Encrypted materials must be decoded before they can be processed or exploited. However, even if a particular cipher is not successfully broken, a great deal can be learned about the target just from the pattern of communications being generated. Direction finding uses multiple receivers to triangulate the location of a transceiver, whereas traffic analysis examines which transceivers or “nodes” in a communications network send and receive the most traffic and to and from which other nodes. Imagery intelligence (IMINT) is the use of various imaging technologies to generate pictures that can then be interpreted to extract intelligence information. Photographic intelligence (PHOTINT) generally refers to images taken in the same light spectrum that the human eye uses to see. Much imagery intelligence employs nonvisible wavelengths, such as parts of the invisible spectrum that the eye cannot detect. Infrared (IR) imagery, for example, detects heat radiated or reflected by an object. IR also makes it possible to form judgments about the composition as well as shape and size of objects because different materials generate heat in different frequencies. Radar imagery can “look” through poor weather conditions, although it is best for imaging solid objects such as buildings and vehicles. Nonvisible wavelength imagery is termed either hyperspectral imagery or multispectral scanning. IMINT may be collected at ground level by elements of the uniformed services engaged in reconnaissance or surveillance and from above using air-breathing or space-based platforms much like SIGINT. Indeed, many satellites carry both imagery and SIGINT sensor suites. Satellites have the particular advantage for imagery purposes that they can legally overfly foreign countries in space, but aircraft are not allowed to enter a foreign country’s sovereign airspace without permission. Imagery intelligence is chiefly limited to that which can be observed. It is also vulnerable to denial and deception through concealment and what is called spoofing through the use of false or notional equipment and facilities such as phony

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tanks made of wood or empty buildings prepared to appear in active use. Although innovations in imagery are constantly made to penetrate them, denial and deception techniques also continuously develop and usually cost an order of magnitude or more or less than the imagery platform and its sensors. Moreover, high-resolution systems such as the U.S. KEYHOLE satellites or the Russian Zenit and Yantar systems are exceptionally expensive to build (in the late 1980s, the KEYHOLE 12/Improved Crystal satellites reportedly cost approximately one billion dollars each), and it is costly in fuel to alter their orbit to cover any new target. Consequently, they only operate in comparatively small numbers. Measurements and signatures intelligence (MASINT) is a very wide category that subsumes gathering and interpreting chemical or radioisotope signatures from sources such as air, soil, or water samples that may indicate particular weapons development, manufacture, and testing; information from active or passive sonar surveillance systems; and detecting and measuring seismic signals to detect and measure underground nuclear tests. Philip H. J. Davies See also Central Intelligence Agency; Intelligence

Further Readings Burrows, W. (1988). Deep black: The startling truth behind America’s top-secret spy satellites. New York: Berkley. Herman, M. (1996). Intelligence power in peace and war. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lowenthal, M. (2006). Intelligence: From secrets to policy. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press. Shulsy, A. N., & Schmitt, G. J. (2002). Silent warfare: Understanding the world of intelligence (3rd ed.). Washington, DC: Brassey’s.

ESSENTIALLY CONTESTED CONCEPT Power is often described as an essentially contested concept. That term was first introduced into political theory in 1958 by William Gallie, who applies it to various subject-terms including

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power. In some hands, the use of the idea of an essentially contested concept is taken to entail that the meaning of words such as power or interests has not been universally agreed. The terms have been discussed for many years, so the lack of consensus suggests that there will never be any agreement. However, there are many scientific terms about which there has been much debate and whose meaning in standard definitions has altered over the years. In physics, the concept of atoms has changed over time, and the central concept of gene in evolutionary theory has several meanings that are much debated. However, physicists and evolutionary biologists do not normally consider their concepts to be “essentially contested.” Rather, essentially contested concepts are not merely those over which there happens to be no agreement over a long time, but those that because of their central role in normative theory can never achieve a universally agreed definition. The claim that power has an ineradicably normative nature leads many to suggest that there can never be agreement over its meaning. If we take the term essential seriously in the idea of an essentially contested concept, then we are suggesting that some terms are necessarily of their nature contestable (and perhaps we should replace “contested” with “contestable” in such discussion). This would mean that even if people do reach agreement, they can never do so decisively; there will always be the possibility that someone can come up with a reason for challenging the definition. As William Connolly maintains, universal criteria for relevant reasons to accept a definition do not suffice to completely settle any debate. In The Terms of Political Discourse, Connolly sets out three criteria for essential contestability. First, that there is no settled agreement; second, that future attempts will fail; and third, that there are good reasons why such attempts will fail. The third makes contestation into essential contestability. That there can be no decisive agreement might derive from two processes. The first is that there is no empirical evidence that could prove one account of, say, the power structure, over another. The claim here is that empirical evidence will always fail to allow the possibility of agreement. We might illustrate this claim with the old community power debate. In that debate, pluralists maintain one vision of the power structure; elitists maintain

another view. Both recognize that within democracies politicians have to consider the views of the masses; otherwise, the politicians will be thrown out of office. Both recognize that democracy is better than dictatorship. However, pluralists maintain that power is generally dispersed among competing elites who represent the interests of different groups, that the same group does not dominate in all issue areas, and that there is some competition between groups within issue areas. Elitists maintain that the same sets of people dominate in all issue-areas and govern in their own interests. One might think that empirical evidence could decide between these competing views. We could see if the elites form one reference group or several. We could examine the circulation of elites. However, the two sides might disagree about what counts as circulation of elites and so whether there is one reference group or many. For example, both might agree that it is not the same individuals in positions of power, but elitists claim that they all come from the same social class and that whatever else they do, they protect the interests of that class. So both might recognize that different people exist in different issue areas but differ in their interpretation of whether those elites form one reference group or several. And they may differ about whether the elites govern almost exclusively in their own interest (and only support the interests of others to the extent the interests of the elite and the mass coincide). Here, the disagreement is over the meaning of elite in terms of reference group and in terms of interest. Even then, we might go farther. Pluralists might suggest that the elites do, by and large, govern in the interests of the masses because, once policies are put to the masses, most (and not always the same majority) support those policies. The elitists then maintain that surveys and polls are not decisive because we have to examine why people support those policies. People might not have full information; they might be mistaken about their own interests because of propaganda from the elites in positions of power. In this simplification of this community power debate, therefore, we can see that judgment or the empirical evidence is complicated by disagreement about the application of several terms such as elite, interests, and power. One possible solution is to see the terms in the rival accounts as terms within that theory, so the

Exchange Theory

terms elite, interests, and so on, can be marked relative to a theoretical claim. Hence, we have “elitep” and “elitee” for elites as understood by pluralists and elitists, with similar definitions for all other terms in the rival accounts. In that way, we do not have essential contestability over the concepts, though we might still have rival interpretations of the nature of the power structure. But what is the nature of that disagreement? One side cannot maintain the other is wrong in their claims if, given their definition of the terms, the power structure is correctly described, even though it is correctly described in the terms of the other theory. Without some common set of agreements about terms and their entailments, all we have are different theories. They are not even rival different theories. This leads to relativism, understood as the thesis that there is no truth of the matter in such cases, only underdetermined descriptions. One way the two views might be made to appear rivals is in terms of our normative attitudes toward them. The elitists generally believe that the structure of power in society is wrong, and power should be more dispersed. The pluralists are more sanguine because they believe that power is already dispersed. However, unless they agree over what dispersed means—and they are not likely to because the term power is assumed to be essentially contested—all we are left with are rival normative views, rather than rival empirical accounts. This constitutes the second reason why essentially contested concepts are thought to be so: that people have different normative commitments and they cannot reach agreement over those commitments. They might appear to agree that, for example, equality is good, or that power should be dispersed, but simply disagree over the empirical provenance of those terms. Keith Dowding See also Community Power Debate; Elite Theories; Interests; Pluralism

Further Readings Connolly, W. E. (1983). The terms of political discourse. Oxford, UK: Martin Robertson. Gallie, W. (1962). Essentially contested concepts. In M. Black (Ed.), The importance of language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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EXCHANGE THEORY Exchange theory was developed by social psychologists and sociologists to model human relationships as forms of reciprocal trade. People give things to each other to get things back. When I give a gift to a friend, I do so for exchange reasons, not necessarily to receive a gift but perhaps, say, out of gratitude and to further friendship through conversation. Exchange theorists model these exchanges much as economists model trade or bargaining. People who trade can create value by exchanging in a mutually beneficial way, but they might have divergent interests with regard to the precise nature of the trade in the sense that they place different valuations on the commodity being traded. The difference in valuation is the potential surplus created through trade, and this gives both the incentives to exchange. However, each might have an incentive to pretend to value the exchange less than they really do to gain extra from the trade. For example, one lover might pretend he is less enamored of his partner than he really is, to extract more care and attention from her. He might lead her to believe that if she does not give complete devotion he might leave the relationship, whereas he would show her complete devotion if he thought she was about to leave him. In economic terms, the two lovers have a common interest in the production of the “love surplus” but diametrically opposed interests with regard to its distribution. In standard (pre-game-theoretic) economic discussions of trade, power takes almost no role. All we have are two partners who can trade for mutual advantage. However, most people would see a potential power relationship in the previous discussion. Imagine for a moment two potential lovers. The first (a man, say) is desperate for the affection of the other, but the second (a woman) is relatively indifferent to the affection of the first. The asymmetry with regard to distribution of affection means that the second lover can demand great attention from the first while giving relatively little in return. Observing such a relationship, we might say she has a great hold over him: she has the power to force him to behave in ways that he would prefer not to. She will not let him go to the sporting events he would like to attend, mix with his old friends, and so on. There is an exchange going on, one that

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(by assumption) he prefers to not having this exchange at all, but one that disadvantages him relative to her. In other words, she gains more than he does because she values the exchange less. Exchange theory deals with these types of asymmetrical power relationships by examining the nature of trades with regard to the equity. In exchange theory, if both parties have similar attitudes toward equitable exchange—that is, both (a) hold the same beliefs about relative profit and (b) hold the same beliefs about equitable exchange—then inequitable social exchange will not continue in the long term because one party might feel annoyed and the other guilty. More interesting for social exchange theory is where the parties do not have similar attitudes. This is seen in the example given earlier, where the beliefs of the parties about the relative profit vary drastically. However, third parties (the friends of the two lovers, for example) might have similar attitudes toward relative profit and, hence, see one partner as exploiting the other. In social exchange theory, therefore, the degree of power of partners in social exchanges is measured relative to the valuations of the profits of the exchanging parties. Love is a good example precisely because “love is blind” and being in love might make one oblivious to what one would ordinarily see as exploitation. In retrospect, one might realize that a partner had great power over one and regret the inequitable exchange that one accepted at the time. In exchange theory, the degree to which one party can have power over another depends on the degree of dependence that one has on the other. In the “love market,” for example, if there is a shortage of supply of potential female lovers, say, then men would be more dependent on the lover with whom they have managed to enter into social exchange. The price of a loving relationship increases with the shortage of love-exchanging partners. Dependency thus gives power. Sometimes there might be mutual dependency, which should lead to equitable exchange. If there were only two people on a desert island, say, then they would have mutual dependence that might lead to equitable trade over time. However, one important aspect of exchange theory relative to standard economic bargaining models is that people might gain benefit from exchange itself. Thus, the two people on the desert island would not have equitable exchange if one of them

valued the exchange relationship itself more than did the other—say she is unable to forage for food as efficiently as he does, or he would be content living alone whereas she needs company. Exchange theory in terms of social relationships has been extended to power dependency theory in political network analysis. Here, organizations are thought to exchange resources (money, influence, information, etc.) for mutual gain. The more powerful organizations are those that are less dependent on the exchange than their partners. Thus, a government regulatory department that had several sources of information about the effects of regulation on its clientele would be less dependent on individual sources than would a department that had only one source of information. Thus, if the regulatory agency depended entirely on the industry or professional body that it was regulating, then the entire power over regulations would lie with those being regulated. Similarly, dependency theory has been applied to exchange relationships between nations and international organizations. Keith Dowding See also Bargaining; Chicken Games; Dependency Theory in International Relations; Exploitation; Networks, Power in; Networks and Communities

Further Readings Blau, P. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. New York: John Wiley. Coleman, J. (1991). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cook, K. S., & Emerson, R. M. (1978). Power, equity and commitment in exchange networks. American Sociological Review, 43, 721–739. Homans, G. C. (1961). Social relations: Its elementary forms. New York: Harcourt Brace.

EXCLUSION The concept of exclusion has risen to prominence in policy debate and academic research since the 1980s. The discovery of a “new” poverty at that time, characterized by growing long-term unemployment, an increased strain on welfare systems, and a proliferation of demands for social justice,

Exclusion

created an unstable political context and a concomitant struggle to define a program of action. This has seen the new poverty accounted for in three distinct ways. One focuses on the emergence of an underclass, denoting a body of people who have fallen beneath the conventional class structure. This does not simply add a new layer of stratification to modern industrial societies, for the dominant account of the underclass is of a body of people who are unable or unwilling to support themselves other then through crime, welfare, and sporadic employment in the informal economy. A second account focuses on the problem of social cohesion, which is framed by the challenges posed by globalization, and in particular the impact of market liberalization on national economies and the organization of public services. Here, the main concern is how to implement reforms without creating inequalities that might lead to social fragmentation and a loss of political legitimacy. Finally, the third account reemphasizes relations of domination, exploitation, and discrimination long associated with coercive state power, capitalist relations, patriarchy, and racism. These are very different ways of interpreting poverty and inequality today, and all are gathered into the concept of exclusion, which raises the question of whether and how such a contested concept might be used for the purpose of social and political analysis. One way of handling this diversity is to retain it, so that the different (and at times competing) accounts are examined as discourses. A discourse can be defined as a relational field of meanings that is constituted by and constitutive of a particular social context, and within which knowledge and practice intersect and interact with other discourses. In this way, exclusion can be seen to articulate a number of strategies and programs that together constitute a field of political struggle.

Power and the Excluded Each of the three discourses sketched can be presented as a statement about the excluded that is both diagnostic and evaluative: 1. The excluded have opted out. 2. The excluded have been left out. 3. The excluded have been kept out.

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The third statement, which is generally expressed by the political Left, has the most to say in connecting exclusion specifically to power. This is because the Left has tended to derive an understanding of power from a Marxist conception of ideology, of state, and of social relations. However, when examined as a discourse, each statement can be seen to adopt a distinct position on power relations. 1. The core argument is that the excluded belong to an underclass that has become disconnected from, and may even actively oppose, social norms and the rule of law. Whether because of lack of ability or willingness to exercise responsibility and self-discipline, the underclass poses a threat to social order. Assuming a moral decline, of which the underclass is merely the most visible manifestation, the discourse articulates a negativesum view of power relations, identifying the egalitarian aspirations of state welfare and affirmative action programs as primary causes. The central thesis is that far from eradicating poverty and inequality in the structure of opportunities, mechanisms of redistribution actually socialize the poor and the less capable into habits of dependency, which in turn erodes social power while fostering conditions that are conducive to criminality. 2. The core argument is that the excluded are the unfortunate and unintended victims of modernization, which is to say that they have been disadvantaged or marginalized by changes that have occurred in the context of late modernity. As a sociological thesis of unintended effects, this is a discourse of renewal and reform that finds its clearest formulation in the post-left–right third way politics. The central thesis is that we are on the cusp of a new age, with a new economy that can benefit everyone if, and only if, each and all recognize that they have responsibilities as well as rights. The discourse articulates a positive-sum view of power relations that links individual empowerment to social empowerment, devolving responsibility to the individual, transforming the citizen into a consumer of public and private services, and encouraging self-help and mutual assistance in the form of familial and community relations. 3. The core argument is that the excluded are a new servant class subjected to a global economy that operates in the interests of the dominant

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consumer classes, nations, and global regions. The discourse articulates a zero-sum view of power relations, and it identifies the “new” poor as migrant communities, ethnic minorities, solo mothers, and other marginalized groups who depend on sweatshop labor and low-paid service sector work. Furthermore, against the idea that the underclass is a collection of criminal and feckless individuals, it is argued that the impoverished conditions once associated with the third world are now found in the ghettos of first world countries, with the new poor blamed for their poverty, or at the very least made responsible for it, through neoliberal reforms that are making welfare entitlements tentative and conditional on participation in training programs and make-work schemes. Although each of these discourses provides a specific account of power and exclusion, they all converge on the more general problem of order.

Power, Order, and Exclusion At the most general level of analysis, the concept of exclusion evokes a conception of order that is based on a relation between an inside (inclusion, the included) and an outside (exclusion, the excluded). Between one and the other is a relation of difference and division, which raises the question of how such frontiers are constituted and instituted. The study of nationalism and ethnicity has produced an impressive literature on how populations, cultures, states, and territories are ordered into discreet entities through the construction of divisions and differences, the boundaries of which have given rise to the bloodiest conflicts in history. A more wide-ranging approach to this problematic can be found in the poststructuralist literature. Poststructuralist theory proposes that any ordered field or system—whether a discourse, a social order, or the international system of nation-states—is constituted through exclusion. The basic premise (drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance) is that each element within a system of elements defers meaning to itself by differing from the others. Chess is a good way of illustrating this point. If we want to explain chess to someone who knows nothing about the game, then it becomes clear that explaining what the rook can do is pretty meaningless unless we define

the rook in relation to the knight, the bishop, and all the other pieces. The chessboard supports a definite universe of identities, dispositions, and relations that are constituted through difference. When we move to the study of social order, then there are three important added dimensions: first, when taken as a whole, the system of elements can be conceptualized as a field of power relations; second, this field has been constituted through struggle and strategy; and third, order, which is the outcome of struggle, is constituted through the deferral or exclusion of some meanings and the inclusion of others. In this way, it can be argued that any ordered field or system is constituted by what it excludes, which is also to say that there is no order without exclusion. At this level of abstraction, the outside of order is essentially beyond language and representation: it is simply a horizon of deferred meanings that renders order unstable. The questions that follow are “how” questions: how is order actually created, how does it endure, how is it transformed? Studies inspired by the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have shown that order is accomplished through hegemony, which stabilizes the field by constructing a specific representation of the inside– outside relation. From a Western perspective, the most pertinent example today is the war on terror. In contrast to terrorist and terrorism, both of which can be given tangible form, terror is a bottomless discursive vessel that can be can be endlessly filled with meaning. As a purely negative symbol, terror is used to constitute a united inside that must be defended. Representations of this inside, such as “the coalition of the willing” or “the free world,” are symbolically charged and yet, like terror, remain essentially vague. In the same way, the political Right has waged a reasonably successful campaign against affirmative action and welfare in the United States by shaping the discourse of the underclass as an immanent threat. In Europe, however, the discourse of cohesion has become hegemonic, and although this may suggest a more egalitarian social democratic ethos, policy is focused on employability rather than on redistribution as the solution to exclusion. An alternative, though related, approach to the study of power, order, and exclusion is inspired by the genealogical method of critique developed by Michel Foucault. An example would be an analysis

Exclusion

of liberal government and exclusion. In postEnlightenment Europe, J. S. Mill could reasonably assert that there was a natural incompatibility between subjection to the will of others and selfgovernment. However, he also argued that the doctrine of liberty had definite limits: it did not apply to children and it did not apply to childlike or “primitive” cultures. His point was that neither was (yet) capable of self-government, so that in both cases the correct and legitimate mode of government was a benevolent form of despotism. In other words, children and childlike cultures must acquire the arts of self-government, which assumes a willingness and ability to learn. The argument, which is derived from universal claims about human reason and the equal moral worth of all individuals, reflected a widely held evolutionary theory of social change. And it was precisely this claim to the universal that constituted the exception to Mill’s axiom of self-government. Not all people were capable of practicing freedom and so, in the name of reason, civilization, and progress, the bodies and minds of children and childlike adults—or the capacity for action that is human life—was to be acted on. But acted on how, and by whom? The answer, at least in principle, was education. If those to be subjected to education and training were capable of self-government, then in time they would benefit from the freedoms that a liberal order bestows on its subjects. Freedom was made contingent on the willingness to learn and the ability to comply with specific norms of conduct, with the ideal subject of liberal order both a self-supporting laborer and a responsible citizen. The autonomy so dear to liberals turns out to be a mode of self-discipline, which can also be imposed by external authorities. This is an example of how knowledge is transformed into a regime of truth, not through the design of individuals such as Mill, but as discourses are assembled from struggles and strategies. The consistency of Mill’s position is found in the way that he assumes all people everywhere to be capable of self-government. What makes the adult of the civilized society different from children and primitives is not a question of essence; it is simply that the minds of children and the mentality of childlike peoples are less developed. And yet Mill’s argument belongs to a system of knowledge that is constructed against an outside that is made into an

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inferior reflection of itself. Classical liberal government was built on illiberal foundations, and yet this was concealed by projecting a socially constructed hierarchy onto a temporal axis so that it became part of the natural order of things. This type of analysis shows that the subject of liberal order was not given by nature only to be discovered during the age of Enlightenment. Instead, the subject was made within a tapestry of disciplinary powers that began with the child and the primitive and expanded through the growth of medicine, psychiatry, education, social work, charity, and child rescue. Furthermore, although liberalism is often associated with the impartial rule of law, in practice a liberal order deploys law and norm in dividing the population and excluding certain people from the status of the autonomous and rational individual. During the 19th century, paupers were subjected to the harsh conditions of the state-administered workhouse, unmarried mothers to private Magdalen asylums, juvenile delinquents to reformatories, and the children of the “perishing classes” to industrial schools. Likewise, the insane, the mentally defective, inebriates, and others perceived to be childlike or primitive in their habits were also excluded in the name of security, order, and progress. Whether coded as care, cure, or control, the effect of these social technologies was to construct a universe of subjects who collectively populated the margin of order and defined its internal limits. And as this margin was carried into the 20th century, so it became the focus of professional social work and the welfare state, as well as of more sinister strategies. Alert for defective minds, deficient bodies, malformed character, and dangerous dispositions that might corrupt the individual and degrade the population, the authorities policing the margin confronted some of the fundamental questions of the day: should the delinquent, the defective, and the depraved be left to their own devices in the hope that they would eventually die out? Could they be cured? Was it better to place them in custody so that the risk of procreation was controlled? Or the most insidious of all: should they be exterminated, either through selective sterilization, or collectively, by applying the techniques of bureaucratic organization and industrial production to the task of purification? In the wake of the Holocaust, there was some effort involved in opposing

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the egalitarian strategy of the welfare state to the brutal techniques of eugenics, but this tends to overlook the fact that both are examples of what Foucault called biopower, or sociopolitical technologies that act on life and living populations. More recently, and coinciding with the changes and challenges sketched earlier—the discovery of a new poverty, an increased strain on welfare systems, and a proliferation of demands for social justice—the exclusions that operated through incarceration have been challenged. Although this has had a limited impact on the prison, there has nonetheless been a general trend away from custody and detention to care and treatment within the community. A question for analysts today is whether social inclusion is a form of empowerment, a new mode of control, or both simultaneously.

Order Without Exclusion? In contrast to the distinctly modern projects of emancipation and equality, the prevalence of debate on inclusion and exclusion suggests a shift away from the pursuit of a final emancipation or end-state of achieved equality. This is coincident with a range of debates on postmodernity, late modernity, and a second or reflexive modernity. A mode of social organization might be emerging that is predicated on the insight that exclusion is the condition of possibility for order, and that order can never be more than provisional because the standing conditions that structure and stabilize social relations are contingent on political struggle. Kevin Ryan See also Discourse; Domination; Foucault, Michel; Hegemony; Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal

Further Readings Bauman, Z. (1998). Work, consumerism and the new poor. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Garland, D. (2001). The culture of control. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Levitas, R. (1998). The inclusive society? Social exclusion and New Labour. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Ryan, K. (2007). Social exclusion and the politics of order. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

EXECUTIVE POWER The separation of powers theory, as developed by the 18th-century French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, distinguishes between executive, legislative, and judiciary power as three branches of government that are not to infringe on each other’s constitutionally vested competences. The executive consists of a government, its ministerial bureaucracy, and subordinate governmental agencies. The separation of powers doctrine more or less accurately describes power relationships in presidential systems, but in parliamentary systems, executive and legislative powers are fused because the executive’s capacity to govern depends on the parliamentary majority’s willingness to support it. In place of an institutional separation of powers, parliamentary systems are therefore characterized by a functional division of powers between the government majority and the opposition. All this is only empirically relevant in democratic political systems because in autocratic regimes formal allocation of powers has no systematic consequences for how real power is executed by dictators, ruling parties, or military juntas. The executive power is the authority to enforce laws and to ensure that they are implemented as intended. Organizational structures to carry out these functions vary considerably. Intragovernmental relationships in presidential systems vary between a clearly dominant president with subordinate departmental chiefs in the United States and a more evenly balanced power structure in some of the Latin American countries. In parliamentary systems, the role of the prime minister varies relative to ministers, depending on cabinet manuals or informal traditions and on whether the government is formed by just one party or is a coalition government. Whereas the British prime minister is clearly first among equals, the constitutional position of the German federal chancellor with his or her competence on guidelines is politically limited because the chancellor has to respect the autonomy of his or her coalition partner(s). In other parliamentary democracies, Italy being a good example, the prime minister has virtually no prerogative competences at all. In addition, presidents in presidential systems combine the roles of head of

Exercise Fallacy

state and head of government, whereas in parliamentary systems with their dual executive, there exist elected presidents or monarchs as heads of state alongside the prime minister. In some instances, these presidents hold real political power that has given rise to a—however heavily debated—new type of democratic governance: semi-presidentialism. The relationship between the government, no matter how power is internally allocated, and the bureaucracy has traditionally been seen as hierarchically structured. On this account, ministers are seen as principals who rely on ministerial civil servants and agencies as agents with all the agency loss problems that delegation of power relationships implies. Parallel to delegation theory, which studies the opportunities to prevent or minimize agency loss and to maintain political control of bureaucratic implementation, core executive studies have recently begun to criticize the traditional hierarchical accounts of the interorganizational structure of the executive by pointing out that network governance may be a more appropriate concept. André Kaiser See also Legislative Power; Prime Ministerial and Presidential; Separation of Powers

Further Readings Dunleavy, P., & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2007). Core executive studies in Britain. Public Administration, 68(1), 3–28. Mainwaring, S., & Shugart, M S. (1997). Presidentialism and democracy in Latin America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Weller, P. (1985). First among equals: Prime ministers in Westminster systems. London: George Allen & Unwin.

EXERCISE FALLACY Exercise fallacy was coined by Peter Morriss, from a point made by Anthony Kenny. Both authors start from the recognition that power refers to a capacity or disposition, rather than to an event or occurrence. Philosophers who have investigated how we should understand the meanings of such dispositional terms have started with

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simple natural powers, such as “soluble.” To say that sugar is soluble in water is to say (something like) that if sugar is put into water, it will dissolve. This does not describe any event that has occurred; it is a claim about what would happen if such an event did occur. What is meant by saying, “This sugar lump is soluble in water,” is very different from what is meant by saying, “This sugar lump has dissolved in water.” Or, in Kenny’s example, whisky only begins to exercise the power to intoxicate after it is imbibed, but it possesses this power even when it is sitting harmlessly in the bottle. The power endures. Ignoring this distinction—to think that a power can only exist when it is being exercised—is to commit the exercise fallacy. Both philosophers and social scientists have been tempted by the exercise fallacy. The motivation for doing so of many philosophers (and some social scientists) has been a wish to rid our language of unscientific metaphysical ideas, such as an immortal soul or a spirit of the age driving history. This led to the view that we can only meaningfully talk about what we can observe. Postwar social scientists were much influenced by this empiricist trend in philosophy. They similarly wanted to rid social science of much of what they considered to be metaphysical nonsense. Thus, the behaviorist school wanted to limit social science (particularly psychology) to talk about behavior, and thus remove the “unscientific” focus on mental events, which were necessarily unobservable, and therefore perhaps not there at all. Behavioralism in political science demanded a similarly pared-down vocabulary. And that led to the exercise fallacy in political science. Thus, Robert Dahl (among others) claimed that to say that someone had power was to say no more than that that person was causing something to happen. But this is false: just as the whisky’s power exists when the whisky is not being drunk, so does the president’s power exist when he or she is not doing anything with it. More recently another influential, and very different, school in social science has taken to committing the exercise fallacy: disciples of Michel Foucault. This is partly because of an elementary blunder in translation, in which two, quite different, French words—pouvoir, which denotes the action, and puissance, which designates something lasting and permanent—are both rendered by the English word power. This has resulted in its

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becoming an orthodoxy, among Foucauldians writing in English, that power exists only when it is exercised. Thus, the exercise fallacy has returned in this banal and uninteresting form. Peter Morriss See also Ability; Ableness; Dahl, Robert A.; Foucault, Michel; Morriss, Peter; Vehicle Fallacy

Further Readings Kenny, A. (1975). Will, freedom and power. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A philosophical analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

EXIT AND VOICE AS FORMS OF POWER If you want others to do as you wish, you can ask them, or threaten them in some way. In certain circumstances, a threat to walk away can make asking someone more likely to succeed. Albert Hirschman made this point well in his famous book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). The basic idea is quite simple: people or organizations have two main responses to the decline in the quality of a product. They may voice, such as complain, or exit by buying another company’s product. This insight extends to a variety of situations where people became dissatisfied, such as consumers of public services, members of political parties, or as employees, and in each situation people use the voice and exit options open to them. Hirschman did not just describe these actions; he argued that they might be rival options, or complementary ones. People might trade off voice and exit; if exit is easy and cheap, then people tend to voice less when they have an exit option. The threat of losing customers helps keep organizations such as business firms on their toes; losing customers affects their profit line. In that sense, the market power of consumers is their exit strategy, and the individual power of a consumer is the threat of exit. A trade union gains power of voice in negotiating with management with the threat of pulling

workers out of their jobs. But entities other than firms in a competitive market might be more sanguine about the possibility of people exiting. An authoritarian regime might be happy to allow citizens to leave rather than give them a voice. In that sense, the salience of exit and voice may give more power to those who are already not responsive and who do not like competition. Individuals who leave are not exercising power because their exit shows they have failed to get a response from their target. Only the threat of exit is a power resource, and it only works if the target cares about the exit of the person. There are many situations where individuals can trade off exit–voice to their advantage and wield power. For one, they can use their potential for exit to make their voices heard. Discontented employees know about this weapon very well: even hinting they might leave their job can be an easy way to get better terms and conditions and to avoid the costs of leaving. Sometimes the possibility of exit means that the individual can voice more strongly, in what is called “noisy exit.” Critics of authoritarian regimes, such as of the former German Democratic Republic, can protest more effectively if they know they can leave. Alternatively, consumers or citizens are reluctant to exit because they have loyalty, so they voice with added passion. Loyalists might voice even more strongly when others are leaving because they can point to the destructive effects of exit. And those on their way out can give a signal to the rest left behind. So even though voice weakens in the face of exit, the threat of exit can strengthen voice in some circumstances. The key insight is that the ingenuity people display in communicating their options to the powerful allows them to increase their influence. Peter John See also Bargaining; Free Market; Loyalty; Threats; Trade

Further Readings Dowding, K., John, P., Mergoupis, T., & Van Vugt, M. (2000). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Analytic and empirical developments. European Journal of Political Research, 37(4), 469–495. Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations and states. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Expectancy Confirmation, Power and

EXPECTANCY CONFIRMATION, POWER AND When people interact with others, they often use preconceived beliefs and expectations as guides to action. Their actions, in turn, may prompt interaction partners to behave in ways that confirm initial beliefs. This phenomenon, in which belief creates reality, is known by several names—the self-fulfilling prophecy, expectancy confirmation, and behavioral confirmation (terminology that emphasizes how the target’s actual behavior confirms the perceiver’s initial beliefs). The behavioral confirmation scenario has been demonstrated in a series of empirical investigations in which a person (the perceiver), having adopted erroneous beliefs about another person (the target), acts in ways that cause the behavior of the target to confirm the perceiver’s expectations. Considerable evidence suggests behavioral confirmation effects are robust and generalize over a wide range of expectations and interaction contexts. Moreover, research has demonstrated that power plays a possible causal role in this interplay of belief and behavior in several compelling ways: those with expectations tend to hold positions of power, the motivations of powerful perceivers differ from those of powerless targets, behavioral conformation is particularly likely within interactions between powerful perceivers and powerless targets, and expectations themselves create a sense of relative power thereby turning perceivers into powerful perceivers. One way that power may be implicated in behavioral confirmation is that those with expectations are often those in positions of power. One can readily think of a variety of situations with powerful perceivers and less powerful targets. For example, teachers, interviewers, employers, and therapists all have positions of power and are apt to have expectations about others with less power. Moreover, these positions of power often make expectations relevant; for example, teachers may rely on expectations about student performance to guide their teaching efforts, employers may rely on expectations in supervising employees, and therapists may draw on expectations in designing therapeutic strategies. Thus, it may be particularly likely that people in positions of power are guided by

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their expectations in dealing with those of lesser power. Moreover, research by Mark Snyder and Julie Haugen indicates that the motivations of perceivers often differ from those of targets and these differences set the stage for behavioral confirmation. Typically, the motivation of perceivers is to “get to know” the target and this motivation leads perceivers to use expectations as a guide for their interactions, as those in positions of high power rely more on stereotyped expectations in their dealings with persons of lesser power. For example, a perceiver interviewing someone expected to be tardy is likely to ask about the times the target had been late in the last month; any affirmative response confirms the initial expectation of tardiness. Further, because of the power associated with the position of interviewer, the interviewer may have ample opportunity to direct the interaction based on his or her expectations, choosing the interview topics that are addressed and making it difficult for the target to avoid discussion areas that might not confirm the perceiver’s expectations. By contrast, the motivation of the target is often “to get along” with the perceiver. This motivation leads targets to acquiesce to whatever inquiries a perceiver directs at the target and not attempt to redirect the conversation. Even if targets are aware of negative expectations held about them, they put themselves at risk attempting to disconfirm the expectations that perceivers hold about them. In general, people are not pleased when their expectations are disconfirmed. Thus, targets may actively confirm expectations in an effort to please and “get along” with the powerful perceiver. Furthermore, the net effect of the interrelations between power, motivation, and the roles of perceiver and target is that behavioral confirmation is particularly likely in interactions that involve a powerful perceiver and a powerless target. In his research, John Copeland demonstrated that power can be created in the laboratory and can be as simple as making a decision about whether someone else should continue in an experiment. Thus, in the classic perceiver/target experimental paradigm, when the power to decide whether the other participant will have the opportunity to earn a reward in a subsequent phase of the experiment is assigned to the perceiver, behavioral confirmation occurs; however, when this kind of explicit social power is

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given to the target, the perceiver’s expectation has no effect on the behavior of the target. In addition, motivation follows power, such that the person with the power is motivated to get to know the other person; when that person is the perceiver, he or she acts on expectations and treats the target in ways that elicit behavioral confirmation. Finally, power confers the opportunity and ability to have one’s expectations confirmed; the expectations themselves confer a sense of power on those who hold them. In experimental settings, Austin Baldwin, Marc Kiviniemi, and Mark Snyder found that the simple act of providing an expectation about an anticipated interaction partner is sufficient to elicit feelings of power over that person. This sense of power comes from feeling that one knows something about someone else and that this knowledge will be of use in social interaction. This effect seems particularly pronounced when the knowledge associated with holding an expectation confers a sense of relative advantage (i.e., that one knows something about the other person that the other person does not know about oneself). The intricate interplay of expectations, power, and behavioral confirmation is not only of theoretical significance, but has “real world” implications too. Every day, people encounter others who have stereotypes, have implicit and explicit biases, or simply have access to information about them. These a priori expectations are often erroneous and, perhaps more often than not, are in the hands of those who have some sort of power. Whether it is the teacher with overt expectations about what minority children are capable of, or the prospective employer who is scrutinizing the résumé of a job applicant eagerly seeking employment, a powerful perceiver’s expectations are likely to affect the target’s behavior and consequently his or her opportunity for success. Mark Snyder and Jennifer Filson See also Knowledge and Power; Relational Power; Social Power

Further Readings Snyder, M., & Stukas, A. (1999). Interpersonal processes: The interplay of cognitive, motivational, and

behavioral activities in social interaction. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 273–303. Snyder, M., Tanke, E., & Berscheid, E. (1977). Social perception and interpersonal behavior: On the selffulfilling nature of social stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 656–666.

EXPLOITATION To exploit something in the most general sense of the term simply means to make use of it. Especially with regard to natural resources, exploitation tends to refer to consumption only. What makes the concept a basic one of social critique and theoretically controversial is that apart from this value-neutral meaning, exploitation can also be used pejoratively. In social theory, the concept of exploitation is usually used to characterize social relations in which an actor or category of actors uses others for their own ends because of a fundamentally asymmetric power relationship between them. Accordingly, most authors define exploitation as taking advantage of another person unfairly, that is, as using someone who, because of his or her disadvantaged and inferior position, has to comply with the exploiter’s will. However, the classic and most influential theorist of exploitation, namely Karl Marx, did not share this standard account of the concept.

Marx: Surplus Labor and Surplus Value Marx’s account differed in two ways. First, Marx explicitly rejected the moral framing characteristic of the standard notion of exploitation. Second, he restricted the concept to the field of labor relations. Most disputes about the concept of exploitation center around these two issues. The first concerns the status of the concept of exploitation: what is the function of the notion of exploitation in social theory? The second issue concerns the range of social phenomena to which the concept of exploitation is applicable: which social relations can be exploitative? Marx identified exploitation as the appropriation of another’s surplus labor. Surplus labor is the amount of labor exceeding what is necessary for the reproduction of the worker’s labor power, that

Exploitation

is, for producing the worker’s living conditions sufficient for the worker’s capability to keep on working. Appropriation of surplus labor is by no means specific to capitalist societies. It is rooted in forced labor and just changes in form in relation to the different ways forced labor has historically been organized in societies. In slaveholder and feudal societies, exploitation as the appropriation of surplus labor occurred in the form of a direct appropriation of surplus labor or in the form of a requisition of the surplus product, respectively. Leaving aside that the institution of slavery disguises the fact that not all of the slave’s labor is exploited insofar as the exploiter is interested in the reproduction of the slave’s labor power, to Marx there is nothing mysterious about these historically prevalent forms of exploitation. What is enigmatic is rather how exploitation can occur within capitalist societies given that these societies, in principle, have abolished forced labor and rest on free labor, instead. The Marxian theory of exploitation is intended to solve this riddle. Marx’s analysis of capitalist exploitation centers around his notion of the “doubly free worker”: Under capitalist conditions, the worker is free in the first sense of being the owner of his labor power, legally uncoerced to work for another apart from contractual labor relations the worker enters into at his or her discretion; the worker is free also in the second sense of being free from any means of production, hence, undermining the worker’s freedom in the first sense, necessitated to sell his or her labor power to make a living. Nonetheless, neither is the surplus labor nor the surplus product of the worker directly appropriated by another under capitalist conditions. The free worker is not exploited in the same way as the slave and the serf. How can the worker be exploited at all? How is it possible that capitalists appropriate free workers’ surplus labor? The mystery resides in the fact that under capitalist conditions goods appear as commodities insofar as they are primarily produced for the market, and all goods can, in principle, be converted into each other (by monetary means) through economic transactions. Therefore, all these transactions have to take the form of an exchange of equivalents. The commodity of labor power is no exception to this rule. Marx argues that the capitalist economy functions in such a way that the workers are paid according to the value of their labor

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power. There is no robbery involved in capitalist labor relations. To explain how capitalist labor relations can embody an exchange of equivalents as well as the capitalists’ appropriation of the workers’ surplus labor, Marx focuses on the specific form surplus labor takes under capitalist conditions, namely surplus value. Capitalist exploitation, then, consists in the appropriation of surplus value. Key to Marx’s notion of surplus value is his analysis of the singular character of the commodity of labor power that is rooted in the labor theory of value he developed on the basis and in critique of classical political economy (most notably Adam Smith and David Ricardo). According to this conception, labor is the sole source of value. Value, Marx states, depends on, but must not be confused with usage value, that is, a good’s particular utility for an actor. In case such goods result from human activity, they have to be understood as products of concrete labor, that is, qualitatively defined labor. Concrete labor—such as, for example, the productive activities of a carpenter and of a weaver—as well as the different usage values of the products are incommensurable, however. Value, in contrast, that allows for the exchangeability of commodities in a market economy (and is realized in economic transactions as exchange value), arises from abstract labor, labor stripped of all qualitative characteristics and determined in purely quantitative terms. Accordingly, the value of a commodity is defined by the (average) amount of labor power necessary for its production. The singular character of the commodity of labor power, then, resides in that its usage value consists in producing value. Labor relations embody an exchange of equivalents insofar as workers are paid whatever is necessary for the reproduction of their labor power; surplus value is produced by consumption of this labor power in excess of the amount necessary for its reproduction, that is, by the worker’s additional working time beyond what would be necessary for his or her reproduction. Being rooted in an exchange of equivalents, no injustice is involved in capitalist exploitation, according to Marx. Yet, the concept of exploitation receives attention just for the reason that it is not normatively neutral. It is intended to identify a wrongness hidden behind the façade of free contractual relations. One reason why Marx did not frame exploitation in normative terms is that he

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believed subjects’ normative assumptions to depend on the socioeconomic conditions prevailing in their society. If, however, one grants more autonomy to the realm of moral argument than the materialist Marxian scheme of society allows for, that is, the scheme of a foundational economic base and an ephemeral superstructure (of politics, law, morality, art, etc.), then the normative ambiguities of the notion of exploitation are open to debate. What kind of wrongness is involved in exploitation?

Other Analyses of Exploitation An obvious answer, it would seem, is that because the liberal notion of freedom disguises the social coercion that forces the “free” worker to sell his or her labor power, capitalist labor relations resemble an exchange of equivalents only on the surface; without such coercion workers would own the whole product of their labor. They are actually entitled to this whole product, and the wrongness of exploitation consists precisely in the fact that they receive less than they are entitled to. The normative core of such an understanding of exploitation is a strong notion of self-ownership according to which agents have the basic right freely to dispose of and capitalize on their natural talents. This interpretation of the concept of exploitation has led some authors to claim a close affinity between Marxism and libertarianism; it is fundamental to left-libertarianism and at the heart of an extensive debate on the normative content of exploitation that has taken place within analytical Marxism. The classic contribution to this debate is John Roemer’s influential analysis of exploitation. Roemer uncouples the concept of exploitation from the highly problematic labor theory of value that (in its Marxian as well as Ricardian, etc., variants) had been superseded already in the late 19th century by the neoclassic subjective theory of value based on the concept of marginal utility. Instead of relying on an objective theory of value, Roemer grounds his approach on a theory of property relations. This leads him to define as exploitative all those situations in which actors are worse off than they would be under conditions of an equal distribution of (external) resources. Exploitation, then, arises from distributive inequality, especially the unequal distribution of the means of production.

Thus, Roemer’s analysis downsizes the normative weight of exploitation that is made dependent on a theory of just distribution. Indeed, Roemer even advises Marxists to redirect their focus from exploitation to inequalities in the distribution of assets and points to the fact that exploitation only counts for one kind of injustice among others. Confronting the problem how, on the one hand, actors can be conceived of as responsible agents (thereby allowing for legitimate inequalities) while, on the other hand, acknowledging that inequalities have to be remedied by redistributive measures insofar as they arise from conditions that are beyond an individual’s control, he further argues for certain restrictions on self-ownership, the supposed normative core of the Marxian concept of exploitation. The normative implications of the concept of exploitation are qualified by this reconceptualization, but of greater importance are the consequences for its explanatory function. According to Roemer, exploitation might be overcome by redistributive measures; in this regard, there is no difference to the neoclassic notion of exploitation as payment of workers beneath the marginal product of their labor. Marx, in contrast, believed that the private ownership of the means of production must inevitably lead to exploitation for systemic reasons. Hence, redistribution (and, for that matter, any intervention confined to the distributive sphere) must necessarily fall short; only a reorganization of the economic system, that is, the productive sphere, would be suited to eliminate the fundamental wrongness of capitalist societies. In this view, the proposition that exploitation is the fundamental wrongness of capitalist societies does not imply that there are no other kinds of injustice, possibly even of greater harm to those suffering them; it simply means that exploitation is that wrongness that sustains conditions under which suffering is inevitable. Whether convincing in this respect, it is central to Marx’s account of exploitation that it does incorporate an explanation of its systemic causation; such an explanation is in danger of getting lost in Roemer’s reformulation. The latter also applies to another set of conceptual analyses. Besides the extensive debate on exploitation, justice, and self-ownership in analytical Marxism and the discussion about the relevance of coercion and structural factors to exploitation,

Exploitation

questions about the concept’s normative content have also been raised concerning the issues of consent and harm. Joel Feinberg has argued for a very broad understanding of exploitation and has defined it in terms of gaining from a relationship with another person; such a relationship may rest on consent and does not necessarily involve any harm in the sense of a violation of rights. Subsequently, Alan Wertheimer has claimed that exploitation can involve a moral wrong even if the exploited is not harmed because a social relationship may be mutually advantageous, but less rewarding to one party than it should be. In determining what actors are entitled to, Wertheimer discusses the neoclassic marginal utility principle and develops the concept of a hypothetical fair market price. However, his focus on noneconomic exploitative relationships might be better served by framing the concept of exploitation itself in noneconomic terms. Such an approach has been presented by Robert Goodin, who defines exploitation as taking advantage of another person’s vulnerabilities in an unusual situation and, therefore, in an inappropriate manner. Yet, it has been remarked that Goodin’s commitment to a consequentialist moral theory undermines his assumption that exploitation can be mutually advantageous. Ruth Sample develops an alternative Kantian conception of exploitation as degradation that might be suited to capture mutually advantageous exploitative relations and cases of exploitation the Marxian analysis did not focus on. Debates about exploitation are not limited to the question whether the concept should be interpreted in moral terms and, if so, what its normative content consists of; discussion also gravitates around the problem of identifying the scope of the concept of exploitation. Marx restricted it to labor relations and focused his analysis on capitalist relations of wage labor that he tended to identify with industrial labor relations. Niklas Luhmann has argued that the concept of exploitation is linked to stratified societies and is not applicable to today’s functionally differentiated world society for which the distinction between inclusion and exclusion might turn out to be central; others have argued that current structural transformations render exploitation anything but obsolete. To highlight changes in exploitative labor relations

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caused by economic globalization, namely the increased power of employers to capitalize on workplace insecurity by threatening to shift production to another country, Pierre Bourdieu has coined the term flexploitation. The shift from industrial to service labor represents another structural change of the economy that has been at the center of a different discussion dating farther back. Disagreement concerns the question whether the labor theory of value, still defended by some, and the concept of surplus value can be applied to white-collar work. In view of recent changes within the field of service labor, the growing importance of immaterial production, and the structural transformation in the direction of knowledge-based societies, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have proposed uncoupling the notion of value from quantitative criteria and defining exploitation as the private appropriation of collectively produced value. With this move, Hardt and Negri also aim to do justice to criticisms according to which the concept, whether based on a version of the labor theory of value or not, remains too narrow and blinds us to important cases of exploitation when modeled on capitalist labor relations. Most important, such shortcomings of classic accounts of exploitation have been demonstrated by feminist authors. They have pointed to affective and emotional exploitation in the context of unpaid labor and reproductive activities in the supposedly private sphere of the household and the family. Moreover, the specific vulnerabilities of children and women have been discussed with regard to sexual exploitation. Last but not least, recent developments in biotechnology have put pressure on the distinction between exploitation within social relations and exploitation of natural resources. As this overview indicates, technological trends and structural changes constantly spark new debates. Nor is there a consensus on the scope or on the normative content and the theoretical function of exploitation. It will remain a contested concept. David Strecker See also Capital, Marxist; Critical Theory; False Consciousness; Gender, Role of Power in; Ideology; Justice; Marx, Karl; Marxist Accounts of Power; Social Power; Structural Power; Substructure and Superstructure; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power

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Further Readings Arneson, R. (1981). What’s wrong with exploitation? Ethics, 91, 202–227. Cohen, G. A. (1990). Marxism and contemporary political philosophy, or: Why Nozick exercises some Marxists more than he does any egalitarian liberals. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16 (Suppl.), 363–387. Goodin, R. (1987). Exploiting a situation and exploiting a person. In A. Reeve (Ed.), Modern theories of exploitation (pp. 166–200). London: Sage. Nielsen, K., & Ware, R. (Eds.). (1997). Exploitation (2nd ed.). Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Reiman, J. (1987). Exploitation, force, and the moral assessment of capitalism: Thoughts on Roemer and Cohen. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16, 3–41. Roemer, J. (1982). A general theory of exploitation and class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sample, R. J. (2003). Exploitation: What it is and why it’s wrong. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Vallentyne, P., & Steiner, H. (Eds.). (2001). Leftlibertarianism and its critics: The contemporary debate. New York: Palgrave. Wertheimer, A. (1996). Exploitation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wilkinson, S. (2003). Bodies for sale: Ethics and exploitation in the human body trade. London: Routledge. Wood, A. (1995). Exploitation. Social Philosophy and Policy, 12, 136–158.

EXTENDED DETERRENCE The idea of extended deterrence is for one actor (A), normally a state, to provide for the security of another (B) by threatening to punish another actor (C) should C undertake a particular course of action against B. The concept is therefore focused on the deterrent concept of punishment rather than denial. At the very heart of the concept of extended deterrence lies the issue of credibility—is another actor prepared to act on behalf of a third party? If the answer is yes, then extended deterrence can work; if the answer is no, then extended deterrence automatically fails. The question is whether actor C believes the threats being made by actor A to protect B. Extended deterrence has been an element within the international system from its beginning. For

example, after the annexation of Czechoslovakia by Germany in 1939, the British and French governments attempted to use extended deterrence as a mechanism to protect Poland from German advances, but this failed, with German forces invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Nevertheless, the concept of extended deterrence is most closely associated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Article V of the Washington Treaty, which formed NATO, stated, “An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all . . .” In reality, this meant that the dominant member—the United States—provided a conventional and ultimately a nuclear guarantee against the threat posed by the Soviet Union during the cold war. The U.S. nuclear provision allowed a number of NATO members to abandon their own nuclear programs and concentrate on providing for their conventional defense. Although the United States had either a monopoly on the possession of nuclear weapons or the ability to strike the Soviet Union without a requisite response against the United States itself, the guarantee was seen by many to be secure. However, with the development of a Soviet capacity to strike the United States from the late 1950s on, the policy became increasingly questioned, especially once the United States and Soviet Union reached the point of mutually assured destruction. In the language of the 1970s debate, would a U.S. president be prepared to sacrifice Washington or New York to save London or Paris? Many thought not but no war resulted, and the United States officially continues to provide a nuclear guarantee to the rest of NATO. Interestingly, the British government used these doubts about the U.S. nuclear guarantee as one of the justifications for the maintenance of its own nuclear deterrent, with references made to the importance of a second center for decision making (i.e., not just the United States) as a mechanism for reinforcing the concept of extended deterrence. Extended deterrence is not solely a NATO concept or one that revolves only around the threatened use of nuclear weapons. The United States has consistently provided protection for a number of other states during the cold war and even today, such as South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. In the case of the first two, this involves the permanent

Extended Deterrence

stationing of U.S. forces in those countries as a sign of the U.S. commitment to their defense. In the case of Taiwan, the United States has signaled its support through the sale of arms and the periodic deployment of aircraft carriers near to Taiwan during times of heightened tension between Taiwan and mainland China including, at times, sailing such carrier battle groups directly between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. Nor should it be assumed that the concept is entirely a U.S. idea. Other states have sought to protect allies against potential opponents over time with various military alliances reflecting a commitment to extended deterrence. For example, the Five Power Pact in the Pacific aimed at China commits the United Kingdom to the defense of

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Malaysia and Singapore in conjunction with New Zealand and Australia. Andrew M. Dorman See also Coercion and Power; Conventional Deterrence; Legitimation; Offense/Defense Dominance

Further Readings Bluth, C. (1995). Britain, Germany and Western nuclear strategy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Stromseth, J. E. (1988). The origins of flexible response. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Yost, D. S. (1999). The U.S. and nuclear deterrence in Europe (Adelphi Paper 326). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

F unequal and selects the one that it thinks is more valuable. If the divider knows the chooser’s preferences, it can exploit this information to make one pile slightly more valuable than 50% for the chooser, so the chooser will select it, keeping for itself the pile it values more (assuming it values different goods from the chooser). Is divide-and-choose fair? To make an assessment, consider the following criteria for determining what a fair share is:

FAIR DIVISION Fair-division procedures offer ways to restrain the exercise of power by preventing one player from gaining more than its “fair share.” Such procedures go back to the Hebrew Bible. For example, Abram (later to become Abraham) and Lot had to decide who would get Canaan and who Jordan. They reached a decision by using a form of divide-and-choose when Abram said to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, between my herdsmen and yours, for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Let us separate: if you go north, I will go south; and if you go south, I will go north” (Gen. 14:8–9). In a similar vein, Solomon had to decide which of two women was the mother of a disputed baby and proposed cutting the baby in half, which elicited a protest from the real mother that revealed her identity. The oldest known procedure for dividing a single divisible good, such as a cake or land, between two players is “I cut, you choose,” or divide-andchoose. The same procedure can also be used if there are multiple goods: the divider partitions the goods into two piles, and the chooser selects one pile. If the divider has no knowledge of the chooser’s preferences, the divider should divide the goods 50–50 for itself. That way, whichever pile the chooser selects, the divider is assured of getting 50%. The chooser, on the other hand, will get more than 50% if it thinks the two piles are

1. Proportionality. If there are n players and they are equally entitled to the goods, a division is proportional if each player thinks it received at least 1/n of the total value. 2. Envy-freeness. If no player is willing to give up its portion in exchange for the portion another received, this player will not envy any other player. In two-player disputes, a division is envy-free if and only if it is proportional. In the case of three players, however, envyfreeness is more demanding than proportionality. For example, I may think I’m getting 1/3, but if I think you are getting 1/2 (because the third player, in my eyes, is getting only 1/6), then I will envy you. Whereas an envy-free allocation is always proportional, even when there are more than two players, a proportional allocation is not necessarily envy-free. 3. Equitability. A division is equitable if all players think they received exactly the same value above 1/n. Thus, no player P envies another’s 239

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happiness for getting more of the value in its eyes than P got in its eyes. To illustrate the difference between equitability and envyfreeness for two players, an allocation is envyfree if one player thinks it received 51% and the other 90%. But it is not equitable, because they both did not receive the same amount above 50%, making the 51% player less happy than the 90% player. 4. Efficiency. An allocation is efficient if there is no other allocation that is better for one player without being worse for another. Efficiency by itself—that is, when not linked with properties such as proportionality, envy-freeness, or equitability—is no guarantee that an allocation will be fair. For example, an allocation that gives everything to me and nothing to you is efficient: Any other allocation will make me worse off when it makes you better off. The other properties of fairness, combined with efficiency, ensure that the total value is distributed according to the aforementioned properties.

The modern mathematical theory of fair division has its roots in the 1940s, particularly in the work of Polish mathematicians who proposed different procedures for dividing both divisible and indivisible goods. Many of the procedures that they and others have proposed are quite esoteric or impractical to apply. Besides divide-and-choose, probably the two most feasible procedures are the following: 1. Strict and balanced alternation. Strict alternation is simply taking turns: You pick an item, then I pick one; you choose again; and so on. Of course, going first can be a big advantage, but giving extra choices to compensate for going second can reduce, if not eliminate, this advantage. A specific way of balancing choices is balanced alternation. If there are, say, four items to be divided between players A and B, the order of choice under balanced alternation is ABBA, whereby B gets two choices in a row after A gets its first choice. Balanced alternation can be extended to more than two players and any number of goods that the players must divide.

2. Adjusted winner. Two players begin by independently distributing a total of 100 points across all the goods to be divided, depending on the relative value they attach to them. The term “winner” in adjusted winner comes from the next step: Each player is (temporarily) given the goods on which it places more points than its adversary. Then the “adjusted” part comes in: Goods are transferred from the initial winner to the initial loser, in a certain order, until the point totals of the two players are equal. This order of transfer, which requires splitting at most one good, guarantees that the final allocation will be envy-free, equitable, and efficient if the players are truthful.

To be sure, players may try to manipulate a procedure by giving false information about their preferences. However, most fair-division procedures provide certain guarantees, even against players that are exploitative. Thereby these procedures tend to level the playing field, so even players with greater resources or capabilities are prevented from gaining unduly large shares. In this sense, fair-division procedures offer a means to prevent exploitation of the weak by the strong and so minimize the effects of power differences. Steven J. Brams See also Justice

Further Readings Brams, S. J., & Taylor, A. D. (1996). Fair division: From cake-cutting to dispute resolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Brams, S. J., & Taylor, A. D. (1999). The win-win solution: Guaranteeing fair shares to everybody. New York: W. W. Norton. Robertson, J., & Webb, W. (1998). Cake-cutting algorithms: Be fair if you can. Natick, MA: A. K. Peters.

FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS At its simplest, the concept of false consciousness denotes a misperception of reality, particularly a

False Consciousness

cognitive inability to comprehend accurately those social relations that are exploitative. It is commonly associated with the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883), where it forms part of an analysis of the conflict between social classes. In Marxist theory, false consciousness refers to a failure of the members of the subordinate classes, the nonowners of the means of production, to comprehend the true nature of their oppression. It explains how they are duped and inadvertently come to accept and support the interests of the class that owns productive resources, which in Marxian terms necessarily constitutes the ruling class. This is sustained through a methodical misrepresentation of material and productive social relations in the consciousness of wage-laborers, which for Marx betrays the real relations between classes. Such a deception, he held, perpetuates the power of the capitalist class. Marx distinguished between a class-in-itself—a shared objective position in productive relations, and a class-for-itself—a subjective knowledge of this position. He realized that during the period in which he lived the proletariat lacked the latter, a unified class consciousness—hence, the familiar term “false class consciousness”; a collective realization is a prerequisite for working-class empowerment, so the workers would, he hoped, in due course develop a true consciousness. Although Marx himself did not use the actual words false and consciousness together (his coauthor and collaborator Fredrick Engels coined the phrase), the concept is nevertheless developed in his writings, and he frequently critiqued the related concept of ideology. Ideological distortion upholds the privileged position of the dominant class. In The German Ideology (1845), Marx and Engels claim that ideology and consciousness have a material premise. It is, as The 1859 Preface famously states, social being that determines consciousness, and not, as had previously been held, the other way round. It follows that if consciousness is mediated via the existing mode of production, it can be transcended only through a radical transformation of its economic premise. Despite its theoretical subtlety, the concept has a number of immediate problems. It is a difficult concept to investigate empirically. Can one really obtain true knowledge of a collective consciousness that is said to be false? And if so, is it then

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legitimate to enforce, perhaps involuntary, the supposedly accurate understanding onto the falsely conscious? Further, with their dislike of metanarratives, postmodernists have typically objected to universal categories of “the truth” that include claims to a correct and authentic consciousness. On a practical level, differences in the status and earning potential of nonskilled, semiskilled, and skilled labor, and competition for consumer items has created the kind of internal divisions within the working class that tend to frustrate the possibility of generating a shared consciousness. Despite these difficulties, the concept has influenced the thinking of Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser, who have, in their own ways, developed Marx’s ideas of consciousness and ideology. In a contemporary setting, these ideas have also received critical interest from a feminist perspective. The manipulated self-perception in which social contradictions are concealed is now said to obscure the realities of gender domination and serve the interests of patriarchy. On the premise that illusionary thinking propagates servitude, and given that both Marxists and feminists point to the social mechanisms that deliberately frustrate consciousness-raising (to generate subjective awareness in subservient classes of their oppressive conditions), the move from class to gender is analytically consistent. In sum, it seems likely that as long as societies are divided distinctively by large class and gender inequalities, and as long as subject classes remain passive, the concept of false consciousness will continue to attract interest. Chris Wyatt See also Domination; Exploitation; Feminist Theories of Power; Hegemony; Ideology; Marx, Karl; Subordination

Further Readings Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy. London: Monthly Review Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. (Original work published 1929–1935) Lukács, G. (1971). History and class consciousness. London: Merlin Press. (Original work published 1923)

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Fascism

Marx, K. (1977). The German ideology, The poverty of philosophy, The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and Preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy. In D. McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected writings. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

FASCISM Emerging from the chaotic and turbulent period following the end of World War I, fascism has come to be identified with tyrannical political systems. Not all military regimes or dictatorships are fascist, however, and the term is usually applied to a few regimes from the 1930s to 1940s counterposed to communist regimes. Fascism has a worldview and most authoritarian governments do not want to change the existing social order. Originating from the Latin words fasci (bundle) and fasces (axe girdled by a bundle of rods, which were used by magistrates of ancient Rome), fascism symbolized authority and absolute power. Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy (1883–1945), first employed the term fascismo or fascism for the movement that he began. A disillusioned socialist and ultra-nationalist who served with the rank of corporal in the war, Mussolini formed a political group called Fasci Italiani di combattimento (Italian groups for combat) in 1919. With the concept of a nation that was turbulent and decadent, fascism called for national regeneration. Mussolini’s rabid nationalism was against the socialists, communists, democracy, and parliamentary institutions. The operational aspect of fascism can be best gleaned from Mussolini’s life and times. He had exploited the agrarian and industrial discontent of Italy during World War I. Mussolini unabashedly used violence to confiscate land, attack factories, and kill shopkeepers charging what he saw as exorbitant prices. People belonging to different classes looked to Blackshirt fascists as protectors of their interests. Fascism gained popularity, and the membership of the party swelled. On October 28, 1922, Mussolini with 40,000 fascists started the famous Marcia su Roma (March on Rome). After 3 days, the National Fascist Party became the majority party by law, and Mussolini was recognized as Il

Duce (the Leader). He had a vision of rebuilding the ancient Roman Empire with himself taking the role of a Caesar. The Mediterranean was to be made mare nostrum (our sea). War was a means for Mussolini to realize his aim and to change the status quo. His troops occupied the Greek island of Corfu in 1923. Mussolini invaded the East African country of Abyssinia (later Ethiopia) in 1935 and occupied the capital, Addis Ababa, the next year. Albania was annexed in 1939. Fascist doctrine developed its unique features in Mussolini’s domestic policy, distinguishing it from other forms of totalitarianism. The neo-Hegelian philosopher of Italy, Giovanni Gentile (1875– 1944) ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism (1932) for Mussolini. The main features of fascism were enumerated therein. The state was all-powerful and individuals as well as groups were conceived only in relation to it. The cardinal postulates of fascism were credere, combattere, obbedire (believe, fight, and obey). The state possessed a will and personality of its own and so was the frame of reference for everything else. It was a corporate state in command over political, social, moral, and economic forces. A ministry of corporations coordinated the conflicting interests of different individuals and classes. Military and military considerations were paramount in a fascist state. Repudiating the doctrine of pacifism, it glorified war as the highest expression of human energy. A nation would expand by means of war, thus manifesting its energy and dynamism. Fascists looked for a real or perceived enemy. The citizens in a chauvinistic frenzy would eliminate the common threat. The enemy could be communists, socialists, or minorities such as the Jews. Mussolini’s fascist state discriminated against Italian Jews in private as well as public. Introduction of a license system, prohibition of intermarriages, expulsion from the Fascist party, and deportation of 7,000 Jews were manifestations of the state’s action against a religious minority. Fascist regimes used symbols such as flags, songs, and slogans to buttress nationalism. Traditional gender roles were emphasized within its patriarchal framework. Family was prized, with divorce, abortion, and deviant sexual behavior frowned on. Abandoning the original doctrine of Christianity, the fascist believed in wars, violence, and intimidation though Mussolini nurtured

Fear, Use of

Roman Catholicism to try to ensure legitimacy in the eyes of the Italian people. Whereas the traditional authoritarian state ruled by means of an existing power establishment comprising the military, bureaucracy, and business, the fascist ruler mobilized the general masses. A select elite was drawn from different classes. In this way, fascism was anticonservatism. The “Third Way” of fascism aimed at the creation of a social order where economic activity, politics, art, and societal norms became parts of the organic state. Fascism also rejected certain aspects of modernity—unbridled growth of capitalism, liberalism, consumerism, and feminism—as anathema to fascist doctrines. Fascism did not abandon modern technology, but endeavored to create a different modernity that suited it better. The fascists viewed themselves as purging modernity of its decadent elements. Fascists looked toward a mythical glorified past, but simultaneously aimed at ushering in a new era. Mussolini’s fascist movement remained in power for almost two decades until the defeat of Italy in World War II. The term fascism was applied somewhat indiscriminately to authoritarian governments that emerged in the post–World War II period in various parts of the globe. Earlier, in the interwar period, governments of Austria, Nazi Germany, Japan, Poland, and the Vichy regime of France were also termed fascist states. Today, many people look back to Nazi Germany as the paradigmatic fascist state. Hitler organized the state on corporate lines, centrally controlling but not overturning capitalist enterprises, and embarked on public works and rearmament that inevitably led to war. Totalitarian governments in Argentina, Chile, Greece, Indonesia, North Korea, North Vietnam, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, and the Philippines have all come under the label of fascism. A broader definition of fascism might include movements emerging after the end of communism from the Soviet Union and onset of globalization in 1990s. During this period, there was a rise of religious fanaticism and extreme rightwing movements. Even in the United States, fascist movements arose in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations of Christ. The fanatical rightwing Hindu fanatic groups of India have also been termed fascists. The rise of Islamic militancy, the

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Iranian revolution of 1979, the Taliban, and al Qaeda have also been seen as types of Islamic fascism. Mussolini is no longer here, but fascism continues in varied forms, retaining some traits of “original” fascism. Patit Paban Mishra See also Coercion and Power; Dictatorship; Military in Government; Police State; Right-Wing Authoritarianism

Further Readings Bosworth, R. J. B. (2002). Mussolini. New York: Arnold. Cardoza, A. L. (2006). Benito Mussolini: The first fascist. New York: Pearson Longman. Gregor, A. J. (2008). Marxism, fascism, and totalitarianism: Chapters in the intellectual history of radicalism. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Griffin R. (1998). International fascism. London: Arnold. Laqueur, W. (1996). Fascism: Past, present, future. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, P. H. (2002). Latin fascist elites: The Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar regimes. Westport, CT: Praeger.

FEAR, USE

OF

Fear is an emotion. Following the subtle analysis of emotions in Jon Elster’s Alchemies of the Mind, fear may be a visceral reaction, in which case it is referred to as phobia, or it may be rationally induced by the expectation of something occurring with consequences that are deemed terrible. Fear plays a crucial role in the maintenance and subversion of order at both the domestic and the international levels. Fear is a key element in the theory of nuclear deterrence (fear of mutual destruction), in the internal working of terror regimes (fear of repression if people act against the system), and in ethnic conflict (fear of rival groups victimizing people in one’s own group). From a theoretical point of view, the debate hinges on whether fear as an emotion has some causal or motivating power on its own, interfering with cognition, or whether the effects of fear can be subsumed in the standard explanatory framework of rational choice theory. There is no unique

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answer to this problem, depending on the nature of the problem. The emotional impact of fear is probably strongest in the case of ethnic conflict. It is often argued that fear created by the threat of victimization by another ethnic group generates anxiety about security that may lead to the use of violence to neutralize the threat. Political entrepreneurs concerned about their survival may manipulate fear to gain the allegiance of their ethnic constituencies. Fear of an attack by another ethnic group may produce cohesiveness in the threatened group. This analysis has been applied, for instance, to the violent conflicts that took place in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Yet other authors have developed gametheoretical models in which fear is nothing but the expectation of terrible consequences. The bigger the threat for the group, the greater the fear, and the more likely people will support extreme solutions, including ethnic violence, to avoid the threat. In these models, fear does not interfere with rational calculations. The emotion is merely an epiphenomenon with regard to the costs and benefits at stake. When the state engages in indiscriminate repression, spreading terror in the population, fear may have a paralyzing effect. Collective action is prevented simply because no one is willing to initiate protest given the generalized fear in the population. However, from a more “rationalist” perspective, indiscriminate state terror fails to induce compliance because the administration of violence is unrelated to the behavior of people. Indiscriminate repression punishes people randomly, regardless of their action. To be effective, ruling by fear must be selective. Stathis Kalyvas, in The Logic of Violence in Civil War, has offered a theory of state indiscriminate terror. If the state cannot bear the costs of identifying and locating wrongdoers, the only available tactic is to instill fear in the population. This tactic provokes a backlash when the opposition is powerful enough to protect civilians from state repression because, under these conditions, many people will shift their allegiance to the rebels. On the other hand, the tactic succeeds when the opposition is so weak that it cannot relieve people from state terror. Nuclear deterrence is based on mutual fear. However, the emotion of fear as such does not add much to the rational decision making of states.

What matters are basically the expectations that states have about each other. Fear, nonetheless, may be important in more limited international crises in which states have to show resolve and commitment capacity. As Thomas Schelling showed in The Strategy of Conflict, emotions can add to, or detract from, the credibility of commitments. This may occur in two ways: people dominated by panic may carry out actions that go against their shortterm interests, and people who lack fear may more credibly signal resolve. The literature in international relations has made clear the relevance of perceptions and misperceptions in conflicts. Emotions such as fear are highly relevant in this context. There has not been much systematic research in the social sciences about the role of fear in interactions between states, groups, or individuals. This is part of the general neglect of emotions in sociology and political science. Fear is generated by the anticipation of a hurtful action. Actors with power to exert violence can pose coercive threats that will produce fear among those threatened. Fear, in turn, may lead to a violent response, as is often the case in ethnic conflicts. Rule by fear is a method to control populations that dictatorships have adopted often. It is not clear whether fear, taken as an emotion, plays an independent, causal role apart from the rational calculations that actors make in strategic contexts with threats. Although formal models tend to ignore the emotional dimension of fear, more empirically oriented research, particularly in the field of ethnic conflict, has emphasized the distorting effects that fear can have on the calculation of the actors. Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca See also Deterrence Theory; Terror Regimes; Terrorism

Further Readings Bourke, J. (2005). Fear: A cultural history. London: Virago Press. De Figeuiredo, R. J., & Weingast, B. (1999). The rationality of fear: Political opportunism and ethnic conflict. In B. F. Walter & J. Snyder (Eds.), Civil wars, insecurity, and intervention (pp. 261–302). New York: Columbia University Press.

Felsenthal, Dan S. Elster, J. (1999). Alchemies of the mind: Rationality and the emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kalyvas, S. (2006). The logic of violence in civil war. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

FEDERAL STRUCTURE A federally structured political system consists of (at least) two levels of government and combines shared rule on the federal level with self-rule of the constituent states. Different from regionalized political systems where some power is devolved to regional territorial units, in federal systems, vertical power separation is constitutionally guaranteed so that changes in the power distribution can only be implemented according to the amendment rules—that is, with the consent of the overwhelming majority of the affected territorial units. Federal structures are established to achieve a better performance regarding the production and distribution of three types of public goods than the constituent units could achieve alone: security from external and internal threats, prosperity through economic efficiency gains, and liberty through adequate representation of preferences. The diverse arrangements found within federal structures can be reduced to two basic types: dual federalism and joint federalism. Dual structures, as exemplified by political systems such as Canada or the United States, are characterized by a strict separation of powers and resources between the federal and the state levels, complemented by voluntary and ad hoc intergovernmental structures of negotiation and cooperation alongside a bicameral legislature that is the central access point for constituent states to influence federal legislation. Joint federalism, as in Germany and in the European Union, does not so much separate powers and resources between levels but allocates functions. The federal level—with the participation of the states—makes decisions, the state level implements them. Following from the need to cooperate in this type of federal structure, intergovernmental relations are fully institutionalized and compulsory. However, because opportunistic incentives to deviate from the constitutional division of authority are built into every federal structure, the

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federal balance is in constant danger of being eroded. A further distinction is between symmetrical and asymmetrical federal structures. De facto asymmetries exist in all federal systems with regard to size, social and cultural composition of population, or socioeconomic potential. Some federal systems, however, deliberately establish de jure asymmetries. They allocate special competences and resources to some constituent units to reflect the multinational character of the country. Whereas symmetrical federalism is found in countries with a pluralist composition of the population based on territorial federalism, asymmetrical federalism responds to the fact that some territorial units are inhabited by a population with a specific national identity: cases such as Francophones in Quebec; Flemings, Germans, and Walloons in Belgium; or Basques and Catalans in Spain (although in this latter case, the constitution does not formally reflect the essentially federal character of the political system). André Kaiser See also Autonomy; Bicameral Legislature

Further Readings Bednar, J. (2009). The robust federation: Principles of design. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Elazar, D. (Ed.). (1994). Federal systems of the world: A handbook of federal, confederal and autonomy arrangements (2nd ed.). New York: Grove’s Dictionaries. Scharpf, F. W. 1(994). Optionen des föderalismus in Deutschland und Europa. Frankfurt: Campus.

FELSENTHAL, DAN S. (1938– ) Dan S. Felsenthal received his BA and MA degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ) and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in political science. He began his teaching career at HUJ but moved in 1973 to the University of Haifa, becoming professor emeritus in 2003. Since 2001, he has been codirector of the Voting Power and Procedures (VPP) Programme at London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Felsenthal’s early work focused on coalition theory, organization studies, and decision making. His early collaborators include Amnon Rapoport, Zeev Maoz, and Abraham Diskin. In 1976, Felsenthal published a two-volume treatise on Mathematics for Administrative Decision Makers (in Hebrew). He was also one of the pioneers of experimentation in political science. After the early 1980s, Felsenthal’s repertoire expanded to include theoretical and applied social choice theory, which has remained his forte ever since. In 1990, he published Topics in Social Choice: Sophisticated Voting, Efficacy, and Proportional Representation. His works on strategic voting under various procedures—including varieties of approval and cumulative voting—have been particularly significant. In contrast to most experts on applied social choice theory, Felsenthal has studied proportional representation systems along with the singlewinner systems. Since the mid-1990s, his principal coworker has been Moshé Machover, with whom Felsenthal has made fundamental contributions to the theory of voting power measurement. Indeed, no serious student of voting power can ignore their magnum opus, The Measurement of Voting Power: Theory and Practice, Problems and Paradoxes. It provides a thorough history of voting power measurement, introduces the classic a priori measures of voting power, and makes the thought-provoking distinction between I-power and P-power. In contradistinction to earlier power studies, their work also deals with ternary voting games— voting settings where the voters have three options: yes, no, or abstain. Various paradoxes of voting power are also discussed in the book. In the authors’ opinion, these are mostly apparent rather than really significant aspects of power indices. Felsenthal and Machover have played an important role in the scholarly debate on the status and reform of the decision-making institutions of the European Union. They have been particularly concerned about the possibility of institutional paralysis as a result of applying a decisionmaking apparatus designed for a 12-member community to the present 27-member union. With the European Union remaining in flux with continual changes to its constitution and size, the

debate on the decision rules of the union will continue indefinitely. Hannu Nurmi See also I-Power; Machover, Moshé; Paradox of New Members; P-Power

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

FEMALE LEADERSHIP AMONG MAMMALS Group living among social mammals gave rise to the need for coordinated collective action. Individuals living in social groups must decide on the timing and execution of activities required for life and for competition. For example, when foraging for food, group members must choose which food sources to pursue, the best route to take to those sources, and the timing of travel. When competing with other groups of conspecifics, a group must decide when to stand ground and fight for a resource and when it is best to flee, giving up that resource. Such decisions greatly enhance or reduce survival and so are subject to selection pressure. The groups with the best decision-making ability survive to reproduce and pass on their abilities to the next generation. Group decision making is facilitated when one individual takes the initiative and provides direction and others acquiesce and follow that direction. Leadership then means defining group goals, influencing others to contribute toward group goals, and coordinating the pursuit of those goals. In social mammals, leadership is especially important in group goals involving foraging and acquisition and defense of territory. Leaders promote group cohesion by refereeing disputes between group members. Leadership is also important in the development of culture as individuals learn new behaviors from one another and teach these behaviors to their offspring. In all intelligent social

Female Leadership Among Mammals

mammals, cultural knowledge taught by mothers is essential for survival because in no mammalian species are survival skills purely instinctual. Mammalian groups usually have one or a limited number of leaders with most group members acting as followers. In every species, leaders are the dominant, older group members. Dominance affects leadership because dominant group members by definition have the power to distribute and withhold resources and punishments from other members. Dominants are also the preferred models of imitation, and as the preferred models, others naturally follow them. Age confers leadership because older individuals generally possess superior cultural knowledge essential for the acquisition of resources, such as knowledge of migration routes and the location of food and water. As in humans, expertise and eminence play a role in animal leadership. Personality traits such as intelligence, boldness, persistence, and motivation also determine animal leadership.

Female Leadership in Mammalian Groups Although male leadership is most common, females occupy leadership positions in many diverse species. It should be noted that in all of these species, animals recognize one another as individuals and have the cognitive capacity to estimate the abilities and remember the ranks of other group members. Female leaders are the older dominant individuals; in cooperative breeders such as wolves and meerkats, leaders are also the primary breeders. In a handful of species, female leadership exists in the context of female dominance over males. Female dominance over males occurs in all mammal species where males and females are monomorphic (similar in size)—examples are hyenas, lemurs, and meerkats. In elephants, female dominance and female leadership happen in the context of allfemale groups, as males leave to form their own groups on reaching adulthood. Female leadership is also observed in many male-dominant species. In these, one or more older, dominant females provide leadership and help check the power of the dominant male. Male dominance with female leadership occurs in higher primates such as gorillas and chimpanzees. Motivation is an aspect of leadership, and females who are pregnant and raising young are often the most

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motivated to forage, so females of many species take the lead in foraging decisions. Dominant males garner favor and support from females by allowing them freedom to take the lead in foraging decisions. In species where there is a male-dominated harem (e.g., horses and some monkeys), females allied with stronger dominant males have the most freedom and leadership opportunity. Subordinate males are preoccupied with defending their harems from other males and so limit the freedom and leadership of resident females. Subordinate males often occupy substandard territory, so the females allied with them have poorer nutrition as well as limited freedom. Female cultural leadership has been well documented in a troop of Japanese macaques. One female who was especially inventive discovered that dipping potatoes in sea water improved the taste. This and other innovations were quickly imitated by others. Soon the entire troop adopted the feeding style of that particular female. Later mothers taught that feeding style to their young. In this example, scientists directly observed the female leader’s contributions to invention and culture. Females in mammalian groups have special individual traits that make them capable leaders. Physically, they are the largest and strongest females. They are often intelligent, creative, bold, and aggressive. However, social skills (more than aggression) make a good leader. In most intelligent social species, coalitions develop and help solidify leadership and dominance. Without social skills, a dominant leader is at risk of being displaced by a coalition of subordinates. Leaders then have to be perceived as fair, reward followers with attention and resources, and judiciously use aggression to punish non-followers. The attributes and strategies of female leaders in particular species are addressed in this entry. Note that leadership in many species is associated with physiologic responses in both leaders and followers. Female Leadership in Family Elephantidae (Elephants)

The two extant species of the family elephantidae (elephants) have a similar social structure with males and females living in separate but connected groups that interact for breeding and socialization. The young of both sexes live in the female group

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where they receive nurturing and protection. On reaching maturity, females usually stay with their mothers but males depart and join all-male bands. The female elephant troop is lead by a senior, dominant female or matriarch. The survival of the family depends on the intelligence and expertise of the female leader. Matriarchs are most familiar with travel routes and sources of food and water. Matriarchs also provide social cohesion and settle disputes. On the untimely death of the matriarch (by, for example, human predation), groups often disintegrate with individuals becoming lost, becoming distressed, and fighting. Extensive field observations have documented individual variation in female elephant leadership style. Some female elephants are bold and aggressive, using force to ensure compliance. Other females are gentle peacemakers. Different personality styles come with diverse costs and benefits. Female elephants with bold aggressive styles are more effective in procuring resources for and defending their groups. However, these individuals also risk themselves and so are more likely to be killed. If a female leader dies before another group member has gained the knowledge and ability to replace her, the group is left in chaos and without necessary survival skills. Female Leadership in Panthera Leo (Lions)

Panthera leo (lions) are the only social cats (felidae), though other species of the suborder feliformia (feliform carnivores) are social and show female leadership. A lion pride is composed of related females, immature offspring, and a resident male who has gained control. Male offspring leave the pride when they reach maturity. Lionesses jointly care for young and do most of the hunting and territorial defense. They also protect young from infanticide. The need for collective action calls for female leadership, and the capacity for individual recognition. Lionesses differ with respect to the personality characteristics that determine leadership. Certain lionesses are bold and consistently take the lead in territorial defense and hunting. Others are consistently followers and are reluctant to risk themselves. Lioness leaders know their followers and behave more cautiously when backed up by less bold pride members.

Female Leadership in Suricata Suricatta (Meerkats)

Meerkats (Suricata suricatta) are feliform carnivores of the family herpestinae (mongoose) that inhabit open and arid regions of Africa. They are small, weighing less than one kilogram. They are highly social and live in familial groups that together constitute a pack of as many as 30 individuals. In each family group, a single dominant female monopolizes reproduction, producing as many as four litters of three to seven pups per year for as long as 10 years, though subordinate females breed occasionally. More than 90% of pups born to dominant females are fathered by the group’s dominant male, who is usually an immigrant or founding member of the group. The dominant female usually either inherits her position from her mother or acquires it as a founding member of a new group. Thus, females with leadership ability tend to disperse and start their own families rather than be dominated by their sisters. As the leaders of the family, dominant female meerkats make foraging and defense decisions. The most interesting aspect of these and other cooperative breeding mammals involves the physiologic mechanisms of succession, leadership, and followership. The dominant female monopolizes breeding partly because she increases in size; has high testosterone levels, particularly during late pregnancy; and is physically aggressive. Her female offspring are exposed in utero to higher levels of testosterone and so are behaviorally more aggressive and assertive. She therefore passes on her dominance status to her daughters through genetic, physiologic, and social-behavioral means. Although the dominant female leader makes the important decisions and produces the most young, other group members generally care for her young and stand guard over the troop. Female meerkats are despotic leaders who enforce their leadership by inducing stress in rivals. Rather than constantly harassing all subordinate females, high-testosterone pregnant dominants target those females with whom reproductive conflict is most likely (older, pregnant, and more distantly related females), exposing them to escalating aggression. Because meerkats do not reconcile following aggression, rivals temporarily leave the group after agonistic encounters. They experience

Female Leadership Among Mammals

both the stress of assault and the stress of social isolation and thus experience chronic elevation of glucocorticoid hormone levels; elevated glucocorticoid levels result in reproductive down-regulation because of reduced pituitary sensitivity to gonadotropinreleasing hormone. Stressed rivals therefore experience reduced conception rates and increased fetal losses. Female Leadership in Crocuta Crocuta (Spotted Hyenas)

The spotted hyena is another social feliform carnivore with female leadership and an unusual physiology. Spotted hyenas live in social groups called clans. These clans are composed of related females who grew up in the clan and immigrant males. All males are subordinate to all females with respect to feeding priority. Although all females breed, dominant females experience the highest breeding success. Female spotted hyenas are exposed to high levels of androgens during critical developmental periods and so are “masculinized” in both appearance and behavior. Female hyenas have a penis through which they urinate and give birth. They are highly aggressive and dominate males. Although testosterone levels in females are lower than those of males during adulthood, females have high levels of other androgens in addition to testosterone. Like meerkats, dominant pregnant hyenas have particularly high levels of androgens that make female offspring behaviorally dominant and aggressive. The process by which females become dominant comes at great cost because there is a high prenatal mortality in spotted hyenas; it can be experimentally reversed by blocking androgen receptors during development. Female spotted hyenas take the lead during cooperative territorial activities, such as marking of territorial boundaries, and aggression toward intruders. Females are more likely than males to lead border patrols and clan wars, and resident females scent-mark along territorial boundaries more than do males. Leadership data also suggest that female spotted hyenas are willing to assume more risks than males during territorial defense. This risk taking is prevalent even during pregnancy and lactation.

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Female Leadership in Lemur Catta (Ring Tailed Lemurs)

Lemurs are primates found only on Madagascar and the Comoro Islands. Lemur catta (ring-tailed lemurs) live in social groups of between 3 and 20 individuals. All females are dominant to males, winning all of the fights between the sexes. Genetically related females form the stable core of ringtailed lemur social groups. Similar to all the species described in this entry, males disperse from their natal groups around the time of sexual maturity. Unlike females, males do not care for young and sometimes commit infanticide. Groups of females switch infants, babysit, form play groups, and even allow infants other than their own to nurse. In striking similarity to female spotted hyenas, female ring-tailed lemurs have masculine-appearing genitalia as well as dominant aggressive behavior. Masculinization of female ring-tailed lemurs occurs in utero under the influence of androgens. The territorial behavior observed in these female lemurs is similar to that of the spotted hyena except that female ring-tailed lemurs do not take the lead in attacking intruders or defense of territory when they are pregnant or carrying young. Instead, nonpregnant females take the lead in these circumstances, allowing pregnant and lactating mothers to seek the safety of rear positions. Females also take the lead in foraging as they are more motivated to eat because of higher caloric need. Females are similarly sized to males and incur all the energetic costs associated with caring for offspring.

Conclusion Leadership in group-living mammals is required for coordination of feeding and intergroup aggression and is associated with individual attributes such as age, dominance, intelligence, boldness, and motivation. Apart from dominance constraints, sex is not a barrier to female leadership in mammals. Dominant female mammals become leaders even in male-dominated societies. Female leadership in foraging often is the result of increased female motivation to feed during pregnancy and lactation. Female leaders are generally the peacekeepers of their groups and work to promote harmony and cohesion. A notable exception occurs in

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meerkats where dominant females are despotic and adopt a specific strategy of stressing other group members. Spotted hyenas and ring-tailed lemurs are two unrelated species that have independently evolved female dominance and genital masculinization. In these two species, all females are dominant over and win agonistic encounters with all males. In these species, the benefits females gain from dominance and access to food outweigh the costs of masculinization. Studies of female leadership show the enormous behavioral potential and diversity inherent in mammals. Liane J. Leedom See also Animal Groups, Power in; Leadership; Leadership and Gender

FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, VIEW OF POWER Providing a conceptualization of power is as central to feminist accounts of international relations (IR) as it is to the more traditional approaches within the discipline. However, the two accounts are very different. Through their focus on gender, feminist researchers have refocused understandings of power within the traditional IR concerns of interstate relations, balances of power, sovereignty, the operation of the market, diplomacy, and so on. In doing so, feminists have brought new areas of study to the IR field that fundamentally alter the very premises of the discipline. Within this, there is no single account of power within feminist IR because this would run counter to one of the central objectives within feminism— to avoid stifling diversity within the approach by delineating rigid boundaries about what may be counted as “correct” forms of research. When analyzing issues of power in IR, feminist scholars base their accounts on three main concepts. First, feminists maintain that the central tenets of IR, the issues it focuses on, its foundational myths and theories, and the methodologies that it employs are not neutral in gender as was often claimed but are shaped by an underlying masculinist basis. Second, this masculinist basis

within IR functions to conceal the agency of women and their central role in the production and reproduction of international politics. Third, feminists maintain that although these gender roles and identities ascribed to women and to men are a central but mainly unexplored category within IR, they are fluid social constructions that are amenable to continuous change. Therefore, it becomes apparent that rather than theorizing power as a tangible to be contested between states and other international actors and institutions, feminist IR scholars are concerned with producing more wide-ranging accounts that explore the gendered impacts and influences within the practices of power. These differences between feminist and more mainstream or “malestream” approaches are based on the very different ontological and epistemological understandings that most feminists draw on. Feminist IR began to emerge as a specific subfield of the discipline in the 1980s. At this point, the previous consensus that had focused research around the search for universal scientific laws of the “international” based on a rigorous application of positivistic scientific methods, was becoming increasingly questioned as more interpretive and anti-foundational approaches including theories informed by poststructuralist thought, critical theory, and forms of constructivism began to rigorously critique the dominant theorizations of the field. Early accounts such as Cynthia Enloe’s canonical text Bananas, Beaches and Bases began to question the apparent naturalness within mainstream IR of its understandings of power and the main tenets of the discipline. Enloe’s book is centered on the asking of the seemingly straightforward question, “Where are the women in IR?” She then proceeds to examine how the world of IR appears to be a world made by men, where women are scarce and their influence minimal. But this masculinized world of the military, foreign policy making, international trade, and so on is also one that is underpinned by the often invisible work of women in many guises—as domestic workers, diplomatic wives, factory workers in export processing zones, prostitutes, workers in international agri-business, and so on. In doing so, Enloe fundamentally challenges what constitutes the dominant reality of our understanding or international relations and its central objects of study and begins to

Feminist Theories of Power

open up spaces where new issues and perspectives focusing on the conditioning influence of gender may be developed. What was assumed to be a comprehensive view of the reality of the field is revealed to be only a partial and constructed one that relies on the obscuring of women’s participation and the perpetuation of underlying gendered understandings. Feminist scholars have subsequently continued to bring a host of new issues and their attending analyses of power into view within an expanded discipline. A large body of work has developed insights into the often complex and contested operation of gender in areas such as nationalist movements, the current U.S.–waged war on terror, militarization, foreign policy making, political economy, and development. Much of this work has continued to focus on women’s experiences, in an attempt to reclaim and reposition their previously obscured subjectivity, but feminists have also been cautious that gender should not be regarded only as a synonym for women and are therefore attentive to exploring the power issues in the construction and experiences of masculinity in the theory and practice of IR. Feminists are also aware that gender does not form the only axis of identity and that to be understood its intersection with influences of race, religion, nationality, and class also need to be considered. This questioning of the power of IR as a discipline to produce particular notions as to what constitutes reality has also prompted feminists to further question the relationship between power and the epistemological foundations of the field. Simply put, feminists are concerned to explore how power shapes what may be counted as legitimate knowledge. Kate Allison See also Feminist Theories of Power

Further Readings Ackerly, B., Stern, M., & True, J. (2006). Feminist methodologies for international relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Enloe, C. (1989). Bananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. London: Pandora.

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Zalewski, M., & Parpart, J. (Eds.). (1997). The “man” question in international relations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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Feminists have developed critiques of conceptualizations of power that naturalize socially created systems of privilege and domination and fail to encompass the experiences of women. Feminists have theorized the nature and operation of gender power, which constrains the way women and men of particular races and ethnicities occupy and move in space, inhabit their bodies, envision their possibilities, and manifest their intentions. Feminists have explored various explanations for the persistence of male power across time and across cultures and have identified strategies for women’s empowerment.

From Ability to Coercion: Voluntarist Conceptions of Power In The Republic, Plato defined power as “that which enables us to do what we are able to do” (Book V, 477c). Focusing on the individual as the unit of analysis, Plato’s voluntarist and circular account has had a profound influence on Western conceptualizations of power, at once acknowledging, legitimizing, and naturalizing power differentials among people. By taking effects as the index of power, this voluntarist frame does not inquire into the institutional bases or cultural sources of power. Resurfacing in social contract theory and the methodological individualism that informs behavioralist and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, the voluntarist conception of power might be characterized as a staple of modernity. As conceived by Thomas Hobbes, the voluntarist conception ties power to the voluntary intentions and strategies of individuals who seek to promote their interests. Within this frame, power is nothing other than “the present means to some future apparent good” (Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 10, p. 150). Situated in a world of conflicting wills and scarce resources, the Hobbesian individual often uses power to eliminate obstacles to the satisfaction of desire. And because the obstacles to be overcome frequently include the

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wills of other individuals, the voluntarist conception of power has been construed within political science as the capacity to get others to do what they would not otherwise do (seen in the work of Harold Lasswell and Robert Dahl, for example). Thus, the individual’s means to attain desired ends slides easily into coercion: power as the force to accomplish one’s objectives, or perhaps less brutally, power as the capacity to secure compliance by manipulation of rewards and punishments. Despite its individualist premises, the Hobbesian voluntarist conception of power has also been adapted by “realists” and “neorealists” within international relations to provide an account of the fundamental operations of the international system. Taking Hobbes’s depiction of the “war of all against all” as a paradigm for international relations, realists posit “anarchy” as the inevitable condition of the relation among sovereign states. Arguing that the rational response of states to anarchy is to maximize power, realists conflate “national interest” with the pursuit of power and define international politics as an unceasing struggle for power in a realm devoid of an absolute sovereign capable of enforcing agreements. Feminist scholars have developed detailed critiques of the voluntarist conception of power, demonstrating that it depends on a defective and markedly androcentric conception of human nature; it equates individual action and international affairs with a particular model of “abstract masculinity”; it legitimates immoral and amoral action by individuals and states; and it remains oblivious to the social conventions that structure human relationships and the relations among states. Feminist scholars have also pointed out that the voluntarist conception of power prevents certain political questions from being perceived and empirically investigated. For example, according to the Interparliamentary Union, 85% of the seats in national legislatures and more than 99% of the offices of president, prime minister, and foreign secretary are currently in the hands of men, the absence of women from national and international decision making is a “nonquestion” according to the voluntarist model of power for it assumes that the answer is already known: individual choice mediated by the contest of conflicting wills is the explanation for the distribution of decisionmaking power. During the past 30 years, feminist

scholars have proven that “individual choice” explanations for women’s underrepresentation in elective and appointive offices are woefully inadequate and only mask the potent operations of gender power and gender structure. These detailed studies illuminate an additional failing of the voluntarist conception of power: it cannot explain how or why agents are able to exercise the power that they do exercise. It is oblivious to forces that shape individual “preferences” or “determine” the will. It ignores institutional contexts that enable and constrain individual action and structural forces that ensure that individuals are not equally unfettered subjects. It masks recurrent patterns of constraint on individual choice linked to race, gender, class, nationality, and sexuality.

Gender Oppression Feminist theorists of power suggest that persistent gender and racial asymmetry should be understood as a system of oppression. Imbalances of power in families, schools, workplaces, churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, and official institutions of governance are interrelated. White-male control over myth and ritual, women’s sexuality and the technology of reproduction, sexual divisions of labor in the domestic and in the public realms, and conceptualizations of masculinity and femininity constitute the means by which unjust constraints are imposed on women’s freedom. Iris Young (1984, p. 136) defined gender oppression as a pattern in the institutional organization of society “in which men have some degree of unreciprocated authority or control over women, and/or men have greater control than women over the operations of institutions.” In this view, women are oppressed when (a) men have power to control aspects of women’s lives and actions and the means to enforce their will, and women do not have complementary control over men’s lives; (b) men occupy institutionalized positions of social decision-making from which women are excluded, and women do not have their own spheres with comparable privilege or control over men’s lives; (c) men benefit from the labor and other activity of women to a greater degree than women benefit from that of men. (Young, 1984, p. 136)

Feminist Theories of Power

Manifested in women’s lower access to money, power, status, leisure, and sense of self-worth, gender oppression resonates in conceptions of masculinity defined in terms of characteristics valued by society and in conceptions of femininity defined in terms of whatever is useful or pleasing to men. It is apparent in systems where a physical characteristic, sex, is used to build divisions of labor, ability, responsibility, and power that are seen as “natural.” It is most visible in systems that define women’s existence solely in terms of the roles of wife, mother, domestic laborer, and consumer, but it is no less pernicious when it surfaces in societies that encourage men and women to be active, independent agents of their own destinies, while subtly affording women fewer opportunities for selfrealization than men. Whether embodied in absolute prohibitions, paternalistic legislation, or informal mechanisms of social control, gender oppression includes both a sexual division of labor that assigns noncreative, isolating, and alienating tasks to women, and a set of arguments concerning women’s nature and the character of women’s work that can be used to justify lower wages and fewer rights for women, thereby exacerbating women’s economic and political dependence on men.

Explaining Gender Asymmetries: From Violence to the Microphysics of Power In addition to external restrictions on the appearance, movement, occupations, and public roles of women, gender oppression involves the cultivation of internalized constraints on women’s action. Through negative sexual stereotyping and systematic sexual objectification, women’s desires and aspirations are circumscribed. Operating on the individual psyche, such oppression does not inhere in any isolated and measurable set of omnipresent facts. Rather, it seems to be an aspect of the organization of collective life, a patterning of expectations and beliefs that give rise to imbalance in the ways people interpret, evaluate, and respond to particular forms of male and female action. We see it not in the physical constraints on things that men or women can or cannot do, but rather in the ways they think about their lives, the kinds of opportunities they enjoy, and in their ways of making claims. Psychological oppression has been linked to a system of cultural practices placing women in a

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double bind—simultaneously affirming their human status while condemning them to the immanence of mere bodily being, devoid of autonomy, cultural expression, and opportunities for transcendence. Because psychological oppression operates through the internalization of debilitating norms, it produces women who are convinced that they are incapable of autonomy, who doubt that they have the abilities to excel in the full range of human activities. By truncating women’s sense of possibility, psychological oppression produces women who are the agents of their own constraint. Gender oppression involves a system of power in which the great majority of opportunities for public influence and prestige and the ability to forge relationships, determine enmities, to speak up in public, use or forswear the use of force are all recognized as men’s privilege and right. Within such a system, women are burdened in systematic ways that make their full human development problematic or impossible. By casting these unequal power relations in the language of oppression, feminist theorists emphasize human agency, insisting that these systems are humanly created and that they are amenable to human transformation. In addition to making dimensions of gender oppression visible, feminists have theorized how these asymmetries are written on the body despite arduous efforts to contest them. Some of the earliest analyses (such as Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, and Harriet Taylor Mill in 1851) tied gender power to physical force, comparing the subordination of women to the violent conquest and enslavement of tribes, nations, and peoples. In the mid20th century, radical feminists identified rape and various practices of violence against women as acts of terror, which generated ritualized subordination that coexists with formal guarantees of equal protection of the law. Long before Giorgio Agamben (in the late 1990s) discussed a “state of exception,” radical feminists sought to make visible structures of power within liberal democratic states that allowed and condoned violence against women who had committed no crime. Feminists situated these acts of violence in a political framework in which the perpetrators of violence (men) quite literally had control of the state, using its lawmaking powers to produce laws reflecting their own interests, and using formal police powers to ensure that they could engage in extra-normal violence with

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impunity. Construing sexual terrorism as a political tactic that produced particular dispositions— most notably “intimidation and demoralization” in the terrorized, radical feminists suggested that sexual terror produces bodies that know their place, accept inferior status, and abandon the full possibilities of freedom. Anticipating Michel Foucault, radical feminists analyzed gendering processes as a microphysics of power that produces docile bodies. As Sandra Bartky demonstrated, sexual terror can be understood as a mode of subjection that produces the feminine body qua powerless, equipped with specific repertoires of gestures, postures, and movements trained to deference. Coercive gendering, then, is a manifestation of male domination that preserves male supremacy through actual and implied violence, keeping women inferior and vulnerable and thus in need of protection. Such vulnerability ensures that the system of male dominance continues. Taking issue with explanations of male domination rooted in physical violence, some feminist scholars adapted analytic strategies developed within German phenomenology to examine how gender and racial power are produced, contested, and reproduced within the shared meanings of given communities. Attuned to the varying symbolic and normative constructs that shape the practical rationalities of situated social agents, intersubjective conventions make action, in general, and the use of power, in particular, possible and intelligible. Some feminist scholars have investigated gender symbolism; that is, the coding of certain forms of human conduct as inherently masculine or feminine, as an intersubjective convention that generates a logic of appropriate behavior shaping individuals’ selfunderstandings and aspirations, thereby structuring social and political opportunities. When rationality, competence, and leadership are coded as inherently masculine characteristics, for example, male power is naturalized and legitimated. When the nation is symbolized as a woman and men are exhorted to risk their lives to defend and protect “her,” norms of citizenship and soldiering are masculinized. When nationalist narratives privilege the roles of men as “founding fathers,” women’s contributions to nation building are erased. When these invented pasts are institutionalized within founding myths, notions of the “national family” reinscribe fathers’ rule and mothers’ obedience as

natural even as they create and legitimate new race and gender hierarchies. When “national security” is promoted by increasing militarization, the growing physical insecurity of women in areas adjacent to military bases and in areas of conflict is eclipsed, driving a wedge between the interests of states and the physical well-being of women. Advancing cogent accounts of subtle processes through which male dominance is naturalized, feminist scholars have demonstrated how gender power is embedded in intersubjective value systems and structures of belief that constitute the identities and aspirations of gendered political agents, thereby constraining the possibilities for individual choice and action. Other feminist scholars have attempted to link gendered asymmetries of power in beliefs and values to structural features of social and political life. They draw insights from a structural model of power that emphasizes that practices of inequality become embedded in institutions and structures in ways that enable male advantage to operate independently of the will of particular agents. Developing concepts of gender structure and gendered institutions, feminist scholars have sought to demonstrate how male dominance in political institutions of the nation-state and in the international arena has been converted into rules, routines, practices, and policies that serve and promote men’s interests, normalize a male monopoly of power, and create political opportunity structures that favor men. Studies of political parties in South Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America, and the United States, for example, have demonstrated that male-dominant party elites have been remarkably resourceful in shifting the locus of power from formal to informal mechanisms when women have gained access to formal decisionmaking sites. Parties that differ from one another in ideological commitments and policy objectives have been remarkably similar and consistent in allowing male gatekeepers to structure candidate selection processes to prevent women from being chosen for open, safe, or winnable seats in legislative races. Patronage practices within political parties also manifest pervasive gender bias. Feminist studies of national parliaments and legislatures have revealed the operation of powerful gender norms. The standard operating procedures

Feminist Theories of Power

of parliaments in Britain, Canada, and Australia, for example, feature loud, aggressive, and combative behavior such as screaming, shouting, and sneering that can create no-win situations for women members. Women who adopt this combative style are ridiculed and patronized by their male counterparts, whereas women who opt for a more demure, consultative, and collaborative style are labeled “weak” or “unfit” for the job. Indeed, Louise Chappell documents patterns of gender harassment in parliamentary systems as women who rise to speak are greeted with increased heckling, coughing, hissing, kiss-blowing, and mimicry in falsetto voices. In the United States, women legislators who refuse to adopt coercive negotiating strategies are often characterized by their male counterparts as failing to understand the rules of the game. Women chairing legislative committees confront forms of opposition in hearings—challenges to their authority, refusal to respect their rulings—that men in comparable positions of authority do not confront. Male legislators often perceive women legislators in terms of raced and gendered stereotypes incompatible with the men’s conceptions of “power players.” In documenting the operation of gender power within the official institutions of state, feminist scholars have provided powerful evidence that there are political dynamics at work within these institutions that have not been recognized by mainstream approaches. They have also demonstrated that the raced and gendered hierarchies created, maintained, and reproduced within the institutions of state have palpable effects on policy making and on domestic and foreign policies.

Biopower To illuminate the policy effects of gender power, some feminist scholars have deployed the Foucauldian conception of biopower, exploring how policies that focus on the “protection of life” rather than on the threat of death, produce discursive regimes that obliterate classical boundaries between public and private, as the state undertakes the regulation of health, sexuality, bodies, dispositions, and desires as part of its legitimate terrain. Although legitimating a vast expansion of the reach of the state, biopower invokes a discursive

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“regime of rights” to mask this extension of power, producing disciplined subjects who believe themselves to be self-regulating or “free.” Thus, the political technology of biopower produces individual identities—resisting identities according to Foucault, but identities also invested in particular orders of desire. Focusing on the gendered dimensions of biopower, some feminist scholars have investigated the contradictions underlying neoliberal rights regimes. Pronatalist and antiabortion legislation, for example, politicize reproductive behavior and assert the biological rights of the collective, inserting the rights of the race-nation into the womb of the woman citizen by according the state a legitimate interest in mandating reproduction for some (white, affluent, heterosexual) citizens, while curbing reproduction of other citizens (low-income people of color, gays and lesbians). In Poland, Turkey, and several U.S. states, as the criminalization of abortion and birth control has been justified to protect life and increase the national population, the wombs of women become the site of intensive policing for within the wombs of women citizens, in Ruth Miller’s phrase “crimes against the biological collective” occur. Indeed, because the only crimes that a citizen could commit against the biological collective involve contraception and abortion, women alone can pose this threat to the race-nation—hence, the state’s rationale for policing women’s reproductive practices. When reproduction is defined as women’s political duty and motherhood is conflated with women’s citizenship, biopower simultaneously produces women citizens invested in mothering, and men and women citizens invested in normalizing heterosexuality. The biopolitical constitution of women’s reproductive citizenship, then, may support growing consensus that the state has a “compelling interest” in prohibiting abortion from the moment of “viability.” The protection of biological life and its needs become politically decisive as privacy concerns and restrictions on women’s reproductive freedom are swamped by discursive constructions of “natural” “moral” imperatives. Nature is invoked to legitimate women citizens’ reproductive responsibility, and heterosexuality more generally. Operating through antiabortion and anticontraception legislation, constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage, statutes prohibiting gay adoption,

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and welfare policies that penalize out-of-wedlock births and promote marriage, biopower expels the liberal chimera of the private domain beyond the reach of the state, replacing it with explicit recognition that the family is a political entity and reproduction is a social and political relation. Situating women’s citizenship within the operations of biopower reveals additional dimensions of gendered inequality that cut across republican, parliamentary, and authoritarian regimes. Within contemporary political systems, political and legal “equality” coexists with distinct male and female modes of citizenship that authorize regulation of women’s bodies for “the common good.” In contrast with liberal notions of distinct demarcation between public and private realms, public and private interpenetrate within the purview of biopower as women’s bodies are made the property of the biological collective. In contrast to neoliberalism’s relentless pressure toward privatization, women’s reproductive organs are “publicized,” and claimed as legitimate targets of public regulation and concern. Within the operations of biopower, women’s citizenship is inherently sexualized, tied to a politicized reproductive agenda and the intimate political intrusions that entails. That many women in the 21st century, as in the late 18th and 19th centuries, construe their central purpose in life in terms of mothering and embrace the norms of patriotic reproductive behavior is a predictable effect of biopower. Within these naturalized circuits, women citizens enter the public sphere on markedly different terms than their male counterparts do. Women are public, in the sense that they are subjects of collective concern and interest, subject to regulation in the collective interest, and sorely lacking in the beneficial aspects of privacy. Thus, feminist analyses of the circulation of power within public and private spheres entail interrogation of the subjectivities produced in and through biopower, as well as identification of strategic mechanisms to foster resistance and to undermine political control of women’s reproductive capacities.

Empowerment For several centuries, empowerment has been a hallmark of grassroots feminist advocacy and activism. Invoking long-standing arguments about the benefits of direct democracy, feminists have

suggested that women’s participation in decision making will generate benefits for the individuals involved (self-development), as well as for the community (enhanced mobilization of talent, collective solidarity, and policies that consider most of the population’s needs). Where such a space is created for women either through greater participation for women or by organizational practices that enable women to shape and change the political and social agenda, then a different set of needs may come to the fore. In multiple concrete cases, the involvement of women in decision making has helped challenge conventional stereotypes about gender needs and has enabled previously hidden needs to emerge. Women’s involvement has allowed us to see the interconnections between different aspects of women’s lives. Fighting to gain social, economic, political, and civil rights under national constitutions and through international treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and providing women with information about their rights, has been a continuing focus of grassroots feminist activism. In contrast to individualist deployments of rights discourses focusing on discrimination, however, feminist activists have linked rights rhetoric to the building of collective identities for women. Drawing on Paolo Freire’s conception of conscientization and feminist notions of consciousness raising, feminist activists have devised strategies to heighten women’s understanding that they can stand together and act together, cultivating their strength to resist and transform oppressive practices through collective organization and mobilization. Enhancing women’s capacities to organize, mobilize, build alliances, and form coalitions to demand accountability and to create social change is a staple of feminist “transversal” politics. Deploying these skills at home and abroad, feminist activists have developed vibrant transnational networks, which they use to amplify their voices. At subregional, regional, and global conferences, as well as through websites, listservs, cyberjournals, newsletters, and public reports and books, feminists have articulated strategies to break down structural inequality between the North and South; to redress the depredations of colonial and neocolonial domination; to fight institutional, cultural, and individual racisms; to alleviate poverty through debt forgiveness, land and income redistribution,

First-Strike Capability

expanded educational opportunity, and accessible and affordable health care; to foster national selfreliance; to control multinational corporations; and to reduce military expenditures. Feminists have worked with international organizations; transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); national, regional, and local governments; and progressive solidarity networks to redefine development at the in terms of the equitable and sustainable allocation of resources to meet basic needs. Within these feminist discourses, equitable development is inseparable from the empowerment of local women to determine their own priorities and the means to address them. In contemporary transnational feminist circles, then, empowerment presupposes concerted action to address the most pressing issues facing women—poverty, racism, unequal trade relations, structural adjustment policies, coercive population control strategies, militarism, war, and environmental degradation. Mary Hawkesworth See also Feminist International Relations, View of Power; Women as Political Leaders

Further Readings Chappell, L. (2002). Gendering government. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Hawkesworth, M. (2006). Globalization and feminist activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Miller, R. (2007). Rights, reproduction, sexuality and citizenship in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32(2), 347–374. Pateman, C. (1988). The sexual contract. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Peterson, S., & Runyan, A. S. (1999). Global gender issues (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

FIRST-STRIKE CAPABILITY The idea of a first-strike capability came to prominence during the cold war within the context of the potential use of nuclear weapons. The tensions between East and West led both the United States and the Soviet Union to develop massive nuclear arsenals and plan for how they would conduct a

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war against one another. Given the destructive power of these weapons, the potential advantage gained from using such weapons first was considerable as a means reducing the potential devastation wrought on one’s own country. Moreover, if an enemy’s command and control systems were destroyed in such a strike it might be possible to prevent or at least significantly reduce that country’s ability to strike back. Thus, from the very start, the targeting of the other’s strategic nuclear arsenal featured prominently. The first-strike idea is not, however, solely a cold war or weapons of mass destruction phenomenon. It has been a feature of warfare from its beginning. Successive generations of military commanders have known that if they can strike their opponent before he or she is ready, then they may be able to gain a significant advantage, if not victory, at an early stage, thus minimizing the cost of the war and reducing the chance of defeat. For example, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sought to inflict damage on the U.S. Navy sufficient for the Japanese to rapidly seize a series of territories that would prove too costly for the United States to attempt to regain. Similarly, the Israeli air and ground assaults against its Arab neighbors in 1967 were in many respects a first strike. The Israeli air force launched a series of surprise air attacks that devastated the air forces of the neighbors and gave the Israelis an advantage that they used to seize territory in the West Bank and Sinai Peninsula. Nor is the firststrike concept limited to the opening stage of a war. The Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981 successfully delayed the Iraqi nuclear program by the destruction of this facility forcing the Iraqis to disperse their efforts as a means of preventing any further successful Israeli attacks. The decision to embark on a first strike is not undertaken lightly because there is no guarantee of success. If the attack should prove unsuccessful or the opponent able to recover sufficiently, there is always a risk of retaliation with no guarantee that this be limited to the same types of weapon used in the initial attack. There is no definite control of the ladder of escalation: a conventional attack could result in a nuclear response. Moreover, such an attack threatens to run counter to international law and provide the opponent with a cause and potential significant outside support.

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Means of countering a potential first strike are U Distributed command and control structures U Dispersal of political and military leadership in times of tension U Delegation of the ability to fire to local commanders in the event of a decapitation strike

Andrew M. Dorman See also Coercion and Power; Legitimation; Military in Government; Offense/Defense Dominance

Further Readings Flynn, M. J. (2008). First strike: Preemptive war in modern history. New York: Routledge. Lavoy, P. R., Sagan, S. D., & Wirtz, J. J. (2000). Planning the unthinkable: How new states will use nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

FISKE, SUSAN Susan T. Fiske is known for her pioneering work in social cognition, the study of how people perceive others. Fiske has emphasized the importance of social motives in shaping social cognition and the importance of power in shaping social motives. Fiske and her collaborators have theorized and demonstrated the mutually reinforcing relationship between power and stereotyping. Fiske defines power as relative control over another person’s outcomes. One of her first experiments showed a link between power and attention: paying more attention to a person in a social situation led to seeing that person as having more power in that situation. Later, Fiske and colleagues proposed and showed that the need to predict and control one’s outcomes leads people to pay more attention to those who control their outcomes than to those who do not. This, in turn, leads people to base their impressions of powerful others on their actual attributes but to rely on stereotypes to form impressions of those less powerful. In an influential article published in 1993, Fiske outlines a theory of the mutually reinforcing relationship between power and stereotyping. Fiske proposes

that social attention mediates power and stereotyping by leading people to pay more attention to the powerful than to the powerless and therefore to individuate the powerful while stereotyping the powerless. This process reinforces stereotypes about the powerless and perpetuates their subordination because stereotypes are created to explain and justify the status quo. This theory ignited interest in the cognitive and other effects of power in social psychology and was followed by an explosion in theory and research on social power in the discipline. Fiske has also studied how the content of stereotypes relates to power. Fiske and collaborators propose that stereotypes are usually ambivalent, or contain both positive and negative attributes, because social groups are usually interdependent: one group may depend more on another, but each group usually controls the other’s outcomes to some extent. Fiske and her colleagues developed a theory and measures of ambivalent sexism, have studied ambivalent ageism, and developed the stereotype content model. This model proposes that all social groups are stereotyped along the dimensions of competence and warmth, and that status predicts perceptions of competence (with high status groups seen as more competent than low status groups) and the nature of interdependence predicts perceptions of warmth (with cooperative interdependence leading to perceptions of warmth and competitive interdependence leading to perceptions of coldness). Experiments by Fiske and her colleagues using functional magnetic resonance imaging show that the medial prefrontal cortex, necessary for social cognition, is not activated when people view images of individuals from groups stereotyped as very low in competence and in warmth. This suggests that the brain pays no attention to these individuals and reacts to them as though they are inanimate objects instead of humans. Fiske’s research has been instrumental to understanding real-world social problems, such as sex and race discrimination, sexual harassment, reactions to the threat of nuclear war, anti-American sentiment, and the torture of enemy prisoners. Jennifer L. Berdahl See also Gender, Role of Power in; Racism, Role of Power in; Sexism, Role of Power in; Social Power; Status

Foucault, Michel

Further Readings Fiske, S. T. (1993). Controlling other people: The impact of power on stereotyping. American Psychologist, 48, 621–628. Fiske, S. T., & Berdahl, J. L. (2007). Social power. In A. Kruglanski & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Social psychology: A handbook of basic principles (pp. 678–692). New York: Guilford Press.

FLYVBJERG, BENT (1952– ) Bent Flyvbjerg is BT professor and chair of Major Programme Management and director of the BT Centre for Major Programme Management at the University of Oxford. He has conducted wideranging research in the fields of urban policy and planning, much of which is applicable to students in other disciplines, including public administration and sociology. According to Flyvbjerg, planning is a quintessential human activity. The ways in which humans plan reveal phenomena that help address some of the most significant issues in political science, including the relationship between rationality and power. His analysis of the famous Aalborg Project—a widely acclaimed scheme to reprioritize road-use and bring about urban renewal in the city—demonstrates how even a technically sound and rational plan can go awry under the influence of political power relationships, despite initial unity of vision among participants. As the project developed, it became apparent that the exercise of power and the protection of special interests were the real objectives of those institutions that were supposed to serve the public interest. Flyvbjerg demonstrates that power defeats rationality, and that power captures rationality, which subsequently becomes an instrument of power. In so doing, Francis Bacon’s dictum that knowledge is power is reversed: power is shown to direct the process of knowledge creation; thus, power is knowledge. This finding is of concern to democracies because they are based on the premise that knowledge that is available to all can be used to restrain and direct those with power. Flyvbjerg sees his analysis of power relationships as providing empirical evidence to support some of the great theories on power posited by

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thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault. Flyvbjerg develops his research by looking at the basis on which large infrastructure projects, or megaprojects, are planned. Using data collected from multiple countries over many decades, Flyvbjerg’s research reveals that, in most cases, these large projects are approved on the basis of highly dubious or untested claims and that there is a systematic tendency for planners to underestimate the costs of projects and overestimate their benefits. Rather than providing neutral support for policy makers, planners become advocates and, at worst, are deliberately deceptive to ensure the implementation of their projects. Such action is akin to rentseeking behavior, designed to benefit a few at the expense of the majority. The solution to this problem is to recognize the mechanisms of power and address them head-on. Democratic traditions emphasizing participation, transparency, and civic reciprocity can be effective in this regard. Flyvbjerg also argues that a reoriented (phronetic) social scientific discipline can contribute much to the practical knowledge of power. Jessica Templeton See also Knowledge and Power; Rationality

Further Readings Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Rationality and power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making social science matter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Flyvbjerg, B. (2003). Megaprojects and risk: An anatomy of ambition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

FOUCAULT, MICHEL (1926–1984) Born in Poitiers, France, Michel Foucault trained in psychology and philosophy. He held posts at a number of French universities before taking a prestigious appointment at the Collège de France in 1969. He was a prolific author, lectured widely in France and the United States, and was active in several political causes, including campaigns for

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prison reform and gay rights. Foucault subscribed to the Kantian notion of philosophy as a critique of knowledge and described his life’s project as a Critical History of Thought. The goal of Foucault’s scholarship was to create histories of the different modes by which human beings are made into subjects. His early scholarship convinced him that his analytical work on the production of the subject required an understanding of how the human subject is placed in power relations. The issue of power became an explicit problematic in Foucault’s lecture series to the Collège de France in the 1970s and in his first volume of The History of Sexuality in 1976. He continued to refine his views on power until his death in 1984. An understanding of Foucault’s earlier scholarship is crucial to understanding his reasons for rejecting contemporary conceptions of power. Foucault’s early scholarship rejected the idea of individuals having universal characteristics and focused instead on the manner in which human beings are made into subjects. He argued that knowledge about human subjects forms part of multiple and fragmented attempts to regulate human bodies and described the way in which these techniques and forms of knowledge differ between historical periods. For example, in Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, Foucault outlined the origins of the modern penal system and considered the development of forms of knowledge, expertise, and new disciplinary techniques that could be used to regulate the movements and behaviors of prisoners. Crucially, he understood these techniques to form part of a broader set of disciplinary techniques that pervade contemporary society. These, he argued, create a very different understanding of the human subject from that of the medieval or early modern period. Foucault’s position on power evolved during the later period of his life but was consistent in its focus on power as a relational rather than an “economic” concept. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault critiqued the economic concept of power that he saw as common to legal, liberal, and Marxist approaches to power. The economic approach encourages us to view power as a commodity or a right that can be possessed and acquired. The liberal conception of power, for instance, relies on the idea of the rational individual who is free to enter into a social contract to

protect his or her economic and civic interests. Such approaches to power, however, subscribe to fixed understandings of human subjectivity. In contrast, Foucault’s historically situated subject needs to be analyzed using a noneconomic conception of power. His alternative to an economic conception of power was the development of a “relational” analysis of power that understands power as a pervasive element of all social relations and in relation to its presence in a given society and historical period. This position can be characterized as a method for incorporating power in an analysis of social relations rather than as a comprehensive theory of power. Foucault’s relational approach to understanding power is demonstrated in his lecture series of 1977 to 1978 and 1978 to 1979, which were published as Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. In these lectures, Foucault developed a historical account of several different modes or forms of power, including those of pastoral power and government. These modes of power were not, Foucault explained, either static or entirely cohesive. Rather, relations of power can best be understood as the product of tactics that were employed in historical situations of conflict or competition between communities or groups. These tactics are accompanied by the development of ideologies, theories, and forms of knowledge that morally justify those tactics. There are two implications of this relational understanding of power. The first is that ideas that legitimate powerful institutions in society such as the divine right of kings, the social contract, or human rights can be understood as the product of tactics and of political maneuvering in specific historical contexts rather than as natural or universal concepts. This conclusion clearly has important implications for normative philosophy. The second implication relates to our understanding of power and freedom. The exercise of power is typically conceived in liberal and socialist thought as an impediment to freedom. Foucault, conversely, argued that freedom is a necessary condition for the exercise of power. He elaborated on this point in his 1982 essay “The Subject and Power.” Here he argued that power can be understood as the attempt to govern the conduct of others. It is the process of shaping—by means of coercion, consent, persuasion, and so on—the field of possible actions available to others. This, Foucault argued,

Framing

relies on an active or free subject who has the agency to choose, adapt, resist, and otherwise respond to the field of possible action created by the exercise of power. The implication of this is that the exercise of power is not inherently an act of oppression. Rather, it constitutes or produces many aspects of our social relations, systems of knowledge, and experiences of material reality. By describing power as a pervasive aspect of all social relationships, Foucault shifted the discussion of power from a focus on powerful institutions or people to a focus on the way in which individuals and groups use the tactics available to them. He avoided, for the most part, questions of legitimacy or consent and focused on the development of an understanding of power that could avoid the use of a fixed conception of the human subject. Foucault’s work continues to challenge and inspire scholars in the fields of postcolonial studies, feminist scholarship, and many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Melissa Lovell See also Biopower; Discipline; Discourse; Domination; Governmentality

Further Readings Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (2000). Power: Essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984 (J. D. Foubion, Ed.). New York: New Press. Hindess, B. (1996). Discourses of power: From Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Kelly, M. G. E. (2009). The political philosophy of Michel Foucault. New York: Routledge.

FRAMING Framing is a technique used by individuals seeking to construct parameters for thought and discourse about a particular issue, event, or problem. It is used to emphasize certain aspects of a subject while de-emphasizing or ignoring others. The concept can be broken down into two distinct

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approaches: equivalency framing and issue framing. Although both equivalency and issue framing techniques can be traced to the same theoretical foundation, the effects of each are manifested via different cognitive processes and subsequently influence decision making in different ways. However, both can be employed by actors seeking to affect the perspective from which a subject will be evaluated by others. The concept of framing was introduced to the social sciences in 1974 by Erving Goffman, who used it to describe the subjective meaning imparted by individuals to an event or scenario. For example, observation of a group of children on a school playground could evoke the frame “recess.” Such a frame might focus an observer’s attention on certain elements of the scene (recreational equipment, the presence of teachers, etc.) that are key to the individual’s interpretation of unfolding events. In this way, Goffman argued, people use frames to make sense of the world; to give meaning to aspects of a scene that would otherwise be meaningless. Subsequent research has led to a significant evolution in our understanding of frames and their effects. In a marked departure from Goffman’s conception of frames as neutral interpretations privately used by individuals to give meaning to everyday events, contemporary theorists often view frames as linguistic tools that can be designed and deployed by actors seeking to influence the way people perceive or discuss an issue or problem. The power of frames to influence decision making is studied in several academic disciplines, including (but not limited to) political science, sociology, linguistics, media studies, psychology, and gender studies. Because the concept has been applied in many different contexts, there is no single, coherent theory of framing; however, most applications of the concept can be categorized as either equivalency framing or issue framing. Equivalency framing involves presenting an individual with two different, but logically equivalent, choices. Although the decisions of rational individuals should be unaffected by different presentations of the same problem, studies have demonstrated that framing questions in ways that emphasize either positive or negative results can affect the respondents’ choices. Further studies have indicated that individuals tend to be risk-averse when faced with a choice of actions that could result either in

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personal gains or maintenance of the status quo, but are risk-seeking when faced with prospective losses. In other words, people are generally willing to take risks to protect their current assets, but are less willing to take risks to secure gains. This finding has led to the development of prospect theory, which seeks to explore the effects of uncertainty on decision making. Equivalency framing can also be used as a strategic, agenda-setting tactic: by presenting an issue or potential consequences of a particular decision in either positive or negative terms, equivalency framing can be used to capitalize on a listener’s perception of risk. In contrast with the subtle, psychologically based effects of equivalency framing, issue-framing tactics are designed to focus debate about a problem on a particular subset of considerations. Frame initiators often use particular words, phrases, or images to provide a shorthand interpretation of a subject, which forms a point of reference from which subsequent courses of action may be judged. Issue framing is substantively different from rhetoric, which is designed to change a listener’s beliefs through argument. Strategic issueframing tactics may repackage an existing issue such that new considerations can be given primacy over old, without challenging the listener’s original preferences. In this way, the listener’s fundamental beliefs need not change; successful framing will shift the focus of debate to render them irrelevant for the question at hand. Unlike equivalency frames, which influence individuals’ decisionmaking processes subconsciously, issue frames encourage people to deliberately evaluate the importance of elements highlighted by the frame initiator. The cognitive processes underlying the two types of framing effects differ substantially. Although individuals may or may not be conscious of the use of issue-framing tactics, even complete awareness of the way a problem has been framed will not necessarily diminish the impact of the frame. Studies have shown that although experts may be sensitive to the presence of frames in discourse, they are also likely to use their expertise to connect the emphases of the frames to their knowledge and understanding of an issue. Although equivalency frames can lead to illogical preference formation, issue frames are intended to structure debate and highlight elements of a subject that frame initiators believe should be considered as

listeners form opinions within the context of rational decision making. However, actors seeking a particular course of action may frame issues in a way that appeals to individuals’ perceptions of risk and their potential for personal gains or losses. Thus, both types of framing effects may be present in political discourse and other contexts in which people seek to influence the behavior and preferences of others. Jessica Templeton See also Agenda Setters; Discourse; Elite Theories; Heresthetics; Manipulation; Rationality

Further Readings Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Levin, I. P., Schneider, S. L., & Gaeth, G. J. (1998). All frames are not created equal: A typology and critical analysis of framing effects. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 76(2), 149–188. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1986). Rational choice and the framing of decisions. The Journal of Business, 59(4), Part 2: The behavioral foundations of economic theory, pp. S251–S278.

FREE MARKET Free market is a widely used expression that at its core describes a system of decentralized trade involving the voluntary exchange of property rights. Individually considered, a free market is simply one where the price results from the unhampered interaction of supply and demand in a competitive environment. In a more aggregate and broader sense, the free market is an economic system that relies on the price system (rather than government commands) for both the production and distribution of goods and services. In its purest ideal form, a free market would rest entirely on private ownership of the means of production and all prices (including wages and interest rates) would be set exclusively by the interplay of supply and demand. Government would only use its power to enact and preserve the institutional framework necessary for the smooth operation of

Free Will

the market—namely clearly defined and enforced property rights, the rule of law, and protection from domestic and foreign aggression. In a complex economy, effective coordination through the price system is only possible with monetary economic calculation. The existence of a reliable monetary system is therefore an additional institutional requirement of the free market. In a free market economy, the profit and loss opportunities provided by the price system act as signals guiding the allocation of resources to their most efficient uses and simultaneously ensure a tendency for specific markets to clear. The coordination of individual activities that takes place through the price system can be seen as an invisible hand process. In this sense, the free market is a dynamic process of permanent adjustment that allows mutual decentralized economic cooperation in complex societies. It also makes possible the articulation of the vast amounts of decentralized information and knowledge that are dispersed throughout the economy. Some critical arguments’ views of the free market concentrate on efficiency and point out a wide range of instances where market failure is apparent (such as externalities, the existence of monopoly, monopsony, or other issues of market power). Others focus on the need to use government power to address the inequality of market outcomes, care for those who come out worst off in a market economy, or protect other relevant national or social values. A third, more radical, criticism views the operation of the free market as inherently unjust because it commodifies labor and points out that no voluntary exchange can occur when workers are forced to sell their labor to survive. According to this view, gross asymmetries of power are deeply embedded in the operation of markets and permeate all trade. In reality, command economies (the polar opposite of free markets) are increasingly rare, but all existing systems rely on significant forms of political regulation of markets. Market freedom is therefore a matter of degree with different mixes of government action and varying institutional frameworks determining the extent to which free markets operate. André Azevedo Alves See also Invisible Hand; Trade

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Further Readings Hayek, F. A. (1991). Economic freedom. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Sunstein, C. (1997). Free markets and social justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

FREE RIDER See Collective Action Problem

FREE WILL Free will is normally contrasted with determinism. Determinism is the claim that our mental states, choices, and therefore acts are caused by preceding states of the world. Thus, although people might be complex objects, the future for any given person is fixed in precisely the same manner that the future state of any other object in the universe is fixed. The future is as unalterable as the past. Free will is then contrasted with this position such that a person is said to be free in this sense when the person is able to control his or her future—it is not fixed in the same way as is the person’s past. Given the events of the past, he or she can choose what actions to take in the future. Past events might influence the person’s decision or even make his or her actions obvious or inevitable in a weaker sense that he or she is bound to act one way or another. However, the person is in control of his or her actions and chooses his or her acts. A great deal of the philosophical literature on freedom of the will is concerned with mapping a plausible version of compatabilism that squares the circle of causal determinism with regard to the universe (including humans as part of it) while making sense of the claim that humans genuinely have agency—that is, freedom of the will. Again, it is easiest to explain compatabilism in relation to its contrast, incompatabilism. Incompatabilists state that if determinism is true with regard to humans, then there is no such thing as moral responsibility and people are truly unfree. Incompatabilists who think that people are truly free because determinism is false are often called libertarians (though

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they must not be confused with political libertarians who think freedom is the only or fundamental value in society). Some incompatabilists accept determinism and believe moral responsibility and free will are sham concepts that do not really map to anything in the world. Compatibilists maintain that the opposite of free will is acting under compulsion and so we often do act freely, even if our actions can be subsumed under normal causal laws. So they claim that moral responsibility is to be contrasted with acting under compulsion or being forced into acting one way rather than another. Moral responsibility on this view might simply be the response we have as social organisms to our own behavior. If we were not to hold people morally responsible for their actions and respond appropriately by shunning them (in early societies) or by jailing them or sanctioning them in other ways (in modern societies), they would not respond as they do. Their future actions are caused by past events, including the response of society to past transgressors of rules and laws, and what those transgressors expect the future response of society would be to such transgressions now. However, these causes lead transgressors to behave in ways preferable to others in society. Here moral responsibility is a concept that drives behavior, and the free will that people enjoy is their mental responses to the incentives they have to act in one way or another. People do choose whether to behave in one way rather than another, but their choice is still caused by their own responses to the environment they inhabit. Keith Dowding See also Agency; Agency–Structure Problem; Autonomy; Coercion and Power; Determinacy; False Consciousness; Freedom; Paternalism

Further Readings Dennett, D. C. (1984). Elbow room: The varieties of free will worth wanting. Cambridge: MIT Press.

FREEDOM It is widely agreed that freedom consists in a relation among three things: an agent, constraints,

and purposes. Thus, all claims about freedom refer at least implicitly to an agent who is free from certain constraints to realize a certain purpose or set of purposes. Unfortunately, there is also a great deal of disagreement about what counts as an agent, about what kinds of obstacles can count as constraints on freedom, and about which purposes an agent can be considered free or unfree to realize. Freedom, no less than power, is a contested concept. As a result, the relation between freedom and power is both complex and controversial. Liberal political philosophers tend to characterize the relevant constraints narrowly—as acts of physical prevention or coercion by other agents— and the relevant purposes broadly—as anything the agent might conceivably desire to do or become. Thus, if A locks B in a room, B is unfree to leave (A is physically preventing something that B might conceivably desire to do). Similarly, if A leaves the door open but threatens to punish B heavily should B leave, B is unfree to leave. By contrast, if the reason B stays in the room is that B has an irrational fear of leaving, or is suffering from a debilitating disease, most liberal theorists will say that, although B is unable to leave (i.e., lacks the “power to” leave), B is nevertheless free to leave. This conception of freedom is often called the “negative” conception because of its emphasis on the absence of interference by others. Many radical political theorists have contested the liberal conception of freedom, holding, among other things, that a wider set of obstacles can constitute constraints on freedom. Depending on the particular conception of freedom adopted, this wider set of constraints might include obstacles of natural origin (such as genetic disabilities or environmental conditions) and “internal” obstacles (such as ignorance, fear, or a mistaken view of one’s own interests). Such alternative conceptions of freedom are generally known as “positive” because they identify freedom with ability (i.e., the “power to” achieve given ends) or, more strongly still, with the following of self-imposed rules or the realization of authentic purposes (freedom as personal autonomy or self-mastery or selfrealization). Is B made unfree when A exercises power over B? It might be thought that, at least on the negative conception (where unfreedom, like “power over,”

French, John R. P., Jr.

is necessarily a social relation), A’s power entails B’s unfreedom, and vice versa. In reality, however, the relation is less straightforward. First, power over is a relation between wills: A exercises power over B by modifying B’s will, as a result of which B decides to do something that B would not otherwise have done, whereas negative unfreedom is not necessarily a relation between wills. Physical prevention is not a relation between wills: when A locks B in a room, A causes B’s body to stay in the room without modifying B’s will as concerns staying or leaving. We must recognize, then, that there can be negative unfreedom (of B) without power (of A). Second, most theorists recognize that there are forms of power over other than coercion (e.g., conditioning, manipulation, offers). When A exercises these alternative forms of power, A affects B’s behavior without restricting B’s negative freedom. We must also recognize, then, that there can be power (of A) without negative unfreedom (of B). Theorists who endorse a positive conception of freedom contest some or all of these cases of “power without unfreedom.” Where A manipulates or conditions B’s behavior, such theorists are more likely to see B as unfree (on the grounds that A creates internal obstacles for B). Indeed, political liberals are often accused by their critics of being blind to the injustices of certain kinds of power relations (e.g., the power of commercial advertisers or the power of men over women) exactly because they are blind to the unfreedom that such power relations create in their victims. Some theorists claim to have identified a third conception of freedom—a “republican” conception—according to which freedom consists exactly in the absence of a certain kind of social power. For these theorists, one is free to the extent that one is not dominated by others, where to the dominated by another is to be subject to the other’s arbitrary will. Republican freedom is different from positive freedom because it does not consist either in the power to achieve certain ends or in personal autonomy or self-realization. Like negative freedom, it is essentially a social relation. But it is also different from negative freedom, republicans argue, because it is possible for A to dominate B without actually interfering with B’s behavior in any way. For example, B might conform to A’s will for fear of incurring sanctions, even though A does

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not threaten any such sanctions, but is merely in a position to do so. In such a case, although A does not exercise power over B, B remains exposed to such an exercise of power and is therefore unfree. Republicans claim that a society is by definition free only to the extent that it secures collective obedience to a set of rules (constitutional safeguards, etc.) guaranteeing the minimization of arbitrary power. Liberals, by contrast, have argued that the relation between social power and social unfreedom is a contingent one rather than a matter of definition: freedom does not consist of the absence of arbitrary power, they say, even though freedom tends, as an empirical rule, to flourish in the absence of such power. Ian Carter See also Ability; Autonomy; Capability; Coercion and Power; Domination; Free Will; Opportunity; Power To and Power Over; Threats

Further Readings Carter, I., Kramer, M. H., & Steiner, H. (Eds.). (2007). Freedom: A philosophical anthology. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Laborde, C., & Maynor, J. (Eds.). (2008). Republicanism and political theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Morriss, P. (2009). Power and liberalism. In S. R. Clegg & M. Haugaard (Eds.), The Sage handbook of power. London: Sage.

FRENCH, JOHN R. P., JR. (1913–1995)

John R. P. French Jr. was a pioneer in the application of the field theory of Kurt Lewin to industrial and organizational settings, particularly in going beyond descriptive analysis to controlled experiments in field settings. French’s name is associated particularly with the social psychological theory and research on the bases of social power and on the effects of the social environment on health. As a doctoral student at Harvard just before World War II, French was part of a remarkable cohort of graduate students, including Dorwin Cartwright and Jerome Bruner, who later became

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leaders in the exciting development of social psychology. Cartwright and French were especially impressed with Lewin, who was a visiting professor at Harvard. From Harvard, French accepted a position with Harwood Manufacturing Company, headed by Alfred Marrow, who had been greatly influenced by Lewin. There, French and Lester Coch, a personnel manager, carried out a classic study of the effectiveness of worker participation and group decision in implementing change in production while maintaining and even increasing productivity. Following research by Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph White that highlighted the problems of authoritarian leadership, French demonstrated the use of role playing and other devices in retraining an autocratic leader. During World War II, with a desperate labor shortage, manufacturers looked to older people and women to help fill the gap. In doing so, they had to deal with negative stereotypes that were resistant to change, particularly by supervisors. French again demonstrated the effectiveness of implementing change through the involvement of supervisors and managers in the education and change program. When Lewin established the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, French immediately joined the staff as one of the program directors, along with Cartwright, Lippitt, and Leon Festinger. After Lewin’s untimely death in 1947, RCGD moved intact to the University of Michigan, where a particularly productive period of theory and research continued. Among their many projects, Cartwright, as director of RCGD, led the center to focus its attention on social power. French and Bertram Raven, then a graduate student, worked together to develop a widely cited theory and research program on the bases of social power (see Social Power). After several successful years of collaboration in this area, French left it to Raven and others to continue with that analysis, while he began to concentrate on a program that examined the relationship between psychosocial environment and health. A most important product of that program was a set of concepts, measures, and hypotheses called the person–environment fit theory. Bertram H. Raven See also Cartwright, Dorwin; Lewin, Kurt, and Power; Raven, Bertram; Social Power

Further Readings French, J. R. P., Jr., & Raven, B. H. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research. House, J. S. (1993). John R. P. French, Jr.: A Lewinian’s Lewinian. Journal of Social Issues, 44(4), 221–226.

FUNGIBILITY

OF

POWER RESOURCES

A good is fungible if it is of such a nature as to be freely replaceable by another of like nature or kind without decreasing in value. Convertibility and mutual substitutability are hence forms of fungibility. Prime examples of fungible goods are money bills or currencies. In the analysis of power, and in a looser sense, the problem of fungibility refers to the issue whether different types of resources (e.g., military, economic, cultural, diplomatic) have the characteristic of being freely exchangeable or replaceable. This issue has gained prominence for two reasons. If resources are highly fungible—that is, they can be mutually substituted without losing much of their value— this allows them to be aggregated to permit the construction of overall power resource indexes. This is crucial for balance of power theories because they rely on such an understanding of aggregate power for explaining the dynamics of the international system and the options (and behavior) of individual states. Also, this time on the level of agency, if resources are highly fungible, then power could become the equivalent of money in economic theory through which different aims can be weighed on a common scale. This allows a unique value of utility as the maximization of different aims can all be converted into power. Yet, research has shown that the assumption of high fungibility is highly problematic, if not mistaken. Balance-of-power theories used to focus mainly on military resources. The greatest stability of the system and, hence, the least violent resolution of conflicts is expected when the different states (or coalitions) have roughly equal military capabilities because it would be irrational to wage war in such circumstances. Also, all states wish to avoid being in an inferior position that invites aggression, so their

Fungibility of Power Resources

individual security policies will tend to reproduce collective power balances. As long as purely military resources are sufficient to account for such an equilibrium, the issue of fungibility does not arise too prominently, although some see the advent of nuclear weapons as a qualitative break. But the moment power theory is applied to explain more generally the outcomes of conflicts (with the expectation that the actor with more capabilities will inevitably win), fungibility becomes a crucial issue. First, it makes an ex ante assessment of capabilities difficult: how do we compare different types of resources, such as speaking the international lingua franca and running a major trade surplus (which some would dispute to be a resource in the first place) and how do they add up? Yet without an ex ante assessment of the overall power relation, any outcome can be ex post rearranged to fit an explanation in terms of power differentials (power analysis becomes tautological). Second, such a power relation is usually taking place in different domains. Although military resources may be crucial in a military dispute, how effective are they in an economic one? Finally, power relations do not necessarily take place between some interchangeable actors. Although military means would be potentially useful in a conflict with enemies, they can hardly be used with allies. Indeed, relations of amity or enmity profoundly affect the value of resources in the first place. As David Baldwin has often argued, all this leads by necessity to a power analysis, which is relational, multidimensional, and highly situational and, hence, precisely not able to rely on a fungible power resource assumption. Indeed, attempts to aggregate such resources independent of such factors are prone to the “lump fallacy of power,” in Robert Dahl’s felicitous phrase. But fungibility is also important for devising a power-utilitarian theory of behavior. A basic assumption of classical realism states that actors struggle for power: they try to maximize their interest defined in terms of power. This produces a type of rationalist theory that runs parallel to economic theory: power takes the place of money, security that of utility. States are maximizing their security, which can be expressed in terms of power. The underlying power–money analogy, and with it the attempt to directly apply economic

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theory to politics, has, however, been criticized even by some realist writers. Raymond Aron has argued that the different aims of economic actors can be made commensurable through money, whereas no such commensurability exists in politics. Aron points to the difference between an economic theory that works against the background of a monetarized economy; that is, one where money has taken over the double role of standard of value and means of exchange, and a political theory with no such equivalent in actual politics, and where aims cannot be reduced to a common power scale. Still, as Robert Art insists, even if capabilities are not measurable in a clean way, it would be absurd to deny that state leaders are (at times) able to find some rough sense of others’ capabilities. But this argument implies that the value of power resources and their level of fungibility is ultimately a function of interpretation and, to be effective, of a convention shared among state actors. Exactly because capabilities cannot just be added and weighed independently of the interaction and shared understandings, actors need to find proxies for conducting their bargaining—proxies on which they have to agree if they are to have effect. The value of resources and their fungibility do not define the political game, but vice versa (although not only). Hence, this realist answer may save power analysis only by moving it onto constructivist terrain. Stefano Guzzini See also Balance of Power; Constructivist View of Power in International Relations; Relational Power; Resources as Measuring Power

Further Readings Aron, R. (1962). Paix et guerre entre les nations (8th ed.). Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Art, R. J., & Baldwin, D. A. (1999). A debate: Force, fungibility, and influence. Security Studies, 8(4), 173–189. Baldwin, D. A. (1989). Paradoxes of power. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Guzzini, S. (2004). The enduring dilemmas of realism in international relations. European Journal of International Relations, 10(4), 533–568.

G GAME FORMS, POWER

a natural framework for analyzing power abstractly. An n-player game form may be represented by an n-dimensional matrix such that each row corresponds to a strategy for player 1, each column to a strategy for player 2, and so forth, and each cell (or strategy profile) belongs to some outcome. (Different cells may belong to the same outcome.) From the point of view of any focal player i, such a matrix can be contracted into two dimensions, such that rows represent i’s strategies and columns represent all possible combinations of strategies for the other players. More generally, rows and columns can represent the strategy combinations for any pair of complementary coalitions of players. Given this setup, a number of definitions, observations, and propositions follow in natural ways. (In what follows, a coalition may refer to any subset of players, including a single player.) A strategy is potent to the extent that there are outcomes that do not appear in that row or column; such a strategy gives a coalition preclusive power. A strategy is decisive for outcome x if it is maximally potent, that is, if it precludes all outcomes other than x; such a strategy gives a coalition affirmative power. A coalition has veto power if it has a strategy that is decisive for some single outcome x (presumably the status quo or some other default outcome). A coalition is all-powerful if it is decisive for every outcome, and power relations are dictatorial if a single player is all-powerful. The affirmative power of every coalition is limited at least by the preclusive power of its complement. If two disjoint coalitions both have

IN

A game form is a game (in the sense of game theory) with all information about the preferences, payoffs, or utilities of the players stripped out. Put otherwise, a game form is a function that maps strategy profiles into outcomes, over which players’ preferences are unspecified. Game forms, rather than games, provide the appropriate representation of voting procedures, electoral systems, constitutions, and other collective decisionmaking institutions or power relationships. The concept of a game form was first explicitly introduced by Allan Gibbard, who proved that every “straightforward” game form with three or more outcomes is “dictatorial.” (A straightforward game form gives every player, regardless of what his or her preferences may be, an undominated strategy.) This general result implies that every “strategy-proof” voting procedure for choosing among three or more alternatives is also dictatorial. (A voting procedure is strategy-proof if it never gives any voter an incentive to cast an “insincere” or “dishonest” vote.) By first proving the general result for all game forms, Gibbard was able neatly to sidestep the questions of what exactly constitutes a voting procedure and what exactly we mean by insincere or dishonest voting. Subsequently, Nicholas Miller used the concept of a game form to define and analyze power. If we define power as the capacity of an actor, alone or (more likely) in combination with others, to bring about or preclude outcomes, game forms provide 269

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affirmative power, they are both decisive for the same single outcome; that is, they both have veto power. It is not always possible to make power comparisons (based on set inclusion with respect to outcomes) among coalitions, but, in the event that one coalition is a superset of another, the more inclusive coalition is at least as powerful as the less inclusive one. Power relations are determinate if the affirmative power of every coalition is limited only by the preclusive power of its complement. Power relations are decisive if the power of every coalition is equal to its affirmative power. Power relations are simple if they are both determinate and decisive; simple power relations generate simple games (in the sense of game theory) regardless of the players’ preference over outcomes. Power relations are maximally weak if no coalition other than the coalition of the whole has potent strategies; they are maximally strong if every coalition or its complement is all-powerful. As power relations become stronger, (a) determinacy increases, which implies that some coalitions become more powerful but not at the expense of others, and (b) decisiveness increases, which implies that some coalitions become more powerful at the expense of their complements. Outcome x is effectively preferred to y if there is a coalition (a) with a potent strategy that precludes y and (b) all of whose members prefer all nonprecluded outcomes (including x) to y. An outcome x is undominated if no other outcome is effectively preferred to x. The absence of an undominated outcome implies social instability, that is, there is no outcome that satisfies every coalition that has the power to upset it. A multiplicity of undominated outcomes implies social bargaining, that is, there is conflict about which undominated outcome should prevail and no coalition has the power to resolve this in its favor. Finally, no nondictatorial power relations can guarantee the existence of a unique undominated outcome (even if all preferences are strong). This proposition is, in effect, the coalition-based or cooperative counterpart to Gibbard’s noncooperative general result on game forms. Both propositions are intimately related to Kenneth Arrow’s general impossibility theorem in social choice theory. Nicholas R. Miller

See also Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Preference Versus Nonpreference-Based Concepts

Further Readings Gibbard, A. (1973). Manipulations of voting schemes: A general result. Econometrica, 41, 587–601. Miller, N. R. (1982). Power in game forms. In M. J. Holler (Ed.), Power, voting, and voting power (pp. 33–51). Wuerzberg-Vienna: Physica-Verlag. Reprinted in Homo Oeconomicus, 15(1999), 219–243.

GAME-THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO POWER Game theory analyzes social situations of interdependent decision making, wherein the outcome depends on the choices of two or more decision makers or players. By comparison, decision theory focuses on one-person games, or games against nature, wherein the outcome depends of the choice of one player and “nature,” which is assumed not to have preferences and whose actions instead occur with specified probabilities. With the exception of the power indices, some of which are rooted in cooperative game theory, power is not much studied in game theory. In noncooperative game theory, which does not assume a contract is binding, players are usually assumed to have an equal ability to influence the outcome. To be sure, players may play different roles (e.g., attacker vs. defender) and so have different preferences. But how stable outcomes, or equilibria in games, depend on the abilities of players to exert influence is rarely analyzed. In the absence of a theory that considers power differences among players in noncooperative games, this entry begins with three examples in which power matters—exercising it may change the outcome. But, paradoxically, it may not change the outcome in favor of the player that possesses it. Actually, the examples demonstrate that the player with ostensibly the most power may be hurt by possessing it. Next, the entry describes a well-known sequential game in which a powerful player can induce less powerful players not to compete with it, but

Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power

this game, too, has a paradoxical aspect. Finally, the entry briefly discusses how order, moving, and threat power in Steven J. Brams’s theory of moves may enable players to achieve preferred outcomes. What game theory adds to the analysis of power is how its exercise is conditioned by the strategic interaction of the players. Thus, the first example illustrates how a game in which a chair and other voters are embedded induces the other voters to “gang up” against the chair, undermining its seemingly greater power. A similar problem arises for the best shooter in the second example, and the omniscient player in the third example when its opponent knows it is omniscient. But the greater ability of a player to control the outcome—a standard measure of power—does help players achieve their goals in most games. Game theory clarifies when this is the case, and it elucidates subtleties in the exercise of power that would not be apparent without it.

Example 1: The Paradox of the Chair’s Position Suppose there is a set of three voters, V  {X, Y, Z}, and a set of three alternatives, A  {x, y, z}, from which the voters choose. Assume that voter X prefers x to y to z, indicated by xyz; voter Y’s preference is yzx, and voter Z’s is zxy. Assume that the plurality voting procedure, under which the alternative with the most votes wins, is used. Assume that the chair X can break a three-way tie (with three voters, there can never be a two-way tie). This would seem to give the chair an edge over the other two voters, Y and Z. If voting is sincere, whereby every voter votes for its most-preferred alternative—without considering what the other voters might do—X will get its first choice, x, by being able to break a threeway tie in favor of x. However, X’s apparent advantage disappears if voting is “sophisticated” (to be defined shortly). To see why, first note that X has a dominant strategy of “Vote for x”: it is never worse and sometimes better than its other two strategies, whatever the other two voters do. Thus, if the other two voters vote for the same alternative, this alternative wins, and X cannot do better than vote sincerely for x, so voting sincerely is never worse. However, if

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the other two voters disagree, X’s tie-breaking vote (along with its regular vote) for x will be decisive in x’s selection, which is X’s best outcome. Given the dominant choice of x by X, then Y and Z face the strategy choices shown in the top matrix of Figure 1. Y has two, and Z has one, undominated strategy, which are never better and sometimes worse than some other strategy, whatever the other two voters do. For example, observe that “Vote for x” by Y always leads to its worst outcome, x. These dominated strategies are crossed out in the top matrix in Figure 1. This leaves Y with two undominated strategies, “Vote for y” and “Vote for z,” which are neither dominant nor dominated strategies: “Vote for y” is better than “Vote for z” if Z chooses y (leading to y rather than x), whereas the reverse is the case if Z chooses z (leading to z rather than x). By contrast, Z has a dominant strategy of “Vote for z.” If voters have complete information about each other’s preferences, then they can perceive the situation in terms of the top matrix in Figure 1 and First Reduction Z (zxy) Vote for x Vote for y Vote for z

Y (yzx)

Vote for x

x

x

x

Vote for y

x

y

x

Vote for z

x

x

z

Second Reduction Z (zxy) Vote for z Vote for y

x

Vote for z

z

Y (yzx)

Figure 1

Sophisticated voting, given X chooses “Vote for x”

Notes: The dominated strategies of each voter are crossed out in the first reduction, leaving two (undominated) strategies for Y and one (dominant) strategy for Z. Given these eliminations, Y would then eliminate “Vote for y” in the second reduction, making “Vote for z” the sophisticated strategies of both Y and Z, and z the sophisticated outcome.

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eliminate the dominated strategies that are crossed out (first reduction). The elimination of these strategies gives the bottom matrix in Figure 1. Then Y, choosing between “Vote for y” and “Vote for z” in this matrix, would cross out “Vote for y” (second reduction), which is now dominated because that choice would result in x’s winning because of the chair’s tie-breaking vote. Instead, Y would choose “Vote for z,” ensuring z’s election, which is Z’s best outcome but only the next-best outcome for Y. In this manner z, which is not the first choice of a majority and could in fact be beaten by y in a pairwise contest, becomes the sophisticated outcome. The successive elimination of dominated strategies by voters, insofar as this is possible—beginning in the example with X’s sincere choice of x—is called sophisticated voting. Sophisticated voting results in a Nash equilibrium because none of the three players can do better by departing from its sophisticated strategy when the other two players choose theirs. This is clearly true for X because x is its dominant strategy; given X’s choice of x, z is dominant for Z; and given these choices by X and Z, z is dominant for Y. These “contingent” dominance relations, in general, make sophisticated strategies a Nash equilibrium. Observe, however, that there are four other Nash equilibria in this game. First, the choice of each of x, y, or z by all three voters are all Nash equilibria because no single voter’s departure can change the outcome to a different one, much less a better one, for that player. In addition, the choice of x by X, y by Y, and x by Z—resulting in x—is also a Nash equilibrium because no voter’s departure would lead to a better outcome for it. In game-theoretic terms, sophisticated voting produces a different and smaller game in which some formerly undominated strategies in the larger game become dominated in the smaller game. The removal of such strategies, sometimes in several successive stages, enables sophisticated voters to determine what outcomes eventually will be chosen by eliminating those outcomes that definitely will not be chosen. In particular, Y and Z can thereby foreclose the possibility that their worst outcomes will be chosen by the successive removal of dominated strategies, given the presumption that other voters will do likewise.

How does sophisticated voting affect the chair’s presumed extra voting power? Observe that the chair’s tie-breaking vote is not only not helpful but positively harmful: It guarantees that X’s worst outcome (z) will be chosen if voting is sophisticated! A situation in which the chair’s tie-breaking vote hurts rather than helps the chair is what Robin Farquharson called the paradox of the chair’s position. Given this unfortunate state of affairs for a chair, it is reasonable to ask whether a chair, or the largest voting faction in a voting body comprising three factions—none of which commands a majority—has any recourse. The answer is no: the sophisticated outcome, z, is supported by both Y and Z, which no voting strategy of X can upset. Power defined as control over outcomes is not synonymous with power defined as control over resources (e.g., a tie-breaking vote or simply more votes). The strategic situation facing voters intervenes and may cause them to reassess their sincere strategies in light of the additional resources that a chair possesses. In so doing, they may be led to coalesce against the chair—that is, to vote in such a way as to undermine the impact of its extra resources—handing the chair a worse outcome than it would have achieved without them. These resources in effect become a burden to bear, not power to wield. Note that Y and Z do not form a coalition against X in the sense of coordinating their strategies and agreeing to act together in a cooperative game wherein binding agreements are possible. Rather, they behave as isolated individuals; at most, they could be said to form an “implicit coalition.” Such a coalition does not imply even communication between its members but simply choices based on their common perceived strategic interests.

Example 2: The Paradox of Marksmanship A truel is a three-person expansion of a duel, in which each of the players can fire bullets at the others to try to eliminate them and survive itself. Assume there is a set of three players, P  {A, B, C}, standing at the vertices of an equilateral triangle. Each player, while hoping to survive, would like to shoot an opponent at one of the other two vertices.

Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power

Let the marksmanships of A, B, and C—or the probability that, by firing a shot, they eliminate an opponent—be a, b, and c, respectively, and consider a sequential truel in which the players fire in succession. A player who is about to fire, whether the player’s turn comes up in a fixed order or is chosen at random, has one strategic choice—namely, which player to fire at. To make this choice optimally, assume a player wants to maximize its survival probability. Regardless of what the other players do, a player in a sequential truel maximizes its survival probability by firing at the opponent against which it would less prefer to fight a duel. The reason is simple: if a player’s shot misses, then it makes no difference which player was the target, but if the player’s shot hits the target, the shooter is better off because its opponent in the resulting duel is weaker. Thus, a player that follows this strongeropponent strategy fires at the opponent whose marksmanship is highest, trying to eliminate it to set up a duel with the lower-marksmanship player. Assume that the marksmanships satisfy a  b  c. Then A will optimally fire at B, and both B and C will fire at A. Assume that the order in which the players fire is random, and they continue to fire until only one player survives (each is assumed to have an unlimited supply of bullets). If a  0.8, b  0.6, and c  0.4, it is not difficult to show that the players’ survival probabilities are PA 0.296, PB 0.333, and PC 0.370. What is surprising is that the survival probabilities are in the reverse order of the marksmanships: the worst shot (C) is most likely to survive, and the best shot (A) is least likely. (For other marksmanship values, the survival probabilities might end up in any order, illustrating the sensitivity of the outcome to the quantitative values.) That the seemingly strongest player in the example does worst illustrates once again how a game may condition player strategies to undermine the power of a player. Surely resources matter, but not always in the direction that they are supposed to.

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player omniscient in a two-person game if it can make such predictions perfectly. (Omniscience might derive from breaking the adversary’s code or similar strategic intelligence.) The omniscient player would seem to have an edge over the nonomniscient player, which might be interpreted as an informational kind of power. But now assume that the opponent is aware of the omniscient player’s ability (e.g., because the opponent has discovered his or her codes have been broken), and both players are playing the well-known game of chicken. In this 2  2 game, in which there are two players each with two strategies, let the column player be the omniscient player O, and the row player the non-omniscient player N, as shown in Figure 2. O and N can each choose between a cooperative strategy of C and a noncooperative strategy of C/bar, which leads to the four possible outcomes at the intersection of the players’ strategies. The players strictly rank the outcomes as follows (i.e., there are no ties): 4  best, 3  next best, 2  next worst, and 1  worst; the first number in the ordered pair (x, y) is the payoff to N, the second number the payoff to O. Thus, the higher the number, the greater the payoff, but the payoffs are only ordinal: they indicate an ordering of outcomes from best to worst but not the degree to which a player prefers one outcome over another. The story usually told about chicken is the following: two drivers race toward each other on a narrow road. Each has the choice between swerving, and avoiding a head-on collision (CC), or —— continuing on the collision course (CC). Player preferences are as follows: Omniscient (O) C C

(3,3) Compromise

C (2,4) O Advantaged

Non-omniscient ( N) C

(4,2) N Advantaged

(l,l) Disaster

Example 3: The Paradox of Omniscience One resource that a player may possess is the ability to predict the strategy choice of a second player before the second player makes its choice. Call a

Figure 2

Game of chicken

Key: (x, y)  (payoff to N, payoff to O), 4  best; 3  next best; 2  next worst; 1 worst.

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U Most prefer that the other player “chicken out” — — when it does not (payoff of 4) at CC or CC U Next most prefer that both players chicken out, making the disgrace of doing so milder (payoff of 3) at CC U Next least prefer to be the sole player to chicken — — out (payoff of 2) at CC or CC U Least prefer that neither player chickens out, causing both to die in a head-on collision (payoff —— of 1), at CC

Note that the best strategy of each player (C or — C) depends on the strategy chosen by the other player, which implies that neither player has a dominant strategy. This interdependence gives — each player an incentive to threaten to choose C, hoping that the other player will concede by choosing C so that the threatener can obtain its best payoff of 4. If the players cannot threaten each other, how will this game be played if O can predict N’s choice, and N is aware of O’s ability? If N—chooses C, O will predict this choice and choose C, giving (2,4), which favors O. On the other hand, if N — chooses C, O will predict this choice and choose C, giving (4,2), which—favors N. Because N prefers (4,2), it will choose C, forcing O to back down and receive only its next-worst payoff of 2. On the other hand, N obtains its best payoff (4), thereby the non-omniscient player does better, in terms of comparative rankings, than the omniscient player does, creating what Brams called the paradox of omniscience. Besides chicken, this paradox occurs in five other 2  2 ordinal games. To have omniscience in a game is equivalent to a player’s moving second, giving it the opportunity to observe the prior choice of its opponent and respond to it. Omniscience simply eliminates the necessity of having to move second: it enables the omniscient player to anticipate its opponent’s choice without actually having observed it beforehand. But the nonomniscient player, aware that the omniscient player will rationally respond to its prediction, can capitalize on this fact in games vulnerable to the paradox. Thereby the apparent informational advantage of omniscience, and the power it would seem to confer on a player over its opponent, may backfire. Once again, the game being played matters in determining whether an extra resource (information in this case) indeed helps a player.

Power May Help Although power in the form of extra resources—a tie-breaking vote (Example 1), better marksmanship (Example 2), or omniscience (Example 3)— may induce a worse outcome for a player, these cases are exceptional. Generally speaking, players can secure better outcomes with extra resources, but not necessarily without paying a price for expending them. In the case of Reinhard Selten’s chain-store paradox, the usual game-theoretic calculation suggests otherwise, but an alternative game-theoretic model demonstrates that power helps in the way one would expect, though at a cost. Assume a chain store, player CS, announces its intention to build stores in 20 different locations where neighborhood stores presently operate. CS indicates that it will enter each local market and compete against neighborhood stores k, k  1, 2, . . . , 20, in a sequence starting with player k  1. Each k can choose to compete directly with CS (in) or close (out). Except for player 1, each k learns the result of the competition (if any) in the k – 1 markets that precede it. CS faces the following decisions. If k chooses out, CS competes unopposed and does not have to choose a pricing strategy. If k chooses in, CS must choose between two pricing strategies, cooperative or aggressive, referring to how vigorously CS undercuts k’s prices. Figure 3 shows a game tree in which the sequence of choices that all players k and CS make in every neighborhood market. Figure 3 also shows in a payoff matrix the consequences for CS, and for each k, of choosing each of their two strategies. 1. If k is out, k receives a payoff of 1. 2. If k is in, k does better than had it exited if CS is cooperative (payoff of 2), worse if CS is aggressive (payoff of 0). 3. CS does best when k is out (payoff of 5), less well if k is in and CS is cooperative (payoff of 2), and worst if k is in and CS is aggressive (payoff of 0).

Observe that an aggressive strategy hurts CS if k is in (payoff of 2 vs. 5). But if k is out, a cooperative or aggressive strategy has no effect on the

Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power

Game tree of moves in one neighborhood market

Player k

Out

In

Player CS

Cooperative

Aggressive

Payoff matrix in one neighborhood market

Player CS Cooperative

Aggressive

In

(2,2)

(0,0)

Out

(1,5)

(1,5)

Player k

Figure 3 Key: (x,

Chain-store game

y)  (payoff to k, payoff to CS)

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than 0 if it is aggressive. By comparison, if k is out, CS’s strategy has no effect on its payoff, making cooperative a dominant strategy. Given that it is in CS’s interest to be cooperative in the 20th subgame, it is in player 20’s interest to be in and realize a payoff of 2. But if in and cooperative are rational choices in the 20th subgame, they are also rational in the 19th because the players can ignore any possible effects that their choices will have on the 20th subgame. Thus, the 19th subgame can be treated as if it were the last, and the previous reasoning applied. Carrying this reasoning successively backward, all players k should choose in, and CS should always respond by being cooperative. The payoff to each k would then be 2, and the payoff to CS, summed across the 20 subgames, would be 20  2  40. But something seems amiss. Is it really in the interest of CS always to cooperate in each subgame—and realize a payoff of only 2 each time—when it can more than double its payoff (to 5) by inducing neighborhood stores to drop out? Because all players k learn what happened to their predecessors, CS can exploit this fact by being aggressive initially, even suffering the consequences of payoffs of 0 in the first 12 markets if its deters the last 8 potential competitors from entering. Thereby CS receives (12)(0)  (8)(5)  40,

payoffs of either player because there is no competition, so CS can follow its normal pricing strategy and gain the entire market. Given that the players have complete information about the payoffs that each receives, what are their optimal strategies? Consider the 20th player k and the subgame it plays with CS. If it chooses out, it gets a payoff of 1. Of course, it could do better (payoff of 2) if it chooses in and CS is cooperative. But it may also end up with a payoff of 0 if CS is aggressive. Now consider the subgame from the vantage point of CS. Because there are no subgames to follow, CS does not have to be concerned about how its behavior might influence the choice of future opponents. If player 20 is in, CS need be concerned only with how to maximize its payoff in this subgame. This CS accomplishes by choosing to be cooperative, which gives CS a payoff of 2, rather

which matches what it would obtain if all 20 players k entered and CS were cooperative. It seems unlikely that it would take as many as 12 instances of being aggressive for CS to establish its credibility. More likely, 6 or fewer instances would suffice—especially if they were strung together at the beginning of the sequence—to discourage future challengers. Assuming this to be the case, CS would come out substantially better off by punishing, rather than appeasing, all challengers (except player 20). This logic can formally be justified by introducing uncertainty into the game and calculating “sequential” Nash equilibria. Such equilibria circumvent the logic of backward induction— working back from the 20th subgame—that indicated that CS should be cooperative from the start.

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“Threat Power” Threats play a similar role in the game of chicken if one player has the power to threaten its oppo— nent with the choice of C (see Figure 2) and to carry out such a threat if its opponent does not heed it. If the threatener’s threat is credible, it forces its opponent to choose C in chicken, yielding the best outcome (4) for the threatener and the next-worst outcome (2) for the threatened player. Of the 57 distinct 2  2 ordinal games without a mutually best outcome, 39 are vulnerable to what Brams calls “threat power.” Twelve games are vulnerable to “order power,” whereby one player is able to dictate the order in which players move from outcomes. “Moving power,” which reflects the ability of a player to continue moving when its opponent must eventually stop, is effective in 16 games. These different concepts of power are grounded in the theory of moves, which assumes that players can move and countermove in a matrix game, based on calculations they make, looking ahead, about where play will terminate. Even if players do not possess any kind of power, this theory yields “nonmyopic equilibria” that may be different from Nash equilibria, which is a myopic equilibrium concept. Sometimes different kinds of power reinforce the choice of these equilibrium outcomes, but other times they destabilize them and produce new outcomes.

Conclusions Some analysts view power as the central concept of political science, but it is notoriously difficult to define, even at a conceptual level. Game-theoretic approaches to its analysis show up paradoxes, whereby players with greater resources may not be able to ensure as favorable outcomes for themselves as those without such resources. This is because the strategic calculations of players, when they act rationally, occasionally complicate matters in such a way as to give an edge to players who lack these resources. Additional resources, however, generally help players secure better outcomes. But these effects have been analyzed systematically only in 2  2

ordinal games, leaving open many research questions about the effects of power in other games. Steven J. Brams See also Game Forms, Power in; Nash Equilibrium; Paradox of New Members

Further Readings Brams, S. J. (1994). Theory of moves. New York: Cambridge University Press. Farquharson, R. (1971). Theory of voting. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Hirshleifer, J. (1991). The paradox of power. Economics and Politics, 3, 177–200. Selten, R. (1978). The chain store paradox. Theory and Decision, 9(2, April), 127–159.

GENDER, ROLE

OF

POWER

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There has been a long-standing and complex engagement among feminist theorists with the phenomenon of power. Over time, the parameters of this engagement have varied, but a crucial preoccupation has been the role played by power in constructing and perpetuating relationships of social, economic, and political gender inequality. Seeking to highlight, deconstruct, and challenge the existence of a social structure in which the perspectives and experiences typical of men’s lives have been, and continue to be, accorded higher priority and value than are those typical of women’s, feminists have turned to the concept of power to explain the existence and tenacity of this patriarchy.

Understanding Patriarchy From the outset, though, it is clear that feminists have differed markedly both in their understanding of the origins of patriarchy and the strategies for securing its eradication. For some feminists, this system of male privilege can be explained

Gender, Role of Power in

adequately by reference to a social legacy under which men have been the principal agents and authors. Central to this, then, is an account of men’s historical and present-day power to do certain things, namely to define women’s identity and appropriate social role in light of men’s understanding of what this is, or of what this should be. Significantly, moreover, it has been argued that this process of mediation has not been one of neutral translation, but rather one of, at best, clumsy misinterpretation and, at worst, deliberate and cynical misrepresentation. Thus, women are identified with domestic and family life, with reproduction and with passive but accessible (hetero)sexuality, and concepts of “femininity” have emerged that valorize women’s vulnerability and naivety, while accompanying concepts of “masculinity” valorize men’s chivalry and protectiveness (while paradoxically also sanctioning selective acts of excessive masculine aggression). For feminists who subscribe to this position, the solution to the problem of patriarchal privilege lies in increasing women’s access to, and thus involvement in, the arenas in which this power to construct gender roles and identities is exercised. Emphasizing the extent of women’s sameness to men, many feminists have called for women’s inclusion in public and political arenas, on the premise that this will offer women an equal opportunity to legislate for their own lives, represent their own experiences and values, and influence the constructions of masculine and feminine that have historically marginalized women. This approach has secured a number of high profile strikes against the patriarchal orthodoxy—women’s access to higher education and their inclusion in the workplace, for example, have been successfully pursued through an approach that highlights the lack of any justification, grounded in gender difference, for not appointing, remunerating, and promoting women on equal terms with men. At the same time, though, a number of other feminists, despite being sympathetic to this agenda of including women in mainstream structures and institutions, have emphasized the limits of any approach that focuses on securing entitlements for women only where they can establish themselves to be “similarly situated” to men and draws attention to the peculiar aspects of the female life experience that are necessarily excluded in this process.

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More specifically, these feminists argue that genuine empowerment of women can only be achieved when we acknowledge, and celebrate, the extent to which women’s own experiences and perspectives— often derived from their distinctive relation to reproduction and its attendant relationships of dependency—provide access to special forms of knowledge and rationality. Such an approach focuses on the purportedly unique ability that women have to nurture, to connect, and to cooperate and demands that these capacities be recognized as empowering on their own terms, both for women and for society at large. But the underlying empirical claim here that women reason in a different way than men do has been challenged, as has the accompanying normative assertion that women’s empowerment will best be secured by valorizing their relational specificity. Indeed, a number of other (often so-called radical) feminists have argued that any account of patriarchy is inadequate if it fails to focus on men’s power to do certain things, or to disqualify certain forms of knowledge, and on men’s power over women. Approaches that are preoccupied primarily with women’s inclusion in preexisting systems, whether because of their sameness to men or their difference from them, fail to capture the deeper dimensions of patriarchy’s operation and perpetuation. Challenging the notion that the subordination of women is essentially a matter of irrational differentiation on the basis of sex, this approach uncovers the role of male domination in making gender difference relevant to the distribution of benefits, always to the systematic disadvantage of women. Under this account, patriarchy emerges, therefore, as a problem of men’s domination over women, rather than a question of women’s sameness to or difference from men, and gender difference is recognized as having only been constructed as significant to justify this pattern of patriarchal power. In this light, the question of whether female difference is affirmed or denied is irrelevant because what matters is the way in which those differences are defined by relationships of power. Instances of inequality are no longer blips in an otherwise legitimate system, but are part of a complex, pervasive network that infiltrates every aspect of our gendered existence. Stipulating men as the authors of the subjection of women and implicating the state as a primary

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instigator and perpetuator of the patriarchal system, this approach, though rhetorically compelling, has provoked concern. In particular, its mono-causal explanation of power disparities has been challenged, with attention being drawn to the plurality of factors, such as race, class, and sexual orientation, that cut across gender in creating experiences of womanhood. The deterministic implications of this approach have also been highlighted—if women are universally victimized and subjected by men, then it is difficult to see how they can exert sufficient pressure to bring about meaningful reform. In the specific context of the relationship between power and patriarchy, these concerns have led an increasing number of contemporary feminists to seek alternative frameworks. A key influence on feminist thinking in this regard has been Michel Foucault, whose work on the disciplinary operation of modern power has provided the opportunity for a nuanced analysis of male– female relations and a critical interrogation of the purportedly one-directional and total imposition of men’s domination over women. Power, in the Foucauldian account, is not an oppressive force imposed systematically from one source, but a positive social presence that operates in all aspects of lives and exerts itself in all directions, creating a variety of relationships other than those in the domination–subordination dynamic. Refusing to perpetuate this conception of repression as being paradigmatic of power, Foucault highlights the oversimplification of sharp distinctions between those wielding power (men) and those subject to it (women), focusing instead on the interplay of the micro-politics of power that operate at a more penetrating level.

Foucault: Resistance, Subversion, Domination For Foucault, resistance and subversion are the natural corollary of disciplinary practices of power. They are manifest not when those people subject to power seek to transcend the prevailing network of intricate power strategies, but when they consciously subvert the expectations of those in power, thereby denying consolidation of their identity within expected parameters. Continual subversion of expectation in this way offers a means of producing change and thereby exercising effective

resistance. This contrasts markedly with the previous feminist account in which the assimilation of patriarchal norms is seen as the consequence of the pervasive power dynamics of gender domination, and the possibility of resistance becomes a conundrum because it entails transcendence in a context in which it is difficult to see how any woman can break out of this dominant hegemony. By drawing on this analysis, contemporary feminist theorists have been enabled, among other things, to conceive of the female body less as the primary site for the operation of masculinist power and more as a cultural statement about the context of gender and power relations. The problematic radical preoccupation with commonality in women’s bodily experiences has been replaced by a focus on the multiplicity of cultural meanings that can be attributed to the female body. In turn, this has enabled contemporary feminists to shift focus away from a primary concern with overarching systems of domination toward the introduction of dialectical power relations, agency and subversion, and toward a necessary recognition of the role played by women in the perpetuation of patriarchy. Although many feminists have welcomed these developments, support has been far from unanimous. In particular, this Foucauldian conception has been criticized for robbing feminism as a movement of claims central to its mobilization and normative positioning. Feminists have expressed reservations regarding his tendency to prioritize analysis of the operation of power at the microlevel over more large-scale frameworks and to allow his thesis on the omnipresence of power to promote an agnostic theory in which power, by virtue of its productive and ineliminable status, becomes normatively neutral. It is argued that the danger of this, from a feminist perspective, lies in its inability to distinguish between good and bad social practices in any meaningful way and thus to differentiate between those practices that are imposed more heavily by prevailing power regimes. A growing body of work (feminist and otherwise) has, however, highlighted the extent to which Foucault (at least in his later work) was far from ignorant of the existence and significance of macrolevel domination. Domination, in Foucault’s understanding, is a highly distinct and specific form of power relation. In a state of domination, the ordinarily free-flowing power forces of modern

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society become stagnated and within this stagnant state, significant benefits are conferred on the power-holder at the expense of the powerless such that the relationship in question becomes conceivable as a kind of commodity in the manner outlined by radical feminist theory. At the same time, though, unlike that radical feminist account, Foucault’s account does not conceive of any overarching system because relations of domination are always secondary results of power. A state of domination is not produced immediately in its totality. Rather, the inherently fluid and pluripotential nature of the formative power relations involved means that it is in the continual process of being repeatedly produced, and this denies any rigid consolidation of the domination dynamic, permitting techniques through which the dominated can generate disjunctions between the dominator’s dictates and the outcome. Thus, even in a state of domination, although the scope for resistance is substantially reduced, the possibility of its realization is never completely obliterated because it continues to be immanent in the power relationships that have stagnated and congealed to form this asymmetrical structure. Although this account may bear little resemblance to the notion of utopian transcendence of male domination promoted by radical feminism, it does offer a potentially transformative rather than merely subversive agenda and, in so doing, challenges concerns regarding the utility of Foucault for feminist strategies.

Conclusion The concept of power has been, and remains, a central preoccupation of feminist analysis—both in recognizing and condemning men’s monopolization thereof and in developing strategies to increase women’s access thereto. At the same time, though, as this discussion indicates, the way in which power has been understood has differed considerably across feminist approaches—with commentators adopting quite divergent conceptions of power as an abstract phenomenon, as well as different perspectives on the modes of its operation and the scope for resistance. It seems, though, that at the heart of contemporary feminist engagement lies a dual commitment to two (prima facie conflicting) positions—the first entailing that

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women as a collective continue to be marginalized or subordinated at the hands of men, and the second entailing that male–female relations are complex and multifaceted, yielding myriad variations on the conventional male power versus female powerless dichotomy. The ways in which feminism negotiates this tension, paying respect to the nuances of experiential reality without undermining the urgency or normative strength of its politics, will mark the terrain in which future theories about the relationship between gender and power develop. Vanessa E. Munro See also Feminist Theories of Power; Foucault, Michel

Further Readings Allen, A. (1999). The power of feminist theory: Domination, resistance, solidarity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: Power, discourse and gender in contemporary social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Munro, V. (2003). On power and domination: Feminism and the final Foucault. European Journal of Political Theory, 2(1), 79–99. Young, I. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

GIDDENS, ANTHONY (1938– ) Anthony Giddens is an internationally renowned British social theorist who has pioneered new theories of social practice, politics, modernity, and the self. Born in Edmonton, North London, Giddens was professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge before he became director of the London School of Economics in 1997. Having been adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Giddens was given a life peerage in 2001. He cofounded Polity Press in 1985. Currently, he is a Life Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge. Although the scope of Giddens’s writing on social theory is too vast to cover in a short space, a clear theoretical thread runs through his work, namely that social theory should be the study of “duality of

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structure,” that agency and structure are two inseparable faces of the same social coin. His overarching theoretical program is perhaps best outlined in his 1984 book titled The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. In the same book, Giddens spelled out a social ontology of social practice, a perspective that is different from agent-centered and structurecentered theories that focus on the role of individuals in the study of social conduct and patterned processes, respectively, believed to have an independent influence on the individual. The way out of this dualist predicament is not adopting an approach that merely recognizes the interfacing of agency and structure, for such perspective ultimately is forced to privilege one over the other. Instead, Giddens insists on a social ontology that has two advantages over previous theories. First, it allows us to have a dialectical perception of structure according to which structure is both the medium through which action is made possible and its reproduction is created through social practice itself. Second, social structure not only has a constraining capacity; it also enables members of society in their dealings with one another. Consistent with this view, Giddens elucidated a theory of power that is markedly different from previous theories. According to Giddens, because any social dynamics involves power relations, social inquiry cannot relegate the study of power to a secondary status, nor should it disregard the “dialectics of control” wherein both the powerful and the powerless influence one another. Despite his novel theory, Giddens does not believe that his new perspective is intended to address issues of a social order that is radically different from the modern age. He does not think that ours is the postmodern era, although it is not wise to stick to the classical formulations of modernity suggested by Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Instead, Giddens asserted that the contemporary world is engulfed in the process of “radicalized modernity,” a condition that has lasting and universal consequences without engendering a sweeping rupture from a modern way of life that had begun in the 17th century. This view is based on an important distinction that Giddens makes between traditional and modern societies. The latter are characterized by reflexive social practices in which institutional and personal

activities are constantly monitored, ultimately resulting in both “the end of nature and tradition.” Modernity has marked the end of nature, for currently there is literally nothing natural that falls outside the province of human intervention. Tradition has ended because modernity is a futureoriented epoch characterized by a never-ending technological transformation and a social-political paradigm premised on an open-ended social change that has prompted constant alteration of democratic institutions. This transformation, among other things, forces the social theorist to explicate a new theory of self and sexuality. In the face of new prospects and stakes engendered as a result of modern developments, modern individuals have no choice but to take their sexual lives seriously. This is even more important as radicalized modernity is the age of “plastic sexuality,” wherein gender relations are less constrained by the dictums of the heterosexual matrix and the needs of reproduction. Most important Giddens’s the theory has significant implications for politics. Like Marx, Giddens believes that the goal of social theory is not to merely interpret the social world; it should also be instrumental in extending the transformative capacity of individuals. In their current form, according to Giddens, the paradigms of right and left politics have inconsistently addressed the issues that have emerged as a result of the “death” of both “welfare consensus” and socialism, and the overwhelming social and economic changes that have taken place after World War II. However, those who consider technological development as a panacea to all problems not only fail to see the multiple consequences of technology, they also fall short of offering a sensible alternative. Giddens is interested in a political philosophy with an ideal that is based on an analysis of the real. Accordingly, he is in favor of what he calls “the third way,” a radical–center approach that synthesizes the political economic virtues of both neoliberalism and classical social democracy. Yet the primary intention of the third way is not to abandon social democracy but to renew it. The revitalization of social democracy, Giddens insists, must deal with the critical dilemmas of our time. The dilemmas are associated with issues and problems concerning globalization, individualism, the distinction between left and right politics,

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political agency, and environmental problems. Here Giddens privileges the state by assigning to it an important role in the processes of both social transformation and protecting members of society. Although receiving praise for his theoretical innovations, Giddens is no stranger to criticism. Some have insisted that Giddens has not successfully overcome the theoretical dichotomy that he is against. Others contend that his emphasis on modernity has amounted to abandoning the study of capitalism and its associated problems, such as social inequality. Alem S. Kebede See also Agency; Agency–Structure Problem; Structural Power; Structural Suggestion; Structuration

Further Readings Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1998). The third way: The renewal of social democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

GLOBAL CITIES See World Cities

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE The expression global governance entered the political and academic vocabulary in the late 1980s and early 1990s, mainly thanks to former members of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission), such as Shridath Ramphal and Maurice Strong. Several of these public figures participated in the Stockholm Initiative on Global Security and Governance in 1991 and then in the Commission on Global Governance, whose landmark report Our Global Neighborhood was published in

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1995. Around the same years, global governance was introduced in academic discourses by the work of James Rosenau, Oran Young, and other scholars. The Centre for the Study of Global Governance was established by Meghnad Desai at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1992, and the first issue of the journal Global Governance was published in 1995.

Definitions The Commission on Global Governance defined governance very broadly, as “the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs.” Rosenau conceived global governance as including “systems of rule at all levels of human activity—from the family to the international organization—in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has transnational dimensions.” Elaborating on this definition, governance can be understood as the creation and implementation of rule systems that facilitate the coordination and cooperation of social actors and determine the distribution of the costs and benefits of collective action. Governance is thus conceptually distinct from government, understood as a material organization in charge of administering and enforcing such rule systems. Most scholars who use the phrase global governance maintain that government is not a necessary condition of governance and that the lack of a world government does not imply the impossibility of governance beyond the level of individual states. Issues such as ozone depletion, the spread of financial crises, and the prohibition of certain kinds of weapons are managed by governance structures that do not conform to the hierarchical model of rule setting and enforcement that is typical of states, although a degree of hierarchy can be an important element in the origin and functioning of those structures. What is “global” about global governance is also open to contending definitions and interpretations. Broadly speaking, it may refer to global issues, global policy impact, or global participation. The existence of global issues or problems is arguably neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for global governance. It is not sufficient because issues perceived as globally relevant—in the sense of involving transcontinental interdependencies—may be addressed exclusively by national

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governance mechanisms, as in the case of the regulation of migration in the 19th century, or not at all. Nor is it a necessary condition, because some important actors may start perceiving a problem as global only as a consequence of their becoming targets of governance initiatives initiated by others. The definition of global problems is often the result of contested political processes where the exercise of compulsory or persuasive power is crucial. Global governance may then be defined in terms of the provision of a global “solution,” with reference to either its reach or its active participants. Rules imposed unilaterally by one state on distant others may count as acts of global governance if what matters is only the geographical reach and scope of their impact. Some find that this stretches the concept excessively and insist that the idea of governance implies some form of cooperation and active participation by those who are expected to follow the rules, although the specific content of the rules may well reflect differences in power and hierarchical relationships. Furthermore, markets may or may not be considered mechanisms of governance, depending on whether institutionalized collective action is considered a defining feature of governance. The creation and enforcement of the rules of market exchange are certainly acts of governance, but arguably, the myriad individual transactions taking place in “the market” are not.

Rationale These considerations show that, although the phrase global governance may be recent, it emerged to address problems that have concerned observers of politics for centuries. For instance, the provision of governance beyond individual states was the ultimate concern of 17th-century philosophers debating the foundations of jus gentium, 18thcentury writers arguing over the ability of balance of power mechanisms to provide order and stability to the European state system, and 20th-century practitioners wondering how effective collective security institutions could be established. The main novelty of the past 20 years is the widespread perception that explanatory frameworks based on the interaction between states are no longer sufficient to capture all important dimensions of governance at the transnational level. Although most

scholars would still regard governments as pivotal actors in world politics, an increasing number maintain that governance functions are exercised through a variety of institutional forms, and that in certain contexts governments are not the only and not necessarily the most important actors. This position is usually supported by referring to a number of significant developments in world politics, notably the importance of supranational bureaucracies in policy formulation and implementation as well as trends toward international legalization and adjudication; that an increasing number of public agencies other than national executives, such as central bankers and securities regulators, establish transgovernmental networks with their counterparts in other countries; the selfregulatory activities of business actors, which created a number of transnational governance mechanisms in the domains of technical standardization, safety regulation, commercial disputes resolution, and other regulatory areas; the growing role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and transnational advocacy networks in identifying transnational problems, formulating policy options, and assisting other actors in policy implementation; and finally, that civil society organizations, companies, national public agencies, and intergovernmental organizations are forming “multistakeholder” policy networks that seek consensual solutions to social problems, such as the World Commission on Dams, the UN Global Compact, and the Global Fund on AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis. For instance, Jan Aart Scholte has argued that the dispersal of governance functions among and across territorial layers—municipal, provincial, national, regional, and global—and across the traditional public–private divide amounts to a transition from statism to polycentrism as the predominant governance principle under conditions of globalization. It is noteworthy that the absence of a unifying governance framework is reflected in the increasingly common use of sector-specific expressions such as global environmental governance, global health governance, and global Internet governance.

Theory and Study of Global Governance The international relations literature experienced a significant departure from state-centric models in

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the 1970s, not least because of Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s development of “complex interdependence” as a conceptual alternative to the realist view of world politics. Since the 1990s, there has been a major surge in theoretical and empirical work on the range of social phenomena now associated with the concept of global governance. But the emphasis on the increasing pluralism and diversity of actors providing governance functions makes the development of a comprehensive and parsimonious theoretical framework difficult to achieve. Rosenau stressed the increasing complexity of world politics: for him, “global governance is the sum of myriad—literally millions of—control mechanisms driven by different histories, goals, structures, and processes,” so he concluded, “Any attempt to assess the dynamics of global governance will perforce have multiple dimensions.” Global governance represents a challenge for established theory-building programs in political science. For instance, rational-choice and game-theoretic models developed to predict the interaction of a limited number of exogenously constituted and institutionally homogeneous states are often unsuitable to generate expectations about the interaction of a larger number of highly diverse actors operating across multiple territorial contexts and possessing different kinds of resources. Most definitions of global governance emphasize the role of rules, so most of the work using this concept may be labeled “institutionalist.” However, although all institutionalists agree that rules can matter in world politics, they disagree on the best way to characterize the impact of rules. This disagreement reflects a more general divide between rationalist (“thin”) and constructivist (“thick”) institutionalism in political science. According to the former, institutional rules operate as external constraints, providing incentives and information to rational actors whose preferences are exogenously determined (or assumed for heuristic purposes). According to constructivist institutionalists, on the other hand, institutions affect actors’ choices in a broader range of ways: by defining standards of culturally and normatively appropriate behavior and common worldviews, they structure external incentives and the basic goals and identities of actors. Institutions affect what actors can do, what they want to do, and even who they are.

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These differences are reflected in the study of global governance. Rational-choice institutionalists in international relations theory often draw on transaction cost economics and other economic approaches, but the most developed theoretical framework for studying “cooperation under anarchy” stems from game theory. Noncooperative game theory examines social situations in which rational actors cannot enter binding agreements and identifies the conditions under which cooperation is nonetheless possible. These insights have been applied to the study of international regimes, originating a flow of theoretical and empirical work that shows how states—conceived as rational egoists—can benefit from an institutionalized environment when interacting with each other. However, game-theoretic analyses that incorporate nonstate actors and focus on multiple sites and levels of governance are still very scarce. For constructivist institutionalists, however, the institutional environment in which states interact does not simply affect their strategies, but participates in shaping their identity and goals. Cooperation under anarchy is possible because states are not oriented only to “logics of consequences” (rational utility-maximizing behavior) but also to “logics of appropriateness” (rules, roles, and identities that stipulate appropriate behavior in given situations). Norms have an independent causal impact on the behavior of actors, who are socialized through domestic and international learning processes. Both institutionalist perspectives have inspired a substantial body of work on interstate relations, and they provide conceptual frameworks that can be used to analyze phenomena of global governance. For instance, Kal Raustiala has explained the increasing involvement of nongovernmental organizations in global environmental institutions from a rationalist perspective, by identifying a range of benefits that this involvement may bring to states facing problems of international cooperation. Conversely, Kim Reimann has drawn on sociological institutionalism to trace the development of a pro-NGO norm among UN agencies, which led to NGOs being increasingly recognized as “partners” to the UN and its member states and given access to international policy making. In general, constructivists might find it easier than rationalists do to conceptualize the transition from interstate cooperation to global governance because

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many nonstate actors tend to affect governance by generating and promoting norms and social identities rather than by wielding material power resources. The multifaceted nature of global governance has stimulated some attempts to devise explanatory frameworks based on multiple traditions of analysis. For instance, Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall have conceptualized power in global governance by identifying two analytical dimensions of power. The first dimension concerns the kinds of social relations through which power works, which can either be in interactions between pre-constituted actors or in relationships of social constitution through which certain actors are produced in the first place. The second dimension concerns the question whether the social relations through which power works are direct and immediate or rather indirect and socially diffuse. These dimensions produce a fourfold taxonomy of power, consisting of compulsory power (direct interaction between specific actors), institutional power (indirect control over socially distant others), structural power (constitutive relations of a direct and mutually constitutive kind), and productive power (production of subjects through diffuse social relations). This taxonomy bridges traditional analytical perspectives and has been applied by a number of authors to the examination of global governance topics such as global policing, trade liberalization, the authority of international organizations, and the relationship between global civil society and global markets. This approach to defining and classifying power can be criticized on a number of grounds (e.g., that power should be conceived in action-centered terms and that it is crucial to distinguish between power and systematic luck), but it can also be considered as a worthwhile attempt to build a conceptual framework that incorporates various approaches to global governance and clarifies their relationship. Other synthetic research programs could shed light on important but still under-researched substantive questions, such as the interactions and collisions between sectoral governance regimes, and the overall coherence of global governance. Mathias Koenig-Archibugi See also Anarchy in International Relations; Globalization; Neoliberalism; Realism in International Relations; Regime Theory in International Relations

Further Readings Barnett, M., & Duvall, R. (Eds.). (2005). Power in global governance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Commission on Global Governance. (1995). Our global neighborhood. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D., & Perraton, J. (1999). Global transformations: Politics, economics and culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Reimann, K. D. (2006). A view from the top: International politics, norms and the worldwide growth of NGOs. International Studies Quarterly, 50(1), 45–67. Rosenau, J. N. (1995). Governance in the twenty-first century. Global Governance, 1(1), 13–43. Scholte, J. A. (2005). Globalization: A critical introduction (2nd ed.). Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Sending, O. J., & Neumann, I. B. (2006). Governance to governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, states, and power. International Studies Quarterly, 50(4), 651–672. Young, O. R. (1999). Governance in world affairs. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

GLOBALIZATION Globalization refers to various processes that link national and regional economies, societies, and cultures. Globalization has been influenced by economic factors (trade, foreign direct investment, capital flows, and migration); by the spread of technology; and by increasing transnational circulation of ideas, languages, and popular culture. Although the term has been widely used among economists and social scientists in recent decades, views on its nature differ. David Held and colleagues say globalization “encompasses everything from global financial markets to the Internet but which delivers little substantive insight into the contemporary human condition,” and Michael Mann refers to globalization as spreading in a “multiple, variable and uneven fashion” with the advanced nation-states of the North more eager to adopt the necessary reforms to encourage the expansion of global processes. Globalization involves many processes that both unite and divide humanity. Whereas humanity was divided into small tribes for many thousands of years, in recent centuries population interaction

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(aided by technology) has meant that very few national societies now exist that are completely homogenous in social and cultural terms. Different people continue to be brought together by new economic, social, and political developments.

Historical Background Trade links have long forged stronger connections between many societies and regions. Urban centers such as Alexandria and Athens during the Hellenistic Age incorporated both Greek and cosmopolitan culture—the Greek word cosmopolis means “world city.” Traders along the Silk Road linking western China and Rome exposed many societies to various products, ideas, knowledge, and technology. During the Age of Discovery dating from European voyages of exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries, many trading posts in Africa, Asia, and the Americas provided Europe with considerable amounts of products such as gold, silver, tobacco, spices, timber, bananas, corn and potatoes (and, unfortunately, slaves). Extensive trade hastened the decline of feudal society; the European economy shifted from a system primarily based on the exchange of goods and products (barter) to one primarily based on the exchange of currency. Interaction between peoples over the centuries also brought negative consequences besides the conquest of indigenous peoples—which might be followed by enslavement, pauperization, even genocide—including the spread of communicable diseases, often with devastating effects. The Pax Mongolica of the 13th century resulted in the rapid transmission of epidemic diseases such as bubonic plague across Central Asia with dramatic consequences for the European economy and society. Historical events during the 16th and 17th centuries promoted further economic globalization. The rise of maritime European empires (especially Holland and Britain) meant that their national interest was increasingly linked to private business through the formation of chartered companies (British East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602) to help minimize risks involved in international trade in investment and financial needs. The British East India Company was the first company in the world to enable joint ownership of companies through the issue of shares of stock.

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By the 19th century, while British imperialism was illustrated by the Opium Wars and further conquest of India—which provided areas with large populations to become consumers of European exports—the major powers (including an emerging United States) were eager to carve up other areas of the world: sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific islands. The conquest of sub-Saharan Africa, which yielded valuable natural resources (rubber, diamonds, and coal) helped fuel trade and investment between the European imperial powers, their colonies, and the United States, but also created greater tension and led to World War I. With Britain a global economic superpower during the 19th century because of its superior manufacturing technology and naval power, its leadership also provided a number of measures that influenced the international economy during the 20th century and beyond. Britain, as the largest creditor, promoted financial stability through its pound sterling and the gold standard, which made multilateral convertibility and adjustment easier to achieve. Choosing not to further accumulate gold stocks, Britain encouraged further economic activity by making the surpluses available for additional investments and loans, thus making the international economy function more smoothly than otherwise would have been the case if Britain had taken a more protectionist stance. Britain relinquished its role in encouraging freer trade in favor of increasing industry protection in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period that also included the gold standard crisis and Great Depression during the late 1920s and early 1930s. But processes toward greater international cooperation continued. Even by 1914, an increasingly smaller world was becoming evident through various international institutions and organizations. These included the International Telegraph Union (established 1865), Universal Postal Union (1874), International Bureau of Weights and Measures (1875), International Bureau against the Slave Trade (1890), International Labour Office (1901), and International Court of Justice (1907). Processes associated with globalization, as we know it today, became much more evident during the second half of the 20th century following the disasters of the Great Depression and World War II. Various international institutions were formed to provide avenues for multilateral cooperation to

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support common values, ideas, and interests regarding international political and economic activity. Following the Bretton Woods conference, which provided an agreement by the Western world’s political leaders to promote a framework for international commerce and finance, a number of international institutions were introduced that were intended to link the economic fortunes of societies and regions (including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). And growing adherence to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, later the World Trade Organization) hastened the growth of the international economy though a dramatic decrease in tariff protection and the creation of free trade zones with minimal or no tariffs. Supporters of open trade hoped to increase economic prosperity and provide opportunity for poorer nations that could use their natural resources and lower wages to attract capital, while enhancing civil liberties and ensuring a more efficient allocation of resources. At the same time, Western consumers would benefit from cheaper consumer goods (such as televisions, radios, bicycles, and textiles). Global trade of manufactured goods increasing dramatically since 1955 has helped fuel the growth of the international economy (particularly benefiting Japan, South Korea, and more recently, China). But globalization was not just economic. In many relatively wealthy and liberal-minded Western nations, many immigrants from poorer nations arrived in the postwar decades, altering the relatively homogenous racial characteristics of many societies.

Globalization Today The increasingly multicultural nature of many societies introduces locals to new cultural practices, ideas, and foods. In the case of the latter, Australians, Americans, and Europeans now regularly enjoy foods from cuisines as diverse as Italian, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese; although some regret the penetration of global brands (U.S.owned) such as McDonald’s and KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken). Western culture continues to profoundly influence many nations through the export of mass media, film, television, and music—although some

may argue that this represents the global domination of U.S. culture at the expense of traditional diversity. Although language remains diverse among nations, with Mandarin the most commonly used language in 2008, followed by Spanish and English, the last is used by 50% of all Internet traffic users; about 35% of the world’s mail, telexes, and cables; and approximately 40% of the world’s radio programs. An increasing proportion of consumers and citizens enjoys the benefits of technology such as fiber optic communications and satellites, which have increased the availability of telephone and Internet, thus allowing greater interaction and communication between people of different cultures. Sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace have created new opportunities for communication with little regard for national boundaries. Such processes create an opportunity to enhance the development of nongovernment organizations and expose news around the world to help inform the public about new issues. Greater global awareness could enhance international cooperation about environmental challenges by enhancing public awareness of the need for greater global awareness on climate change, cross-boundary and pollution, over-fishing of the ocean, and the spread of invasive species. In business terms, companies (and consumers) have benefited from reduced transportation costs (such as the development of containerization for ocean shipping) and from the harmonization of intellectual property laws with a number of standards applied globally (including copyright laws, patents, and world trade agreements). The creation of the WTO following the Uruguay Round of GATT (1986 to 1994) is also intended to mediate trade disputes. But processes associated with globalization have raised concern about recent policy trends with criticism coming from church groups, national liberation factions, unions, intellectuals, artists, and anarchists. Sometimes opposition is expressed by well-organized (and sometimes violent) antiglobalization protests at various cities hosting major business and government meetings. Although many poorer people have benefited from trade— most notably in China, which became the world’s largest exporter during 2009—there is much evidence of greater income disparity both within and

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between many nations, and hundreds of millions in poorer nations still suffer from chronic malnutrition (850 million people in 2005 according to the United Nations). There is also concern about the rapid expansion and power of multinational corporations (MNCs). Although poorer people receive relatively higher wages from investment by MNCs, at least when compared with other domestic jobs, if wages rise then there is a risk that MNCs will relocate to even lower-cost economies. Thus, workers in poorer nations that play host to MNCs are often forced to endure long hours and even unsafe working conditions with many children exploited, despite antisweatshop campaigns in Western societies seeking legislation to legally require companies to respect human and worker rights and prohibit the import, sale, or export of sweatshop goods. Others argue that globalization has also eroded the capacity of national societies to resist change as Western governments have adopted dramatic economic reform including lower taxation rates, and labor market deregulation that has benefited the rich and companies most. It has been suggested that democracy no longer provides a balance between domestic traditions and external influences as a nation’s social needs and identity are being swamped by the collective need to compete in global economic terms. Another view is that necessary economic reform means that, as HansPeter Martin and Harald Schumann say, “Redistribution of power and prosperity are eroding the old social entities more rapidly than the new order can develop” (1997, p. 9). Critics point to the outsourcing of domestic production to offshore workers (with lower wages), which has many corporations and consumers buying goods and services from foreign countries while laying off manufacturing sector workers in their own countries who are often forced into the service sector where wages and benefits are low and turnover is high. Even poorer nations can be adversely affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs to other developing nations. With continuing emphasis on the need for improved productivity by businesses and government and with increasingly weaker trade unions, this may mean a declining middle class and less chance of people climbing out of poverty in Western societies. At the same time, poorer nations, which often rely on the export of

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their agricultural goods, also suffer from market prices reduced by subsidies implemented by wealthier nations (especially the EU Common Agricultural Policy). And the intellectual capacity of poorer nations can be depleted by its doctors and other professionals moving to Western nations, often helping to meet skill shortages in those countries. There are also immense environmental problems compounded by globalization as the world’s economies have become increasingly linked by trade. One has only to note the removal of Brazilian forest since the mid-1960s to make way for cattle ranching and soybeans or the dramatic clearance of tropical rainforests in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. With China overtaking the United States as the world’s biggest producer of carbon dioxide in 2007, it is also likely that global emissions of carbon dioxide will rise further as China and India consume more coal and oil, thus complicating any concerted bid by nations to address global warming. Growing demand from newly prosperous populations is driving up global food prices. On top of this, many ocean fisheries are showing sings of depletion because of unsustainable fishing practices, with the prospect of an end to wild-caught seafood in the decades to come. The problem of supply and demand in all commodities, especially in times of economic boom, has recently been demonstrated by the rise in crude oil prices from about $25 a barrel in August 2003 to more than $140 a barrel by July 2008. Other negative effects associated with globalization concern the illicit trade of goods. This includes the trade in illegal drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and synthesized chemicals; the increasing international trade in endangered plant and animal species; and the counterfeiting of copyrighted goods, including music and film CDs and DVDs. And there are adverse effects caused by modern modes of transportation that have allowed more people and products to travel around the world at a faster pace, thus helping to spread deadly infectious diseases (including AIDS/HIV). With enormous benefits and potential costs from global processes caused by the flow of information, goods, capital, and people across political and geographic boundaries, opinion remains divided about trends and the role of government and nations. There is still a business view that the nation-state is an obstruction and nuisance when it

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comes to the development of the international economy with local conditions imposed by national governments impeding both global and individual prosperity. Others argue that the nation-state remains a pivotal institution for creating the conditions for effective international governance while preserving their lawmaking functions to guide and adjudicate between the competing claims of corporate entities and citizens. But processes associated with globalization will test the positive view once suggested by a hope that an international community of Christian European states would be replaced by one that is global or all-inclusive in its scope. With China predicted to match the United States in wealth, industry, and technology in coming years, Western nations have immense policy difficulties to overcome. Although both developed and developing nations depend on the fortunes of the international economy, it remains to be seen what impact global forces have in future years as Western nations are forced to both meet ongoing social welfare expectations and higher levels of debt. With globalization offering much benefit to global corporations given the reduction, elimination, or harmonization of subsidies, there is a growing belief that the world will experience a period of deglobalization after years of increasing economic integration, particularly after the recent global financial crisis that followed the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market, created in the wake of government deregulation of the banking industry. The world has indeed become a smaller place because of global processes regarding economic and cultural factors (aided by technology), but the same trends have not eliminated the problems that can both unite or divide humanity (including nation-states). Globalization seems to make citizens even less powerful to control their lives, but also makes many governments less able to control their economies, social policies, and even their legal systems. Globalization is changing the international power structure with the advance of some nations, but does not seem to be advancing the power of institutionalized global political forces such as the United Nations. This is leading to many global agencies taking on powerful roles regarding such issues as regulation and has created powerful multinational global corporations whose reach goes into may countries.

Globalization is changing the world power structure with new agents and agencies coming to the fore. It remains to be seen how the traditional bastions of political power—the nation-states—will survive these global forces. Chris Lewis See also Anarchy in International Relations; Business and Power; Capital, Marxist; Castells, Manuel; Collective Action Problem; Environmental Treaties; Global Governance; Governmentality; Hegemonic Power; Mann, Michael; Multinational Corporations

Further Readings Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D., & Perraton, J. (1999). Global transformations: Politics, economics and culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Hirst, P., & Thompson, G. (1996). Globalization in question. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Mann, M. (1997). Has globalization ended the rise and rise of the nation-state? Review of International Political Economy, 4(3), 472–496. Martin, H.-P., & Schumann, H. (1997). The global trap: Globalization and the assault on prosperity and democracy. London: Zed Books. Ohmae, K. (1995). The end of the nation-state: The rise of regional economies. New York: Free Press.

GOVERNMENTALITY Governmentality—a neologism for “rationality of government”—is a Michel Foucault–inspired analytical approach to government and power. In the introduction to The Foucault Effect, Colin Gordon expertly summarized Foucault’s conception of governmentality as a way of “thinking about the nature of the practice of government (who can govern; what governing is; what or who is governed)” in terms that make it in some form “thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and to those upon whom it is practised.” Consistent with Foucault’s iconic approach to power, the notion of governmentality deliberately displaces the intellectual focus on institutions of government and ideology in examining the rationalities and practices of government. Foucault also develops his notion of governmentality in

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dialogue with concepts of sovereign power, disciplinary power, biopower, and pastoral power. Since the 1990s, numerous scholars have taken up the governmentality approach to apply to further empirical domains and to extend its theoretical and analytical utility. Governmentality has been explained to involve an intertwining of “political rationalities” and “technologies of government.”

Foucault’s Notion of Government In a series of lectures and writings in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Foucault’s governmentality approach arises out of his earlier conceptualization of power and his examination of sexuality. Foucault begins by reframing the commonly held notion of “government”—which referred to the sovereign state and its institutional apparatuses—instead embracing an earlier (16th-century) and broader definition. In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault explains that the exercise of power lies in guiding the possibility of conduct and arranging the possible outcome. Power, he argues, lies not so much in the relationship between two adversaries, but is a question of government. In the 16th-century sense, government comprised legitimate forms of political or economic subjection and modes of action that structured the possible actions of others. Such “conduct of conduct” is examined through the lens of Foucault’s understanding of power, thereby acknowledging the institutional forms of power, but also the “capillaries of power” and the indirect forms of governing “at a distance.” Central to this notion of government is its calculated nature. For example, Foucault approvingly quotes the 16th-century writer Guillaume La Perrière, who explains, “Government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end.”

Emergence of Governmentality Central to the notion of governmentality is the process that Foucault refers to as the “governmentalization of the state,” by which he means the long-term inscription of sovereign power into calculative, administrative practices for the formation and regulation of individuals and collectives. Foucault locates the emergence of governmentality—or the “art of government”—in 16thcentury debates about the “reason of state.” In

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these debates, Foucault argues, we see a shift in the focus of state rulers from geographical territory to population. Where once rulers’ sole occupation was with territory, they now become interested in the population, its wealth, and its health, as these are increasingly viewed as reflective of the power and health of the nation-state. Foucault notes a range of political activities and innovations that reflect this governmental focus on the wealth and health of the population. Mercantilism, which emphasizes the dependence of national prosperity on the supply of capital, operated in the 16th to the 18th centuries. Another development is Cameralism, or German Polizeiwissenschaft (science of police). It operated in the 17th and 18th centuries as a calculated form of administering the population through detailed rules and regulations to enhance the order and well-being of the populace. The emergence and rapid growth of statistics—also known as “science of state” and “political arithmetic”—reflects the growing governmental interest in the population. Moreover, the collection and analysis of statistics leads to realization and reinforcement of the notion that both the population and the economy are dynamic and independent entities with their own regularities. In “Governmentality,” Foucault expounds on the ways in which statistics reveal cycles of death and disease, plenty and famine, wealth and poverty. The observation that the population and the economy are dynamic entities forms part of liberalism’s political ideology (or governmental rationality) of limiting state involvement in the operation of civil society and the economy. An understanding of population dynamics also supports the emergence in the 19th century of the government of “the social,” as evidenced by the proliferation of social science, social work, public health, and other means of managing the population. Insurance is a central governmental technology for spreading risks, which after growing in the private sector, is taken up as “social insurance” by modern states in the 19th and 20th centuries to become the centerpiece in the creation of modern welfare states.

Governmentality and Forms of Power Foucault’s notion of governmentality has clear affinities with his earlier idea of power. However,

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Foucault’s writings on power and government in the 1970s and early 1980s contain a number of versions of power that both illuminate and confuse. In 1975, Foucault developed his notion of disciplinary power in his celebrated book Discipline and Punish. Disciplinary power involves the operation of power over and through individual human bodies and populations. Central to this process is the gaze—that is, the process of being watched— the aim of which is to internalize discipline for selfgovernance. Disciplinary power develops slowly from the temporarily and spatially regulated practices of the monastery of the Middle Ages, to the regulated bodily operation of the solider, to the formation, operation, and examination of the student in the school and the patient in the hospital. Foucault argued that disciplinary power reaches its zenith in the prison architecture of Jeremy Bentham’s late 18th-century panopticon, which made all prisoners visible to the continual gaze of the prison warden without knowing whether they were being watched. More recently, a number of commentators have likened modern computer databases that contain the data through which states can “observe” citizens, to the panopticon. Biopolitics and biopower are other concepts developed by Foucault that he uses to refer to the administration of bodies and populations. Biopower involves powers of life and death, the capacity of the sovereign to give and take life. It is also associated with the governance of the population through such developments as public health (sewerage, sanitation), disease control (immunization), social welfare, and more sinisterly, eugenics. Many recent authors have used this idea to examine the ways in which new genetic technologies operate as a contemporary form of biopower. Foucault talked about “pastoral power,” which is likened to the pastoral care of shepherds for their flock. It is seen as originating in the Christian understanding of God caring for the well-being of the people. Foucault contrasts this “shepherd– flock game” with the “city–citizen game”; the former focuses on the well-being of the individual within a population, whereas the latter focuses on the freedoms and rights of the individual within the political community. Foucault held that the operation of governmental power involved the dual operation of these two forms of power, Omnes et Singulatim (“for all and for each”).

Foucault also spoke of “sovereign power,” which is to be understood as the exercise of arbitrary and constraining power inherent in the political sovereign and the juridic-legal system. Foucault’s famous statement, “In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king,” has been incorrectly read as implying that sovereign power has been displaced by more dispersed forms of power. Rather, with his analysis of government, Foucault sought to highlight a more calculated and directed form of power operating alongside sovereign power. Indeed, Foucault spoke of a triangle of power: “sovereignty–discipline–government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security.” The debate about the operation of sovereign power within liberalism and neoliberalism (see later) reflects this point. Making sense of Foucault’s various concepts of power and how they fit in an overall scheme was not directly addressed by Foucault, but has been taken up by other authors.

Post-Foucault Developments Since the 1990s, a wide range of scholars has picked up Foucault’s notion of governmentality to analyze and make sense of contemporary governmental practices. A proliferation of studies across a wide range of academic disciplines has used governmentality to examine power and government in a myriad of locations. One of the conceptual developments in governmentality studies has been Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller’s account that governmentality involves both “political rationalities” and “technologies of government.” The former involves the ideas and discourse about what constitutes the way in which government is to be thought of (who is to be subject to it, and to what end) and simultaneously rendering reality in such a way as to be calculable. The latter refers to the practices and techniques by which government is to be enacted. Much of the subsequent governmentality literature has tended to adopt the ideational and discursive aspects of governmentality, while giving less prominence to the material practices and artifacts. The range of analyses is very broad: globalization, empowerment, refugees, the unemployed and welfare reform, prenatal testing, performance indicators,

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shopping centers and city malls, accounting methods, and electronic government. Although Foucault gave considerable attention to the analysis of liberalism, what we now call neoliberalism received less attention. PostFoucauldian governmentality studies have readily filled this gap. One of the key arguments of such scholars is that, contrary to the neoliberal rhetoric of minimal state government, neoliberalism is government by other means. It operates “at a distance” through the use of experts, market mechanisms, and individual choice, rather than through coercive state regulations and rules. (Scientific) experts are held up as speaking the truth, and in doing so operate to shape the decisions individuals make: they similarly affect incentives mechanisms. Technologies are also seen as embodying certain forms of operation and knowledge, which in turn shape the behavior of those deploying them and those subject to their operation. Indeed, Rose goes as far to argue in Powers of Freedom that freedom itself is a mechanism of governance. Individuals are “not merely ‘free to choose,’ but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice. They must interpret their past and dream their future as outcomes of choices made or choices still to make.” The emphasis of governmentality studies on neoliberalism’s government at a distance has prompted a debate about other, more coercive, forms of government operating within neoliberalism. Some commentators warn that it is important not to take neoliberal rhetoric at face value—that is, that it involves the minimization of state government. Such authors point to the history of coercive government of colonized populations by Western liberal governments, and the more recent coercive treatment of asylum seekers, welfare recipients, and terror suspects in neoliberal states. Terms such as authoritarian liberalism and the liberal government of unfreedom and despotic liberalism have been coined to denote this coexistence of governmental and sovereign forms of power. Similar sentiments have been voiced from within different theoretical traditions by Carl Schmidt, whose work defines sovereignty as the power to define the state of exception, and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life. The governmentality analytic, which Foucault articulates and which has been taken up and

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extended by other scholars, will continue to generate important and critical insights into modes of power and rule in contemporary and past societies. It is not, however, a universal or grand theory and so several authors have sought to merge governmentality insights with other understandings of power and government. Paul Henman See also Biopower; Critical Theory; Discipline; Discourse; Foucault, Michel; Liberalism; Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations; Sovereignty

Further Readings Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power: Afterword. In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208–226). Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect (pp. 87–104). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality: An introduction. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect (pp. 1–51). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

GRAMSCI, ANTONIO (1891–1937) Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales (Sardinia) in 1891 and grew up in very modest circumstances. His father, a minor official in a local government office, was involved in a corruption scandal (it is thought that the charges were unfounded) that eventually led to his imprisonment for several years. This made life very difficult for the entire family. Economic problems were compounded by health problems for the young Antonio, who was accidentally dropped at the age of 2, after which he developed a curved spine. This made him small and somewhat frail, and he suffered from poor health throughout most of his relatively short life. His initial political position was that of Sardinian nationalism, which ceded to socialism by the time

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he got a scholarship to study linguistics at the University of Turin in 1911. Moving from rural Sardinia to Turin in 1911 was probably somewhat like going from an African village to Tokyo today: Gramsci came into contact with a completely different world, the world of the modern industrial working class, which strengthened his conviction that the future was going to be socialist. Italian socialism was not radical enough for him, however, and he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as a founding member in 1921. In 1922, he worked for the Comintern (Third International) in Vienna and Moscow, and then assumed leadership of the PCI in 1924. Mussolini, who had been in power in Italy since 1922, began imprisoning and having his opponents murdered during the consolidation of the fascist regime during the 1920s. After the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924 and the crisis of the Aventine Secession, it became impossible politically to coexist with Mussolini. In November 1926, Gramsci was arrested and sent to prison. Shortly thereafter, he began working on the Quaderni dal carcere (Prison Notebooks), which he carried out until he was physically too ill to read and write, which was sometime in 1935. Thereafter, his health deteriorated. He died in 1937, only a few weeks after being released from prison. In addition to being the driving intellectual force of the PCI and providing the foundation of its theoretical and practical orientations in the post–World War II period, Gramsci is regarded as a major figure in Western Marxism along with such figures as Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Perhaps the best way to understand his ideas is to see how he develops and enriches some of the key concepts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Gramsci and the Marxist Tradition In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels initially dismiss the state as nothing other than an executive committee for managing the affairs of the entire bourgeoisie. By the time of the writing of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), however, Marx suggests that at historically specific moments in the struggle of contending classes, it is possible for a stalemate to arise. If this occurs, the state (a term that for Marx,

like the term capital, denotes a relation and not a reified thing) can achieve a degree of relative autonomy from the ruling and subaltern classes in civil society. In the period before eventual working-class hegemony, Marx argues, this is likely to happen when the financial, landowning, and manufacturing factions of the ruling bourgeois class are in conflict with one another or in conflict with the bourgeois classes of other nation-states. When this kind of conflict arises, the bourgeois class is sometimes prepared to sacrifice a considerable degree of its political freedom to the state, so that the state can resolve the class stalemate by restoring the socioeconomic conditions necessary for renewed accumulation and profitable production—that is, by restoring a certain measure of unity to the ruling class in return for political power that in constitutional terms should really be exercised by the legislature rather than the state executive. When the executive is able, or encouraged, or allowed (depending in the context in question and the history and structure of extra-parliamentary class alliances in the country in question) to usurp the constitutional prerogatives of the legislature, it can develop an almost pathological grip on all areas of social life, as in the case of fascism. Later theorists in the Marxist tradition regard the Eighteenth Brumaire as a key text for developing a Marxist theory of power, the state, and fascism. Gramsci is able to make much use of the idea that power is exercised in ways that transgress state/civil society and base/ superstructure boundaries. He does this with his theory of hegemony and related theories of civil society, passive revolution, historic bloc, and the role of the intellectuals developed in his Prison Notebooks. If after the rather reductive definition of the state in the Communist Manifesto Marx goes on to suggest that there can be no easy or automatic articulation between the socioeconomic interests of the dominant class and forms of state, Gramsci takes this refinement further with the help of his readings of thinkers in the Italian tradition of historiography and philosophy such as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469– 1527), Giambattista Vico (1688–1744), and Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). Gramsci retains the notion of class struggle as the basis of his analysis of power, but also insists in a Machiavellian fashion that politics is a terrain of unparalleled liberty in which decisive choices between different kinds

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of régimes are enacted. In Gramsci’s estimation, a given level in the development of society’s productive forces makes certain political choices possible, but economic forces are not determinate or decisive in the last instance. Thus, the increasing capacity of humanity to dominate nature and subordinate it to human ends need not result in any specific form of democratic or communist polity, and indeed, as Gramsci was personally to experience, could actually result in fascism or other authoritarian state forms. In arriving at a conception of the autonomy of the political while remaining within a broadly Marxist framework of analysis, Gramsci carefully studies the history of the French and Russian revolutions, as well as the history of Italian unification. In the Prison Notebooks, he argues that the expulsion of the French and Austrians from the Italian peninsula in successive stages in 1848, 1861, and 1870 came about as the result of what he calls a passive revolution. Put simply, the idea of a passive revolution is that things must change so things can remain the same: although fascism is a dramatic example of this, more subtle instances of passive revolution can be seen at work in the New Deal in the United States or even in Thatcherism. The point is that because capitalism is a dynamic system in which the different factions of the dominant classes are in constant flux and a continual process of fusion, separation, and recomposition, and because oppositional groups and classes are also constantly changing and reforming on new social bases, the dominant classes are constantly compelled to push the forces of production forward while recasting the very institutional terms in which the compromise between capitalism and labor is enacted. To repeat, this means that if private control over the means of production is to be maintained, the public institutional (i.e., political, legal) framework in which class compromises are enacted must continually change. Crucially, for Gramsci, this recasting, recomposition, and reformation is neither a mechanical process that can easily be read from changes in the structure of the economy, nor is it limited to the most visible and easily identifiable institutions of conflict mediation and collective decision making. It affects and is in turn affected by all areas of civil society and culture in the widest sense, right down to what Gramsci, following Vico, calls common

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sense (senso comune) in the New Science (Scienza nuova, 1725, 1730, 1744).

The Case of Italy In the specific case of Italian unification, Gramsci believed that in contrast to the active, successful revolution lead by the Jacobins in France, the Italian bourgeoisie, like the Russian bourgeoisie, was only capable of engineering a passive revolution that did not change commonsense understanding of everyday life, nor educate the masses in the duties, obligations, and glories of republican citizens. Like the budding Russian financial and industrial elite in the period following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the Italian bourgeoisie was not, in a word, hegemonic. The comparison with the French case is once again striking for Gramsci. He reckons that although in France one witnesses a complete transformation of the relations between state and civil society as a result of the rise of modern republicanism, Enlightenment, and new ways of thinking about science, religion, art, and politics, in Italy the Italian bourgeoisie relies on a series of behind the scenes compromises and bargained agreements that leave many of the existing social, economic, and political structures before unification intact. Thus in marked contrast to what Gramsci regards as the heroic period of the English and French bourgeoisie, in which the dominant classes of England and France are able to convert most of society to the principles of the market and to suffuse almost all of society with middle-class aspirations, their Italian counterparts are continually struggling for some sort of stable basis for their class power. This leads Gramsci to synthesize Machiavelli and Marx, and to conclude that although a class that comes to power on the basis of a passive revolution will have to constantly negotiate and renegotiate the social and economic bases of its ability to rule, hegemonic classes manage to transform all social relations and firmly establish their power in genuine revolutions. Thus, Gramsci believed that if Italian unification was followed by the corrupt political dealings of a weak ruling class, the bases of bourgeois power and capitalism had by no means been established definitively in Italy. These bases could be renegotiated, or, more to the point, toppled, if the working class could align itself with the peasantry

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and relaunch national unification on truly popular and democratic bases institutionalized in a new state form with far more legitimacy than parliamentary democracy. He thought that this was precisely what was in the process of happening during the “red two years,” the biennio rosso of 1919 to 1920, when factory councils assumed control of production throughout Italy. There is still debate among historians about whether this was a truly revolutionary situation comparable to Russia in 1917. It is less controversial to affirm that the occupations destabilized an already weak state and scared the Italian bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie to such an extent that even Mussolini and fascism seemed like an acceptable alternative to the constitutional monarchy founded in 1861. Here the Marxist theory concerning the extra-parliamentary bases of the parliamentary-democratic state acquires particular historical and practical relevance for explaining changes in state forms during transitional periods. In this case, the transition is from clientalist, unregulated capitalism to a form of planned capitalism under the auspices of an authoritarian state and private capital. It is a plausible theory if one bears in mind that the communist experiment in Russia was still young and not yet discredited, and that soviet democracy based on workers, peasants, and urban councils could still present itself as a viable alternative to capitalism and parliamentary democracy. When the workers occupying factories across Italy were eventually forced to accept a parliamentary solution negotiated by the leadership of the reformist Italian Socialist Party (PSI, founded in Genoa in 1892), Gramsci left the PSI with a number of other disaffected comrades to form the PCI.

Hegemony, Revolution, and the State While in prison Gramsci had time to meditate on the reasons for the failure of the factory occupations of 1919 to 1920 to spark the Italian revolution, the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, and the authoritarian turn of the Soviet Union. He concludes that although the revolutionary intransigence of the occupying workers and factory councils was admirable, it was premised on the idea that the French Revolution, the events of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution of 1905, and then the two Russian revolutions of 1917 constitute a

kind of universal history and an inexorable progress from political emancipation from feudalism to human emancipation from capitalism. By the time of the prison writings, however, he perceives that each historical context presents unique problems and possibilities, so that it is impossible to formulate a general theory positing a universal path to revolution. For example, one of the particulars of the political situation in prerevolutionary Russia is that the metaphorical gulf between the people in civil society and the political institutions of the state is much deeper and wider than it is in Western Europe, where this distance is mediated by a complex network constituted by universities, libraries, different constitutional traditions, churches, trade unions, museums, diverse political parties, media, and so on. In the Russian case, a military strategy based on what Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks calls a war of maneuver is appropriate, and indeed, the Bolsheviks did well to pursue this course of action and “seize” power. In cases where the civil society and state are much more closely mediated and interwoven, he argues, as in the case in Western Europe and North America, a war of position aiming at a new hegemony and the transformation of common sense is more appropriate. Where a war of maneuver is required, power relations are usually relatively transparent, that is, as in the case of a tsar who, ensconced in a small leadership clique, is cut off from the great mass of the population. Here the revolution can come about as a series of bold and resolute assaults on state power. Where a war of position is necessary, power cannot be seized, as such, and power relations are much less transparent. A slow communist conquest of the intermediary institutions of civil society alluded to earlier has to be prepared by the party working in conjunction with worker and (where appropriate) peasant councils, trade unions, and alternative cultural associations. There are three main dimensions to this argument. First, the Bolshevik path to revolution does not offer a universal model of revolutionary strategy or postrevolutionary society because the modalities of power in prerevolutionary Russia are different from those that effectively operative elsewhere. Second, and once again following Machiavelli as much as Marx, Gramsci suggests that the stability of a new state depends on many factors, one of which is the mode of foundation. If a state

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is founded on a war of maneuver, a fair degree of fortuna (Machiavellian good luck) has probably helped to consolidate the coup. For the coup to evolve toward a genuine revolution, however, culture in the widest sense must change, lest the leadership find itself in its turn cut off from the great mass of the population, and thereby ripe for a fall. If the path to change has been carefully prepared through the virtù (virtue in a Machiavellian political sense of virtuoso) of the party in constant contact with the masses in their organizations in and outside the workplace, it is likely that it can become hegemonic rather than merely ruling or governing. That is, the term hegemony (egemonia) implies a relation of democratic consent and contact between leaders and the grass roots. Gramsci is confident that this relation is possible provided that the party never loses sight of the fact that all people are intellectuals with more and less developed theories of power, freedom, and future possibilities. He reasons that if hegemony is already established to a great extent before the actual socialization of the means of production, one is justified in thinking that the transition to a new society might proceed peacefully on the basis of a legitimate consensus between leaders and led. But in any case, no real revolutionary party can rely exclusively on fortuna. In this context, overreliance on fortuna might mean waiting for a state to collapse because of its own internal crises and then seizing power, as was possible in 1917 to some degree (the extra-parliamentary power of the Soviets and the disaster of World War I were also important factors in the Russian case). If a party manages skillfully to allow the impersonal forces of fortuna to somehow be “harnessed” to the party’s own political virtù, instead of trying to let fortuna do the preparatory work thus enabling the party to reap the benefit in a sudden seizure of power, the party might well become hegemonic. Part of what it means to be hegemonic is to act on Marx’s insight that the terms class, state, and capital denote relations that are in constant flux and recomposition. Hegemonic parties act with this dialectical and relational theory of politics and power in mind—they do not react in a desperate bid to maintain their power, nor do they degenerate into electoral vote-getting machines. Third, and in contrast to both mechanical and militaristic conceptions of Marxism (sometimes known as

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Marxism–Leninism), it is not possible categorically to distinguish and separate state and civil society or base and superstructure. Gramsci maintains that modern industrial states are characterized by a constant flow of exchange between elites in the economy, state, and civil society. In what might be regarded as the basis of Hegelian or what one might also call western Marxism, Gramsci actually dispenses with the term state. He speaks instead of political society and civil society as the repressive and consensual moments of a hegemonic order. He implies that it is thus wrong to assume that the economic base causes the legal, political, religious, and aesthetic superstructure on the basis of a model of pseudoscientific, mono-directional causality. The constantly shifting bases of hegemony are continually negotiated and renegotiated in a series of compromises and agreements between actors who are in the base as well as in the superstructure. These alliances, some parliamentary and most extra-parliamentary, constitute the basic components of what Gramsci calls an historic bloc (il blocco storico). The bloc is aggregated and disaggregated across the lines of the (in itself highly questionable) base–superstructure division. The aim of the Communist Party is to disaggregate the existing historical bloc by acting in concert with people in the economy, universities, police and army, media, and so on. He reserves an important role to intellectuals in this project of disaggregation and reaggregation. The belief that all people are intellectuals guides Gramsci’s argument that communism is a real historical possibility rather than a utopian dream. Darrow Schecter See also Elite Theories; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Marxist Accounts of Power; Miliband–Poulantzas Debate

Further Readings Bellamy, R. (1987). Modern Italian social theory. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Boggs, C. (1984). The two revolutions: Gramsci and the dilemma of Western Marxism. Boston: South End Press. Jay, M. (1984). Marxism and totality: The adventures of a concept from Lukács to the present. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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Schecter, D. (2007). The history of the Left from Marx to the present: Theoretical perspectives. London: Continuum.

GRAND COALITION Party alliances can be said to be grand coalitions when they involve at least two of the largest parties in parliament. Modern examples of grand coalitions include those between Austria’s People’s Party and Social Democratic Party (1945–1966, 1986–2000, and 2006– ), and in the United Kingdom between Liberals and Conservatives (1916– 1918). Grand coalitions should not occur under normal conditions. In standard coalition theory, parties will want to maximize their power in government. In William Riker’s power-seeking model, parties will try maximize the number of portfolios they control within a cabinet. This implies that parties will want to form minimal winning coalitions, that is, they will want to form coalitions of the smallest size possible that will command a majority in the parliament. In rival models where parties are policy seeking, parties will want to form coalition governments with parties that are closest to them in ideological terms. Under either of the two major coalition theories, grand coalitions should not form. First, grand coalitions are, by their very nature, larger than minimal-winning. Second the larger the grand coalition, the broader the ideological spread of the parties within the government is likely to be. There are circumstances where parties might find it in their interest to form grand coalitions. First, a centrist party might see advantages to having a grand coalition with parties both to the left and to the right, ideologically speaking, so that it can trade one off against the other. More particularly, however, grand coalitions occur when a nation is facing a major crisis. Major crises such as war or massive economic problems can lead big parties to set aside their ideological differences and unite against a common external threat. Sometimes smaller parties will be too fragmented to form stable alliance partners or to enable a parliamentary majority. Furthermore, an alliance between major parties can act as an effort to exclude extremist or anti-system parties from influencing

legislative business. Because of the inherent size of grand coalitions, they have the potential to dominate legislative activity. This has been the case historically in the European Parliament with the coalition between the European People’s Party (Christian Democrat) and the Party of European Socialists (Social Democrat). This example raises questions about the lack of institutional constraints on oligarchic coalition formation, and, given its emergence and longevity, questions the extent to which coalition behavior is really constrained by ideological considerations. Adam Packer See also Coalition Theory

Further Readings Kreppel, A., & Hix, S. (2003). From “grand coalition” to left–right confrontation: Explaining the shifting structure of party competition in the European Parliament. Comparative Political Studies, 36(1/2), 75–96. Laver, M., & Schofield, N. (1990). Multiparty government: The politics of coalition in Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

GRANOVETTER, MARK (1943– ) Mark Granovetter, Joan Butler Ford Professor at Stanford University, is best known for the legendary phrase, “The strength of weak ties,” that came from his 1973 article that has been widely used, and just as widely misused. Surprisingly, the article is relatively technical, and although it has had a wide secondary impact, it primarily states that no strong tie is a bridge and that it will be always a weak tie that links strongly connected, clustered subnetworks. More precisely, for large networks, there may be a long, convoluted path around the network, but the weak ties provide a local bridge. Despite massive citation, and Granovetter’s reputation among network analysts, he says that for him network analysis was a period that ended in 1976. However, he discovered that social science, and particularly his fields of economics and sociology, cannot escape the influence of a network conception.

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Granovetter’s work bears such wide reference because it epitomizes a rarely appreciated understanding: there is a strong analytical model between the “oversocialized” conception of human action in modern sociology and the atomized “undersocialized” approach of neoclassical economics (which also, contradictorily, relies on accepted norms of law-observance and decency). The model is networks, where the characteristics of individuals and those of networks are supplemented by the geometry of the relations. This geometry belongs to neither the individual nor the network, but to both. Granovetter wrote widely on issues that directly and indirectly affect power in society and interpersonal relations in articles that deal with economic action, inequality, and “embeddedness,” where economic relations are not seen as part of a process apart from the social context but are embedded in the social networks that already exist. Stuart Astill Further Readings Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. Granovetter, M. (1990). The myth of social network analysis as a special method in the social sciences. Connections, 13(2), 13–16.

GROUPTHINK This Orwellian-sounding term was adopted in 1971 by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis to refer to a pathological form of group decision making that he alleged was a root cause behind several fiascoes in U.S. foreign policy. Groupthink has since been invoked as an explanation of all sorts of governmental, corporate, journalistic, and professional mishaps and disasters. On the strength of a highly evocative key concept and a series of compellingly written case studies offering a persuasive interpretation of a string of traumatic policy disasters deeply carved into the public imagination, Janis’s 1972 book Victims of Groupthink went on to become one of the most influential psychological contributions to the study of decision-making politics, management, and the

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professions ever. Janis challenged the then-dominant view in theoretical and applied social psychology that group cohesion always results in better performance. He maintained that under certain conditions and when a group engages in stressful decisional tasks, strong group cohesion can contribute to defective decision making that, in turn, may lead to a policy disaster. He defined groupthink as a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. He also stated that groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures. Janis identified eight main symptoms of the groupthink “syndrome”: an illusion of invulnerability among group members, the use of rationalizations to discount warnings and other negative feedback, a shared belief in the inherent morality of the group, stereotyped views of members of opposing groups, self-censorship by group members, an illusion of unanimity, self-appointed mindguards within the group who act to shield the group from information challenging its premises or decisions, and direct pressure put on any members of the group showing signs of dissent with the assumed consensus. In Janis’s formulation, three types of antecedents are likely to trigger groupthink: the group is highly cohesive; there are structural faults in the organization in which the group is embedded, neutralizing potential checks and balances on and within the group (such as group insulation from the rest of the organization, a lack of norms requiring methodical procedures for group deliberation, and a lack of a tradition of impartial leadership); and the group is acting in a provocative situational context generating a high degree of stress in the members of the group. Groups that are affected by groupthink are likely to display a series of decision-making defects such as an incomplete survey of alternatives, failure to reexamine the preferred choice as well as initially rejected alternatives, and a poor scrutiny of information. Combined, such decision defects set the group up for choosing, and rigorously sticking with, decisions that are unrealistic and often morally questionable. Whereas Janis focused on groupthink in U.S. foreign policy, dozens of analysts have since identified

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symptoms of groupthink as a root cause in a host of fiascoes worldwide, ranging from major information technology failures to plane crashes, from the Barings Investment Bank collapse to the two space shuttle accidents, and from mass resignations in major league baseball to the WorldCom fraud. In recent years, the allure of groupthink as a ready-made explanation of all sorts of evil was reconfirmed by the prominent role accorded to it in official U.S. Senate and U.K. Privy Council reports on U.S. intelligence failures preceding the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the British decision to join the United States in invading Iraq. Groupthink has traveled well in and beyond the social sciences. To some degree, this is remarkable because among scholars there has been significant and enduring skepticism about its explanatory power. Serious methodological queries about the incoherent and possibly contaminated nature of the various components of the theory, and the biased nature of ex post facto case study evidence purporting to support groupthink explanations of fiascoes have been raised. Also, the inherently negative connotation of groupthink has been challenged by some, who pointed out the potentially positive functions of many of its symptoms for speeding up routine decision-making processes and for team building. Moreover, a stack of controlled experiments has cast doubt on the status of the antecedent conditions identified by Janis. Since 1972, numerous attempts have been made to reformulate groupthink theory to remedy these flaws and to ground it in more firmly rooted psychological phenomena such as group polarization (the tendency for group discussions to lead individual members to adopt more extreme versions of their initial predispositions), framing (when a problem is defined as a threat, people are more likely to be willing to take risks in dealing with the problem), collective efficacy (group members’ shared belief about the group’s ability to successfully perform some task), and conformity (in which groupthink is recast as a form of anticipatory compliance of a group to a revered, intimidating, or otherwise powerful leader whose mind is clearly set on a given course of action at the outset of group deliberations). All this seems to matter little. The sheer heuristic power of the idea of groupthink is enough to ensure its continued textbook status. Anyone with

organizational experience of one kind or another has felt the power of groups over their members, and the power of leaders—formal or informal ones—over groups. And anyone with such experience will at some point have witnessed close up how bad decisions emerge from meetings of smart people. Groupthink provides a convenient catch phrase to capture these phenomena, and its invocation as an explanation for collective failures of whatever kind will continue to blossom regardless of the findings of systematic replication research. Paul ‘t Hart See also Argument, Power of; Deliberation

Further Readings ‘t Hart, P. (1994). Groupthink in government: A study of small groups and policy failure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (Revised and expanded edition of the original 1972 Victims of Groupthink) Turner, M. E., & Pratkanis, A. R. (Eds.). (1998). Special issue on 25 years of groupthink. Journal of Organizational Decision Making and Human Decision Processes, 73, 2–3.

GROWTH COALITIONS The idea of growth coalitions (or “the growth machine”) in urban politics grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, especially associated with the work of Harvey Molotch, John Logan, and William Domhoff. They suggested that urban power politics were dominated by growth machines that have privileged developers over the wishes of local residents. The idea behind the growth machine derives from Marxist economic ideas of exchangevalues dominating use-values. The general idea is that local power is structured around land-based interests and landowners simply want the value of their land to rise. This ensures that there is a common interest between ordinary home owners and capitalists or rentiers owning large areas of land. Organized capitalists initiate development within the community that

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will help raise the value of all land. Democratically elected politicians will support new development because it will secure employment, raise land values, and keep the bulk of the local population happy. However, growth-machine writers argue that the benefits of local growth are skewed away from the general population toward the rentiers and capitalists. Exchange-value is favored over use-value, so development does not necessarily achieve local growth—or at least it does not ensure development that will increase local growth in the form of employment or amenities that are useful for the local public. William Domhoff, an elite theorist, argues that growth machines intertwine local, national, and international developers. Domhoff reexamined the evidence of Robert Dahl’s New Haven, Connecticut, study that argued community power machines were pluralist, saying that the local business community had met with Mayor Lee—the central actor in Dahl’s study—within weeks of his election, to urge their development program on him—a program that had been developed under the previous regime. Growth-machine writers argue that development is cited in virtually all community power studies because it is one of the most important issues affecting communities and ends up as central to all local power issues. Although the growth-machine model was developed specifically to examine community power in the context of U.S. cities, the model has been applied to numerous developed and developing countries. Whereas in the United States the growth machine is fueled by private interests, in other more corporatist states the interlocking of private and public growth efforts is more apparent. Here, development strategies might favor bureaucratic or local state interests over those of purely private developments. However, many studies of European and Latin American growth machines suggest that extensive landholding by local governments enables them to sell land to developers to help them buy elections. Developers also favor greenfield sites, and environmentalists have suggested the growth machine distorts the use of land away from redevelopment of low-value but developed land. Government could and should push for greater brownfield development. The growth-machine literature spans the agency–structure divide, using structural accounts

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of the interrelationship between exchange-value and use-value and suggesting that the impersonal force of development and rising land values motivates home owners, capitalists, and local politicians. This argument relates to Clarence Stone’s claims of systemic power or Keith Dowding’s work on systematic luck. However, this structural power interpretation of the growth machine, seen in Logan’s and Molotch’s work, sits less well with the more empiricist account in Domhoff’s work. In his work, the role of individuals within the capitalist class predominates. His version of the growth machine is highly agent specific, examining the relationships between specific individuals who network and conspire to promote their own capitalist interests. The growth-machine model is closely associated with Stone’s regime theory that became the dominant model of urban power structures in the 1980s and 1990s. Critics of the growth machine argue that, although development is undoubtedly in the interests of local businesspeople and developers, it is welcomed by local voters and in a well-functioning democracy their wishes should prevail, so it is right and proper that development is supported by local politicians. Although Molotch describes employment as the “key ideological prop for the growth machine,” it is also the key welfare prop for most families. Local businesspeople and capitalists are, of course, going to be the prime movers for development; however, they do not need to be such prime movers against the wishes of the local population. To the extent they are locally powerful, this power might well be benign. To demonstrate the malign power that seems to underpin the growth machine theory, its proponents need to prove that development occurs against the wishes of the local population. Moreover, local studies show that student-led and middle-class opposition to local development can prevail. The rise of professional and technocratic local government enables the middle class to prevent rezoning that affects their quality of life, even if they might gain more in the exchange-value of their homes with development. Keith Dowding See also Dahl, Robert A.; Domhoff, G. William; Dowding, Keith; Elite Theories; False Consciousness; Marxist Accounts of Power; Pluralism; Systematic Luck

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Further Readings Domhoff, G. W. (1986). The growth machine and the power elites: A challenge to pluralists and Marxists alike. In R. Waste (Ed.), Community power: Directions for future research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Logan, J., & Molotch, H. (1987). Urban fortunes: The political economy of place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

GROWTH MACHINE See Growth Coalitions

GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY The term dates back to the practice of the imperial powers of Europe in the 19th century to display naval might to establish new trade partners, colonial outposts, and expansions of empire. In a transferred sense, the term has come to encompass the diplomatic use of intimidation by the demonstration, threat, or use of military force generally, thus making it more or less synonymous with the term coercive diplomacy. James Cable has defined gunboat diplomacy as “the use or threat of limited naval force, otherwise than as an act of war, in order to secure advantage, or to avert loss, either in the furtherance of an international dispute or else against foreign nationals within the territory of the jurisdiction of their own state” (1981, p. 14). Gunboat diplomacy did not end with the decline and fall of European colonial powers. During the cold war, the rivaling superpowers used their navies frequently for diplomatic purposes, and the contemporary use of U.S. military strength is often labeled gunboat diplomacy by critics. Naval forces have proved particularly useful for diplomatic purposes. They permit accessibility, freedom of action, and an open line of retreat from

impending collision; capable of conspicuous presence and withdrawal, they offer readily perceived and understood signaling instruments, and they do not depend on bases in the interior of other states’ territory. In the 20th century, aircraft carriers became the most often used means of power projection. Gunboat diplomacy, in the narrow sense, is therefore the most frequently used variety of shows of force or coercive diplomacy. It can be subdivided into four categories: definitive force, designed to create a fait accompli; purposeful force, designed to change the policy of a foreign government; catalytic force, designed to use force to deal with an unforeseen or unspecified threat; and expressive force, designed to express attitudes, underscore policy statements, and provide an emotional outlet. The fundamental controversy surrounding gunboat diplomacy concerns its legitimacy and utility. With its historically bellicose connotations, the term is frequently used in a deprecating way. Yet studies of the occurrences of gunboat diplomacy in the 20th century indicate that it has been an effective instrument. The result of one study of 133 incidents of gunboat diplomacy between 1956 and 1978 indicate that it has been most effective when involved a definitive, deterrent display of force undertaken by an assailant who had engaged in war in the victim’s region and who was militarily prepared and politically stable compared with the victim. Christer Jönsson See also Diplomacy; Realism in International Relations; Sea Power

Further Readings Cable, J. (1981). Gunboat diplomacy 1919–1979: Political applications of limited naval force (2nd Rev. ed.). London: Macmillan. (Original work published 1971) Mandel, R. (1986). The effectiveness of gunboat diplomacy. International Studies Quarterly, 30, 59–76.

H understanding, and this can be achieved through universal pragmatics. Through discussion and mutual exchange, we can learn from and empathize with each other, even though we have myriad different desires and ends. The rationality here is through the structure of interpersonal linguistic competence, which will require a universal moral understanding. Attaining complete communication will require full moral understanding and entail complete human emancipation. In this way, Habermas thinks, the attainment of a true deliberative democratic system, equality, and humanity can be attained. He believes that we have developed this potential through evolution, but it has been distorted by competitive capitalist society. Habermas believes that deliberation in the public sphere can shift means of power away from state organizations and capitalism and away from instrumental rationality into communicative rationality and the collective will of the people. He thinks that practical reasoning is carried out in actual discourse in public forums that enable people to reflect on their needs and obligations to each other. Through deliberation, it is harder for people to defend their own personal interests because they must justify the decisions they think public deliberative bodies should provide; doing so can lead to consensus. Power becomes the force for argument and practical rationality. Critics query whether power and rationality can be separated—that is, whether there is any objectivity in communicative rationality (or “argument”) or whether it always involves partiality. The latter would mean, Foucauldians argue, that there is always some domination even within

HABERMAS, JÜRGEN (1929– ) Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher renowned for his work on the foundations of social theory, his analysis of advanced capitalist societies though “critical theory” but with a defense of modernity, and finally the idea of communicative competence and deliberative democracy. His work on the foundations of social theory is closely tied into other aspects of his thought. Critical theory is the idea that the role of the social scientist is not just to analyze society but also to provide the means by which to change it. This Marxist thought is brought to fruition in critical theory by the idea that the end of social theory is action, not some proposition or law about the world. Habermas argues that the Enlightenment project of understanding the world through reason is unfinished: that is, our role is to complete the Enlightenment project and not to discard it, as relativists or postmodernists suggest. He argues that advanced capitalism has brought about inequality and exploitation, but completing the rationalist project will correct these flaws and bring equality. We attain this through a process of communicative competence or rationality. Modern capitalist societies and modern enlightenment thinkers use instrumental rationality, wherein rationality is seen as the efficient means of achieving our ends but says nothing about the worth of those ends, which are taken as given. However, social emancipation can be brought about through communicative rationality. The idea of communication is mutual 301

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Habermasian practical ethics. In other words, communication is the exercise of power and rhetoric. Habermas thinks that through such public deliberation, false consciousness will be overcome and there will be no domination. Consensus can result—not partial consensus where the weak give way to the strong, but genuine consensus where each has listened to the other and reached practical agreement. In this account of practical deliberation in the public sphere, there is a role for experts, but their justifications for their positions must be open and understandable to all people. Through these means, power is transformed from the domination of capital and the state into a force that belongs to the people. Habermas was critical of Michel Foucault’s relativism, whereas Foucault criticized Habermas for the utopia of perfectly transparent communication. However, Habermas did recognize that the ideal speech situation cannot be established perfectly in actual communication, and hence, regulation of public debate and of dominance relations was necessary. The difference between them is that Habermas thought a universalistic theory of discourse is possible, whereas Foucault believed that discourse works itself through actual power relations in specific contexts. Those contexts can never be surmounted. Keith Dowding See also Deliberative Democracy; Flyvbjerg, Bent; Foucault, Michel; Rationality

Further Readings Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for civil society? British Journal of Sociology, 49, 210–233. Habermas, J. (1975). Legitimation crisis. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1984). Taking aim at the heart of the present. In D. Hoy (Ed.), Foucault: A critical reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Kahn, R. P. (1988). The problem of power in Habermas. Human Studies, 11, 361–387.

HABITUS Habitus is an old concept that has an important place in the history of Western thought. Although

they have not given it the decisive role it deserves, numerous social theorists—including Aristotle, the Scholastics, Émile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss—have used it to address the interface between the body and the social order. However, in its current form, the notion of habitus found a nuanced expression in the generative structuralism of Pierre Bourdieu. Habitus is one among many concepts that Bourdieu has coined to overcome the false antinomy between objective and subjective reality that social phenomenology and social physics—as a result of their monodimensional accentuation of either consciousness or voluntarism and rules or social structure—have sustained. Transcending these shortcomings and consistent with his relational approach, Bourdieu (1992, pp. 26–27) defines habitus as “the durable and transposable systems of schemata of perception, appreciation, and action that result from the institution of the social in the body.” The definition contains three important themes: first, although habitus is primarily a disposition, it should not be merely perceived as a cognitive apparatus of framing and making sense of the social world. Rather, it is an “embodied sensibility” through which individuals simultaneously perceive and generate social practices. Second, habitus is the outcome of a dialectical process in which both the processes of internalization of the external social world and externalization of the internal world are asserted. Finally, habitus is an enduring (but not a permanent) schema that allows individuals to participate in both routine and improvised social practices. Habitus should not be confused with habit, although there is a close affinity between the two. Habitus, like habit, has acquired characteristics; yet it is a relatively permanent disposition inscribed in the body. These features give habitus the semblance of being inborn when it is actually the outcome of specific social history. Unlike habit, habitus also connotes generative properties. Where habit implies mechanistic repetition, habitus reproduces social reality in a transformative fashion. Although habitus is the internalized form of social structure, there is no one-to-one correspondence between it and that which is produced in social practice. Most importantly, habitus is a capital or a “discapital,” a property, reflecting the position

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of individuals in the system of social fields. Corresponding to each social field is a habitus made possible through a long process of construction. Habitus, however, is not a closed system; it is exposed to multiple experiences that either buttress or mutate its structure. In the latter case, habitus becomes a misfit that could challenge the fundamental codes of existing symbolic power. Alem S. Kebede See also Agency–Structure Problem; Bourdieu, Pierre

Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1992). The logic of practice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Hillier, J., & Rooksby, E. (Eds.). (2005). Habitus: A sense of place. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

HALL, JUDITH A. Judith A. Hall is a social psychologist whose research has focused on dyadic communication processes with a special emphasis on nonverbal communication, gender, and social power. She earned her BA in 1967 from Harvard College and her PhD from Harvard University in 1976. She served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University and held appointments at the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health before moving to Northeastern University’s Psychology Department in 1986. She has served as the editor and associate editor of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior and the editor of Patient Education and Counseling, as well as on numerous editorial boards. In her basic research on nonverbal communication, Hall studies both interpersonal sensitivity and specific nonverbal behaviors, both with respect to social power and gender and in relation to other social psychological or personality variables. She is

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a coauthor of Sensitivity to Nonverbal Communication: The PONS Test (1979), coauthor of Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction (2005), and author of Nonverbal Sex Differences: Communication Accuracy and Expressive Style (1984). She is also coeditor of the volume Interpersonal Sensitivity: Theory and Measurement (2001). In her applied research, Hall studies the communication of physicians and patients, both as a process and in relation to antecedent and outcome variables. She is coauthor of Doctors Talking With Patients/Patients Talking With Doctors: Improving Communication in Medical Visits (2006). In her entry on Nonverbal Communication and Power for this encyclopedia, Hall draws on several meta-analytic reviews of the “verticality” concept (subsuming the related concepts of power, dominance, and status), as well as other recent research, to summarize the present state of knowledge about the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and interpersonal sensitivity. This topic also intersects with her interest in gender differences in communication style, insofar as gender and power are linked in society and may be linked in the phenomena under review. Hall concludes that “verticality,” regardless of which specific conceptual or operational definition is under discussion, is more a structural variable than a psychological one, meaning that prediction of the psychological states and therefore the nonverbal behavior of persons in different vertical positions is far from clear-cut. Because nonverbal behavior is the product of proximal states (including emotions, goals, motivational states, and role construals), and because vertical positions do not map unambiguously onto such states, the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and sensitivity is bound to be a highly moderated one. As a very broad summary (one that needs much qualification), higher verticality predicts higher nonverbal sending and receiving skills and predicts using more open postures, approaching others more closely, using louder speech and more verbal interruptions, and engaging in a relatively higher proportion of looking while speaking than while listening in conversation. Beliefs about the relation of verticality to specific nonverbal behaviors are stronger and more numerous than are the actual relations, based on meta-analysis. Finally, she

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shows gender differences in nonverbal skill and behavior do not closely parallel verticality differences in nonverbal skill and behavior. Judith A. Hall See also Nonverbal Communication and Power

Further Readings Bernieri, F. J., & Hall, J. A. (Eds.). (2001). Interpersonal sensitivity: Theory and measurement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hall, J. A. (1984). Nonverbal sex differences: Communication accuracy and expressive style. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Knapp, M. L., & Hall, J. A. (2005). Nonverbal communication in human interaction (6th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Rosenthal, R., Hall, J. A., DiMatteo, M. R., & Rogers, P. L. (1979). Sensitivity to nonverbal communication: The PONS Test. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Roter, D., & Hall, J. A. (2006). Doctors talking with patients/patients talking with doctors: Improving communication in medical visits. Westport, CT: Praeger.

HARSANYI, JOHN C. (1920–2000) John C. Harsanyi, one of the leading game theorists of his generation, was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics jointly with John F. Nash and Reinhard Selten. Harsanyi was also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Harsanyi was born in Budapest and attended the same Lutheran Gymnasium (high school) from which John von Neumann graduated. Harsanyi’s parents owned a pharmacy, so he studied pharmacology in college, despite his early interest and evident aptitude in mathematics and philosophy. When the German army occupied Hungary in 1944, Harsanyi narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp. After the war, he obtained a PhD in philosophy from the University of Budapest, and he then assumed a junior faculty position at the University Institute of Sociology, where he

met his future wife Anne Klauber. By 1950, the Hungarian regime had become wholly Stalinist and, at considerable risk, they managed to cross the border into Austria; some months later, they emigrated to Australia. Harsanyi worked in a factory for 3 years while taking evening courses and earning an MA in economics at the University of Sydney. In 1956, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship for study at Stanford University, where he earned a PhD in economics under the supervision of Kenneth Arrow. Harsanyi’s visa required him to return to Australia, where he took a research position at Australian National University. But Harsanyi felt isolated from ongoing work in game theory and, with the help of Arrow and James Tobin, was able to return to the United States to take a faculty position at Wayne State University. He was subsequently offered a position in the Business School at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent the remainder of his career. Even before his first visit to the United States, Harsanyi had published important papers that recast utilitarianism in terms of von Neumann– Morgenstern cardinal utility functions. Harsanyi imagined an impartial observer who believes he or she has an equal chance of being anyone in society (complete with that person’s utility function) and orders social states accordingly. Making welfare comparisons therefore becomes a problem of individual decision making under risk, and social welfare is maximized when the average utility of all members of society is maximized. Thus, Harsanyi devised the thought experiment of putting a decision maker “behind a veil of ignorance” to make welfare judgments, several years before John Rawls published his earliest work along the same lines. But Harsanyi’s impartial observer chooses on the basis of expected utility maximization, rather than Rawls’s maximin principle (which Harsanyi later severely criticized). Beginning with his Stanford dissertation, Harsanyi’s work shifted to cooperative game theory. In papers that subsumed and generalized earlier work by Frederik Zeuthen, John Nash, and Lloyd Shapley, Harsanyi proposed a set of “strong rationality” postulates that give a determinate solution for any bargaining game and thereby lead to a measurement of social power. Harsanyi argued that, in the absence of some communication bias, every logically possible coalition forms simultaneously,

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each defending the common partial interests of its members in a bargaining game with the complementary coalition and that this “principle of fullcoalition formation” likely characterizes the broad and long-term operation of the political process in a pluralist society. Harsanyi’s book Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations fully developed this line of work. Harsanyi subsequently became a leading advocate and analyst of noncooperative game theory, which he came to view as providing greater generality than cooperative theory does. Harsanyi published a series of pioneering papers on games with incomplete information, in which players do not know each other’s utility functions. By postulating that each player is one of some finite number of “types,” each of which has its own utility function, and that players have consistent beliefs on the distribution of types, Harsanyi demonstrated that every game with incomplete information is equivalent to some larger game with complete information, which can then be solved by standard methods. This approach is now a standard tool of information economics, including the strategic analysis of auctions. Harsanyi subsequently used this approach to provide a new and more satisfying interpretation of mixed strategy equilibria in noncooperative games and to develop a tracing procedure to identify a unique equilibrium in any noncooperative game. The latter effort was most fully developed in his book A General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games, coauthored with Reinhard Selten. Harsanyi’s goal was always to seek the greatest possible degree of analytical generality. His ultimate aim was to define a unique solution concept that could be applied in all games with two or more players, cooperative or noncooperative, zerosum or variable sum, and with complete or incomplete information and, in his productive scholarly life, he largely accomplished this goal. Nicholas R. Miller See also Bargaining; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Noncooperative Games

Further Readings Harsanyi, J. C. (1977). Rational behavior and bargaining equilibrium in games and social situations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Harsanyi, J. C., & Selten, R. (1988). A general theory of equilibrium selection in games. Cambridge: MIT Press.

HAUGAARD, MARK (1961– ) Mark Haugaard’s contribution to the study of power can be organized under two headings. The first concerns his general approach. In contrast to theorists who seek a single definition of power, Haugaard argues that power is best understood, from Ludwig Wittgenstein, as a family resemblance concept. Depending on the context of power’s use, it will be appropriate to deploy one or more members of the power family (e.g., consensual power, conflictual power, power “over,” power “to”). The second heading concerns specific approaches to the study of social and political power. Recognizing the validity of a range of theoretical systems and modes of analysis (such as analytical and normative approaches), Haugaard proposes that these can be conceptualized as language games that are suited to specific tasks. His own work, which is primarily in the area of social theory, combines consensual and conflictual power and examines the relation between freedom and constraint in the context of modern social order. Developing Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory, Haugaard shows how goal-directed action is possible because of the existence of social structures, and that structures are reproduced through the pursuit of goals. This is also the basis of social power because social order—the structured and hence predictable flow of social life—allows us to act in concert with others. Much of what we do can be classified as goal-directed action, from embarking on a career, to purchasing the ingredients for a family meal. The knowledge entailed in accomplishing such tasks is largely tacit; we may need to think carefully about what to buy in the grocery store, for example, but rarely do we need to think very deeply about the extensive knowledge entailed in shopping, and this has important consequences for the study of power. For example, the act of shopping helps to reproduce capitalism—a basic sociological truism—but in Haugaard’s theory it is also implicated in what Steven Lukes calls the third dimension or “face” of power. Following Lukes, but rejecting the Marxist notion of false

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consciousness (which is central to Lukes’s theory), Haugaard is interested in how the dominated contribute to (and contest) their own domination. In the context of a patriarchal society, for example, our shopper planning the family meal is most likely a woman, a social subject excluded from public and professional life. Although this mode of domination may entail the episodic exercise of coercion, it exists as a social structure because it is carried in tacit consciousness. However, as history attests, this mode of domination is mutable, which raises the question of how three-dimensional power is undermined. Haugaard provides a complex answer that can be summarized in four parts. 1. The subject of a modern social order is socialized in a particular way. Learning competency in a plurality of spheres (e.g., as a family member, a worker, a consumer, a citizen), the individual acquires a range of interpretative horizons that may be used as a critical resource. When second-wave feminists organized meetings to “raise” consciousness, what they did was pool the interpretative horizons of participants, using the private and public spheres against each other to reconfigure boundaries, thereby politicizing sexual relations and contesting gender inequalities. 2. Staying with the example of raising consciousness, what this entails is the conversion of tacit consciousness knowledge into discursive consciousness knowledge, thus exposing the arbitrariness of constraints. 3. Though constraints may be questioned and relations of domination challenged, the magnitude of effects remains conditional on the extent to which a given challenge resonates in its context. In other words, if a critical insight is to have a social effect, then it must be affirmed by others, in which case constraints may be modified. 4. Structural transformation may or may not result, for this depends on just how deeply conflict cuts into the existing order. Here Haugaard uses Michel Foucault to distinguish between “shallow” and “deep” conflict. The former is a situation where conflict over goals

reproduces existing structures, and the latter is a conflict over the social order itself.

Kevin Ryan See also Consensual Power, Theories of; False Consciousness; Foucault, Michel; Giddens, Anthony; Lukes, Steven; Social Power; Third Face

Further Readings Haugaard, M. (1997). The constitution of power. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Haugaard, M. (2003). Reflections on seven ways of creating power. European Journal of Social Theory, 6, 87–113.

HEGEMONIC POWER Hegemonic power is the dominance of a particular nation-state in international relations (IR). This can mean dominance of the international system, or of a particular region, or dominance over other countries within a particular sphere of influence. The IR use of hegemony should be distinguished from the concept of hegemony found in other social sciences, particularly the Gramscian concept that is discussed later. In mainstream IR, the concept most closely resembles the original Greek work hƝgemonia meaning leadership. In IR, then, hegemony most often refers to the leadership or dominance of a particular state, either within the world system or among a group of states. When the terms hegemony and power are used together, it is most usual to think of the realist position within IR. Indeed, going back to the Greeks, realists look to the work of Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War as an early example of realpolitik or power politics. In the Melian Dialogue, Thucydides famously says, “The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” Behind realist accounts of power is usually the notion, best formulated by Robert Dahl, that the exercise of power is about A getting B to do something that B would not otherwise have done. For Thucydides, the rising power of Athens was seen as a threat by Sparta. When looked at in

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terms of the Greek system of independent citystates, we can see the changing power relationship between Athens and Sparta as a threat to the balance of power in the region. The Peloponnesian War is a good example of hegemonic war between the two dominant powers within that particular system of states and has inspired the classical realist vision of power, politics, and international order. Subsequent realists have looked to Thucydides and other classical writers to provide a general theory of international politics based, as Robert Gilpin suggests, on the idea that the differential growth of power among states creates the nature of international relations. Gilpin, taking a somewhat systemic slant, also suggests that the idea that conflicts in international relations arise from the unequal distribution of power among states is the theory of hegemonic war. Ultimately, the whole matter of the leadership of the international system is at stake.

Liberalism and Realism in International Relations The modern discipline of international relations really begins in the early 20th century, whereas the realist position gains influence during the interwar years as a critique of the idealism of liberal thinking. Against liberal talk of international peace and harmony among nations, the realists argued that states always act in their own interests and that they are driven by power politics and the struggle for survival. Among the early realist critiques of liberalism, E. H. Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis stands out. In a world dominated by self-interest, security, and power politics, the main aim of states is to preserve or improve their position in the international system. This was evident from the failure of the League of Nations and the dashing of liberal hopes for the spread of democracy and economic prosperity. For Carr, the realist emphasis on power politics is a “necessary corrective to the exuberance of utopianism,” the view he attributes to the interwar liberal internationalists. A realist view has to be rooted in the way things are, rather than in what the utopians would like them to be. It is not surprising, therefore, that the doctrine of realism, with its claim to being realistic, is often closely associated with political practice and the tradition of realpolitik. It looks to the work of practitioners such as Niccolò Machiavelli (whose account of the power politics between

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Italian city-states is often compared to Thucydides) and the statespeople of 19th-century Europe, most notably Otto von Bismarck. Two prominent 20thcentury realists who have combined scholarly work with being political practitioners are George Kennan and Henry Kissinger, both closely identified with the exercise of U.S. hegemony. Although we have mentioned power in relation to the international system, the starting point for many of the early realists—and Hans Morgenthau in particular—is not system but human nature. States are power seeking because, for Morgenthau, it is in our human nature to seek power. People have egotistic passions, and social forces, ultimately, “are the product of human nature in action.” Although Morgenthau is best known for his claim that international politics is driven by the concept of interest defined in terms of power, he argues in Politics Among Nations, “Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.” Hence, the causes of international conflict and war lie in human nature or, as Morgenthau dramatically claims, in “the tragic presence of evil in all political action,” a view that has been criticized as “biological realism.” Morgenthau concludes that the realist cannot apply universal moral principles because these are always overridden by national interest. Despite the earlier quote, Morgenthau tends to deny the possibility of establishing general laws of politics because of the complexity and uncertainty of the social world and the political actors who inhabit it. This leads us to a discussion of the difference between early realism and the new breed of realism or neorealism, particularly over the issue of state behavior and motivations. For classical realists such as Morgenthau, the selfish, even evil, nature of human beings is responsible for the power-seeking behavior of states. The state, after all, for Morgenthau, is “man writ large.” For later neorealist scholars such as Kenneth Waltz, such a view is reductionist in explaining the international domain by recourse to human behavior. For Waltz, human nature is something that belongs to a different level of analysis. Neorealists therefore concern themselves with examining the position of a state in the international system, and this structural relationship determines the way states behave.

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Taking such a stance leads Waltz to express his belief in “the striking sameness in the quality of international life through the millennia.” He bases this claim on what he believes to be the nature of the international system—a Hobbesian anarchy that forces states to behave in a self-interested way. Rather than looking at how states shape the system, Waltz looks at the effect that the anarchical international system has on state behavior. This in turn is based on a level-of-analysis argument that looks only at the system level of relations between states rather at what goes on within states and such things as individual or group behavior, domestic politics, and internal political processes. This system-based approach argues that in contrast to the “ordering principles” of domestic politics, international relations are characterized not by hierarchy, but by a system of formally equal actors, distinguished by capability rather than by function. The distribution of capabilities then becomes important when examining what characterizes different orders, and ultimately this allows neorealists to explain the changing balance of hegemonic power. Hegemony in neorealism is again a matter of dominance, self-interest, and the exercise of power over others. It tends to be seen in military capabilities, based in turn on what Waltz calls a preponderance of material capabilities. But this poses further questions because hegemony in relation to other states implies relations between those states— in other words, not just straightforward anarchy, but some sort of order and hierarchy in the international system. Neorealism, despite its claim to show how the system influences states, ends up back at the view that states influence systems. World systems are characterized by the number of great powers, making them either unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar.

The Balance of Power The balance of power refers to a situation where no one state is able to dominate the international system and some sort of equilibrium exists between the main powers. The classic example of this is 19th-century Europe. Any potential hegemonic power—France, for example—should be guarded against by an alliance of other powers. The threat of violent conflict leads states to take measures to

preserve order. Britain, in this situation, was conscious of the need to play a balancing role—in Europe at least. Britain was aware that it could not become a hegemonic power on the European continent, but could exercise its military dominance through naval supremacy further afield. In general, then, balancing occurs when states attempt to prevent any one state from becoming hegemonic. This situation is one of multipolarity involving a number of stronger and weaker states. Those who believe that a multipolar system provides most stability point to the fact that from 1815 to 1914 there were only five minor wars between the great powers. The two world wars of the 20th century point to the spectacular power shifts that occurred at the end of this period of balancing. After 1945, a condition of bipolarity developed between the two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union. For many realists and neorealists, this locked various states into a stalemate, thus best preserving peace. Smaller states made little difference to the position of the two superpowers, and this made world order a lot more certain than it had been during the great power politics of the multipolar system. Preserving stability and their own dominant position in the system overrides any mutual fears and suspicions dominant states may have. Deterrence is easier with less of an imbalance in power and a lower chance of miscalculation. Waltz believed that this was only further emphasized by the nuclear standoff and the threat of mutually assured destruction. Ironically then, many realists and neorealists lament the ending of the cold war era and the development of a unipolar situation where the dominant state—the United States—nevertheless feels threatened by an increasingly insecure international situation. The question now is whether, given the fact that the United States is unchallenged as a hegemon, the United States is more or less likely to intervene in other parts of the world. It would at first seem likely that a hegemon such as the United States would feel more secure, allowing it to pull back its military forces. But it might mean that the hegemon is tempted to intervene more and use its superior position to remake the political order in different parts of the world—the Middle East comes to mind here. It may be that the hegemon does not feel secure at all and is driven to act by a feeling of insecurity rather than by total dominance.

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This points out that there are significant divisions within neorealist analysis, most notably between defensive realists such as Waltz that believe that the system constrains states that might otherwise seek to enhance their power—indeed, that it would be foolish to pursue hegemony—and offensive realists such as John Mearsheimer who argue that states should try to enhance their power as much as they can and win hegemony if possible. Balancing can be ineffective and gaining as much power as possible is the best guarantee of survival. Great powers should therefore attempt to gain as much as possible in relation to their rivals, with hegemony the ultimate prize. There are many criticisms of neorealism, particularly for its claim about the striking sameness of international relations. As far as neorealists are concerned, hegemonic change is simply a matter of the distribution of capabilities across the system rather than anything more historically significant. Other critics, such as Jack Donnelly, have argued that Waltz’s approach is wholly unable to deal with such things as feudal political order in medieval Europe, or China’s relations with its neighbors during the Qing dynasty. Or, to take a more recent development, how neorealism is to explain the development of the European Union? This challenges the neat distinction Waltz relies on between hierarchical and anarchical ordering principles. The English School approach can perhaps temper realism by adding an institutional element to the analysis. Hedley Bull argues, “Great powers contribute to international order in two ways: by maintaining their relations with one another; and by exploiting their preponderance in such a way as to impart a degree of central direction to the affairs of international society as a whole” (Bull, 1977, p. 8). Contrary to neorealist claims, international anarchy is not a matter of Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all,” but a set of institutionalized power relations based on certain shared norms, values, and understandings. Where these exist, Bull argues that we can speak of an international society rather than merely of an international system as might be found in neorealist theory. International society, for the English School, is clearly something more social and historical than just the mere interactions between states. Liberal views of international order also contain this more social element. Perhaps most pertinent to

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our discussion of hegemonic power is John Ikenberry’s work After Victory that looks at how, once a power shift has occurred, the new hegemon seeks to build a new international order, institutionalizing its rule through various international organizations and agreements. Ikenberry argues that international hegemony is as much to do with consent and legitimacy as with direct power and coercion. This is a situation he describes as “penetrated hegemony” where the dominant power allows other states access to its own political system. As Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney argue, transnational relations are the means by which subordinate states forward their interests to the hegemon and provides consensus between the hegemon and lesser powers. Thus, the United States is seen as responsible for maintaining a liberal international system that has the consent of the smaller powers through an asymmetrical relationship. Potential challengers such as Germany and Japan, following their failed military bids for hegemony in the early 20th century, are now locked into a situation of “semi-sovereignty” and selfimposed restraint. Even within the realist position, a view of hegemons as stabilizers of the world system emerges. In the 17th century, this was the Netherlands, in the 19th century Britain, and now we have a system of Pax Americana. Having said this, some such as Robert Keohane believe that the hegemonic power of the United States has declined to the point where we are now in a situation best described as “after hegemony.” This might be difficult to accept given that the United States so clearly continues to dominate the world system through its unmatched military capabilities. But Keohane’s view hints that more is going on here than simple military dominance. That other, weaker states have an interest in supporting a hegemon such as the United States when it is able to bring its stabilizing influence to different parts of the international system, including military, but also political and economic stability (elements often ignored by neorealist accounts of power). Neorealists will respond that once the power of the hegemon starts to wane, all sorts of new rivalries will break out.

Hegemonic Stability Theory One way of understanding liberal international order while taking more of a realist and less of a

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liberal theoretical stance is through hegemonic stability theory, which argues that only with the existence of a hegemon can a liberal economic order be maintained. Michael Webb and Stephen Krasner suggest that a hegemonic distribution of power is one where a single state has a predominance of power and this situation is the most conducive to open and stable economic systems. In other words, the liberal order is a product of the hegemony of a dominant power rather than the openness of a liberal international system. The dominant power has to be willing to support and maintain such a system, taking on some of the costs of providing public goods and disciplining those who cheat (this approach relies for its argument on the rationalist assumptions of game theory). Charles Kindleberger believes the hegemon may have benign motives in maintaining a liberal trading order, providing public goods and stabilizing the system. Others, such as Robert Gilpin and Stephen Krasner, argue that the hegemon acts in such a way because it gains disproportionately from a liberal international order. The reason a country such as Britain supported a liberal international order in the 19th century was because it stood to gain most from free trade. Pax Britannica involved such things as the management of the gold standard, but by the 1930s it was clear that Britain was unable to lead and the United States was unwilling to take over responsibility. The disorder of the 1930s can be seen as resulting from a decline in hegemonic power and an unraveling of the international agreements established by British dominance of the international system. The remaking of international order in 1945 can therefore be seen as a result of a new preparedness by the United States to take on such a responsibility and establish new institutions for postwar order such as Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, through which the United States offered monetary leadership. Although other international organizations such as the United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) could also be mentioned as part of this new order, the economic aspect of bringing stability to world markets and enforcing the rules of the international system is most important to hegemonic stability theory. Nevertheless, the hegemon exerts economic and political power backed by a preponderance of

military capabilities. The United States is able to put itself forward as a hegemon in a way that the main U.S. economic rivals—Japan and the European Union (EU)—cannot. The hegemon itself bears most of the costs for establishing what is a benign liberal order and creates an institutional infrastructure to facilitate international trade and investment. This is not something that goes completely uncontested. And could it be that the U.S. intervention in Iraq to secure oil reserves might actually benefit other powers such as China more than the United States itself benefits? Some states (revisionist states) may try to alter the balance of power, whereas status quo states that have no interest in this. Some realists such as Mearsheimer believe that the nature of the system drives great powers to behave like revisionist states and to try to shift the balance of power in their favor. Or else declining powers might be tempted to launch a preemptive war against a rising power while the declining power still enjoys a relative advantage. According to some approaches such as Abramo Organski’s power transition theory, hegemonic war occurs when a rising power challenges the hegemon and the existing distribution of power. This goes against the balance of power view in arguing that wars between powers are quite likely when the distribution of power between states is closest. Gilpin talks of hegemonic war as distinguished by its scale, objectives, and the means used to achieve them. It has a worldwide character, affecting the whole international system, with the matter of the structure and the leadership of the international system ultimately at stake.

Two Forms of Realism What we have are two alternative ways of understanding IR—a form of realism based on balance of power arguments, and a form of realism based on hegemonic stability. For balance of power approaches, powers mobilize against a potential hegemon, maintaining equilibrium and forming alliance to balance against states that try to develop a hegemonic position. By contrast, those approaches that emphasize hegemonic stability argue that a hegemonic power can actually help manage the international system better. The power

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of the hegemon allows for the construction of a system of rules and norms that both furthers its position and stabilizes the system. The most vulnerable moment for the international system occurs when the hegemonic power starts to weaken but is not yet overtaken by a rival hegemon. But these differences are not quite what they first seem. First, although both approaches are informed by realism, the hegemonic stability approach tends to move away from absolute anarchy toward a theory of regimes and shares much in common with neoliberal institutionalism and interdependency approaches. It might also be wondered whether these differences are really within the same domain because balance of power approaches are very much within the militarystrategic domain, whereas hegemonic stability approaches tend to relate hegemony to political and economic stability. If other powers give their support to the dominance of a hegemon in return for stabilizing the system, then this suggests a degree of consent and legitimacy. Here we are on the cusp of a more consensual view of hegemonic power as might be found in Gramscian work. Indeed, Keohane says that Antonio Gramsci adds a greater ideological and consensual element to the study of hegemony that rests on greater subjective awareness among states of the benefits of accepting the hegemony of a dominant power. Neo-Gramscians in IR have therefore sought to correct the mainstream IR usage of the concept of hegemony, which, Robert Cox notes, tends to be reduced to a single dimension of dominance and physical capabilities. By contrast, the Gramscian view of hegemony points to the importance of ideas, institutions, norms, and beliefs. These things persuade others to accept the rulership of the dominant power. Seeing the international system as a complex mix of domination and consent, Cox combines traditional Marxist emphasis on material conditions with an examination of the ideas and institutions of international politics. For Cox, therefore, a hegemonic order consists of the dominant elements of economic production, state–society relations, and world order. This can be said to follow from Gramsci’s own account of U.S. hegemony in terms of what he calls Americanism, that is to say, Fordist-style mass production, consumer society, the liberal state, and dominance

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of the world system. International hegemony, therefore, as Cox suggests, is an economic structure, a political structure, and a social structure. Yet this U.S.-led hegemonic order started to break down in the 1970s, most notably because of the relative decline of U.S. leadership in the economic field. It could be argued that awareness of this decline could lead to the post–cold war behavior of the United States in reasserting its hegemony through a display of military supremacy and a new, more assertive and aggressive foreign policy. Interestingly, most U.S. realists have come out against such a policy. Various other Marxist approaches might explain U.S. hegemony in terms of empire or imperialism, whether in terms of inter-imperialist rivalry, a more cooperative form of ultra-imperialism that benefits all the leading capitalist states, or, getting back to a more hegemonic view, super-imperialism where subordinate states defer political leadership to the most powerful state. Debates about globalization are starting to make headway within IR theory, so discussion has emerged about how the nature of hegemony might also be transformed. For William Robinson, U.S. hegemony will be replaced not by a new hegemon such as China, but by a new sort of transnational hegemony based on a new globalized elite. Although such a view might be questioned, it does point us back to our original starting point—what is hegemony itself? Is it, as the IR mainstream maintains, a power relationship among states, or is it, as the Gramscian view suggests, something that is more deeply rooted in social relations that go beyond the boundaries of the states system? Jonathan Joseph See also Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemonic War; Hegemony; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Bull, H. (1977). The anarchical society. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Cox, R. (with Sinclair, T.) (1986). Approaches to world order. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Donnelly, J. (2000). Realism and international relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Keohane, R. (1984). After hegemony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Morgenthau, H. (1954). Politics among nations. New York: Knopf.

HEGEMONIC WAR The concept of hegemonic war is a key element in classical and neoclassical realist analysis of structural change in international relations (IR). Within this realist tradition, hegemonic wars are conceptualized as the means through which changes in the leadership, hierarchy, and structure of the international system take place. A hegemonic war is triggered by a shift in the distribution of power within an international system. This shift may be the result of new political, economic, social, or technological conditions or developments, or even of natural factors, such as natural disasters, that exceed human control. As a result of this shift, the actors who dominate within the international system and are the main beneficiaries of the status quo face a direct challenge from rising actors, who benefit from the new redistribution of power and want to redefine the structure of the system in a way that reflects the new balance of power and their interests. Consequently, hegemonic wars are systemwide wars where what is at stake is the leadership and structure of the international system, as well as the set of principles, values, and rules that are to dominate in a rising new international order. Hegemonic wars are then both the historical vehicle through which change within an international system takes place, and the main determinant for the direction of this change and the nature of the new international order. Robert Gilpin attributes the first use of the concept of hegemonic war to Raymond Aron who, analyzing World War I, argued that in this type of war, hegemony in the state system, even if it is not the conscious motive of the competing actors, is certainly the inevitable outcome of the struggle. A number of important texts appeared in the second half of the 20th century that used variants of the concept of hegemonic war in their attempt to develop theories for analyzing historical change and continuity within the international system. These include A. F. K. Organski’s model of power transition and George Modelski’s work on long cycles and global wars. The work of historian Paul

Kennedy on the rise and fall of great powers could also be included here. Yet, the most influential and most frequently used source on the theory of hegemonic war is Gilpin’s work, especially his book War and Change in World Politics. According to Gilpin, the theory of hegemonic war founds its origins in Thucydides’ analysis of the Peloponnesian War, where, for the first time, the uneven growth of power among states is taken to be the main driving force in the evolution of international relations. Gilpin distinguishes between five stages in Thucydides’ analysis of hegemonic war. There is a relatively stable international system characterized by a rather stable hierarchy of states. However, over time the power of a subordinate state begins to grow disproportionately, which leads to a collision between this rising state and the dominant state of that system. The struggle between the dominant and the challenging state for preeminence leads to the formation of systemwide alliances and to the bipolarization of the international system. As a result, the international system becomes increasingly unstable. A new equilibrium will be restored when this disjuncture between the old structure of the system and the new redistribution of power within the system is resolved. In history, in most cases, this new order is the outcome of a hegemonic war, that is, the struggle between the hegemon and its challengers. The main function of a hegemonic war is the reordering of the system in a way that its structure reflects and matches the new distribution of power. Thus, war is the penultimate stage in the theory of hegemonic war, whereas the new equilibrium and order that follows this war is both the final stage in the evolution of a hegemonic cycle and the first stage of the next cycle, which will also follow a course of growth, expansion, and decline. In modern history, Gilpin analyzes three hegemonic wars: the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) that led to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the emergence of the modern nation-state system; the Napoleonic War (1792–1815), expanding from the French Revolution to the defeat of Napoleon, which led to a new balance of power in Europe and the rise of Pax Britannica; and the continuum of World War I and World War II that led to the demise of the European international primacy and order, and to the bipolar system of the cold war that was based on the rivalry between the United

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States and the Soviet Union (USSR). The collapse of the USSR, the rise of neoliberal globalization as a new hegemonic discourse, the tentative unipolar structure (or moment) of the existing international system, and the rise of China as a global actor, suggest a fundamental transformation of the contemporary international system. The exact impact of the forces unleashed by the end of the cold war on the structure of the international system remains to be seen.

Characteristics of Hegemonic Wars To distinguish hegemonic wars from other types of war, Gilpin refers to five characteristics: hegemonic wars involve all the states in an international system; their outcome determines the leadership and structure of the system; they affect the relations among states and the internal composition of societies; they are at once political, economic, and ideological in significance and consequences; and because of the stakes involved, the material means and practices employed by participants to win the war are usually unlimited. Gilpin also suggests there are three preconditions related to the outbreak of hegemonic wars. The first one is spatial and material in nature, and refers to the “closing in” of space and opportunities for expansion within the international system. When an international system reaches its limits of possibilities for economic expansion, then clashes among states for resources and markets increase in frequency and magnitude, gradually leading to hegemonic rivalry and war. The second precondition is psychological. It refers to an emerging perception among the key players of the system that a fundamental historical change is under way, and an increasing fear on the side of the hegemon that time works against it. In an attempt to deal with challengers while the advantage is still at its side, the hegemon engages in preemptive wars. This reading goes back to Thucydides’ analysis of the causes of the Peloponnesian War: the “growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.” The third and more general precondition for a hegemonic war is that it is both based on, and sets off, a course of events that escape human control. The forces that are unleashed by a hegemonic war as well as its outcome cannot be controlled or foreseen by those actors involved.

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Dynamics and Cycles Two final aspects in the theory of hegemonic war must be stressed. The first relates to the aforementioned independent dynamic of a hegemonic war. There are two important points here. First, the actors engaged in conflicts in the international system cannot know in advance whether these conflicts are parts of a broader hegemonic war process (i.e., a fundamental transformation of the international system) or not. Extending this line of analysis, it can be argued that there is no way to establish whether the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are hegemonic wars, as some scholars claim, or to foresee their implications for the broader structure of the international system. Second, in an explicit hegemonic rivalry contest, the main actors involved tend to underestimate the effects that their actions can have on themselves and their future, as well as on the overall structure of the system. Hence, the forces unleashed by a hegemonic war may be detrimental for all the main contenders and may pave the way for the rise of new peripheral states. For instance, when Athens and Sparta entered into war, they could hardly foresee that the war would lead to their exhaustion and thus to a shift of the balance of power within the Greek citystate system in favor of Macedonia. Similarly, when the dominant European powers entered in both world wars, no one could foresee that the outcome of these wars would be a completely different international system based on the U.S. and USSR bipolarity. The second issue of hegemonic war theory that needs to be discussed here is whether war is the only possible outcome of a hegemonic rivalry and the only means for restoring balance in an international system. We must ask, is war the only way to solve the imbalance that is produced by a redistribution of power within an international system, or is it possible such a redistribution can be accommodated by peaceful means? It can be argued that war can be averted if the challenged hegemon manages to restore its primacy through a revision of its existing policies, in a way that increases its resources or reduces the costs of hegemony, or both. The hegemon may also adopt a policy of retrenchment by directly and unilaterally reducing foreign-policy commitments, by entering into new alliances, by new policies of rapprochement with less threatening powers, or by adopting a policy of

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appeasement. The later has been strongly criticized and failed in the case of World War II but, as Gilpin notes, seems to have worked well in the case of Britain and its policy toward the United States before World War I. Overall, it can be argued that a rebalancing of the system, without regressing to war, is possible when a declining hegemon manages to restore its primacy by changing its strategy and policies. There is always the possibility, however, that any sign of weakness or retrenchment from the side of the hegemon will have the opposite effect—that is, it will increase the appetite of the rising power(s) for hegemony, and thus it will speed up conflict and war. The peaceful rebalancing scenario seems, however, to refer more to the manner in which continuity can be restored within the international system rather than whether change can be peacefully accommodated. Thus, the question remains whether war is the main means for structural change within the international system. This question and the traditional tendency of realist scholars to answer positively were put under new scrutiny after the peaceful end of the rivalry between the United States and the USSR. Indeed, the peaceful end of the cold war had a diverse effect on the theory of hegemonic war. This ending brought the strands of neoclassical realism that focus on hegemonic rivalry back to the core of international relations theorizing. The main reason for this was the apparent failure of the dominant structural realist perspective (i.e., neorealism) to consider history and historical change. Thus, most realist scholars, in their attempt to explain the peaceful end of the cold war, turned to the historically informed, classical roots of realist tradition. This development was to a certain extent paradoxical. How was it possible to use a conceptual tradition that focuses on war as the primary means of change in the structure of international system for explaining a peaceful change in this system? Neoclassical realist scholars have responded to this paradox by arguing that the cold war should be read as a credible but ultimately failed Soviet challenge to U.S. hegemony. Following this framework, William Wohlforth argues that realist theories of hegemonic rivalry offer a convincing explanation for the end of the cold war on the basis of three key assumptions: decision makers’ assessments of power, rather than material capabilities themselves, are

what matters; declining challengers are more likely than are declining hegemons to try to retrench and reform rather than opt for preventive war; and a sudden decline or civil strife on the losing side of a struggle is less destabilizing globally than is such decline or strife on the winning side. This explanation seems to converge with the peaceful rebalancing scenario mentioned earlier. Yet, when placed within the bipolar structure and context of the cold war, it does not seem to offer a convincing explanation why the USSR decided to give up its status and accepted a structural transformation in the international system that was disadvantageous to its interests (and its existence) without a fight. If nothing else, one would assume that the fear of decline on the USSR side would have made the USSR more aggressive, not less. Similarly, even if the United States is to be conceived as the real hegemon, an assumption that is problematic within the bipolar cold war system, then why did it not engage in a preventive war in the late 1960s to early 1970s when the USSR, having reached military parity with the United States, seemed to challenge the U.S. hegemony directly? Finally, during the cold war, the main assumption of hegemonic war theory was that a hegemonic conflict would be triggered if one of the pair (the United States or the USSR) failed to play its balancing role—an argument that made and makes perfect theoretical sense within a bipolar system, but that was proven inaccurate. This analysis points to a key weakness of hegemonic rivalry and hegemonic war approaches. Theories that are based on the notion of hegemonic cycles are characterized by a high degree of historical determinism, and therefore, if they are taken seriously, they can function as self-fulfilling prophecies. This determinism is, for instance, clear in John Mearsheimer’s seminal neoclassical realist statement The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. There, Mearsheimer concludes that a wealthy China would not be a status quo power but an aggressive state, and therefore the United States should do what it can to deter the rise of China, and even if the United States does not do so, it will be forced to do it by the structural imperatives of the international system. Finally, it can be argued that the theory of hegemonic war is based on a specific and rather limited understanding of hegemony and how it is achieved and operates in the international system. The main

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factors for this narrow understanding of hegemony are the theory’s territorially centered prism of analysis, combined with its focus on material and mainly military capabilities (or perceptions about them). The nature of war has changed over time and will continue to change. The same can be argued for the nature of hegemony. Arguably, then, the hegemonic wars of the future may be a different animal—that is, if the latter is not already with us. Andreas Antoniades See also Balance of Power; Hegemonic Power; Hegemony; Realism in International Relations; War

Further Readings Gilpin, R. (1981). War and change in world politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mearsheimer, J. (2001). The tragedy of great power politics. New York: W. W. Norton. Wohlforth, W. (1994/1995). Realism and the end of the cold war. International Security, 19(3), 91–129.

HEGEMONY Hegemony etymologically derives from ancient Greek hegemon meaning chieftain. The use of the concept of hegemony in social and political theory is relatively new and signifies the domination of a social class over others, which is exerted beyond what may be accounted for as coercion, law, and force. In the 19th century, the concept of hegemony was used in a specific sense to describe the domination of one state over others. In the period of Napoleon’s reign, French control over the rest of Europe and beyond is referred to as a hegemonic relationship. In this sense, the concept is used to refer to Britain’s political influence and economic domination beyond its formal boundaries in the 19th century and the U.S. domination after 1945. This meaning of the concept comes very close to the core meaning of the concept of imperialism, namely the great power policies intending to expand and establish economic and political predominance. This meaning of the concept of hegemony is still current in the debates among the theorists of international

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relations in the United States and in Europe among political theorists on imperialism (new imperialism, Euro-imperialism) exploring European Union’s policies, especially since the monetary union in 1999. The concept of hegemony was introduced into modern social and political thought by the Russian philosopher Georgi Plekhanov to describe the relationship between a political party and the social class that the party aims to represent. The broader meaning of the concept to refer to the domination of a social class over others by cultural and ideological means has, however, been explored by Italian philosopher and communist politician Antonio Gramsci. His central category is civil society as distinct from political society. In his concept, Gramsci reflects on and explores a long-standing tradition. On the one hand, he looks back to the scholarship on civil society starting with John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and particularly G. W. F. Hegel. On the other hand, Gramsci aims to develop the concept of hegemony as has been explored in the European communist movement in the first quarter of the 20th century. In his exploration of both of these traditions, he endeavors to answer the question why revolutionary uprising in Western Europe did not succeed, whereas in Russia it did. In classical liberalism, a distinction is made between civil society (consisting of passive citizens) and political society, referring to active citizens in magistrates, councils and parliaments, and so on. Hegel brings a third element into this conceptual distinction between civil society and political society and redefines the concept. He differentiates between society consisting of families (private sphere) and civil society (system of needs) consisting of estates (stände) or classes and the state. When Gramsci uses the concept of civil society, he points to the Hegelian concept explicitly as his main source. But he draws also on Karl Marx’s distinction between structure and superstructure. He introduces a new element into Hegelian and Marxian concepts. This new element refers to newspapers, journals, universities, churches, trade unions, and all sorts of other associations on which the state rests. The reason, then, why the revolution could succeed in Russia is that there was no civil society that the state could rely on and which had to break down under revolutionary

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pressure. In Western Europe, on the contrary, the state could activate all sorts of elements of civil society and enjoy support from the base to resist revolutionary uprisings. This observation leads Gramsci to develop a new concept of hegemony that is in many ways an original one. On the one hand, Gramsci agrees with Vladimir Lenin that a social class can acquire its leadership not only if it makes use of force but also if it is able to convince other (subaltern) social classes to take the leadership in science, culture, moral, religion, and in all other fields of superstructure. Traditionally, the state has been explored in terms of force. Gramsci insists that the role of the state is to subdue society and subaltern social classes through manipulative conviction by using civil society. This conviction enables one social class to rule over others and creates an agreement of subaltern social classes with the values of the ruling class. This is, then, the real and primary strength of a ruling class, or what he calls historical bloc, rather than using force. In contemporary debates on civil society and hegemony, new concepts and aspects such as global civil society and global hegemony have arisen—concepts and aspects Gramsci only mentions and hardly explores in detail. The nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) ranging from Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam) to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are referred to as civil society organizations. Political aspects of new developments in global civil society regarding the concept of hegemony are explored in the debate on global or cosmopolitan democracy. Many scholars are highly critical of the functions of these global organizations in economic and political international relations, which are said to have been instrumental in stabilizing an unjust global system rather than helping developing countries and the poor. Dogan Göçmen See also Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemonic Power; Hegemonic War

Further Readings Gramsci, A. (2003). Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of rights (A. W. Wood, Ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lenin, V. I. (1960). What is to be done? In Selected works (Vol. 1, pp.123–284). Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, K. (1918). Preface. In Critique of political economy. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.

HERESTHETICS Heresthetics is a term invented by W. H. Riker to explain how societies can radically change direction with new states of stable coalitions. He says heresthetics is the art of manipulation and is the fourth element of the class of the arts of language alongside the three defined in ancient Greece: logic is concerned with validity; grammar with communication-value; rhetoric with persuasion; and heresthetics with the strategy-value of sentences. In his book Liberalism Against Populism, Riker uses Arrow’s theorem to demonstrate that different choice procedures can lead to different outcomes despite identical preferences among people. Riker argues, using May’s theorem, that only the simple majority rule with two alternatives can meet reasonable normative standards for decision making. Furthermore, two generalizations of Arrow’s theorem provide problems for democratic theory. First, the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem shows that all voting systems are “manipulable”; that is, through agenda setting and strategic voting, democratic outcomes can be driven by subsets of voters. This means we cannot be sure that any result represents the true opinions of the people. The McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem shows that if issue space is multidimensional, then any bundle of policies can beat any other bundle in a pairwise vote. This theorem was thought by Riker to show that politics was essentially chaotic and any result we reach is merely contingent. He concludes that democratic society’s social choices are unordered, inconsistent, and arbitrary. These conclusions lead to a type of skepticism about the normative worth of democracy: not that democracy is a sham, but the belief that the results of a democratic decision are the true “will of the people” is a sham.

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One problem that emerges for the chaos theorem is that political life appears more stable than it should. If any bundle of policies can beat any other in multidimensional issues, how is it that as soon as one party gains power, another does not come up with a bundle of policies that beats the first and so is able to take over at the next election? Or even why as soon as one party announces its policies, another announces a winning set, merely for the first to announce a set that beats that one? There are many potential answers, including the transactions costs of such a process and institutional constraints on such rapid transfers of policy commitments. However, another, more interesting answer is that people just do not think in multidimensional issue space. We simply cannot think about what our views are in many different dimensions at a time. Rather, we tend to think in single-dimension (left–right) ideological space, or perhaps (as empirical analysis suggests) we can handle two-dimensional issue space but not more. In one or two dimensions, together with reasonable assumptions about the structure of individual preferences, stability can be assumed. This is shown by Duncan Black’s median voter theorem. We are now in a position to explain Riker’s views of heresthetic politicians. His idea is that astute politicians can manipulate the agenda through their speeches so that the stable outcomes that emerge in one-dimensional ideological space can be shifted such that a new coalition emerges. Politicians do this by manipulating the dimensionality of issue space by bringing to the fore new issues or describing issues in subtly new ways that bring forth new preferences that split previous coalitions and force new ones together. He argues his case through a series of examples, his most prominent one being the emergence and reemergence of slavery as an issue in U.S. national politics between 1787 and 1860. He suggests that from 1787 a dominant Jefferson–Jackson coalition dominated U.S. politics, and although the slavery issue arose many times, it did not become dominant until the supreme heresthetician Abraham Lincoln manipulated the issue to create a new coalition. In his book The Art of Political Manipulation, Riker illustrates his claims historically, with a series of stories from Pliny the Younger to Abraham Lincoln and other examples through to the 1950s. The art of heresthetics is an interesting account of the potential power of politicians to manipulate

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preferences, not through bundling together sets of issues but, rather, reimagining the bundles that are already there. How convincing Riker’s accounts are is open to question. His interpretation of historical events has been heavily criticized, the distinction between reimagining issues rather than simply producing new bundles is not clear, and whether his cases are really so different from ordinary politics is open to question. Furthermore, even if all these problems can be overcome, it is not clear whether some politicians are clever herestheticians as he and others suggest or simply stumble onto winning formulas. Keith Dowding See also Agenda Power; Agenda Setters; Coalition Theory; Manipulation; Riker, William H.

Further Readings McLean, I. (2002). William H. Riker and the invention of heresthetic(s). British Journal of Political Science, 32, 535–558. Riker, W. H. (1976). The art of political manipulation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riker, W. H. (1982). Liberalism against populism. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

HETEROSEXISM, ROLE POWER IN

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Heterosexism refers to what is often articulated as a heterosexual bias inherent in the sociopolitical, cultural, and economic systems of many Western societies. As a socially regulated predisposition toward heterosexuality, and therefore heterosexual people and heterosexual behaviors, heterosexism implies the presence of intimate and pervasive, but also institutionalized and highly politicized, relations of power at the social, personal, organizational, and international levels of human interaction. Heterosexist relations of power are particularly common to politically liberal cultures and societies, which depend on the assumption of a foundational distinction between private and public, moral and amoral. Embodying the privileging of normative heterosexuality, heterosexist practices and processes

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are the result of heteronormative institutions, structures of understanding and practical orientations that (as is particularly well articulated by Louise Berlant and Michael Warner) render heterosexuality not only coherent, but also privileged. Herein, reproductive heterosexuality is classified, analyzed, and regulated as the only normal, natural, or appropriate standard for human relations. The human body, its behaviors, and sexual practices are thus only understood as “natural” when measured against a socially reproduced norm of reproductive heterosexuality. All nonheterosexual behaviors and practices are thus considered unnatural, abnormal, deviant, or abhorrent. Heterosexism is related to but not, therefore, interchangeable with heterocentrism because it is perhaps more perniciously policed than the oftenunconscious heterocentrist assumption (made usually by heterosexual people) that everyone is heterosexual. The two are linked because the naturalization of heterosexuality would necessarily have some impact on people’s “automatic,” unconscious (but socially constructed) beliefs. The difference here is that heterocentrism is one effect of intentionally heterosexist practices, processes, and structures that may have become so normalized in human relations that they seem entirely “natural.” Studies in heterosexism and heterosexist bias have a significant intellectual heritage in historical analyses of the means and functions of mechanisms of social control over the body. To understand the concept of heterosexism, one need also conceptualize the social production and reproduction of power. Analyzing power as productive and reproductive (of social identities, regulatory apparatuses, and mechanisms of control) is a practice particularly embraced by postmodern and queer theories of power. French scholar Michel Foucault examined the effects of social discourses of sex (embodied in historically contingent discourses of science, medicine, and technology) to reveal the extent to which bodies are constrained and controlled by repressive moral discourses emanating from political, economic, and judicial institutions of social authority. In societies based on the market economy, it was and is essential that people keep producing (economically) and reproducing (similarly productive offspring but also the rules of society itself). Herein, one of the most expedient ways by which

people can be distinguished and assigned different but mutually complementary roles is through the imposition of a rigid, but apparently “biologically true,” female–male distinction. This is how the category “sex” is conventionally understood. For Foucault, at a time when the industrialization of Europe demanded a vast, willing, and malleable workforce, sexuality became monitored and regulated by powerful, historically specific apparatuses of state control. Mechanisms were established and maintained to control, for example, conjugal relations, to monitor women’s sexual physiology, to regulate birthrates, and to supervise children’s sexuality. The state would oversee, regulate, and discipline through social institutions such as medicine and medical advice, psychiatry, schools and teaching curricula, labor regulations, and legal, judicial, and penal requirements. These institutions would scrutinize and compel socioeconomic order through fixed hierarchies of individual behavior imposed according to, and symbolized by, strict (and restrictive) man/woman, normal/deviant binaries. A socioeconomic order is thus heteronormative when it is built around and on the institutionalization, regulation, and reproduction of heterosexuality as “normal” and “natural.” The operations of power that regulate heterosexuality are pervasive, function at all levels of human interaction, and remain in many instances tacit and implicit, so we are unlikely ever really to notice them. Judith Butler’s work begins from this premise to develop a Foucauldian analysis of power as productive and repressive of a social regime that constantly reproduces heterosexuality as compulsory. Extending the term compulsory heterosexuality, which was first used by feminist scholar Adrienne Rich to denote heterosexuality as a bastion of male dominance, Butler develops an articulation of power, nature, and scientific discourse that analyzes how woman/man is created as a “naturally” distinct, dual-sex binary. Herein, bodies are compelled by powerful socioeconomic, legal, and juridical discourses to operate according to a strictly limited idea of nature that has already been established for them, which effectively tells them how (and how not) to behave, perform, produce, and reproduce. Heterosexism thus implies more concentrated, and systematic, operations of power than a simple predisposition toward heterosexuality/ heterosexual people might suggest. Heterosexist

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bias and privilege are the result of highly prohibitive, regulatory, and heteronormative sociocultural discourses that compel bodies to conform to preestablished social or cultural norms constructed to appear natural and universal. Indeed, the legal, social, cultural, economic, and political reproduction of sexual difference according to this binary logic so often goes unnoticed or unremarked on that it is very often presumed to be a condition of every and all cultures.

Heterosexism in Practice: Some Examples Variations persist across and within countries— specific political, social, and economic institutions regarding attitudes toward and prohibitions against homosexuality. As V. Spike Peterson points out, the very processes of state making are themselves heterosexist, with the formation of the nation-state historically dependent on “stable” heterosexual identities wherein women are compelled to bear children in the service of group reproduction. Such compulsion is achieved through political rhetoric, government policies (criminalizing abortion, for example), and pro-natalist financial incentives. Similarly, some countries continue to operate “sodomy laws” or have explicitly criminalized homosexuality or abortion, whereas others may have publicly decried discrimination while continuing to depend on and deploy discriminatory policies and practices. In other instances, heterosexism may be so fundamentally embedded in the workings of a society that discrimination occurs in subtler, but no less pernicious, ways. Examples of various forms of heterosexism are many and varied. The Church of Scotland, for example, has publicly admitted that the institution has been institutionally homophobic for much of its history, actively discriminating against samesex partnerships; a 2000 MORI poll revealed British attitudes to homosexuality to be resoundingly heterosexist, with 41% of respondents disagreeing with the statement, “Gay couples form an important part of society”; Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, a persistent critic of homosexuality, has publicly cited homosexuals as “worse than pigs and dogs”; in 1999, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni invoked Articles 140 and 141 of the penal code to criminalize homosexuality; the

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Fijian government has continued to deploy colonial penal laws to criminalize homosexuality and abortion, despite the Fijian constitution’s commitment to protect individual rights to privacy and equality before the law. Examples of perhaps less overt forms of political, social, and institutionalized heterosexism vary similarly according to context. Health professionals in parts of India, for example, continue to offer behavioral therapy, involving electrical, hormonal, and drug-based “cures” for the pathological “mental illness” of homosexuality; the U.S. military operated a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy from 1993 until 2010, with cases of the harassment, bullying, suicide, and even murder of homosexual personnel all too frequently reported; a survey conducted by the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby revealed that in Australia approximately two thirds of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people continue to experience harassment and assault on the streets. Gay men in Australia are four times more likely to be assaulted than other men are, and lesbians in Australia are six times as likely as other women are to be assaulted. Penny Griffin See also Foucault, Michel; Gender, Role of Power in; Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations

Further Readings Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1998). The will to knowledge: The history of sexuality (Vol. 1, R. Hurley, Trans.). London: Penguin. Griffin, P. (2007). Sexing the economy in a neoliberal world order. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9(2), 220–238. Peterson, V. S. (1999). Political identities/nationalism as heterosexism. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1(1), 34–65.

HIERARCHY Most organizations and social groups are hierarchically ordered to some degree. Contemporary

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societies have far greater numbers of organizations with complex hierarchical structures than ever before in history. Given that people often do not like to exist within hierarchies where they take orders from above and oversee those below, one question that arises is why modern societies are hierarchically ordered and whether this is likely to remain the case. In human history, the development of hierarchy as a form of authority and control has increased inexorably. From what we know of 20th-century foraging societies, they were the most egalitarian form of human society on earth. There would be some form of authority from elders but no strict hierarchy, and sharing food seemed to be the norm. With no capital accumulation, hunter-gatherer societies could remain egalitarian, sharing food and risks. As groups got larger and especially as agriculture developed, allowing some form of capital accumulation, hierarchies started to form. Social hierarchies based at first on wealth and then by historical convention through blood developed. Political hierarchies also developed as societies began to become more complex and specialist roles were required. The most developed hierarchies historically have been armies. Generally, armies are structured in units and subdivisions, each with a commander who reports to the unit above. Until relatively recently, most societies did not have many organizations that were hierarchically structured outside of armed forces. Exceptions include ancient civilizations in South America, which seemed to have had strict hierarchical forms through government offices, and the Chinese system of government, which had a strict bureaucratic structure that also ordered the population by rank and by geographical region. In the West today, hierarchies are all-pervasive. Businesses and government bureaucracies tend to be strictly hierarchically organized, meaning that most people work in hierarchical organizations. It is easy to forget that this has not always been true. During the Industrial Revolution, larger firms started to develop but these had fairly flat hierarchies with a few managers at the top, supervisors for both clerks and workers, and then the mass of workers. Even toward the end of the 19th century, many people worked as individual tradespeople and most economic activity was carried out in small cottage industries rather than in vast industrial

concerns. State bureaucracies in most European countries and the United States were only loosely hierarchical. Land agents, postmasters, and customs and taxing officers worked as individuals miles from their nearest “supervisor” and often took payment from the taxes they collected. High government officials had offices around them, but any pyramid hierarchical structure was low and flat. So why did hierarchies develop? With larger groups and more complex tasks, coordination and collective action problems develop. Having an agent to solve these problems through authoritative direction brings efficiency. For example, in small foraging groups, it is quite easy to monitor who is collecting and sharing food. Each member of the group can police every other member. In large groups, however, especially where specialism develops, it is much harder to monitor others. If I am ignorant of the difficulty of the tasks you are doing, it is hard to judge whether you are shirking. A monitor of a set of individuals each carrying out the same specialist task can compare the output of each worker to make judgments about who is working well and who shirking. If the monitor knows the task because the monitor was once one of the specialists, all to the good, but all the monitor really needs is to compare the output of different people doing the same tasks. In this sense, monitors become specialists themselves. They need authority to command workers in their tasks and perform the policing function. In this manner hierarchies develop. They are a consequence of size and complexity. The need for hierarchy within armies is most obvious in battle situations, where directing troops to act as a single body rather than an uncoordinated mass brings military advantage. Training army units to work together so that each soldier knows his or her allotted task also brings efficiency. Indeed, if soldiers are trained how to react to given battle situations their commanders do not need to direct them when on the battlefield. The direction has been given through their training. This is the case in developed bureaucracies in firms and government. Workers are trained in their roles, so they know how to proceed when tasks are set before them. The superiors need only assign work as it comes in, oversee the process to ensure their inferiors are carrying out tasks as expected,

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and then pass the results upward to their superiors. In this manner, hierarchical structures can act like machines efficiently designed to carry out the processes for which the organization has been created. We might ask why economic organization moved from cottage industries and individual tradesmen to larger economic corporations. One answer is that once products become more complex, each aspect of the manufacturing process becomes nonseparable. Essentially, the idea of nonseparability is that certain tasks require more than one person to complete. Even lifting a heavy object might involve two or more people together, and someone shouting “heave” so they all lift together helps the process. Setting up manufacturing processes that involve large numbers of teams who together produce part of a product that is then fitted together with other parts also produced by teams requires an organizational structure of subunits overseen by higher units. A large part of the coordination problem is an informational one. No member of the subunits need have any knowledge of what other units are doing. This is the nature of specialism. However, for the complex product to be put together, someone needs to have information of the whole process (though not detailed knowledge of each aspect). Hierarchy is thus partly a function of costs of information. It would be too costly for everyone to have knowledge of everything, so each worker only needs information about his or her task. This informational component of the food production and distribution needs of the ancient civilizations seems to have driven their bureaucratic structures. Hierarchy develops to achieve efficiency in the total output of the organization or society. It automatically creates a command or power structure within the group. Command in one field tends to lead to command in others. Although superiors in an organization might mix freely and equally with their inferiors socially, the nature of the authority tends to reduce such mixing even outside the organizational structure itself. Grumbling about superiors and disciplining inferiors is not likely to be easily forgotten outside the organizational structure. The development of hierarchy for economic and political production created a structure of unequal power. Furthermore, the very fact that those higher in the hierarchy need respect and authority means they tend to be paid more and

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accumulate wealth, exacerbating the unequal power relations in society caused by the hierarchical structures of its organizations. Hierarchy has been criticized for the past 20 years. The rise of neoliberal ideas about the superiority of markets has run alongside arguments that strict hierarchy stultifies innovative practices within organizations. Firms have taken to contracting out large parts of the productive processes to other firms who compete for the business, driving down costs. The end of Fordist production processes with increasing mechanization and reduced need for armies of workers has changed the nature of hierarchy and enabled much greater mobility through the ranks of the hierarchies that remain. Massive technological advantages in computing and information technology have reduced the costs of acquiring information and reduced the need for some specialist knowledge. It is too soon to tell whether these new global forces will reduce the degree of hierarchy. Keith Dowding See also Authority; Bureaucratic Power; Collective Action Problem; Coordination; Principal–Agent Relationship

Further Readings Finer, S. E. (1999). The history of government (3 vols.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Miller, G. J. (1992). Managerial dilemmas: The political economy of hierarchy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

HOBBES, THOMAS (1588–1679) Thomas Hobbes’s great influence on power in politics is his solution to the problem of power politics. The phrase power politics has a long history, generally tracking schools of political realism in Western political thought and practice. Many associate power politics with the international relations of “the great powers,” each pursuing his or her own national interests, or simply their rulers’ interests. In its most general form, power politics refers to the sort of hard-boiled realism associated with the ancient Greek historian

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Thucydides who recorded many instances of might trumping right in the long battle between Athens and Sparta, and many early doctrines of political rule where a polity’s own interests are accorded higher priority than are ideals of disinterested “justice.” Thus, power politics means that interests of power drive politics, crushing alternative interests such as justice or merit or desert: used in this sense, to have a “political” interest means to have an interest in accumulating and wielding self-interested powers. What holds for polities can also hold for individuals. Notable radicalized versions of power politics are presented by the character Thrasymachus in his confrontation with Socrates in book one of Plato’s Republic, and by the character Callicles in a similar confrontation with Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias. From a Socratic perspective, power politics emerges as the default position in politics. Hence, what is argued in the political fictions of Plato reinforces the grim political realism recorded in Thucydides’ History, where the noblest forms of political rule protect a people against the selfinterested use of power by antagonistic regimes. Ancient practice becomes modern doctrine through Hobbes’s contribution to the power politics story. One of Hobbes’s earliest works was his translation of Thucydides’ History, which appealed to Hobbes’s growing interest in the theory and practice of political power (see Borot in Sorell, pp. 311– 315). By the time Hobbes wrote his major work, Leviathan, that interest has developed into perhaps the first full-blown theory of power politics in Western political thought. Whereas Plato invites us to witness Socrates trying to convert Thrasymachus and Callicles away from their realist professions of power politics toward idealist theories of justice, Hobbes senses that conversion is often unreliable because it lacks the power to enforce compliance. Hobbes’s preferred strategy is to use fire to fight fire: impose an all-powerful ruler to restrain the disorder arising from competing power-hungry individuals. Leviathan paints a picture of unredeemed self-interest of people tending to “a condition of war of every one against every one” (Leviathan, ch. 14; see Ryan in Sorell, pp. 216–225). Hobbes’s version of a Socratic conversion away from endemic natural war is presented in Leviathan’s code of laws framing a just civil peace. All that Plato can do in his two dialogues is silence the

protagonists of power politics: we never really know whether Thrasymachus or Callicles were persuaded away from their self-interested power perspectives, or whether they simply went through the motions, waiting for Socrates to move on. In many respects, Hobbes’s Leviathan is a realist’s response to Plato’s idealist Republic. For Hobbes, given that personal power politics is the problem, the solution is a kind of impersonal power politics managed by a powerful but representative government. First, the basic problem: the personal level of power politics is conveyed in Hobbes’s account of social psychology in the first part of Leviathan (“Of Man”). Here is an early version of the view that the personal is the political: we differ only in that we give different names to the things we find pleasant and the powers we pursue to secure our own happiness, which is nothing except “a continuall progress of the desire” (Leviathan, ch. 11). Grand concepts of good and evil are simply “names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions” (Leviathan, ch. 16). The personal becomes the political because there is no natural hierarchy of human desire: we each pursue different life plans, “some one thing, some another,” varying according to our various “complexions,” “customes, and education” (Leviathan, ch. 8). Standing back and looking impartially, Hobbes reports that the common element amid this diversity is each individual’s “desire of power” as the prerequisite for whatever we value. Human life is “a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (Leviathan, ch. 11). The political problem emerges as the clash of competing powers, with no natural source of arbitration. Hobbes’s account of power politics is a picture of unregulated competition: in the absence of any restraining force, each tries “to kill, subdue, supplant, or repell the other.” The beginnings of a political solution enter when Hobbes focuses on the need for “a common power to keep them all in awe” (Leviathan, ch. 13). Now, the general solution. The impersonal level of power politics emerges in Hobbes’s account of “the sovereign power” in the second part of Leviathan (“Of Common-Wealth”), comprising the institutional heart of what Hobbes refers to in his subtitle as “the matter, form and power” of a commonwealth. The device of the social contract allows Hobbes to illustrate how the personal

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“power politics” that imperils the state of nature can be traded for an agreed civil society maintained by a powerful but civil government. The “sovereign power” of the constructed government is powerful on one dimension (that of the “absolute power” of law and order) but weak on others: precisely because it is purpose-built, its powers are limited to protecting the liberty of the citizens it represents (see Ryan in Sorell, pp. 231–237). Hobbes’s account of power politics matters because it generates the first and possibly most influential theory of the liberal framework of society. Concepts of power politics preceded Hobbes (e.g., Niccolò Machiavelli), but none was grounded in a “state of nature” theory holding that there is no natural right by some to rule others, and that rule has no other source of legitimacy than an agreed-upon social contract. Hobbes’s account of natural equality underwrites modern liberalism by providing it with its foundational moral psychology (see Gert in Sorell, pp. 157–174). Civil society holds together so long as two conditions are met: first, that the sovereign representative minimizes the adverse effects of personal power politics; and second, that the collective power of the contracting citizens confines the impersonal power politics of the ruler to the limited purpose of keeping the peace. Readers of Hobbes have rarely been persuaded by his account of this second condition, although admiration for his perceptive insight into power politics continues. John Uhr See also Authority; Liberalism; Paternalism; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Hobbes, T. (1968). Leviathan (C. B. Macpherson, Ed.). Hamondsworth, UK: Penguin. Sorell, T. (Ed.). (1996). The Cambridge companion to Hobbes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

HOLLER, MANFRED (1946– ) The economist Manfred J. Holler is primarily an applied game theorist whose writings have

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spanned both cooperative and noncooperative game theory. He is coauthor of one of the most popular German textbooks on the subject. Born in Munich, Germany, Holler studied economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, where he also obtained his doctorate (1975) and Habilitation (1984) (a German postdoctoral qualification necessary for a professorship). Following a number of temporary appointments in Munich, he became an associate professor at the Institute of Economics and Statistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in 1986. In 1991, he was appointed to the Chair of Microeconomic Theory at the University of Hamburg. Holler’s contributions to research on power have mainly been concerned with power indices. He is the originator of the Public Goods Index (PGI). This index belongs to the family of indices based on minimal winning coalitions (another such index is the Deegan–Packel index). Holler was initially critical of his own creation because it is not monotone in voting weights, which means that if we compare two voters i and j such that i has more votes than j, it can be the case that the PGI assigns more voting power to j than to i. In later writings, Holler has taken the position that if the rationale of an index is acceptable, then we should accept such power assignments because the very idea of a power index is to test our intuitions of power distributions, not confirm them. A power index that would simply confirm our intuitions about the distribution of power would not provide us with any additional knowledge and therefore be unnecessary. Another strand of Holler’s research is connected with the analysis and application of the so-called inspection game. A third area of interest is industrial organization with a focus on standardization and market entry. He also has diverse interests in law and economics, cultural economics, and the history of economic and political thought. Most recently, he has turned to writing on Adam Smith and Niccolò Machiavelli. Holler has been highly active as an editor, putting together a series of books on power indices and coalition formation as well as founding the European Journal of Political Economy and Homo Oeconomicus, which was one of the first Germanlanguage journals to concentrate on rational choice and game theory (it now has converted entirely to

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publishing in English). Under Holler’s editorship, Homo Oeconomicus has become one of the primary outlets for research on the measurement of power. Matthew Braham See also Public Goods Index

Further Readings Holler, M. J. (1982). Forming coalitions and measuring voting power. Political Studies, 30, 262–271. Holler, M. J. (1998). Two stories, one power index. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 10, 179–190.

HOMOGENEOUS WEIGHTED MAJORITY GAMES Voting power in political and other decisionmaking bodies can often be represented by a simple game. For instance, in a parliamentary democracy, the players in the game are the political parties, which can form coalitions: a coalition is winning if it has a majority of seats, and losing otherwise. Also shareholders in a firm can form coalitions, where a coalition is winning if it has a qualified majority of shares, and losing otherwise. In general, given a set of players N  {1, 2, . . . , n}, a simple game is defined by identifying which coalitions—that is, subsets of N—are winning. All other coalitions are losing. A weighted majority game (WMG) for the set of players N is a simple game that can be represented by an array [q;w1, . . . ,wn], where the weights w1, . . . ,wn are nonnegative integer numbers and the quota q is a positive integer number greater than (w1 . . . wn)/2, such that a coalition of players is winning if the sum of the weights of its members is at least q, and losing otherwise. Such an array [q; w1, . . . ,wn] is a representation of the WMG, but this representation is not unique. For instance, the three-player games [9;8,7,2] and [2;1,1,1] represent the same WMG because the sets of winning coalitions are identical. The latter representation seems much more attractive and adequate because (a) it uses minimal weights— thus, numbers of seats, or votes—to describe the

same situation in terms of voting power, that is, the same simple game and (b) each minimal winning coalition (i.e., each winning coalition from which no player can be dropped without making it losing) has the same total weight, which is, moreover, equal to the level q. More generally, a representation [q; w1, . . . ,wn] of a WMG is homogeneous if the total weight of each minimal winning coalition is equal to q. A WMG is homogeneous if it has a homogeneous representation. A representation [q; w1, . . . ,wn] of a WMG is minimal if the total weight sum w1 . . .  wn is minimal among all representations of the WMG under consideration. Axel Ostmann has shown that each homogeneous WMG has a unique minimal representation. This representation is itself homogeneous and assigns equal weights to symmetric players. (Players i and j are symmetric if adding player i to any coalition not containing i and j has the same effect as adding player j.). Moreover, dummy players—that is, players that never make any difference—get weight zero, and the least powerful non-dummy players get weight 1. Ostmann provides a simple algorithm to compute this minimal representation. In the special case of a strong WMG—that is, one in which a coalition is winning if and only if its complement is losing—we have the (intuitively obvious) result that q  (w1 . . . wn1)/2 in a minimal representation. If such a game has no dummy players, then every representation is a multiple of the minimal representation, which is generated by the nucleolus of the game. Hans Peters See also Simple Games; Weighted Majority Game

Further Readings Ostmann, A. (1987). On the minimal representation of homogeneous games. International Journal of Game Theory, 16, 69–81.

HUMAN DOMINANCE MOTIVATION Dominance motivation results from the drive to obtain first access to resources in the social and

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nonsocial environment. This is called the dominance drive. Power implies the control of these resources, so dominance motivation and the desire for power are essentially synonymous. Within society, dominant individuals have power, control resources, and administer rewards and punishments to others. Social mammals, including humans, form fairly stable dominance hierarchies. These hierarchies determine the order of access to resources and are important because they eliminate the need to expend energy intimidating or fighting each time there is a desired resource. Dominance exchanges are necessary but they are also energetically costly to both winners and losers. Dominance hierarchies or power structures conserve energy and promote harmonious group living. Humans are unique among social mammals in that humans often belong to more than one social group. A human being can be dominant in one group and nondominant in another. Despite that observation, an individual’s dominance motivation functions as a personality trait and determines his or her behavior. There is wide individual variation in dominance motivation. Not all individuals desire to achieve and maintain power. Dominance motivation depends on the activity of the limbic system of the brain and on specific endocrine hormones. Individual differences in dominance motivation, therefore, arise from differences in the brain limbic system and from differences in endocrine hormones. This entry discusses the nature of dominance motivation and the sources of individual differences in this motivation.

Life in Society In the evolution of society, the urge to form groups led to the development of affiliation motivation. This affiliation motivation simply dictates that individuals desire the company of others of their species. Mammalian species that have affiliation motivation live social rather than solitary lives. The motive for affiliation involves both pleasure and anxiety. Social mammals generally feel anxious when alone and greatly enjoy being together. The emotions of fear and pleasure thus function to keep mammalian societies together. There is a second level to the motives, drives, and emotions of mammalian affiliation. That level

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concerns what individuals do after they affiliate. In humans, there are four other social drives associated with reinforcement, pleasure, and specific emotions. These are the sex, parenting, affection, and dominance drives. Between individual adults, there is variation in the degree to which each of these four is valued as a source of pleasure and fulfillment. This variability between individuals arises during development as a result of interactions between genetics and experience. Specifically, the degree to which an individual is motivated by a drive for affection varies and is termed communion. Child-rearing practices of warmth and affection, such as the carrying of infants, foster the development of communion. The degree to which an individual is motivated by a drive for dominance also varies and is called agency. Child-rearing practices that promote the development of agency are those that foster independent mastery of the environment. These two, communion and agency, are separate dimensions, and an individual can be high or low in both, or high in one and low in the other. However, the motives of dominance and affection or agency and communication are generally not manifest in the same individual at the same time. The temporal antagonism between dominance and affection is not seen with the other social pleasures. For example, sexual pleasure can occur within the context of either affection or dominance. That affection and dominance motives cannot be simultaneously expressed has important consequences for humans. The antagonism between these two behavioral systems allows affection and empathy to inhibit the drive for social dominance and resultant aggression. Affection has also allowed humans to display egalitarian behavior in many contexts. Affection allows for sharing of resources because affection is itself rewarding. When a healthy person shares a resource, rather than monopolizing it, he or she feels a measure of affection toward the person with whom he or she shares. Often, this experience of affection is more rewarding than the item being shared. Therefore, it is not possible to consider dominance motives without also considering affectionate motives and the mutual antagonism between these two. The affection reward in sharing may be unique to humans. Chimpanzees share, but they do so strictly on a quid pro quo basis.

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They have the ability to remember the sharing behavior of each other and exact retribution on those who fail to live up to the bargain. Dominants often share to maintain social status within their groups. Unfortunately, dominance motives also inhibit affection. The relative balance of these motives within individuals determines social behavior. For humans, this means both prosocial and antisocial behavior. Good leaders are high in both agency and communion. Despotic rulers and individuals with personality disorders seek agency at the expense of communion. Within the rest of humanity, communal motives and affection generally predominate over dominance motives and agency, with the result being a relatively peaceful group existence where resources are shared.

Dominance Motivation Within Individuals Dominance motivation or agency reflects an individual’s desire to obtain all the rewards present in the environment, both social and nonsocial. Dominance behaviors are those aimed at gaining and controlling privileged access to resources. Individuals who achieve dominance are more driven to gain and maintain rewards, and so are competitive and assertive. Because the personality trait of extraversion relates to environmental reward, dominance motivation is part of the trait extraversion. An individual is said to act dominantly if the goal of his or her behavior is to achieve or maintain high status—that is, to obtain power, influence, or valued resources—over another member of his or her group. An individual who has achieved dominance is said to have power. Power gives a person the ability to provide or withhold valued resources or administer punishments to others. Individuals with much dominance motivation are comfortable with and enjoy having power. Thus, dominance motivation is often a predictor of power because individuals who behave dominantly attain higher power in their social groups. Dominance motivation is not the only predictor of power, because in humans other factors such as inherited status and perceived wisdom may also confer status independent of dominance motivation. Submissive behavior is the converse of dominance behavior. Submissive individuals do not have strong dominance motives and do not feel

comfortable with or enjoy having power. There is no “submissive drive” or direct pleasure in submission. The reward value of submission comes from alleviation of fear once submission is expressed because submissive postures deter aggressive dominants. Subordinate individuals have less dominance motivation than do dominant individuals. Submissive individuals often find themselves in situations defined by powerlessness and lack of control over rewards. Both the experience of power and the experience of powerlessness have profound psychological and physiological sequelae. Dominance and the experience of power energize behavior and create positive affect. Subjugation and powerlessness have a demotivating, deactivating effect on behavior. Individuals deprived of power become behaviorally inhibited and may experience negative affect. They are also more likely to inaccurately feel that others dislike them. Dominance Versus Aggressive Motivation

Dominance behavior can be distinguished from aggressive behavior, although much of what is observed as aggressive behavior stems from dominance motives. Aggressive behavior may be motivated by self-defense, in which case, dominance motives are not involved. An individual is said to act aggressively if his or her apparent intent is to inflict physical injury on a member of his or her species. Unfortunately, much of the literature regarding aggressive behavior does not distinguish between dominance motives and aggressive motives per se. A close examination of this literature reveals that most aggressive behavior actually occurs within the context of dominance motivation because dominant humans and animals use aggression to acquire and assert their status and to punish subordinates. Unlike dominance motivation without overt aggression, aggressive motivation is often accompanied by an affective state, namely anger. Anger occurs when dominance motivations are thwarted. Emotions function to energize behavior and signal an individual’s progress in attaining an incentive. That anger occurs when dominance motives are thwarted is evidence for the presence of dominance incentive. Because of the presence of anger and the overt behavior seen with aggression, dominance

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motivation that includes anger and aggression is easier to quantify than is dominance incentive unaccompanied by aggression. It can also be argued that aggression is more problematic for society than is nonaggressive dominance behavior. Ease of measurement and perceived importance of aggression are responsible for the fact that much of the research focus has been on aggressive rather than dominance behavior. Recently, many have argued that the observed association between testosterone and aggression is mediated by the relationship between testosterone and dominance behavior. There is a robust association between androgens and dominance motivation in animals that is also observed in studies of human dominance motivation.

status. Thus, the terms aggression and dominance are often used interchangeably in the literature. Human dominance motivation may be observed in the following behaviors when they occur in the context of a dominance contest: 1. Nonverbal and nonphysical interactions c c c c c

It is easy to assess dominance in animals. Researchers simply supply a resource and observe access to that resource. Direct observation has also been used to assess dominance motivation in humans. Dominance motivation in humans is assessed by two additional means: self-report questionnaires and implicit tests. Observational studies have assessed dominance motivation in children and in adults in institutional settings. These studies have linked dominance motivation to testosterone levels in both men and women. Self-report studies have also linked testosterone to dominance motivation in adults and adolescents. Most self-report measures assess a person’s perceptions of his or her own behavior, which might not equate with actual dominance motivation. Therefore, self-report questionnaires assess perceived as opposed to actual dominance motivation.

c c

c c c c c c

What are the specific behaviors that can be observed as correlates of dominance motivation in humans? There are a host of dominance behaviors in humans, some of which have been defined as aggressive and some of which have not. The confusion between dominance and aggression is exemplified by the term social aggression. Although aggression usually indicates physical harm to another, social aggression means the social harm of another when the harming behavior is used to gain

Monopolizing conversation Interrupting/refusing to tolerate interruption Asking personal questions/assuming undue familiarity with another Insulting and degrading speech Speaking loudly and forcefully Coercive speech including nagging Lying Using profanity Making overt verbal threats

3. Nonviolent physical interactions c c

Taking an object by force Jumping to the head of a line or queue

4. Social means c c c c

Besmirching another’s reputation Charming another Threatening abandonment Seeking an alliance

5. Overt aggression c c c

Observations of Human Dominance Behavior

Unusual calmness or ease Showmanship Intense eye contact Ignoring of interpersonal space boundaries Threatening/assertive body postures

2. Verbal interactions

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Assessment of Dominance Motives in Humans

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c c

Thievery/robbery Sexual coercion Rape Assault Murder

As the list indicates, humans have a full repertoire of observable dominance behaviors. Self-Reported and Implicit Measures of Dominance Motivation

Although self-reports have been used to assess dominance motivation, implicit assessments have greater predictive value. Psychologists have

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developed an implicit approach to measuring dominance motivation called the Picture Story Exercise (PSE). A typical PSE consists of four to six pictures showing people in various social situations (e.g., people dining at a restaurant, sitting on a park bench, or working in a laboratory). Subjects are asked to write a short, imaginative story about each picture. The stories are later analyzed, and the resulting scores are said to capture a subject’s dominance orientation or implicit need for power. Inter-rater reliability among trained scorers is at least 85% for the PSE. Researchers also use other implicit tests for power motivation. One of these is presented to subjects as a measure of visual perceptual speed. Participants have 7 minutes to complete the test, which is a word test similar to the jumble puzzles that appear in many Sunday newspapers. The word search contains a mix of 10 status occupations (advisor, advisee; doctor, hygienist; director, staff; lawyer, paralegal; president, secretary) and a collection of neutral words. Both implicit measures of power motivation correlate with individuals’ behavior during experimental status manipulations. Subjects high in implicit power motivation also have higher testosterone levels. Testosterone levels of power-motivated individuals generally increase after winning contests. Hormonal Measures of Dominance Motivation

Dominance motivation is difficult to measure, so it has been suggested that perhaps salivary or plasma testosterone is the best marker of an individual’s dominance motivation in situations of status change or threat. A growing literature suggests a link between basal testosterone and dominance behavior under these conditions. Single measurements of testosterone have been shown to predict a variety of behaviors related to dominance both within and outside of the laboratory. High testosterone has been linked to dominance displays among female roommates as well as more extreme behaviors such as rule breaking among prison inmates and getting into fights involving direct confrontations as means of demonstrating dominance in prison. Correlations have also been observed between basal testosterone and a person’s tendency to view situations as a way to assert power over others. These studies demonstrate that

individuals high in testosterone are motivated to achieve or maintain positions of power, and this desire influences their behavior. Testosterone is not the only hormone that correlates with dominance motivation. There is a negative correlation between dominance motivation and the activity of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis. High HPA activity predicts submissive behavior; interestingly, HPA activity is also associated with affection motivation. Physical affection decreases the activity of the HPA axis. Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is a hormone that is secreted, along with cortisol/corticosterone, by adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) stimulation of the adrenal glands. This hormone antagonizes the action of cortisol/corticosterone, and it has androgenic properties. Individuals differ in the ratio of cortisol and DHEA released in response to the stress of dominance challenges, so DHEA may play a role in dominance. Individuals high in DHEA have been shown to be stress resistant. Stress resistance and fearlessness are important concomitants of dominance. Fear activates the HPA axis and therefore suppresses dominance motivation. Fearlessness and low stress reactivity are associated with dominance. Subordinate animals fear dominants, and their levels of HPA activation are proportionate to this fear. Androgens suppress fear responses and embolden animals and people alike. Interestingly, the hormones of the HPA axis suppress those of the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal (HPG) axis and vice versa. The mutual antagonism between the HPA and HPG axes suppresses reproduction by subordinates and by all during times of stress and environmental scarcity.

Human Dominance Motivation Across the Lifespan Noted primate researcher Harry Harlow made an important observation about the development of dominance motivation in primates. His observation was that the affectional motivational systems develop before the dominance motivational systems and moderate dominance motivation even in the very young. In humans, the affectional system begins development at birth, followed by the development of dominance motivation midway through the second year. For most children, this

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means that bonds of affection are firmly established before the development of agency. Crosscultural studies reveal that cultures whose practices promote the development of communion produce toddlers who are more compliant toward authority. Dominance motivation and the expression of dominance behavior peak twice during development. During these two developmental periods the strength of the dominance drive generally exceeds the brain’s self-regulatory capacity to suppress it. The first peak is during the ages 3 to 5, and the second peak begins at adolescence and continues until the frontal lobe areas important to self-regulation are fully developed in one’s early twenties. Behavioral data indicate that physical aggression also peaks during these developmental periods. The dominance drive is strongest in early adulthood when individuals of both sexes compete for mates and the establishment of status. The experiences of parenthood and pair bond formation reduce dominance motivation and the hormones associated with dominance. Generally, middle-aged and older humans maintain their rank based on expertise and wisdom rather than through winning dominance contests.

Dominance Motivation and Health Dominance motivation is one of the factors that enable an individual to attain status. In most countries, this status means better health because of access to better living conditions, nutritious food, and health care. Dominance motivation has also been associated with ill health. Excessive dominance motivation is part of the type A personality associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Excessive dominance motivation as part of extraversion is associated with risk taking, head injury, and substance abuse. An optimal level of dominance motivation and status is needed for mental health. Individuals with excessive dominance motivation are at risk for personality disorders. Depression is associated with lack of drives, including dominance motivation. Being abused and subjugated can also cause depression. Well-being is associated with autonomy and competency. To possess both of these, an individual must exercise dominance motives.

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The Role of Dominance Motivation Human behavior has evolved to support life in society. Our social life involves bonds of both affection and competition for resources. Dominance motivation determines individual differences in competitiveness, and is a factor in the attainment of power. Ontogeny supports a balance between dominance and affection for most humans. The development of dominance and affectionate motivation is inseparable from the neuroendocrine systems that support these behaviors. Both the under- and over expression of dominance motivation are associated with ill health. Liane J. Leedom See also Animal Groups, Power in

Further Readings Harlow, H. (1978). Learning to love. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson. Schultheiss, O. C., & Wirth, M. M. (2008). Biopsychological aspects of motivation. In J. Heckhausen & H. Heckhausen (Eds.), Motivation and action (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, C. P. (1992). Motivation and personality: Handbook of thematic content analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.

HUNTER, FLOYD (1912–1992) Born in Kentucky to a farming family, Floyd Hunter attended the University of Chicago and became a social worker first in Indianapolis and then for the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war, he worked for a welfare agency in Atlanta, the city he studied in his famous Community Power Structures (1953). He stood for the Progressive Party for Congress in 1948 and was fired by his employer for hosting in the agency an anti-segregation speech by Progressive presidential candidate William Wallace. Following these experiences, he studied sociology in the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina. His dissertation was a study of the power structure of Atlanta that became his famous book.

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Community Power Structures has stood the test of time as one of the key books in the study of power in the United States. It is important for two reasons: first, its pioneering reputational methodology, and second, its stark findings of a power elite in a major U.S. city. Hunter’s reputational method consisted of several stages, each designed to check on the earlier ones. He first compiled preliminary lists of “leaders” in Atlanta (called “Regional City” in the book) contributed by civic organizations, the chamber of commerce, the League of Women Voters, newspaper editors, and other civic leaders. Then he selected a panel of 14 “experts” or “judges” representative of religious, business, and professional people. He tried to achieve balance between age, color, and gender. These judges reduced the first list from 175 to 40, and there was a great deal of agreement on the top people in this list. Next, Hunter interviewed 27 of the 40 leaders, who added 5 further names to the list. They were also asked to nominate the top 10. He also interviewed 34 leaders from the black community and 14 planners and welfare workers. This reputational method is still conducted in some network approaches and enables researchers to see who are thought to be powerful and to trace the interlinkages within the top elite. This method led him to conclude that there were only a small number of power wielders, and that most of them were businesspeople, capitalists,

or corporate lawyers. They were socially and institutionally interlinked. Hunter saw there were power pyramids; although the same people dominated in different issue areas, different individuals might head each pyramid. He felt that issues emerged in the city from the informal social discussions of the city’s elite. In his later (1980) study, he found that black business leaders had penetrated some of these social groups to become influential. Hunter also recognized in his first study that the key issue was growth, an insight that was taken up in the growth machine literature and confirmed by his own and Clarence Stone’s later studies of Atlanta. Importantly, although the power elite saw growth as the major issue, it was not the only or most important issue for everyone in the community, as Hunter’s wider set of interviews revealed. Keith Dowding See also Elite Theories; Power Elite; Reputational Analysis

Further Readings Hunter, F. (1953). Community power structure: A study of decision makers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hunter, F. (1980). Community power succession: Atlanta’s policy-maker revisited. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

I League of Nations. It received a visceral attack in E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939). There is no agreed definition of idealism. The term is often employed in a rhetorical way, particularly by realist thinkers, to discredit radical or reformist ideas they dislike. As a consequence, various approaches and bodies of thought— cosmopolitanism, internationalism, liberalism— have frequently been lumped together and labeled idealism despite considerable differences between and diversity within them. According to most accounts, idealists emphasize the power of reason to overcome prejudice and counteract the machinations of sinister forces. They believe that the spread of education and democracy—including increasing democratic control of foreign policy—will empower world public opinion, and make it a powerful force that no government can resist. Idealists view war as a disease of the international body politic, contrary to the interests of all except a few special interests and unrepresentative governments. Arms manufacturers and merchants have frequently been targets of their wrath. Left-internationalists have also attacked large business corporations for their aggressive pursuit of profit and disregard of general human welfare. Idealists emphasize the importance of universal bodies such as the League of Nations and the United Nations in galvanizing and organizing world public opinion. Through such means, they contend, it will be possible to eliminate crude power from international relations, substituting research, reason, and discussion in place of national armies and navies. Importantly,

IDEALISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS In general parlance on international matters, idealism is a term applied to any idea, goal, or practice considered to be impractical. Thus, eradicating nuclear weapons is considered idealistic, as is substituting open for secret diplomacy, entrusting international security to the United Nations, creating an African Union on the model of the European Union, or the global eradication of poverty and injustice. The bases of such judgments are rarely made explicit, but they usually rest on a pessimistic reading of human nature along with a historical judgment on the difficulty of peaceably achieving radical change in world affairs. In the professional study of international relations (IR), idealism is generally employed in two ways: one broad, one narrow. The broad understanding sees idealism as a perennial doctrine or disposition toward world affairs that can be witnessed in all historical periods where independent political communities exist in a condition of anarchy— that is, in the absence of central government. Idealism is an optimistic doctrine that seeks to transcend the international anarchy, and create a more cosmopolitan and harmonious world order. The narrow understanding sees idealism as intimately tied to the interwar period (1919–1939). It is a doctrine that dominated the first phase of IR theorizing, emphasizing the growing interdependence and unity of humankind, and bound up with the experiment in internationalism that was the 331

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idealists tend to stress the existence of a natural harmony of interests between all peoples underlying the superficially conflicting interests of their states or governments. Although accepting that the different peoples exhibit different codes of behavior, cultural norms, values, habits, and tastes, idealists contend that human beings are fundamentally uniform. Regardless of ethnic, social, cultural, and religious background, all human beings desire the same things in terms of security, welfare, recognition, and respect. All are bound by a common morality with its bedrock in basic human rights and the Kantian principle that human beings should be respected as ends in themselves and never treated as mere means. Many idealists share Guiseppe Mazzini’s belief that there is no essential incompatibility between nationalism and internationalism. There is a natural division of labor between nations. Each nation has its special task to perform, its special contribution to make to the well-being of humanity. If all nations were to act in this spirit, international harmony would prevail. This doctrine provided the philosophical basis for U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s campaign to put national self-determination at the heart of the 1919 peace settlement. In the interwar period, these beliefs gave rise to numerous policy prescriptions, nearly all of which sought to regulate the power of the independent nation-state by investing increasing power and political authority in international organizations. The international anarchy of competing nationstates was seen as the underlying cause of the catastrophe of World War I, and thus the principle of sovereignty and the institution of the balance of power needed to be regulated and, in the view of some of the more radical idealists, abolished if the same were not to happen again. Collective security, compulsory adjudication of disputes, national disarmament, open diplomacy, and international colonial accountability were the most cherished policy prescriptions of interwar idealists. Some went farther, calling for the creation of an international police force and complete international oversight of armaments production. One of the main criticisms Carr leveled at the idealists (or utopians as he preferred to call them) was that they underestimated the role of power in international politics and overestimated the role, actual and potential, of law, morality, and public

opinion. He was particularly scathing of the idea that reason and discussion could replace armies and navies. Change did not come about, he claimed, through reason—or at least not reason as conceived by the utopians. Power was a decisive factor in every political situation, and one could no more abolish power than abolish politics. Power— whether used, threatened, or held silently in reserve—was an essential factor in international change, and change would only be brought about by those who could wield power or in the interests of those who could wield power. Realists today often criticize the intellectual descendents of interwar idealists—for example, those advocating global governance, cosmopolitan democracy, and much greater power for the United Nations—on much the same grounds. These idealists ignore the power and self-interestedness of the independent nation-state, the reign of instrumental (compare abstract) reason in international politics, and the emotional appeal of national sovereignty. Peter Wilson See also Anarchy in International Relations; Carr, E. H.; Interdependence Theory; League of Nations; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Ashworth, L. (1999). Creating international studies: Angell, Mitrany and the liberal tradition. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Carr, E. H. (2001). The twenty years’ crisis, 1919–1939: An introduction to the study of international relations (M. Cox, Ed.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Long, D., & Wilson, P. (1995). Thinkers of the twenty years’ crisis: Inter-war idealism reassessed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Wilson, P. (2003). The international theory of Leonard Woolf: A study in inter-war idealism. New York: Palgrave.

IDEAS Ideas are mental constructs that arise in the human mind as a result of cerebral activity. They are embedded in the cognitive capacity of the human brain to process, categorize, and creatively

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reorganize information. The mental ability to create complex ideas is a prerequisite for the development of abstract mental images—concepts—that are the foundation of knowledge. Without this mental capacity, it would be impossible to conceptualize an abstract notion such as power. Modern cognitive science and contemporary philosophy generally define ideas as subjective entities that originate in an individual’s brain, but in ancient Greece ideas were considered to be an objective force outside of human minds. For Plato, ideas were objective universal essences that expressed the ideal form of all objects: unlike these general essences that stand for the perfect formation of particular types, human perception is always an imperfect reflection of these ideal forms. For example, an actual bird is an imperfect copy of the idea of a bird. In this perspective, human understanding of the world is seen as innate whereas ideas are the only true reality: the observed physical objects are never more than imperfect images of an ideal form—the idea. In contrast to this view, John Locke defines ideas as both physical sensations and mental perceptions that humans acquire through sensory experience. Instead of being innate, ideas are seen as originating wholly outside of the human mind. Locke believed the mind is a tabula rasa (“clean slate”) shaped entirely by external experience. Immanuel Kant disputed Locke’s empiricism by arguing that instead of being a blank sheet, the mind is endowed with the categorical apparatus for organizing sensory impressions. The mind creates ideas, not the environment. Although Kant gave primacy to mind over matter, he differed from Plato by conceptualizing human beings as autonomous rational subjects who create ideas through their own mental capacity. The philosophical debate on whether ideas or the material realm have the upper hand has its direct offshoot in social science where the focus is on what causes human action: is social reality principally constituted and directed by ideas, meanings, and values (idealist epistemology) or alternatively, is the human world created through the tangible material, mostly economic and political, forces (materialist epistemology). Although idealist perspectives explain social reality through ideas and norm-determined actions, materialist approaches focus on individual or collective material interests and institutional structures to understand human

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behavior. For example, mass, plebiscitary support for an authoritarian leader would, from an idealist perspective, be explained by looking at the intensity and transformation of beliefs shared by his or her followers, or at the form and content of ideological messages disseminated in the mass media. In contrast to this, materialist accounts would interpret the same behavior by identifying individual self-interest, collective political benefits, elite directed manipulation, or historical and structural contingencies as the root causes of this popular appeal. Another example described by Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey is formed over whether parliamentarians can be swayed by debate or whether they only represent the material interests of their party or constituents. Siniša Maleševiü See also Idealism in International Relations; Ideology

Further Readings Schonhardt-Bailey, C. (2006). From the corn laws to free trade: Interests, ideas and institutions in historical perspective. Cambridge: MIT Press. Walsh, D. F. (1998). Idealism/materialism. In C. Jenks (Ed.), Core sociological dichotomies. London: Sage.

IDEOLOGY Ideology is a relatively universal and multifaceted social process through which individual and social actors articulate their beliefs and behavior. It is a form of “thought-action” that penetrates most of social and political practice and that is conveyed through the distinct conjectural arrangements of a particular social order. Its contents often surpass experience because they are, for the most part, nontestable, offering a transcendent grand vista of collective authority. Ideological messages are constructed to make potent appeal to advanced ethnical norms, superior knowledge claims, to individual or group interests, or to popular emotions to justify actual or potential social action. Ideology is a complex process whereby ideas and practices come together in the course of legitimizing or contesting power relations.

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Traditionally, ideology was conceived as a rigid, closed system of ideas governing social and political action. Typically, individuals were deemed to be ideological if they expressed unquestioned loyalty to the principles set out in the doctrine they adhered to, or if they followed a particular ideological doctrine so that they acted contrary to their own self-interests. The representative examples of such rigid systems of thought would include followers of closed religious sects or radical political organizations. Recent studies have questioned such understandings of ideology by emphasizing the flexibility and plasticity of ideological beliefs and practices, as well as the indispensability of ideology for making sense of one’s social and political reality. In a number of highly influential works, Michael Billig has demonstrated that the popular reception of ideological messages is always unsystematic and riddled with contradictions. Beliefs are often anchored in the shared categories and concepts of recognizable ideological traditions and are commonly perceived not as ideological but as obvious, normal, and natural, and yet these categories of thought are rarely if ever treated as monolithic systems of meaning. Rather, popular beliefs and practices are filled with “ideological dilemmas” originating in the social environment where there are always competing hierarchies of power. Hence, when ideology confronts the complexities and contingencies of everyday life, human beings find themselves in ongoing “contradictions of common sense.” In addition to its flexibility, Michael Freeden also emphasizes the cognitive necessity of ideological belief and practice. In his view, ideology maps one’s social and political world. Social facts and political events never speak for themselves and thus require a process of decoding, and the use of a particular ideological map helps one understand and contextualize these facts and events. Ideology imposes coherence and provides structure to contingent actions, events, and images so that ideological narrative assists in creating socially comprehensible meaning.

History of the Concept Although contemporary understandings highlight the inherent link between thought and action as vital ingredients of ideology, the conceptual origin of the term was associated exclusively with ideas.

The French Enlightenment aristocrat Destutt de Tracy actually coined the term ideology in 1796, and he conceived it as a universal science of ideas almost in a same way as biology is a science of living organisms. Following Etienne Condillac’s sensualistic school of thought, and believing that humans are an irreducible part of the animal world, de Tracy also understood the scientific study of all ideas, meaning ideology, as an integral part of zoology. Sharing the aspiration of the Enlightenment to employ the faculties of reason in distinguishing truth from prejudice, ideology was conceptualized as an all-embracing grand science that would identify the “first principles” of human knowledge, following which it would systematically organize and use that knowledge in the process of transcending social conflict. This universalist, technical, and value-neutral meaning of ideology was gradually transformed into its opposite. Napoleon Bonaparte denounced de Tracy and his collaborators as “ideologues,” alleging that they were fixated on implementing abstract models of the Enlightenment. In this way, ideology became associated with dogmatism and rigidity. Since Napoleon’s time, the popular understanding of ideology has retained this pejorative meaning, remaining a synonym for an overly irrational attachment to abstract principles. Although starting from the same pejorative and narrow view that sees Hegelian idealism as ideological, which is to say an illusionary and obstinate worldview, Karl Marx was the first social and political thinker who attempted to sociologically contextualize and historicize the concept of ideology. For Marx, the dominant values of a particular historical period are always linked to specific social and historical circumstances: for example, the ascendancy of such concepts as honor and chastity in European feudalism stems from the ruling position of aristocracy in medieval Europe, or the growth and acceptance of liberal principles of political freedom and equality in postrevolutionary France is directly connected to the economic and eventually political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. Most importantly, for Marx ideology is tied to different economic systems and in particular to the dominant modes of production. Focusing predominantly on the economic foundations of the modern era, he identified “commodity fetishism” as a powerful symptom of ideological malaise that

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characterized the human condition in the capitalist age. Marx argued that social relations in the capitalist world are regulated by the autonomous interactions of commodities that are produced by human beings. In this way, individuals are alienated from one another as they are forced to treat their fellow humans as things. In other words, under the ideological veil of capitalism, social relations are atomized and reified as the social character of labor is obscured by the constant circulation of commodities. Although this conception of ideology retains a profoundly negative connotation, it also moves away from the narrow particularism associated with the term’s previous uses: ideology is no longer a simple doctrinaire mode of thinking derived from somebody’s emotional attachment to abstract ideas. Instead, it is a complex historical process rooted in the workings of a particular socioeconomic system. In other words, Marx views ideology as a structural mechanism for the justification of an unequal distribution of economic and social resources in a capitalist social order, the consequence of which is that the economic logic of capitalist enterprise creates distorted perceptions of social reality. If these structural economic conditions of exploitation were changed, in Marx’s view, ideology would cease to exist as a meaningful social force. Although Marx developed a more sociological concept of ideology than did any of his predecessors, his model nonetheless exhibited two major flaws. First, it was grounded in economic determinism, which incorrectly overemphasized capitalism and class relations at the expense of cultural, political, and other sources of social conflict. As the experience of the former communist states has demonstrated so well, transforming the economic foundation of society does not automatically lead to either the disappearance of social antagonisms or the obliteration of the need to justify one’s political action. On the contrary, under such social circumstances, ideological practices and messages proliferate to an unprecedented extent. Second, Marx’s understanding of ideology as something historically dispensable was rooted in a teleological belief that saw ideology as a form of social pathology, a distortion that requires some kind of external remedy. For example, under capitalism, the human vision of other humans—their mutual relations as well as their relations to their environment—is deceptive

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and illusory: the product of false consciousness. This strict distinction between true (nonideological) and false (ideological) consciousness rests on the epistemologically problematic premises that one can somehow decouple knowledge from power and that one can know what somebody else’s true interests and consciousness are. Both of these premises were placed under rigorous scrutiny by Karl Mannheim, whose book Ideology and Utopia has further transformed the conceptual meaning of ideology. Instead of regarding some ideas, practices, and socioeconomic orders as being inherently ideological, Mannheim developed a historical model whereby no social and political group, order, practice, or idea is immune to ideology. For Mannheim, ideology is present in all historical periods and in all social agents, so that Marxism itself can be no exception. He also distinguishes between a particular and a total conception of ideology. The particular conception stands for personal, conscious distortion and intentional manipulation, whereas the total conception aims at analyzing the entire worldview of different historical epochs. This second sense of the term preoccupied Mannheim’s attention as he attempted to reconstruct the intellectual and social history of collective thought, that is, to articulate the sociology of knowledge. This approach focused on the study of different worldviews and their corresponding historical periods. Mannheim aims to recreate the entire intellectual outlook of particular groups by identifying their “ideological thoughtsystems.” He also differentiates between ideology and utopia, that is, between dominant thought systems of the respective period and the ideas and practices that attempt to transcend reality. Unlike ideology, which for Mannheim reflects the concrete historical environment of a particular dominant group, utopia is an articulated mental image of a transformed, perfected future held by subjugated groups in the same society. The two are in a constant state of political tension and gradually or abruptly replace one another, so the clear distinction between the two can only be established in time, after the event. By making the concept of ideology so broad as to include almost any socially and historically determined viewpoint, however, Mannheim ended up in a relativist and logically self-refuting trap that is now known as Mannheim’s paradox: the fact that one cannot

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maintain a position that all worldviews are ideological without simultaneously accepting that one’s own position is ideological too.

Contemporary Theories of Ideology Despite the evident shortcomings of their conceptual frameworks, Marx and Mannheim have provided the analytical foundations for nearly all subsequent influential theories of ideology. In other words, contemporary approaches to ideology have developed either as a sophisticated reformulation of these two positions or else in direct creative opposition to them. Of the four leading theoretical approaches to the study of ideology, two draw on the works of classics (neo-Marxism and symbolism) and two are articulated as explicit counterarguments to Marx and Mannheim (anti-foundationalism and cognitivism). Neo-Marxist theories of ideology, which are formulated most elaborately by Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, were developed with the aim of overcoming the weaknesses of classical Marxism while preserving the central proposition that ideology is a structural mechanism for the justification of asymmetrical power relations. Both Gramsci and, after him, Althusser attempted to soften Marx’s economic determinism by attributing a great deal of importance to culture. Similarly, they also made an effort to surmount the classical Marxist view concerning the dispensability of ideology. Gramsci’s starting point was the apparent lack of revolutionary enthusiasm among the contented workers in the West, which seemed to contradict Marx’s teleological prediction about the inevitability of proletarian revolution. To explain this lack of class conflict, Gramsci coined the term hegemony, which referred to the ability of a ruling class to ensure the consent of the majority by creating a sense of ideological unity. In other words, ideological power of one class over another was achieved not through the threat of violence, by direct control of the means of production, or by the state apparatus but, rather, via a subtle hegemonic penetration of civil society, the effect of which is that popular consent is perceived by most as spontaneous assent. Hence, ideological hegemony does not reside just in the workings of the state machinery (i.e., educational system or state-controlled media) but more importantly in the outlets of civil

society such as an independent mass media, publishing networks, religious associations, and even folklore. Unlike Marx, who saw ideology in an exclusively negative light, Gramsci aimed to counterbalance hegemonic power by advocating a strategic adoption of counter-hegemonic practices for the proletariat, thus embracing a much more positive conception of ideological practice. This view that ideology is located in the concrete, everyday practice of individuals received further elaboration in Althusser’s theory of ideology. Building on some of Gramsci’s ideas, Althusser attempts to shift the emphasis farther from a repressive machinery of the state toward what he terms ideological state apparatuses (ISA). This consists of multiple and relatively autonomous fields such as educational ISA, family ISA, religious ISA, legal ISA, and so on. Unlike the repressive state apparatus, which functions through coercion, ISAs function by ideological hegemony. For Althusser, ideology is rooted in material practices, in the everyday activities of individuals: ideology is what people do rather than what they think. As these material routine activities are molded by the ideological apparatuses of the state, which for Althusser are determined in the last instance by the relations of production, the upshot of this is that individual consciousness does not matter. Human subjectivity is, in his view, not distorted by ideological practices. Rather, ideology creates reality as it shapes us into what we are: through the practice of interpellation or naming, ideology constitutes us as distinct subjects such as women, workers, Germans, or lesbians. In this respect, ideology is not a (historically transitory) falsified representation of real relations as it was for Marx, but an eternal, real, lived relation of human beings in itself. Ideology is not a historically dispensable set of practices, but an everlasting realm of social contestation. Although remaining influential, neo-Marxist theories of ideology have come under sharp criticism from the other three leading perspectives on ideology. Despite its sophisticated reworkings of the classical Marxist view of ideology, neo-Marxism is still seen as over-economistic and over-structuralist in its preoccupation with tracing the source of ideological practice to the workings of capitalism. Drawing on Mannheim’s neo-Kantian epistemology, Clifford Geertz and his followers developed a

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symbolist theory of ideology that shifts the emphasis from the neo-Marxist focus on the function of ideology toward the content of ideological messages. For Geertz, ideology is not an economic but rather a predominantly symbolic force that invokes powerful meanings that directly influence attitude formation and eventually mold human behavior. Ideology is a cultural system of interacting symbols that represent a particular social reality—a conceptual map that helps individuals and groups adjust in the social worlds they inhabit. What is central in understanding the impact of ideology, in Geertz’s view, is not the objective workings of economic inequality under capitalism, or the political authority of the modern state, but rather subjective collective perceptions as they are shaped through the powerful rhetoric of metaphor, irony, hyperbole, analogy, and the inherent ambiguity of symbols. Ideology consists of schematic images of a particular social order that are couched in the language of metaphors that are charged with social meanings. These schematic images contain complex, multilayered symbols that bring conceptual unity to the diverse ideas and perceptions that resonate among the population. For example, the nearly universal veneration of the concept of human rights in contemporary Western societies creates a situation where this concept becomes a powerful ideological symbol of intergroup contestation and in-group cohesion. Thus, the protection of human rights can be and is invoked by individuals who oppose the actions of other individuals or groups (e.g., the right to abortion), by minority groups when contesting the state (e.g., the right to homosexual marriage), by the state itself when attempting to justify the use of force within its borders (e.g., to arrest groups or individuals who are presented as likely to obstruct the human rights of others such as those who perform female circumcision), or outside its borders (e.g., to remove a dictator who has no respect for human rights). Despite the obvious diversity of all these situations, the same concept is evoked and functions as a potent ideological symbol for the society as a whole. In other words, “human right” is a forceful rhetorical device, a metaphor that conveys strong social meaning that can mobilize public support. Although anti-foundationalists share this emphasis on the importance of cultural representation, they also oppose what they perceive to be

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a functionalist and scientific universalism of symbolist perspective. Instead, they denounce any attempt toward ascertaining a singular truth. Influenced by the pluralist epistemology of Friedrich Nietzsche, proponents of a number of anti-foundational perspectives such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, and post-Marxism maintain that truth claims are always contingent, provisional, and discursive. Any attempt to distinguish truth from nontruth is motivated by power and control, so in anti-foundationalists’ view, one can only speak about plural, multiple, and particular truths. As a result, most anti-foundationalists either give more analytical weight to the concept of discourse over ideology or simply reject the term ideology altogether. What is of utmost importance in this view is not to dissect ideological practice but rather to deconstruct the processes of discourse articulation: there are no essential meanings and fixed identities, so the analyst sets out to unpack the arbitrariness and discrepancies that are integral to all processes of discourse construction. Whereas poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze bluntly oppose the concept of ideology in its entirety, perceiving it to imply commitment to economic reductionism, scientism, and human consciousness, post-Marxists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe attempt to preserve the notion of ideology by scaling down its explanatory ambitions. For Laclau, ideology is the representational moment of closure through which an attempt is made to stabilize a particular meaning within a specific social context. However, despite important differences, all anti-foundationalists share the view that discourse analysis with its emphasis on language use and construction reveals more about the structuring of social order than any ideology critique does. For Foucault, discourse is a form of power so that by analyzing the grammar and genealogy of discourse formation and articulation, one can identify how something that is generally viewed as normal, ordinary, and self-explanatory is actually a highly contingent set of institutionally imposed norms of behavior and thought. The processes of discursive formation are seen as being inherently conflictual and multilayered, framed by a constant struggle to dominate the particular “field of discursivity” by creating a center of meaning that masks contingency and stabilizes the social field of relations. For example, Ahmed may identify

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himself primarily as a professional cricket player, but the two dominant and competing discourses of social order under which he lives might define him almost exclusively as Muslim or Pakistani. Although nominally rejecting the falseconsciousness argument of Marxism and the relativist implications of Mannheim-inspired approaches to ideology, anti-foundationalism is not immune to either of the two criticisms. Although the focus shifts here from “an economics of untruth” to “a politics of truth,” the empirical outcomes of poststructuralist deconstruction and neo-Marxist ideology critique often appear to be very similar because they are both engaged in demonstrating the trappings of distorted communication rooted in asymmetrical power relations. Similarly, by reducing social reality to language games, and in insisting on the impossibility of universal explanation while treating all truth claims as incommensurable and equal, an epistemological position emerges that is prone to a much stronger version of relativism than is that of Mannheim’s theory of ideology. The cognitivist approach aims to overcome such relativism while developing a universalist theory of ideology. Furthermore, by shifting the emphasis to the content and structure of ideological thought and practice as well as to the motives of agents involved, this research tradition seems able to resolve both Mannheim’s paradox and the structuralist and functionalist pitfalls of the other three positions. The leading representatives of this approach, Raymond Boudon and Michael Freeden, differ significantly in their general understanding of what ideology is, yet they nevertheless provide similar arguments on how ideological practices operate and why, and when and how ideological thought acquires mass support. For Boudon, ideology is a rational force grounded in scientific theories that are for the most part false. Deriving authority from science, and appealing to utilitarian and symbolic motives of individuals as well as to the value and “situated” rationality of groups, ideologies gain popular following. In this view, ideology is not restricted to some worldviews or particular groups; it is a universal process that operates in all social orders as social actors subscribe to ideological views for rational reasons. Grounded in distinct individual or collective ways of living, ideological thought is stubborn and often resists argument. Consequently, a profound change

in ideological orientation is more likely to be caused by the changing social reality than by criticism and logic. Although Freeden also links ideology to scientific and analytical thinking, more precisely to political theory, he opposes the view that associates ideology with faulty science. Instead, ideology is seen as being intrinsic to political activity so that all understandings of social reality are necessarily mediated interpretations that are shaped by specific social and historical contexts. Ideology is a potent cognitive mechanism that helps human beings attribute meaning to otherwise disconnected experiences. For Freeden, ideology is ubiquitous and a universal mode of political thinking through practice, and concepts are decontested in this way. In other words, by removing the meaning of particular ideas from ongoing ideational contest, ideology provides a sense of security and stability of meaning: in the words of ideology, “This is the true meaning of liberty” or “Equality means socialism.” The central focus here is on the morphology of central ideas and actions—that is, the distinct ways in which ideologies configure and pattern key concepts such as equality, freedom, community, or progress. Furthermore, like Boudon, Freeden emphasizes the role of human agency and individual choice in embracing distinct worldviews. Ideology is not seen as an omnipotent structural totality that molds humans into what they are. Rather, Freeden insists on the dynamic process quality of ideological thought and practice so that individuals are capable of changing and refashioning their interpretations of social and political reality in an increasingly ideologically diverse world.

Ideology or Ideologies? Unlike neo-Marxism and anti-foundationalism, cognitive perspectives are highly successful in accounting for the variety of forms that ideological practice can take. Hence, instead of conceiving of ideology in the singular, whether to accept it as with neo-Marxists or to reject it as the antifoundationalists do, cognitivists prefer to speak about ideologies in the plural. However, adopting a plural approach does not automatically mean reducing ideology to worldviews or simple party politics as in the conventional political science

Imperial Power

perspective. Rather, cognitivism attempts to provide a relatively univeralist model of ideology that is able to do both—to widen the concept of ideology beyond the narrow historical and geographical confines of capitalist Europe and, by focusing on the intrinsic need of human beings to make sense of the social world they inhabit, to simultaneously maintain the analytical strength of the concept. Nevertheless, cognitivism is by no means immune to criticism. The standard critique is that cognitivism is too rationalist and too individualist in dealing with the profoundly structural force that ideology is seen to be and is thus unable to explain the emotional appeal of symbols and the way that sudden outbursts of collective fanaticism are often associated with particular ideological doctrines. This epistemological weakness stems partly from the cognitivist preoccupation with a single layer of ideological reality—that is, the official or normative doctrine. It may be the case that Freeden and Boudon link ideologies too strongly to science and social and political theory and thus pay insufficient attention to popular, folk ideologies. To fully comprehend the impact of ideology it seems crucial to distinguish between the normative—the officially institutionalized narrative—and the operative— the form a particular doctrine takes in the contingencies and fluctuations of everyday life. The two layers can overlap, express similar or even identical values and ideas, but more often than not they tend to be composed of differently articulated concepts. Normative layers often derive their authority from science or advanced ethical theory, so they are bound to speak in the language of universalist rationality and moral impartiality. In contrast to this, operative layers focus on a particular audience and are thus likely to address individuals and groups as members of a very specific interest and emotionally bound collective by using a narrow particularist language. For example, although all communist regimes subscribed to proletarian internationalism in their official doctrines, thus focusing on the revolutionary universalism of class struggle, their operative ideologies tended to infuse these ideas with a hefty dose of nationalism and self-interest by attributing a privileged role not to “the international worker” but to “our heroic people.” The subtle analysis of the inner workings of these two layers of ideology can help us to better understand the full

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complexity of the exceptional appeal that ideologies espouse. Siniša Maleševiü See also Argument, Power of; Foucault, Michel; Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemony; Ideas; Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal; Marx, Karl; Marxist Accounts of Power

Further Readings Eagleton, T. (1991). Ideology. London: Verso. Freeden, M. (1996). Ideologies and political theory. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Freeden, M. (2003). Ideology: A very short introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Maleševi, S. (2006). Identity as ideology. New York: Palgrave. McLellen, D. (1991). Ideology. London: Open University Press.

IMPERIAL POWER The term imperial power has two separate but related meanings, depending on whether it is applied at macrolevel (between empires) or microlevel (within empires). At macrolevel, an imperial power is a lead country, or “great power,” that engages in imperialism to improve its relative position and influence in the international system. At microlevel, imperial power refers to the ability of a strong country to coerce or strongly influence weaker territories to act in accordance with its interests. This can be achieved through formal empire, where the dominant country controls subordinate territories’ internal and external affairs, or through informal imperialism, where a strong country uses its superior military, economic, diplomatic, or cultural influence to pressure or bribe weaker territories to comply with its wishes. In the realist view of international relations, imperialism arises from the unregulated competition among states in an anarchic international system. Great powers compete with one another for markets and territories, dividing the world according to their relative strengths. The lead power amasses the largest empire, gaining resources that

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reinforce its position and creating a world order in line with its national interests. But no single power can dominate the international system for long because states form coalitions to maintain the balance of power and because countries’ relative strengths shift over time. States gain power through technological and organizational breakthroughs and lose power by diverting resources away from wealth creation. Hence, most countries would prefer to remain hegemonic powers rather than becoming imperial powers because the latter involves high costs. However, a multipolar international system often requires a move to formal empire to prevent rival powers from gaining ground. The shift from hegemonic to imperial power can occur in both directions. Most 20th-century empires were replaced by hegemonies, so that imperial powers no longer controlled the internal and external affairs of their former peripheries, but instead influenced the territories’ external affairs only. Hegemonic relationships have also turned imperial. Athens moved from being the dominant partner in the Delian League to an imperial power, determining the size of its former allies’ contributions and stationing military garrisons in their cities to ensure that their internal policies complied with its interests. Some commentators have argued that the United States is following the path of Athens and converting its hegemony in international affairs to imperial power. They deduce this from the U.S. refusal to be tied to international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol, and its 2002 announcement that it would act independently of the United Nations in pursuing security concerns in Iraq. Herfried Münkler has argued that it is better to remain a hegemon than to become an imperial power: the latter option risks inevitable loss of empire and the loss of hegemony. Gita Subrahmanyam See also Empire; Imperialism; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Doyle, M. W. (1986). Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kennedy, P. (1989). The rise and fall of the great powers. London: Fontana.

Münkler, H. (2005). Empires. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

IMPERIALISM The term imperialism has taken on a number of different meanings since it came into use in the 1840s. Broadly speaking, imperialism is the exertion of control or influence by a strong country over a weaker country by political, economic, or cultural means. Imperialism’s main purpose is to enhance the dominant country’s size, prestige, or resources to enable it to become or remain a leading power in the global system of states. Imperial control can be imposed formally, whereby the strong country assumes full political control of the weaker country, or informally, where the dominant country allows the weaker country to remain nominally sovereign but applies diplomatic, economic, or military pressure to force the weaker country to act in accordance with the dominant country’s wishes. Imperialism in its political form is the establishment and maintenance of empire: the dominant country claims sovereignty over and effectively governs a weaker country, making decisions on its behalf that shape its political and social development. The word imperialism was first used in this sense, referring to the expansionist policies of Napoleon Bonaparte. It gained prominence after 1872, when British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli employed the term while outlining his policy of colonial expansion. This explains why imperialism became associated with “colonialism,” more specifically European overseas expansion, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Of course, empires have existed since ancient times, and imperialism also applies to continental empires. However, the various theories of imperialism that have been generated relate mainly to the “New Imperialism” after 1870, when leading powers in Europe raced for colonies and spheres of influence around the globe. Imperial control was usually established by military conquest, leading Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter to conclude that military forces played a central role in prompting imperialism during this period. European countries were no longer at serious threat of war, so the

Imperialism

military sought a new purpose and activity, which it found in the conquest of overseas territories. Imperialism was the displacement of European political competition to the international arena: through overseas expansion, a country could enhance its prestige without directly challenging other powers at home. Economic concerns were integrally linked to territorial expansion. Colonial commercial activities were controlled by the imperial power and integrated into its global industrial complex. Liberal and Marxist theorists claimed that capitalist interests, rather than political exigencies, engendered imperialism and colonial exploitation. In 1902, British economist John Hobson argued that surplus capital was the “economic taproot” of imperialism: wealthy capitalists looking for greater profits than were available at home used their influence to persuade governments to annex overseas territories and open them for investment. Colonization accompanied colonialism, and governments colluded with wealthy settlers, providing them with choice lands and commercially profitable infrastructures, funded by taxpayers rather than by financiers. V. I. Lenin viewed imperialism as the highest, “monopoly stage” of capitalism, where a powerful and concentrated financial oligarchy directs state foreign policy to provide itself with secure markets, raw materials, and profitable outlets overseas. Inter-imperial rivalries lead to the territorial division of the world among a small number of capitalist powers that exploit a large and increasing number of weak countries forced to trade and accept goods on disadvantageous terms. Lenin argued that inter-imperial competitions would intensify once the entire world was carved up, leading to war between capitalist powers and eventually the collapse of capitalism. Thus, World War I was a clash of rival imperialisms. Imperialism requires popular support and funding, so every imperial power has forwarded moral justifications for its expansionism. The Holy Roman Empire spread to protect the “faithful” against barbarians and Muslims. The rationale for European colonialism was to end the slave trade and to educate and uplift “heathens” in “backward” areas of the world. Such justifications were often criticized as masking the baser motives for imperial expansion and constituting a racial arrogance that placed European civilizations above

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non-European cultures. But although the export of Western religions, languages, and education to Eastern colonies may have stripped colonial subjects of their traditional identities, it also helped foster nationalism, which led to the crumbling of late Victorian empires. Three notable trends accompanied the mass decolonization of Western European empires after World War II. First, imperialism did not disappear but was transformed from a formal process into an informal influence—“imperialism without colonies.” Second, the imperialism label became disassociated from European countries and attached itself to the United States, one of the two leading powers of the postwar period. It did not apply to Russia, which continued to maintain an empire because the links Marxists had made between capitalism and imperialism led to the belief that communist countries were incapable of imperialism. Nor was the U.S. informal empire a new phenomenon, according to Ronald Robinson and Jack Gallagher: Britain had also practiced informal economic imperialism in the mid-Victorian period, until the emergence of challengers to its hegemony forced Britain to formalize its empire. Third, neoMarxist and postcolonial writers formulated dependency theories demonstrating how the colonial system, although abandoned, continues to perpetuate inequalities in the modern world system. Because former colonies remain economically dependent on Western trade, investment, and foreign aid, their sovereignty is nominal and they must conform to the edicts of Western powers, primarily the United States. Kwame Nkrumah termed this phenomenon neocolonialism. Others have argued that cultural imperialism continues to operate in the form of globalization. With the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989, the United States emerged as the unchallenged world leader. After 2001, when U.S.-led coalitions overthrew political regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq and established interim governments in the territories, questions arose whether the United States had converted its informal empire into a formal one. Imperialism has enjoyed a resurgence of interest. Gita Subrahmanyam See also Dependency Theory in International Relations; Empire; Globalization; Imperial Power

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Influence

Further Readings Cohen, B. J. (1973). The question of imperialism. New York: Basic Books. Lenin, V. I. (1939). Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. New York: International. Mommsen, W. J. (1981). Theories of imperialism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Nkrumah, K. (1965). Neo-colonialism, the last stage of imperialism. London: Thomas Nelson.

INFLUENCE Many accounts of political or social power make a distinction between influence and power itself. In some accounts, influence is seen as a subset of power—one way in which an agent might wield power; in other accounts, influence is seen as a separate category altogether. One general description of actor A’s influence on another agent B, offered by Felix Oppenheim, is that A influences B to the extent that B does something B would not otherwise do. Such a definition would mirror almost precisely some standard definitions of power, such as that of Robert Dahl. Therefore, any difference between influence and power resides in the nature of the causal relationship between agent A and the change in B’s behavior. In such an account, influence will be a subset of power. Influence in this sense is usually considered a form of verbal persuasion. Information given by A to B will change B’s decision. That information influences B’s decision. One distinction would be that A has only influence rather than power if A could not wield any sanctions that would alter B’s behavior. For example, if A could threaten B that unless B takes some action x then A will impose some penalty on B, that threat would constitute the operation of power rather than influence. However, if B merely chooses to take the action because of the information provided, then A has only influenced the decision. Another way of thinking about the distinction between influence and power, which for some makes the two concepts clearly different, is in terms of the resources used. Thus, a general definition would say that power is defined in terms of

structurally determined abilities to change behavior, whereas influence is the socially induced modification of behavior. We might think of this in terms of the distinction between formal or legal powers and influence. Thus, a senior civil servant might have the power to rule that a given order by a cabinet member is illegal and should not be carried out. That same civil servant as a policy advisor might only have influence over the minister to the extent of advising that a given proposal would be likely to cause undue concern and might be politically unpopular. The difference is between the civil servant’s power to veto a decision and the ability merely to try to alter a decision. Sometimes it is claimed that agents have power without influence. To continue the example, the civil servant might have the formal power to veto a proposal but not have the nerve or feel he or she has the ability to do so (knowing that such a veto would cause undue concern and political unrest). If the civil servant is unable to persuade the minister that the proposal would be a bad idea, and is unable to influence the public regarding the legal problems that might subsequently result, the civil servant has the legal power to change it (which he or she dare not wield) but no influence. Such a demarcation between power and influence is only definitional. There is nothing odd or ungrammatical about suggesting that my decision not to speed on the highway was influenced by the presence of speed cameras and thus by the threat of fines should I be caught speeding. Furthermore, whether influence is a subset of power or a different category altogether is only of any interest if the difference has any effect on the manner in which we examine and explain society. Keith Dowding See also Argument, Power of; Authority; Dahl, Robert A.; Power To and Power Over; Veto Power

Further Readings Oppenheim, F. (1981). Political concepts: A reconstruction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Willer, D., Lovaglia, M. J., & Markovsky, B. (1997). Power and influence: A theoretical bridge. Social Forces, 76, 571–603.

Intelligence

INTELLIGENCE Intelligence has been described by Sherman Kent, long-term head of the U.S. Office of National Estimates, variously as knowledge, activity, and organization. As knowledge, intelligence is a part of the wider information base acquired and maintained by governments to inform decision making. As activity, intelligence is the process of gathering, collating, interpreting, and exploiting that information. But the idea also subsumes those agencies that gather, process, and manage that information. There is no single accepted definition of intelligence, and approaches to the subject are usually polarized between narrow definitions that emphasize covert collection (as advocated by Ken Robertson in the United Kingdom or Michael Warner and Abram Shulsky in the United States), or espionage, and broad definitions that focus on the production of appreciations or “finished” intelligence through the exploitation of all available sources, both overt and covert (as typified by the U.S. Department of Defense or Kent). A range of intermediate definitions have been proposed that either emphasize, as Roy Godson has suggested, the role of national security in the collection and assessment of information or Michael Herman’s concept of the use of all sources specifically to try to penetrate efforts by an adversary or rival at concealment and misinformation, formally known as denial and deception (D&D). Despite long-running debates over basic definitions, it is generally accepted that intelligence is concerned principally with discerning the capabilities and intentions of an individual, group, or state viewed as a current or potential threat. A widely employed approach to understanding intelligence as an activity and facet of government organization is the elements of intelligence schema advocated in various forms by Roy Godson, Angelo Codevilla, and John Bruce Lockhart. According to this formula, intelligence and the work of intelligence agencies generally entails some or all of four main categories of activity: Collection: Information is collected by a range of means according to priorities laid down by consumers in government. That information is collected on

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the basis of two basic dualities: open or overt sources (open source information or intelligence) rather than covert sources and human sources rather than technical. Open sources range from confidential diplomatic reporting and liaison through information published by one’s target to third-party information such as reporting from the media, nongovernmental, and other research organizations. The use of covert sources or covert collection refers essentially to the conduct of espionage. The product of this process is often referred to as raw intelligence. Analysis: Once acquired, the available information from both overt and covert sources must be evaluated and collated. The various sources and reports (which may not entirely agree with each other) have to be weighed against one another. A net judgment is formulated and then articulated in a form that intelligence users can understand and make use of. The resulting assessed product is termed finished intelligence. That finished intelligence is then disseminated or circulated to the consumers who requested it in the form of reports, verbal briefings, and, increasingly, online media over highly secure networks such as databases, archives, and wikis. Counter-intelligence: Both to guard one’s security and to protect one’s own intelligence activities from interception, prevention, or disruption by another state or target organization, it is essential to try to detect, prevent, or disrupt that adversary’s intelligence efforts. Counter-intelligence is divided broadly into counter-intelligence “proper” and counter-espionage. Counter-intelligence proper is the defensive investigation and detection of hostile intelligence collection efforts. Counter-espionage is the offensive practice of trying to penetrate an adversary’s intelligence and espionage system and operations. Covert action: Covert action, also known as “special activities,” is the process of taking secret and deniable methods in pursuit of political ends. It can be broadly divided into covert special political actions and paramilitary special operations. Political actions range from funding friendly or useful political parties or publications in foreign countries to influence elections through recruiting agents of influence who will advocate useful policies or views in public or within corridors of power to seeking to

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engineer coups in unstable regimes. The term special operations denotes a range of paramilitary activities from actions conducted by officers from intelligence organizations engaging in sabotage and assassinations to less direct involvement providing funds, weaponry, and logistical support. In most Western democracies, covert actions require high-level political authorization and, like covert collection, are conducted on the basis of policy requirements issued by the top level of the nation’s political leadership. Generally, intelligence is described as operating in terms of a cycle known as the intelligence cycle. The first stage of this cycle is direction, in which the politicians and senior civil servants who need intelligence to inform their decision making formulate and articulate their information needs in the form of requirements and priorities for operational agencies. Because of those requirements, intelligence collection entails the various operational organizations gathering information from overt, confidential, or secret sources according to their remits and capabilities. Processing occurs next as the raw intelligence is evaluated and interpreted so that it can be fed into the third stage, analysis, which produces finished intelligence. Finally, dissemination circulates the finished intelligence to the consumers who then revise their information needs on the basis of what has been learned and issue a revised set of requirements and priorities, restarting the entire process. Intelligence can go wrong for a number of reasons at all the various stages in the intelligence cycle. From the outset, consumers may make shortsighted or erroneous judgments over the requirements and priorities placed on agencies. There may be a failure to successfully acquire the needed information, resulting in a “collection gap.” The information may also be erroneous or misleading because of either faulty reporting or flawed validation, or because of hostile denial and deception efforts. However, the analytical stage is most prone to failure. Intelligence may be misinterpreted because certain key factors or indicators, termed analytical lynchpins or drivers, are misinterpreted or weighted too heavily in the assessment process. These errors may be driven by fixed intellectual convictions or cognitive bias or by self-serving bias because it may benefit an agency politically or in budgetary terms to reach a particular conclusion. Analysts may “mirror-image” or underestimate

cultural or intellectual differences between themselves and the intelligence target. Where there is a strong and usually tacit consensus that discourages the interpretation and assessment of the available intelligence, alternative, possibly accurate appreciations may be ignored or suppressed.Conversely, if policy makers are confronted with too many different competing interpretations of the intelligence, they may suffer from “analysis paralysis” or the inability to reach any conclusion at all because of their resulting uncertainty. Finally, during dissemination, reports may not go people who need them for a number of reasons. Sometimes the reports are classified above the consumer’s clearance, sometimes the producers are unaware of that particular consumer’s needs, and sometimes the consumers are unaware that the product is or can be made available to them. There are fundamental differences between liberal democracies and nondemocratic states in the role apportioned to intelligence and intelligence agencies. In liberal democracies, intelligence is essentially a form of decision support and scrupulously separated from the policy process to try to mitigate the risk of intelligence reporting becoming contaminated by policy or political bias. Allowing intelligence appropriations to be skewed in favor of one policy preference or another is called politicization and is a key source of intelligence failure when it occurs. Intelligence collection activities are generally subject to strict legislative and administrative controls and approval processes, such as the issuance of warrants for communications intercepts or access to private property. In nondemocratic systems, intelligence agencies are often central players in the political process and are principally concerned with protecting the security of the governing regime rather than the nation-state as such. A government that depends on its intelligence and security services to keep a particular party or faction in power by pursuing domestic political opponents at home and abroad has been termed by John Dziak a counter-intelligence state. A similar notion has been applied to some of the more autocratic Arab regimes through the concept of the socalled mukhabarat state, mukhabarat being the Arab generic term for an intelligence service. Philip H. J. Davies See also Central Intelligence Agency; Espionage

Interdependence Theory

Further Readings Godson, R. (1979). Intelligence requirements for the 1980s: Elements of intelligence. Washington, DC: National Strategy Information Center. Herman, M. (1996). Intelligence power in peace and war. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lockhart, J. B. (1987). Intelligence—A British view. In K. G. Robertson (Ed.), British and American approaches to intelligence. London: Macmillan. Robertson, K. G. (1987). Intelligence, terrorism and civil liberties. Frederichton: University of New Brunswick, Centre for Conflict Studies. Shulsky, A. (1991). Silent warfare: Understanding the world of intelligence. New York: Brassey’s. Warner, M. (2002). Wanted: A definition of “intelligence.” Studies in Intelligence, 46(3), 15–22.

INTERDEPENDENCE THEORY Many theories of power adopt an intrapersonal perspective, analyzing human power relations by reference to individual-level biological processes, personal traits, or cognitive experiences. In contrast, interdependence theory provides a comprehensive interpersonal analysis of power. Analogous to contemporary physics—where the relations between particles are as meaningful as the particles themselves—in interdependence theory, betweenperson relations are as meaningful as the individuals themselves. The theory analyzes interdependence structure, describing the character of the interpersonal world by identifying crucial properties of interactions and relationships. The theory also analyzes interdependence processes, explaining how structure influences cognition, motivation, and behavior. Harold Kelley and John Thibaut developed interdependence theory over five decades, beginning in the 1950s. Its initial formulation was contemporaneous with early social exchange and game theories, with which it shares some postulates.

Interdependence Structure Outcomes, Interactions, and Interdependence Situations

Interdependence theory presents a formal analysis of the abstract properties of social situations. Rather than examining concrete social phenomena

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such as “employer threatens employee” or “student relies upon professor,” the theory identifies abstract properties such as “partners are highly dependent” or “power is nonmutual.” As such, the theory allows scientists to understand situations that might differ in their superficial character, but that share crucial abstract structural properties. These abstract structural features of a situation constitute its “interpersonal reality”—a reality that causes people to think, feel, and behave in predictable ways. The theory uses two formal tools to represent interdependence structure—matrices and transition lists. The purpose of these formal representations is to precisely specify the character of situation structure—to describe the ways in which people can affect their own and one another’s outcomes. Interaction (I) describes two people’s (A’s and B’s) needs, thoughts, and motives in relation to one another in the context of the specific interdependence situation (S) in which their interaction transpires. Expressed formally, I  f (S, A, B). That is, to predict what will transpire in an interaction between Mary and John, we must consider (a) what situation they confront (e.g., are their interests at odds, does one hold greater power?), (b) Mary’s needs, thoughts, and motives with respect to this interaction (e.g., which traits are activated, is her perspective short- or long term?), and (c) John’s needs, thoughts, and motives with respect to this interaction. As a result of their behavioral choices in a given situation, each person experiences good versus poor outcomes—consequences that are more versus less satisfying or pleasurable. The outcome of an interaction is satisfying to the extent that it gratifies (vs. frustrates) the individual’s most important needs, such as survival, exploration, or belongingness. Interdependence theory analyzes the ways in which people may affect their own and one another’s outcomes, describing social situations in terms of six structural dimensions (see later). Most situations are defined by two or more dimensions, such that the key dimensions of interdependence are the building blocks of structure. The concept of affordance describes the implications of a specific situation for specific types of cognition, emotion, and motivation, identifying that which a situation makes possible or may activate in interaction partners. That is, specific structural patterns are meaningful in that they activate specific sorts of traits and motives, influence cognition and emotion, and

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thereby shape behavior. Situations also determine what people can learn about one another and communicate to one another. Dimensions of Interdependence Structure

Level of dependence, the first structural dimension, describes the degree to which an individual’s outcomes are influenced by the actions of an interaction partner. Mary is dependent to the extent that John can cause Mary to experience good versus poor outcomes, either through his unilateral actions or by influencing her behavioral options. Mary is independent when John’s actions do not affect her well-being. Dependence is the converse of partner power—when Mary is dependent on John, he holds power over her. High dependence (low power) tends to cause increased attention to situations and partners, as well as more careful and differentiated cognitive activity (“how might he behave?”). Whereas dependence causes people to persevere in a given interaction or relationship (“I need to persist with this”), it also makes people vulnerable and exposes them to possible exploitation. Therefore, dependence affords people thoughts and motives about trusting and depending on others versus remaining independent of others. To fully understand the implications of interdependence structure, it is important to understand the level of dependence and whether dependence is mutual. The second dimension, mutuality of dependence describes the degree to which partners are equally dependent on one another. Mutual dependence exists when John is as dependent on Mary as she is on him. Unilateral dependence exists when Mary is more dependent on John than John is on Mary, such that John holds greater power over Mary than Mary holds over John. As such, power should be understood by the degree to which each person is dependent and by the degree to which they are equally dependent. Mutual dependence constitutes balance of power and tends to yield a more stable and trusting interaction. Interactions or relationships with unilateral dependence entail risk, in that unilaterally powerful partners may behave as they wish without concern for others’ well-being; unilaterally dependent partners are vulnerable to possible exploitation or abandonment. Thus, situations with unilateral dependence afford thoughts and motives about

vulnerability (for the more dependent partner) and responsibility (for the more powerful partner), and give the more powerful partner the opportunity to behave in a generous or heroic manner. A complete understanding of the implications of interdependence structure also rests on knowledge of the basis for each person’s dependence. Basis of dependence, the third dimension, describes the manner in which partners influence one another’s outcomes. Dependence may rest on partner control, where Mary’s outcomes are governed by John’s unilateral actions (unilateral power), versus joint control, where Mary’s outcomes are governed by the two persons’ joint actions (joint power). With partner control, Mary’s outcomes are entirely governed by John’s behavior, so interaction often involves promises or threats as well as the activation of morality norms (“this is how a moral person should behave”). When partner control is unilateral, interaction entails the unilateral decision by the power-holder to behave in a self-centered versus benevolent manner; when partner control is bilateral, interaction may entail exchange-based patterns of interaction such as tit-for-tat (“I’ll cooperate so long as you do”) or turn-taking (“let’s take turns benefiting one another”). With joint control, Mary’s outcomes rest on coordination with John (if she can predict his actions, she can modify her behavior and achieve good outcomes), so interaction involves contingent coordination and tends to be governed by norms of “good sense” (“this is how a sensible person would behave”). Thus, basis of dependence affords the expression of dominance versus submissiveness and assertiveness versus passivity (e.g., suggesting a pattern of fair exchange, taking the lead in coordinating action). The manner in which power is exercised also depends on the extent to which interaction partners’ outcomes correspond versus conflict. Covariation of interests, the fourth dimension, describes the degree to which partners’ outcomes correspond—whether events that benefit Mary are similarly beneficial for John. Covariation ranges from completely correspondent situations (what is good for Mary is also good for John) through mixed motive situations to situations with completely conflicting interests (“zero sum”; what is good for Mary is bad for John). Interaction is simple when partners’ interests correspond—irrespective of how dependent versus powerful John is, he can simply

Interdependence Theory

pursue his interests, knowing that doing so will also yield good outcomes for Mary. And interaction is simple when interests are completely in conflict— one person must lose if the other is to gain, so each person tries to “come out on top.” Mixed motive situations are more complex, pitting impulses to benefit the other against temptation to exploit, thereby affording the expression of cooperation versus competition and trust versus mistrust. Temporal structure, the fifth dimension, is also crucial to understanding power relations and describes how interactions are dynamic and evolve over time. As such, interaction must be understood in terms of the immediate outcomes produced by partners’ choices and in terms of the future behaviors and outcomes that are made available versus eliminated because of interaction. For example, Mary and John may make an extended series of investments to develop a strong and committed work group. Or for example, by behaving in a particular manner today, John may cause the pair to proceed down a path where only poor outcomes are available for one or both partners. Temporally extended situations afford the expression of selfcontrol and the inclination to “stick with it”— dependability versus unreliability and loyalty versus disloyalty. Availability of information is the sixth and final dimension of situation structure. Mary and John may possess complete versus incomplete information about their own or the other’s outcomes for various combinations of behavior (“how loyal is Mary?”), the partner’s motives (“will John use his power benevolently?”), or future interaction possibilities (“if we do this now, where will it take us?”). Information is especially crucial in novel or risky situations and in interactions with unfamiliar partners. Inadequate information gives rise to ambiguity and misunderstanding, thereby challenging interaction. Thus, incomplete information affords the expression of optimism versus pessimism as well as tolerance for ambiguity versus the need for certainty.

Interdependence Processes Cognition, Motivation, Attribution, and Self-Presentation

Cognition is highly interpersonal: humans are well prepared to recognize key properties of

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interdependence situations. Indeed, interaction is shaped by interdependence structure and by partners’ needs, thoughts, and motives in relation to one another in the context of the situation in which the interaction takes place (I  f [S, A, B]). Thus, it is important to understand how situation structure affords specific sorts of affect, cognition, and motivation. Transformation. To describe the interface between interdependence structure and process, interdependence theory distinguishes between (a) the given situation, or behavioral preferences based on the reality of self-interest as represented in situation structure; and (b) the effective situation, or preferences based on broader psychological considerations. Transformation is the motivational process whereby people depart from situation-based selfinterest, instead reacting on the basis of broader considerations, such as long-term goals, the wellbeing of a partner, or stable traits or motives. The transformation process may rest on systematic thought or automatic habits. Through this process, an individual’s unique “self” is revealed. For example, if John decides to depart from his immediate self-interest by behaving in such a manner as to provide good outcomes for Mary, he reveals his concern for her well-being. Because he departs from that which is dictated by the given situation, his unique traits and motives become visible (i.e., his prosocial values, his feeling of responsibility for Mary’s well-being). Attribution process and self-presentation. People engage in attribution processes to understand the implications of their partners’ behavior in specific situations. During the attribution process, people seek to explain prior behavior and predict future behavior via an analysis of the meaning of behavior in light of specific patterns of interdependence structure (“is John concerned about my needs?”). In like manner, through self-presentation, people attempt to communicate the implications of their own actions via deviations from the dictates of self-interest (“see, you can trust me”). Of course, people cannot communicate or discern all motives in all situations, in that specific motives are relevant to specific types of situation. For example, in situations with perfectly corresponding interests, John cannot display trustworthiness—if he behaves

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in ways that benefit Mary, he is likewise benefited, such that it is impossible to determine whether he is driven by self-interest versus prosocial motives. Adaptation

Where do the motives that guide the transformation process come from? In a novel situation, Mary may treat the situation as a unique problem, carefully examining her options; alternatively, she may react impulsively. In either event, she acquires experience: if her reaction yields poor outcomes she may behave differently in future, parallel situations; if her reaction yields good outcomes she is more likely to react similarly in future, parallel situations. Adaptation describes the process whereby repeated experience in situations with similar structure gives rise to stable transformation tendencies that on average yield good outcomes. Stable adaptations may reside within persons, relationships, or groups (see later). Interpersonal dispositions are actor-specific inclinations to respond to specific situations in a specific manner across numerous partners. During development, people undergo different experiences with kin and peers. As a result of adaptation, people acquire dispositions to perceive situations in specific ways, to anticipate specific motives from others, and to transform situations in predictable ways. For example, if John was exploited or abused as a child, in later situations involving high dependence and conflicting interests, he may anticipate that others are likely to behave in a malevolent manner, he may exhibit antisocial transformation of the situation, and he may therefore behave in a ruthless, mistrustful, or avoidant manner. In short, the “self” is the sum of one’s adaptations to previous interdependence situations. Relationship-specific motives are inclinations to respond to situations in a specific manner with specific interaction partners. For example, Mary’s trust in John reflects her confidence in his benevolence. Mary develops trust when John enacts a prosocial behavior, departing from his self-interest to promote her welfare. His actions communicate responsiveness to her needs, thereby enhancing Mary’s trust in his motives, causing her to feel less fearful in situations involving conflicting interests, encouraging prosocial transformation,

and thereby enhancing the probability of reciprocal benevolence. This form of trust is relationshipspecific, and exists beyond generalized tendencies people possess based on their long-standing dispositions. Social norms are rule-based, socially transmitted inclinations to respond to particular situations in a specific manner. For example, societies develop rules regarding acceptable behavior in specific types of situation; rules of civility and etiquette regulate behavior in such a manner as to yield harmonious interaction. In like manner, people may develop dyad- or group-specific norms that promote harmonious day-to-day interaction—for example, agreements about the fair division of group rewards and resources.

Conclusion Interdependence theory provides unique and necessary tools for analyzing interpersonal phenomena. Whereas many theories of power focus on the individual, suggesting that people behave as they do because of their unique traits or cognitions, in interdependence theory the relationships between people are as important as the people themselves. Thus, the theory represents an elegant, functional model of the nature and implications of interdependence. It is a truly social psychological theory. Caryl E. Rusbult and Paul A. M. Van Lange See also Chicken Games; Cooperation; Coordination; Exchange Theory; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Prisoner’s Dilemma; Trust

Further Readings Kelley, H. H., Holmes, J. G., Kerr, N. L., Reis, H. T., Rusbult, C. E., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2003). An atlas of interpersonal situations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kelley, H. H., & Thibaut, J. W. (1978). Interpersonal relations: A theory of interdependence. New York: John Wiley. Rusbult, C. E., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2003). Interdependence, interaction, and relationships. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 351–375. Thibaut, J. W., & Kelley, H. H. (1959). The social psychology of groups. New York: John Wiley.

Interests

INTERESTS The notion of interests is intimately connected to the notion of political and social power. The viewpoint one adopts with regard to the interests of a person, group, or some other actor partly determines one’s attitudes to the nature of power in society. For this reason, the concept of interests, like the concept of power itself, is often described as “essentially contested.” To claim that a policy or practice is in the interests of some agent is to say both that the actor would benefit from that policy or practice and that therefore there is a reason for enacting that policy or practice. It means that interest is both a descriptive term and, more than many other words, a normative one. The concept of interest can be used in a number of different ways: we can talk about the interests of a person, of a group, of an organization such as firm or political party; the national interest, the public interest, and so on. Let us begin by discussing how we might define the interests of a single agent, a person, and then examine the complications that can result from applying this concept to collective entities such as firms or “the public.” A person’s interests might be equated with the person’s welfare or well-being. Thus, it is in someone’s interests to be healthy, happy, and materially comfortable. Any aspect that affects a person’s welfare might be thought to be in their interests. Thus, a healthy diet contributes to good health, so it is in your interests to eat healthy food and avoid unhealthy food. But of course, many people like to eat unhealthily. They choose to eat poor food when they could afford healthy food. Indeed, we often recognize that we do not always act in ways that are in our interests. We cannot therefore judge what is in someone’s interests by examining their behavior. Although we satisfy our immediate wants and desires through our actions, they do not reveal our true interests. Saying that immediate wants and desires revealed through action are not identical to interests does not mean that interests are not tied closely to wants and desires. We might eat unhealthily but know we ought to eat better food. In that sense, we do want what is in our interests, even though we do not follow them. However, this does suggest that there is an objective element to our

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interests. One way of understanding that objective element is to make a distinction between wants and needs and to perceive that the notion of interests is tied to needs. The difference between wants and needs is that the latter is a modal term—that is, it has to be explained in terms of something else—but the former is not. Any statement that x is needed for y only provides a reason for doing x if y is something that we want. If we say, for example, that a healthy diet requires fresh fruit, then eating fresh fruit is something desirable only because a healthy diet is something we want. Of course, it hardly seems necessary to explain that we want health because it is so obvious; nevertheless, the objective nature of the need—it is, say, factual that fruit is necessary for a healthy diet—ensures the link between what is in our interests and our wants. In liberal accounts, this link is vital. Liberal accounts of the good life want to ensure a strong link between any claim that something is in our interests and what we would choose if we were free to do so. Interests are thus tied to well-being, but the basis of that well-being must be tied to what the person wants. If someone genuinely does not care about his or her health, then we cannot make the claim that eating fresh fruit is in that person’s interests. The liberal account of interests might be referred to as “subjective interests” because they are tied to the explicit wants of the subject. Such “subjective interests” might not be recognized as interests by the individual. For example, let us take it as factual that fresh fruit is a necessary part of the healthy diet that cannot be replaced by anything else (vitamin tablets, for example) and therefore for a healthy diet one must eat fresh fruit. Thus, it is in a person’s interests to eat fresh fruit whether the person knows this or not. Someone might think that he or she is eating well—eating plenty of food and taking vitamin tablets, say— and is convinced that fruit is not necessary. In such a case, a person would be wrong about his or her interests. These interests are still subjective: the person is trying to eat a healthy diet, but is failing because he or she is wrong about what that entails. We can be wrong about our subjective interests. This account is controversial. Some people maintain that one cannot be wrong about one’s own interests. They might agree that people might not eat healthy food, even though they want to eat

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well, because they are tempted by the wrong types of food. So these people admit that people cannot act in their own interests. However, it is necessary for the person to recognize what is in his or her own interests for it to be so. The problem with that account of interests is that it turns interests into wants or desires. It breaks the link between interests and needs given wants. Interests must surely include that link. A further account of interests is in fully objective interests. In this account, people can be wrong about the link between what they need and their wants and about their wants too. According to this “radical” view, we might be wrong about our wants because we live inauthentic lives. The information we receive about the world and ourselves is biased and leads us to want things we should not want. The distinction between objective and subjective interests is partly normative but partly methodological. The need for “objective” interests arises according to some because the subjective interests of individuals, what they recognize as good for them beyond their immediate impulses, are still created by forces outside of themselves. They might recognize interests that are beyond their immediate wants or impulses, but there might be other interests that they do not recognize. In this view, objective interests are the interests a person would choose without the intervention of outside forces or those interests a rational individual would choose considering all possible outside forces. Such a view of objective interests is controversial. Can we make sense of “the perfectly rational individual”? What does it mean to say we should consider all possible outside forces? Can there be a “disinterested” account of objective interests? Finally, can we make sense of objective interests that are completely separate from the wants of an individual? The way we might approach objective interests is to suggest that we can try to explain where people’s wants derive from. Some wants might be natural—everyone has them; some might derive from lifestyles and circumstances that cause divergence of tastes but that are relatively neutral with regard to best interests; some, however, derive from circumstances that are not neutral with regard to best interests. The notion of “best interests” is relatively uncontroversial. In the same way that people might recognize that it is not in their interests to do something they want, they might

recognize it was not in their interest to derive that want, rather than another, in the first place. Given that, we can design policies that enable the generation of the best wants. Humans naturally have a taste for sugary products. They also have a taste for salty products. Salt brings out the natural taste of food; sugar produces energy. Until relatively recently, given the scarcity of natural sugars and salts in food, it was to the advantage of people to enjoy sweet foods and to eat to excess when they were available. However, now that sweet foods can be enjoyed to excess all the time, it is not good for humans to have such a sweet tooth. Similarly, food manufacturers have discovered how to enhance the taste of products by having high salt content, much higher than is good for people. We can see how our taste buds once operated in ways that were good for us, but now work against us healthwise. We can consider a strategy for attempting to grapple with individual interests that accepts there are natural desires—for health, for pleasure—and some basic self-chosen desires. The ontological interests thesis has two parts. The first, liberal part is that what is in a person’s interests is not simply that person’s desires, because interests depend on needs as well as desires. Individuals can be wrong about their interests because they might be unaware of their needs given their desires. The second, radical, part is that people can also have desires that have been generated by processes that once fed desiderata such as health, but no longer do so in a changed environment. The epistemological interests thesis is that although some interests might entirely depend on some wants that might be chosen or just happen (they are endogenous to the individual), most wants depend on forces external to them (they are exogenous to the individual). To the extent that we can examine the processes by which endogenous and exogenous interests arise, they are open to inspection and critique by all, and hence objective in a further sense. Keith Dowding See also Lukes, Steven; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Barry, B. (1990). Political argument. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Internet and Power Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Reeve, A., & Ware, A. (1983). Interests in political theory. British Journal of Political Science, 13(4), 379–400.

INTERNET

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POWER

Various claims have been made for the potential effect of the Internet on power relations. Some authors have deemed widespread use of the Internet to have a leveling effect, reducing inequalities and allowing previously under-resourced groups to gain access to power. Others have claimed the opposite—that the Internet creates a “winner takes all” environment and reinforces existing power relations, with some new gatekeepers to online resources (such as search engines) becoming increasingly influential. These competing claims are examined here using a number of approaches to the study of power. For the first claim, resource-based accounts of power can be used to assess the differential effect of the Internet on the four resources identified by John C. Harsanyi and the fifth later identified by Keith Dowding as important in the bargaining power of individuals and groups: conditional and unconditional incentives, authority, information and expertise, and reputation. The Internet also has the potential to work against some of the collective action problems claimed by Mancur Olson to prevent large groups from mobilizing. If this claim is right, then the Internet will contribute to a more pluralistic society, in which some groups are able to equip themselves with key resources that they have tended to lack and can overcome collective action problems that might otherwise prevent their formation. In contrast, to assess the second claim, it is necessary to examine the extent to which the Internet benefits existing elites and creates new ones. With respect to the various resources, use of the Internet makes little difference to authority. It may make it easier for those actors possessing authority (typically state organizations) to wield that authority, particularly in authoritarian states, but widespread use of the Internet to subvert authority by societal actors generally means that it would be

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difficult to evidence any net gain. The Internet has some marginal influence on the ability of groups and individuals to amass money, perhaps most forcefully illustrated by spectacular fundraising through the collection of multiple small amounts by under-resourced U.S. presidential candidates such as John Kerry and Barack Obama. Obama raised twice as much as his rival Hillary Clinton (who used more traditional methods) in the early months of 2008, much of it from small donors, and the nearly 75 million dollars he raised in February 2008 was an all-time high for any presidential candidate in a primary election. Various websites geared to collect numerous small-scale donations from individuals for charitable causes have also had notable success. The widely used U.K. site justgiving.com, for example, had by 2008 involved 5.2 million individuals in raising nearly £300 million (more than $444 million U.S.) for about 5,000 charities. The impact of the Internet on the other resources is more marked. First, with respect to information, the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) with around 15 billion pages and growing (actually it can be plausibly be argued that the WWW is infinite, because of its increasingly dynamic nature) vastly increases the range of information that is freely available to any Internet user, on virtually any subject imaginable. Before the rise of search engines in the early 2000s, it was often argued that meaningful information was difficult to find, like looking for a book in an uncataloged library, but search engines have revolutionized informationseeking behavior, and organizations that seek and strategize to be visible generally can make themselves so. For the growing proportion of populations of developed nations that use the Internet as a first port of call to find things out, the Internet has transformed the information environment and access to the information resource. With respect to expertise, also, it can be argued that the Internet provides new possibilities for individuals to acquire professional expertise in specific areas, with implications for power relations. This development is particularly marked in health where sophisticated search engines and the widespread online publication of health research means that on a given complaint or illness, an ordinarily educated but skilled Internet user can become an expert and challenge the views of health professionals, as well

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as gain knowledge from other people in the same situation. This latter advantage comes from the capacity of the Internet to segment populations into groups with similar interests, however geographically or socially dispersed. Enhanced access to expertise reduces conventional information asymmetries between principals and their agents, particularly where the agents are professionals such as doctors and lawyers. With respect to reputation, the Internet provides the possibility for individuals or groups to acquire reputation in ways that circumvent traditional methods such as print and broadcast media or elite networks. So, for example, new websites such as YouTube or MySpace have acquired billions of users in only a couple of years largely by word of mouth—or at least, via millions of communications carried out via online social contacts. The characteristics of network structures make the creation of reputation via network contacts (compared with broadcast media, a one-to-many form of communication) far easier. Researchers from a range of disciplines such as the physicist Albert-László Barabasi and the sociologist Duncan Watts have shown that the WWW exhibits “small world characteristics,” which means that any two pages are connected via a surprisingly small number of links. In this small world, linkages (so-called short links) between clusters within networks can transform the nature of political communication, meaning that news about events, groups, or individuals can spread incredibly quickly. Once a phenomenon, group, or individual has acquired a certain reputation then traditional media may help to enlarge it, but neither media prominence nor advertising is necessary to reach such a level. For this reason, entry costs for smaller groups and political parties are lower than in the off-line world. Another key way in which the Internet can plausibly be claimed to affect the power of traditionally under-mobilized groups is through its impact on the collective action problems predicted by Olson for large “latent” groups. Information and reputation are the resources most needed to facilitate collective action. The Internet also helps work against heterogeneity, an element of the collective action problem, given the capacity to aid the identification of people with shared interests and preferences across geographical boundaries (diasporas, for example, or people with the same

chronic illness such as multiple sclerosis or diabetes). The Internet also aids group interactiveness, helping with coordination problems caused by size and geographical dispersion; many protests, particularly international ones such as antiglobalization demonstrations, are now organized almost entirely online. The Internet also promotes visibility, which helps to overcome the free-rider problem. So, for example, the naming of individuals on websites (such as electronic petitions or sites for charitable donations) combined with search capabilities makes nonparticipation in collective action aimed at providing public goods easier to spot and more difficult to hide. Finally, the capacity of the Internet to provide real-time information about the preferences or participation of others—for example, in informing someone considering whether to sign a petition of the millions of others who have signed—offers the potential to exert the type of social pressure that Olson considered only feasible for small and well-organized groups. Turning to the second claim, the Internet can also be hypothesized to reinforce and create new inequalities in power relations. First, not everyone is a skilled Internet user or even has access to the Internet at all, so the effect of differential rates of Internet usage and penetration on any shift in power relations should be considered. In many developing nations, Internet penetration is still very low or even (in North Korea, for example) almost zero. In countries where Internet penetration has risen steadily since the 1990s, those with Internet access are no longer a minority; around 65% of U.K. citizens have access to the Internet, and this figure is far higher in Scandinavia, North America, and Australasia. In these populations, even those without Internet access are not necessarily excluded from the resources to which the Internet gives access. Evidence from the Oxford Internet Survey in the United Kingdom shows that around 70% of non-Internet users could “probably” or “definitely” get someone to use the Internet on their behalf if they needed to, suggesting that less than 10% of the population is completely excluded from online resources. However, other inequities are present within the group of Internet users, given the emergence of digital choices that mean that different people use the Internet for different purposes, which may not necessarily mean accessing political information or indeed any

Invisible Hand

information at all, but maybe for listening to music or playing games, for example. Second, the Internet may have a differential effect on different types of actor. State organizations seem less innovative than do other types of organization such as private firms and civil society organizations in developing online applications, meaning they can suffer a net loss of visibility in the online world, with consequences for their power relative to other organizations. Third, the Internet introduces new actors with resources into the political process. In particular, search engines and Internet service providers have become extremely powerful in some political contexts. Governments possess little data about Internet usage; such data are almost exclusively collected, managed, and owned by massive search engine corporations. Such corporations can act to both weaken and strengthen the power resources of the state. When the U.S. FBI asked Google Corporation in 2005 for one million anonymous records of the users of websites offering child pornography, with the aim of investigating usage of these sites, the corporation refused. In contrast, numerous U.S. corporations, including Google, have been berated by human rights groups for releasing personal records that lead to the incarceration of cyberactivists, for example in Burma, Egypt, and China. Fourth, some characteristics of the online world mean that pre-Internet patterns of power and influence are reinforced online. With respect to information, authors such as Bruce Bimber claim that “the media-rich get richer,” on observing that those likely to access print or televised political news are more likely to access such information online. With respect to reputation, A. L. Barabasi has argued that the WWW exhibits a winnertakes-all-effect, because of the property of “preferential attachment,” meaning that as a network gets bigger, a site is more likely to link to a site that has a large number of links. Although early network models have been disputed and the winner-takesall hypothesis has been disproved in some areas such as scientific research, the hypothesis has been shown to apply to other areas of Internet activity. At the simplest level, if a website has more links coming into it, it is more likely to be visible to search engines (who use the number of links partly as a proxy for popularity) and therefore more likely to be linked to in the future.

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Overall, the Internet has appealed to a wide range of democratic commentators for its potential to provide ordinary citizens with the means to acquire some of the resources that lead to power, particularly information, expertise, and reputation. The Internet can also aid group formation, through the reduction of problems traditionally associated with collective action. If this potential is realized, the Internet can be seen as facilitating a more pluralist society, where inequalities between groups are reduced. Such a result, however, is challenged in turn by the inequitable distribution of the benefits the Internet can provide, particularly given that different Internet users use the Internet for different purposes and some citizens do not use the Internet at all. Furthermore, as online networks increase in size some actors, such as existing elites and new gatekeepers to the Internet, acquire disproportionately greater resources while others lose visibility. Helen Margetts See also Collective Action Problem; Dowding, Keith; e-Governance; Harsanyi, John C.; Pluralism; Reputational Analysis; Resources as Measuring Power; Small Worlds, Power in

Further Readings Albert, R., & Barabasi, A. (1999). Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science, 286(5439), 509–512. Bimber, B. (2002). Information and American democracy: Technology in the evolution of political power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Helsper, E., & Dutton, W. (2007). The Internet in Britain from 2003 to 2007. Oxford, UK: Oxford Internet Surveys (Oxford Internet Institute). Lupia, A., & Sin, G. (2003). Which public goods are endangered?: How evolving communication technologies affect the logic of collective action. Public Choice, 117, 315–331. Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998). Collective dynamics of “small-world” networks. Nature, 393, 440–442.

INVISIBLE HAND The metaphor of the invisible hand comes from the work of Adam Smith (1723–1790) and is a

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key concept of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is generally used to describe processes through which the intentional actions of individuals bring about outcomes that were not directly intended or designed by them when planning those actions. A similar line of reasoning can be found in the statement by Adam Ferguson (Smith’s contemporary) about institutions that are the result of human action but not of any specific human design. The metaphor of the invisible hand is used by Smith both in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and in The Wealth of Nations and plays an important role in his “system of natural freedom” (another, possibly earlier, use occurs in his History of Astronomy). The invisible hand, by leading agents to promote social ends that were not part of their individual intentions, ensures that choices made on the basis of individual self-interest promote the common good. A precursor to the invisible hand can arguably be traced back to the Fable of the Bees, where Bernard de Mandeville argues that “private vices” may under certain conditions lead to “public benefits” that are in the interest of the whole community. When used in this more restricted sense (i.e., of leading to positive unintended social outcomes and not just unintended social outcomes), the invisible hand metaphor is often employed in arguments in favor of the operation of the free market. Depending on how the invisible hand mechanism is understood, it has different implications in terms of power in society. A literal reading of the invisible hand metaphor brings into play the operation of supernatural powers. In this case, the possible harmonizing social effect that makes individual actions result in unintended consequences is brought about by divine intervention or at least divine purpose. Another reading of the metaphor consists in using it to account for institutional processes through which the results are brought about by self-regulating mechanisms. In this second sense, individual hand explanations (an expression coined by Robert Nozick) are used to describe social outcomes that come about through a multitude of individual actions but are nevertheless beyond the power of a single mind or group of minds working together to purposively bring about. Skeptical views about the invisible hand metaphor emphasize that in some cases the unintended consequences produced are either undesirable or

enforce a preexisting unjust power structure (a criticism that disputes the desirability of allowing the invisible hand to operate but not the concept itself) or argue that the metaphor hides or obscures the intended and purposeful action of visible powers in society. Invisible hand explanations in social science have been applied to such institutions as language, money, and even the price system in a free market—all understood as the unintended result of the decentralized and not consciously coordinated action of millions of agents interacting in the social order. André Azevedo Alves See also Free Market; Trade

Further Readings Smith, A. (1776). An inquiry into the nature and cause of the wealth of nations. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

I-POWER I-power is the notion of voting power as the degree of a voter’s potential ability, under a given decision rule, to influence the outcome of a division of a voting body on a proposed bill—whether the bill will be approved or defeated. This is contrasted with P-power. The terms I-power and P-power were introduced by Dan S. Felsenthal, Moshé Machover, and William Zwicker in 1998, but the conceptual distinction was first made by James S. Coleman in 1971. The most important distinctive attributes of I-power and of situations in which it is appropriate are as follows. First, the outcome of a division is not the acquisition of power or any other private good by the winners, but a public good (or public bad) that may benefit (or harm) all the voters and others, possibly in an open-ended way (i.e., not a constant sum). Second, absolute I-power is the primary concept. The sum total of the absolute I-powers of all the voters is not constant but depends on the decision rule. Relative voting power—a voter’s relative share of the total—is a secondary, derived concept. Changing the decision rule may result in a given

I-Power

voter gaining absolute I-power while losing relative I-power. Third, bargaining and binding agreements among voters before a division is not presupposed as an inherent part of the procedure (as it would be in a fully fledged cooperative game). Thus, I-power is applicable to secret voting. Almost all work on measuring I-power is confined to binary decision rules, in which abstention is not admitted as a distinct option. Formally, such a rule is equivalent to a simple cooperative game. For measuring a priori (“constitutional”) I-power—which voters derive solely from the decision rule, and which excludes data about voters’ preferences, propensities, and mutual affinities as well as about the nature of the issues to be decided— there is essentially only one serious candidate: the Penrose measure—invented by Lionel Penrose and reinvented independently by John Banzhaf—and its refinements, the two Coleman measures. The latter are conditional versions of the Penrose–Banzhaf measure, which quantify separately a voter’s negative power (the power to block a bill) and its positive counterpart (the power to “initiate” a bill). The Penrose–Banzhaf measure identifies a priori I-power with a voter’s potential ability to cast a decisive vote that determines the outcome of a division.

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Measuring a posteriori, or actual, voting power— which considers voters’ specific preferences and behavioral propensities and the nature of the issues to be decided—poses much more difficult problems. These problems concern the choice of theoretical framework for modeling these additional data, as well as the means of obtaining the data with sufficient precision. Moshé Machover and Dan S. Felsenthal See also: Ability; Ableness; Banzhaf Voting Power Measure; Coleman, James S.; Coleman Index; Felsenthal, Dan S.; Influence; Machover, Moshé; Penrose Voting Power Measure; Power to Initiate Action and Power to Prevent Action; P-Power; Simple Games; Voting Power

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (2001). Myths and meanings of voting power: Comments on a symposium. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 13(1), 81–97.

J state. He also elaborated his more general strategicrelational account of structure and agency through criticism of alternative philosophies of social science as well as of different approaches to state power. Moreover, responding to charges of “politicism”—that is, excessive concern with the political moments of political economy—he developed a distinctive approach to its economic moments. This synthesizes the French neo-Marxist regulation approach in economics, West German state theory, and the analyses of Antonio Gramsci within the overall framework of Marxist political economy and aims to establish the connections and mediations among capital’s basic contradictions, middle-range institutional dynamics, and specific strategies and conflicts in particular conjunctures. Jessop moved to Lancaster University in 1990. His research on responses to the crisis of Fordism prompted his controversial claim that the transition to post-Fordism involves a tendential shift from the Keynesian welfare national state to a Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime. This claim connects changes in economic and social policy, territoriality and scale, forms of governance, and the role of spatiotemporal fixes in displacing or deferring the inherent contradictions of capitalism. He also reinterpreted post-Fordism in terms of the “globalizing knowledge-based economy” and identified new (or newly important) economic and political contradictions. This work is informed by his collaboration with NgaiLing Sum on a distinctive, post-disciplinary cultural political economy approach that integrates

JESSOP, BOB (1946– ) Bob Jessop is a British social theorist, state theorist, and political economist. He addresses five problems with major implications for power: (1) the agency–structure problem, which he interprets through his strategic-relational approach; (2) the relative autonomy of the capitalist type of state and its transformation in the postwar world; (3) complexity and complexity reduction and their implications for the coordination of complex relations of interdependence—reflected in problems of governance, governance failure, meta-governance, and its failure; (4) spatiotemporal dynamics in general and their implications for the temporal sovereignty of the state and democratic politics; and (5) the semiotic dimensions of social life and their centrality to hegemonic struggles. Jessop read sociology at Exeter University (1964–1967) and then held a PhD studentship in economics and politics and a postdoctoral fellowship in social and political sciences at the University of Cambridge (1967–1975). His interest in Marxism developed from the May 1968 student unrest in France and other European countries, becoming a key part of his identity as a theorist following his move to Essex University, where he taught government, sociology, and history (1975– 1990). State theory soon became a passion, leading to major studies of Marxist approaches to the state, an intellectual biography of Nicos Poulantzas, debates about Thatcherism, and a major survey of non-Marxist and Marxist approaches to the 357

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critical semiotic analysis into the heart of political economy. A major statement of the strategicrelational approach, State Power (2007), has been followed by further work on cultural political economy and its implications for contemporary economic and political transformation. Ngai-Ling Ivin Sum See also Agency–Structure Problem; Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemony; Marxist Accounts of Power; Poulantzas, Nicos; Relative Autonomy of the State

Further Readings Jessop, B. (2007). State power: A strategic-relational approach. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Jessop, B., & Sum, N. -L. (2006). Beyond the regulation approach: Putting capitalist economies in their place. Chelmsford, UK: Edward Elgar.

JOST, JOHN (1968– ) The works of John Jost—labeled and bound together by the theory of system justification—address the perception, maintenance, and passing on of existing social arrangements. Their key problem is the relationship of the individual to society as a whole, including the order and structure that constitute the background of the individual’s relationship to his or her society, group, and self-concept. Although John Jost was born in Canada, his experiences and schooling are American. It is indispensable to an understanding of his career to know that his father is a respected philosopher specializing in moral philosophy. John Jost also received a master’s degree in philosophy, after receiving a bachelor’s degree in psychology. His interest in philosophy manifests itself in many written reflections, as he reaches for Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Marx as intellectual resources, and in the openness with which Jost greets the developments of European social psychology. Before finishing his philosophical studies, Jost matriculated at Yale University, where he became the last doctoral student of William J. McGuire. Jost’s strong attachment to McGuire was highly

facilitating: Jost found a tutor of social and political psychology who had a deep philosophical education, who was always thinking at a systems level of analysis, who proceeded very consciously in terms of methodology, and who was a firm proponent of empirical research. The central idea of Jost’s thesis was first published in 1994, a year before the defense of his dissertation. A special issue of the British Journal of Social Psychology devoted to stereotypes published his penetrating analysis (coauthored with Mahzarin Banaji) concerning the role of stereotyping in system justification and the production of false consciousness. The theory of system justification has contributed much to a functional analysis and characterization of stereotypes by highlighting their role in legitimizing the societal status quo. After receiving his PhD at Yale University, Jost conducted postdoctoral research with Arie Kruglanski at the University of Maryland and then with Brenda Major at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He taught organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University between 1997 and 2003. After that, he became professor of social psychology at New York University. Jost and a great number of collaborators have made significant and accelerating progress in determining, exposing, and clarifying the nature of system justification during the past 15 years. He pays special attention to the typical situation in which—under varying types of social relationships—people who are in a disadvantageous situation accept the inequalities of the system, rationalize their own disadvantageous situation to themselves and others, and acknowledge the superiority of those who are in a more favorable position. Jost reveals and interprets this phenomenon, applying it to better understand certain manifestations of psychological and political conservatism. During his research, the social applications and empirical tests of the theory are becoming more substantial and variegated, spanning the analysis of culture, ethnicity, power, economic organization, and political ideology. György Hunyady See also System Justification Theory

Jurisdictions and Structure-Induced Equilibria

Further Readings Jost, J., & Major, B. (2001). The psychology of legitimacy: Emerging perspective on ideology, justice and intergroup relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

JURISDICTIONS AND STRUCTURE-INDUCED EQUILIBRIA Institutions are widely held to affect outcomes (e.g., neo-institutionalist theories in the social sciences). An important argument in this context concerns the stability of political interactions. This argument was developed in reaction to the “chaos theorems” of majority rule. The global cycling theorem of Richard McKelvey and Norman Schofield demonstrates that, in a multidimensional space with three or more voters who cast their vote in favor of the closest alternative and decide according to simple majority rule, a sequence of votes can (almost always) be constructed that leads to any outcome. Any proposal that attracts a majority of votes can in turn be beaten by another proposal preferred by a different majority. Two consequences follow from this result. First, an actor who controls the agenda effectively chooses the outcome. Second, majority rule is inherently unstable because any outcome can be overturned. In this interpretation, the result of a voting process is just caused by the (arbitrary) end of voting. An equilibrium only exists in a very rare preference configuration—for example, a median in all directions. Thus, we would expect to observe vote cycles according to the chaos theorem’s interpretation of these formal results. In reality, decision making in legislatures is characterized by stability. Neo-institutionalist scholars, most prominently Kenneth Shepsle, have argued that the observed stability of decision making results from the institutions that govern decision making. Thus, the equilibrium of decision making is induced by the structure of the process. One main application of the concept of structure-induced equilibrium has been to legislative organizations. Whereas majority rule in a multidimensional space is unstable, Duncan Black’s median voter theorem

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tells us that majority voting on a unidimensional issue leads to a stable outcome at the position of the median voter. Legislators are faced with a multitude of public policy problems on which there is disagreement on various aspects. In other words, they act in a multidimensional policy space. As legislatures typically consist of more than three voters and often act by simple majority rule, the chaos theorem seems to apply. Shepsle asserts that the stability of legislative decision making in this situation can be explained by a structure-induced equilibrium. Institutions determine what issues are considered when and by whom. By shaping the behavior of legislators, these institutions can induce stability. One example is a strong committee system, which effectively reduces the multidimensional space, which is prone to instability, into a series of unidimensional spaces, in which the median voter theorem ensures stability by dividing the space into separate jurisdictions. Furthermore, institutions can require legislators to vote on one issue at a time within the committees. One objection to this view is that the structure of the process—that is, the institutions—is subject to debate as well. The Riker objection says that, if legislators were aware of the implications for policy of a given set of institutions, they would be tempted to change them to manipulate the outcome in their favor. Thus, the choice of institutions inherits the instability of the choice of policies. Andreas Warntjen See also Structure-Induced Equilibrium

Further Readings Diermeier, D., & Krehbiel, K. (2003). Institutionalism as a methodology. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 15(2), 123–144. Krehbiel, K. (1998). Spatial models of legislative choice. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 13(3), 259–319. Shepsle, K. A. (1986). Institutional equilibrium and equilibrium institutions. In H. Weisberg (Ed.), Political science: The science of politics (pp. 51–81). New York: Agathon Press. Shepsle, K. A. (2006). Old questions and new answers about institutions: The Riker objection revisited. In

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B. Weingast & D. Wittman (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of political economy (pp. 1031–1049). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Shepsle, K. A., & Bonchek, M. S. (1997). Analyzing politics. New York: W. W. Norton.

JUSTICE Much of our interest in power is motivated by a concern for social justice. Considerations of power are relevant to justice in a number of different ways. This entry discusses four such ways: power and democracy, voting power, powers and welfare, and domination.

Power and Democracy A concern with democracy was the impetus for the post–World War II power debate. It then seemed that democracy had triumphed over fascism in the Western half of the world; at the same time, the ideological battle against communism was being conducted in the name of democracy. Democracy was, then, a crucial political and ideological value. And democracy made bold claims about power: power should not be located in the hands of one authoritarian leader or one ruling party. Power should be spread widely among the populace; ideally, it should be spread equally. In the real, non-ideal, world, equality of power might be impossible, but the distribution of power in a democracy should approximate as closely as possible the ideal of equality. The standard-bearer for democracy was then (and still is) the United States. So it was a shock when The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills, was published in 1956. Mills argued that power was not widely spread in contemporary United States. His thesis was that power was monopolized by a small elite that consisted of the leaders of the military–industrial complex. Democracy could have some impact on the minor decisions, but it had none over the major ones, which were taken by the power elite, in their own interests. In a way, Mills revived the theory of the classical elitists (Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels), who had argued some 50 years earlier that all societies had to be ruled by elites; the only question

was which elites. But that, largely European, debate had not had much impact in the United States. Mills, an American writing about the United States, at the height of the cold war, was a different matter. The response to Mills from within the newly emerging discipline of political science was twopronged. A group of Marxists objected to Mills’s failure to employ a class analysis; they argued that there was not an elite ruling the United States— there was a ruling class. The most tenacious of these writers was William Domhoff, who published a series of books to support this claim. But far more numerous and important were those who wanted to defend U.S. democracy against Mills’s attack. And the most important of these was Robert Dahl, who, in a number of path-breaking articles and books, outlined a number of theses that have formed the basis for several different research agendas in subsequent decades. One strand was that Dahl accepted some of the ideas of the classical elitists, but argued that nevertheless democracy was different from other political systems in that it consisted of a competition between elites—and a competition that was open to any interested group to join. Another strand was Dahl’s argument that Mills and others had an insufficiently articulated understanding of the concept of power and that Mills’s research was flawed because of his failure to understand this concept correctly. This applied some of the ideas of the prevailing philosophical school of conceptual analysis. Dahl’s focus on the need for careful examination of the concept of power has led to a large literature on this topic; Dahl’s work has been superseded, but that does not take away from his importance in initiating this line of work. Further, and importantly, Dahl did not just write critiques of the empirical research of others: he conducted his own. His methodology was not really suitable for studying power in the United States as a whole, so he suggested that it would be more informative to study politics in a U.S. city. He chose the city in which his university was based: New Haven, Connecticut. This resulted in the path-breaking study: Who Governs? The findings in Who Governs? were that there was no ruling elite dominating New Haven. Power was certainly not spread equally, but neither was it concentrated in just a few hands, and, importantly,

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there were few barriers to any group getting its views heard. This study helped spark the community power debate (there had been earlier studies, notably Floyd Hunter’s study of Atlanta) that raged in the 1960s and 1970s. Many interesting studies of various cities and towns (and rural areas)—mainly, but not exclusively, in the United States—were published during these years. But, importantly, these studies did not set out just to tell us about how power was distributed in the community of choice; many of these studies also showed methodological sophistication, and were self-consciously designed to test the expectations of democratic theory. Important contributions in this vein were made by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, Matthew Crenson, John Gaventa, and many others. It is something of a mystery why this vibrant subgenre has now largely died out. In part, this may have been a realization that national power is not necessarily local power writ large. But partly, it just seemed that the participants (and perhaps funding agencies) became exhausted, and new researchers were attracted by other topics. The debate remained inconclusive, perhaps necessarily so.

Voting Power Another area of research that was motivated by similar concerns, but that developed in a very different way, is voting power. This again starts with the connection between democracy and power, and the demand that power should be distributed equally. But now, instead of looking at who rules in a society, attention is turned to the demand of the theory of representative democracy—that, at the very least, voters should have equal power with each other. (John Stuart Mill had suggested in the mid-19th century—at a time when the franchise was restricted to much less than half the adult male population—that although there was a good case for extending the vote to all, better-educated people should be given more votes than less-educated ones, but this idea has never really been taken seriously.) The demand of “one [adult] person, one vote” was eventually met, with the suffrage in most Western democracies being extended gradually to all males, and then, reluctantly, to all women and to all races. But once this goal was achieved, it was realized that more still was

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required. Some local governments redrew their constituency boundaries to create constituencies of vastly differing size, each electing one representative, making sure that the areas occupied by outgroups (whether racial, ethnic, or religious) were the most populous. (This device could not, of course, be used to discriminate against women voters, once they had been granted the vote.) This meant that an additional clause had to be added to the slogan of representative democracy, which now became “one person, one vote, one value.” And that raised the difficult question of just how one does assess the value of a vote. In many cases, this was easy. For instance, if a ghetto area with 100,000 inhabitants is formed into one constituency with one representative, and affluent suburbs with 100,000 inhabitants are formed into 10 constituencies electing 10 representatives, then it is not difficult to see that the inhabitants of the ghetto are underrepresented. But rapidly, more difficult cases emerged. What if the ghetto remains one constituency, but its representative is given 10 votes? Does this give each inhabitant of the ghetto the same power as one in the suburbs, or less power or more power? These issues were first raised by John Banzhaf, who created a simple index that has subsequently borne his name. The need for an index, rather than just looking at the raw votes, can be seen by supposing that the ghetto’s representative had 11 votes, not 10— with the suburbs electing 10 members with one vote each, as before, and there being no other constituencies (and decisions being reached by a simple majority). Then it is fairly obvious that the ghetto’s representative is all-powerful: if the representative votes for a motion, it will pass; if he or she votes against, it will fail. The representative has slightly over half the votes, but all the power. Conversely, if we have a three-member council, with the representatives of two large areas having 10 votes each, while the representative of an underpopulated area has only one, it can be shown easily that each representative has the same power, despite the difference in votes (two representatives—any two representatives—are required for a majority). This would give the votes in the small area a much greater value than those in the large areas have. So sometimes the larger area is advantaged (as with the 11-vote ghetto) and sometimes the smaller area; we need an index that somehow captures this.

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Exactly how one constructs an index turning votes into power turns out to be quite difficult; many such indices have been produced, and one has to be a competent mathematician to choose between them. This is discussed elsewhere in this encyclopedia; the best recent work has been done by Dan Felsenthal and Moshé Machover, and by a number of younger scholars influenced by them. The need for establishing such an index can be seen by looking briefly at two well-known voting arenas in which it is thought desirable for the voters to have votes of different weights. The older of the two is the U.S. Electoral College, where representatives of the constituent states have votes proportional to their representation in Congress— which gives smaller states more votes per head of population than larger states. At first glance, that looks as if the smaller states are overrepresented, and campaigns have occasionally been launched to remove this extra power. But most indices of voting power suggest that it is actually the larger states that are overrepresented. The second example is a more recent one: the voting system in the Council of Ministers of the European Union (EU). Here it is acknowledged that each state should have a vote, which should be somehow related to its population. But how it should be related has not been determined, with the result that it has been argued heatedly about each time that the EU has been enlarged. It might be thought that democratic theory should specify some algorithm—along the lines of “one person, one vote”—for such situations. As yet there is no agreement on what that algorithm is, though one strong candidate is that the number of votes each state has should be proportional to the square root of its population.

Sen’s theory has two key terms: functionings and capabilities. Functionings are closely connected to the familiar concept of welfare: states of a person that can be accepted as desirable, such as being adequately nourished and having good health. But Sen then says that knowledge of functionings is not enough. Sen often uses the example that we should not look merely at whether a person has enough food: food is, of course, essential for adequate functioning and welfare, but we draw a very different normative lesson about those who are starving because they choose to starve themselves (e.g., as part of a religious purification ritual) than we do about those unable to get hold of any food. That is to say, it is often less important what goods people actually have than what goods they are able to have. Justice, then, should be concerned that people are in a position to get whatever is necessary for a satisfactory life; not that they actually do get these things, should their wishes be to the contrary. We must, in short, include an assessment of what Sen calls people’s capabilities—which is to say, their powers (in the sense of power as ability or, rather, ableness). This account also provides an important research agenda. As the community power studies did for a previous generation, the capability approach to justice forces us to reflect on the normative significance of different distributions of power. One point that arises here (and also in considering voting power) is that power is not zero-sum: that is, there is not a fixed amount of it to be somehow distributed. Enhancing one person’s capabilities does not (necessarily) reduce those of anyone else. So the aim here should not be merely to equalize powers, but also to enhance them to the greatest extent possible.

Powers and Welfare

Domination

One of the things that any theory of distributive justice has to consider is what it is that should be distributed justly. One of the currently more fashionable candidates is Amartya Sen’s capability theory. What lies at the heart of this is the importance of human powers. This requires some explication, as Sen, unfortunately, does not phrase his theory in terms of power.

Sen’s view connects justice with power, in the sense of power to. Another approach has been to rehabilitate the concept of power over, and put that at the center of a theory of justice. This has been done by Steven Lukes, and more recently by Philip Pettit. They both focus on the injustice done to those who are dominated by another. To be dominated is to be in another’s power. Pettit stresses that to be

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dominated is not necessarily to be coerced: the dominator may be benign and considerate and not abuse his or her power. (The power may not be exercised.) Nevertheless, to be dominated—to be subject to the will of another—is to be demeaned and dehumanized. For most of us, the exemplar of an unjust social system is one based on, or allowing, slavery: slavery is injustice, par excellence. But slavery is no more than an extreme case of domination, and what is unjust about slavery is also present in domination. This injustice lies in being subject to the arbitrary will of another—that is to say, to be in his or her power. For Lukes and Pettit, a concern for justice requires us to eliminate domination (or maybe reduce it as much as possible). Peter Morriss See also Ableness; Community Power Debate; Dahl, Robert A.; Mills, C. Wright; Power To and Power Over; Voting Power

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Further Readings Dahl, R. A. (1956). A preface to democratic theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dahl, R. A. (1961). Who governs? Democracy and power in an American city. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Lovett, F. (2010). A general theory of domination and justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Pettit, P. (1997). Republicanism: A theory of government and freedom. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. K. (1993). Capability and well-being. In M. Nussbaum & A. K. Sen (Eds.), The quality of life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

K KNOWLEDGE

AND

resource for the exercise of power. Starting with the development of mechanistic physics, the natural sciences, discovering the laws of nature, provide the knowledge base for reshaping the environment according to political will; later, with the formation of the social sciences, the social fabric itself turned into an analogous object of conscious political reconstruction. As early as in the late 16th century, this transformation provided the background for Francis Bacon’s famous aphorism identifying knowledge with power; it bluntly came to the fore in the technocratic programs of the 20th century, and it carries the whole spectrum of today’s practices of political consulting and advisory boards to governmental institutions that give rise to research on types and processes of counseling, the political implementation of scientific advice, the function of advisory boards (especially the question of efficiency and effectiveness vs. legitimation), the role of uncertainty in such counseling, and the reversal of dependencies in such relations. The second transformation is rooted in the shift to the democratic dispersion of political power. According to the aforementioned basic idea, knowledge is a necessary resource for exercising power well; hence, if everyone participates in the exercise of political power, everyone has to be equipped with formidable sets of knowledge. Universal compulsory schooling and especially civic and political education represent institutionalizations of the basic idea under conditions of democracy, an “aristocracy of everyone” (Benjamin Barber). The second perspective on the external conception of the relationship in question focuses on

POWER

The relationship between knowledge and power has been an object of philosophical and scientific inquiry at least since the times of the ancient Greeks. In principle, one can distinguish two different ways of understanding this relationship. Knowledge and power can be viewed as linked either externally or internally. According to the external conception, power and knowledge are analyzed as two independent elements that may influence each other in specific ways. According to the internal conception, their relationship is more complicated and intricate because knowledge and power are not conceived as two distinct elements. The external relationship of knowledge and power can and has been analyzed along two different lines of possible influence. A first perspective focuses on knowledge as an influence on power; a second perspective on power is as an influence on knowledge. As to the first, the idea that information and wisdom are necessary attributes of the ruling if power is to be exercised well already underlies traditional institutions such as the council of the elders and ancient theories such as Plato’s conception of the philosopher-king. This basic idea has undergone two major transformations crucial to its manifestation in the contemporary world. Regarding the first transformation, only when nature came to be understood as a disenchanted universe functioning according to its own intrinsic laws was continued scientific research institutionalized as an essential 365

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power as an influence on knowledge. The issue here is scientific and academic freedom; disputes concern the question of which limits legitimately circumscribe these freedoms. On the one hand, liberal democracies institutionalize such liberties in the form of rights, and they do so for reasons of prudence (like prosperity and innovation) and in respect of the implications of their normative commitment to personal autonomy. On the other hand, just the same adherence to the value of personal autonomy may require the enforcement of limits to the interests of scientists. Accordingly, questions of censorship and of a ban on research programs arise from attempts to insulate power from its possible corrosion caused by the distribution of knowledge and, for example, from individuals’ claims to defend the integrity of their private sphere as well as with regard to new biotechnologies such as cloning and embryonic stem cell research. A different set of questions appears when knowledge and power are understood not as factors exerting an external influence on each other, but rather as forming an inseparable complex. This conception goes back to the notion of ideology as a form of knowledge that is nothing but a reflection of social conditions, that is, the relations of power under which it is produced. Although at first view this might seem like a relationship of external influence (of power on knowledge, the first distorting the latter), the causation comes full circle when considering that the notion of ideology also comprises the idea of this knowledge itself being a necessary factor for the stable reproduction of the power structure that generates the ideological knowledge in the first place. The notion of ideology generates methodological questions regarding the relationship of knowledge and power the sociology of knowledge centers on. The range of alternatives already becomes clear in the transition from Karl Marx to Karl Mannheim and consists in the question whether there is a criterion that allows one to judge how far a set of knowledge has been distorted by the context of power within which it was generated or whether all knowledge depends on the social conditions of its production in essentially the same way, leaving no room for a context-transcendent, objective evaluation of sets of knowledge. This latter alternative also structures the field of social critique. Although those committed to critical theory (as formulated within the tradition of the Frankfurt School) devote substantial energy to the

justification of the measures of critique (most prominently Jürgen Habermas), poststructuralist approaches, instead, have focused on the devaluation of practices by telling the story of their genesis in such a way that those involved would be motivated to critically distance themselves from these practices. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, such a genealogical form of critique has been formulated most forcefully in the 20th century by Michel Foucault. To this task, Foucault developed the concept of power/knowledge. The genealogical method aims at tracing in terms of a microphysics of power the unstable forces between actors in which are rooted those practices that define what counts as true, legitimate, and desirable within society—by disciplining and normalizing the individual (e.g., the practices of psychology and education) and regulating the population (e.g., the practices of statistics and population control). The concept of power/ knowledge has been influential in refining the popular research method of discourse analysis and is widely employed today in substantive analyses—for example, of health practices and gender relations. David Strecker See also Autonomy; Critical Theory; Democracy; Discipline; Discourse; Foucault, Michel; Gender, Role of Power in; Governmentality; Ideology; Marx, Karl; Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations

Further Readings Barnes, B. (1988). The nature of power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon. Stehr, N., & Meja, V. (2005). Sociology and knowledge: Contemporary perspectives in the sociology of knowledge and science (2nd ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Strecker, D. (2011). Logik der Macht. Zum Ort der Kritik zwischen Theorie und Praxis. [The logic of power: On the place of critique between theory and practice]. Weilerswist, Germany: Velbrück.

KROPOTKIN, PETER (1842–1921) Like many 19th-century socialists, Peter Kropotkin identified power with the machinery of government

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and the instruments of repression, on the one hand, and the emancipatory force of the oppressed, on the other. His interest in power was sociological rather than philosophical and his concern was to understand the state’s historical rise, outline its likely future development, and suggest the means of its abolition. When he considered power in the state, he broadly followed Jean-Jacques Rousseau, arguing that state formation could be explained as a result of force and fraud exercised by the combined strength of a military, religious, and economic elite. Kropotkin used this analysis in two ways. First, he developed a functional view of the state. Like Karl Marx, Kropotkin argued that the state was an instrument of exploitation in which power was used to secure the interests of the economically dominant class. Second, he developed an organizational theory of the state. In state systems, he argued, power was concentrated in particular ways: centralized, militarized, and hierarchical. Although states might meet their function in different ways, sometimes resorting to open force and at other times relying on fraud, the historical development of the state suggested that the tendency was toward the increasing concentration of power. In the years leading to World War I, Kropotkin used the term Caesarism to describe the likely development of European states. His fear—which ultimately led to his controversial backing of the Allied cause (Britain and France) against Germany—was that states would be “Prussianized.” Were this to happen, he argued, the cause of liberty would be set back, and European states would enter into a new phase of nearconstant war.

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Kropotkin understood nonstate, or popular, power as the inverse of state power. Functionally, power was the instrument of liberation, and it could take different forms, depending on the historical and political contexts in which the oppressed operated: insurrections, strike actions, individual acts of revolt, resistance, or rebellion. Organizationally, it could only be exercised in decentralized, acephalous, nonhierarchical environments. Kropotkin’s concern with the organizational aspects of power led him to suggest that the key to the state’s destruction was the ability of individuals to cooperate in the construction of new ways of living. He explored the prospects for such cooperation in the theory of mutual aid. In The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, he tied this use of power to the process of revolution. In finding ways to secure the means of well-being, he argued, individuals would bypass the power of the state and, in acting for themselves, present it with a revolutionary challenge. Kropotkin’s revolution would end with the abolition of the state and the relocation of power. Ruth Kinna See also Anarchism, Power in; Bakunin, Mikhail

Further Readings Kropotkin, P. A. (1946). The state: Its historic role. Retrieved from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_ archives/kropotkin/state/state_toc.html Kropotkin, P. A. (1990). The conquest of bread. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Kropotkin, P. A. (1995). Fields, factories and workshops. Montreal: Black Rose Books.

L Her concrete experience of the overdetermined political struggles in Colombia and in other Latin American countries further stimulated her critical evaluation of structural Marxism’s class reductionist scheme. Together with Ernesto Laclau she published Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), which outlined the basic concepts and arguments of their poststructuralist theory of discourse. She is currently a professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Westminster, where she is studying the relations between politics, social antagonism, and democracy. The political trajectory of Ernesto Laclau differed from that of Chantal Mouffe. He joined the Argentinian Socialist Party (PSA) in 1958, and in 1963 he became part of the leadership of the Socialist Party of the National Left, one of the splinter groups of the PSA. He also served as editor of the Party’s weekly Lucha Obrera (Workers’ Struggle) for several years. In 1964 he graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, where he had been very active in the student movement, having been president of the student union and student representative in the Columbian senate. He gained a lectureship at the University of Tucumán in 1966, which he lost after a year as a result of the military coup. Laclau came to Britain in 1969 when he was awarded a scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at St. Antony’s College in Oxford. It was at this time that he began to study Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism. Although he was attracted by Althusser’s notions of uneven and combined development and overdetermined contradictions as well as his theory of ideological interpellation, Laclau’s firsthand

LACLAU, ERNESTO (1935– ) AND MOUFFE, CHANTAL (1943– ) From the late 1970s onward, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have been the leading figures in the development of a poststructuralist theory of discourse. In a nutshell, Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse provides a tool for analyzing the more or less sedimented system of rules, norms, and meanings that condition the political construction of social, political, and cultural identities. However, as we shall see, it has also important implications for the understanding of power. The topical focus and theoretical content of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse have been influenced by a series of political events and experiences, and, in particular, by the attempt to understand Latin American politics. Chantal Mouffe was educated at the Université Catholique de Louvain, and she was active in the Belgian student movement, chief editor of two minor socialist journals, and a member of the left-wing faction of the Belgian Socialist Party. In the mid-1960s she moved to Paris, where she attended the seminar of Louis Althusser, the leading figure in the group of structural Marxists. However, she was not interested in Althusser’s attempt to provide a theoretical renewal of the French Communist Party. Instead, she became engaged in anti-imperialist struggles and joined several Latin American liberation groups. This interest encouraged her to take a position as a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the National University in Colombia. 369

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experience with populist politics in Latin America turned him into a fierce critic of the class reductionist tendencies in structural Marxism and of its essentialist assertion that the social formation, in the last instance, is determined by the economy. His subsequent advancement of a poststructuralist discourse theory took place during his time as a professor at University of Essex, where he founded and directed the Centre for Theoretical Studies. Interestingly, both Laclau and Mouffe found in the open and undogmatic Marxism of Antonio Gramsci the theoretical inspiration to criticize and transgress the structural Marxism of Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Nicos Poulantzas and to deconstruct the Marxist legacy, which in a paradoxical way tends to reduce politics to a passive reflection of the inner contradictions of the capitalist economy. In the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, Laclau and Mouffe developed a Gramsciinspired critique of structural Marxism. The Gramscian notions of hegemony, historical bloc, collective will, moral-intellectual reform, and national-popular ideology helped them to understand the political construction of the institutional articulation of the state, economy, and civil society and opened up a space for thinking ideological interpellations that are not reducible to a particular class content. Inspired by poststructuralist writers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe advanced a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse in their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which was published in 1985. The essentialist remnant in Gramsci, which made him insist on the privileged role of the fundamental classes in the struggle for hegemony, was removed. The social classes owed their privileged role in the struggle for political, moral, and intellectual leadership to their structural position in the sphere of production, which provided a nonpolitical anchorage for the political struggles. However, by questioning the essentialist assertion of a determining center of society and by insisting on the political structuration of the economic field, Laclau and Mouffe not only effectively eliminated the last element of essentialism, but also paved the way for the development of a poststructuralist theory of hegemony, discourse, and social antagonism that asserts the primacy of the political over the social.

From the late 1980s onward, Laclau and Mouffe aimed to develop a new type of postmodern theorizing that focused on the construction of political subjectivity in populist movements and democratic struggles. Laclau and Mouffe were increasingly inspired by Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Although he was generally sympathetic toward Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical project, Žižek criticized their reliance upon the structuralist conception of the subject in terms of a bundle of subject positions that interpellate the individual as consumer, woman, French, and so on. In response to this criticism, Laclau and Mouffe developed a theory of the political construction of political identity through processes of identification that are prompted by the dislocation of the subject prior to its subjectivation. The hegemonic articulation of different points of identification is conditioned by the construction of an antagonistic frontier that, in the language of Carl Schmitt, divides friends from enemies. The construction of a populist antagonism between the “people” and the “oppressive regime” involves the construction of a chain of equivalence linking the unfulfilled demands of particular social and political groups who tend to rally around tendentiously empty signifiers (such as “the People,” “Progress,” or “Modernization”) that aim to express the loss of a fully achieved community. The problem now became one of how to reconcile the ineradicable presence of social antagonism with a pluralist democracy. This can be achieved through the development of an agonistic democracy, which turns enemies into adversaries who agree on the basic rules of democracy, while disagreeing on their interpretation and their implications for how to organize society. Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist theory of discourse has profound consequences for the understanding of power. According to Laclau, the dislocation of the discursive structure is the condition of possibility of both power and contingency. A discourse is dislocated when it is confronted with events that it fails to represent or domesticate. The disruptive effect of the joint occurrence of economic stagnation and inflation in the early 1970s is a case in point. Dislocation reveals the undecidability of the social—an undecidability that calls for an ethico-political decision that arrests the endless oscillation between determinate

Language and Power

possibilities. Because political decisions are taken in an undecidable terrain characterized by nontotalizable openness, they will always involve the exclusion of alternative options, meanings, and identities. One might provide plausible reasons for choosing A rather than B, C, or D, but it is impossible to link the choice of A with a rational cause or motive derived from an absolute truth. As such, the choice of A will always depend on the forceful repression of B, C, and D. The act of exclusion is structurally inscribed in the exercise of power. Power constitutes social identity in an act of exclusion that tends to produce an outside that is constitutive of the identity, which is constructed through the exercise of power. As the constitutive outside is present within the inside as an always real possibility, the contingency of the constructed identity is revealed. We can, therefore, conclude that all social relations are power relations and that contingency penetrates the very heart of the social. Hence, power is an ontological category. What we think, do, and say is shaped by contingent discourses that are constructed in and through crisscrossing power strategies. The power strategies that construct the hegemonic discourse work best when they succeed in effacing their own traces. This is done through the act of ideological totalization that conceals the contingency of the social by presenting the hegemonic discourse as something natural or objective. The critical potential of poststructuralist discourse theory consists in revealing the political and contingent character of the social through a deconstructive or genealogical analysis of the dominant discourse. Jacob Torfing See also Discourse; Foucault, Michel; Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemony; Ideology; Postmodern Theories of Power

Further Readings Laclau, E. (1977). Politics and ideology in Marxist theory. London: Verso. Laclau, E. (1990). New reflections on the revolution of our time. London: Verso. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy. London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2005). On the political. London: Routledge.

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Power is both cause and effect of language. This bidirectional relationship can be summed up in terms of two concepts: the power behind language and the power of language. Power behind language refers to a language’s symbolic roles in signifying or reflecting the power relationships that already exist. In these passive roles language serves as a conduit of power, but otherwise has no power of its own. The power of language, on the other hand, refers to the generative roles of language in creating power for influence and control. In these active roles language is power. Power behind language can be illustrated by the well-known saying that a dialect with an army behind it becomes a language. For example, after conquering all other major Chinese states in 221 BCE, Emperor Qin standardized the script of his own state and made it the official writing system for the whole of China, displacing all other regional scripts. The military prowess behind the Qin script was responsible for the script’s elevation in status and popularity. Much the same can be said of the ascent of English in modern times, although religious, colonial, and industrial factors are also at play. Such ethnolinguistic vitality provides a conceptual framework for analyzing the power that lies behind language, and understanding this power allows us to systematically classify the factors that can account for the vitality of different languages. Once empowered, a language enables its users to bask in the reflected glory of the power behind it. The resulting “feel-good effect” contributes psychologically to ethnolinguistic pride and social identity, and can serve as a motivational driver for ethnolinguistic nationalism (which can be seen in the Bahasa Melayu, now known as the Bahasa Malaysia movement). As well, the empowered language affords users tangible advantages such as better educational, political, and job opportunities relative to nonusers, giving rise to a range of language-based discriminatory practices that favor users. In other words, the power that is behind a language becomes transmitted to users of the language. The power of language has many sources. It can be based on the very power that lies behind language and is later transmitted to users of the

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language, as shown above. Alternatively, it can be derived from the language itself, because of the ability of language to influence thinking and behavior. The simplest case is the power of single words. For example, “How fast were the cars traveling when they smashed into one another?” would mislead eyewitnesses of the car accident to overestimate the car speed and the seriousness of the accident, compared to “How fast were the cars traveling when they hit one another?” The power of loaded words such as smash is due to their connotative meanings that bias the reconstructive memory of the observed event. Single words without loaded connotations can also influence behavior through other psychological processes. According to the linguistic category model, action verbs induce readers to assign greater responsibility or causality of the action to the sentence subject than to the sentence object. For example, a newspaper headline “Unions always quarrel with employers” would induce its readers to hold unions (sentence subject) rather than employers (sentence object) responsible for quarreling, whereas the alternative headline “Employers always quarrel with unions” would produce the opposite effect. The reason for sentence subject bias is due to action verbs’ association with the agent–patient cognitive schema, which interprets causal events as flowing from the agent (represented as sentence subject) to the patient (represented as sentence object). Another category of verbs, called state verbs ( such as trust), leads to sentence object bias by activating the experiencer–stimulus schema, which interprets state verbs as flowing from the stimulus (represented as sentence object) to the experiencer (represented as sentence subject). Thus readers of the state verb trust in the headline “Unions trust employers” would infer that the trust is due to trustworthy employers more than to trusting unions. The power of language goes beyond single words. When words are strung into sentences and sentences are combined into discourse the power of language flourishes even more. A number of linguistic devices are available at the sentential and discourse levels for distorting and masking reality, thereby influencing readers to perceive the reality as presented by the author. Critical linguistics, discourse analysis, and the study of rhetoric provide fine-grained interpretative frameworks

for deconstructing texts to reveal the subtle influence of language. The following three headlines illustrate the devices of passivization and deletion in masking the role of soldiers in shooting civilians. Shot is an action verb that links the action to the sentence subject. Thus the first sentence clearly holds the soldiers responsible for the shooting by assigning them to the sentence subject position. By using the passive voice (passivization) of the verb in the second sentence, the author removes the soldiers from the sentence subject position, thereby distracting readers’ attention away from them. In the third sentence, the soldiers are deleted from the description altogether. The joint use of passivization and deletion enables the author to present a version of reality that is favorable to the soldiers. 1. Soldiers shot dead ten civilians. 2. Ten civilians were shot dead by soldiers. 3. Ten civilians were shot dead.

The manipulative use of linguistic devices to represent reality in a self-serving way highlights the dark side of the power of language. Application of these linguistic devices requires literary skills and special efforts. Another source of linguistic power that is relatively independent of literary skills and special efforts is derived from the linguistic routinization of power relationships between social groups. For example, men’s dominance over women in society can become codified in language, and the resulting male-centered language functions to keep women in their (inferior) place simply through its routine use in everyday life. The power of a sexist language, however, can be broken, as shown by the success of the nonsexist language movement. Sik Hung Ng See also Argument, Power of; Discourse; Framing; Influence; Propaganda

Further Readings Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and women’s place. New York: Harper & Row. Ng, S. H., & Bradac, J. J. (1993). Power in language: Verbal communication and social influence. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Leadership

LASSWELL, HAROLD (1902–1978)

Harold Dwight Lasswell was a political scientist who taught at the University of Chicago from 1924 to 1938. He entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate at the age of 16 and completed his PhD at the same institution. He later moved to the Yale Law School, where he taught from 1945 to 1975. Lasswell’s work was especially influential with respect to the conceptualization of power during the first two decades after World War II. Both Robert Dahl and Herbert Simon explicitly acknowledged their intellectual debt to his work on power. Although Lasswell made many contributions to the social sciences, including defending behaviorism and making vital contributions to communications research and policy science, his most important contribution to research on power was Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry, written in collaboration with the philosopher Abraham Kaplan. Written as part of a wartime research project sponsored by the U.S. Library of Congress, this work was completed in 1945 but was not published until 1950. Lasswell and Kaplan depicted power as triadic in the sense that specification of a power relationship requires attention to scope, weight, and domain. They portrayed power as a relation among humans rather than as a property of a person or group. They identified eight base values that could underlie a power relation—wealth, respect, power, rectitude, affection, well-being, skill, and enlightenment—while denying that any of these was more fundamental than the others. A base value was defined as a causal condition of the exercise of power. Lasswell and Kaplan distinguished between power and influence by associating severe negative sanctions with the former. Although Lasswell and Kaplan were attempting to lay conceptual foundations for a rigorous scientific study of power, they denied that this would lead to universal truths. Instead, they emphasized the importance of embedding scientific research on power in a particular context. They argued that the forms of power are likely to vary from one age to another, from one culture to

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another, and within a culture from one structure to another. David A. Baldwin See also Bases of Power; Coercion and Power; Domain; Influence; Resources as Measuring Power; Scope

Further Readings Lasswell, H. D. (1958). Politics: Who gets what, when, how. New York: Meridian. (Original work published 1936) Lasswell, H. D., & Kaplan, A. (1950). Power and society: A framework for political inquiry. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Rogow, A. A. (Ed.). (1969). Politics, personality, and social science in the twentieth century: Essays in honor of Harold D. Lasswell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LEADERSHIP There are various approaches to the study of leadership. Some studies are normative in that they suggest in what ways leadership can be good or bad. They are normative not just in the sense that some leaders succeed in their aims and some fail, but also in that some leaders provide what their followers want and some do not, thus making good leadership an aspect of the welfare function of the group. Some studies concentrate upon psychological characteristics or traits. Others focus upon contextualized accounts of leadership that specify the types of issues leaders face and the structures in which they operate. Some approaches are situational in the sense that they draw attention to the facts that leaders emerge in certain circumstances and that leadership can be considered a niche that has to be filled. Other approaches borrow from both structural accounts of the situations and circumstances within which leaders emerge and accounts that examine personal characteristics, suggesting that the two factors interact. Such studies suggest that what makes a good leader might be contingent or a matter of luck rather than something inherent in a person, yet they do not deny that there are important personal characteristics in leaders.

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Normative Approaches Leadership is important because it helps groups to coordinate and solve collective action dilemmas. In any group of people, issues will arise over which there might be underlying agreement but disagreement over details or tactics. Leaders can fill the coordination role that ensures that agreements are made and kept. Leaders thus help secure an agreement and then police that agreement: they ensure that everyone knows what role he or she should play and carries it out. Having the coordination and policing function fulfilled is not only important in itself, but also assures everyone that everyone else is doing their bit for the good of the group. Leaders can fulfill this function more or less well. We can study all sorts of organizations and groups of people to see how well run they are, whether activities are coordinated or disparate, and whether the organization efficiently achieves its aim or fails miserably. Either way, the leadership niche is filled by the person recognized as the leader (e.g., the boss, the CEO, or the president). But there is another normative concern about leadership that is orthogonal to this aspect: the manner in which the coordination takes place. There might be better and worse ways of achieving these coordination and policing functions. Some leaders might inspire followers to want to carry out their roles. Others might do it through incentives, both positive and negative: extra payments are made to those who work well, and sanctions employed against those who do not. Leaders might be liked and respected or feared and distrusted. We can see that this dimension is orthogonal, because a feared and distrusted leader might ensure that coordination does take place, that the organization does succeed, and, for example, that the firm makes big profits. In some studies, however, leaders who are feared and distrusted are not considered good leaders even if they achieve the aims of the organization in other senses. Here, generating admiration is an intrinsic quality of leadership. Such studies often concentrate upon the charisma or personal characteristics of leaders. They suggest that good leaders inspire confidence and win the hearts of their followers. There are two types of literature in this approach. One tends to concentrate upon telling inspiring success stories

that illustrate the charismatic nature of such leaders. Managerial textbooks, for example, often tell the stories of specific CEOs coming in and turning around the fortunes of an organization, and include glowing testimonials from staff. This approach has been called the “troubadour tradition” and includes many self-serving autobiographical accounts by CEOs and politicians. Or the narratives do the opposite, demonstrating how charismatic figures lead people to disaster. Foday Sankoh, the former dictator of Sierra Leone, gathered a large following and promised to bring health care and welfare services to the country, reform education, and get rid of corruption. Undoubtedly charismatic, he ended up paying his army with the proceeds of looting and sometimes secured the loyalty of young recruits by requiring them to kill their own parents. Such stories, which rely upon the horror inflicted by leaders who in some terms excelled at leadership, are used as examples to argue that that is not what is meant by good leadership. In these accounts, the term leadership has a normative flavor that entails that morally good outcomes accrue and that leaders bring welfare benefit to everyone in their following. A second strand of this type of literature tries to provide generalizations about leadership based upon collections of narratives. Such accounts of good leadership often resemble a checklist of good qualities; these lists are not always consistent, and sometimes they are contradictory. The reason, of course, is that qualities useful in some circumstances (“A good leader will show willingness to take a risk”) might prove disastrous in other circumstances (“A good leader will be cautious where conditions dictate”). Furthermore, whether a given risk was justified, or whether caution is the best course of action, is judged in retrospect, and thus is rarely helpful as advice to prospective leaders.

Psychological Approaches Studies that concentrate upon the personal characteristics of leadership often emphasize charisma. In addition to the anecdotal management studies that emphasize how leaders can inspire the members of an organization, social psychologists have examined leadership in experimental situations. The central aspect of charismatic leadership is believed to be the development and implementation

Leadership

of a compelling vision for the group that develops follower enthusiasm for new solutions to problems. Often such charismatic leadership emerges because of a crisis that requires new ideas, making followers more willing to take new leaders on board. However, crisis-generated charismatic leadership can fizzle out once the crisis passes. For that reason, perhaps, some charismatic leaders sustain crisis in order to sustain enthusiasm. While much of the literature in the past 30 years has examined the good side of charismatic leadership, academics are increasingly looking to its dark side. Leading groups with shared values is one aspect, but charismatic leaders can bind groups together by emphasizing some values at the expense of others. Experimental work has demonstrated that people will work to defend their interests more easily than to extend their interests. That is, they can be motivated to defend what they have more easily than they can be persuaded to work for better things in the future. Thus, one way of binding a group together is to create an out-group of others that is seen to threaten them. Charismatic leaders can work to generate enthusiasm for ethnic or other types of conflict with out-groups. Studies of charismatic leaders have shown that they might portray themselves as self-sacrificing but often serve themselves corruptly. Charismatic leaders who come to power in a crisis might begin by leading through inspiring enthusiasm from their followers, but often need to rely upon repressive and authoritarian measures to sustain their own vision once enthusiasm starts to wane. Leaders who never inspired to the same extent gain power through building coalitions and working through institutions and maintain that process through thick and thin.

Styles of Leadership Criticism of the charismatic leadership studies notes that the context to which charismatic leadership flourishes is also important. Not only does charismatic leadership seem to emerge in crisis situations, it also seems to work best in more bureaucratic organizations than in nonbureaucratic ones. At first this might seem surprising because charismatic leadership might be thought to be important in groups with no formal organization, but perhaps control as well as inspiration is

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necessary for sustained charismatic rule. Furthermore, most of the studies of charismatic leadership ignore important aspects of the leadership coordination and problem-solving outlook such as planning and decision making. In complex situations (as opposed to merely leading a rabble into battle) the more bureaucratized organization can sustain the leader’s vision through its normal implementation processes. Without that organization, the leader’s enthusiasm dies on the vine. Drawing on these sorts of criticisms, Michael Mumford and colleagues posit three types of outstanding leaders: charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic. They argue that in conditions of crisis or great change the behavior of complex organizations becomes unpredictable. The direction an organization should take becomes unclear. In these conditions, a leader can have great influence if he or she chooses a specific direction. The great ones are those who succeed; those who fail we categorize as poor leaders. Direction and success at a time of change and instability give back feelings of control, and this can enable leaders in times of crisis to utilize more authoritarian methods, at least for short periods until instability recedes. Mumford analyzed the biographies of 120 historical leaders who were assigned on an a priori basis to one of the three categories. He then analyzed their rise to power and how they operated once in power, to see whether there were differences across the three categories. All did well with respect to performance (they were chosen as successful leaders), but differed with regard to other aspects of behavior. Pragmatists relied upon experts in problem solving, whereas charismatic leaders received less input from experts. Pragmatists also tried to govern by employing logical arguments in communications to followers in order to persuade people. Charismatic and ideological leaders used emotional appeals. The major difference between those categorized as charismatic and those categorized as ideological depended upon their use of preselected values. Charismatic leaders influenced values to a greater extent, whereas ideological ones appealed to extreme shared values often directed at out-groups. Some experimental work has also shown evidence of variations between these categories. There are other ways of categorizing leadership, many of which are based upon the tactics that

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leaders adopt. Authoritarian leaders are contrasted with democratic and laissez-faire leaders in terms of how they go about making decisions. The first directs, the second directs through using multiple choices, voting, and group participation; the latter stands back and coordinates, allowing subgroup leaders to make decisions within their areas of responsibility.

Situational Approaches Some theories of leadership suggest that we should turn away from the characteristics of leaders altogether and look to structural or social accounts. Contingency theories suggest that situations of type X requires leaders of type x, and situations of type Y require leaders of type y. There will be a tendency for the right type to emerge in situations, partly through competition (the wrong type fails and is replaced) and partly because groups recognize (perhaps unconsciously) what sort of leader is required in particular circumstances. An example might be how in 1945 the British electorate rejected their great wartime leader Winston Churchill in favor of the dour Clement Attlee, perhaps recognizing that peacetime required different leadership. Contingency theory suggests that the environment, the resources available, and the history of the organization jointly determine the right kind of leader. Contingency theories fit well with niche theories of social structure. Niche theories suggest that in any group or organization certain roles must be performed and agents will emerge to fulfill those roles. Niche theories tend to look at times of stability, whereas contingency theories look at times of change. Both discount the importance of personal characteristics in explaining the emergence of leaders, concentrating upon the structures that require leaders with those characteristics. However, we might need to examine both personal characteristics and circumstances because both structure and agency are involved. Interactionist theories take this line.

Interactionist and Constructionist Accounts Psychological and contingency theories tend to operate within a scientistic framework that assumes that there are objective personal characteristics and objective conditions that leadership functions

fit within. Interactionist accounts suggest that the personal characteristics and structural conditions interact in the sense that “conditions make the person,” and leaders can manipulate the conditions. Constructionist accounts develop the latter point, suggesting that contexts and situations are socially constructed by leaders in ways that legitimate and justify their action. It is not the case that there is a niche of a certain shape and it is filled when the right-shaped blob comes along; rather, our views of the niche and of the leader who fits it are shaped by his or her actions, so that we do feel that he or she fills the position. How might situations help create a personality? Think of two tennis players competing over many years. They might be evenly matched, and who wins on given days is based upon contingent factors, such as how they feel and luck in the form of occasional bad calls or near misses. If one player suffers those moments on days that always coincide with major championships, while the other suffers only in minor competitions, then one might be thought a champion, the other a choker. Being thus labeled may be a matter of chance, but the players might start to believe it, and then the occurrence of such factors is due to one being a winner and the other a loser, in personality terms. Similarly, good or bad luck at certain moments can give persons (and others) a view of themselves that then becomes a part of their personality. Character and circumstances interact to help create the former. Similarly, leaders might be able to create the events that are seen as important. In tennis matches it might be clear which are major tournaments and which minor, but within an organization what constitutes the major decisions and what the minor—what triumphs are important and what failures do not matter—may be less clear. How the leader narrates the events and manipulates information about those events can alter views of his or her success. Leaders can also shift blame, moving blame for failure on to inferiors and taking credit for success, even though the decisions and implementation were equally delegated. Another factor in leaders’ success can be based upon public perception. A leader who does what everyone thought was the right thing to do will not be given as much credit as a leader who gambles against current opinion and is successful.

Leadership and Gender

Contrariwise, a leader who fails to do what everyone thought should be done will not be blamed as much as one who takes risky decisions. Many management textbooks praise risky entrepreneurial behavior in leaders, but it is the nature of risk that the riskier the decision the least likely is success, though at any level of risk some will succeed.

Leadership and Power Leaders are obviously people who have more power than their followers do. How strong leaders are depends upon which resources they can utilize. They also rely upon their ability to build favorable coalitions, which requires both personal characteristics and the convergence of interests. Personal characteristics such as those associated with charismatic leadership are certainly important. Being able to change the values of an organization through inspiring rhetoric or action is an important ability. The context in which these qualities can emerge is important. Personal leadership power depends upon structural resources, and crisis moments can massively increase leadership power as people seek stability and control. Leaders can also utilize values that already exist and, depending on their resources, can manipulate information. Manipulating information is not always normatively suspect. It can be an important resource in coordinating activity and indeed convincing people to work together by exaggerating their shared interests and downplaying conflict. Leadership studies may have suffered by placing too much emphasis on personal characteristics and not enough on context, and by selecting case studies on the dependent variable: successful leaders. We might believe that some behavior brings success because successful people do it, but careful study of failures might show that failures behave in precisely the same way. We might find that luck, both simple luck in risk coming out as one hopes, and the more complex interplays of luck that contribute to building character, play a key role in leadership, and hence in power itself. Keith Dowding See also Agency–Structure Problem; Authoritarian Personality; Authority; Coordination; Elite Theories; Entrepreneurs; Heresthetics; Leadership and Gender; Policy Entrepreneurs; Principal–Agent Relationship

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Further Readings Cha, S. E., & Edmondson, E. C. (2006). When values backfire: Leadership, attribution, and disenchantment in a values-driven organization. The Leadership Quarterly, 17, 57–78. Grint, K. (2001). The arts of leadership. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mumford, M. D. (2006). Pathways to outstanding leadership: A comparative analysis of charismatic, ideological and pragmatic leaders. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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In almost every social, political, and economic sphere, positions of leadership are largely held by men. An overview of some of the statistics reveals the current level of imbalance. In the early 21st century, on a global political level, only 15 countries are currently led by a woman serving in the role of president, prime minister, or governor general. Women constitute 17.3% of the world’s parliamentary representatives, although this is subject to wide regional and national variations, with the Nordic states achieving the highest average representation at 41.6% and the Arab states the lowest at 9.6%. Rwanda has the highest proportion of women in parliament, with 48.8% of seats held by women, followed by Sweden (47.3%), Finland (42%), and Costa Rica (38.6%). Women hold 7% of the world’s ministerial positions, but again there is variation. In Sweden, 52% of cabinet portfolios are held by women. Within the economic sphere, women’s leadership within the top levels of business is limited; only two CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women. The percentage of directors in the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 that are women is 3%, a figure that has remained static for some years. However, within this general outline indicating a general lack of women’s participation in the top levels of leadership, more complex and sometimes contradictory trends may be discerned. In the legislative sphere, women’s representation has increased from the 11.3% of parliamentary seats held by women in 1997. Within cabinets, women tend to

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be disproportionately represented in fields such as women’s and children’s issues and social affairs. Evidence suggests increasing success for women at the very top levels of business. The number of top FTSE 100 companies with more than one female director went from 12 in 2000 to 29 in 2006. Within the top 20 companies in the FTSE 100, 16 (80%) have female directors, compared to 8 (40%) of the bottom 20 companies. More women are securing positions at the junior and middle management level. Overall, women constitute 30% of managers in Britain, compared with their 45% share of employment. However, other recent studies also indicate that this trend toward increasing women’s participation may stagnate or begin to fall, with fewer women moving into senior management roles. The number of female senior managers working in businesses in the United Kingdom has fallen by over 40%. In 2002, 38% of senior management positions in the FTSE 350 were occupied by women; in 2007 it is 22%.

Exploring the Gender Imbalance in Leadership The phenomenon of the “glass ceiling” was first outlined over 20 years ago in 1986 in an article appearing in The Wall Street Journal. It refers to the invisible and apparently intractable barrier that prevents significant numbers of women moving into the highest levels of leadership, despite their increasing prevalence at lower and middle levels. There are many studies as well as much anecdotal evidence concerning why there is a continuing gendered imbalance in leadership roles. Some theories maintain that innate biological characteristics make females less suited to the demands of leadership than men, although these theories are not widely accepted. Other accounts focus upon the underlying structural factors. There is little consensus, and most theories remain contested. Several possible reasons for the continued lack of women’s representation are discussed below. Attitudes to Women in Leadership Roles

Attitudes to women in leadership positions have undoubtedly changed as women have demonstrated increasing capability in a myriad of fields. Yet there is much conflicting evidence about the ongoing perception of women in leadership positions and its

impact upon their ability to progress and solidify their gains. Some studies suggest that within business the role of manager is still imbued with a masculinist understanding and that men in the corporate world continue to see women as lacking the capabilities for successful leadership. Other studies, though, have found that almost all employees, including men, actually preferred to work under a female manager. An example from politics reveals a similarly contradictory attitude. In 2007, opinion polls suggested that 85% of U.S. citizens would be prepared to vote for a female president if she were suitably qualified. At the same time, there is a general perception that the United States as a whole would not accept a woman president, only 58% of people believing that the country was ready to elect a female president. Such research suggests a continued uncertainty as to women in leadership roles. Recent research has also identified a new phenomenon known as the “glass cliff.” This refers to the promoting of women into difficult or precarious positions where the risk of failure is high. There is also evidence that companies already experiencing financial difficulty may be more likely to promote women to their boards; continuing problems may then become associated with the presence of women. The glass cliff is also said to be prevalent in politics, with women often being asked to run for less secure seats and/or being given riskier cabinet positions. In Australia, the only two female state premiers ever appointed both gained their positions midterm and after their parties had experienced scandals. This is thought to be a significant factor in their both losing their seats in subsequent elections. Institutional Styles of Leadership

It is sometimes suggested that the leadership styles prevalent in large organizations and political institutions are highly masculine. It is felt that women utilize alternative approaches to leadership and find it difficult to progress in environments where such approaches are incompatible with the prevailing culture. However, other studies maintain that forms of leadership that are increasingly coming to influence working practices are highly compatible with women’s skills and actually offer

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women a comparative advantage. New forms of leadership are often labeled as transformative styles. They involve an approach that includes a more democratic and participatory focus, encouraging supportive relationships and inviting employees to be more questioning of the practices of the organization and the direction of its leadership. In contrast, transactional leadership is associated with a masculine style in a more traditional authority relationship between the superior and inferiors. However, it is not clear whether women benefit from these changes, and the evidence as to whether men and women really conform to these styles is deeply contested, with attempts to delineate feminine and masculine styles of leadership often being criticized for potentially relying upon stereotypical accounts of male and female behavior. Domestic Life Balance

For many women, combining a high-level leadership position with the demands of family life is extremely difficult. Political and corporate working hours are often long, erratic, and arduous. Women are increasingly rejecting the “having it all” and “superwoman” images that dominated earlier understandings of women’s success. However, taking a career break to raise children or opting to work part-time is often detrimental to a woman’s future progression within the workplace. Many women return to work in more junior positions and struggle to be accepted as fully committed to the job. These difficulties are accentuated for women as they still spend more time than men on domestic duties, child care, and care of elderly relations. In many situations the lack of good quality, affordable child care results in women being forced to leave the workplace. Employers are being urged to respond to this by providing more opportunities for their employees to work flexible hours and to diversify routes of career progression. There is also concern to make sure that part-time positions are of good quality. However, many maintain that these demands are not being addressed seriously enough or with sufficient urgency. A concern for greater flexibility in work may also be behind the increasing trend toward women leaving the corporate world in order to set up their own businesses. In the United Kingdom the number

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of self-employed women has reached one million and has risen by 18% from 2001 to 2007.

Strategies to Increase Women’s Representation: Affirmative Action and Quotas Lack of representation by women in leadership roles and the slow rate of change have come to be understood by many governments, businesses, and international bodies as a problem requiring specific interventions to redress the gender imbalance. The forms and labels given to these interventions vary depending upon the particular context in which they will be put into practice. In the United States, such policies are generally described as affirmative action, while within the European Union the term positive action is more commonly used. Affirmative action programs can be instituted to assist other groups understood as systematically disadvantaged within a society; such groups include ethnic and racial minorities and people with disabilities as well as women. Affirmative action may be implemented in strong or weak forms. In the weak form, strategies may include attempts to provide women with the skills they need to compete equally with men through special training or educational courses. Allowances may be made for constraining factors that may impede a woman’s ability to compete in the world of education and employment. On the other hand, strong affirmative action can be seen as the active preferential advancement of women within legislatures. Within the world of politics, affirmative action has often taken the form of the institution of quotas for women’s representation within parliaments. Quotas have aimed to place a critical minority of women into parliament. This is usually set at around 30% to 40% of the available seats. At this level it is felt that the presence of women reflects more than tokenism and can form a stronger political presence. Various forms of quotas have been implemented. There may be a reserved number of place on individual parties’ candidate lists, seats in parliament, or positions in government. Currently more than 80 countries, including Afghanistan, Norway, South Africa, Argentina, Rwanda, and Peru, utilize some form of quota system. The use of quota systems and affirmative action to redress gender imbalances has often been

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extremely contentious and remains subject to much debate and analysis as to its efficacy. Proponents of quotas and affirmative action maintain that they are central to the realization of genuinely democratic governments. Women as citizens should have the right to equal political representation. Quotas are also understood as a compensatory measure for the discrimination that women encounter in political participation. Some maintain that women have particular skills that should be actively brought into government. However, many have argued against quotas for a wide variety of reasons. The main arguments center upon the accusation that such practices are fundamentally undemocratic. They simply replicate objectionable practices of discrimination in reverse and are harmful because they restrict voters’ electoral choices. Some argue that important positions may be filled by unqualified women, which not only has an immediate negative effect upon the quality of representation but can further act to harm women‘s longer term credibility. Others maintain that the practice has little real effect upon women’s influence and is only a way that party elites may appear to be sympathetic to women’s issues without fundamentally challenging existing power structures. Quotas do not have universal support among women, with many rejecting them on the grounds that their imposition leads to women being judged by their sex and not by their personal achievements and skills. It has often proved difficult to assess the ability of affirmative action and quota systems to promote more gender-equitable forms of leadership. In attempting to do so a host of other factors must be considered; quotas alone are not sufficient to break down obstacles to women’s participation. As top-down processes, quotas and affirmative action must also be met from the bottom up and receive wider support from local populations and organizations.

Do Men and Women Practice Different Leadership Styles? The relationship between gender and actual styles of leadership began to receive scholarly attention in the 1970s. It remains a field of study that is greatly contested. In some respects we have strong understandings of women as natural peace builders,

practicing less hierarchical, more inclusive forms of leadership than that which is associated with men. But these also tend to be at variance with other images of women’s leadership such as the archetypal “iron ladies” U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979−1990) and Israeli prime minister Golda Meir (1969−1974), who both practiced noticeably forceful and dominating leadership styles and led their respective countries in military conflicts. Some argue that it is difficult to measure whether men and women practice different forms of leadership because, despite recent changes, the common understandings of leadership remain embedded within a masculine ideal. It is suggested that these ideals force women to repress their femininity and practice a leadership style that conforms more readily to the stereotype. Although women leaders and feminine leadership styles are very often reported as positive, it is argued that women leaders themselves actually describe their own personal leadership styles in ways that strongly resemble a traditional, masculine form. Other arguments suggest that theorizing leadership directly in relation to gender is misleading and that men and women do not instinctively practice different forms. The key factor is not gender but the prevailing leadership ethos within the specific organization and context. The expectations of a leader within an individual organization will be the primary conditioning factor. It has also been argued that gender cannot be the only way of understanding leadership and that other influences such as the age and the level of experience of an individual in question will also affect leadership style. Developing this line of thought, some have argued that a continuing and specific focus upon men and women and their supposed leadership styles serves only to reify stereotypical ideas concerning men’s and women’s leadership. Kate Allison See also Female Leadership Among Mammals; Feminist Theories of Power; Gender, Role of Power in

Further Readings Hopfl, H., & Matilal, S. (2007). “The lady vanishes”: Some thoughts on women and leadership. Journal of

League of Nations Organizational Change Management, 20(2), 198−208. McTavish, D., & Miller, K. (2006). Women in leadership and management. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. International IDEA & Stockholm University (2010). Global database of quotas for women. Retrieved from http://www.quotaproject.org

LEAGUE

OF

NATIONS

Founded in 1920 and formally dissolved in 1946, the League of Nations was established to promote international cooperation and achieve international peace and security. Members of the League pledged themselves not to resort to war, to respect international law, and to maintain scrupulous respect for treaty obligations. In the 1930s certain members of the League, notably Japan, Italy, and Germany, flagrantly violated these pledges, and when their actions met with a weak and disunited response, the role of the League in the maintenance of peace and security effectively ended. No League action was taken against Germany in 1936 when it remilitarized the Rhineland in violation of its treaty obligations. Previously, the principal League members had dragged their feet when responding to Japanese aggression in Manchuria. They also proved divided on how to respond to Mussolini’s seizure of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Economic sanctions were imposed in the latter case, but halfheartedly. France in particular was not prepared to risk the alienation of Italy in light of its broader strategy of containing the rising power of Germany. For these reasons the name of the League quickly became associated with impotence. The League is generally viewed as having been a unitary body designed to promote collective security. In reality it was neither. From the onset of negotiations in 1919, the victorious Allied and Associated Powers held different conceptions of the kind of body they wanted the League to be. The driving force behind the idea, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, conceived of the League as an antidote to the secret diplomacy and realpolitik of the prewar years. Conference diplomacy and strict adherence to the principle of nonaggression

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would replace the balance of power that had led to World War I. France, however, saw the League as a bulwark against Germany and bastion of the 1919 territorial and political status quo. Britain, in contrast, conceived of the League as a means of peaceful change and of controlling costly arms races. Uppermost in British thinking was the need to reduce the costs of maintaining an extensive empire and to provide a means of peaceably altering a European status quo that a disadvantaged Germany would not accept indefinitely. The League comprised a Council, an Assembly, a Secretariat, a Mandates Commission, an International Labour Office, and a range of specialist committees on refugees, narcotics, the slave trade, national minorities, the control of contagious diseases, intellectual cooperation, and other issues of concern. Institutionally, therefore, the League was a complex organization, far from the unitary actor of popular imagination. Similarly, the description of the League as a collective security organization is misleading because its Covenant imposed no obligation on member states to automatically apply military sanctions against an aggressor. The term collective security does not appear in the Covenant. Wilson wished to reduce the power of the independent nation-state and to reduce its capacity and need to act unilaterally. For quite different purposes, Georges Clemenceau of France wanted the League to have a strong supranational component, including its own armed forces. Neither conception prevailed, however, and the independent power of the nation-state remained intact. Wilson placed huge faith in the power of public opinion and, fortified by the effectiveness of the wartime blockade, economic power to bring aggressors to their senses. International public opinion, however, proved no more capable of being forged into a unity than the various governments. Economic power proved enormously difficult to organize, especially following the onset of the Great Depression. According to some, the failure of the U.S. Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, thereby blocking the entry of the United States into the League, fatally wounded the institution at the outset. Yet the League went on to achieve considerable successes in the economic, social, and

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humanitarian fields, often with American cooperation. The great lesson of the League is the difficulty of controlling the independent power of the nation-state. Peter Wilson See also Balance of Power; Diplomacy

Further Readings Armstrong, D., Lloyd, L., & Redmond, J. (2004). International organisation in world politics. London: Palgrave. Northedge, F. S. (1986). The League of Nations: Its life and times, 1920−1946. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press.

LEGISLATIVE POWER According to Montesquieu’s separation of powers theory, the legislative power is coequal to and independent of both the judiciary and the executive. Legislative power rests in a deliberative assembly with the tasks of debating, passing, amending, and repealing laws; raising taxes; and adopting a budget. Legislatures usually take final decisions in plenary sessions but are subdivided into various types of committees that may scrutinize government activities, including legislation, or conduct inquiries into specific matters. This separation of powers doctrine more or less accurately describes power relationships in presidential systems, but in parliamentary systems executive and legislative powers are fused because the executive’s capacity to govern depends on the parliamentary majority’s willingness to support it. Therefore, in place of an institutional separation of powers, parliamentary systems are characterized by a functional division of powers between the government majority and the opposition. Consequently, legislative power in parliamentary systems is effectively in the hands of the government. The government has the right to initiate legislation, including an exclusive right to introduce money bills. The role of parliament is to scrutinize government bills, which opens up an opportunity for the opposition to publicly present

its alternatives to government action. In presidential systems, lawmaking is essentially the task of the legislature, which makes use of an elaborate system of committees and subcommittees. Winfried Steffani argues that it is not by chance that we use the term legislature for cases like the U.S. Congress whereas for European countries the term parliament (from the French parler, to talk) is adequate. However, recent research has shown that power relationships in parliamentary systems vary considerably more than this simple typological distinction between parliamentary and presidential systems suggests. Using an extended database on parliamentary procedures and structures of European legislatures, Herbert Döring shows that the balance of power between government majorities and opposition parties in parliamentary democracies differs in the extent to which they can make use of procedures for setting the parliamentary agenda. His core finding is that the power of the opposition with regard to the timing of different parliamentary stages and the sequence in which amendments to a bill are voted upon are inversely related. To illustrate, in the British House of Commons, the government can make use of the guillotine motion to drastically reduce the amount of time spent on a bill but it does not have the so-called last amendment power. More generally, parliamentary systems differ dramatically with regard to the extent to which the executive branch has institutional prerogatives for controlling the content of bills and the conduct of parliamentary business. Seen from an agenda-setting perspective, the role of legislatures is often more relevant than the dualism between government majority and opposition in parliamentary systems seems to imply. André Kaiser See also Executive Power; Prime Ministerial and Presidential; Separation of Powers

Further Readings Döring, H. (Ed.). (1995). Parliaments and majority rule in western Europe. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Campus Verlag. Döring, H. (2001). Parliamentary agenda control and legislative outcomes in Western Europe. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 26,145–166.

Legitimation Heller, W. B. (2001). Making policy stick: Why the government gets what it wants in multiparty parliaments. American Journal of Political Science, 45, 780–798. Lijphart, A. (1992). Parliamentary versus presidential government. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Steffani, W. (1995). Semi-Präsidentialismus: ein eigenständiger Systemtyp? Zur Unterscheidung von Legislative und Parlament. Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfrage, 26(4), 621–641.

LEGITIMATION Legitimation is the act by which the right to be obeyed is conferred on a particular authority on the basis of its justifiability. Accounts of legitimation are commonly distinguished according to their descriptive or normative nature. In the social sciences, legitimacy of power is normally described, following Max Weber, as the factual belief in its rightfulness on the part of the power-subjects. In this sense, legitimacy is empirically studied by reconstructing the attitude of citizens toward their governments. Descriptive interpretations of legitimation have also been produced against the normative background of Marxist theory. According to the dominant ideology thesis, legitimation is both a source and a product of power: in capitalist societies, the reproduction of class relations is ensured by the diffusion of ideas and values in such a way as to create or reinforce the subjects’ belief in the legitimacy of power. Normative accounts are offered by political theorists who assert the necessity of universal criteria for the evaluation of authority and suggest definitions of legitimacy focused on conformity to certain ascertainable principles of justification. Jürgen Habermas, in Legitimation Crisis, attempts to overcome the divide between normative and descriptive definitions of legitimation. His proposal includes both a historical analysis of the causes that lead advanced capitalist states into a legitimation crisis and the proposal of a particular interpretation of the concept of legitimation. Like Weber, Habermas defines legitimacy as the belief, on the part of the power-subjects, in the validity of an existing political order. Nonetheless, he claims that the attitude of the power-subjects should be

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based on the effective justifiability of the situation: the belief in legitimacy needs to be a true belief. According to Habermas, legitimation is motivated rationally through discursive procedures that are able to provide objective criteria for the assessment of authority. In a deliberative setting in which all the participants share an adequate knowledge of the object under consideration, it is possible to reach a rational consensus on the definition of those generalizable interests that provide the basis for the evaluation of the existing order. The conformity to the interests expressed through discursive procedures is to be seen, then, as what distinguishes legitimate exercises of power from exercises of force. What follows from this analysis is a rejection of the Weberian account of legal-rational legitimacy, in particular of the interpretation of Weber proposed by Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann’s social theory describes the legal system as one of the autopoietic (i.e., self-creating) systems that compose complex modern societies, as differentiated and independent from the political, moral, and economic systems. According to him, legitimation does not depend on individuals’ evaluations, but is a property of the legal system itself. Legitimacy has nothing to do with the truth: due to the complexity of modern society, individuals cannot make their own judgments on single issues on the basis of some sort of values, but must rely on the validity of the legal procedures that autolegitimize the system on the basis of its own framework of positive law. The legitimation of the system, then, depends only on the accomplishment of its own social function: the production of laws enabling social relations. In Habermas’s perspective, on the contrary, the legal procedures that regulate the production of norms are not a sufficient condition for their legitimation: just as in the case of a fascist regime, in contemporary capitalist states the legal validity of the normative process serves only to mask the illegitimate interventions of politics in the regulation of generalizable interests. In order to mitigate the economic shortcomings of capitalism, in fact, the state intervenes through the production of norms that pursue particular interests and reproduce inequalities. The economic crisis of capitalism, then, constitutes the basis for the legitimation crisis of capitalist states, which will eventually

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arise when citizens recognize the failure of the state in sustaining generalizable interests. Pamela Pansardi See also Habermas, Jürgen; Luhmann, Niklas; Weber, Max

Further Readings Barker R. (1990). Political legitimacy and the state. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Habermas, J. (1976). Legitimation crisis. London: Heinemann. Luhmann, N. (1985). A sociological theory of law London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

LEWIN, KURT,

AND

POWER

Kurt Lewin (1890−1947) was one of a number of distinguished scientists who emigrated from Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s and 1940s and who had great impact on social science in the United States. Lewin particularly affected the direction of social psychology, making important contributions to theory, research, and applications to social influence processes and social power. Lewin’s name is most closely associated with field theory in social psychology. In contrast with psychoanalytic theory and behaviorism or reinforcement theories that dominated American psychology and social psychology during the first half of the 20th century, Lewinian field theory focused on a psychological definition of the individual’s life space, which he analyzed in terms of tensions within the person (his or her needs, values, and desires) and the consequent forces or vectors that pressed that person to engage in some behaviors and to avoid others. The person might experience conflict when an activity region has both positive and negative valence or when two opposing regions have positive valence. By representing such situations in topological drawings, Lewin and his students found they could productively examine psychological and social situations that were both interesting and relevant, situations ranging from (a) a child

who is attracted to the waves at a seashore but frightened by them as he or she gets too close, to (b) the conflicting pressures of a member of a minority group in adapting to a majority culture. In examining social influence processes, Lewin distinguished between a person’s own forces, which emanate directly from that person’s desires and wishes, and induced forces, which are imposed on that person by another person or group. A major question, then, concerned the process by which induced forces are accepted and internalized as own forces. Such considerations played an important role in the classic experiment by Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph White on the effectiveness of autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire leadership. In later years, Lewin and his coworkers focused much of their attention on the power of the group. Group cohesiveness was defined by his students Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back as the total field of forces that act on members to remain in the group. Festinger then continued with theory and research on pressures toward uniformity, such pressures being greater in highly cohesive groups. Thus, during World War II, groups of housewives were more likely to serve unpopular cuts of meat if, following discussions, they made a group decision to that effect. Lester Coch and John R. P. French Jr. later found that group discussion and decision could effectively increase the productivity level of a work group. Out of such considerations, a whole field of theory and research on group dynamics developed, and indeed the Research Center for Group Dynamics was established under Lewin’s direction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later moving to the University of Michigan, where it was directed by Dorwin Cartwright. In the 1950s, the Center collectively focused attention on the psychology of social power, resulting in the publication Studies in Social Power. One chapter, “The Bases of Social Power,” by John R. French and Bertram H. Raven, continues to be widely cited. Expanding on that chapter, Raven later presented an all-encompassing power/interaction model of interpersonal influence. Bertram H. Raven See also Bases of Power; Cartwight, Dorwin; Festinger, Leon; French, John R. P., Jr.; Raven, Bertram

Liberalism

Further Readings Cartwright, D. (Ed.). (1959). Studies in social power. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research. Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science. New York: Harper. Marrow, A. M. (1969). The practical theorist: The life and work of Kurt Lewin. New York: Basic Books.

LIBERALISM There are many varieties of liberalism—classic liberalism, modern liberalism, social liberalism, welfare liberalism, revisionist liberalism, libertarianism— but they all agree on one thing: the importance of liberty. More specifically, many liberals tend to take as their normative starting point a state of nature, in which everyone is completely free and neither the state nor the community have any claims on how people live their lives. As John Locke suggested in the 1690s, people are born in a state of freedom and can order their property as they see fit in a state of equality. Most liberal theorists agree that citizens have a right (natural or otherwise) to liberty. The right to liberty means that people should not have to argue for particular liberties; rather, the burden of proof is on whoever wants to restrict their liberty. In the 19th century John Stuart Mill suggested that the burden of proof must lie with those who wish to restrict liberty; the a priori assumption must be in favor of freedom. If those who want to restrict liberty carry the burden of proof, they will have to argue for why any proposed restriction would be legitimate. In particular, a restriction to some liberty usually needs to be justified in terms of how it helps protect some other and more important liberty. But although liberals agree on this, they disagree on what those justified restrictions are. Two issues in particular are central to this disagreement: the relation between liberty and private property, and the nature of liberty as such.

Liberty and Private Property Many have claimed that the relation between liberty and private property is instrumental; that

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is, private property is necessary in order to protect other and more basic rights. For example, it is claimed that owning property enables the independence necessary to be able to oppose the state, or that owners of private property develop the independent characters necessary for such opposition. Others— especially libertarians—have claimed that the connection between private property and liberty is stronger and that a right to private property follows directly from a right to liberty. The idea of self-ownership, introduced by Locke and other early liberals and nowadays advocated especially by libertarians, emphasizes that people own themselves (their minds, their bodies, and their abilities) and also own all natural resources with which they have somehow mixed their labor— given some proviso that there is, in Locke’s words, “enough and as good” left for others. Exactly what the last point implies is widely debated, because what it means to leave “enough and as good” for others in a world in which natural resources are scarce is highly controversial. There is also wide disagreement on whether resources so far not claimed are owned by nobody or owned jointly by everyone and whether an agent who makes some resource his or hers is required to compensate those thereby excluded from using that resource.

The Nature of Liberty The other main issue that divides liberals on the legitimacy of restrictions to liberty—and, especially, what restrictions to private property are necessary to protect the right to liberty—is the nature of liberty itself. Liberals tend to understand liberty in one of two ways: as negative or as positive freedom. Negative Freedom

The distinction between negative and positive liberty was introduced by Isaiah Berlin. Negative liberty is freedom from deliberate intervention by others in what one can legitimately do. For classical liberalism—and later libertarianism—the main threat to negative liberty comes from the government. What was needed to ensure liberty, above all else, was to make sure that the government could not interfere too much in the lives of citizens. (As mentioned, the sanctity of private property has often been defended by its role in giving citizens

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the independence necessary to oppose the government.) To be free was to be free of coercion, to be free of interference with one’s actions. The main coercive power was the state, and therefore its power needed to be constrained. There are only a few things a state can legitimately do, if people have a fundamental right not to be coerced or interfered with. The state can protect individual liberty by protecting people from the coercion or illegitimate inference of others. Further, the right to private property also means that the state should protect citizens’ property; thus, it should make and enforce laws against theft. To facilitate voluntary economic cooperation, the state should also serve as the third-party guarantor of contract law. But the strong connection between private property and liberty—especially if people are taken to own their abilities and the riches that result from their use of those abilities—has been thought to place severe restraints on the state’s power to redistribute resources through taxation. In some views, taxing people is equal to forcing them into slavery, as the state would take from them the fruits of their labor and thus force them to work for free. If we own our abilities, our labor, and some property, it is unjust to interfere with the results of our work. In particular, a free market economy has been seen as the only economic system compatible with freedom, and sometimes even as partly constitutive of freedom, as it has been argued to be a spontaneous order of voluntary cooperation in which nobody is coerced to do anything except to abide by the terms of contracts into which they have freely entered. But it has also been seen as a protector of freedom in more instrumental ways, in that property would become dispersed in the hands of private individuals rather than the state, thereby ensuring many people the independence from the state that is seen as necessary for opposition to the state’s coercive power. Positive Freedom

But a number of factors slowly changed many liberals’ view that the government was the main threat to liberty. The economic market did not seem to be the ideal solution once thought. It created serious inequalities that limited the choices open to people from the working class, while at the same time at least some governments seemed to manage economic planning quite successfully. And

with the democratization of most Western societies, the discretionary and arbitrary expressions of power that liberals had protected themselves against by limiting the government’s ability to interfere with citizens’ lives became less of a threat. The result was the emergence of a new form—or rather, perhaps, forms—of liberalism: welfare liberalism, social liberalism, social justice liberalism, revisionist liberalism, egalitarian liberalism, and so on. (For the sake of convenience I will proceed as if this form of liberalism is a single one and will refer to it as modern liberalism.) Modern liberalism sees the state more as a tool that can be used for good than as the main threat to liberty. Modern liberals emphasize a different concept of freedom: positive freedom. The idea that what matters is not—at least not solely—to be left alone but to have real and valuable options to choose from: to be free is to have the ability to act. Power is less about who has power over someone else, than about having power to do things. A poor person may not be coerced or threatened by anyone to work under particular conditions, but nevertheless has little choice but to accept whatever employment conditions others dictate, as the alternative could well be starvation. More generally, having money opens up possibilities. Having none or very little leaves people without much choice about how to live and makes them vulnerable to the dictates of others. A more equal distribution of resources would thus give more people power over their own lives to live as they choose. The emphasis on the ability to choose how to live is closely connected to a particular liberal ideal (found in the writings of early liberal theorists like John Stuart Mill in On Liberty): that of the autonomous, independent person who self-reflectively chooses his or her way of life. Autonomous people are those whose goals and desires are their own. They are not under any compulsion (like a drug addict) and are not forced by sheer necessity to live in a particular way: rather, they have reflected upon their values and goals and live their lives according to what they find important. It could, however, be argued that if individuals lack reasonable options, they also lack autonomy because their actions are dictated not by goals and values accepted after critical reflection, but by sheer necessity. The concept of positive liberty has been criticized for allowing too many things to count as

Liberalism

restrictions to liberty. Surely many things we lack the power to do, such as our inability to live forever, to fly without the help of a lot of technology, or—for most of us—to hit a hole in one, are just facts of life, not restrictions on our liberty. A restriction on our liberty, many argue, must stem from something other people have caused. What, exactly, that means is debated. The answer to that question clearly influences what one takes to be the obligations of society and the state to increase people’s positive freedom. But at least it is clear that increasing the positive freedom of the poor necessarily requires resources, and, therefore, a much more extensive taxation system and a change in the view of private property. It also requires the state to regulate citizens’ interactions more extensively to empower the most vulnerable citizens. Emphasizing positive rather than negative freedom thus requires the state to intervene more often and influence many more aspects of citizens’ lives. Whether one accepts a negative or a positive view of freedom thus greatly influences what one believes the state can legitimately do.

The Concepts of Power Implied Negative freedom is usually tied with the idea of power to. One is negatively free to do what one can do. The difference, perhaps, lying in the form that negative freedom is moralized by referring to what one may legitimately do, power referring to what one can do more broadly. It implies that others’ power over will be restricted. As the most powerful agent of all is the state—and at the time of the early liberal thinkers, the state was undemocratic, often tyrannical, and certainly coercive in many areas of life we would now consider private—the number one priority was to ensure protection against the state. The concept of positive freedom, on the other hand, emphasizes that people’s lack of liberty can stem from more sources than the deliberate attempts of others to coerce them to do something they would otherwise not have done. Consequently, this view downplays the idea that an agent A can be unfree only if there is some agent B whose intention and interference forced A to act in a way A did not wish to. It allows that A can be unfree even if no agent B intended to interfere with A and that A can be unfree even if no agent B actually

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interfered with A. If power can be exercised without anybody ever being coerced, the focus of debates about power shifts from power as the actual exercise of strength to win conflicts, to that of power to make nondecisions, that is, to keep certain issues from becoming the topic of conflict. If people expect to lose a conflict if they were to enter into one with you, they will not engage in such conflicts, but that does not mean that they are happy with the way things are. For the concept of positive freedom, then, power can be exercised even if nobody is coerced or loses an actual conflict: you have power to do things only if you would succeed—or would have a reasonable chance of succeeding—if you tried. If you abstain from trying because you know or have very good reason to suspect that someone else would make you fail if you did try, then you do not have power to do that thing. Here positive freedom can be enhanced where others, including the state, have power over the individual, for they can force individuals into enjoying aspects of positive freedom that they would not otherwise be able to countenance. The negative and positive views of freedom are thus based on rather different views of both power and autonomy. For negative freedom, the idea of autonomy is tied specifically to an agent being left alone to choose his or her goals free from undue interference of others. In positive freedom, autonomy takes on a broader scope in which one is autonomous to the extent that one can choose rationally, and rationality can be enhanced through the interference of others. In the former though not the latter someone who shapes our perception of what is in our interest is exercising power over us regardless of the fact that there are no open conflicts and no need to coerce us. Lina Eriksson See also Autonomy; Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton; Dahl, Robert A.; Freedom; Justice; Lukes, Steven; Neoliberalism; Paternalism; Pluralism

Further Readings Berlin, I. (1969). Two concepts of liberty. In Four essays on liberty (pp. 118–172). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Gray, J. (1986). Liberalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Locke, J. (1967): Two treatises of civil government (Peter Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1690) Mill, J. S. (1963). Collected works of John Stuart Mill (J. M. Robson, Ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

LOYALTY Loyalty is often associated with passivity, acceptance, and lack of reflection. The term conveys an image of people who are unwilling to challenge authority and will not get out when the going gets tough. By implication, they may be used or taken advantage of by others in the knowledge that they will continue to support the organization no matter what happens and how badly they are treated. This would seem to give elbow room to the powerful and means that those who are loyal do not have much power. Consider loyal members of a political party, such as those in the U.K. Labour Party from the 1980s to the 2000s. These people may have grown up with parents and peers who supported Labour and may have developed an attachment to the party because it upheld their values. In the 1980s, the party jolted to the Left and lost elections, but these members did not decide to leave for the alternatives, such as the Social Democratic Party, even though they did not like their party losing, nor did they much support the left-wing policies that Labour espoused. Then Tony Blair moved the party to the Right and introduced policies these people did not like either, such as market-led public service and an aggressive foreign policy that led to the invasion of Iraq. But they carried on supporting Labour all the way through. The party leaders could take these people’s support for granted and did not need to pay attention to their views in deciding policy. In this sense, loyalty is associated with little or no power. But loyalty need not make people powerless. In fact, loyalty may be associated with active citizens or consumers who notice what is going wrong and agitate to get it right. Albert Hirschman understood this well in his Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970). Hirschman did see loyalty rather passively, as

when someone just waits for things to get better. But he also thought loyalty mediated the relationship between exit and voice, reducing the chances of exit but increasing the probability of voice. In this sense, loyalty gives elbow to voice, which is powerful because some kind of agitation from citizens or consumers keeps organizations on their toes. So loyalty helps people realize their power to change things. Others have developed the notion further, notably Brian Barry (1974), who argued that loyalty contained voice to a certain extent, which means that people who are loyal fight for what they believe in. In that sense, individuals can be powerful when they are strongly motivated through loyalty. And organizations have most to fear from loyalists who turn against leaders out of disgust about how things have been managed. It may be more in the organization’s interest to have indifferent supporters who will exit or can be bought off, rather than the committed loyalist who agitates until things get put right. Peter John See also Exit and Voice as Forms of Power

Further Readings Barry, B. (1974). Review article: “Exit, Voice and Loyalty.” British Journal of Political Science, 4, 79−107. Hirschman, A. (1970). Exit, voice and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations and states. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

LUCK “Is it better to be powerful or lucky?” In 1980 Brian Barry published under this title a paper in Political Studies criticizing the main indices used in the voting power literature. Ironically, in the second part of his essay Barry proposes an alternative view that basically coincides with the initial measure proposed by Lionel Penrose in 1946. Moreover, this measure is similar to the normalized Banzhaf index, which Barry so much dislikes. Still, the distinction between power and luck, or success and luck in Barry’s view, is important to

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understanding politics and the extent to which political actors are able to shape or determine outcomes. Let us start with an example of three political parties A, B, and C, which have the following numbers of votes based on their seats in a committee: parties A and C have 3 votes each, and party B has 1 vote. The total number of votes in the committee is 7. The number of votes sufficient for the passing of a proposal is 5, which reflects a special majority arrangement. Clearly, in this example, only A and C are necessary for forming a winning coalition. Coalition AC has 6 votes and thus can pass (and if necessary block) a proposal. Whether party B joins this coalition or not will not affect the vote, because B is not needed. Moreover, coalitions like AB or BC do not have a sufficient number of votes to reach the threshold of 5. Clearly, party B does not stand out as a powerful player in this committee. A next step is to add more content to our example: in view of the committee’s jurisdiction, parties have preferences. Party A has a rather conservative view, while party C is the most progressive party. Party B is the center party with preferences between A and C. So we have a ranking on possible issues of A < B < C where “<” is read as “prefers less than.” Before a vote, parties A and C negotiate on the issue and agree on a compromise that is spatially located between their positions. This outcome will be very close to the outcome initially preferred by party B, which may benefit most from this outcome. Is this party therefore powerful? This answer is no: party B is lucky in the sense that it happens to be in the right place at the right time. The ability to shape the outcome has to be contributed to parties A and C. These parties could also have decided not to pass a proposal. Being lucky is therefore not the same as being powerful. If we conceptualize power as a capacity, independent from some preference configuration like the one in our example, a powerful player will repeatedly be able to shape outcomes. An actor who has been lucky once will soon discover that fortune will not always be on his or her side. A last step in our example is to assume that parties A, B, and C have the same preferences: in passing a proposal it is no longer clear who has actually contributed to the making of that proposal. Does this mean that these parties are of

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equal power? The answer is again no. The fact that we cannot observe that power is exercised does not mean that actors do not have power. This is inherent to the concept of power as a capacity. Only when actors have different preferences can power as a capacity, in the sense that some actors are capable of overcoming the resistance of others and are able to make and shape an outcome, become observable. Still, power and preferences are abstract and distinct concepts that should not be blended. Suggesting, as Barry does, that power can be seen as overcoming opposition reduces the concept to specific—and mostly opposing—preferences. The strength of a concept like power is that it applies to countless situations in which actors may have all kinds of different preferences. A rather logical step is therefore to discuss power and luck in more probabilistic terms, giving them content irrespective of a specific decisionmaking situation like the ones discussed in our examples. A probabilistic interpretation is therefore not incompatible with the concept of power, as Barry argues, but helps to distinguish power from preferences. This leads us to the field of (voting) power indices in which a priori assessments of power are made. For our understanding of luck Lionel Penrose’s attempt to define power is especially interesting. Penrose, in his 1946 paper, was the first to acknowledge that power needs to be distinguished from luck. In a setting in which voters independently make up their mind and have equal probability of voting yes or no, Penrose asserts that in general, the power of the individual can be measured by the amount by which his chance of being on the winning side exceeds one half. The power, thus defined, is the same as half of the likelihood of a situation in which an individual can be decisive—that is to say, a situation in which the remaining voters are equally divided upon the issue at stake. (Penrose, 1946, 53)

This approach includes two ideas. First, power is based on a probability expressing the relative number of instances in which the individual is on the winning side. Second, power is distinguished from luck by deducting from this calculation the number of instances in which the individual is just lucky. Interestingly, luck defined in this way is seen

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as a baseline level of being part of the winning group based on probability. Only if an individual’s score exceeds this baseline, can one speak of power. In this probabilistic interpretation power is regarded as a systematic effect, which is a result of an individual’s capacity to affect outcomes, while luck is a random effect that occurs once in a while. We all are sometimes just lucky. But to measure one’s power, we need to focus on those instances that go beyond the baseline. Penrose’s conceptualization of power is the first measure developed for approaching power in the context of voting. As shown by Dan Felsenthal and Moshé Machover (2005), the initial identity proposed by Penrose is the same as half of what later became known as the nonnormalized or absolute Banzhaf index. Moreover in Penrose’s later work he modifies his initial definition of power so that his proposed measurement exactly equals the absolute Banzhaf index. Unfortunately, this work in the late 1940s and early 1950s was largely forgotten and subsequently reinvented by Banzhaf and, to some extent, by Douglas Rae and James Coleman. The Penrose–Banzhaf index expresses power as the potential influence an individual can have over the outcome of voting based on various divisions of the decision-making body by focusing on the passing of a proposal. Felsenthal and Machover therefore label this concept of power as I-power (with I for influence). This concept is different from some of the other indices, most prominently the Shapley–Shubik index, which is based on a voter’s crucial position of turning a losing coalition into a winning one (or vice versa) for all possible orderings of voters. The relative number of times a voter is in this position, that is, a voter is pivotal, determines a voter’s share in the total amount of power, which is set to one. In this way, the index represents, according to Felsenthal and Machover (2005), “a voter’s expected relative share in a fixed prize available to the winning coalition under a decision rule, seen in the guise of a simple cooperative game” (p. 491). Consequently, this conceptualization of power can be labeled as P-power (with P for prize). With its focus on pivotal voters who occupy a crucial position in a voting process, the index clearly distinguishes a measurement of power from luck. Luck and power are rather different concepts. Power can be regarded as a capacity to affect

outcomes in collective decision-making situations. In a probabilistic context, power has a systematic effect on the likelihood of being decisive and therefore can be distinguished from luck. Luck is the incidental occurrence of a preferred outcome, which could be related to other factors, such as preferences or the location of the status quo, than power. In a probabilistic context, it is a random effect. Therefore, as Barry puts it, one’s success in political life—that is, the degree to which one can determine the world—consists of power and luck. To put this differently, anyone can be lucky, even a powerful actor. At the same time, luck should not be part of our understanding of power. For this reason it is better, on average, to be powerful. In a single event, I only wish to be lucky. Bernard Steunenberg See also Barry, Brian; Blocking Coalition; Dowding, Keith; Felsenthal, Dan S.; I-Power; Machover, Moshé; P-Power; Penrose Voting Power Measure; Shapley–Shubik Index; Strategic Power Index; Systematic Luck

Further Readings Barry, B. (1980). Is it better to be powerful or lucky? Parts I and II. Political Studies, 28, 183–194; 338–352. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (2005). Voting power measurement: A story of misreinvention. Social Choice and Welfare, 25, 485–506. Penrose, L. S. (1946). The elementary statistics of majority voting. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 109, 53–57.

LUCK, BRUTE Brute luck is the good or bad luck that one has independently of one’s choices. Paradigmatic cases of brute luck are stumbling over a chest of gold (good) and being struck down by lightning (bad). Ronald Dworkin introduced the term brute luck in order to distinguish this kind of luck from option luck, or the luck one has as a result of a risk that one has either consciously taken or that one could in any case have foreseen and avoided. Paradigmatic cases of option luck include winning

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at roulette (good) and suffering an injury while practicing a dangerous sport (bad). Dworkin’s reason for introducing this distinction was an ethical one having to do with the relation between luck and justice. If Ann and Bob start life with equal chances of success, and Ann subsequently works hard to improve her lot while Bob fritters away his initial endowment on leisure, we are less inclined to object to the resulting inequality between Ann and Bob than if Bob had become disadvantaged as a result of some entirely unforeseeable accident. There is something unjust or morally arbitrary about an unequal distribution of the benefits and burdens of luck, whereas there is nothing unjust or morally arbitrary about an unequal distribution of benefits and burdens resulting from the choices of their respective beneficiaries or sufferers. By “luck” here, Dworkin means brute luck: in terms of distributive justice, Bob’s losing his entire endowment in a roulette game would be no different from his frittering it away on leisure. Similarly, when theorists of power distinguish between power and luck, they generally have in mind brute luck rather than option luck. To be powerful is to be able to achieve certain results if one tries, whereas to be lucky is simply to enjoy those results without any intervention on one’s own part. The distinction between brute and option luck is not always easy to draw. Suppose Smith’s house is destroyed by an earthquake. Is this a case of bad brute luck? One might respond negatively on the grounds that Smith freely chose to buy a house in an area known to be at risk. On the other hand, one might deny that Smith really made a free choice, given that he could find no work in other areas. Perhaps the notion of option luck is best thought of as a matter of degree, ranging between the extremes of pure brute luck and wholly free choice. If option luck is a matter of degree, then degrees of power should be seen as depending, in part, on degrees of option luck. Where a benefit is enjoyed as a matter of pure brute luck, power will have played no role in its creation. But where that benefit is a matter of option luck, its creation should be explained partly in terms of power, partly in terms of luck. Ian Carter

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See also Barry, Brian; Causation; Determinism; Distributive Justice; Freedom; Luck; Responsibility

Further Readings Dworkin, R. (1981). What is equality? Part 2: Equality of resources. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10, 284−345.

LUHMANN, NIKLAS (1927−1998) Niklas Luhmann is considered one of the most important, if not the most important, recent German social theorists. His life project consisted of the development of a systems theory of society. Starting out as a short-term student of Talcott Parsons, Luhmann soon began working out his own original approach, which differs from that of Parsons in three respects. First, it responds to the charges of conservatism raised against Parsons by arguing for the primacy of functions over structures. Functions can be fulfilled by different social structures; hence, structures may change without threatening the existence of the social order. Second, Luhmann argued that communication, rather than action, has to be taken as the basic concept in social theory, on the grounds that the concept of action overemphasizes the actors’ intentions. Third, he adapted from biology the notion of autopoietic systems that are open to their environment (in the sense of possessing the capacity to scan their environment for information) for just the reason that they are operationally closed; that is, their reproduction depends exclusively on intrasystemic processes and not on inputs and outputs. This was in contrast to the central importance of inputs and outputs in the previously dominant conception of social systems as operationally open vis-à-vis their environment. In Luhmann’s theory of society the concept of power comes into play on several levels; in its most specific form, power is the name for the symbolically generalized communication medium of the political system that today we call the state. Luhmann’s conceptualization of power is shaped by his methodological commitment to constructivism. Concepts, he argues, while being the instruments that allow us to understand the

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world, at the same time necessarily blind us to certain aspects of the world; therefore, social theory cannot build on the conceptual framework of actors but must rather construct new conceptual forms that enable the sociologist to observe how actors observe and describe the world. This constructivist commitment to secondorder observations guides Luhmann when he develops his basic assumptions concerning the notion of power in a critique of what he calls the classic concept of power, that is, the capacity of acting according to one’s own will even in face of opposition. According to Luhmann, this classic concept of power, formulated most prominently by Max Weber, rests on ontological assumptions that are untenable but, nonetheless, typically held by actors due to the limitations inherent in their perspective on the world (first-order observation). The classic concept of power reproduces the actors’ illusion that causality and intentions are real while in fact, as second-order observation shows, they are constructions contingently ascribing effects to causes (by identifying just two elements within a chain of determinations potentially unlimited in both directions). Having detached the concept of power from the notions of causality and intentionality, Luhmann then lays out his own approach. He starts from the premise that power can only arise under conditions of uncertainty, that is, conditions that are not completely determined but rather allow for the realization of alternative possibilities. Such conditions are brought about by the functional differentiation of systems: autopoietic systems are fields of uncertainty insofar as their structure is self-produced and does not depend upon external determinations, all of which the differentiation process disrupts. One such uncertainty has to do with the fact that the members of society are dependent upon each other. The insecurity concerning how others will react to one’s own actions and the ways one has to take others’ actions into account give rise to influence, or the capacity effectively to act with regard to others. The next step in Luhmann’s argument consists of distinguishing three different symbolic forms influence has taken. The first he calls insecurity absorption or authority: the imputation that actors could provide reasons for their assertions if they were requested to do so. Such social power

remains diffuse and can easily be challenged. A second and stronger form of influence rests on positive sanctions: exchange relations make for quite a robust structuring of actions. Such economic power is limited, however, in that it collapses in case the positive sanctions remain unfulfilled and turn out to be illusory. This is different in the case of the third widespread symbolic form influence has taken in modern society, namely, influence based on negative sanctions. Only such political power, according to Luhmann, proves stable enough to function as the symbolically generalized medium of communication of the political subsystem, the differentiation of which it thereby allows for. Political power is backed by the threat of negative sanctions. Yet, it is one of the most striking features of political power that, in fact, it depends upon these sanctions normally not being enacted. This is so because power arises under conditions of actors having contradictory preferences. The power holder then constructs a further inverse preference structure, namely sanctioning an inferior actor who does not comply; but this result is only a second best to the power holder who rather seeks the inferior’s compliance, and he or she remains a power holder only in case the inferior also prefers compliance over negative sanctions. Negative sanctions are effective if both parties wish to avoid them. Of course, this presupposes that the inverse preference structure and the threat of negative sanctions are known to both. Hence, symbolic representation is essential to political power. What has to be represented symbolically, in the last instance, is physical violence, because it is the most effective means to back the threat of negative sanctions for at least two reasons. First, violence is generalizable—that is, not bound to specific circumstances—and, second, violence can be organized especially well. One consequence of these features, Luhmann argues, is that the concentration of physical violence within the state allows for the other functional subsystems of society to operate relatively free of violence. This is not meant to imply that negative sanctions remain restricted to the political system, or, for that matter, that positive sanctions are used only in the economic system. Employers, for example, may threaten employees with negative sanctions, and the political system employs positive sanctions as

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incentives. Nonetheless, according to Luhmann, negative sanctions within the economy remain grounded in monetary exchange relations, while within the political system positive sanctions are ultimately grounded in the possibility of physical violence. A second consequence of these central features of physical violence is that political power does not only allow for the unstable relationship of the power holder to the inferior, but rather for a differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate power holders, which is further stabilized by the democratic differentiation of government and opposition. David Strecker See also Authority; Bases of Power; Causation; Influence; Parsons, Talcott; Weber, Max

Further Readings Luhmann, N. (1979). Trust and power: Two works. New York: John Wiley. Luhmann, N. (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft [Society as a social system]. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, N. (2000). Die Politik der Gesellschaft [Politics as a social system]. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Strecker, D. (2011). Logik der Macht. Zum Ort der Kritik zwischen Theorie und Praxis. [The logic of power: On the place of critique between theory and practice]. Weilerswist, Germany: Velbrück.

LUKES, STEVEN (1941– ) Steven Lukes is currently a professor of sociology at New York University. Lukes has also lectured at the University of Siena (1996–2000), the London School of Economics (2001–2003), and Balliol College at Oxford University (1966– 1987). Lukes took his BA in 1962 at Balliol College. He worked as a research fellow at Nuffield College and lecturer in politics at Worcester College and took his MA in 1967. He took his doctorate in 1968, writing a dissertation on the work of Emile Durkheim. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris; New York University; the

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University of California, San Diego; and the University of Jerusalem. Lukes’s main research interests are in political and social theory, the sociology of Durkheim and his followers, individualism, power, rationality, the category of the person, Marxism and ethics, the sociology of morality, and new forms of liberalism. Lukes has published extensively over the course of his academic career in both books and academic journals. His most important books are Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, A Historical and Critical Study (1973), Power: A Radical View (1974), and Liberals and Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity (2003). Lukes’s most influential work, Power: A Radical View, was first published in 1974, and has been reprinted many times. In 2005, a second edition was released with two additional chapters titled “Power, Freedom, and Reason” and “ThreeDimensional Power.” In it, Lukes outlines his famous theory of the three faces of power. Lukes begins by asking two questions. The first asks how should one think about power theoretically and how to think about it empirically. The second, which Lukes says cannot be answered without answering the first, is whether American politics is dominated by a ruling elite or exhibits pluralist democracy. In response to the first question, Lukes submits that there are three faces, or dimensions, to power. The first dimension of power is the most straightforward, which is that of basic decisionmaking power. It also the most visible and most observable of the three faces of power. It focuses on actual behavior and specific outcomes of decision-making processes. In this view, power is in the hands of those who prevail in decision making. The first dimension of power looks directly at observable conflict between interests. These interests are observed by the expression of policy preferences, which is revealed by political participation. Proponents of this one-dimensional view of power include Robert Dahl, Nelson Polsby, and Raymond E. Wolfinger. The second face of power is in essence the power to influence, or to use Lukes’s term, the power of nondecision making. Nondecision-making power is the power that groups and individuals have to control the agenda in debates and make certain issues unacceptable for discussion in moderate

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public forums. Proponents of the second dimension of power took exception to the one-dimensional view of power, claiming that it reflects a far too narrow understanding of power. Because of this, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz argue that the one-dimensional view gives a misleadingly sanguine pluralistic picture of American politics. Not only can power be enforced by exerting decisionmaking power, it can also be enforced by controlling and setting the norms, values, and the design of the systematic decision-making procedures that consistently benefit certain groups at the expense of others. In contrast with the one-dimensional view, proponents of the two-dimensional view hold that potential issues should also come under scrutiny when studying power. However, like the onedimensional view, the two-dimensional view looks only at observable conflict of interests and conflicts, which are embodied in express policy preferences and subpolitical preferences. Also, the twodimensional view assumes that nondecision making is in itself a form of decision making. Because of this, Lukes says that the two-dimensional view is only a qualified critique of the one-dimensional view. Finally, the three-dimensional view holds that along with the two faces of power described above there is a third face of power: power as domination. This form of power is the most important and the most insidious, according to Lukes. The third face of power works to influence the thoughts and desires of individuals so that they will want things that they would otherwise oppose. The problem with both the one-dimensional and the two-dimensional views of power is their focus on actual behavior, decision making, and conflict. According to Lukes, systematic bias is not sustained simply through series of individual acts but also by the patterned behavior that develops over

time through action and inaction. Lukes claims that the third face of power can manifest itself in latent conflict as well as actual conflict. According to Lukes, the ways in which issues are left out of public discussion are manifestations of the third face of power. Looking at the third face of power allows one to look at whether consensus in society is real or manipulated, as well as looking at uses and abuses of power beyond the realm of conflict. In the second edition of Power, he grapples further with the agency–structure problem and Foucault’s account of domination, which Lukes sees as the epitome of power. Because power necessarily involves domination, Lukes sees it as ineradicably contested. In extending his account of power in this way (which some critics see as a fourth face of power) Lukes takes power farther away from empirical measurement. Lukes’s work has had a tremendous influence on the study of power. His three-dimensional view of power goes beyond the previous traditional understanding of power and forces scholars to consider the effects of power when it is not overtly seen through conflict as well as consider the uses of power in actual conflicts. Joseph Angolano See also Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton; False Consciousness; Foucault, Michel; Interests; Pluralism; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Dowding, K. (2006). Three-dimensional power: A discussion of Steven Lukes’ “Power: A Radical View.” Political Studies Review, 4, 136–145. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave.

M the result should excuse.” Machiavelli is explicit that this argument only applies to forming or reforming the state. Moreover, he maintains that cruelties are cruelties, and cruelties have to be minimized. He fully accepts the Christian value system, but argues that in many cases peace and order can only be achieved through cruelty. The second statement that became prominent is a question: “Is it better to be loved more than feared, or feared more than loved” (The Prince, p. 90). His answer:

MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ (1469–1527)

Political science might have developed quite differently if, over the past centuries, the work of Niccolò Machiavelli had not been ridiculed and besmirched and its author not demonized. Rather than discussing why and how this happened, this entry will point out the essentials of the theory Machiavelli elaborated in his major political writings: The Prince, the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, and the History of Florence, highlighting two of his most prominent statements that invited outcry and refusal. His must prominent statement is that “the end justifies the means” (The Prince, p. 94). This is not what he advocates or values, but the conclusion of his observations, as we see from the following quote:

Men love at their own free will, but fear at the will of the prince, and that a wise prince must rely on what is in his power and not what is in the power of others, and he must only contrive to avoid incurring hatred, as has been explained. (The Prince, p. 91)

There is nothing wrong with his answer; it describes a maximin solution. However, in general, maximin solutions are inefficient in variable-sum games; it seems that Machiavelli is quite aware of this and so he repeatedly proposes that the prince should seek the love of the people. It may prevent conspiracies from within, serve as a rampart against outside competitors (The Prince, pp. 96 and 108), or serve both roles:

Let a prince therefore aim at conquering and maintaining the state, and the means will be judged honourable and praised by every one, for the vulgar are always taken by appearances and the issue of the event; and the world consists only of the vulgar, and the few who are not vulgar are isolated when the many have a rallying point in the prince.

Those tyrants who have the masses for friends and the nobles for enemies are more secure in the possession of their power, because their despotism is sustained by a greater force than that of those who have the people for their enemies and the nobles for their friends. (Discourses, p. 186)

In the Discourses (p. 120) we can read “a wise mind will never censure anyone for having employed any extraordinary means for the purpose of establishing a kingdom or constituting a republic. It is well that, when the act accuses him, 395

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Machiavelli regards as unfortunate those princes who, to assure their government to which the mass of the people is hostile, are obliged to resort to extraordinary measures; for he who has but a few enemies can easily make sure of them without great scandal, but he who has the masses hostile to him can never make sure of them, and the more cruelty he employs the feebler will his authority become; so that his best remedy is to try and secure the good will of the people. (Discourses, p. 139)

The latter quote explicitly connects love of the people and cruelty. There is hardly any better illustration of this combination than the following episode, which reports how Cesare Borgia, called the duke, made use of his minister Messer Remirro de Orco to gain power and to please the people. When he [Cesare Borgia] took the Romagna, it had previously been governed by weak rulers, who had rather despoiled their subjects than governed them, and given them more cause for disunion than for union, so that the province was a prey to robbery, assaults, and every kind of disorder. He, therefore, judged it necessary to give them a good government in order to make them peaceful and obedient to his rule. For this purpose he appointed Messer Remirro de Orco, a cruel and able man, to whom he gave the fullest authority. This man, in a short time, was highly successful, whereupon the duke, not deeming such excessive authority expedient, lest it should become hateful, appointed a civil court of justice in the centre of the province under an excellent president, to which each city appointed its own advocate. And as he knew that the hardness of the past had engendered some amount of hatred, in order to purge the minds of the people and to win them over completely, he resolved to show that if any cruelty had taken place it was not by his orders, but through the harsh disposition of his minister. And having found the opportunity he had him cut in half and placed one morning in the public square at Cesena with a piece of wood and blood-stained knife by his side. The ferocity of this spectacle caused the people both satisfaction and amazement. (The Prince, p. 55)

In this episode, the prince excelled in strategic thinking. This is a characteristic feature of successful

heroes in Machiavelli’s tales; and of course it is a dominant feature of his own reasoning. It is not an exaggeration to say that he introduced game theory into political reasoning and political theory. However, Machiavelli had a much grander project: the renaissance of the Roman Republic, as described in the Discourses, through unification of Italy, which will bring peace and order to the people and protection against outside enemies. To reach this goal he is prepared to accept the tyranny of Cesare Borgia and, after his failure, a princely regime of the Medici. Just as in the history of Rome he expects that, in the end, the despot will be replaced by a republic. He also expects that history will repeat itself. The republic will be followed by chaos, chaos will be followed by tyranny, and tyranny again will be followed by a republic. To Machiavelli, this cycle is not a law of nature but the quintessence of his study of the past and the general conclusions that he derived from it. It is a way of thinking about history and a justification for the study of history. From the Discourses it is obvious that he prefers republican government to monarchy or tyranny. Perhaps more surprisingly, he gives a series of arguments for why he thinks that “the people are wiser and more constant than princes” (Discourses, p. 214). No wonder that the kings of divine right and their vassals were keen to discredit Machiavelli. So far, democratic writers and politicians have not tried hard enough to revise the negative picture of his work that his enemies were successful in creating. Manfred J. Holler See also Leadership

Further Readings Machiavelli, N. (1952). The prince. New York: Mentor. Machiavelli, N. (1882). Discourses on the first Ten books of Titus Livius, in The historical, political, and diplomatic writings of Niccolò Machiavelli (Christian E. Detmold, Trans.). Boston: Osgood.

MACHINE See Dispositif

Manipulation

MACHOVER, MOSHÉ (1936– ) Moshé Machover is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of London. A mathematician and logician by training, he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ), spent 1959–1960 as a UNESCO Fellow at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and received his PhD at HUJ in 1962 and worked there as a lecturer in mathematics until 1964. From 1964 until 1966 he was a visiting lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Bristol. After a short period as a lecturer at HUJ, Machover moved to the University of London, where he worked first as reader of mathematical logic and thereafter as professor of philosophy until becoming professor emeritus in 1999. Since 2001 he has been the codirector of the Voting Power and Procedures (VPP) Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Until the early 1990s, the main focus of Machover’s work was in mathematical logic, more specifically the philosophy of mathematics, recursion theory, and nonstandard analysis. Machover is the author or coauthor of four books: A Course in Mathematical Logic (with J. L. Bell in 1977), Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy (with E. Farjoun in 1983), Set Theory, Logic and their Limitations (in 1996), and The Measurement of Voting Power: Theory and Practice, Problems and Paradoxes (with Dan. S. Felsenthal in 1998). In the 1990s Machover started the extended and very productive collaboration with Felsenthal that produced the fourth book. Their early work dealt with specific voting procedures such as the sequential voting by veto, the method for electing the Israeli prime minister, and Condorcet’s method of voting. The main focus of the collaboration has, however, been on the measurement of voting power in multimember bodies. The best-known contributions of this collaboration are the distinction between I-power and P-power, the reinterpretation of various paradoxes pertaining to voting power measures, and the analysis of ternary voting games. In addition, they have extensively and authoritatively discussed the history and main applications of power measures in many articles and in The Measurement of Voting Power. Of particular practical importance are their studies on the

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Council of Ministers of the European Union and, more generally, the workings of European Union institutions after the recent expansion. The authors have on several occasions expressed their concern about the decision-making capability of the Union at its current size when the prevailing decision rules basically stem from the period when the Union had 12 members. The most visible and practical role of VPP has undoubtedly been to contribute to the debate on institutional reform in the EU. The paradoxes of voting power have also been dealt with by these authors. They argue that many paradoxes—notably the paradox of large size, the paradox of redistribution, and the paradox of new members—have been regarded as such mainly because of the rhetoric used in their expression or because of the failure to distinguish between absolute and relative power. Along with his multidisciplinary scholarly work, Machover has been an active discussant and commentator in matters ranging from EU institutions (especially decision making and distribution of voting power) to Middle Eastern political developments. Hannu Nurmi See also Felsenthal, Dan S.; I-Power; Paradox of New Members; P-Power

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.

MANIPULATION Manipulation means the handling or controlling of something, and in the context of social power is the handling or controlling of another person. Such manipulation is normally taken to be morally wrong and thought to imply covert or subtle, devious or underhanded control of another actor. Some argue, however, that the manipulation of one person by another is not necessarily wrong if that manipulation is in the best interests of the subject. Manipulation is usually thought to be a separate form of power from force or influence. A

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person is forced to do something by another person either when he or she is made physically incapable of doing anything else or when the negative incentives against him or her carrying out the activity are so great that they have no other choice. A negative incentive here is some cost to the individual for not carrying out the activity. To speak of being “forced” to do something when the positive incentives are high (i.e., the rewards for carrying out the activity are large) is usually considered a metaphorical use of the term. However, some argue that the distinction between negative and positive incentives is difficult to maintain unless the distinction is made in reference to some norm—such as the prevailing conditions or status quo—or it is given some normative justification. One person is influenced by another when he or she responds in some way to the actions of the influencer. It might be that the influencer has some very persuasive arguments, or is trusted by the person because of his or her authority, knowledge, or expertise. One person might influence another because of some other powers he or she holds. Government might be influenced by the views of important business people or corporate financiers. The power such actors have if they are displeased or threatened by government policy might mean their views hold great sway over the government. Both force and influence are overt: the actor being forced or influenced is usually aware that of being subject to this pressure—though actors might be influenced by others or events without being aware of it. Manipulation, however, is normally thought to be carried out behind the back of the subject, so to speak. When someone deliberately influences you without your knowledge, then this is usually considered a form of manipulation. We might define manipulation in the following manner: A manipulates B by getting B to choose something B would not otherwise have done by restricting B’s alternatives in some manner, where B does not understand that A is thus affecting his or her choice. The restriction on the alternatives of B might be a physical reduction in them—forcing B into a restricted choice set. But often such manipulation occurs through B’s lack of knowledge or information about the other alternatives. Indeed, restricting or affecting the information that the subject receives is the most discussed form of manipulation in the literature.

Information might be a power resource but one might rationally be ignorant. There are four sources of rational ignorance: (1) people have imperfect information; (2) they know they have imperfect information; (3) it is costly to (a) acquire more information, and (b) to assess the worth of that new information; and (4) the expected gains of that new information might not be worth the costs. Robert Goodin in his Manipulatory Politics argues that manipulators often exploit these four sources of rational ignorance with four distinct strategies. First, manipulators simply lie to their subjects, relying on the fact that people do not have perfect information. But lying is potentially costly, because once a manipulator is caught lying he or she loses reputation and the ability to manipulate in the future. For that reason, manipulators directly lie only when it is necessary, or when they judge that the chances of being caught are very low. Second, they rely upon secrecy, knowing that people are ignorant and that it can be costly to collect information. In this sense manipulators do not lie; they simply do not give out relevant information. In doing so they recognize that decisions will be made based on biased information, because key and relevant aspects will be missing from the information set of the decision maker. Third, they rely upon propaganda. (To some extent propaganda simply means “information,” but it has come to mean biased information.) Here information is give to the subject to aid his or her decision, but that information is systematically biased, with some facts not given and other facts given a spin to lead the decision maker to one particular viewpoint. Advertising can be a form of manipulation because it gives information with a particular spin; the information provided might not be strictly false, but is not complete. Advertising also often appeals to nonrational aspects of a person, associating a product with a particular lifestyle—a drink with life on a luxury yacht—that appeals at some noncognitive level. Advertising directed at children is also manipulative, not only by creating desire in children but also, at one remove, in their parents, as the child demands the product. Finally, rather than hiding information, lying, or even spinning, manipulators might simply overload subjects with information, giving so much that the subject is unable to come to a rational decision.

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Persuasion might slide into manipulation in cases where the subject is no longer aware of the manipulator’s influence, or perhaps is unaware of the manipulator’s interest in the outcome and hence trusts the advice more than he or she should. Indeed, when repeated, persuasion can lead to a form of brainwashing; this form of manipulation is the topic a large part of the literature on manipulation. The complete subjugation of a subject’s will to that of another, such as that which happens within some religious sects, groups, or families, is the most obvious form of manipulation. Some people are more vulnerable to such subjugation, which can be neurologically observed in changes in the prefrontal cortex. There might be a genetic element in this susceptibility, but emotionally scarred and educationally subnormal people are the likely victims, as manipulators work on an emotional level, providing psychological rewards and punishments. Keith Dowding See also Agenda Setters; Authority; Blackmail; Coercion and Power; Deflected Wants; Exploitation; Influence; Manipulation; Submissive; Subordination

Further Readings Goodin, R. E. (1980). Manipulatory politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ware, A. (1981). The concept of manipulation: Its relation to democracy and power. British Journal of Political Science, 11, 163–181.

MANN, MICHAEL (1942– ) Michael Mann is a historical sociologist whose main work, The Sources of Social Power, will, when completed, provide a history of power from the beginning to the present day. Two volumes have been published so far (1986, 1993), taking the story up to the World War I. He intends to take the story up to our own time in one or more volumes to come. Mann has also written a number of other books and articles, but The Sources of Social Power is the central statement of his view of power; the view is elaborated primarily in

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the first chapter of volume 1 and slightly revised in the first chapters of volume 2. The importance of Mann’s work is that his definitions of the different sources of power, as well as his detailed arguments about their workings in various historical periods, are bound to inform the discussion about power for many years to come. Mann argues that there are four types of social power, which can be distinguished by source. The first three—economic, political, and ideological power—are familiar to sociologists, although, as we shall see, Mann conceptualizes them somewhat differently from other thinkers. The fourth is military power, which is rarely considered or distinguished as a separate source of power in the social sciences (except perhaps in international relations). These are different types of power; they are autonomous and operate differently, even though they can also become intertwined. The initial letters of each of the four (ideological, economic, military, and political) thus lead to his IEMP model of power. Several distinctions can be made in relation to these four sources: one is that the sources of social power are conceived of as networks that overlap and intersect and differ in terms of their spatial reach. Second, they take different forms, so that power is not only distributive, or zero sum, or A over B (which is how Karl Marx and Max Weber conceived of power). Instead, power can also be collective (Mann draws on Talcott Parsons here). Collective power is that whereby people cooperate to enhance their power over third parties or over nature. Finally, power can be extensive, with great spatial reach, or intensive, in which case it is more tightly organized. It can also be authoritative— that is, deliberate and coercive, or it can be diffused, which entails similar but not explicitly commanded practices. These characteristics apply to all four types of power. Economic power, for example, can be authoritative and intensive when it applies to production in the organization of labor, or it can be diffused and extensive, especially under capitalism, when it applies to exchange relations, which tend to involve far-flung networks of buying and selling goods without a single top-down organization. This view of economic power means that Mann, unlike Marx, does not see economic classes as engaged in direct confrontation with one another,

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but rather as being organized through quite different types of power networks that are nevertheless always asymmetrical, such that the networks of ruling classes tend to be more extensive and cohesive than those of other classes. But economic power relations of class also typically overlap with or intersect with other types of power, such as ideological networks of religious power. Similarly, the organization of political power has, in the past, often prevented class politics from going beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Ideological power is divided into a transcendent and thus spatially extensive type, and the more intensive type of immanent morale that can, for example, reinforce organized protest or battle units. The most important examples of transcendent ideological power are the world religions, though political ideologies such as fascism and communism have also had extensive reach. Mann has been criticized for downplaying the role of ideological power, but he has argued, against Marx and his followers, that ideology is not necessary for underpinning or maintaining capitalist power relations. Military power can also be divided into two types. There is a concentrated–coercive type, as in tightly-ranked troop formations, but also a more extensive type, as when colonial outposts or foreign bases can exercise control over distant lands even if this control does not reach deeply down into the population. The distinction between military and political power is a feature that sets Mann apart from other social thinkers, and allows him to include war in his explanation of the rise of the modern state. In this respect, Mann follows Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, and others, and this account of the emergence of the state is now widely accepted among historical sociologists. Still, military power and the military relations between states are frequently either overlooked or regarded as contingent forces outside the scope of social scientific analysis; Mann, on the other hand, offers a structural account of military power. Political power constitutes the most complex part of Mann’s analysis: in contrast to Marx, but as in Weber’s sociology, political power is autonomous. Political power, like the other sources of social power, has taken many forms over the course of history, but in Mann’s view it always

consists of centralized control over territories. In modern societies, political power has become monopolized by the state, and Mann’s account of the state builds on and extends Weber’s famous and still widely used definition that the state holds a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. Even so, Mann distinguishes the despotic power, for example, of absolutist and authoritarian states from the state’s infrastructural power through society, which first emerged in Europe and America in the middle to late 19th century. This allows Mann to conceptualize contemporary state power not just as a coercive apparatus, as Marx and Weber did, but also as a product of the struggle for democratization whereby the state has been able to incorporate various citizen groups through party representation. At the same time, state capacity has grown enormously, so that it now also provides various infrastructural services, including universal education, health care, and welfare for its citizens. In this way, the state has penetrated the lives of its citizens more deeply. Finally, Mann rejects the notion, widespread among contemporary social thinkers, that state capacity is nowadays being increasingly undermined by globalizing forces from without and hollowed out from within. Instead, again because of his view that power is not a zero-sum game, he has argued that new forms of governance are being added to the state’s capacities, even as some of its other powers are being weakened or transformed. Mann’s historical account of power relations, as mentioned earlier, has reached the 20th century. Apart from ongoing work to complete the final volume of The Sources of Social Power, he has put his dissection of power to use in books about fascists, ethnic cleansing, and American imperialism. In the case of the American empire, for example, he has argued that while the extensive reach of its military power is greater than that of any previous empire in history, this power rests on a weak ability to project American political, economic, and ideological power into the world, and is thus “incoherent.” This a good example of how Mann’s distinction between four types of power rather than the more conventional three types allows him to address crucial issues that other social scientists are unable to deal with. Mann’s central concern with power puts him close to thinkers like Marx and Weber who want to

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explain the major asymmetries in power relations as central to the dynamic of social change. Unlike these classical thinkers, however, he wants to delineate power relations throughout history in a way that is faithful to the complexity of the comparative-historical record and at the same time provides an all-encompassing account that allows for the interplay of all the four sources. This is an ambitious undertaking that has no equal in contemporary social science, though Mann characteristically makes modest claims for what this kind of enterprise can achieve, particularly in cases where his own expertise or the historical record is too limited to come up with definitive answers. A key feature that sets Mann apart from other contemporary social thinkers is that for him all power works through organized networks. This distinguishes his work from other current approaches, which understand power in terms of individual choices or in terms of socially constructed beliefs that shape people’s identities. Mann’s work, in contrast, has been described as taking an organizationally materialist approach, and in this respect his writings can be seen as extending a sociological tradition that sees human beings as being enmeshed in power relations. Mann calls this social caging, again developing a sociological perspective that places the emphasis on social structures—or in this case organized networks of power—instead of focusing on individuals and their beliefs. Mann’s work can thus be seen as advancing the tradition of sociological thinking whereby human beings are constrained and enabled by networks of power of their own creation. Ralph Schroeder See also Authority; Ideology; Imperialism; Marx, Karl; Networks, Power in; Parsons, Talcott; Relative Autonomy of the State; Weber, Max

Further Readings Hall, J. A., & Schroeder, R. (Eds.). (2004). An anatomy of power: The social theory of Michael Mann. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schroeder, R. (1998). Michael Mann. In R. Stones (Ed.), Key sociological thinkers (pp. 338–354). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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MARTIN See Martin Index

MARTIN INDEX Luther Martin was a Maryland delegate to the convention that drafted the U.S. Constitution in 1787. He was hostile to proposals that would substantially strengthen the central government and give larger states greater representation than smaller states. Martin left the convention before it had finished its work, and he subsequently opposed ratification of the Constitution. Martin delivered a report on the work of the Constitutional Convention to the Maryland State Legislature. In this report, which was also published as a pamphlet for use in the Antifederalist cause, Martin (1787/1937) argued that even if the States who had the most inhabitants ought to have the greatest number of delegates [to the proposed House of Representatives], yet the number of delegates ought not to be in exact proportion to the number of inhabitants because the influence and power of those states whose delegates are numerous will be greater, when compared to the influence and power of the other States, than the proportion which the numbers of their delegates bear to each other; as, for instance, though Delaware has one delegate, and Virginia but ten, yet Virginia has more than ten times as much power and influence in the government as Delaware.

Martin assumed that each state delegation would cast its votes as a bloc, and he went on to count up various voting combinations of states in order to support his claim. His objection to apportioning seats proportionally to population clearly anticipated one of the fundamental propositions of modern voting power analysis— namely, that voting power is not the same as voting weight (e.g., seats). When William Riker discovered Martin’s argument, he thought it sufficiently insightful to be characterized as “the first power index,” though

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Martin never proposed a summary measure of voting power. Moreover, while voting power may be highly disproportional to voting weight, it need not be so and, under the provisional apportionment of House seats to which Martin referred, each state’s share of Banzhaf voting power is in fact closely aligned with its seat share. However, if Martin had focused on the two-stage voting power of individual members of the House, his objection would have been well founded, as each of the 10 Virginia members would have had more than two and one half times the Banzhaf voting power of the lone Delaware member. While Martin’s expectation that state delegations in the House would act as blocs was not borne out, state electoral votes (for President) would soon be cast in blocs, and the U.S. Electoral College has subsequently been one of the principal institutions to which voting power analysis has been applied. Nicholas R. Miller See also Voting Power

Further Readings Martin, L. (1937). The genuine information delivered to the legislature of the state of Maryland relating to the proceeding of the General Convention. In M. Farand (Ed.), The records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (Rev. Ed., Vol. 3; pp. 172-232). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riker, W. H. (1986). The first power index. Social Choice and Welfare, 3, 293–295.

MARX, KARL (1818–1883) Marx’s theory of power has its origins in his initial understanding of the problems of alienation and reification. In his early writings, and most notably in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), On the Jewish Question (1843), and the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx begins to think about the political and socioeconomic implications of Ludwig Feuerbach’s ideas on Hegel, alienation, and religion. Marx suggests that it is to Feuerbach’s great merit to have demonstrated that God can be

understood anthropologically as a creation of humanity. To use language more reminiscent of Hegel and Marx, in Marx’s estimation it is to Feuerbach’s credit that he shows why God is the alienated essence of humanity that has been projected onto an alien being. Marx adds that what is particularly interesting in the process of projecting human qualities upon nonhuman entities is that what begins as a human affair in the world of people comes back to humans in a form they no longer recognize as being the product of their own actions and imaginations. To the extent that God is attributed with the ability to love, create, share, forgive, make peace, know and understand all aspects of life, that is, is attributed with humanity’s best qualities, humanity in its turn becomes incapable of realizing those qualities in the actual lives of its concrete, individual members. Humanity thus becomes hateful, stupid, craven, passive, violent, and, of particular interest from Marx’s point of view, property-mad and acquisitive. In the writings of early modern philosophers and social scientists avant la lettre, these negative attributes then become elevated to ahistorical traits of humanity as it supposedly always has been and always will be. Marx notes that once these decidedly antagonistic premises are accepted as being anthropologically and scientifically valid, it is relatively easy for bourgeois economists and legal theorists to construct their ideological justifications of capitalism and parliamentary democracy as necessary and inevitable, that is, as somehow natural. It is not simply that in giving our best qualities to God we forfeit the chance to realize them ourselves in practice. In the pageantry, rites, rituals, secret codes, and ordered hierarchies of organized religion we lose sight of the fact that behind the phenomenological appearance of otherworldliness in these rites there is a human essence that has become obscured beyond recognition. That essence, distorted and transformed in religious ceremony, comes back to the very people who created it in an otherworldly form. When this happens, Marx suggests, people become the playthings of forces that they do not understand, and that they subsequently misrepresent in thought and culture as totem and fetish. Form, essence, and force are emphasized here in order to show that Marx is interested in the relation between our modes of knowledge, suggested by the terms form and

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essence, and our social relations. Like Hegel, Marx thinks that in the course of history knowledge is progressing to such an extent that at some point absolute knowledge and freedom becomes a real, objective possibility. Marx and Hegel, of course, have different explanations for this optimism. For the moment, the point is simply that power comes into play when faulty modes of knowledge become effective means of perpetuating relations of domination such as those obtaining between the upper echelons of the clergy and ordinary individuals. To the extent that the relationship is legitimized as something ordained by God, it attains a quality of unassailability, inevitability, and indeed of regal glory. On this account, the fear and awe inspired by the church hierarchy and its cults is held to be something beautiful and heroic, when in fact, Marx says, it enslaves people to illusions and forlorn hopes of salvation in a world that does not exist. This is going to prompt the young Marx to argue that to be radical is to tackle things at the root: one must eliminate the earthly causes that give rise to religious thinking rather than criticizing religion according to its own flawed logic and mystified claims. This anticipates his mature view that the analysis of power in capitalist society should never uncritically accept the premises of capitalist society itself, that is, that humanity is naturally acquisitive and aggressive, that competition is by definition efficient, that resources are inevitably scarce, that value is realized in exchange, and so on. For Marx the student of the dialectician Hegel, there is no form without content, and no subject without an object (only God has the privilege of having knowledge by knowing Himself, and therefore, all nonmetaphysical knowledge is knowledge of an object exterior to but not hermetically sealed from the knowing subject). Hence we misconstrue our relation with the world when we as epistemological subjects stop seeing that to a significant extent we actively create the external world of known objects. That world is not separate from us or imposed upon us by mysterious forces. When humanity loses sight of its active and collective role in transforming nature for the purposes of satisfying human need, engaging in artistic expression, and creating the bases of the transcendence of natural necessity, humanity becomes alienated from nature and from fellow humanity; where

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there is alienation power is exercised. Kant understands this when he suggests that all objectivity is mediated by human subjectivity, that is, objectivity is mediated by the two forms of sensible intuition (time and space) and the 12 categories of the understanding (causality, existence, plurality, contingence, etc.). But while Kant argues that there is always a discrepancy between the forms of our knowledge of objects and the objects themselves (were it possible to know them without the mediation of conceptual form), Hegel thinks that in the course of history all epistemological dichotomies will be eliminated in a perfect synthesis of humanity and nature, form and essence, subject and object, and so on. But Hegel also thinks that the mediation of humanity and nature, working itself out in the historical process in a series of stages in the rational progression of what he calls the unfolding of Geist (mind, spirit) on its journey to self-discovery, must pass through long phases of acute alienation before a final reconciliation (not fusion) of humanity and nature becomes possible. Marx’s early understanding of these issues takes a decisive turn in 1843–1844 when he comes to the conclusion that what Feuerbach has done for God and religion must now be accomplished for Hegel and Hegel’s political philosophy, in which the reconciliation of humanity and nature is accomplished in the modern state. It will be seen below that for Marx alienation is not to be explained as a manifestation of original human sin or as the regrettable but inevitable (natural, ahistorical) limit to understanding. It is in fact part of his theory of power that he insists that, whether consciously or not, ahistorical arguments are usually articulated with a view to defending the existing social order against the implications of critical epistemological inquiry. Critical epistemological enquiry (in philosophy, political economy, science, and art) is therefore always subversive of hierarchy and other institutionalized obstacles to human freedom. While it is easy to see how religious thought and institutions impede the realization of human freedom and humanity’s best qualities, from 1843–1844 onward Marx is determined to transform the critique of religion first suggested by Feuerbach into a critique of all alienated political power, that is, the state, as well as a critique of all alienated socioeconomic power, that is, alienated labor. The early writings thus foreshadow his

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more mature view that the legal and socioeconomic modalities of reproducing alienated labor power (in short, the wage system) offer the key to understanding the ideological mystifications caused by the exercise of entrenched power through private ownership of the means of production and the capital–labor relation. Feuerbach’s demonstration that humanity creates God and then becomes incapable of recognizing its own mental and sensual energies in the institutions of organized religion is expanded upon by Marx in relation to Hegel’s theory of the modern state. In the Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel regards the institutions of the modern state as the realization of the most perfect expressions of Geist that world history had witnessed up until that time (leaving open the question of what was to follow the most recent stage of perfection). For Hegel the state is part of a larger constellation he refers to as Sittlichkeit (ethical life), which is structured by the family, civil society, and the state itself. Hegel abandons the distinction between the state of nature and civil society employed in various ways by thinkers in the social contract tradition (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant). He regards the idea of a spontaneous and unanimous exit from the state of nature to be an ahistorical abstraction, and, moreover, one cannot derive the terms of political obligation from a contract, because the very idea and practice of a valid contract presupposes the state. The state is thus an idea that is also real; it is the manifestation of reason in history. It is an instance of mediation between humanity and nature in which humanity is freed from natural necessity (in the guises of mechanical causality and natural scarcity), though it does not abolish what is natural in humanity (such as what he considers to be our natural inclination to reproduce, have families, and love our children). In the modern state the difference between nature (thesis, unconscious, vital) and humanity (antithesis, conscious, rational) is aufgehoben, that is, it is cancelled and preserved in a higher synthesis that preserves what is rational and necessary in nature while it cancels and preserves what is rational and necessary in human consciousness. In this account the relation between humanity and nature is neither identical (humanity is more than mere nature because of consciousness and thought) nor dualistic (humanity is always also a part of nature), but dialectical. It is a relation

propelled by contradiction, tension, and conflict; but, Hegel insists, it is a relation that is deeply rational. This rationality is manifested in ethical life as follows. The family has its basis in nature; ties are noncontractual, spontaneous, sometimes violent, but always benevolent. In the family the relation between humanity and nature can be characterized as unmediated unity. In civil society the unity between humanity and nature is broken: people enter into contractual relations governed by calculations of individual interest and personal profit. Thus, civil society is both inferior to the family and superior to it as well. As the term aufgehoben suggests, civil society is inferior because it lacks unity; it is superior, however, because no one is naturally dependent on anyone else as they are in the family. That is, although it is far from ideal, the great gain in civil society vis-à-vis the family is that people enjoy a form of freedom that they do not have where relations are so close to nature that there is little scope for reason. It is a sphere of mediated disunity. In the state, in contrast with civil society, relations between humanity and nature achieve a quality of mediated unity in which the spontaneity, affect, and community of the family is carried to a much more complex and rich stage of development after passing through the moment of mediated disunity in civil society. The mediated unity of the state is only possible because of the mediated disunity of civil society, and indeed, it is part of Hegel’s argument that the modern state is superior to the Greek polis precisely because, however beautiful, the polis was more like an extended family than a rational state in which both subjectivity and collective being can flourish. Marx shares the view that the relation between humanity and nature is based on dialectic rather than relations of dualism or identity, and indeed, he acknowledges that his predecessors Kant and Hegel established this before his entry in these debates. But Kant and Hegel regard the mediation of humanity and nature to be accomplished in reason and, by extension, in law. For Marx, however, moving from idealism to historical materialism, a radical analysis of the question shows that the relation between humanity and nature is mediated in the labor process. Labor power is reason operative in history, and all hitherto existing modes of production have been successively less flawed mediations on the way to perfect mediation. It is thus the

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revolutionizing of the labor process that holds the key to moving from merely political emancipation to human emancipation, which is what Marx demands in On the Jewish Question without referring to labor power or different modes of production. Hegel sets the stage for the radical revolutionary standpoint with his theory of objective spirit (objektiver Geist), in which he counters Kant’s claim that all objectivity is mediated by human subjectivity, that is, objectivity is mediated by the two forms of sensible intuition and the 12 categories of the understanding. Hegel does this by arguing that all subjectivity is mediated by socioeconomic and historical objectivity. In other words, Hegel believes that history and society—not timeless nature—are the conditions of subjectivity. Because history and society are continually changing forms in the ongoing unfolding of Geist, human subjectivity is also in a state of constant and contradictory movement. For Hegel, human subjects are always being propelled toward a more perfect understanding of nature and more complex forms of political organization and freedom. But whereas Hegel can be interpreted to mean that this process reaches a certain point of culmination with the institutions of the modern state, Marx counters that the state is nothing other than an expression of alienated political power, and that alienated political power will persist until the labor process in civil society is liberated from the shackles placed on it by private ownership of the means of production and exchange. Marx insists that the potential of living labor is curtailed by the interests and needs of accumulated labor in the form of capital and private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism liberates humanity from the chains of feudalism, only to become a brake on human productivity in more modern social relations dominated by capital. Marx envisages a revolution in which humanity takes back its best personal qualities from God, while reappropriating its best political qualities from the state as well as its most productive and creative qualities from the owners of capital. Hence, whereas Hegel can conceive of a perfect state, for Marx the term state is symptomatic of social relations that are allowed to assume the form of mediated unity, when in reality mediated disunity continues to prevail as class conflict, inequality, alienation, and various forms of unaccountable power and state-sponsored violence. It

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is precisely the social power of capital that it can distort an epistemologically critical analysis of the socioeconomic and political phenomena that serve to reproduce the capital/wage-labor relation as if it were a quasinatural occurrence governed by autonomous laws. Marx adds that where social relations are construed as somehow natural, inequality and alienation tend to seem like matters of chance, fate, destiny, and even natural sorcery. It is in this sense that Marx regards his project as a completion rather than as a dismissal of the ideals of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Subsequent Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci (1891– 1937) have been particularly sensitive to the role that culture in the widest sense plays in perpetuating the social power of capital. Darrow Schecter See also Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemonic Power; Interests; Marxist Accounts of Power; Miliband, Ralph; Miliband–Poulantzis Debate; Revolution; Revolutionary Cell Structure; Substructure and Superstructure

Further Readings Avinieri, S. (1968). The social and political thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Henry, M. (1983). Marx: A philosophy of human reality, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Schecter, D. (2007). The history of the Left from Marx to the present: Theoretical perspectives. London: Continuum. Schmidt, A. (1971). The concept of nature in Marx. London: NLB.

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POWER

Roughly speaking, and leaving aside doctrines of Marxism in power associated with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other revolutionary leaders, Marxist contributions to the study of power after Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci tend to fall in one or more of the following categories: Western Marxism, critical theory, and structuralism. It is sometimes asserted that the critique of instrumental reason common to much of Western Marxism and

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critical theory is an attempt to reconstruct a philosophical debate on consciousness, experience, reason, and knowledge that in fundamental respects goes back to Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, and that as such the great philosophical rigor of Western Marxism and critical theory is achieved at the great expense of a substantial sociological deficit. This deficit is visible in the evident lack of a theory of social action that does not reduce action to class interest; the claim is that Marxists often do not distinguish between interests and values. Therefore, few Marxists apart from Gramsci can account for both consensus as well as conflict in advanced industrial societies without resorting to the very dubious idea of false consciousness. The attempt to incorporate a theory of communication and discursive consensus into a Marxist framework tends to modify the framework beyond the parameters of Marxism. The case of Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) would seem to provide a very good example. Habermas can be regarded along with Alfred Schmidt (b. 1931; author of Marx’s Theory of Nature, 1962) as one of the last living members of the first generation of critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, which was founded with the financial backing of Felix Weil in the 1920s, and which was directed for many years by Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and then Theodor W. Adorno (1903– 1969). Habermas’s doctoral thesis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), is a fine historical account of the disintegration of a noncommercialized sphere of public information in advanced industrial democracies, and is written from a broadly Marxist perspective. In his subsequent works he abandons this perspective in favor of an analytical and normative approach he refers to as a theory of communicative action. His theory of communicative action has very little in common with Marxism, and indeed, in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) and other works he explicitly sets himself the task of correcting the sociological and communicative deficits of Marxism and historical materialism that render the latter obsolete. The corresponding problem is that what there is of sociology in Marxist theories of power tends to be excessively empirical and restricted to more and less complex models of stratification. In extreme cases this has meant broadening the analysis of the

class composition of advanced industrial societies from bourgeoisie and proletariat to as many as 35 different identifiable social classes, measured according to varying levels of skill, education, income, and so forth. Hence, it is widely argued that the sociological deficit in Western Marxism and critical theory is reflected in the fact that power is conceptualized more effectively by thinkers such as Foucault (1926–1984), Bourdieu (1930–2002), and feminist as well as other new social movement theorists. These theorists are credited with having a more nuanced conception of power than one focused on social class and stratification, which usually means they take up questions of identity, group affiliation, social action (in the broadest sense), recognition, and transgression in non-Marxist terms. While Foucault and to an even greater extent Bourdieu would probably concede that they are indebted to Marx in key respects, they would not define themselves as Marxists. Hence, in assessing the legacy of Marxist accounts of power after Marx and Gramsci, the first issue is to ascertain to what extent the critique of instrumental reason is also a critique of power. For Western Marxists such as Georg Lukács (1885–1971), what distinguishes capitalism as a mode of production is that for the first time in history, the economy is no longer a secondary activity performed for the sake of more fundamental aims such as political authority, military conquest, religious salvation, and so on. Following Max Weber’s analysis of capitalism and Protestantism, and his sociology of law, Lukács maintains that in the wake of the industrial revolution, economic considerations begin to infiltrate all areas of life, including religious spirituality and artistic creativity. In History and Class Consciousness (1923) and other writings, Lukács reads Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism through the lens of Weber’s theory of legal-rational domination. He observes that on the one hand, capitalism creates unprecedented levels of economic development, which make freedom from necessity an objective possibility for practically everyone living in the industrialized world. On the other hand, however, the widespread reification and alienation that accompany this process of rapid industrialization and technological development tend to obscure the basic workings of the system. Lukács’s solution is quite simply that the acute alienation of the

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proletariat makes it the subject–object of history entrusted with the historical mission of ending alienation by taking control of the labor process and directing it toward universal human self-realization rather than private accumulation and the perpetual expansion of capital in need of new markets. This would seem to confirm the sociological deficit theory in no uncertain terms! It is in any case a position that is rejected by other Western Marxists such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), for whom humanity is not only alienated from its living labor power through the mechanisms securing the private appropriation of socially created wealth. For Sartre, following the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), humanity is alienated from something more fundamental than its own labor power. Indeed, it is alienated from something that does not even belong to it, and that it cannot reappropriate in any meaningful sense; that is, it is alienated from being. Hence Sartre maintains that there is always a discrepancy between pure being “in itself” (what Heidegger calls das Sein) and human being (what Heidegger calls Dasein) “for itself.” Once again, it would seem that social and political questions are collapsed into dubious philosophical solutions. But Sartre is aware of this problem. The author of Being and Nothingness (1943) and the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) maintains that the conflict between philosophical inquiry and political reality is concretely resolved in practical struggles in society. Acting as individuals and in groups, people engage with society and other people and groups; they become involved in projects that demand their responsibility and decisiveness. Rather than accepting the theory of false consciousness, Sartre holds that it is people who choose what they become because, he insists, any notion of a timeless, ahistorical human essence is always belied by the reality of precarious and open-ended human existence. Sartre thus attempts to provide Marxism with a theory of social as opposed to merely class action, as well as a theory of existence. Without these new components, he adds, Marxism runs the risk of becoming a doctrine of state power rather than a critical theory of the dialectical relation between humanity and nature as it unfolds in history and society. Indeed, for Sartre it was no accident that where Marxism had degenerated into an apology and justification

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of state power, as in the USSR and China, social action was largely ritualistic and conformist. Sartre warns against an overemphasis on the labor process for an overall understanding of society and power relations within it. This overemphasis, characteristic of orthodox Marxism, deflects attention from the fact that although people grow up in milieus constituted by the existence of social classes, they also mature in neighborhoods, families, various peer groups, and so on, where class location is mediated by a wide range of other experiences that are no less important for the formation of an individual’s worldview and orientation in terms of political allegiance, weak or strong sense of nationalism, attitudes toward authority, and capacity to deal with ambiguity. Whether or not someone becomes a racist, or a scab, or a supporter of colonialism remains a matter of individual choice and responsibility, which cannot be deduced from one’s relation to the means of production. Similarly, qualities such as courage, generosity, and steadfastness are found across the class divisions operative in society. When observing social action, Sartre notes the existence of a network of groups that coalesce, disperse, and re-form on new bases in a continual process marked by congruent, overlapping, and conflicting allegiances. This is certainly a far cry from any mechanical model premised on an economic base that gives rise to a legal, political, aesthetic, and religious superstructure. Other Marxists, such as the structuralist Louis Althusser (1918–1990), regard this kind of existentialist Marxism as a retreat to a humanism of the sort that Marx the scientist abandoned shortly after the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), On the Jewish Question (1843), and the 1844 Manuscripts. In making this argument, Althusser is influenced by the structuralist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). Lacan argues that subjectivity and consciousness do not actively constitute the world, as is suggested in the idealist philosophies of Kant and especially of Hegel and Hegelian Marxism. To posit subjectivity as constitutive of knowledge and being is to assume the causal primacy of some kind of metaphysical self-constituting presence or essence, when in fact subjectivity for Lacan is characterized by a lack rather than a presence. Subjectivity does not constitute but is rather constituted by the inability of the subject to harmonize what he

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refers to as the imaginary, symbolic, and real levels of existence. At the imaginary core of experience there is thus a lack rather than a transcendental ego or other such organizing center. If Marxist and other versions of humanism regard the real as the totality of humanity (subject) and nature (object) mediated by reason (where reason is variously understood as law, history, labor, or society), Lacan rejects the possibility of any mediated totality between subject and object. He asserts that no matter how one tries to formulate this approach, it remains trapped within the confines of a framework that configures reality in terms of a subject-centered (and therefore, for proponents of theoretical posthumanism, metaphysical) presence. Althusser finds this extremely useful for his own methodology. The rejection of the subjective constitution of reality leads Lacan to argue that there is no integral center of the self that might function as a determining agent; the self is overdetermined by the unstable interaction of the symbolic (linguistic), the imaginary (dreams, images) and the ultimately indeterminate real. Althusser attempts to make Lacan useful for a Marxist methodology capable of understanding the capitalist economy as the absent cause of the superstructure, that is, as a plural cause that manifests itself in terms of its absence rather than as an identifiable base that causes the phenomena of the superstructure. In his estimation, this is how one avoids the problems of empiricism, which is bourgeois and therefore apologetic of capitalism, as well as the problems of humanism, which is metaphysical and therefore ideological–religious rather than scientific. Although he sets himself up in opposition to all forms of humanism, including that of Lukács, Althusser’s approach would seem also to dissolve sociological and political problems in theoretically sophisticated but ultimately academic philosophical approaches to the study of power. The consequence is of course that it is difficult to derive any theory of social action from Althusser’s Marxism, which is revealed by his own initial description of his structuralist Marxism as theoretical practice. The search for a more sociological Marxist theory with practical implications is taken up with much greater success by Henri Lefebvre (1901–1999), author of the three-volume Critique of Everyday Life (1947, 1960, 1981). Despite his continued use of Marxist terminology in many of his writings,

Lefebvre concedes that Marxism is in need of urgent updating in order to be able to explain post-World War II phenomena such as consumerism, youth culture, urban planning, and the arrival of what might be called mass society. That is, common to both Lefebvre’s sociology of everyday life and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is the project of explaining why history is not a movement from primitive classlessness to caste, class, and finally complex classlessness, as historical materialism had predicted, but rather a movement from primitive classlessness to caste, class, and then mass society. For critical theory, the task consists in supplementing the Marxist theory of class polarization and exploitation with a theory of coerced integration drawing on Weber, Freud, and aesthetics. For Lefebvre, the solution to the evident problems of Marxist theory and the oppressiveness of Marxist regimes in practice is not to jettison Marxism for some kind of standard empirical social science or for new social movement theories, especially if in both cases this means bracketing out political economy from the inquiry of society and social power. He attempts to enrich Marxism with a sociologically informed theory of the modalities of daily life. This entails taking the idea of surplus value, which explains how what appears to be an exchange of equivalents (the labor power of the individual members of the proletariat sold in return for wages paid by capitalists) is actually a relation consummating the appropriation of labor power, and enlarging it with the aim of developing a systematic account of how experience in a wider sense is appropriated in modern industrial societies. Hence, where Marx speaks of the appropriation of labor power by capital, and Weber studies the appropriation of citizen political action by party machines, Lefebvre analyzes the appropriation of individual experience of daily life by experts in the medical profession and consultants of various stripes, the professionalization of sport, the commercialization of popular culture, the arrival of supermarkets and fast food, and, crucially, media manipulation of information concerning everyday life. His ideas had an enormous impact on Guy Debord (1931–1994) and the Situationist International, and a great many of the protagonists in the contestations of 1968 in France as well. In the context of French culture and beyond, his critique of everyday life acts as kind of bridge between the surrealist critique of everyday

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life formulated by André Breton (1896–1966) in the 1920s and 1930s, and the more sociological formulation of that critique in the writings of Foucault and Bourdieu in the 1960s through the 1980s. In Lefebvre’s writings one glimpses the bases of a very original and insightful Marxist theory of power that could be much more fruitfully developed than it has been to date. Darrow Schecter See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Foucault, Michel; Gramsci, Antonio; Marx, Karl

Further Readings Jay, M. (1984). Marxism and totality. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Lefebvre, H. (1991). Critique of everyday life (Vol. 1). London: Verso. McLellan, D. (1979). Marxism after Marx. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Plant, S. (1992). The most dangerous gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern world. London: Routledge.

MCCLELLAND, DAVID (1917–1998)

David McClelland was an American personality psychologist known for his research on implicit achievement motivation and later his studies of implicit power motivation. He was educated at Wesleyan University, the University of Missouri, and Yale University. Most of his career was spent at Wesleyan University, Harvard University, and Boston University. In the 1940s, McClelland used motive arousal experiments to develop a content analysis system for scoring motive imagery in the stories that people wrote about pictures in the Thematic Apperception Test. In the 1970s, beginning with a study of the relationship between power concerns and drinking, and drawing on David G. Winter’s research on power motivation, he then developed a general conception of the power motive in all its forms and manifestations. Specifically, he explored how power concerns are channeled in different

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stages of psychosocial adaptation to the environment, how the power motive may be divided into different components (such as strong vs. weak, sex aggression vs. others) that predict prosocial versus antisocial behavior, how power motivation combines with other personality variables, how power is expressed in religions, and how the different forms of power motivation are related to social and historical events such as national growth, resource mobilization, and war. One combination of power-related variables extensively studied by McClelland and his colleagues is the Leadership Motive Pattern (LMP), a binary variable involving (a) high power motivation (above the median), that is (b) higher than affiliation motivation, and (c) high activity inhibition (above the median). People with the LMP are effective leaders and managers, able to increase morale and assemble resources. In the late 1970s, McClelland began systematic research on the physiological aspects of power motivation. Power motivation and the LMP, especially under conditions of stress or inhibition, are associated with increased sympathetic nervous system arousal and increased secretion of specific hormones such as norepinephrine. Over time, this processes can lead to high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems, and reduced immune system functioning. Because of their less effective immune system, people with stressed power motivation are more vulnerable to infectious diseases. McClelland also explored relationships between implicit achievement and affiliation motives and various physiological processes and hormonal secretion. This line of research has been continued and expanded by Oliver Schultheiss, who had a postdoctoral fellowship with McClelland. Throughout his career, David McClelland argued that the lack of correlation between implicit and direct (questionnaire) measures of power motivation (which he referred to as implicit and self-attributed motivational systems, respectively), as well as the different behavior correlates of the two measures, was strong evidence that these two kinds of measures represented two fundamentally different motive systems. David G. Winter See also Power Motive; Testosterone, Power and

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Further Readings McClelland, D. C. (1975). Power: The inner experience. New York: Irvington. McClelland, D. C., & Boyatzis, R. E. (1982). The leadership motive pattern and long-term success in management. Journal of Applied Psychology, 67, 737–743. McClelland, D. C., Koestner, R., & Weinberger, J. (1989). How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ? Psychological Review, 96, 690–702. Winter, D. G. (1998). Toward a science of personality psychology: David McClelland’s development of empirically derived TAT measures. History of Psychology, 1, 130–153.

MECHANISMS Mechanisms, as used in the social sciences, are analytical constructs that tell in detail how the two components of an explanation are related— that is, how the explanans produces the explanandum. Social mechanisms are particularly suitable to address power-related phenomena due to their interdisciplinary nature, their ability to connect macro and micro phenomena, and their acknowledgment that purposive actors (not variables) have the starring roles in politics. Used across the natural and the social sciences in the form of simple models, mechanisms produce satisfactory partial explanations without the formal requirements of causal explanations and without the universal aspirations of the grand theory. Mechanisms, frequently presented as simplified analogies of how something works, have always been part of the scientific toolboxes of the natural and the social sciences. Mechanistic thought was commonly used by several pre-Socratic philosophers (Anaximander, Pythagoras) to describe the functioning of nature in general and of celestial bodies in particular, and is widely use in contemporary state-of-the-art studies of the neurosciences to explain the functioning of the brain. In the social sciences, from Aristotle to Karl Marx and from Adam Smith to Talcott Parsons, the mechanical analogy has also been used to describe the dynamics of human relations, whether in regard to the provision of material goods (economics), the crystallization of social practices

(sociology), or struggles for the control of enforceable rules (politics). Such a broad scope of application throughout time and across diverse fields of knowledge is possible due to the simplicity, pervasiveness, and great explanatory power of the mechanistic analogy. Mechanisms are usually described as formed by three sets of components; two of them are static and the third is dynamic. The static components (also called elements or entities) are the whole and its parts, as in a clock and a click wheel. The dynamic component is the flux or movement that relates the parts among themselves and with the whole, as is the case with the ticking of the clock. For example, the mechanism of social differentiation works in such a way that a given individual (the part) feels empathy or antipathy (the dynamics) with other individuals (other parts) to form groups like “us” and “them” (the whole). As shown in the previous example, the use of mechanisms as explanatory devices and pedagogic resources facilitates the description of complex phenomena in simple terms, a sort of modeling that allows for the separation of the phenomenon to be explained from the rest of the social phenomena. Mechanisms tend to be simple and linear processes, located close to factual experience, that explain a small part of social interactions. They seldom work in isolation; it is usually the confluence of several mechanisms that produce the macro social events. To continue the example, the mechanism of social differentiation works along with the mechanisms of material inheritance and symbolic identification to create the phenomenon of nationalism. Given the difficulties of building a full-fledged definition of nationalism, an efficient alternative is to use social mechanisms to describe a portion of the creation and promotion of national sentiments. The fact that mechanisms as explanatory devices are used in several disciplines makes it difficult to agree on a shared definition. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify common patterns in the usage of the mechanistic analogy across the social sciences. Mechanisms refers to recurrent processes, logical sequences of interactions between rigid parts and dynamic processes that are expected to function always in the same fashion, regardless of contextual variables. Mechanisms, unlike social systems, are not expected to adapt or to receive

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any feedback from the surrounding environment. Therefore, it is possible to say that mechanisms are automatic; once the initial conditions are in place and the process is launched, the outcome will certainly occur. In this sense, they represent a form of thoroughgoing determinism that leaves almost no room for human agency. This indifference to human will and passions has rendered mechanisms cold and distant artifacts, indifferent to the richness of the human being; on the other hand, they have proven to be democratic and egalitarian entities that make no distinctions of race, religion, or gender. Regarding their place in the broad edifice of scientific knowledge, mechanisms are located between universal covering laws and thick narrative descriptions, between formal modeling and storytelling. Because mechanisms provide detailed descriptions of how things actually work, with no need for an extensive theoretical framework and without the ambition of formulating social laws, they are rather convenient for social scientists working with middle-range theories. Indeed, the greatest achievement of social mechanisms is their explanatory efficiency, that is, the considerable amount of intelligibility they convey with little analytical structure. It is important to point out that they complement conventional explanations. Causal links tie a cause to an effect; instead, mechanisms explain how that relationship occurs. For instance, the Marxist mechanism of surplus value explains how class exploitation actually occurs. There are several examples of mechanisms in the social sciences. The bandwagon effect consists of people adopting a belief or attitude based solely on its popularity, regardless of its substantive merits; it is also known as herding. Another example of a popular social mechanism is the self-fulfilling prophecy, in which an event that would not otherwise have happened occurs because of the aggregation of artificially inflated expectations. This is the mechanism used in economics to explain one type of inflation: prices that otherwise would have stayed stable skyrocket only because people increased their demands on the belief that prices were going to rise. Other examples of well-known mechanisms in the social sciences are the Hegelian dialectic (a thesis generates its own antithesis and then its synthesis) or the defensive mechanisms of

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the brain that block the memory of stressful events. Martin A. Maldonado See Also Deterrence Theory; Dispositif

Further Readings Elster, J. (1989). Nuts and bolts for the social sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hedstrom, P., & Swedberg, R. (Eds.). (1998). Social mechanisms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2004). Social boundary mechanisms. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34, 211–236.

MEDIA, THE Mass communication is the process by which messages created by one person or a group of people are transmitted to a large audience. This process is made possible by the existence of a device (medium) that has the possibility to reach a large number of people. The complex of these devices (such as the press, radio, television, and the Internet) is often referred to as the mass media. Although ancient societies used forms of communication and devices that, relative to the technological possibilities of the times, could be classified as mass media, the invention and diffusion of the printing press in the 15th century transformed in an unprecedented way the possibilities of reproducing writings at low cost and reaching large audiences; this invention opened the possibility of the development of modern mass media. Newspapers developed during the 17th century in Europe, although it was only in the 19th century that they started reaching vast portions of the population in Europe and North America. The production function of media products is characterized by huge economies of scale. The fixed cost of producing the first copy of a book or a newspaper normally constitutes the largest component of the total cost. Once the first unit has been produced, the possibility of producing more copies depends on the costs of the physical reproduction and delivery of the original product. The

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20th century saw these costs fall dramatically, thus allowing for the first time the distribution of printed material to a huge audience. The role of printed media in society has therefore increased with the discovery of new technologies for cheap and massive duplication of the original material. The same argument can be applied to movies and, later on, to the development of radio, television, and, more recently, the Internet. The growth of mass communication has paralleled the development of democratic institutions to the point where the mass media have been referred to as the fourth power, a pillar of democratic decision making comparable to the executive, legislative, and judicial powers, whose separation constitutes the foundation of democratic governance. This idea is based on the presumption that mass media have a very powerful influence on public opinion and on voting behavior. Whether this is the case or not has been the object of intense debate among social scientists. Research in this direction started in the period between the two world wars, under a general presumption that mass communication was an extraordinarily powerful device: Walter Lippman, in his book Public Opinion in the early 1920s, suggested that “it is no daring prophecy” that learning to create consent will change politics. These ideas now go under the name of theories of mass propaganda: use of the media for political propaganda was quite common at the time both by authoritarian regimes and by the Allies during the World War II. However, the first systematic study, conducted on survey data by a group of researchers at Columbia University, provided rather disappointing results. Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet studied Erie County, Ohio, during the 1940–1944 American elections, finding little evidence in favor of the theories of mass propaganda, for they found that those with the strongest views listened to and read from their own partisan side. Those most open to conversion were the ones who read and listened the least. The influence of the Columbia School was such that, since then, the dominant view has been that campaigning and the media have only minimal effects on voters. Until quite recently, most studies continued to find little evidence of persuasion by mass media. Consequently, observed correlations between media exposure and voting choices

were regarded as spurious. One hypothesis, well documented by psychological research, is that people tend to avoid information that contradicts their prior beliefs: this phenomenon generates a confirmatory bias, that is, a tendency to emphasize information that supports one’s views and to ignore or discredit that which does not. More recent research, however, has shifted the focus from a generic media effect to a more sophisticated understanding of the types of effects. In particular, it is now commonly accepted that the news affects public opinion in three ways: enabling—allowing people to learn what world events are occurring; mobilizing—getting people involved in politics and voting; agenda setting— defining the policy agenda and shaping attitudes toward issues. Voting choices are concomitantly influenced. It is important to remember that only a small part of the media effects can be directly observed in voting behavior: this is the case when voters can be convinced to change their vote from one candidate to another (persuasion) or when they can be convinced to vote for a candidate when they would have otherwise abstained (activation). A number of other effects can lead to reinforcement of prior opinions or to variations that are not pronounced enough to induce a change in behavior. The discreteness of the voting choice constitutes therefore a first obstacle toward an accurate observation of media effects. In this sense, behavioral changes are likely to underestimate the total effect of media on the political attitudes of voters. An alternative hypothesis is that the impact of political communications is larger at intermediate levels of exposure. The reason for this nonmonotonicity is that the probability of changing opinion is a function of two variables. On the one hand, it is increasingly a function of the exposure to media, because the viewer is exposed to more messages; on the other, only the messages that are accepted will determine a variation in the receiver’s opinion. Voters with stronger prior beliefs will be less likely to accept messages that are not in tune with their opinions. These voters are those who are generally more interested in politics and therefore more exposed to media influence. This means that voters with the highest exposure will not be easily persuaded and voters with little exposure will not receive the messages. Hence, it is at intermediate

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levels of media exposure that the conversion effect should be stronger. Convincing evidence of the impact of mass media on people’s beliefs and attitudes has now been accumulated by the extensive research on the topic conducted during the last 20 years. Experimental evidence suggests that the effects of mass media have less to do with persuasion than with commanding attention and priming judgments. However, apparent minimal effects can be, at least partially, a consequence of measurement errors. John Zaller argues that tangible effects are due to the reception gap, the difference between the amounts of information received about different candidates. According to Zaller, most studies have been conducted on U.S. presidential elections, where campaigning is normally quite intense, with plenty of information on both candidates: this generates a minimal reception gap and therefore minimal effects, which is different from arguing that the campaigns had no effect. In local elections, however, where the reception gap between incumbents and challengers is normally much larger, the impact of the media has been found to be sizeable. One of the main problems that researchers have to tackle when studying the effects of mass media on the public is the fact that people practice a selective exposure to outlets of similar political orientation: hence a correlation between exposure to mass media of a given political orientation and voting for parties that represent that orientation almost certainly contains a reverse causality effect. The empirical strategy to identify media effects consists therefore in finding a source of exogenous variation in media exposure. David Stromberg, for example, uses the diffusion of radio across U.S. counties during the 1930s and finds that radio affected the distribution of relief funds during the New Deal as a result of the impact that it had on political participation. Valentino Larcinese, using the amount of information supplied by some major British newspapers about candidates and electoral districts during the 1997 general election campaign, finds that politicians’ prominence in the media increases the probability that voters recall their names and that, in turn, political knowledge increases the propensity to vote. A study of the impact of FOX News (Rupert Murdoch’s ultraconservative cable television channel) on the choice of American voters, exploiting the fact of its varying availability in

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different areas, found that it caused an increase in votes for the Republican party of about 0.5%. Having established that the mass media can have important effects on public opinion and elections, some scholars question whether the commercialization of media and their dependence on advertising revenue could compromise their role of watchdog of political and economic power. This represents an important argument in favor of the presence of relevant public broadcasters, like the BBC in the United Kingdom. More generally, the important role that the mass media can play in democratic life makes them quite different from other businesses and justifies the introduction of the special regulations on ownership and limits to market concentration that are usually present in democratic countries. On the other hand, and for precisely the same reasons, state control of the media is certainly not a guarantee of independence, and dictatorships are often observed to propagandize heavily through state-controlled media. Hence the organization of the media market requires striking a delicate balance among various forces in order to create a media system that is as independent and pluralistic as possible and that can therefore serve democratic institutions rather than specific political or economic factions. Valentino Larcinese See also Information; Manipulation; Persuasion; Voting

Further Readings Converse, P. E. (1964). The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In D. E. Apter (Ed.), Ideology and discontent. New York: Free Press. Della Vigna, S., & Kaplan, E. (2007). The FOX News effect: Media bias and voting. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122, 1187–1234. Larcinese, V. (2007). Does political knowledge increase turnout? Evidence from the 1997 British general election. Public Choice, 131, 387–411. Lazarsfeld, P., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1944). The people’s choice. New York: Columbia University Press. Stromberg, D. (2004). Radio’s impact on New Deal spending. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119, 189–184. Norris, P., Curtice, J., Sanders, D., Scammell, L., & Semetko, H. A. (1999). On message: Communicating the campaign. London: Sage.

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Zaller, J. (1992). The nature and origins of mass opinion. New York: Cambridge University Press.

MICHELS, ROBERT (1876–1936) Robert Michels is the paradigm theorist of oligarchy. His main text is Political Parties; first published in 1911, it represents a landmark in the study of organizational dynamics. Originally a sympathizer with revolutionary Marxism, Michels came to despair of democracy’s viability and (reluctantly) accepted elite theory. One of his core ideas is that usually one group of elites does not simply replace another. Rather, there is an ongoing process of power-sharing pacts, with the older sections absorbing and assimilating the new elements: not so much a circulation des elites as a réunion des elites. Recognizing this, and realizing the potential of charismatic leaders to break through rank-and-file apathy, he went on to become an adherent of Mussolini’s fascism. His key claim is that power in organizations will inexorably concentrate in the higher echelons of their bureaucratic hierarchies. Organizations are subject to and will succumb to the unyielding and deterministic tendencies that constitute what he terms “the iron law of oligarchy.” The iron law, as the name suggests, has universal application. The argument is that due to obstacles inherent in their internal edifices, mass parties, trade unions, and large-scale pressure groups will inevitably degenerate into self-perpetuating oligarchies. As these organizations are indispensable to the state, society, Michels reasons, cannot be democratic. To test his hypothesis, he studied organizations within the socialist movement, especially the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). At the time, the latter was the world’s largest socialist party and the most committed to maintaining democracy in its internal organization. Supposedly, it would be here that a counterexample might exist. However, Michels found that the SPD was, as he predicted, incapable of sustaining nonoligarchic structures of accountability between the leadership and the rank and file. The socialist society of free individuals, he came to argue, is absurdly naive. His work remains central to the study of organizational structures, and is still of great interest to the student of elite theory, socialism, and democracy.

The complex of tendencies that prevent the fulfillment of democracy may be classified into those dependent upon organizational necessities and those that are irreducible psychological imperatives. First, organizations are characterized by an extensive differentiation of function, and the expert leadership required to fulfill technical imperatives of efficiency ensures that the power of determination quickly concentrates disproportionately in their hands. As a corollary, leaders become independent of the control of the collective will. This, the technical indispensability of leadership, is the principal cause of oligarchy. Second, leaders become accustomed to oligarchic privilege and develop an urge to dominate others, while the masses have a need to be guided and require leaders they can venerate; feelings of gratitude help guarantee the leaders’ continual reelection. These are the two main premises upon which Michels develops his thesis that democracy contains an oligarchic nucleus. He provides three different yet interrelated theories about the origins and development of oligarchy, even though the relationship between them is not always clear. He has what Herbert Kilschelt calls two weak and one strong conception of oligarchy. They are a theory of transaction costs, a theory of membership lethargy (weak, or preliminary, theories), and a theory of elite control (strong theory). The weak theories build on the elite theories of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, while the strong notion goes beyond them. The weak notion is critical of direct democracy, in particular of the idea that all members of an organization are able to participate equally in the collective decisionmaking process. Due to the actual numbers involved, this is mechanically and technically impossible. The strong notion stresses that the interests of elites and those of the masses will polarize. Initially, a leadership clique may be responsive to its constituency, but as the organization matures, professional leaders become stable and evolve into a remote institution. From here they form a kind of cartel and build up a metaphysical wall. Democratic control, Michels concludes, is reduced to a minimum. Expressed laconically, the underlying sociological law of all modern democratic parties is, “Who says organization, says oligarchy.” Michels’s argument has attracted various criticisms. He treats psychological characteristics as eternal categories: individuals share a universal

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identity. It can be countered, with good reason, that they could just as likely be the result of particular circumstances. Furthermore, Michels’s inference that specialized knowledge will monopolize overlooks the disagreements that often exist between expert opinions. Further still, when an amalgamation of elites does take place, it may be that the old leaders do hold on to their positions. But if this is at the expense of compromising their policies, such an argument could, as Gordon Hands explains, be used in support of democracy rather than against it. Perhaps the most encouraging response to Michelian oligarchies, though, has come from the literature on producer cooperatives. Michels is characteristically skeptical of the survival of workplace democracy, as his brief discussions on syndicalism and producer cooperatives indicate. Significantly, this has not always been confirmed by empirical evidence. On the contrary, the empirical inquiries into participatory workplace democracies by researchers like Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen Whitt have shown that oligarchic tendencies can be resisted, although not easily. The degree to which these attributes can be successfully sustained remains to be seen, but certainly the prediction that politico–economic organizations are destined to be dominated by the dictates of oligarchs is open to question. Nevertheless, Michels’s thesis continues to have a strong influence as a comprehensive explanation of oligarchic development. It is now clear that organizational democracy is an elusive goal. Since Political Parties, the progress toward oligarchy by what begins as organizational democracy has been widely accepted as largely unavoidable. The tendency for power to concentrate at the summit of an organization is an (almost) omnipresent phenomenon. Michels’s seemingly accurate predictions about the future behavior of democratic organizations have ensured that Political Parties is a pivotal text in the canon of political sociology. Although it may be an exaggeration to universalize and speak in terms of iron laws, Michels highlights and defines what are clearly formidable tendencies. Irrespective of whether he always analyzed them correctly, it is indisputable that they exist, and that they are strong. Chris Wyatt See also Democracy; Elite Theories; Political Parties

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Further Readings Kitschelt, H. (1990). The medium is the message: Democracy and oligarchy in Belgian ecology parties. In W. Rudig (Ed.), Green politics one. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Michels, R. (1990). Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. London: Transaction. (Original work published 1911) Parry, G. (1969). Political elites. London: Allen & Unwin. Rothschild, J., & Whitt, J. A. (1986). The co-operative workplace: Potentials and dilemmas of organisational democracy and participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

MILIBAND, RALPH (1924–1994) Adolphe Miliband was born in Brussels to PolishJewish parents and raised in a working-class community. He fled to England in 1940 and settled with his father in London, changing his name to Ralph. Early interest in socialism was reinforced by wartime life in the East End of London and youthful exposure to the work of Harold Laski. He entered the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1941, becoming Laski’s intellectual protégé and a student activist. Following naval service, he completed his first degree, started doctoral research, and began teaching at the LSE. In 1972 he became professor in politics at Leeds University and held various part-time appointments in North America from 1978 through 1992. Throughout his academic career, Miliband was politically active, initially in the Labour Party (where he supported the Bevanite Left) and later in the British New Left. He supported New Left Review, cofounded The Socialist Register, and helped form the Socialist Society as an independent, broad-based left-wing movement with red–green (i.e., left-wing and environmental) sympathies. These political commitments convinced Miliband that teaching and research should contribute to socialist education. This is reflected in his first book, Parliamentary Socialism (1961), which critically dissected how the Labour Party’s attachment to parliamentarism had prevented it from forming strong links to its base in the labor movement, limited its radicalism, and ensured that periods in office further weakened any radical policy commitments.

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Commitment to socialist education also prompted his most famous book, The State in Capitalist Society (1969), which offered a cathartic critique of the pluralist approaches to economic and political analysis dominant in the Anglophone world. It revealed the close connections between the state apparatus, state managers, and the political class and the interests of capital as mediated through direct personal connections, the nature of the ruling ideas, the role of schooling and the mass media, and broader structural constraints. It also triggered the famous Miliband–Poulantzas debate and helped set the research agenda on the slate in the 1970s and 1980s. Miliband published four further books. Marxism and Politics (1977) was a general introduction to Marxism and its analysis of politics from Marx and Engels onward and covered many crucial theoretical and political issues. Capitalist Democracy in Britain (1982) developed the general insights of his first two books through a broader analysis of the dynamics of class power in Britain, offering insights into Thatcherism as well as earlier periods of Conservative and Labour rule. Class Power and State Power (1983) packaged various earlier essays and revisited the old question about the relative autonomy of the state, especially as reflected in the relationship between class power and state power. Finally, despite his terminal illness, he completed Socialism for a Sceptical Age (1994), which updated the case for a socialist alternative to the capitalist order. Bob Jessop See also Marxist Theories of Power; Miliband– Poulantzas Debate

Further Readings Barrow, C. W., Burnham, P., & Wetherly, P. (Eds.). (2007). Class, power and the state in capitalist society: Essays on Ralph Miliband. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Newman, R. (2002). Ralph Miliband and the politics of the New Left. London: Merlin.

MILIBAND–POULANTZAS DEBATE This debate occurred between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas in the pages of New Left

Review, a radical journal, in the 1970s. It concerned the nature, form, and functions of the state and how to analyze them. It is usually described as pitting instrumentalism (the state is an instrument that can be used by different social forces for different purposes) against structuralism (those in charge of the state are structurally constrained to advance the interests of capital). As such, it framed many theoretical discussions and empirical research on the state in the 1970s and 1980s. This description is misleading, however, and it is important to revisit the debate to see what was really at stake. This misleading account arises because the two protagonists conceived the capitalist state in radically different terms and adopted different presentational strategies. Whereas Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) moved from elites as social categories to broader social forces and then to structural factors, Poulantzas’s Political Power and Social Classes (1968) moved from structural analysis via class struggles to specific social categories. Focusing on their respective starting points suggests that Miliband was an instrumentalist and Poulantzas a structuralist, even though their overall approaches contradict this. Poulantzas initiated the debate in 1969. He argued that Miliband’s book erred in basing his Marxist analysis on revealing the factual errors in non-Marxist approaches because it trapped him into debating on their terms, and that it was too concerned with individual agents and their motives rather than with classes and their interests. These errors shaped Miliband’s critique of the managerial revolution thesis and the alleged neutrality of the state bureaucracy. He had also neglected the distinctive class unity of the state apparatus and so failed to explore the sources of this unity; and overlooked the key role of the “ideological state apparatuses” in securing social cohesion in a classdivided society. In essence, because Poulantzas was more concerned to attack Miliband for not sharing his own approach, he ignored the polemical and cathartic value of Miliband’s text in the prevailing academic and political context in the Anglophone world to which it was addressed. Miliband’s immediate response (1970) made four main points: Poulantzas (1) ignored the role of empirical material in developing a critique of the state, (2) relied on “structural superdeterminism”

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to explain the limits on the state’s autonomy from capital, (3) advanced such a strong claim about the state’s growing autonomy from popular forces that he could not distinguish democracy from fascism or appreciate the virtues of democratic regimes for democratic struggle, and (4) mistakenly placed ideological state apparatuses inside the state rather than in the wider political system. This first exchange shaped reception of the debate as one between structuralist and instrumentalist accounts of the same analytical object. Yet Poulantzas’s book concerned abstract features of a generic capitalist type of state whereas Miliband’s book focused on real states in postwar Western capitalist social formations. The debate was renewed in Miliband’s 1973 review of the English translation of Poulantzas’s book. He still ignored its specific theoretical object and special order of presentation and focused on Poulantzas’s aim of escaping economic determinism. He accused Poulantzas of a “structuralist abstractionism” that mainly produces a “formalized ballet of evanescent shadows” and claimed that economism quickly reenters Poulantzas’s analysis through the inevitable class character of state power. Miliband also returned to the importance of democratic politics by noting that Poulantzas exaggerates the state’s unity, ignores the role of political parties, and, in neglecting the variability of political regimes, conflates democracy and fascism. This review strengthened the instrumentalist– structuralist polarization. Just as Poulantzas had criticized Miliband for being too empirical, Miliband criticized him for “hyper-theoretical” concern with the essence of the capitalist state. By linking his review to their initial exchange rather than focusing on Poulantzas’s book, Miliband missed the influence therein of juridico-political concepts and Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, with their respective implications for the institutional variation among political regimes and the influence of social forces on the exercise of state power. Round four was initiated by Ernesto Laclau (1975), who identified complementary methodological errors in the respective arguments. Whereas Miliband erred in not systematically presenting his own theory and then testing it against other theories, Poulantzas constructed a theory but did not demonstrate its superiority empirically.

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While superficially plausible, Laclau’s critique fails to note that the protagonists would have constructed and tested quite different theories had they followed his protocols of theory construction and empirical evaluation. Laclau also commented more generally on the meaning of the economy and the autonomy of the political in remarks that are not relevant here. The debate ended with Poulantzas’s reply to Laclau and Miliband in 1976. He largely accepts Laclau’s critique, pleading guilty to difficult language, using terms without immediate empirical referents, “theoreticist” concern with the conditions of theoretical production to the neglect of how the real world is reflected in theory, and using data only illustratively. He then attacks Miliband. Poulantzas had not presented a purely structuralist account but had referred explicitly to the changing institutional separation of economics and politics as well as to the state’s key role in shaping the class struggle by organizing a power bloc and disorganizing the masses. He then introduces his more recent account of the state as a social relation, the role of class struggle in shaping state power, and the difficulties of unifying a state riven by internal contradictions and tensions. But he then spoils these brilliant insights by claiming that capitalist logic and interests always prevail in the long run. The influence of this debate waned along with interest in Marxism and the rise of other approaches, notably state-centrism and Foucauldianism. Paradoxically, after the first round, both key protagonists redefined their respective theoretical objects and developed new accounts that brought their positions much closer to each other. Bob Jessop See also Determinism; Gramsci, Antonio; Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal; Miliband, Ralph; Poulantzas, Nicos

Further Readings Aronowitz, S., & Bratsis, P. (Eds.). (2000). Paradigm lost: State theory reconsidered. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barrow, C. W., Burnham, P., & Wetherly, P. (Eds.). (2007). Class, power and the state in capitalist society. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.

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MILITARY

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GOVERNMENT

The military in government is usually taken as synonymous with military regimes and taken to mean that the military has direct control of the machinery of government through a chain of command: military personnel hold executive posts, not least that of chief executive. Such governments are also generally held to be those installed, initially at least, by the military seizing power through the illegal act of a coup d’état. In these conceptions, the military is normally taken to be the army. These images, however, are misguided. Contrary to the image conjured up by the idea of military in government having seized power in a coup d’état, governments composed entirely of military personnel are far less likely to be installed by coups than are mixed military–civilian governments, including some headed by a civilian. Though some cases of military in government may be entirely military regimes, others may simply be governments in which some members of the cabinet are military personnel. Military in government also need not necessarily have been installed by a coup and those personnel may come from other branches of the military than the army. For example, in Salvador Allende’s government, elected to power in Chile in 1970, military personnel held key posts, including a general as minister of defense and an admiral as minister of finance. In the 1973 coup in which Allende was overthrown, not only the army but also the armed police, the navy, and the air force were involved. Whether installed by a coup or not, the difference between military in government, where the military has direct control of the machinery of government and uses that control to pursue its own military interests, and cases in which military personnel represent civilian interests, is important. To fully understand military in government, a concept of power that differentiates between power and force is needed; concepts such as those offered by Hannah Arendt or by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz are, therefore, appropriate. When the military intervenes in politics through the illegal act of a coup d’état, it does so, by definition, through the threat or use of force. Without consideration of political institutions and procedures and the need for legitimized decision making, the military is

concerned with the imposition of policies and actions. As Bachrach and Baratz would have it, “in the face of others’ non-compliance, force, not power, is exercised. More accurately,” most of the time such force is used without bothering to discover the existence of people’s noncompliance; such uses of force are the equivalent of a shot in the back. The term military in government develops special poignancy, therefore, when the military imposes its wishes upon the cabinet and the population in general, does so over a wide scope of key issues (not just security and defense) including preventing important issues ever being debated, and implements its policies through violence.

Military Personnel in Government Only around one in six coups d’état result in military regimes composed entirely of military personnel. Coalitions between civilians and military have ranged from those with a single civilian, as in the coup in Burma in 1962, where he was combined minister for foreign affairs, labor, housing, mines, public works and rehabilitation, to those with one military officer, as in Ecuador in 1961. (In the latter case, an officer was the minister of defense.) There are many examples of civilians heading these mixed military–civilian regimes; for example, in Iran in 1953, when the military brought back the Shah. Other examples include Afghanistan in 1978 and 1979, Brazil in 1964, Greece in 1967, Togo in 1979, and Uruguay in 1976. In cases where military in government is not installed by coups, military personnel sometimes hold cabinet posts. In Tanzania, where no coup has ever occurred, in 1983 a brigadier held the post of minister for defense and national service, having previously been minister for home affairs; in the following year a colonel was the minister for defense and youth. Elections following coups can also bring military personnel to office. The contrasting cases of El Salvador and Ghana serve to demonstrate certain important differences. In El Salvador, a year after a coup in which Colonel Rivera was a member of the postcoup Civilian–Military Directorate, rigged elections were held in both 1961 and 1962. In the general election Rivera’s Party of National Reconciliation won all 54 seats in the Constituent Assembly; in the presidential election Rivera was

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elected unopposed (the opposition did not participate in protest over election malpractice). In Ghana in 1979, in contrast, following the coup that installed Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings as chairman of the Armed Revolutionary Council, not only were all the military officers holding ministerial posts in the overthrown government replaced, but elections were soon held that returned the country to civilian rule (though not permanently). In that government, the only military title belonged to the minister for works and housing: Colonel David Zanlerigu, once a commander of the presidential guard now turned farmer and businessman, had been elected to parliament for the People’s National Party. The most obvious example of a military man who went on to hold high office following an election but without the prior event of a coup is General Dwight David Eisenhower, who, after his retirement from the army, went on to become president of the United States of America. Though his military connections provided evidence for C. Wright Mills’s theory of the power elite, the example clearly illustrates that military in government is not simply an issue of military personnel holding office but a question of their policies, whose interests they serve, and how these are implemented. The distinction between governments in which there are military personnel but that do not rely on force (the employment of violence), as opposed those which do, is crucial.

Violence and Military Government Violence used by the military in government to implement policy is directed against opposition. Initially, it is used against those who supported the government overthrown by the coup; later, it is used against anyone who opposes new policies, whether peacefully or not. In Chile, for example, after General Pinochet came to power in 1973, members of Allende’s Popular Unity government were herded together with supporters and innocent bystanders, around 5,000 in total, in the National Stadium in the capital, Santiago, where they were imprisoned and subjected to random violence, torture, and murder. Elsewhere suspects were arrested and summarily executed or, as the euphemism has it, “shot while trying to escape.” The total number of people killed in the period

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between the military coup d’état in Argentina in March of 1976 and the removal of the military junta in 1982 is estimated at between 10,000 and 30,000. Some 340 secret detention centers were set up for the interrogation and torture of those detained; the “disappeared” victims were buried in mass graves or dropped from aircraft into the La Plata River. In Guatemala, where, as in Argentina, opposition took the form of revolutionary guerrilla movements, 200,000 people were killed or “disappeared” between 1981 and 1983, the military carrying out over 600 massacres. Uganda provides yet a further gruesome example. Between Idi Amin’s military coup in 1971 and the regime’s overthrow in 1982, it is estimated that from 12,000 to 30,000 people were killed by the regime, with many estimates putting the figure as high as 100,000 to 500,000 victims. Initially, those supportive of the previous government were the main targets, but as the years wore on killings became increasingly indiscriminate and mass killings became commonplace. In Ethiopia, after Emperor Haile Selassie was publicly deposed in September of 1974, the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC), effectively a new name for the Derg (Coordinating Committee of the Ethiopian Armed Forces, Police and Territorial Army), which had taken over in June, tortured and killed thousands of people. The killing became especially bad from 1976 and escalated further after Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile-Miriam, who had been first vice president and then prime minister, became president over the renamed Derg. In Asia, one of the most notorious examples of the violence of the military in government is that of Indonesia under General Suharto from the coup d’état in 1965 until his resignation in 1998. After President Sukarno’s overthrow in 1965, an estimated one million people were killed in the space of just a few months. Sukarno had been sympathetic to the Communist Party (PKI). After Suharto’s coup, anyone suspected of left-wing sympathies was killed or arrested. The violence took an estimated toll of 100,000 lives on the island of Bali in just six months; this was some 7% or 8% of Bali’s population. People were simply “disappeared,” eventually to be unearthed from mass graves. Following the Indonesian army’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, a Portuguese colony moving toward independence at the time, by 1993 more than

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200,000 East Timorese had been killed. According to an assessment by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian parliament, this constituted nearly one third of the total population of East Timor.

Explaining Military in Government There are many explanations for why military personnel are in government. Some, as in the cases of General Eisenhower in the United States and Colonel Zanlerigu in Ghana, had proven their worth in their former capacities and entered new professions as elected politicians. Such cases come within the normal realms of liberal democratic politics. Others have been adopted into governments as ministers of defense because of their special expertise; such cases, too, may be constrained within normal representative government. Coups, which are, by definition, an illegitimate means for changing government through the use or threat of violence, do not, and neither does the use of violence to implement policies and to destroy oppositions, such as has occurred in some of the cases of military in government discussed above. The question of why the military is in government following a coup d’état largely relates to the causes of coups (see the entry “Coups d’État”); the wider question of why there are military personnel in government is best answered through consideration of their special attributes. It is also instructive to consider their motives. The obvious special attribute of the military is that it is armed. This puts the military in an advantageous position both to threaten and to use violence. Its motives for doing so are less obvious. Accusations of the incompetence and corruption of the previous regime are common, but these may be rationalizations to conceal real motives, such as the desire to share the spoils of power. Given that military intervention in the form of coups generally occurs in countries especially vulnerable to economic instability with consequent fluctuations in government revenues over which governments have little control, the military in postcoup governments is unlikely to perform any better. However hard they try, and whatever the number of the military in government, they too are likely to be blamed for poor economic performance and accused of incompetence or corruption. The failure

to achieve successful outcomes of policies helps to explain the military’s resort to force, whether against opposition, as violence, or to implement policies with speed. The very violent cases mentioned above do, however, point to some particular observations. In Ethiopia, the PMAC was set up after the revolutionary overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie, and Mengistu’s domination was achieved through the killing of members of the military council who opposed his extreme policies of forced collectivization in agriculture and nationalism (which entailed violence against secessionist movements). The notable elements here are extreme policies—Stalinist economic policies combined with nationalism— and the choice of coercive means for their implementation. In Indonesia, Suharto was motivated by anticommunism with a desire for ethnic cleansing thrown in. Whilst the vast majority of Indonesians are Muslim, neither the Bali nor East Timor were majority Muslim. In Uganda under General Amin, members of the Muslim Kakwa nationality, of which Amin was one, together with other Muslim communities, primarily the Nubis, were among those most protected from the violence. In Guatemala, Mayans, the native Guatemalans, were disproportionately targeted in what the report of the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), administered by the United Nations and published in 1999, describes as acts of genocide. General Ríos Montt, head of government following his coup in 1982, explained the attack on Mayans in terms of their involvement with guerrillas. Left-wing guerrillas as targets also featured in the case of the military junta in Argentina. In both cases the violence of the military regime was quite out of proportion to the violence they encountered. According to the Argentinean regime’s own figures, the guerrillas’ victims totaled 700, hardly a match for the tens of thousands killed by the regime. In Guatemala, in the CEH assessment the Guatemalan state and its allied death squads were responsible for 93% of the violations and the guerrillas responsible for just 3%. Military regimes that ally with death squads, themselves based on the lawlessness of summary justice, share important features with terror regimes. As the lesson of General Pinochet in Chile demonstrates—though it was not what he intended, he was removed from office by holding and losing

Mills, C. Wright

an election in December of 1989—military in government can be brought to an end. Only when a government, freely and fairly elected, is no longer under threat of intervention or interference from the military in any capacity other than as just one of many interest groups can it truly be said that the military is out of government. Rosemary H. T. O’Kane See also Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton; Coercion and Power; Coup d’État; Dictatorship; Mills, C. Wright; Right-Wing Authoritarianism; Terror Regimes

Further Readings Danopoulos, C. P. (Ed.). (1992). From military to civilian rule. London: Routledge. Decalo, S. (1990). Coups and army rule in Africa: Motivations and constraints. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. O’Kane, R. H. T. (1989). Military regimes: Power and force. European Journal of Political Research, 17, 333–350. Welch, C. E., Jr. (1987). No farewell to arms? Military disengagement from politics in Africa and Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

MILLS, C. WRIGHT (1916–1962) C. Wright Mills was a social theorist who is best known for his important contributions to the sociology of power and the theories of social inequality and social organization. Committed to the critical understanding of modern capitalist societies, Mills was against the sort of intellectualism that, in the name of axiological neutrality, distances itself from political life. Yet he was not a blind ideologue. He was remarkably able to balance his anger with his analytical perception to scrutinize basic social relationships. Mills was also critical of social inquiry that falls into the dual trap of what he calls “grand theory” or “abstracted empiricism.” Whereas grand theorists spell out near-metaphysical concepts that are devoid of either social and political significance or heuristic value to social inquiry, abstracted empiricists, with their fetish for method, do not provide a theoretically nuanced view of the social world.

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Mills was born in 1916, in Waco, Texas, graduated with a BS in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939, and then pursued his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After getting his PhD in sociology, he spent five years as assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and then worked at Columbia University until his death in 1962 as a result of heart attack. Mills was a prolific writer. During his relatively short lifespan, he published 12 books, 200 scholarly papers, and numerous articles meant for public consumption. Perhaps Mills is best known for his book The Sociological Imagination (1959), a classic where he outlined the principles of social inquiry as a craft. His other important works include The New Men of Power, White Collar, Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba, and Character and Social Structure (with Hans Gerth). Mills’s lasting contribution lies in his study of power, which went through three major phases, culminating in the publication of his 1956 opus, The Power Elite. The New Men of Power was Mills’s first serious work on power, primarily focusing on labor leaders. In this work, Mills challenges the Marxist political paradigm that the working class is a universal class destined to free both itself and society at large. Nor does Mills see its leaders as capable of working along with Marx’s envisioned future. Because they are trapped by the constraints of bureaucratic organization, labor leaders hardly followed the paths of bringing about a wellordered society. In labor leaders, Mills saw no political philosophy that fundamentally challenges the social system. They are focused on slight changes in the system that would allow workers to get part of the “economic pie.” What is more, the internal dynamics of organized labor are antithetical to social justice. Not only is bossism rampant, but labor leaders have miserably failed to alter the political habitus of workers. No serious attempt is made in preparing them for a war of position (to use Gramsci’s term). Moreover, in spite of their focus on projective framing, labor leaders lack vision regarding the nature of the future society. Instead, the underlying assumption of their political imagination is based on emulating the lifestyle of the classes above them, rather than challenging the system in order to bring about a lasting solution. Their political

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actions are further hampered by a pluralist assumption that power is equally distributed in the United States. In White Collar, his second important work on the sociology of power, Mills examined the role and place of the American middle class. Consistent with his historicist approach, Mills analyzed the transformation of this class. He notes that as a result of the preponderance of class property over democratic property, the American middle class now consists of two segments, the old and the new. The old middle class is composed of self-employed individuals and independent professionals, whereas the new middle class consists of white-collar workers and professionals whose existence is organically linked to the bureaucratization of the American society. Although seemingly independent, the new middle class does not possess the political habitus necessary for a truly democratic society. Far from being a group-for-itself, its members have become “cheerful robots” whose primary focus is maintaining their social status rather than engaging themselves in politically meaningful activities. They are in a precarious situation, primarily suffering from “status panic,” because their wellbeing is highly dependent on the condition of the organizations by which they are hired. In addition to the aforementioned social implications for organized labor and white-collar workers, developments that have taken place after World War II had another critical implication for American society: a “higher circle” has emerged with a colossal amount of power at its disposal. Mills takes up this subject in his last phase of power analysis, which concluded with the publication of The Power Elite. The power elite are a relatively unified group that makes decisions that have both national and international repercussions. The power elite’s authority has less to do with the charismatic qualities of its members than it does with their place in the “command posts” of the three major institutions that have emerged in postwar America: the economic, political, and military orders. Not only are these institutions intricately involved with each other, but they have also become so powerful that they have relegated other institutions to a secondary status. Critical decisions are now made by corporate chieftains, the political directorate, and high-ranking military generals; these three groups are unified because

they share common institutional interests and worldviews. Alem S. Kebede See also Elite Theories; Habitus; Power Elite

Further Readings Horowitz, L. (1983). C. Wright Mills: An American utopian. New York: Free Press. Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Tilman, R. (1984). C. Wright Mills: A native radical and his American intellectual roots. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

MINIMAL WINNING COALITION In a simple game, a minimal winning coalition (MWC) is a winning coalition that would become losing if any member left. Although the idea of MWC surely goes back a long way, the formal concept was introduced into game theory in 1944 in the fundamental book by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. In 1962, William Harrison Riker introduced the idea of MWC in his study of the formation of political coalitions as an alternative to the view of vote maximization expressed by Anthony Downs in 1957. The MWC concept is essential to the Public Goods Index introduced by Manfred J. Holler and also essential to the Deegan–Packel Index. A simple game may be described by the list of coalitions (subsets of players) that are winning, where this list satisfies these conditions: 1. the empty coalition (of no players) is losing; 2. the coalition of all players is winning; and 3. if coalition S is winning, any more inclusive coalition (i.e., any superset of S) is also winning.

A coalition S is a minimal winning coalition if (i) S is winning, but (ii) the loss of any member converts S into a losing coalition. Given the

Mobilization of Bias

superset property above, a simple game can be more concisely described by the list of its minimal winning coalitions. Therefore an MWC is a winning coalition that does not include any other winning coalition. A player who belongs to every MWC is called a veto player (or blocker). A player who by himself constitutes the sole MWC is a dictator. A player who does not belong to any MWC is a dummy. A dummy player is a player who does not play an essential role in the game. MWCs take on notable importance in weighted majority games in which every player can be assigned some numerical weight and a numerical quota can be fixed such that a coalition is winning if and only if the total weight of its members equals or exceeds the quota. Suppose that a parliament has 100 seats distributed thus: 50 for party A, 30 for party B, 15 for party C, and 5 for party D. If the quota is 51 (i.e., simple majority rule), no party can decide alone. Party A, however, has a clear advantage in that it belongs to every winning coalition (A is therefore a veto player). Each of the others needs to form a coalition with A, as a coalition between B, C, and D would still be losing. On the other hand, A can obtain nothing alone, as it does not have a majority on its own. The winning coalitions are therefore: {A, B}, {A, C}, {A, D}, {A, B, C}, {A, B, D}, {A, C, D}, and {A, B, C, D}. But not all of these are MWCs: for example {A, B, C, D} would still be winning even if D left. The MWCs of this game are: {A, B}, {A, C} and {A, D}. To understand the role of MWCs in determining certain power indices, consider the Public Goods Index for this game. This index is based on the number Mi of MWCs each player belongs to, and the power of each player i is given by Mi divided by the sum of the Mi values over all players. In this example, party A belongs to all minimal winning coalitions, so MA = 3, while parties B, C, and D belong to only one minimal winning coalition each, so MB  MC  MD  1. Thus the power assigned to parties A, B, C, and D are 3/6, 1/6, 1/6, and 1/6, respectively. Note that equal power is assigned to the three smaller parties, even though they have very different numbers of seats. The size principle introduced by W. H. Riker in 1962 proposes that where winning coalitions receive some prize, such as the spoils of holding

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office, only minimal winning coalitions will form, because larger winning coalitions would have to divide the prize among more claimants. Cesarino Bertini See also Public Goods Index; Riker, William H.; Simple Games; Voting Power; Weighted Majority Game

Further Readings Fishburn, P. C., & Brams, S. J. (1997). Minimal winning coalitions in weighted majority voting games. Social Choice and Welfare, 13, 397–717. Holler, M. J. (1978). A priori party power and government formation. Munich Social Science Review, 1, 25–41. Riker, W. H. (1962). The theory of political coalitions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

MOBILIZATION

OF

BIAS

Eric Elmer Schattsneider introduced the idea of the mobilization of bias into considerations of the power structure of society. Pluralist views hold that different groups in society can have access to the power holders through the interest-group or pressure-group system. Schattsneider pointed out in his book The Semi-Sovereign People that access is heavily skewed because “organization is the mobilization of bias.” He further suggested that some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out. Many issues that come before political elites, both elected and nonelected bureaucrats, are brought to their attention by organized interest groups. Often the public will not even be aware that these issues are being discussed within a parliament or legislature—they might be details not brought up by the news media, for example. Even more pertinently, the public will not be aware of issues being discussed within the civil service. Such issues might be concerned with the details of some legislative proposal or some regulatory reform. Nevertheless, such details can have a big effect upon the regulated industry and the public. Without knowledge

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of such discussions it is not possible for the public to organize to have its say. For that reason many firms, industries, and concerned organized interests employ professional lobbyists, one of whose functions is to listen for discussions that might affect their clients. In that way lobbyists not only lobby on behalf of clients but also bring issues to their attention. Issues can also get organized out of politics. For example, an organization might bring the attention of lawmakers to possible problems that some proposed legislation might cause. Risk-averse politicians might not want to ruffle the feathers of important supporters and hence would prefer that the issue not be explored in public. Thus the discussion is not even aired in public to elicit different views. The key factor in the mobilization of bias is organization. It is not only the case that some issues are organized out, but also that some issues are not organized in. If affected interests are not organized sufficiently to bring their concerns or dissatisfaction to the attention of politicians, then the state will not attempt to deal with them. Many conflicts that led to violence or other unrest have arisen from issues where the state was not aware of the strength of feeling, even if it knew of some disquiet. The degree of mobilization between different groups in society varies a great deal. Collective action problems vary in strength across groups, but the greatest problems emerge for the poorest and most diffuse groups, who are the least organized. Industry, being wealthier and more concentrated in its interests, tends to be the best organized, though in major nations many advocacy groups are now well organized in response to business organization. Keith Dowding See also Collective Action Problem; Community Power Debate; Corporatism; Pluralism

Further Readings Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Schattsneider, E. E. (1960). The semi-sovereign people: A realist’s view of democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson.

MONOPOLY POWER A monopoly is a market where there is only one seller. In standard neoclassical economic theory, fully competitive markets are efficient in the sense that they produce the products that buyers want at the lowest feasible cost. Buyers signal their wants with their purchasing habits, and firms’ production costs are pushed down as they compete for market share. Companies will make profits, but profit margins are kept in check by competition. In competitive markets, firms will produce the quantity of goods at the price where marginal cost equals marginal revenue (i.e., at the point where it costs as much to produce the last good as is obtained from selling it). Monopolists, however, can make excess or monopoly profits. They can restrict output, pushing up price. Monopolists also do not need to respond or react to consumer demands in the same manner. Where customers have no other equivalent products to choose, they will have to buy the products the monopolist produces. The idea of monopoly power derives from this analysis of monopoly. Although, strictly speaking, monopoly means “one seller,” firms can have some degree of monopoly power where competition is weak and producers can collude. If there is only one seller, then the degree of monopoly power is sometimes expressed as the ratio of price to marginal cost, because that measures the degree of excess profit. Where there are several sellers their monopoly power can be measured by the Herfindal Index, which is a measure of the degree of concentration in an industry. The index calculates the sum over all firms of the square of each firm’s market share expressed as a proportion. The lowest value would be where all firms have equal market share the highest value being 1—a perfect monopoly. So monopoly power is the degree of power held by any seller to set the price for a good. If it is a pure monopoly, it has full power (still constrained by demand), but big firms with a large share of the market, while still subject to some competitive constraints, can set the price to a large degree. Hence the monopoly power of a market is assumed to be equivalent to the degree of concentration, understood as how closely the market approaches a monopoly.

Moral Hazard

In the United States, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 identifies in its Section 2 two violations: first, the possession of monopoly power; and second, the willful acquisition of monopoly power (as opposed to growth or development due to a superior product, business acumen, or historical accident). This has been understood within law as the ability of a business to control price within its relevant product or geographic market or to attempt to exclude a competitor from doing business within that market. It is only necessary to demonstrate that a firm has that power, not that it has exercised it, in order for the plaintiff to get a ruling that a firm has committed a Section 2 violation. Similar competition laws operate in many countries and within the European Union. Outside of economics, the idea of monopoly power has been used by legislative scholars examining the role of committees in presidential systems. The idea is that under certain rules (i.e., the closed rule in the U.S. Congress) a committee is a monopoly supplier of proposed changes to the status quo. If members vote strategically, then they open up a broader set of outcomes that will not be overturned by the full legislature (a broader array of structure-induced equilibria). The degree of this broader array is a measure of the committee’s monopoly power. In other contexts, one agent might have a monopoly of information about an issue that gives it great power over other agents. Such a monopoly of information, or information asymmetry, is more generally studied in principal–agent models, manipulatory politics, and with regard to power in the media. Keith Dowding See also Free Market; Jurisdictions and Structure-Induced Equilibria; Legislative Power; Manipulation; Media, The; Principal–Agent Relationship; Structure-Induced Equilibrium

Further Readings Cowling, K., & Mueller, D. C. (1978). The social costs of monopoly power. Economic Journal, 88(353), 727–748. Denzau, A. T., & Mackay, N. J. (1983). Gatekeeping and monopoly power of committees: An analysis of sincere and sophisticated behavior. American Journal of Political Science, 27(4), 740–761.

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MORAL HAZARD Moral hazard is a term that was first used in the banking and insurance industries in the 18th century, and reintroduced into the economics of risk by Kenneth Arrow in the 1960s. Moral hazard occurs in cases where the very act of making some contract changes the behavior of one of the contractors in a manner that is against the interests of the other contractor. Thus, within insurance markets, the very act of taking out property insurance means that the insured party will not act as carefully with regard to one’s property as one otherwise would have; or, if one has insured against ill health or accident, one might take riskier actions knowing one is covered. With no home insurance, one might buy extra strong locks for windows and doors; once the contents are insured against burglary, one might save money on the locks. Thus, in the classic moral hazard account the contract changes the nature of the behavior of the agent. In Arrow’s original health market case, the moral hazard issue is particularly potent: the patient and the doctor both have an interest in the provision of a greater amount of health care at any given level of patient illness, because it is the insurance company that will pick up the bill. For example, if the doctor offers two remedies, one very cheap and likely to cure the problem, the other very expensive but only slightly more likely to work, then patients who have to pay the bill themselves might choose the cheaper, almost-as-good option. However, if the insurance company is paying the bill, they will choose the slightly better option no matter how much more expensive it is. Of course, the doctor and hospital would prefer to sell the most expensive treatment. The patient and the doctor are in a latent conspiracy against the insurance company. Similarly with property insurance: if some item is damaged and the and householders themselves are paying, they would rather repair the damaged item at a lower cost than fork out for a new one. Or they might accept that the damage is minor and not have the item repaired at all. However, if the insurance company is paying, householders can conspire In order to overcome moral hazard, insurance companies demand that patients pay a fixed portion

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of the cost of treatment, insist on specified traders providing services, require several quotes, or send their own assessors out to assess damage. Moral hazard thus involves a power relationship concerning asymmetric information between those with information and those without. It is part of the general principal–agent problem and closely related to adverse selection. However, it is a mistake to think that any action taken by an agent that is unseen by a principal constitutes a moral hazard issue, or else it becomes difficult to distinguish moral hazard from adverse selection. Adverse selection might also involve unseen action, because agents who act against their principals’ interests when they are not being watched are simply displaying the adverse dispositional characteristics the principals wanted to avoid when appointing them. Furthermore, in Arrow’s sense, moral hazard can occur where the population is homogeneous but the act of making a contract has itself created perverse incentives. Adverse selection, on the other hand, requires a heterogeneous population. Keith Dowding See also Adverse Selection; Knowledge and Power; Principal–Agent Relationship

Further Readings Arrow, K. J. (1963). Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care. American Economic Review, 53(5), 941–973. Holmstrom, B. (1979). Moral hazard and observability. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 10, 74–91.

MORGENTHAU, HANS J. (1904–1980)

Hans Joachim Morgenthau was born and educated in Germany. After studying philosophy and law at the University of Munich and the University of Frankfurt, he received a doctoral law degree from the latter in 1929. He taught in Switzerland and Spain before emigrating to the United States in 1937. In 1943 he received an appointment at the University of Chicago.

The publication of Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace in 1948 established him as the leading academic proponent of the theory of realism in international relations. This book was the most widely used text in American university courses in international relations for many years. Morgenthau rejected a legalistic– moralistic approach to international relations in favor of one emphasizing power. He saw the desire for power as rooted in human nature, and politics as a struggle for power. He defined power as control over the minds and actions of other people. Morgenthau identified nine elements of national power, including geography, natural resources, industrial capacity, military preparedness, population, national character, national morale, quality of diplomacy, and quality of government. Each of these elements was evaluated in terms of its potential contribution to a country’s ability to fight a war. Morgenthau viewed all nations as constantly preparing for war, fighting a war, or recovering from war. The concept of balance of power was central to Morgenthau’s theory of realism. He rejected the idea that nations had a choice with respect to the balance of power. In his view, the balance of power was a necessary consequence of the struggle for power among nations. Thus, the balance of power and policies to preserve that balance are not only inevitable, but also desirable in the sense that they serve as stabilizing factors in international relations. Some confusion inevitably resulted from Morgenthau’s use of the phrase balance of power to mean four different things: (1) a policy; (2) a state of affairs; (3) an approximately equal distribution of power; and (4) any distribution of power. In the 1970s, Morgenthau’s theory of realism was challenged from two directions. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye attacked three realist assumptions with respect to the dominance of states as actors, the utility of military force as an instrument of statecraft, and the hierarchy of issues confronting states in Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition. Kenneth Waltz found the roots of the balance of power in the nature of the international system rather than human nature and asserted international politics to be a struggle for security rather than a struggle for power in his Theory of International Politics. David A. Baldwin

Morriss, Peter See also Balance of Power; Carr, E. H.; Defensive Realism; Idealism in International Relations; Interdependence Theory; Neorealism; Realism in International Relations; Sprout, Harold

Further Readings Claude, I. L. (1962). Power and international relations. New York: Random House. Keohane, R. O. (Ed.). (1986). Neorealism and its critics. New York: Columbia University Press. Morgenthau, H. J. (1948). Politics among nations: The struggle for power and peace. New York: Knopf. Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

MORRISS, PETER Peter Morriss is one of the most important contemporary analytic theorists of power. His book, Power: A Philosophical Analysis, first published in 1987 and reprinted in 2002 with a substantial new introduction, has set the standard in careful analytic scrutiny of the concept of power. Morriss’s approach differed from others in four main ways. The first was in paying more attention to how the word power is used in ordinary language. Second (and connected to the first), Morriss was asking why we have concepts of power: what jobs do we want such a concept to do? The third was to explore more extensively the relevant literature in analytic philosophy on how we can explicate such concepts. The fourth was to link all this with the more mathematical—and hitherto rather separate—literature on voting power. Thus Morriss’s book was the first that attempted to produce an account of power that combined the insights of disciplines as diverse as analytic philosophy, social science, and mathematics. This methodology led to a way of thinking of the concept of power different from that prevalent at the time. First, it led to focusing on power as the power of an actor to do something, rather than the power an actor had over another. Second, it interpreted power as a dispositional term: that is to say, that a power was something that could be exercised, rather than something that necessarily was exercised. Such dispositional terms had been extensively

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explored in analytic philosophy, particularly in philosophy of science; Morriss drew on these discussions, and developed them so as to create a coherent account of explicitly human powers. His work has important negative and positive aspects. He has produced a critical analysis of many problems that exist in the literature on power. He has discussed the exercise fallacy—the fallacy of confusing the holding of power with its exercise. (And points out in his new preface that the crude way Foucault apparently commits this error in English-language versions of his work is based on poor translation.) He discusses the vehicle fallacy, which is to confuse the power of an agent with the resources available to a person to exercise his or her power. He expertly and nontechnically discusses many of the power indices and shows how inferences sometimes made from them are fallacious. These essentially negative attributes are important in their own right and justify a careful reading of his book, not least to ensure that readers do not commit these sorts of errors themselves. On the other hand, however, he gives a positive account of what power is. In doing so he covers a lot of ground and demonstrates how difficult it is to conceptualize power. He discusses the nature of counterfactual analysis and suggests that some versions of doing counterfactuals lead us astray. He briefly discusses the relationship between power and freedom, and importantly argues that the context in which we discuss power is important to our analysis of it. Morriss defends two major ideas in his book. First, while power over and power to are both valid and important conceptions of power, it is power to that is fundamental. He makes clear in the text, and emphasizes in the 2002 preface, that at times what we are interested in when doing social research is power over. However, power over depends for its meaning upon the logically prior concept of power to. In mainstream analytic approaches to power, that view is now largely accepted. Second, Morriss defends the idea of an agent’s power to do x in terms of the agent’s ability to do x. This might seem straightforward, almost trivial; it might seem obvious that an agent’s power to do something consists in his or her ability to do it. But, after all, analytic conceptual analysis will produce analyticity. What is important in analytic method is the subtlety of the analysis; here Morriss provides a key distinction between ability and

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ableness, and hence power-as-ability and poweras-ableness. He argues that when discussing power we need to put it into context. We need to understand the generic abilities of people—that is, claims about what people could do if certain conditions obtain. Whether those conditions do obtain at any given time is irrelevant to generic abilities. Ordinarily we think of people’s powers as their ability when standard conditions obtain, and those standard conditions are understood by convention. Ablenesses are those things that someone could do when conditions actually obtain. Here what people can do when those conditions do not obtain is irrelevant. Ablenesses considered generically are taken to be when usual conditions obtain; it is an empirical matter about what are usual conditions. These are deep and subtle distinctions and require close scrutiny and study to fully comprehend. Despite being an analytic conceptual exercise, the book does address how we should study power in society and considers different ways of measuring power. An important thread is that despite the fact that exercising power as ability is dispositional—it occurs when certain conditions obtain—we cannot have (many) generalizations about power. Morriss ties his account of power closely to choice, for example the fact that psychological or structural laws cannot generate precise predictions about the power of people. Criticisms of Morriss’s position have included a defense of the possibility of our learning more about the structure of power in terms of some forms of generalizations (though he would not deny that holding great wealth is likely to be associated with more social power); a defense of power over as being more important than power to; the defense of measuring power in terms of resources (i.e., a critique of the vehicle fallacy argument); and critiques of Morriss’s ableness–ability distinction. Some of these criticisms rely upon the consideration of whether or not individuals’ preferences are implicated in accounts of their abilities and ablenesses and of whether Morriss’s account of power can truly grapple with the strategic nature of power conflict. Most of his account is given in nonstrategic concerns, and some have suggested that his conceptualization does not fit well with game-theoretic accounts. Handily, however, in the 2002 preface Morriss provides a robust response to many of these criticisms. Keith Dowding

See also Ability; Ableness; Exercise Fallacy; Game Forms, Power in; Game-Theoretical Approaches; Power Indices; Power To and Power Over; Preference Versus Nonpreference-Based Concepts; Vehicle Fallacy

Further Readings Barry, B. (1988). The uses of power. In Democracy and power: Essays in political theory 1. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A philosophical analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS The past 50 years have been characterized by the rapid expansion and ascendancy of a new form of economic and political organization—the multinational or transnational corporation (TNC). In the annual Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Report, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates that there are 78,000 parent corporations with over 770,000 affiliates operating worldwide. A purely economic, and arguably wide, definition views transnational corporations as enterprises that operate in more than one country. Conducting business in more than one country is not, however, a sufficient condition to qualify as a TNC. It is also necessary for a firm to manage or control at least one foreign direct investment project in a host country; in other words, a TNC is also expected to create new productive assets through greenfield investment operations or to purchase the majority or minority of shares in existing firms for the purpose of managerial participation. Controversies still exist over the exact technical definition of a TNC because it is unclear how much managerial control of a foreign enterprise a transnational enterprise must own. Furthermore, political geographers have increasingly called into question the term transnational, which primarily refers to economic operations originating from the TNC’s home country and spanning across national borders, arguing instead that some corporations are not closely tied to any single state. However,

Multinational Corporations

the term continues to be important in two respects: first, it reflects the notion that home countries still bear a political and economic significance for the corporation; second, the term allows for differentiation between foreign-owned affiliates linked to TNCs and firms involved in production sharing agreements, collaborative research, or joint ventures aimed at strengthening bilateral or multilateral cooperation among states.

Transnational Corporations as Political Actors The aforementioned functional definition nevertheless conceals the political autonomy and power that corporate actors have assumed in the contemporary political economy. The political role of the corporation has returned as a debated and contested subject of scholarly inquiry since the 1990s, when the political and economic transformations ensuing from the processes of globalization became associated with the declining power of states and the concomitant rise of nonstate actors. In this context, transnational corporations have been conceptualized not only as the main agents of globalization but also, according to some commentators, as the main beneficiaries if not the prime causes of the transformation of the state. The discussion is further polarized by a debate between scholars who argue that TNCs have become the “new sovereigns” or the “new rulers of the world” and those who contend that, despite their global reach and power, corporations are still constrained and dependent upon the economic policies and legal frameworks laid out by states. In conjunction with these theoretical divisions, which largely fall within unresolved discussions over the nature and facets of globalization, the most recent studies on the new political activities of TNCs have attempted to shed new light on the changed role of corporations in international affairs. A. Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter (1999) were the first to elaborate upon the concept of private authority to delineate the types of rule-making and standard-setting emerging from formal or informal, loose or highly institutionalized forms of cooperation among firms and business associations. While the existence and forms of privately wielded authority remain cardinal to

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understanding how TNCs can and do exercise autonomous influence alongside the state, current empirical and conceptual studies have drawn attention to the new political actions of TNCs through self-certification schemes, quasiregulation, public–private partnerships and multistakeholder initiatives and have brought to the fore the merits and tensions arising from the new public role of corporate actors. Liberals and social constructivists, on the one hand, have recognized these developments as necessary complements to increase the efficiency of global public provisioning; on the other hand, critical scholars have openly condemned these new forms of governance, pointing to the inherent incongruence between the pursuit of commercial interests and the public good. Despite the emergence of a growing literature on the incorporation of TNCs and postulations about the influence of TNCs within global governance, the question of the dimensions of corporate power has been largely peripheral. This marginalization can be attributed to the state centrism that still characterizes the field of international studies as well as to the difficulties and controversies that arise in attempting to prove the exercise of power and to correlate power with identifiable outcomes.

Instrumental Power of Transnational Corporations A useful stating point to capture one of the dimensions of the power of TNCs comes from the classical pluralist political tradition of Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom. The conceptualization of power presented by this school of thought, which is still employed by many contemporary pluralist scholars, employs an agency-centered approach. This approach applies the assumption of instrumental rationality and focuses on the processes of influence and their direct political outcomes. In the context of national corporate political activity, this approach has proved be particularly useful for the study of more traditional types of political activities, such as corporate funding and donations or the rise of corporate lobbying as a response to perceived threats to particular competitive advantages. Individual firms or associations have been able to exercise influence on policy makers either through

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direct lobbying or by employing lobbying groups to voice a particular stance on their behalf. The exercise of instrumental power through lobbying has also increasingly assumed a transnational dimension, with corporations able to target multiple governments as well as supranational institutions. An illustration of this trend, for example, is provided by tobacco TNCs, who have consistently attempted to minimize the impact of restrictive legislation at the national and regional levels and even within the World Health Organization, as they did on the occasion of the development of the International Framework for Tobacco Control. Although an instrumental definition of power is able to illustrate and partially explain some of the political activities and influence of TNCs, taken in isolation it is subject to substantial criticisms deriving from its particular assumptions about rational choice formation and causality.

Structural Power of Transnational Corporations A complementary dimension of the power of TNCs can be drawn from the insights of structural theory. Unlike pluralist analysis, a structural understanding of power is concerned with indirect influences upon policy input through agenda setting; in other words, a structural understanding attempts to account for the political processes that prevent or hinder an issue or a proposal from reaching the policy agenda. Structuralists are therefore concerned with the ways in which, without applying direct pressure, TNCs reinforce certain institutions, political values, and practices before bargaining takes place in order to reduce or eliminate the possibilities of a potentially detrimental outcome. The primary source of the structural power of TNCs rests in their control over existing and future investment. By virtue of monopoly control of mobile capital, which has far-reaching ramifications for employment, production, and growth, corporations divide the world into competing states, restrict the regulatory policy options of governments that are dependent on foreign direct investment, and inhibit the demands of workers who rely on wages from TNCs for survival. This invisible dependence

limits the pursuance of national policies or collective action that might impede sustained capital accumulation and allows the interests of corporations to be often, and in different forms, prioritized and accommodated. In the contemporary political economy, however, corporations have acquired other means to exercise indirect influence, as they have been granted the capacity to create, implement, and enforce rules. The proliferation and increased scope of self-certification schemes and voluntary codes, at company, sectoral, or even global level through initiatives such as the United Nations Global Compact or the Global Reporting Initiative not only have opened new spaces for TNCs to control and shape the social, environmental, and economic agenda, but have also granted them the possibility of shifting the regulatory debate from top-down regulation toward soft regulation. Recent empirical evidence such as the European White Paper on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the appointment of CSR ministries in the Europe, and the most recent legislative developments in the U.K. Companies Act suggest that governments have started to adjust their policies to account for the new public role of the private sector as well as providing further legitimacy to corporate actors. Limits to structural analysis of TNCs’ power exist; the approach in fact has been criticized for being excessively actor-centered and for placing almost exclusive emphasis on explicit conflict of interest while overlooking when and how power can be exercised in circumstances other than conflicts between private and public interests.

Ideological Power of Transnational Corporations In order to overcome some of the criticisms raised in response to structural analyses, a third dimension of corporate power, often referred to as the ideological or discursive dimension, is commonly employed in sociological, Marxist, and neoGramscian approaches to international relations. Although these schools tend to place different emphases on the structural origins of such power and the purposive power of the ideology, they all tend to locate power within the global order and focus on dominant ideas and practices that are

Mutually Assured Destruction

portrayed and legitimized as common interests. Here, a distinction is commonly made between power as force and power as consent, which is exercised through manipulation or positive reinforcements; power is greatest, or a hegemonic world order prevails, when no actor attempts to resist it. An indicator of the ideological power of TNCs is the global spread and hegemony of neoliberal ideas within formal institutions and socioeconomic policies. The processes of liberalization and privatization, which are supported by the notions of freedom and expansion of private enterprises, have been accelerating throughout the world since the 1980s and have been identified as the most evident manifestations of the power and growing authority of TNCs. The institutional channels that facilitate and reinforce a probusiness ideology and political economy are those that champion competition both by nation-states as well as international organizations, most notably the IMF and World Bank. Together with these developments, neoliberal hegemony has also been associated with the recognition, at different levels of governance, that the market is not only the most efficient allocator of scarce resources but also a legitimate and superior provider of public goods and guarantor of welfare. At the national level, this trend is evident in areas such as health, education, and security, while at the international level TNCs have been increasingly called upon to lead the fight against global poverty and environmental degradation. TNCs are said to strengthen and expand their ideological hegemony by projecting an image of legitimacy as political actors through marketing and public relations exercises, and by building coalitions with nongovernmental organizations, which are often but controversially perceived as the custodians of the public interest. However, as neo-Gramscian analyses would note, the ideological power of TNCs can be and has been challenged by counterhegemonic social forces. Ideological approaches to power are problematic in many respects. Consent and ideological domination are difficult to operationalize, as they leave no trace in events. The absence of conflict of interest may in fact not be sufficient evidence to conclude whether congruence in interests is the

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result of ideological domination or simply reflects existing interests and preferences. Furthermore, it has been also noted that linking dominant economic or political ideas to a particular group incurs several methodological difficulties—is it possible or plausible to identify neoliberalism with the agency of TNCs, a single group, or transnational capitalist class? The question of the power of TNCs in global governance remains fraught with methodological problems and a scarcity of evidence, either quantitative or qualitative; but it is a question that touches upon the very core of the interface between democracy and global capitalism. Catia Gregoratti See also Banks; Constructivist View of Power in International Relations; Dahl, Robert A.; Globalization; Pluralism

Further Readings Cutler, C., Haufler, V., & Porter, T. (Eds.). (1999). Private authority and international affairs. Albany: State University of New York Press. Fuchs, D. (2007). Business power in global governance. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Korten, D. (1995). When corporations rule the world. London: Earthscan.

MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION The term mutually assured destruction (MAD) was used starting in the mid-1960s by American policy makers and strategists to describe a situation in which the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) each possessed the capacity to retaliate with a devastating nuclear attack on the other, even in circumstances in which the retaliator had been struck first in a surprise nuclear attack. The term denoted a form of strategic stability in which neither side would initiate a nuclear attack for fear of retribution. The barely imaginable power of nuclear weapons was stalemated by mutual capability. The concept guided how some American decision

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makers saw the relationship between technology and strategy and in particular how ostensibly defensive measures, such as antiballistic missiles (ABMs), were thought to weaken stability. The idea of assured destruction became associated with Robert McNamara, the highly influential secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction—MAD—became a focus for critics of McNamara’s policies on both the Left and Right. Opponents of nuclear weapons, including those in Europe, took the acronym as an indicator of the insanity of nuclear war. The “father of the atomic bomb,” Robert Oppenheimer, had previously likened the two superpowers to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other but only at risk to its own life. Yet, for a decade or more after the Soviets first tested their atomic bomb in 1949, the United States possessed overwhelming numerical superiority in nuclear weaponry over the Soviet Union. Indeed, until the early 1960s, the United States might well have been able to wreak devastation on the USSR without suffering direct retaliation. With the development of long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), however, the Soviet ability to attack the United States was increasingly apparent. The term assured destruction was first used in 1963, and reflected a change in American thinking about nuclear strategy. McNamara had previously sought to design an American nuclear strategy that would provide incentives for the Soviet Union to withhold attacks on American cities even if the United States had struck the USSR first (as existing American and NATO strategy envisaged). This would be done by avoiding attacks on Soviet cities at the outset of war, but then threatening such destruction to deter attacks on American cities. McNamara articulated this counterforce strategy to NATO in May 1962 and then publicly in June 1962, when it became known as the no-cities approach. The development of a strategy based on assured destruction therefore reflected a significant shift from McNamara’s earlier approach. The essence of assured destruction was that retaliation would be inexorable and destruction would be sufficiently devastating to act as a deterrent. Quantifying what level of damage was unacceptable to the Soviet leadership led American

strategists and policy planners to quantify the level of devastation. Initially, it was suggested that assured destruction would involve the destruction of 50% of Soviet industry and 30% of the Soviet population. This would be delivered by U.S. nuclear attacks amounting to the equivalent of 400 million tons (or 400 megatons) of TNT. Yet, when it came to discerning what was unacceptable to an American leader, McNamara, as well as other senior officials of the Kennedy administration, believed that a U.S. president would be deterred from using nuclear weapons against the USSR by the loss of only a handful of U.S. cities. Crucial to the idea of mutual deterrence was the belief that the Soviets would deploy their own invulnerable forces by developing submarinebased ballistic missiles and placing their ICBMs in silos. McNamara courted controversy when, for example, he approved of the USSR hardening its silos to protect their ICBMs. Within the U.S. military, and in particular within the U.S. Air Force, there was opposition to this. For many military leaders, mutually assured destruction remained counterintuitive. Developing more potent ways of destroying Soviet nuclear forces and providing both active defenses (such as ABMs) and passive defenses (such as population shelters) were means of reducing potential damage and casualties. As the 1960s progressed, the idea of perpetuating the nuclear superiority of the 1950s became less credible, though vigorous debate about the nature and meaning of strategic superiority continued into the 1980s. Furthermore, Soviet nuclear doctrine and force procurement appeared to indicate that they too embraced ideas of superiority. In the 1970s and 1980s, some American strategists and policy makers became concerned about a “window of vulnerability” in which a form of Soviet superiority undermined MAD and granted the Soviets political leverage, in particular in the third world. Particular technologies posed challenges to the concept of mutual deterrence. ABMs were developed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles and called into doubt the assuredness of retaliation. So too did increasingly accurate multiple warheads that could destroy ICBMs in their silos. The United States reacted by maintaining a strategic triad that comprised bombers, land-based missiles, and

Mutually Assured Destruction

submarines, each of which could reach the threshold of assured destruction on its own. Equally important were the agreements between the superpowers that sought to codify and preserve strategic stability. The 1971 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty imposed strict limits on ABMs, and the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty created ceilings on the number of offensive forces. The precise status of MAD in U.S. policy remains a matter of debate. Although the concept guided thinking on arms control and in particular on defensive forces, American nuclear strategy was driven by various ideas and interests. MAD was more of a declaratory concept than an operational doctrine or targeting policy. It suggested that the seemingly limitless destructive power of nuclear weapons could be reduced to deterring the nuclear weapons of the adversary. As preemption could only be suicidal, mutual deterrence afforded a form of stability. For some, this became the existential condition of the cold war. Proponents of what became known as existential deterrence argued that the only purpose of nuclear weapons was to deter their use by the enemy.

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MAD described the circumstances of the nuclear age and prescribed nuclear policies designed to place the search for strategic stability above strategic superiority and to emphasis deterrence over nuclear war fighting. Yet the pursuit of superiority and the idea that preparing to fight a nuclear war was the best way to prevent one helped generate new arms race dynamics that weakened arms control and generated new tensions in East– West relations. Len Scott See also Deterrence Theory in International Relations; Realism in international Relations

Further Readings Freedman, L. (2003). The evolution of nuclear strategy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaplan, F. (1991). The wizards of Armageddon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shapley, D. (1993). Promise and power: The life and times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown.

N Player 2

NASH EQUILIBRIUM Player 1

Nash equilibrium (NE) is a solution concept in game theory named after the mathematician and economist John Nash. Informally, a NE can be described as a situation in which each individual player obtains the maximum possible payoff given what the other players are doing. Thus, in a NE no player has an incentive to unilaterally change his or her behavior. More formally, if we consider a game with n players (indexed by i), each with a utility function ui ðs1 ; ; s2 ; . . . ; sn Þ where si is the  strategy played by player i (and indicating with s2i the vector of strategies played by the remaining n − 1 players), then the strategies s1 ; ; s2 ; . . . ; sn  form a NE if,for each  player   i, the strategy si is   such that ui si ; s2i $ ui si ; s2i for any other strategy si available to player i. When the inequality is strict for all players and for all feasible strategies then we have a strict NE. If instead   for some  players it is the case that ui si ; si ¼ ui si ; si for some si, then we have a weak NE. We can illustrate the NE concept and some of its properties with the following example of a game represented in the so-called normal form (see Figure 1). Two players each have two strategies. Player 1 can choose either the strategy UP or the strategy DOWN. Player 2 can choose either LEFT or RIGHT. The numbers in brackets represent the utility (or payoff) corresponding to each combination of strategies (also called strategy profile), where the first number is the utility of player 1 and the second the utility of player 2. If player 2

Figure 1

LEFT

RIGHT

UP

(3,3)

(1,2)

DOWN

(1,0)

(2,2)

Two-player game in normal form

chooses LEFT then the optimal strategy for Player 1 is to play UP, which gives him or her a utility of 3 rather than 1. Hence, UP is a best response strategy for player 1 to player 2 playing LEFT. Analogously, DOWN is player 1’s best response when player 2 plays RIGHT. For player 2, LEFT is best response when player 1 plays UP, and RIGHT is best response when player 1 plays DOWN. A NE is then given by a strategy profile such that the strategies are best response to each other. In our example there are therefore two NE: (UP, LEFT) and (DOWN, RIGHT). As this simple example illustrates, a game can have more than one NE and, if so, they entail different payoffs. A game can also have no NE at all, unless we admit the use of mixed strategies, for example, probability distributions over ordinary (pure) strategies, in which case at least one NE is always guaranteed to exist. A NE is not necessarily Pareto optimal. In our example (UP, LEFT) is Pareto optimal but (DOWN, RIGHT) is not, because both players could be better off if they managed to coordinate on (UP, LEFT). However, no player can benefit from a unilateral deviation from (DOWN, RIGHT). NE is therefore a very important concept to illustrate the value of coordination: 435

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rational utility maximizing agents do not necessarily manage to reach efficient outcomes without some coordinating device. Over the past several decades, much game-theoretical research has focused on equilibrium refinement—that is, the development of concepts that narrow down the set of Nash equilibria that we can expect to result from rational behavior. Valentino Larcinese See also Chicken Games; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Harsanyi, John C.; Prisoner’s Dilemma

Further Readings Nash, J. F. (1951). Non-cooperative games. Annals of Mathematics, 54, 286–295.

NATIONALISM Nationalism is variously defined as political doctrine, a sentiment or sense of identity, a political or social movement, and a form of power. In the context of this encyclopedia, this entry defines nationalism as movements seeking or exercising state power on the basis of nationalist ideology. The core claims of that ideology are: there is a nation; the nation provides the principal focus of identity and loyalty; the nation should be self-determining. Self-determination usually means sovereignty over national territory and government by fellow nationals. If one distinguishes three kinds of social power— coercive, economic, and ideological—nationalism, like other “isms,” is ideological. Ideological power persuades people to act in conformity with beliefs expressed by the ideology, or more specifically by its interpreters, such as intellectuals or priests. However, although this distinction between kinds of power is necessary for analysis, in every case the kinds overlap and interact. Let us first outline why and how nationalism acquires persuasive appeal and then consider ways in which, as a political movement, it combines beliefs with violence and material interests to achieve social power. There are debates about the origins and nature of nationalism. The most important difference is

between those who consider the nation as prior to nationalism and those who do not. The first position begins by tracing the formation of nations, whether regarded as a long-run historical process or a modern development. The long-run approach usually links national sentiment to ethnicity, constructed internally as belief in common descent and externally in conflict with enemies, reproduced culturally through such mechanisms as storytelling and ritual, and reinforced by territorial organization. The modernist view considers processes like industrialization and urbanization, growth of a print media and mass literacy, and formation of a modern bureaucratic and interventionist state as underpinning nation formation. Nationalism is an ideological and political expression of nation formation. Thus, nationalism is not really a significant form of power but rather a derivative of national power. The second position argues that nation formation, even where it can be traced and analyzed, does not correlate closely with nationalism. Nationalism is not significant in modern England, although nation formation has a long and continuous history. Conversely, significant nationalism operates in countries with little prior national identity or institutions, for example, many colonial states. Indeed, nationalists see nation formation as their most important task. If one takes this position, wherein lie the ideological origins and the appeal of nationalism? Some suggest that it is in the emergence of mass politics within the territorial state. Mass politics—which can be linked to mass literacy and increased social mobility due to industrial and urban growth—is accompanied by political forms such as political parties contesting elections to sovereign parliaments, and professional politicians exploiting new methods of mass communication. Appeals to “the people” figure centrally in their rhetoric. The modern territorial state, which appropriates a growing proportion of gross domestic product for military, infrastructural, and welfare purposes, becomes an object of enhanced importance for its subjects. These subjects, represented in political rhetoric as the people, now are turned into a particular set of people, those inhabiting a sharply defined territory. To this set of people is applied the term nation. Where there is no significant disagreement about the proposition that PEOPLE  NATION,

Nationalism

this will not give rise to explicit nationalism, except indirectly in conflict with other states. However, very often certain political elites reject this proposition, claim that they represent a particular subset of the subjects, usually concentrated in one region, and institute a nationalism opposed to that of the existing state and its dominant nation. Nationalism displays a rich repertoire in appealing for support. It flatters popular sentiment by projecting all the virtues of the nation—its history, its culture, its “character”—upon the people, expressing this by means of powerful images, ceremonies, and rituals. Nevertheless, no political ideology succeeds solely on the basis of appealing arguments or belief claims. Nationalism works politically in three other significant ways. First, nationalism provides orientation and justifications for a varied set of elites. For example, in the British Raj there was a bewildering range of elite interests that stood to gain from the removal of British control. In the Congress Party, a jumble of interests formed in symbiosis with the Raj itself, these varied interests could find political expression, both organizational and ideological. Second, nationalism mobilizes mass support. How far such support is the product of elite manipulation is hotly debated. Some analysts argue that political elites take certain markers or categories that distinguish one group from another and convert these into notions of essential group interest and identity. Others insist that the identities in question must already have genuine significance for many people if the elite appeal is to have any resonance. Third, nationalism legitimizes a political movement in the eyes of powerful outsiders. By the end of the 19th century the most powerful states in the world defined themselves as national states and supported, in principle, national self-determination. It made sense for oppositional elites in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires during World War I to frame their demands in terms that harmonized with the program of the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, in which national self-determination was the central element. After the World War II the two superpowers proclaimed themselves antiimperialist and hostile to European overseas empire. Colonial nationalist movements in Africa and Asia quite naturally sought to appeal to these

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great power sentiments as well as presenting themselves to their increasingly reluctant imperial masters as legitimate successors to state power. None of these claims would have worked had they not been embodied in political and military organizations able to threaten and, if necessary, use violence. One must also take account of material interests. The victors in the World War I supported national self-determination in empires that had lost the war but not in their own empires. The United States and the USSR professed hostility to European overseas empire but denied that their own extensive power itself smacked of imperialism. Nationalist movements favored particular sectional and class interests. The demand for self-determination promised control of significant resources. Nationalism helped create the current international order, which represents itself as one of sovereign nation-states. Nationalism should have little further meaning if this really is the case, as it would become the rhetorical assertion of state interests, while the capacity of nation-states to shape or express national identity would turn nationalism into a banal and universal sentiment. But precisely because nationalism is not the expression of the nation but a contingent, constructed politics, there are always conflicting forms of nationalism, seeking both to subvert and strengthen existing states. Only when the self-defined nationstate ceases to be the principal form of coercive power, as well as a major source of economic power, can one expect the ideological power of nationalism to disappear. John Breuilly See also Empire; Globalism

Further Readings Delanty, G., & Kumar, K. (Eds.). (2006). The Sage handbook of nations and nationalism. London: Sage. Hearn, J. (2006). Rethinking nationalism: A critical introduction. London: Palgrave/Macmillan.

NEOCORPORATISM See Corporatism

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NEOLIBERALISM Neoliberalism is the term commonly given to the political philosophy that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the economic recession of the 1970s. It drew upon the growing critiques of the welfare state and the crisis in Keynesian economics to advocate a smallgovernment and free-market philosophy. The advocacy of these ideas became known as Thatcherism in the United Kingdom, Reaganomics in the United States, and economic rationalism in Australia. It was these English-speaking countries that initially embraced the philosophy and its policy applications of floating currency markets, reducing trade barriers, privatizing public sector activities, and deregulating industry. It also became associated with reforms of the public sector that came to be known as new public management, in which the public sector was required to operate more like private sector entities. These policy prescriptions were spread around the globe, particularly through international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which required recipient nations to comply with neoliberal governance and economic development principles. By the early 1990s, neoliberalism was the dominant economic paradigm across much of the developed and developing world, even though the practical applications of the philosophy varied considerably from country to country. Neoliberalism’s intellectual hegemony was challenged by the global financial crisis of 2008, with some political actors arguing that neoliberalism’s excessive faith in free markets has caused the crisis.

Historical Background Neoliberalism is considered to be a close descendant of the classical liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Neoliberalism shares classical liberalism’s commitment to free markets, free trade, and a night watchman state whose role does not extend beyond securing the institutional conditions for efficiently operating markets. However, there are also significant differences between the two, as classical liberalism emerged as a critique of the feudal

aristocratic state in the nascent years of capitalism while neoliberalism emerged as a critique of the social democratic welfare state in late capitalism. Classical liberalism emerged and was propagated as a political doctrine legitimating the early capitalists’ challenge to aristocratic authority and the feudal state. It is associated with the authors John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. It advocated the fundamental equality of persons, the primacy of consent as the basis of authority, and belief in rationality as the basis of public decision making. It embraced the view that individuals acting rationally to pursue their greatest happiness was both the most just and the most effective way of organizing society. It is widely credited with initiating the popularization of democracy. Neoliberalism emerged, in contrast, as a critique of the social democratic states in the middle of the 1900s. The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek initiated the movement with his groundbreaking text The Road to Serfdom in 1944. In 1947 he convened the first gathering of the Mont Pelerin Society, a community of scholars committed to the reinvigoration of classical liberal ideas. This group of intellectuals went on to attack the growth of the democratic welfare state and to advocate a greater reliance on free markets. The body of thought emerged along two central prongs, the first being a critique of democratic states and the second in advocating the superiority of markets. The neoliberal framework classically seeks to weigh government failure against market failure, usually concluding that the latter is the lesser evil.

Public Choice Theory The neoliberal critique of the democratic state is widely associated with public choice theory. Scholars such as James Buchanan developed models of democratic systems in which political actors such as politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens behaved in accordance with economics’ assumption of the rational self-interested person. Proponents of public choice theory developed an analysis of the ways in which narrow interests are able to secure disproportionate power through the democratic process. Key arguments of public choice theory rely on analysis of voters, legislatures, lobby groups, and bureaucrats. They argue that political candidates

Neoliberalism

are elected by a narrow constituency, not by the whole nation. In order to secure reelection, each politician will seek to secure a disproportionate share of public resources for his or her constituency. Major decisions tend to be made by a minority of powerful politicians on committees and in cabinets. As a result, political decision making will tend to result in a distortion of the allocation of public resources toward the constituencies of those in power, to the cost of those who do not currently hold power. Similarly, according to the theory of rent seeking, social conditions enable some citizens to effectively organize themselves to lobby government, while the majority of voters are too dispersed and are rationally ignorant of the political process. This results in government decision making being distorted in favor of minority interests. Finally, public choice analyses of the bureaucracy argue that public servants act to maximize the budgets of their departments, enlarging their empires and boosting their status and prestige. The politicians’ reliance on the bureaucracy for expert guidance and the lack of alternate sources of advice lead politicians to accept this advice, resulting in an inefficient expansion of the public sector. Public choice theory makes the case that these forms of government failure are endemic to the democratic state.

Economic Arguments The second and arguably more prominent prong of the neoliberal argument has been argued through economic policy and doctrine. It is widely associated with Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics. The economic arguments are made at both the microeconomic level and the macroeconomic level. The microeconomic argument draws directly on neoclassical economics and take the central challenge confronting humanity to be the problem of scarcity. It argues that competitive markets are the most efficient way of distributing scarce resources to produce the variety of goods and services that consumers access to maximize their well-being. This arises because, on the one hand, when individuals decide how to spend the household budget they will pay high prices for products they value more and lower prices for products of lower value. On the other hand, businesses seeking to maximize their profits will target their activities at producing

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products people are prepared to pay high prices for but that are low cost to make. The market brings these self-interested drives together to systematically provide the products that are most highly valued and of least cost. Neoclassical economists argue that if both businesses and consumers are fully rational, this is the optimal solution to the problem of scarce resources. This microeconomic argument posits that humans’ self-interested nature is better harnessed to the collective good through markets rather than through democratic politics. It celebrates the decentralized nature of power in the market system. It sees consumer preferences as the ultimate arbiter of success or failure in the market. The process of competition limits businesses, subjecting all businesses to market constraints and preventing the accumulation or abuse of power. At the macroeconomic level, Friedman developed monetarism as a refutation of Keynesian economics and the dominant view in the 1950s and 1960s that governments could manage the economy and minimize the extremes of the economic cycle. Friedman argued that government attempts to manage the economic cycle would ultimately fail as economic agents would adjust their behavior to take government actions into account, thereby nullifying the effect of policy on demand and output but creating movements in inflation. Friedman argued that government should limit its interference in the market to establishing a policy of steadily increasing the money supply.

Classical Liberalism and Neoliberalism Compared Through this two-pronged attack neoliberals can be seen to have advocated the same solution of minimal governments and free markets as classical liberals, even though the two were pitted against different foes. The ways in which neoliberals had to reframe the classical arguments to make their case put the two schools of thought at odds over core principles around rationality and freedom. Classical liberalism and neoliberalism both center on conceptions of rationality, yet they are quite distinct in terms of their treatment of individual rationality. Classical liberalism advocated rationality as an antidote to the reliance on tradition and religion in governing the aristocratic state. It placed great

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weight on the capacity of reason to govern human affairs. In contrast, neoliberalism’s critique of the democratic welfare state centered on the limitations of public reasoning. Building on John Nash’s critique of Adam Smith, neoliberalism sought to point out the ways in which individuals pursuing personal interests operated against the public interest, and that democratic processes conducted by rational actors often did not yield policies in the public interest. To make this argument neoliberals adopted a controversial conception of rationality that ran against the trend in debates about the nature of reasoning that washed across the social sciences in the 1970s. The result was that the neoliberal approach to rationality challenges the cornerstone of classical liberal arguments for democracy. Classical liberalism and neoliberalism also differ, though in less central ways, in how they conceive of freedom. Classical liberalism painted the essence of individual freedom as economic independence on the production side of the market, reflecting the predominance of small-scale artisan business in the early years of capitalism. Neoliberalism, by contrast, emerged against the backdrop of globalization, large multinational corporations, and liberation movements. For neoliberalism, individual freedom lies on the consumption side of the market, as freedom is expressed and experienced primarily through consumer choice and consumer sovereignty. Like all political philosophies, neoliberalism distinguishes itself from its competitors by the forms of power it focuses its analysis upon, and the forms of power it neglects. Neoliberalism adopts a narrow conception of power. It sees power as occurring where individuals’ self-interested behavior is not constrained by competitive forces that channel it to the greater good. Market power arises in the case of monopolies, where market circumstances mean that no one else can effectively compete with a dominant business. This lack of competition enables the monopolist to set prices so as to maximize his or her individual profit to the detriment of the public benefit. Neoliberals’ critique of governments is also based on monopoly power. The public choice arguments about the failures of the political process through rent seeking, about interest group behavior, and about the bureaucracy all share this same logic. There are features of the process of

democratic government that enable some narrow groups of people to press their agenda on the system more effectively and with only limited competition from others. This results in a distortion in the allocation of public resources to the detriment of the public benefit. Neoliberalism’s approach to power is also evident in its definition of utility and its ideal of Pareto optimality. It treats utility as noncomparable across persons. It also aspires to Pareto optimality as the condition where resources are allocated so that no reallocations can be made that make one person better off without sacrificing the wellbeing of at least one other person. This approach results in the analysis putting no weight on the distribution of income in assessing whether a reallocation amounts to an efficiency gain, nor does it attribute any role to disparities in income or power in shaping the outcome of bargaining. Neoliberalism’s neglect of most of the more common characterizations of power is central to its conflicts with its critics. Neoliberalism’s theoretical approach to modeling social behaviors is critiqued by detractors as being dominated by methodological individualism. Social phenomena are commonly modeled by imagining the rational choice of action available to a single actor and then generalizing the behavior to a group. Critics argue that this approach overlooks the power relations that make up social relations. Marxists initially critiqued classical liberals’ use of these types of frameworks because they were silent about the power relationship between the rich and the poor, between owners of capital and workers. They argued that the oversight legitimated a free market system in which the powerful were able to exploit the weak. Constructivists later made further critiques of methodological individualist thinking. They argued that people were not autonomous individuals, but socialized members of communities in which norms and beliefs shaped decision-making patterns. They argued that people’s perceptions of their goals and of their constraints were shaped by social discourse, and as a result, what was deemed to be rational was socially or culturally framed. They argued that neoliberalism’s blindness to these issues resulted in it legitimating social systems that exploited women or people of color as the outcome of rational social processes.

Neorealism

Neoliberalism’s ideological competitors argue that its blindness to these other forms of power is willful and that neoliberal ideas operate to enshrine and legitimate unequal power relationships. It is widely considered to be the legitimating ideology of capitalism. Lindy Edwards See also Free Market; Liberalism; Monopoly Power

Further Readings Buchanan, J. M., & Tulloch, G. (1962). The calculus of consent: Logical foundations of constitutional democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hall, P. A. (1989). The political power of economic ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hayek, F. A. von (1946). The road to serfdom. London: George Routledge and Sons.

NEOREALISM Neorealism concerns a series of theories with a common hard core of axioms and assumptions on the behavior of states, in particular the major powers, in the international system. Its founding text unquestionably is Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, which was published in 1979. Neorealism’s hard core is the same as that of classical realism, of which Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations is the most representative text. Neorealists and classical realists share a pessimistic view of world politics and are skeptical as to the possibilities of changing things for the better. Neorealists differ from classical realists in that they believe that world political phenomena can be studied and understood with the tools of empirical science. The message Waltz tried to convey in Theory of International Politics may be summarized in six points. 1. Scientific theories are not collections of laws to describe empirical phenomena, but attempts to explain why things are as they are.

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2. The theory developed in Theory of International Politics is a systems theory. The universe of possibly relevant phenomena can be divided into phenomena that are relevant to the explanation of international politics and those that are not. The ones that are relevant are considered to be part of a system—in this case, of course, the international system. These phenomena or elements of the system are somehow interrelated. This means that the conduct or state of any one of the elements is influenced by the conduct or state of the other elements. Moreover, as far as these elements are concerned, a distinction must be made between the interacting units (the states) on the one hand and the structure on the other hand. It is this structure that makes it possible to think of the units as forming a set as distinct from a mere collection. 3. The structure of the international system is defined by the principle by which it is ordered, as well as the distribution of capabilities across the states. Anarchy is the ordering principle or deep structure of the international system. As to the distributional structure, traditionally three types are distinguished: a multipolar structure, which means there are more than two great powers in the international system; a bipolar structure, in which there are two great powers; and a hegemonic or unipolar structure, when there is only one great power. Waltz limited himself to an analysis of the properties of multipolar and bipolar systems. 4. Waltz’s explanatory principle that states wish to survive, combined with the anarchical structure of the international system, leads to the conclusion that balances of power will recurrently form, whether states intend to establish a balance or not, and that balancing, not bandwagoning, is the behavior induced by the system. 5. Waltz explains that the more uneven the balance of power in the international system, and the smaller the number of great powers or poles in the system, the less dependent in military and economic terms will these poles be on other states and on one another, thus increasing the chances that the system will be stable and peaceful. The international system is

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a small number system, and “smaller is more beautiful than small.” 6. This statement also applies to the management of international affairs. The smaller the number of poles, and the more powerful these are, the more they will be prepared to invest in solutions for common problems faced by the states in the international system.

Although Waltz has strongly objected to “putting old and new realists in the same pot,” and distanced himself from attempts by Thomas Christensen and Jack Snyder and Randall Schweller to increase the empirical content of his theory, it is generally agreed among international relations scholars that classical realism, neorealism and its offshoots offensive and defensive realism, as well as the more recent neoclassical realism, can be seen as theories that together constitute a scientific research program in the sense intended by philosopher of science Imre Lakatos. According to Lakatos, a scientific research program is characterized by four elements. It has a hard core, which contains the explanatory principle and some crucial assumptions, as well as a negative heuristic, which tells scientists working in the program not to busy themselves with establishing whether this hard core is true or not. Instead they should develop a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses around the hard core, and be concerned with inventing, testing, and replacing these auxiliary hypotheses. Finally, the program’s positive heuristics provides the researchers with suggestions on how to develop the program, and to strengthen its protective belt.

The Core of Neorealist Research The four assumptions that make up the hard core of the realist research program are the following: first, the structure of the international system is anarchical. The international system lacks an agency that if necessary can force the members of the system, even the most powerful ones, to abide by the rules and keep their promises. Second, states are the most important actors in the international system. Realists believe that a sound understanding of international politics can only be achieved by focusing on the ways in which states, in particular the major powers, adapt to the system’s structure and interact with one another. The third

assumption concerns the explanatory principle. It assigns the states a motive to act: they wish to survive in the international system. States are able to order their behavioral options, and will choose the option that they expect to contribute most to strengthening their position vis-à-vis other states. The fourth assumption defines the relationship between the states and the structure of the international system. A state can only hope to survive if it is able to adapt itself successfully to the structure of the international system—and the laws that govern it—and not the other way around. The structure, however, does not determine the behavior of the states. It is up to the states to find out what the structure looks like and to decide whether or not they want to comply with it. They also can completely misread it. The manner in which this adaptation process takes place can in turn have consequences for the structure of the system.

Other Neorealist Assumptions Two further assumptions are perhaps a bit too controversial to warrant the status of belonging to the hard core, but can be seen as typical neorealist additions. The first was introduced by Michael Taylor and popularized by Robert Axelrod in his The Evolution of Cooperation. According to it, states are opportunistic, or perhaps better, myopic actors. The present value of an outcome of a certain behavioral option is less, the more distant in time this outcome is realized. The second concerns Gossen’s First Law, which is to the effect that, to paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, as a state goes on acquiring successive increments of a good (e.g., security), the intensity of its desire for one additional unit of that good declines monotonically until it reaches—and then conceivably falls below— zero. This implies that the more secure a state expects to be vis-à-vis other states, the less weight it will attach to acquiring an additional unit of security. This assumption helps to explain why states do not continue acquiring and are not exclusively concerned with acquiring the means that presumably will lead to yet another increase in security. The more secure a state believes itself to be, the more it will feel free to pay attention to, in the words of Robert Gilpin, “beauty, truth and goodness.” Gossen’s law also provides the explanation for Schweller’s observation that states satisfied

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with the status quo are risk-averse for gains, while dissatisfied states are risk-acceptant in that respect.

Relative Versus Absolute Gains One of the conclusions Waltz derived from this hard core is that states are more interested in relative than absolute gains. Because they feel insecure, states facing the decision to cooperate for mutual gain “are compelled to ask not ‘Will both of us gain?’ but ‘Who will gain more?” This position was further elaborated by Joseph Grieco in his energetic defense of neorealism against the liberalinstitutionalist position developed by Robert Keohane, mainly in the latter’s After Hegemony. According to Grieco, states are defensive positionalists that are sensitive to gaps in payoffs. They will therefore refuse to enter a cooperative arrangement with another state or will abandon an existing cooperative arrangement if they expect the gains that will accrue to the other state to exceed their own. This argument, however, is fatally flawed, because a state does not only take into account the respective gains of the prospective partners in a cooperative venture, but also what will happen if cooperation is not achieved. A state may loathe the fact that its potential ally will gain far more than itself from a defensive alliance against a potential aggressor, but will nevertheless decide that it is worth its while to conclude this alliance if by so doing it will prevent certain destruction. More generally, the concept of states’ worries about relative gains inhibiting cooperation loses all sense if more than two states are involved.

Balancing Behavior and Bandwagoning The positive heuristic of the research program has particularly led neorealist researchers to investigate the double claim made by Waltz in Theory of International Politics that in the international systems balances recurrently form, and that when states are confronted with a rising hegemon, they will engage in balancing behavior. In his earlier contribution to the Handbook of Political Science, which clearly foreshadowed the argument developed in Theory of International Politics, Waltz had stated that the theory of the balance of power was in principle testable, but admitted that its level of generality might be too high to get clear results.

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This naturally applies to the idea of the balance as the intended or unintended outcome of an international struggle for power and peace. When precisely is a balance of power established? In the decade after World War II the United States was far more powerful than the Soviet Union. Should it therefore be considered to be a period of American hegemony, or did a balance of power nevertheless obtain between the two powers? As far as balancing behavior is concerned, this implies, according to Waltz, that a major power confronted with another major power aspiring to hegemony will try to thwart that power’s aspirations. That major power does this by internal and external means. Internally, the major power increases its economic and military efforts to thwart the hegemon’s ambitions, while externally it also looks for allies to join in its efforts. Waltz also distinguished a second kind of behavior: bandwagoning. A state engages in bandwagoning when it attempts to join the potential hegemon on terms as advantageous as possible. But because bandwagoning leads to a state becoming dependent on the whims of the aspiring hegemon, it is a far more dangerous strategy than balancing, and states will wish to avoid it. From this the conclusion follows that balancing, not bandwagoning, will be the dominant behavior of states in the international system. It is precisely this theoretical argument that, according to Paul Schroeder, is contradicted by the reality of the history of the international system. Two examples discussed by Schroeder must suffice here. During the last quarter of the 17th century, France under Louis XIV threatened to establish its hegemony over northwest Europe. When France invaded the Dutch Republic in 1672, according to Waltz we should expect that England would have allied with the Netherlands to counteract French ambitions. In fact she did exactly the opposite and bandwagoned with France against the Dutch. When France under Napoleon made no secret of her hegemonic ambitions at the beginning of the 19th century, and Austria tried to form a balancing coalition against it, Prussia, rather than join this coalition, allied with France against Austria. More generally, one can say with Schroeder that in the Napoleonic era the larger and smaller powers in Europe were busier trying to live under Napoleonic hegemony rather than trying to challenge it. Schroeder concludes that bandwagoning is more common than

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balancing. Balancing is a strategy of last resort. States only decide to balance if they feel that everything else they have tried has failed. Confronted with the evidence presented by Schroeder, Waltz tried to play it down, but at the same time felt it necessary to fall back on the position that he had only predicted that “willy nilly, balances will form over time,” and that it was impossible to say how long this process would take. If this were true, it would be wholly uninteresting to try to test Waltz’s theory of the balance of power, for several reasons. First, stated in this form there is no explanation of why and how balances form. Second, this prediction is nonfalsifiable, lacking a specification of the conditions that are conducive to the forming of balances or that will retard it. Whatever we find in the world of international politics, it always agrees with Waltz’s prediction. But this is not true. In Theory of International Politics Waltz also predicted that states, when confronted with a rising hegemon, will engage in balancing behavior, and explained why this must be so. And it is this prediction that presents the theory with an anomaly.

Chain-Ganging, Buck-Passing, Hiding, and Transcending In the context of attempts to solve this anomaly, four more types of reaction to a hegemonic threat have been added to neorealism’s protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses. Christensen and Snyder introduced chain-ganging and buck-passing as aberrations of normal balancing behavior in a multipolar system. Schroeder, for his part, introduced hiding, as well as transcending. Chainganging is the behavior exhibited by great powers in a multipolar system when they perceive that an ally will easily be defeated if it is attacked by another great power, and that this defeat will severely weaken their own position vis-à-vis the attacker. If the attack occurs, they see no other option than to rush to their ally’s defense. Great powers engage in buck-passing when they perceive that an ally will be powerful enough to successfully resist an attack by another great power. In this situation, allies will try to shift the costs involved in stopping a rising great power on to one another, with the result that the rising power is allowed to acquire a far stronger position than it would have

had the allies together opposed it. Schroeder’s hiding is behavior that is typical of small states. If a war threatens between the great powers, perhaps as a result of a hegemonic bid by one of them, small states try to hide by declaring themselves neutral or by acting as if the threat does not exist. Perhaps they will try to strengthen their defenses, but the smallest states will refrain from doing even that. Their inability to influence the course of events makes small states withdraw into isolation and hope that everything will blow over. Transcending behavior implies that states will try to defuse a threat by searching for institutional arrangements and procedures that can put an end to it and prevent its recurrence. Robert H. Lieshout See also Anarchy in International Relations; Balance of Power; Realism in International Relations; Waltz, Kenneth

Further Readings Lieshout, R. H. (1995). Between anarchy and hierarchy. A theory of international politics and foreign policy. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Schroeder, P. W. (1994). Historical reality vs. neo-realist theory. International Security, 19(1), 108–148. Vasquez, J. A., & Elman, C. (2003). Realism and the balance of power: A new debate. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

NETWORKS, POWER IN A network is the sum of connections between individuals or organizations in a given locale or sector of activity. It is more than a one-off or oneshot interaction necessary to do a single piece of business, but is something that iterates and continues in place for a long time. Sometimes the exercise of power needs no network, like the confidence man who approaches someone on the basis of no prior knowledge; this lack of a prior network helps the con take place. More usually, individuals have relationships with people they know over a reasonably long period of time,

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and these relationships are structured by that history, which is also influenced by the bonds of common knowledge or friendship. There are various kinds of network structure, which may, for example, be close, sparse, or centralized, with various kinds of pathways between the different actors. A network may contain or embed social values that influence how the social actors relate together and make decisions. The relationship between power and networks is subtle. Networks are a form of social cooperation that helps ensure that collective action takes place. They provide the knowledge and trust to ensure that benefits are shared out fairly and help solve problems based on mutual knowledge and exchange. Network members can signal to each other to act, thereby confronting the collective action problem. The closeness of the bonds among members can help build up trust. Also the expectation that an actor will meet the other actor again (rather than act imperiously, as in a oneshot game) prevents conflict from becoming destructive or people taking their gains and walking away. Networks also provide resources that individuals need in order to act. Mark Granovetter claims that networks can allow individuals to access information and even if the links are not strong, where they bridge across different networks individuals gain collective power. Informal links are often more important that organizational ones (the “strength of weak ties”). Some networks will have greater resources than others; for example, extensive middle-class networks of acquaintances may be more effective in accessing resources such as employment than, for instance, a dense workingclass network made up of family members and neighbors who do not know people outside their close circle. As a result, bridging networks are associated with better policy outcomes because of their better access to information. Of course, these networks could contain untrusting members who just have to work together, but this is probably uncommon, as networks need a lot of trust to work effectively or else they break apart. Actors do exercise power in networks to get what they want—they use the network to dominate others, usually by taking advantage of the fact that the structure of the network determines the information flow. Formal network analysis, which

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concerns the measurement of networks, helps understand how this works. Networks are composed of nodes and ties: nodes are the actors, while ties are the links between them that may or may not be present or present to a different degree. Nodes and ties may be arranged in different patterns and have mathematical properties as determined by graph theory. Of importance for the study of power is that it is possible to denote a score for each actor in the network created by summing the ties to others. The most common score is network centrality, which is useful from a power perspective because the more central an actor’s location, the more influential he or she is likely to be. Because information flows through that central actor, the network the network can be structured to his or to her own advantage. For writers on government, this notion of centrality is often called nodality, and in the view of Christopher Hood and Helen Margetts it is one of the key tools governments use to get things done. There are different measures of centrality. The most common is degree centrality, which counts up the links one actor has to the rest. This might be thought to be too simple, for what matters is the extent to which an actor dominates others who have weak ties rather than simply the number of ties the actor has. As Phillip Bonacich writes, “It is advantageous to be connected to those who have few options. Power comes from being connected to those who are powerless” (1987, p. 1171). Thus, for Bonacich centrality is defined as the sum of an actor’s connections to other points, weighted by the centrality of each of these other points, though in practice it is highly correlated with simple or what is called Freeman centrality. There is a lot of research that links centrality to power in networks, such as in banking and in the study of community power. There are other measures of network structure, but they are less used in studies of power. The main problem with the study of social networks is drawing inferences regarding power, because the structure of the network may reflect existing power relations rather than shape them. It is possible that the nodes have formed a network of a particular shape because individuals are powerful rather than the structure of the network causing the power relationships. (For example, individuals may have resources, making it advantageous for other actors to network with them.) The response

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to this criticism is to say that networks may reflect embedded relationships that individuals have invested in or power relationships that operated in the past. The network is path dependent because these routes are already in place and it is costly to change. So networks shape how interactions take place. For example, consider the place of the United Kingdom in international relations. The United Kingdom was placed at the center of many international networks as one of the victors at the end of World War II. The United Kingdom’s economic and military power has declined since then, but its continuing position in the networks allows it to “punch over its weight,” or so the diplomats would have people believe. The real problem with social networks and power is to find studies that demonstrate the power of networks. This was highlighted in the finding of Karen Cook and her colleagues. Their experimental study shows that centrality was not associated with power in networks, a finding that the Bonacich and other measures were designed to counter, and something the empirical, experimental, and simulation literatures have found hard to unseat. Keith Dowding’s 1995 review of network studies was similarly pessimistic, finding that network analysis has proved inadequate to providing fully determined causal analysis of particular networks in structural terms. Either the research program is not advanced enough, or there is a fundamental problem: networks do not really affect power relationships. Peter John See also Networks and Communities; Small Worlds, Power in; Structural Power; Structural Suggestion; Structure-Induced Equilibrium

Further Readings Bonacich, P. (1987). Power and centrality: A family of measures. American Journal of Sociology, 92, 1170–1182. Cook, K., Emerson, R., & Gillmore, M. (1983). The distribution of power in exchange networks: Theory and experimental results. American Journal of Sociology, 87, 275–305. Dowding, K. (1995). Model or metaphor? A critical review of the policy network approach. Political Studies, 43, 136–158.

Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–1380. Hood, C., & Margetts, H. (2007). The tools of government in the digital age. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Scott, J. (2000). Social network analysis. London: Sage.

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People are social animals, and they live in groups. These social groups form coherent units that enable individuals to live and flourish. Of course there are many ways of organizing social groups, and these have become more complex over time. Nevertheless, the basic insight of network theory and the idea of community is that the organization of social groups enables people to flourish more completely. The idea is that the stock of social bonds, networks, and patterns of association help people in many ways, such as providing support or information. When these stocks of bonds are added together societies can operate more efficiently in that many social ills are corrected automatically. Moreover, governments can intervene by relying on citizens cooperating, sorting themselves in ways that are constructive, and providing support for each other. In this way, societies with these bonds and networks achieve collective ends much more easily than do societies without them. The ideas of supportive networks and communitybased collective action are attractive, so it is no surprise that they have been revived in recent years with the large amount of work on what is often called social capital—for example, Robert Putnam’s 2000 work, Bowling Alone. The problem is tying down a concept so notoriously slippery that it is hard to know what it measures and that is so flexible in usage that its utility in social analysis is problematic. The key problem is definition. Are we talking about networks, in which case the power comes from how efficiently people are joined up, how they may exchange information so as to signal cooperation, thus helping to overcome the collective action problem? Lots of problems in society have this characteristic—people collectively want to get to a certain outcome, but just do not know

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what other people are going to do. Consider a street on which the residents have the option of recycling their waste. People put their recycled waste into boxes for collection, but they know that if no one else does this, their own efforts will be pretty pointless. So how do the residents act collectively? The existing social network allows each actor to signal to the others how he or she will act, so that people can put out their recyclables in this knowledge. Of course, this must be a supportive network that allows people to trust each other. In that sense, some writers on this topic, for instance Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer, suggest that trust should be the important ingredient—in exchanges with each other, we should not treat each other as knaves, for if we do we will never be able to come to an agreement to buy and sell. Some kind of trust is necessary for most kinds of social interactions to arise, though it is not clear whether it should be a generalized kind of trust (what is called social trust) or a particular sort tailored for a particular context. Some researchers, such as Putnam, think that associational membership is the key, with participation in associations creating the networks that foster effective public action and better policy outcomes. Partly because of the ambiguity of definition, academics have been very skeptical as to whether social capital is a meaningful concept at all and whether the data support the claims being made (see Jackman & Miller, 2004). Nonetheless, as noted by David Halpern, there is an accumulation of studies across many fields that show that these measures are associated with higher performance in the form of better government actions, and various desirable policy outcomes like lower crime, better health, and more prosperous economies. The results demonstrate that many forms of social networks and other forms of reciprocation have benefits for wider society. Peter John See also Collective Action Problem; Social Capital; Strength of Weak Ties

Further Readings Halpern, D. (2005). Social capital. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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Jackman, R. W., & Miller, R. A. (2004). Before norms: Institutions and civic culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Knack, S., & Keefer, P. (1997). Does social capital have an economic payoff? A cross-country investigation. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112, 1251–1288. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone. New York: Simon & Schuster.

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844–1900)

A German philosopher and poet, Friedrich Nietzsche has been called, among other things, the wellspring of the 20th century. Many artists claimed him as an influence, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Herman Hesse, along with various surrealists, cubists, and modernists. He was also claimed as an influence by a variety of thinkers, including psychologists such as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Wilhelm Reich, Marxists such as Theodor Adorno, Nazis such as Alfred Baumler and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, postmodernists, feminists, the phenomenologist Max Scheler, the neoconservative Leo Strauss, and some analytic philosophers. Interpretations of his thought vary as wildly as the cross-purposes behind them. However, almost all interpreters agree that his biography is important to understanding the growth and gist of his thought, making him one of the few eminent philosophers in the West whose life matters to his influential readers. Nietzsche was trained as a philologist. Although he is remembered primarily as a philosopher and writer, a few of his philological innovations have become standard fare among classicists, including his speculations about the pronunciation of ancient Greek vowels. While still a professor of classics, however, his interests turned to philosophy. He sought but failed to attain a professorship in philosophy. He published essays on such topics as “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” and “Schopenhauer as Educator.” He also brought out his first two collections of philosophical aphorisms. After eventually leaving the university, he was able to focus all of his energy on philosophy. Three more collections of aphorisms appeared

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over the next three years. Then, perhaps unexpectedly, Nietzsche spent two years on four long poems, these being the four books, originally published separately, that make up Thus Spoke Zarathustra. After that, more philosophical works appeared. Among these, Beyond Good and Evil and Toward a Genealogy of Morals have the greatest notoriety. The final year of his career was his most productive, yielding five separate though short works, including an autobiography. Early in his 10-year professorship, Nietzsche became a close friend of the most celebrated artist of his era, Richard Wagner, and his eventual wife, Cosima. At that time Cosima, illegitimate daughter of composer Franz Liszt, was married to another man while living adulterously and having children with Wagner in Switzerland. Nietzsche admired their open contempt for the repressive morality of the times. He was also deeply impressed by Wagner. He spent half of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, discussing Wagner. Later he contracted with a group of Wagner’s followers to publish an essay, Wagner at Bayreuth, in association with the festival that occasioned the first ever performance of Wagner’s epic Ring cycle. At or around the time of the festival, Nietzsche discovered that his heart was no longer with Wagner, and eventually that it was squarely set against him. They ceased to communicate. However, Wagner is discussed in all but a few of Nietzsche’s books, and he is the primary topic of two pamphlet-length works from his final year, The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner. All of Nietzsche’s thinking on art is clearly influenced both by his knowledge of the ancients and by what he calls his years of “recuperation” from Wagnerian romanticism, whose influence on himself and on European taste he likened to a disease. His philological background is also obvious in his epistemological work, where he developed a theory of necessary fictions, that is, falsehoods required for producing truths. His other major themes in epistemology involve traditional Enlightenment ideals, including the positivist dream of employing scientific method in the study of moral and aesthetic phenomena. In that direction, Nietzsche hoped for the development of a scientific psychology that could improve our understanding of human nature, and thereby improve our political and philosophical thought. Philosophy, he held, had gone astray due to its ignorance of humanity just as frequently

as had political thought. His theory of the will to power began as a contribution to psychology. Eventually his resistance to all things romantic led Nietzsche into a confrontation with the metaphysical idealism of German philosophy. He saw Wagner and German philosophy, including both Kant and Hegel, as reactions against the Enlightenment and delayers of the onset of scientific atheism. He found their historical analogue in the early Christian suppression of the Greco-Roman enlightenment. Against the German idealists he favored naturalism, empiricism, and a fight to the death against obscurantism. Nietzsche’s politics remain enigmatic. Although he looked with favor on a case in which his position was labeled “aristocratic radicalism,” he also frequently sided with the working classes. He dismissed revolution, but praised democracy for providing the freedom that science and philosophy too often lacked. He saw and admired war, yet denounced as wasteful the armed peace under which he lived most of his life. He despised weakness and praised strength, yet he often admonished the rich as lazy-minded and superficial. He consistently urged sobriety in political affairs, yet called, near the end of his career, for a new caste that would rule Europe. In ethics Nietzsche is less enigmatic. He denied free will, and on that basis denied moral responsibility. But he is remembered by ethicists for his attack on moral sentiment, in particular for his devaluation of pity, selflessness, and egalitarianism. In place of what he thought of as a morality of beautiful feelings, he advocated what he called a morality of rationality, which consisted primarily of a campaign of self-improvement. In this he resembles what is known as a virtue ethicist, meaning the kind of ethicist who concentrates on what kind of person we should be rather than on which individual actions to take or avoid. Bryan Finken See also Will to Power

Further Readings Green, M. S. (2002). Nietzsche and the transcendental tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kaufmann, W. (1950). Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, antichrist. New York: World.

Noncooperative Games May, S. (1999). Nietzsche’s ethics and his war on “morality.” New York: Oxford University Press. Schacht, R. (1983). Nietzsche. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

NON DECISION MAKING In their empirical work, pluralists have studied controversial decisions made in local politics in order to determine who influenced those decisions. They were criticized for concentrating upon issues that were in the public eye and ignoring issues that were not publicly discussed. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz introduced the phrase non decision making to describe processes that led to some issues being organized out of politics. They defined a non decision as “a decision that results in the suppression or thwarting of a latent or manifest challenge to the values and interest of the decision maker” (Bachrach & Baratz, 1970, p. 44) and went on to say that such non decision making allows “demands for change on the existing allocation of benefits and privileges in the community to be suffocated before they are even voiced; or kept covert; or killed before they gain access to the relevant decision-making arena; or failing all these things, maimed or destroyed in the decision-implementing stage of the policy process” (Bachrach & Baratz, 1970, p. 44). They broke non decisions down into four categories: 1. force (including harassment, imprisonment, and murder); 2. the threat of sanctions; 3. the use of prevailing norms, rules, and procedures to quash issues; 4. reinforcing or creating new norms to stop incipient conflict.

Their account was criticized by pluralists such as Raymond Wolfinger and Nelson Polsby, who suggested that non decisions could not be said to exist if they could not be seen and measured. However, from the definition and empirical work of Bachrach and Baratz and others, it is obvious that at least some non decisions are observable and measurable. Certainly harassment, imprisoning, and murdering are actions that can be seen

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and measured. What Bachrach and Baratz meant was that decisions are often taken on issues in order to keep them out of the public eye and out of political discussion. However, to the extent that such issues are controversial and different groups become involved, these types of non decisions are not outside pluralist discussions of power, even if they fall outside some empirical pluralist studies. More radical writers criticize the concept of non decisions from precisely the opposite viewpoint. Radical critics suggest that we need to go beyond non decisions into the creation of values. They suggest that issues might be uncontroversial despite being against the interests of most people. For example, the abolition of the wealth tax in the United States received popular support, even though it was a redistributive tax from the richest 2% to 98% of the population. The unpopularity of wealth taxes might be an example of the third category of non decision making. Furthermore, non decisions, according to the fourth part of the definition, seem to include the creation of values, which radical writers see as an important element of power. However, the all-encompassing nature of the definition of non decision making is itself a problem for the concept. Because the concept utilizes the notion of “force” (its first manifestation) and the idea of “creating new norms” (its fourth manifestation) it seems too broad to be used analytically. Surely identifying power through force is very different from identifying power through creating norms. And the radical critics are correct in the idea that value systems do not have to be created by the powerful or privileged in order to help maintain their power and interests, yet non decision making as laid out by Bachrach and Baratz seems to have a deliberative element within it. Keith Dowding See also Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton; Dahl, Robert A.; Pluralism; Second Face of Power

NONCOOPERATIVE GAMES Game-theoretical modeling is a tool used to study situations in which the outcome depends on the

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strategic interaction of rational actors. The models used can be divided into two categories: cooperative

and noncooperative. This distinction is based on the ability of players to make binding agreements with each other. Players in noncooperative games cannot make binding agreements to coordinate their actions. This implies that all actions have to be explained in terms of the interests of individual players. Furthermore, we can distinguish between strategic form games and extensive form games. In strategic form games all players select their strategies simultaneously, while extensive form games specify a sequence of moves.

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To solve noncooperative games, we first need to specify the relevant players, the set of actions available to them, and the payoffs they would receive from all possible outcomes. In other words, we have to decide whose actions are relevant to explain a given event, what actions these actors can take to influence the outcome, and how they rank the possible outcomes. Figure 1 (p. 450) gives an example of a strategic form game with 2 players (Row, Column) who can use two actions (cooperate, defect).

The numbers in the cells denote the payoff each actor would get from this combination of actions. By convention, the payoffs of the row player are given first. If both actors choose to cooperate, Row would get a payoff of 3 in this example. The higher the payoff, the more utility an actor derives from an outcome. Thus, Row would prefer the situation in which he or she defects but Column cooperates with the situation of mutual cooperation because the former yields a higher payoff (4  3). For extensive form games, we also have

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to decide on the order in which actors have to move and their level of information at each stage. This information is commonly represented in a game tree. Figure 2a (p. 450) provides an example of an extensive form game tree in which Row moves before Column and Column knows about Row’s move. By convention, payoffs are listed in the order of moves. Uncertainty about previous moves by other players can be incorporated in the extensive form as well. Figure 2b (p. 450) provides an example of an extensive form game with imperfect information. The dashed line between Column’s decision nodes depicts Column’s uncertainty with regard to Row’s previous move. Uncertainty about the payoffs (incomplete information) can be modeled by introducing a move by a neutral instance (Nature) that determines which game or subgame is being played. In Figure 3 (p. 451), Row plays the game of Figure 2a with probability p (upper branch) and against a column player who always prefers to cooperate with probability 1 − p (lower branch). To solve a game we need to specify a principle which guides the choices of the players in this strategic setting. Most noncooperative games use the Nash equilibrium concept (and refinements thereof): An outcome is stable (in equilibrium) if no actor has an incentive to deviate from it unilaterally. In Figure 1 (p. 450), mutual defection is the Nash equilibrium. Both players would receive a lower payoff were they to change their actions individually. Because binding agreements are, by definition, not feasible, mutual cooperation cannot be reached by a coordinated move. Backward induction is a widely used solution concept for extensive form games. Andreas Warntjen See also Chicken Game; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Prisoner’s Dilemma

Further Readings Osborne, M. J. (2004). An introduction to game theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rasmussen, E. (2007). Games and information. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Further Readings Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1970). Power and poverty: Theory and practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.

NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION AND POWER The relation of nonverbal communication to power, and to related constructs such as dominance and status, has captured the interest of researchers for more than 30 years. In this entry, two kinds of nonverbal communication are discussed— nonverbal behavior and nonverbal communication skill. Nonverbal behavior is any visible or audible behavior aside from the linguistic content of a message. Nonverbal behavior can convey information about emotions, attitudes, roles, cognitive and physical states, and personal characteristics such as gender, age, and personality. Such information can be conveyed both deliberately and unintentionally. Visible nonverbal behaviors include facial expressions, head movements, posture, body and hand movements, touching oneself or others, leg positions and movements, interpersonal gaze, directness of interpersonal orientation, and interpersonal distance. Vocal nonverbal behaviors include qualities of the voice such as pitch and pitch variation, loudness, speed, and tonal qualities. Several additional behaviors are often included among nonverbal behaviors even though they are closely related to speech: interruptions, pauses and hesitations, listener responses (such as uh-huh uttered while another is speaking), filled pauses (such as um uttered during one’s own speech), dysfluencies in speech, and amount of speech. Nonverbal communication skill encompasses two kinds of skill: accuracy of encoding (sending or expressing) messages or other kinds of information through nonverbal behavior, and accuracy of decoding (interpreting or understanding) the meanings of other people’s nonverbal behavior. To

Nonverbal Communication and Power

measure these skills, there must be a criterion against which accuracy can be scored. Nonverbal communication has been investigated with regard to a variety of power-related concepts, including dominance, authority, expertise, influence, rank, status, and power. The fine distinctions among these terms are not always easy to draw, partly because researchers do not always use them in the same way. Because all of these definitions reflect position on a low–high dimension, here the term power will be used to subsume these conceptually related, though not synonymous, concepts. Power may be defined in absolute or relative terms, may be defined in terms of states or traits, may be defined in terms of intentions or outcomes, and may be attached to individuals on an achieved, ascribed, or assigned basis. Examples include personality dominance, experimentally assigned roles, occupational rank, and social class.

Theoretical Perspectives The theorist Nancy Henley argued that nonverbal communication has a far-reaching relation to the acquisition, expression, and maintenance of power. Because nonverbal behavior is often produced and interpreted in subtle and nonconscious ways, it can serve power-role functions even when the people involved are not aware of them. According to this perspective, people with high and low power both exercise power and attempt to gain power through the use of nonverbal cues. Nonverbal cues serve power roles both directly, for example through their instrumental relation to power acquisition, and indirectly, by signaling that the person is portraying his or her power role as expected. Henley also proposed that differences in the nonverbal communication style and skills of men and women may be traced to gender differences in social power, with women behaving as low-power people do and men behaving as high-power people do. This subordination hypothesis attracted great interest as a possible explanation for well-established gender differences in smiling, gazing, interpersonal distance, touching, encoding and decoding skill, and a variety of other nonverbal behaviors. Some aspects of nonverbal communication that have been proposed to be related to power include smiling, gazing (amount and pattern), interpersonal

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distance, nonverbal decoding skill, and touching. However, the specific proposed relations to power can vary. For example, though one can predict that low-power people engage in relatively high levels of smiling due to the need to ingratiate or appease others, it is also possible to predict the opposite on the grounds that low-power people experience more negative affect than high-power people. Similarly, it has been argued that low-power people manifest high levels of nonverbal sensitivity (decoding accuracy) because they have an adaptive need to do so; but, on the other hand, other theorists have proposed that low-power people have relatively less developed decoding ability (in organizations, at any rate) because such skill is often not very important for successful completion of the tasks required of persons in low-ranking positions, whereas for more high-ranking individuals there may be strong demands to be interpersonally sensitive both to subordinates (in order to understand morale, etc.) and to peers or competitors when engaging in complex negotiation or decision-making tasks. As a final illustration of theoretical ambiguity, one might argue that low-power people need to monitor others closely through gazing, in order to ascertain others’ desires or to detect threats, or simply to show that they are paying attention; on the other hand, one could argue that low-power people’s anxiety or desire to appear deferential might produce low levels of gaze, while high-power people engage in large amounts of interpersonal gaze because of their need to monitor subordinates or because of their freedom to impose on others (in this instance, to impose symbolically by gazing at them). Because theory does not produce unambiguous predictions about power and nonverbal communication, it is essential to attend closely to the empirical evidence.

Power and Nonverbal Communication: Believed and Actual Relations Several meta-analyses (quantitative reviews of research) have greatly improved understanding of the research literature. A large group of studies has documented beliefs about the relations of power to nonverbal communication. Though occasionally participants are asked to state their stereotypical beliefs about these relations directly,

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most investigators have inferred such beliefs by presenting nonverbal cues to participants and asking them to indicate their impression of power (dominance, status, etc.). Beliefs are inferred from the correlations between the power ratings and the measured nonverbal cues. For example, if target individuals who self-touch more are given lower power ratings than target individuals who selftouch less, the researcher infers that participants believe low-power people touch themselves more than high-power people. Another large group of studies has documented actual relations of power to nonverbal communication (i.e., studies that measure power and nonverbal communication using independent and objective methods). As an example, a researcher might measure the personality dominance of a group of target individuals using a self-report scale, record their behavior during a conversation, and then employ trained (blind) coders to measure their nonverbal behavior. In such a study, the objectively measured nonverbal behavior is then correlated with the independently assessed personality dominance measure. Table 1 presents results from meta-analytic reviews as well as other published findings that bear on both stereotypical beliefs about power and nonverbal communication and actual relations between power and nonverbal communication. It is important to keep in mind that the results in the figure are a broad summary and that they are sometimes based on only a small number of studies for a specific nonverbal variable (occasionally, only one study is available). And, very importantly, regardless of whether there was a net trend or not, the effects are highly variable across studies, sometimes going in diametrically opposite directions. For example, some studies found that people gave higher power ratings to target individuals who smile more, while some studies found the reverse. Similarly, one study found that highpower individuals used more back-channel responses (such as uh-huh) while listening during conversation whereas several others found exactly the opposite. Finally, the average effects are quite modest in magnitude, often reflective of the high degree of heterogeneity in the results. Table 1 indicates that beliefs are pervasive. High- and low-power individuals are believed to

Table 1

Believed and actual nonverbal communication of individuals higher in power (empirical findings)

Variable

Believed Actual

Smiling

no

no

Gazing (more overall)

yes

no

Visual dominance ratio (higher)*

yes

yes

Lowered brows (more)

yes

no

Facial expressiveness (more)

yes

yes

Nodding (more)

yes

no

Self-touching (less)

yes

no

Touching others (more)

yes

no

Hand/arm gestures (more)

yes

no

Bodily openness (more)

yes

yes

Bodily relaxation (less)

yes

no

Bodily shifting (more)

yes

no

Moving feet

no

no

Interpersonal distance (smaller)

yes

yes

Orientation (directness of facing other)

no

no

Vocal variability (more)

yes

no*

Loud voice (more)

yes

yes

Interruptions (more)

yes

yes

Conversational overlaps

no

no

Back-channel responses

no

no

Speech latency/pausing (shorter, less)

yes

no

Filled pauses (less)

yes

no

Laughter (more)

yes

no

Speech dysfluencies (less)

yes

no

Speed of speech (faster)

yes

no

Amount of speech (more)

yes

yes

Voice pitch (lower)

yes

no

Relaxed voice (more)

yes

yes

Encoding accuracy (greater)

yes

yes

Decoding accuracy (greater)

no

yes

*Result went in opposite direction from predicted result. Note: “No” means the available research does not support a relation between power and nonverbal communication (for an exception, see vocal variability); “yes” means that higher power has been shown to be associated with higher values on the listed behavior.

Nonverbal Communication and Power

differ on the great majority of the nonverbal behaviors that have been examined in the literature. In contrast, actual effects are far fewer in number. Only facial expressiveness, bodily openness, interpersonal distance, vocal variability, loudness, interruptions, relaxed-sounding voice, visual dominance ratio (ratio of percentage of looking while speaking to percentage of looking while listening), encoding accuracy, and decoding accuracy emerged as correlates of power. Some of these findings run counter to some earlier theorizing. For example, more accuracy in decoding nonverbal cues based on standard tests was associated in a meta-analysis with more personality dominance, more capacity for status (another selfreport scale), higher social class, and, in women, more liberal (less oppressed) gender-role attitudes and domestic division of labor (when decoding a female target). Most research on decoding accuracy and power is based on trait measures of decoding skill. When decoding accuracy is measured in situations where two persons of unequal power engage in a live dyadic interaction rather than watching recorded test stimuli, the results appear to be contradictory in that accuracy is higher in the low-power group (findings not in table); however, this has been shown to be due not to the low-power group’s decoding accuracy per se (i.e., their motive to be accurate), but rather to the fact that the low-power role produces deficient nonverbal expressions in those assigned to that group, compared to those assigned to the high-power group. Thus, in the dyadic power paradigm, low-power individuals are more accurate decoders because their own expressions are relatively difficult for their highpower partners to decode. The subordination hypothesis, according to which male–female nonverbal communication differences parallel those based on power, is not well supported by the data. Some behaviors show the predicted parallelism (e.g., both high-power people and men use more open postures), but others show the reverse (e.g., high-power people use smaller interpersonal distances, but so do women). In addition, a number of behaviors that do show gender differences (e.g., women smile and gaze more than men) do not show overall power differences. Further research is needed to address possible

455

behaviors and situations in which men’s and women’s nonverbal communication might be influenced by their power.

Theoretical Progress and Future Directions Research on actual power and nonverbal communication sometimes shows no relationship to speak of, but more often than not it produces highly divergent relations. Therefore, an appropriate conclusion is not that actual power and nonverbal communication have only sporadic relations, but rather they have very inconsistent relations. Accordingly, one must conclude that other factors besides power per se are operative. Indeed, the relationship between power and nonverbal communication may be so highly moderated by other factors that the search for overall effects is not very profitable. Because nonverbal behavior predominantly reflects current emotions and interpersonal intentions, it is likely that factors relating to emotion, goals, motives, and role construals will emerge as the moderators. These factors, which can be called proximal states, probably cannot be predicted with great confidence from power per se and therefore should not be assumed to covary strongly with power in a general sense. For example, a low-power person may smile a great deal if he or she desires to appear sociable and likeable, but may smile very little if anxious, angry, or depressed or if he or she believes that a more serious demeanor will make a better impression. By the same token, a high-power person who defines his or her role as supportive and nurturing may smile a great deal, but may smile very little if motivated to appear stern and controlling. Such factors, which have rarely been measured in research on power and nonverbal communication, may explain both weak overall effects (because they create “noise” in the data) as well as divergent results across studies (because different proximal states may be aroused in high- and low-power groups in different studies). Future research should attend closely to proximal states as moderator variables. Other promising directions include more attention to the dynamic interplay of power-related nonverbal behaviors between individuals of differing power. Research suggests interesting patterns

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Nonverbal Communication and Power

of complementarity for power-related nonverbal behaviors that emerge between interactants during ongoing conversation (specifically, open vs. closed body positions), as well as predictable outcomes for dyads displaying complementary behaviors. Another promising area of research suggests that degrees of power may be associated with degrees of psychological inhibition and behavioral variability, with high-power individuals being less inhibited and more behaviorally variable. Research on both encoding and decoding accuracy within dyadic interaction is also in its infancy. Most research on encoding accuracy is based on posed portrayals, and most research on decoding accuracy is based on participants’ responses to standard audiovisual tests. Though informative, such research does not shed light on the process of being accurate as an encoder or decoder during live, ongoing interaction. Dyadically based research is essential to understanding how power influences communication in real life. Also relevant to ecological validity is the

need for more research on people who actually differ in power, as opposed to being assigned to different power positions in the laboratory. Though crucial for controlling extraneous factors, laboratory manipulations of power are likely to be deficient in producing the motivations, emotions, and reward contingencies that are present in real power relations. Judith A. Hall See also Hall, Judith A.

Further Readings Knapp, M. L., & Hall, J. A. (2005). Nonverbal communication in human interaction (6th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Hall, J. A. (1984). Nonverbal sex differences: Communication accuracy and expressive style. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

O opposing army cannot be translated into decisive strategic victory over the opposing state. Thus, Napoleon’s armies defeated Russia’s armies in battle in 1812 but could not conquer Russia. Napoleon could not translate tactical offensive success into strategic success, and so won battles but lost the war.

OFFENSE/DEFENSE DOMINANCE Scholars of international relations use the term offense/defense balance to refer to the relative ease of conquering versus defending territory. The offense is strong if conquering and holding territory is relatively easy. The defense is strong if conquest is relatively hard. Conquest is almost never actually easier than defense. Rather, even when offense is strong it usually remains somewhat harder than defense. Accordingly, scholars use the term offense dominance to refer to situations where conquest is unusually easy (even if defense remains easier than offense in absolute terms), and defense dominance to refer to situations where conquest is unusually difficult. Thus, military conditions in Western Europe were offense dominant in 1939–1940, as shown by Germany’s quick conquests of Poland, France, and the Low Countries, although defense probably remained somewhat easier than offense in those years. Scholars distinguish the strategic offense/defense balance from the tactical offense/defense balance. The strategic offense/defense balance refers to the relative ease of conquering states versus defending states from conquest. The tactical offense/defense balance is a more local concept, defining the relative ease of offense and defense between military forces, especially at a point of attack. A tactical defensive or offensive advantage tends to create a strategic defensive or offensive advantage, but exceptions can be found. For example, sometimes a successful attack on an

Factors Shaping the Offense/ Defense Balance The offense/defense balance is shaped by military, geographic, and domestic social and political factors, as well as by international institutions such as alliances. Military technology, doctrine, and force posture can favor the offense or the defense. For example, the coming of nuclear weapons strongly favored the defense. Any state with a secure nuclear deterrent is secure from conquest, as it can annihilate any attacker. And a secure deterrent is far easier to maintain than to threaten, so nuclear powers can defend themselves against states with many times their economic power—as they often could not before nuclear weapons appeared. Hence the nuclear revolution is a defensive revolution in warfare. Guerrilla war is a defensive form of war, because it is useful for defending territory but not for aggression. Hence the development of guerrilla doctrine and the spread of small arms (which enable guerrilla tactics) in the 20th century moved the global offense/defense balance toward the defense. The development of the machine gun, rapid fire rifles, barbed wire, and railroads (which enhanced 457

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Opportunity

the mobility of defenders but not attackers) favored the defense in Western Europe in 1914–1918. On the other hand, the development of tanks, combined with Germany’s invention of a new offensive armored doctrine—blitzkrieg—moved the offense/defense balance in Europe back toward the offense in the late 1930s. Geographic barriers such as mountains, rivers, or oceans favor the defense by impeding the movement of attackers. Conquest among island states is hard because water barriers protect them from one another. Conquest among states that lie exposed on an open plain is easier. Densely forested terrain favors the defense by supporting guerrilla resistance against invaders. The rise of nationalism since the late 18th century is widely argued to favor the defense by ensuring that invaders will face punishing popular resistance by occupied nations. A network of defensive alliances—that is, conditional promises by states to fight on the side of allies if these allies are attacked, but not if they attack others—ensures that attackers will face many enemies, while victims of attack will have many friends. This favors the defense. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1862–1890) used such a network to preserve peace in Europe from 1879 to 1890. When neutral states act as balancers, joining the weaker of two competing coalitions to restore balance between them, conquest is harder. Aggression is self-limiting because aggressor states and coalitions generate more opposition as they expand. Britain and later the United States traditionally played the role of balancers to Europe, providing a counterweight to potential continental hegemons. This made conquest harder for the strongest continental powers. The offense/defense balance can differ from region to region around the world at any given time. The offense was dominant between Israel and its neighbors in 1967 because they lay near one another, they were separated by no formidable geographic barriers, they possessed mobile armored forces, and they did not possess nuclear weapons. At the same time, the defense was dominant between the United States and the Soviet Union because their great size, their great distance from each other, and their nuclear weapons made it almost impossible for each to conquer the other.

The Offense/Defense Balance and International Relations Theory The concept of offense/defense balance is important mainly for its central role in offense/defense theory. This theory has emerged since the late 1970s as a prominent explanation for war. It argues that war is more likely when conquest is easy, for two main reasons: (1) Predatory states launch more wars of conquest when conquest is easy because they see more opportunities to conquer others. (2) All states are less secure when conquest is easy because their borders are harder to defend and their neighbors are more aggressive. Hence they launch aggressive wars to gain more defensible borders, and to cut their neighbors down to size. Offense/defense theory helps to explain many wars, both modern and ancient. Stephen Van Evera See also Defensive Realism; First-Strike Capability; Mutually Assured Destruction; Security Dilemma; Spiral Model

Further Readings Glaser, C. L., & Kaufmann, C. (1998). What is the offense-defense balance and can we measure it? International Security, 22(4), 44–82. Jervis, R. (1978). Cooperation under the security dilemma. World Politics, 30(2), 167–214. Lynn-Jones, S. M. (1995). Offense/defense theory and its critics. Security Studies, 4(4), 660–691. Van Evera, S. (1999). Causes of war: Power and the roots of conflict. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

OFFENSIVE REALISM See Defensive Realism

OPPORTUNITY The idea of opportunity in relationship to the power structure concerns its distribution. If some people have greater opportunities than others to

Opportunity

secure the positions they desire, to gain wealth or political office, then they will obviously be in a stronger position to gain greater power. However, it is also clear that if everyone had the same opportunities in life this would not necessarily lead either to equality in final outcomes or to equality of power. Some people might make the best use of their opportunities while others waste theirs. Equality of opportunity is often taken to mean equality of opportunity before the law. In other words, no positions in society can be closed to some people for irrelevant reasons. Of course, for many positions certain qualifications are needed. Those without medical degrees will not be considered for employment as hospital doctors; often advertisements will specify certain skills or educational attainment required if the applicant is to be considered for the job. Irrelevant considerations in modern times would be the applicant’s gender (for most positions; sometimes this might be considered pertinent), race, caste, or social background. For many egalitarians, however, equal opportunity simply specified in legal terms is not enough. We need to equalize opportunities more broadly. But measuring the chance that people have to make use of their opportunities and whether they really have them is problematic. It might be argued, for example, that one’s opportunities are directly related to one’s ableness, as Peter Morriss defines the term. Giving someone the opportunity to apply for a given job—sending them the application form, for example—is not much of an opportunity if they do not have the relevant qualifications. Or, to take Morriss’s examples, giving someone a library card does not give them the opportunity to read if they have never been taught to read, any more than does handing a blind person one’s reading glasses. On this account opportunity is equivalent not only to the conditions of the possibility but also the ability to make use of those conditions. Ability plus the conditions is (roughly) what Morriss means by ableness. This approach implies that the equalization of opportunities requires the development of people’s capacities and abilities. But note how strong Morriss’s argument is. We might think that ensuring that every child goes to school and participates in a reading program will entail that all learn to read. Nevertheless, some

459

will be advantaged because their home has many books and their parents encourage them to read. They will have greater opportunities. This implies that children need to be treated unequally at school for them to have equal opportunities to learn to read. Further, if some are genetically less able to read (or play sports) they will not have had equal opportunities unless, somehow, they attain the same outcomes as those with more ability, because the measure of true opportunity on this account is being able to get the same outcome. This seems too strong an account of opportunity. It might be that in order to comprehend equality of opportunity we should not examine the attainments of two people, but rather sets of people. After all, the main idea behind equality of opportunity is that each person should be given the same chance of succeeding, not that all should equally succeed. Two people of equal initial abilities might be given equal opportunities to learn some skill, but one works hard whereas the other does not. Their attainments are not equal, but they did have the same opportunity for attainment. Furthermore, we might think that two people with different abilities had the same opportunities as long as one was given the chance to excel at what that one did well, whereas the other was given the opportunity to shine in his or her own domain of ability. We can probably only examine equality of opportunity in this sense across classes or types of people. This is what John Roemer attempts to measure with his equality of opportunity metric. Roemer’s measure is designed to capture autonomous effort. He cannot do so for a specific person, but with certain assumptions can do so for types of people—such as women, given ethnic groups, and so on. He assumes that each person within a type faces similar opportunities, and how well they do through their choice of elements within the sets is a measure of their responsibility. Differences across types are a measure of the relative opportunities of those types. So we can look at the average salary of each centile in two types (men and women) and the differences across them will show the difference in opportunity to earn money between the two types. Types have to be chosen carefully, because an assumption of the metric is that average effort will remain the same across the groups. Thus we could not measure effort across the groups in terms of attainment if

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Organization of the State

one was the “hardworking group” and the other the “congenitally lazy group.” However, unless we have independent reasons for thinking that certain groups are, as a group, less likely to take advantage of their opportunities, Roemer’s measure should capture relative opportunity. Using such a measure to govern public policy could not ensure that each person had equal opportunities, but would identify groups that lose out, and providing better opportunities for those groups would help reduce relative inequalities across such types. Of course, this would be controversial because, for example, some men might complain that extra resources for women disadvantage them personally even while recognizing they do not disadvantage men as a group overall. Using the measure to help direct public policy would therefore help to reduce structural deficiencies in the distribution of power in society. Keith Dowding See also Ability; Ableness; Distributive Justice; Responsibility

Further Readings Morriss, P. (2002). Power and philosophical analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Roemer, J. (1998). Equality of opportunity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

ORGANIZATION

OF THE

STATE

States are the most important political organizations in the modern world. In the last four centuries or so they have come to a large extent to dominate and subsume other forms of territorially based political organization such as empires, cities, feudal structures, tribes, and villages. However, their organizational character is problematic and contested, especially in the context of globalization in the 21st century. The organizational supremacy of the state rests on two analytically distinct but inextricably intertwined foundations. In the first place, the state, as an organization or institution, is embodied

in particular factors including: (a) a set of generally accepted “rules of the game”; (b) the distribution of resources in a particular society; (c) a dominant ideology; and (d) the capacity of the state to use force, whether the “monopoly of legitimate violence” (in Max Weber’s phrase) or a range of legal, economic, and social sanctions, to impose particular decisions and ways of doing things upon both individuals and the society as a whole. In the second place, the state, like other organizations and institutions, is populated by a range of actors within and around the state apparatus. These state actors make decisions and impose outcomes on nonstate actors. In other words, the state is both a structured field of institutionalized power and a structured playing field for the exercise of social or personal power. The most important organizational characteristic of states is that they are differentiated organizations. In other words, states are organizationally distinct from families, churches, classes, races, interest groups, and the like; from economic institutions like firms or markets; and indeed, from nonstate political organizations such as interest and pressure groups or social movements. They are in legal and philosophical principle (and to some extent in practice) both discrete and autonomous, in that they are not subordinate to, incorporated within, or morphologically determined by (structurally subsumed into) other organizations, institutions, or structures. The state stands on its own. Nevertheless, the state is a contested category both conceptually and in practice. The modern state as it has evolved in recent centuries is often taken as a given of political, social, and economic life. However, it is more useful to see it as problematic—as a starting point for analysis and debate. The very notion of the state is what philosophers call a reification—that is, seeing an abstract concept as if it were a material thing. But states, like ideas, have real consequences. The state can be seen as contested on at least three levels.

How the State Is Contested First, the state is an economically contested organization. As noted above, it is organized around relationships of power as well as around political ideas such as fairness and justice, whereas economic organizations like firms and markets are

Organization of the State

organized in principle around material relations of profit, exchange, and economic efficiency. However, firms and markets also involve inherent relationships of power, and states and state actors have been increasingly involved over the long term in trying to promote economic growth and modernization. The organizational relationship between state and economy has been the subject of intense debates and conflicts, both academic and political, private and public. Second, the state is a socially contested organization. States are not natural, spontaneous emanations from a taken-for-granted, preexisting society, people, or public. States are political superstructures that are historically constructed by real people around and over divisions, often deep ones, such as class, ethnicity, geography, gender, and ideology. People are regularly forced or indoctrinated into acquiescing to the rules, ideas, power structures, and policy decisions of the state. Citizens are made, not born, and this often entrenches deep conflicts of identity and interest within the state. Finally, the state is a politically contested organization. States are both originally constructed and controlled and fought over by political, social, and economic actors—from absolutist monarchs and national revolutionaries to various bureaucrats, officials, patrons, and clients, from corporate elites to popular movements, and from religious movements to corrupt and even criminal gangs. On the one hand, states can be organizationally strong in the sense that they can be rooted in widely accepted social identities and bonds, or that their institutions are effective and efficiently run, or that their writ runs throughout the territory. They can also be powerful internationally. On the other hand, states can also be weak on both levels. All states have particular strengths and weaknesses along various dimensions, often cutting across the so-called inside/outside distinction (see below).

Inside/Outside and Globalization Nevertheless, what is distinctive about states in the modern world—as historians would say, since about the 17th century—is that the state form of political organization has at least until recently prevailed historically over other forms. The combination of hierarchical power inside the state

461

and the spread of the state form of organized governance across the globe—along with the rise of modern political ideologies and the strategic and tactical focus of political, economic, and social actors on gaining power and influence within the state—has led to the widespread assertion and belief that states are somehow inherently sovereign. The concept of sovereignty is rooted in the notion that power and rule, to be effective and legitimate, must stem from a particular source that is identifiable and, in theory, ultimately accountable either to a god (the concept of the divine right of kings) or, as in the modern world, to the people (popular sovereignty). Thus, state organizations, in the final analysis, are said to represent a holistic concentration and centralization of generalized, overarching political power that is unique among organizations—what the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called a civil association, as distinct from an enterprise association—that has specific purposes and a limited remit. The sovereignty of the state also has both an inner and outer dimension. In the first place, at the international level of analysis, there is no international state or authority structure that has the kind of legal, political, social, economic, or cultural reality or claim to primacy that the state possesses. The international “system of states”— the claim that the international system itself is composed of and constructed by and for states above and beyond any other institutions or structure—is seen as the norm. The international balance of power, the territorial division of the world, and international law are all constituted by and through relations among states. The international system therefore is constructed in principle upon the foundation of states that are not only distinct domestically but also relatively autonomous from each other. Each state is in principle, in international law, founded upon a unique base—a specific geographical territory, a specific people or recognized group of citizens, a specific organizational structure or set of institutions, a specific legal personality, and a specific sociological identity. As Aristotle argued, political communities or states (polities) are rooted in common conceptions of justice and friendship that delineate and separate the “us” within the state or polity and the “them” or the barbarians outside.

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Organization of the State

The two aspects of this inside/outside distinction are in principle mutually reinforcing both historically and in terms of contemporary political action. On the one hand, the capacity of the state to stabilize, protect, psychologically foster, and economically develop the domestic or internal state and society requires the assertion of independence from external would-be conquerors or rulers (noninterference), the ability to defend and maintain the integrity of the national territory, the capacity of state actors and institutions to enforce their decisions upon the populace in an effective manner, and the potential for the state to project power externally in the pursuit of its national interests. On the other hand, the ability of the state internationally to remain independent, to defend itself, and to pursue national interests in an often hostile world depends in turn upon the capacity of the internal state to exact loyalty, to develop economic strength and domestic prosperity, to build and maintain an efficient military (and civilian) bureaucracy, and to evolve into what is often called an effective arena of collective action. Therefore both dimensions of the inside/outside distinction are rooted in the organizational capacity of states—that is, the ability of states (and state actors) to act autonomously in the context of both the interaction of states in the international system and that of domestic politics. Historians usually focus on tracing the development of these dual capacities of states over time as part of a wider process of the modernization of the world system. Political scientists often focus on this process as explaining the parameters of strategic or rational action by political, social, and economic actors operating on modern domestic and international playing fields. However, the inside/outside distinction has always been problematic, and is becoming more so in an era of globalization. This is the case in two main ways. On the one hand, various international, transnational, and global structures and processes have always competed with, cut across, and constrained—as well as empowered—states and state actors. The most successful European states throughout the early modern and modern periods were ones whose power and prosperity were rooted in international trade and imperial expansion as well as domestic consolidation (as was also the case with the United States once it had

expanded across the American continent). Indeed, globalization itself has often been seen as the externalization of a mix of hegemonic British and later American patterns of open capitalism, trade liberalization, monetary and financial hegemony, and military success in defeating more authoritarian and state-corporatist states like Germany and Japan, and even the Soviet Union in the cold war. But in working to expand and extend such patterns globally, state organizational power has paradoxically boxed itself in by promoting its own subsumption in the globalization process. States and the state system thus do not exist in a vacuum, but are cut across by a range of complex interdependencies. Globalization theorists suggest that these interdependencies constitute a rather different structure of the international or global system, one based on crosscutting linkages that states have both ridden on the back of and struggled to control. This structure includes multinational corporations, international production chains, the increasing international division of labor rooted in trade interdependence, globalizing financial markets, the spread of advance information and communications technologies (the “global village”), rapidly growing patterns of migration and diasporas, and the emergence of diverse forms of “global governance” and international regimes, not to mention the rapidly evolving field of international law. Indeed, the core of domestic state power—what is called in legal terms the police power—is becoming more problematic in this world, where borders are often useless in controlling the movement of people, information, goods, and ideas. These highly structured linkages and patterns of behavior have encompassed and shaped the ways states are born, develop, and operate in practice—and they are becoming increasingly institutionalized. They have their own organizational characteristics, power structures, and agents that shape the world in ways even apparently strong governments must work harder and harder to catch up with. They may not exhibit the same holistic, hierarchical institutions and processes that are associated with developed states, but they are often more structurally mobile and organizationally flexible than states. In the 21st century, states are increasingly seen as the organizational Maginot Line of global politics.

Organization of the State

On the other hand, states are rapidly evolving in their role as arenas of collective action at the domestic level in ways that are—in the mirror image of the traditional inside/outside distinction—inextricably intertwined organizationally with complex interdependence and globalization rather than autonomy and force. Paradoxically, the world as a whole was only finally divided up into nation-states in the late 20th century, just as globalization was starting to change the organizational parameters of the world: in the 1950s and 1960s, when the British and French empires shed their final colonies; and in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Soviet Union lost its Eastern European empire and itself dissolved into the Russian Federation and other post-Soviet states. Furthermore, many newer states, as well as older states that had in the past been part of quasi-imperial spheres of influence like that of the United States in Latin America, have not developed into bureaucratically effective, politically unified, socially homogeneous, or economically more prosperous or fairer societies. Some have thrown in their lot with regional organizations like the European Union, some have stagnated and become more corrupt, and some have become “failed” or “collapsed” states, descending into quasi-anarchy.

Organizational Capability and Interdependence States are therefore not equivalent in organizational capacity. Some are effective, efficient, and powerful; others are weak, collapsed, or failed. Even in relatively developed and powerful states like the United States, a combination of economic problems and the increasing difficulty of controlling external events has led to what the historian Paul Kennedy called “imperial overstretch.” These developments do not merely involve the lack of capability to project military and economic power abroad, but also what in the Vietnam War was symbolized by the “body bag syndrome,” that is, the unwillingness of the American public to see American soldiers die for either unwinnable or inappropriate foreign adventures—a syndrome revived by the war in Iraq. James Sheehan has argued that precisely because of its extreme experience of war in the 20th century, Europe, the cauldron of international imperialism in the modern era, has simply lost its

463

taste for war and evolved into a grouping of “civilian states,” more concerned with promoting transnational economic prosperity than seeing their survival and success as bound up in warfare and the external projection of power. In this context, states are also endogenously organizationally diverse. They consist of a bewildering variety of institutions and practices—democratic, authoritarian, egalitarian, exploitative, and so on— that have very different consequences both for their inhabitants or citizens, on the one hand, or for other states and their citizens or inhabitants, on the other. No state can fail to be enmeshed in the global web in one way or another. Each state combines with and internalizes globalizing trends in somewhat different ways; sometimes this enables states to exploit the opportunities presented by the opening up of particular international markets, for example the so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), but sometimes they find that their international linkages exacerbate domestic problems by aggravating social or ethnic conflicts, hindering or even reversing economic development, or undermining political stability and leading to violent conflict, civil wars, and terrorism. Nevertheless, states are still the central and predominant political organization of the modern era—compared with all the others, at least. Markets and other economic organizational structures are concerned with material outcomes, not basic social or political organization. Ethnic groups pursue their own cultural goals, whether inside or outside existing political structures and processes. Only in theocracies do religious organizations claim political sovereignty, and even in the leading theocracy of the 21st century, Iran, religious claims to political authority are contested at various levels. International institutions and regimes are fragmented and lack sanctioning power, although a certain neoliberal hegemony increasingly pertains. As a result of such variables, therefore, the role of the state is increasingly contested both inside and outside. States are the conventional product of history and social forces, not a given or natural phenomenon, and their organization is continuing to evolve in a more open and interdependent world. It is possible to identify a range of organizational issues crucial to any understanding of how states work both internally and externally in this

464

Organization of the State

more complex environment. The first of these is what some international relations theorists call capabilities, a term that originally covered mainly military resources but that has been extended more and more to social and economic organization and, in particular, the ability to maintain those military resources over time. States that could marshal concentrated military power to defend their national territory and, especially, to conquer or exercise effective influence over other states and power sources, have over the course of modern history been likely to exercise disproportionate influence over outcomes at the international as well as the domestic level. Such powerful states could use their organizational capacity to control other states and the evolution of the international system in general, whether through alliances or more direct forms of domination. However, such states were also very vulnerable to complex shifts in the balance of power and often found that others could counterbalance their power by forming alliances too. Technological changes can also upset such existing balances or relations of capabilities. And diplomacy or international bargaining and politicking among states could constrain or effectively alter existing balances too. Although the possession of such capabilities has been the main underpinning of national strength or power in the modern era, today it is often seen that other forms of capacity or effectiveness are far more important. As noted above, people, especially in liberal democratic states, are more aware, because of the development of the “global village,” of the downside of military involvement in other parts of the world. Paradoxically, this globalization of awareness has led to a growing unwillingness to get involved in military operations abroad unless they are relatively costless. Historians usually see the 1968 Tet Offensive by the Vietcong against American military forces in Vietnam as the cultural watershed here, when for the first time in history images of battles apparently being lost (although historians disagree on who won or lost Tet) were viewed over the breakfast table by ordinary people and fed into a mass movement against the war. More important, the costs of war, like the costs of empire in the 1950s, are increasingly seen by economists to be counterproductive of economic development, growth, and prosperity—in other words a drain on the state (and the country) rather

than a benefit. Debates are raging over whether the cost of the War in Iraq, often estimated at U.S. $2–3,000,000,000,000, have prevented the United States from tackling a range of other problems, both domestic (health care, rebuilding infrastructure, social security, employment) and foreign (development aid, fighting disease, etc.). In this context, the maintenance or expansion of military and military-related capabilities are increasingly seen as having negative consequences for state, society, and economy. The implications of this shift for the organization of the state are enormous, both in opening the state up to new international economic and institutional opportunities and constraints and on expanding the economic regulatory/domestic state. The second major organizational issue facing the state in the 21st century involves the internal coherence and hierarchical effectiveness of states in both domestic and foreign decision making. States that are internally divided, bureaucratically weak, torn asunder by civil conflict, or subject to the influence of special interests of various kinds, may either be ineffective or inefficient in pursuing so-called national interests; or these weaknesses may cause destabilization processes that undermine state organizations themselves and therefore limit or even destroy state capacity. But all states, including the strongest, are facing analogous pressures. Competing domestic interests have often been at odds with the perceived national interest in the modern era, and in the age of globalization, such conflicts of interest are expanding rapidly. This is true at three levels in particular. The first level involves the competition of interests, which has previously been analyzed primarily at domestic level but is becoming increasingly transnationalized and “translocalized.” This has been identified and analyzed in a variety of contexts. Some critical analysts have identified the formation of a transnational capitalist class—or at least a transnational elite—linked with multinational corporations, global financial markets, various transnational policy networks, epistemic communities, and the like, further associated with hegemonic opinion formers—especially in developed states. These groups are more than mere competing actors. Indeed, they are said to have a common interest in the spread of a neoliberal model of globalizing capitalism. Not only do they

Organization of the State

have common goals across borders, but they also have resource power and a set of institutional bases and linkages that go from the local to the global (sometimes called glocalization)—not to mention the kind of personal connections traditionally associated in domestic-level political sociology with class and elite analysis. Even if they do not possess this kind of organizational coherence and instead are seen as a set of competing pluralistic interests, their common concern with developing transnational power bases— cross-border sources of income and influence— gives them a kind of collective political muscle that predominantly domestic groups cannot match except during particular periods of crisis or electoral campaigns, where the latter might temporarily coalesce around emotive, usually protectionist issues such as illegal immigration or job outsourcing. Although the development (or imposition) of national identities has been crucial in the modern era in underpinning statehood, countervailing social and economic trends have become more and more salient in the global era. The most powerful interest groups are usually those that can mobilize resources transnationally and not just internally—multinational corporations, global financial market actors, social networks like ethnic or religious diasporas that cut across borders, and even consumers who do not care where particular goods are made provided the price and quality are right. The nation-state represents sociological “nations” less and less, and is characterized more and more by domestic fragmentation and cross-border linkages—what James N. Rosenau calls “fragmegration,” or transnational integration alongside domestic fragmentation. In this context, neoliberal globalization has become the “common sense” of a wide range of otherwise competing interests and factions. The second major organizational issue of the 21st century concerns whether the state itself is increasingly becoming splintered or disaggregated. In studies of bureaucracy in the 20th-century tradition of Max Weber, the key to effective rule was to have a hierarchically organized state in which officials knew their roles and functions in the larger structure. Although a full command hierarchy in the authoritarian or Soviet planning modes was seen to be counterproductive, the state required a certain amount of centrally organized institutional

465

coherence and administrative efficiency in order to develop and prosper. Today, that logic has been turned on its head. The most effective bureaucratic structures and processes are those that link officials in particular issue areas with their counterparts in other countries, in order that they might design and implement converging international standards, whether for global financial market regulation, trade rules, accounting and auditing standards, or other areas. Anne-Marie Slaughter has argued that expanding transgovernmental networks among regulators, legislators, and legal officials are effectively transnationalizing such issue areas, redlining them from domestic protectionist interests, dominating policymaking processes, and transnationalizing the most important parts of the state in order to promote economic growth and other key policy goals in a globalizing world. A third level of internal organizational change concerns the so-called competition state. Modern nation-states, in the pursuit of the public interest or the general welfare, have traditionally sought to decommodify key areas of public policy—to take them out of the market through some form of direct state intervention—in order to protect strategic industries or financial institutions, bail out consumers or investors, build infrastructure, counteract business cycles, and integrate workers into the capitalist process through unionization, corporatism, the welfare state, and the like. In the 20th century, this process was linked with the growing social and economic functions of the state, and tended to come about through the expansion of what have been called “one-size-fits-all” bureaucracies for the delivery of public and social services. Today governments are more concerned not with decommodification of social and economic policy but with the “commodification of the state” itself. This has two goals. The first is to promote the international competitiveness of domestically based (although often transnationally organized) industries. Domestic sources of inputs and domestic markets for products are too small to be economically efficient; only competitiveness in the international marketplace will do. The second is to reduce the costs of the state—what is called “reinventing government”—or “getting more for less.” These two processes are aimed both at streamlining and marketizing state intervention in the economy and

466

Owen Value

at reorganizing the state itself according to organizational practices and procedures drawn from private business. The welfare state is increasingly under pressure in the developed world, and developing states are often not able to provide meaningful welfare systems at all. In general, economic growth today is more the result of global economic trends and developments than of state policies. Politics, politicians, and policies are required more and more to tack to the requirements of global competition rather than pursue domestic autonomy and the common good of the citizens of a particular state. Inflation, heavy-handed government intervention, trade protectionism, taxation seen as burdensome on businesses, and bureaucracy in general are likely to deter investment and reduce economic activity. The result is often a “democratic deficit,” in which government is seen to be, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “the problem, not the solution.” This combination of the transnationalization of interests, the disaggregation of the state, and the coming of the competition state has fundamentally transformed how the state itself works, eroding, undermining, and making end runs around the inside of the traditional Weberian state. Finally, different states have distinct institutional (or organizational) logics. Each is subject to a form of path dependency in which historical developments create both specific constraints and specific opportunities that become embedded in the way states work. The United States, for example, is characterized by a loose and fragmented form of federal organization that has been crucial in enabling individuals and capitalist actors to operate in a marketfriendly fashion that has led to America becoming the leading economy, or economic hegemon, of the contemporary era. France, Germany, and Japan have been characterized by a much stronger role for the state in political, social, and economic development, although each model is quite different from the others in specific ways. China is a complex mixture of the centuries-old legacy of imperial China, the communist period, and rapidly encroaching global capitalism. Latin American countries are still bound in many ways by the era of import substitution industrialization of the mid-20th century, mixed with anti-Americanism and the tradition of the caudillo or military strongman. African states are still deeply scarred by the legacy of British and French colonial administration, which, when mixed

with tribal and clan legacies, has made it very difficult to develop effective states at all. In other words, the organization of the state is not a given, but a problématique or analytical puzzle, the parameters of which are continually evolving, especially in the current era. Organizationally strong states are to some extent able both to internalize and to resist the pressures of economic, social, and political globalization. Organizationally weak states are undermined by globalization, and crisis becomes endemic. Most states are in between these two extremes, with state actors—still crucial players in the international system of states as well as the expanding globalization process—seeking to alter, reform, or completely restructure states in order to cope with the organizational challenges of a globalizing world. Philip G. Cerny See also Authority; Autonomy; Bureaucratic Power; Globalization; Interests; Weber, Max

Further Readings Cerny, P. G. (1990). The changing architecture of politics: Structure, agency and the future of the state. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Osborne, D., & Gaebler, T. (1992). Reinventing government: How the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming the public sector, from schoolhouse to statehouse, City Hall to the Pentagon. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Keohane, R. O., & Nye, J. S., Jr. (2000). Power and interdependence (3rd ed.). White Plains, NY: Longman. Soederberg, S., Menz, G., & Cerny, P. G. (Eds.). (2005). Internalizing globalization: The rise of neoliberalism and the erosion of national varieties of capitalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

OWEN VALUE The Owen value () is a value for cooperative games in characteristic function form, based on a bargaining model that takes account of a priori unions in coalition formation. This value, proposed by Guillermo Owen, is generally understood as a modification of the Shapley value of a game for cases in which certain sets of players may be more likely to act together than others. In the same

Owen Value

work, Owen proposed an extension of his value to union structure hierarchies, that is, to subgroups of a priori unions. Some preliminary definitions are given below, together with a presentation of the Owen value by means of an example. This is followed by a mathematical formalization of the value. The extension of the Owen value to union structure hierarchies will be introduced using another example. (Familiarity with concepts relating to the Shapley value is assumed.) Let N5f1; 2; . . . ; ng be a set of players. A cooperative game on N is said to be expressed in characteristic function form if a function v (the characteristic function) is given that assigns a value v(S) to every coalition S  N where vðØÞ 5 0. The game characterized by v is usually called game v. An a priori union structure is a partition T5fT1 ; T2 ; . . . ; Tm g of the set N where coalitions Tj 2 T are unions of players who have agreed to collaborate. Of course, these unions are pairwise disjoint, and their union is N. The Owen value, like the Shapley value, assigns each player his or her expected marginal contribution to coalitions with respect to a random order of entering players. But while the Shapley value assumes that all orders are equiprobable, the Owen value restricts the set of orders according to the coalition structure. In other words, taking all possible permutations of the Shapley value into account, the Owen value deals with the subset that keeps the members of each Tj 2 T together.

indicates the number 1·2·3 . . . n, with the convention 0!  1. The number of possible orderings (or permutations) of n objects is n! (i.e., 1·2·3· . . . n, with the convention 0!  1). Given four players, there are 24 possible orderings. Table 1 calculates the Shapley value of each player, as displayed in the last line. Now suppose that players 1 and 3 have a greater tendency to unite than any pair of players, so the a priori union structure is T  {{1, 3}, {2}, {4}}. Only those permutations that keep players 1 and 3 together enter into calculation of the Owen value. For example, permutations (1, 3, 2, 4) and (4, 3, 1, 2) are admissible, while permutation (1, 2, 4, 3) is inadmissible because players 1 and 3 are not adjacent. Eliminating the 12 inadmissible permutations leaves us with those shown in Table 2, showing only those permutations that respect the a priori union, with the Owen values of the players shown in the last line of the table. Note that the Owen value, like the Shapley value, satisfies efficiency with respect to the grand coalition, that is, the total payoff across all players is v(N). A mathematical formalization of the above will now be given. Let P be the set of all permutations on the set of players N. Consider a generic ordering p 2 P . Suppose that player i is in the jth position of this i ordering. For each player i, Sp indicates the coalition of all players who are from the first to the jth position in . The marginal contribution of player i i i with respect to the order  is vðSp Þ 2 vðSp \figÞ . If the n! permutations are equiprobable, the average marginal contribution of player i in the game v is

Example 1 Consider the four-person game in characteristic function form: N  {1, 2, 3, 4} v(i)  0 for all i  1, 2, 3, 4 v(1, 2)  50 v(1, 3)  60 v(1, 4)  70 v(N)  100 v(S)  100  v(N \ S) for all other coalitions. First the Shapley value of this game is calculated. It should be remembered that the symbol n!

467

fi ðvÞ 5

 i  1 i + vðSp Þ 2 vðSp \figÞ n! p2P

for all i 5 1; 2; . . . ; n, which is the Shapley value. For a given a priori union structure T, consider the subset PðTÞ of all orders, (T) in number, that are admissible with respect to T. The Owen value of player i in the game v with the a priori union structure T is given by  i  1 i Vi ðv; TÞ 5 + vðSp Þ 2 vðSp \figÞ pðTÞ p2PðTÞ Note that the Owen value coincides with the Shapley value when the system of unions is such that each union is a singleton.

468

Table 1

Owen Value

Calculation of the Shapley value

Row

Permutation of the Players

Players’ Contributions

1

{1, 2, 3, 4}



{1}

{1, 2}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

2

{1, 2, 4, 3}



{1}

{1, 2}

{1, 2, 4}

3

{1, 3, 2, 4}



{1}

{1, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

4

{1, 3, 4, 2}



{1}

{1, 3}

5

{1, 4, 2, 3}



{1}

6

{1, 4, 3, 2}



7

{2, 1, 3, 4}



8

{2, 1, 4, 3}

9

Sequence of Coalitions

2

3

0

50

50

0

{N}

0

50

0

50

{N}

0

40

60

0

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

0

0

60

40

{1, 4}

{1, 2, 4}

{N}

0

30

0

70

{1}

{1, 4}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

0

0

30

70

{2}

{1, 2}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

50

0

50

0



{2}

{1, 2}

{1, 2, 4}

{N}

50

0

0

50

{2, 3, 1, 4}



{2}

{2, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

70

0

30

0

10

{2, 3, 4, 1}



{2}

{2, 3}

{2, 3, 4}

{N}

0

0

30

70

11

{2, 4, 1, 3}



{2}

{2, 4}

{1, 2, 4}

{N}

60

0

0

40

12

{2, 4, 3, 1}



{2}

{2, 4}

{2, 3, 4}

{N}

0

0

60

40

13

{3, 1, 2, 4}



{3}

{1, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

60

40

0

0

14

{3, 1, 4, 2}



{3}

{1, 3}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

60

0

0

40

15

{3, 2, 1, 4}



{3}

{2, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

70

30

0

0

16

{3, 2, 4, 1}



{3}

{2, 3}

{2, 3, 4}

{N}

0

30

0

70

17

{3, 4, 1, 2}



{3}

{3, 4}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

50

0

0

50

18

{3, 4, 2, 1}



{3}

{3, 4}

{2, 3, 4}

{N}

0

50

0

50

19

{4, 1, 2, 3}



{4}

{1, 4}

{1, 2, 4}

{N}

70

30

0

0

20

{4, 1, 3, 2}



{4}

{1, 4}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

70

0

30

0

21

{4, 2, 1, 3}



{4}

{2, 4}

{1, 2, 4}

{N}

60

40

0

0

22

{4, 2, 3, 1}



{4}

{2, 4}

{2, 3, 4}

{N}

0

40

60

0

23

{4, 3, 1, 2}



{4}

{3, 4}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

50

0

50

0

24

{4, 3, 2, 1}



{4}

{3, 4}

{2, 3, 4}

{N}

The Owen value, like the Shapley value, may be characterized axiomatically in several ways, including one proposed by Owen himself. The Owen value may be extended to union structure hierarchies. These structures allow for the possibility that, within each union, some groups may be more closely allied than others. For example, some of the union members may belong to a certain “clan,” some of the clan members may belong to a certain “family,” and so on, until reaching single-player sets. In like manner, the method for calculating the Owen value for union structure hierarchies keeps

1

4

0

50

50

0

Totals

720

480

560

640

i(v)

720/24

480/24

560/24

640/24

each distinct set of players (union, clan, family, etc.) together.

Example 2 Bearing in mind example 1, consider the following a priori unions: ff1; 2; 3g; f4gg . Suppose that {1, 3} forms a clan inside the union {1, 2, 3}, giving the hierarchy structure H  fff1; 3g; 2g; f4gg . In order to calculate the Owen value for this situation, the following procedure should be adopted. Out of all possible permutations of the four players, the permutations to be considered in calculating the

469

Owen Value

Table 2

Calculation of the Owen value for the coalition structure t = {{1, 3}, {2}, {4}}

Row

Permutation of the Players

Players’ Contributions 2

3

3

{1, 3, 2, 4}



{1}

{1, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

0

40

60

0

4

{1, 3, 4, 2}



{1}

{1, 3}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

0

0

60

40

7

{2, 1, 3, 4}



{2}

{1, 2}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

50

0

50

0

Sequence of Coalitions

1

4

9

{2, 3, 1, 4}



{2}

{2, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

70

0

30

0

11

{2, 4, 1, 3}



{2}

{2, 4}

{1, 2, 4}

{N}

60

0

0

40

12

{2, 4, 3, 1}



{2}

{2, 4}

{2, 3, 4}

{N}

0

0

60

40

13

{3, 1, 2, 4}



{3}

{1, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

60

40

0

0

14

{3, 1, 4, 2}



{3}

{1, 3}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

60

0

0

40

20

{4, 1, 3, 2}



{4}

{1, 4}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

70

0

30

0

21

{4, 2, 1, 3}



{4}

{2, 4}

{1, 2, 4}

{N}

60

40

0

0

22

{4, 2, 3, 1}



{4}

{2, 4}

{2, 3, 4}

{N}

0

40

60

0

23

{4, 3, 1, 2}



{4}

{3, 4}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

50

0

50

0

Totals

480

160

400

160

i(v, T)

480/12

160/12

400/12

160/12

Table 3

Calculation of the Owen value for the union structure hierarchy H

Row

Permutation of the Players

Players’ Contributions

3

{1, 3, 2, 4}



{1}

{1, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

7

{2, 1, 3, 4}



{2}

{1, 2}

{1, 2, 3}

9

{2, 3, 1, 4}



{2}

{2, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

13

{3, 1, 2, 4}



{3}

{1, 3}

20

{4, 1, 3, 2}



{4}

21

{4, 2, 1, 3}



22

{4, 2, 3, 1}



23

{4, 3, 1, 2}



Sequence of Coalitions

2

3

4

0

40

60

0

{N}

50

0

50

0

{N}

70

0

30

0

{1, 2, 3}

{N}

60

40

0

0

{1, 4}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

70

0

30

0

{4}

{2, 4}

{1, 2, 4}

{N}

60

40

0

0

{4}

{2, 4}

{2, 3, 4}

{N}

0

40

60

0

{4}

{3, 4}

{1, 3, 4}

{N}

50

0

50

0

Owen value with this hierarchy are those that both: 1. keep players 1 and 3 together; 2. keep player 2 immediately before or immediately after the pair of players {1, 3}.

Table 3 shows only permutations that satisfy these conditions, and displays the Owen value

1

Totals

360

160

280

0

i(v, H)

360/8

160/8

280/8

0/12

under structure H in the last line for each player. The Owen value may also be applied to simple games. Owen also proposed an analogous modification of the Banzhaf value for games with a priori unions, called the Banzhaf–Owen value. Cesarino Bertini

470

Owen Value

See also Banzhaf Voting Power Measure; Shapley Value; Simple Games; Value of a Game

Further Readings Owen, G. (1977). Values of games with a priori unions. In R. Henn & O. Moeschlin (Eds.), Essays in mathematical economics and game theory (pp. 76–88). Berlin, Germany: Springer Verlag.

Owen, G. (1981). Modification of the Banzhaf–Coleman index for games with a priori unions. In M. J. Holler (Ed.), Power, voting, and voting power (pp. 232–238). Würzburg, Germany: Physica-Verlag. Shapley, L. S. (1953). A value for n-person games. In H. W. Kuhn & A. W. Tucker (Eds.), Contributions to the theory of games II (pp. 307–317). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

P PARADOX

OF

six: that is, the removal of the member would make the winning coalition nonwinning. The same holds for the Shapley–Shubik index as each member is pivotal in two out of six permutations. (Indeed, this voting body is effectively a simple majority unweighted voting system.) But now suppose that the body is enlarged by one member, D, with one vote. The simple majority now becomes 5 out of 8. There are six winning coalitions where at least one member is critical. A has 5, B has 3, C has 3, and D has 1 swing in those coalitions. Hence, the standardized Banzhaf index values are, respectively, 5/12, 3/12, 3/12, and 1/12. Thus A’s Banzhaf index value has increased with the entrance of D, and the Shapley–Shubik index gives exactly the same values in this example. Perhaps more striking is that A’s absolute Banzhaf voting power, that is, A’s probability of casting a decisive vote, also increases from .5 to .625 with the enlargement of the voting body, despite A’s reduced share of the total votes. The essential point is that the enlargement means that A’s extra vote relative to B and C now gives A possibilities that B and C do not have to gain power by forming coalitions. A particularly interesting special case of the paradox occurs when a dummy player is empowered, that is, when a member with no swings in a voting body becomes a critical member in at least one winning coalition of the enlarged body. Brams and Paul Affuso give empirical examples from the history of the European Union. From 1958 until 1973 the Union (then the European Community) consisted of six members: France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, with

NEW MEMBERS

The paradox of new members, discovered and named by Steven J. Brams, pertains to weighted voting games and measures of a priori voting power defined for these games. Consider a voting body consisting of n existing members, each endowed with a fixed voting weight or number of votes. Suppose now that the body is enlarged by admitting new members with their own fixed voting weights or votes. The decision rule—simple majority, two-thirds majority, or whatever fixed proportion of the total voting weight—remains the same before and after the enlargement. We now compute the a priori voting power index values of (1) the existing members of the original voting body and (2) of all members of the enlarged body. The paradox of new members occurs if it turns out that some existing member of the voting body has a larger power index value in the enlarged body than in the original one. The paradox boils down to the possibility that a decrease in a voter’s share of votes is accompanied with an increase in the voter’s influence over the voting outcomes, while the decision rule is kept constant vis-à-vis the relative voting weights. The following example illustrates the paradox. Let the voting body consist of three members A, B, and C with votes 3, 2, and 2, respectively, and let the decision rule be the simple majority, that is, 4 out of 7 votes. Then the standardized Banzhaf index value of each member is 1/3 because every member is critically present in two winning coalitions out of 471

472

Parsons, Talcott

voting weights 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, and 1, respectively, in the Council of Ministers. With the decision rule of 12 out of 17, Luxembourg was not critical in any winning coalition. Hence, Luxembourg was a dummy, with a Banzhaf value of 0. When Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom joined the Community in 1973, with 3, 3, and 10 votes respectively, the voting weights of the existing members were modified so that the 4-vote members got 10, the 2-vote members 5, and the 1-vote member 2 votes, with a new decision rule of 41 out of 58 (which, in relative terms was essentially equal to the previous 12/17 rule). Thus the vote shares of all six existing members, including Luxembourg, diminished. Yet, the power index value of Luxembourg increased from 0 to .016 in terms of the standardized Banzhaf index and from 0 to .010 when measured by the Shapley–Shubik index. The dummy member Luxembourg was thus empowered. Similar in spirit but not identical in logic is the new states paradox, which may occur under some rules for the apportionment of legislative seats to constituencies in proportion to their populations. In particular, given the Hamilton or greatest remainder formula, the entrance of a new member state may cause an unexpected and counterintuitive redistribution of seats among the existing states. An example from the history of the United States illustrates this paradox. Prior to the admission of Oklahoma as a state in 1907, Maine and New York were entitled to 3 and 38 seats, respectively, in the House of Representatives. When Oklahoma was admitted to the union, the size of the House was increased by five members, the number of seats that Oklahoma was expected to (and in fact did) receive. The further expectation, of course, was that the apportionment of seats among the preexisting states would remain unchanged. But surprisingly Maine gained a seat at the expense of New York. It should be emphasized, however, that the new states paradox pertains to the allocation of seats, while the paradox of new members is related to measures of a priori voting power. Hannu Nurmi See also Banzhaf Voting Power Measure; Shapley–Shubik Index; Weighted Voting

Further Readings Balinski, M., & Young, H. P. (1982). Fair representation: Meeting the ideal of one man, one vote. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Brams, S. J. (1975). Paradoxes in politics: An introduction to the nonobvious in political science. New York: Free Press. Brams, S. J., & Affuso, P. J. (1985). New paradoxes of voting power in the EC Council of Ministers. Electoral Studies, 4, 135–139.

PARSONS, TALCOTT (1902–1979) Talcott Parsons was a prolific American sociologist who wrote widely on society, developing a theory of social evolution. His most significant work on power and influence was published in the early 1960s. His main thesis was that power in a political system, and influence within a social system, serve the same function as money in an economic system. Parsons recognizes that the core idea behind human power is some kind of capacity to get things done. However, he argues that we need to go beyond this core idea when analyzing power itself. Parsons addresses the issue of power in terms of three problems. The first is that power is too often described in terms of other things, such as influence or money, and this reduces it to other aspects of society. Power needs to be treated as a process in its own right and not reduced to other sets of processes. Second, Parsons argues that there is a problem with power being not one but two things. Power is both coercive and consensual, he argues. Coercive power is getting people to do things that one wants. Consensual power is working together with others to attain outcomes that one otherwise could not have achieved. Finally, he argues that there is a problem in many power studies in that they see power as zero sum. That is, whatever gains in power one agent enjoys necessarily means that there is someone else who loses power. Parsons maintains that we should not think of power as zero sum; on the contrary, by working together we can gain in power. Power is a positive-sum concept. While Parsons recognizes power in the coercive sense, he argues that power in society should rather be seen as consensual. It can be generated by

Parties, Policy-Seeking Versus Power-Seeking

a social system much as money is generated by an economic system. The aspect of power, like money, that might make it appear zero sum is that what power (or money) a given individual has cannot be held by another. However, by using our powers together we can generate more power in some social systems than in differently organized ones. Industrial societies have more power than agrarian ones, for example. Parsons believes that, also like money, power is a circulating medium in the sense that binding obligations can be generated as different people or subunits of society recognize the legitimacy and authority of others. These allow us to attain collective goals. Like monetary units, accepted by convention, these authoritative directives are accepted by convention. Power is thus derivative from authority, with the latter being the institutionalized legitimation which underlies power. There are four channels through which power can be utilized: two are material and two communicative. First, we have material negative and positive incentives (say, monetary rewards or threats); second, we have negative and positive incentives through communication (influence through persuasion of good reason or threats in the form that such action would be “morally wrong”). Parsons discounts compulsion with legitimation as being a form of power at all. The wielding of power is not the wielding of force. He offers no decisive reasons as to why all power is legitimate and thus ensures his discussion of power is outside many of the major debates about the power structure of society. Parson’s article on power opens with some key questions, but his analysis does not in the end answer them satisfactorily. This is because he attempts to provide a single conceptualization within some grand theory. Advances in power studies have provided answers in the form of recognition of different types of power: outcome and social power; power to and power over; and that some power questions are zero sum (ones concerned with power over, perhaps) whereas others are positive-sum conceptions. Parsons, however, concentrates upon one specific aspect of power— that of the common use of resources for societies or groups to attain what they want. He is correct, of course, that different ways of organizing society will imply different levels of power. In many ways, despite a very different language, Parsons’s concept

473

of power is close to modern accounts of social capital. Even the analogy between social capital and (material) capital mirrors his analogy between power and money. Keith Dowding See also Consensual Power, Theories of; Power To and Power Over; Social Capital; Social Power

Further Readings Giddens, A. (1968). Power in the recent writing of Talcott Parsons. Sociology, 2, 257–272. Parsons, T. (1963). On the concept of power. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107, 232–262.

PARTIES, POLICY-SEEKING VERSUS POWER-SEEKING A simple way to frame the motivations of political parties that contest elections is to ask the question: do political parties win elections to implement their policies, or do they build their policies in order to win elections? This is another way of stating the problem of whether ideology is a means or an end. Anthony Downs’s answer to this question was to confirm the idea that policy plays a purely instrumental role in the allocation of political power. In this sense, before elections, policies are proposed opportunistically in order to satisfy the median voter’s ideal point. After elections, policies are repositioned in order to form the most politically expedient coalitions. The power-seeking argument is not just a positive theory—that is, a statement of how political behavior works—but it also posits that political parties that do not orient themselves toward an office-seeking strategy will fail to obtain and hold on to political power, in the same way that businesses that fail to maximize profits fall into insolvency. It is possible to argue, however, that the alternative explanation is true: that parties are policyseeking organizations in a manner that places the same emphasis on politicians as rational, utilitymaximizing agents. This is because we can also assume an infraparty arena where candidature is dependent on a majority of rank-and-file party

474

Parties, Strong and Very Strong

supporters. In this arena, success is dependent on the support of the median party supporter, not the median voter in the electorate at large. Assuming the median party supporter’s motivations are ideological in nature, we could then say that party candidates are policy-seeking actors. The influence of party leaders and whips may also deter individual politicians from reneging on policy commitments in the interest of office seeking. Adam Packer See also Coalition Theory; Grand Coalition; Political Parties; Riker, William H.

Further Readings Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York: Harper & Row. Shepsle, K., & Bonchek, M. (1997). Analyzing politics: Rationality, behavior, and institutions. New York: W. W. Norton.

PARTIES, STRONG VERY STRONG

cabinets under different permutations of party system structure and issue space. The findings from Laver and Shepsle’s experiments from simulated parliamentary configurations is that strong parties are more likely in parliaments with low policy dimensions and low numbers of parties. Although less common than strong parties, the emergence of very strong parties is correlated to the same factors: parliamentary systems with lowdimensional issue space and party system structure. Interestingly, there can only ever be one strong party in a given iteration of Laver and Shepsle’s simulated parliament. Laver and Shepsle’s account of strong parties contrasts with more standard game-theoretic accounts of core parties. The difference is that core parties exist within the win-set in unconstrained policy space. For Laver and Shepsle, strong parties exist within the win-set, but the win-set is constrained by the potential allocation of portfolios of parties that might form a coalition. While an important distinction theoretically, there is little empirical work that has attempted to distinguish the two conceptions.

AND

In parliamentary systems, a political party is considered strong if it is contained in every cabinet that is approved of by the legislative majority controlling the selection of all portfolios. A party is considered very strong when it fills every portfolio in the cabinets approved of by the legislative majority. Why this distinction? The difference between strong and very strong parties plays an important role in Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle’s analysis of portfolio allocation in parliamentary cabinet formation. Say we are interested in explaining how a cabinet will be composed based on a preliminary distribution of party shares and policy preferences using majority rule. A strong party is a relevant actor in cabinet formation because it is the only such actor that can petition to form a government on its own. A very strong party is not only one that can insist on forming a government autonomously, but also its doing so is the only equilibrium solution to the cabinet formation problem under majority rule. Understanding these outcomes is helpful in deciding the possible composition of

Adam Packer See also Core Parties; Political Parties

Further Readings Laver, M., & Shepsle, K. (1996). Making and breaking governments: Cabinets and legislatures in parliamentary democracies. New York: Cambridge University Press.

PATERNALISM Paternalism normally refers to actions of the state—laws or policies—that restrict the freedom of its citizens without their consent for the sake of their own good. Examples might include requiring car passengers to wear seatbelts, prohibiting prostitution and recreational drug use, and some workplace health and safety rules. It raises two main issues, discussed in turn below: first, around identifying whether some act is paternalistic; second, around the nature and limits of individual

Paternalism

autonomy, and the appropriate tradeoff (if any) between the freedom of persons to make their own choices about how they will lead their lives and the powers that it is legitimate for a state, operating both coercively and in terms of incentives, to possess. Identifying genuinely paternalistic policies is difficult both because many seemingly paternalistic policies can be reinterpreted as protecting the interests of third parties and because many policies that have entirely different intentions may incidentally promote the interests of persons whose freedom of action is restricted by them. As an example of the first difficulty, consider the policy that makes it compulsory for motorcyclists to wear helmets. This would appear to be an exemplary instance of paternalism, but the policy can be justified on the basis that if the rider suffers traumatic head injury this may harm others: his emotional and financial dependents, fellow members of his insurance scheme, taxpayers who may support public health services, and so on. As an example of the second difficulty, consider a government that introduces a universal public health system for reasons of justice, fairness, or efficiency. In paying for this system from general taxation, the government in some sense forces its citizens to spend more of their money on insuring against health care costs than they would if left to make their own choices, and this may be good for them, but arguably neither the goal of the policy nor its justification is paternalistic. One response to these difficulties is to restrict the meaning of paternalism to so-called pure paternalism, which requires that those whose interests are advanced are the same as those whose freedom is restricted (so, a pure paternalist would admit motorcycle helmet laws only if they were intended to promote the interests of the riders themselves). This is theoretically neat, but it may mean excluding some policies that seem genuinely paternalistic but where there is a gap between those protected and those interfered with (cases of so-called impure paternalism). An example might be the government banning a drinks manufacturer from selling “alcopops” (sweet alcohol-based drinks that resemble soft drinks) in order to promote the good of teenagers who would otherwise willingly drink too much. Debates over paternalism go to the heart of the proper relationship of the state and its citizens. For

475

liberals, in particular, the burden of proof lies with those who would deny to adults the right to make their own decisions and instead treat them as children who are not the best judges of their own interests. Defenses of paternalism can take a number of forms. One possibility, advanced by moral paternalists, is the protection of a person’s moral welfare. For example, a moral paternalist might argue for the prohibition of sadomasochistic activity between consenting adults, not because it might be harmful but because it is morally corrupting. However, this position requires not only justifying interference with others for their own good, but a particular account of the moral good. In conditions of pluralism, this seems too demanding. A more familiar justification for paternalism refers to the more general welfare of the person being interfered with—defined in terms of the things that make a person’s life go better, such as their physical and psychological state. Welfare paternalism of this sort can be defended in a number of ways. The most obvious is a consequentialist argument: interference leads to more utility overall. Another candidate is a narrower justification that sometimes an individual’s interest in autonomy in general is advanced by a short-term restriction; for example, preventing someone from taking minddestroying drugs when permitting them to do so would be to allow them to destroy their long-term capacity for autonomy. Critics, though, allege that even if true, and if the paternalistic intervention leads to long-term benefit, that does not explain why it is permissible for the state to interfere in the voluntary choices of adults given the importance that liberals assign to individual freedom. A citizen who wishes to risk his or her future autonomy by taking drugs, or riding a motorcycle unprotected, should be free to do so. A modified paternalism—soft paternalism— tries to meet this challenge by holding that the state is only justified in ascertaining whether the individual is acting voluntarily or pointing out defects in their rationality (e.g., by presenting alternatives to eating junk food through education). Critics argue that such policies still fail to respect individual freedom because they cannot avoid promoting some conceptions of rational behavior over others.

476

Penrose Voting Power Measure

One final possibility in defending paternalism tries to incorporate this need to respect individual freedom by arguing that paternalism can be justified if we would reasonably agree to such interference in some properly described hypothetical situation. This contractualist account has the attraction of appealing to the agent’s own will, but, for many, merely incorporates all the disadvantages of hypothetical contracts while not advancing any independent argument for the justifiability of paternalistic interventions. Arguably, none of these defenses of paternalism work in a liberal context in which individual choice is assigned such moral and political value. Yet few would deny outright the desirability of some paternalistic policies, and it is unlikely that even liberal states can avoid all appearance of paternalism. The onus remains on those who favor paternalism, however, to make their case. Alex Bavister-Gould and Matt Matravers See also Autonomy; Freedom; Liberalism

Further Readings Dworkin, G. (1972). Paternalism. The Monist, 56, 64–84. Feinberg, J. (1986). Harm to self. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mill, J. S. (1956). On liberty. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. (Original work published 1869)

In defining the voting power of an individual voter, Penrose assumes the Bernoullian model, in which, when voting on an arbitrary resolution, all 2n possible divisions of the set of n voters into yes and no subsets are a priori equally probable. (All probabilities mentioned below are the a priori probabilities of this model.) A resolution passes if some specified majority of the voters support it. No abstention is allowed. Penrose defines the voting power of voter a to be ra – 1/2, where ra is the probability of the event that the outcome of the division goes the way a votes. He then goes on to state (without proof) an identity—a theorem according to which the voting power of a, so defined, equals half the probability a of a situation in which a’s vote is decisive, that is, that the other n – 1 voters are divided in such a way that a’s vote determines the outcome. Penrose’s 1952 modified definition is double what it was in his 1946 paper. Thus a’s voting power is, by Penrose’s identity: 2ra  1  a. Penrose’s measure, in the form denoted here by a, was independently reinvented in 1965 by John F. Banzhaf III, and is often referred to as the absolute (or unnormalized) Banzhaf measure (or index). If the decision rule is interpreted as a simple game, then Penrose’s measure can be defined equivalently as

a⬊ a/2n–1,

PENROSE VOTING POWER MEASURE Lionel Sharples Penrose (1898–1972) was a British mathematician, statistician, psychiatrist, and geneticist. Although his main research work was in genetics and psychiatry, he also investigated the principles on which an ideal two-tier representative system should be based. In 1946 Penrose published an article in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society that, as far as we know, is the first properly scientific discussion of voting power, and in which he proposed a probabilistic measure of absolute voting power. He slightly modifies its definition in his 1952 booklet.

where a is the number of winning coalitions in which a’s membership is critical—that is, which are no longer winning if a defects from them—and n (as before) is the number of players–voters. For any voter a the following useful identity holds:

a  2a  , where a is the number of winning coalitions to which a belongs and  is the total number of winning coalitions. Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover See also Banzhaf Measure; I-Power; Voting Power; Square Root Rules

Perceptual Symbols of Power

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Penrose, L. S. (1946). The elementary statistics of majority voting. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 109(1), 53–57. Penrose, L. S. (1952). On the objective study of crowd behaviour. London: H. K. Lewis & Co.

PERCEPTUAL SYMBOLS

OF

POWER

Many of the most pervasive forms of power in a society exist in symbolic form, as visual representations that convey particular meanings. Such symbols abound in addition to textual or verbal attempts to transmit power. They are commonly found in art and design, in architecture and city planning, in the mass media, in advertising, in the conduct and attire of political office holders, or in public rituals and ceremonies—the latter referred to by Pierre Bourdieu as legitimation through social magic. The perceived iconography of symbols constructs and allocates variable meaning to the social world—a significant act of power—but their diverse interpretation also allots power to their viewers to accept or reject those effects, eliciting unanticipated responses. Space and structure offer compelling ideological maps of ranking and significance; content, color, size, rhythm, and movement confer emotional impact and urgency through feelings such as awe, fear, empathy, pleasure, or pride. The impact of such symbols is often immediate and simplistic, as in military parades, police uniforms, or press photography, but it may be multilayered and complex, as in techniques of commercial marketing or images of national identity. Those who absorb the meanings embedded in such practices and objects may be conscious or unaware of their influence, just as those who fashion such symbols may do so deliberately or unintentionally. Obvious symbols of power are manifest in propaganda, of which the poster is the most typical. Posters focusing on war aims, support, and recruitment, or those disseminating the “heroic” achievements of the Soviet Union are among the best-known stateinitiated varieties. Ideological mobilization for

477

national ends is also conducted through ceremonies— in which totalitarian societies have excelled—such as the massive and emotionally overwhelming choreographed displays at Nazi Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s. Publicly funded documentaries and newsreels have delivered slightly more subtle propaganda-cum-information messages. Films and television discharge similar roles through fact and fiction; newspapers seek to inform, persuade, and shock through photography and layout, and notably employ the political cartoon as a long-established critical opinion former. Videotapes circulated by terrorist organizations have strong affective impacts, exuding menace as well as evoking the countervailing power of resistance. Monumental urban architecture also transmits unambiguous power messages. Some edifices reinforce authority and rank priorities of public prestige: statues of political and military leaders, royal palaces, parliaments and palaces of justice, and the grand avenues and squares that augment them. The dimensions, design, and location of those structures can be decoded as ideological maps of hierarchy and of national values and identity, while cathedrals have performed similar powerand awe-inspiring roles in the field of religion. Art may express the power of nature or of the supernatural, but the communication of social power through art can take the shape of a visual manifesto, as frequently as not challenging as well as underpinning social order. Public power involves not only competitions over the control of political language but over the appropriation of political visions of the future. Their artistic representation is a major means of creating and disseminating a political ideology, including seductive utopias as appealing alternatives to present existence. Perceptions of power may also be aural: national anthems are intended to evoke communal feelings of allegiance and loyalty, both of which are central to the support that centers of political power require in order to function. Michael Freeden See also Ideology; Legitimation; Propaganda; Totalitarianism

Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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Persuasion

Clark, T. (1997). Art and propaganda. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Goldberg, V. (1991). The power of photography. New York: Abbeville. Groys, B. (2008). Art power. Cambridge: MIT Press. Reeves, N. (1999). The power of film propaganda: Myth or reality? London: Cassell.

PERSUASION Persuasion is one of the classic forms of power. Persuasion is at work when an actor (a person or group) is able to convince others to give their assent to a recommended course of action. The power of persuasion is the power to convince, typically on the basis of credible rather than proven evidence. Thus, to be persuasive is to be able to get the assent of others to take on trust the credentials of the persuader and the credibility of the proposed course of action. The credentials of persuaders can derive from their formal authority, but in many of the more interesting instances of social persuasion it can derive from their unofficial “moral authority” or personal power. Persuasion is one of the oldest forms of social power, and its history is interwoven with the practice and analysis of social trust. An early example that still features prominently in the scholarly literature on persuasion is the story recorded in Book IX of Homer’s Iliad, where various friends of the great warrior Achilles plead with him to rejoin the Greek forces doing battle against Troy. The retinue of persuaders take turns in working through the now-standard list of persuasive strategies (e.g., pleas to honor, obligation, and interest) to try to get Achilles to rejoin their campaign. This classic example illustrates much about the play of persuasion: the persuaders have to convince Achilles to agree to rejoin them, and Achilles has to be convinced that it is in his interests to do so. The routines of persuasion almost always involve argument because the merits of the proposed action are not self-evident but are open to debate (see “Argument, Power of”). As with many arguments, both sides in the persuasive relationship have a case to make. Not all the power rests with the persuaders: to a considerable degree, being persuasive means being accepted or chosen as a credible

source, where much of the power to accept or reject rests with the receiver rather than the transmitter of the message. Of course, there is no message without a transmitter, which suggests that the real power of persuasion arises from a relationship where power is shared between proposer and respondent. Persuasion is a distinctive form of power because it works through influence, which is the term most frequently used by scholars to describe the nature of persuasion. Influence is an imprecise term referring to remarkably effective if little-understood social powers. Influence refers generally to a flow of information and advice comprising a relationship of power initiated by persuaders in order to get the assent of the persuaded. To have influence is to have an effect, usually by moving or motivating others to accept advice. This type of social power is all the more effective because it elicits “buy-in” by the persuaded, whose consent reinforces the persuasive relationship. Of course, genuinely free consent is fully informed consent. But there is nothing in the nature of persuasion that requires persuaders to comply with this high standard of full disclosure. The murky nature of persuasion is evident from the industry of influence surrounding commercial and also political marketing and advertising. Vance Packard’s 1950s work The Hidden Persuaders still resonates in both commerce and politics where consumers and citizens are sized up by marketing experts whose expertise is hidden well behind the products on offer. Effective persuasion in both commerce and politics can become an exercise in spin (by so-called spin doctors), which speeds up and force-feeds the assent-giving process. Practices vary, but if there is a regulatory ideal it is that the persuader offers advice and the persuaded, if convinced, accepts the advice, after whatever deliberation is considered appropriate in the circumstances. Deliberation literally means “weighing things up” and assessing the relative balance of good and bad effects. Theories of persuasion highlight the important place of deliberation in norms of the persuasive process, in contrast to the alternative norms of control through force and coercion. Deliberation might be interpersonal, such as between the persuader and the potentially persuaded; or internal, privately within the one person or group being persuaded. Ideally, to persuade is to convince freely without resort to force or coercion. Thus persuasion is

Pivot Player

an important medium of social power at the opposite extreme from the external compulsions of force and coercion. Effective persuasion works because of the inner compulsion of being persuaded in response to a message or communication or plea from the persuader. But the absence of force and coercion does not necessarily mean that persuasion is free from strategy or stratagem. Persuasion has many of the attributes of so-called soft power (e.g., public diplomacy), including a capacity, possibly even a propensity, to use polite fictions and other devices of deception that fall short of truthfulness. To be persuasive is to be powerful in the arts of pleading and advocacy, all of which reflect a preoccupation with the personal power of speech, whether it be in oral or written communication. Persuasion is thus a very practical verbal art where words carry the weight of argument. Persuasive words are crafted to get their effect, which is the agreement or consent of the target audience. Persuasion is an important political power. Political leaders rely on persuasion to build their trust with followers. Richard Neustadt’s classic Presidential Power identifies the power to persuade as the exemplary political resource of U.S. presidents, which is another way of stating that leaders cannot rely solely or even primarily on the uses of force and coercion. But the power to persuade is a power shared by many other offices and institutions in the public sphere, including the media. What makes heads of government special is the attentiveness of the public, which has significant power over who holds important offices of public trust. The scholarship on persuasion makes it clear that there are limits to the capacity of transmitters to convince receivers of the credibility of incomplete, misleading, or deceptive accounts of proposed action. John Uhr See also Agenda Power; Agenda Setters; Blackmail; Knowledge and Power

Further Readings Benoit, W. L., & Benoit, P. J. (2008). Persuasive messages: The process of influence. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Dillard, J. P., & Pfau, M. (Eds.). (2005). The persuasion handbook: Developments in theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Garsten, B. (2001). Saving persuasion: A defence of rhetoric and judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

PIVOT PLAYER A pivot player is a player who, in the formation of a coalition, turns a losing coalition into a winning one. This term was introduced by Lloyd Stowell Shapley and Martin Shubik in an important article published in 1954 in which they particularized the Shapley value of a game (Shapley, 1953) in the context of voting games, thus creating the Shapley–Shubik power index. The concept of a pivot needs to be distinguished from the similar but not identical concept of swing, which is the basis for the Banzhaf–Coleman–Penrose index and many others. Let N5f1; 2; . . . ; ng be a set of players. A cooperative game v on N is said to be expressed in characteristic function form if a function v (the characteristic function) is given that assigns a value v(S) to every coalition S  N under the condition vðØÞ 5 0 . A game v is simple if vðSÞ 5 0 or vðSÞ 5 1 for all coalitions S  N . In the first case, S is losing; in the second case, winning. Consider a generic ordering (i.e., permutation) of the players of N. Suppose that player i is in the jth position of this ordering. Suppose that the coalition S is composed of all players who are from the first to the jth position in such ordering, is winning, while the same coalition without player i is losing. Then the player i is the pivot for that permutation. The Shapley–Shubik index assigns to each player the quotient between the number of times he or she is a pivot in all possible permutations, and the number n! of all possible permutations. The concept of pivot player should be distinguished from that of swing, used in other power measures, in particular such as the Penrose– Banzhaf–Coleman measure. A swing for the ith member of N is a pair of coalitions ðS; S\figÞ such that S is a winning coalition and S\fig is not winning. Essentially, the difference between a pivot player and a swing lies in the fact that identification of a pivot takes into account the ordering in which a player becomes crucial for a coalition, whereas identification of a swing takes into account

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only the coalition itself. Put otherwise, the pivot is based on permutations, while the swing is based on combinations. Following the paper by Shapley and Shubik, various other versions of pivot players have been specified, such as the pivot of queue, the pivot of roll call, and the pivot of ternary roll call, introduced by Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover in 1998. Gianfranco Gambarelli See also Ability; Banzhaf Voting Power Measure; Shapley–Shubik Index; Shapley Value;

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power. Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Owen, G. (1995). Game theory (3rd ed.). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Shapley, L. S. (1953). A value for n-person games. In H. W. Kuhn & A. W. Tucker (Eds.), Contributions to the theory of games II (pp. 307–317). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shapley, L. S., & Shubik, M. (1954). A method for evaluating the distributions of power in a committee system. American Political Science Review, 48, 787–792.

PIVOTAL POLITICS In general terms, pivotal politics deals with the power of political actors in a collective decisionmaking situation. A pivot is a person or thing around which something turns or depends, and in coalition theory, a player is said to be pivotal if its departure from a winning coalition renders the coalition nonwinning. In 1998, Keith Krehbiel proposed a formal theory of pivotal politics with a focus to ascertain who was pivotal in various lawmaking situations in the United States. This theory also explores the relationship between divided government and gridlock, where gridlock refers to political stalemate, or more specifically, an absence of policy change in equilibrium in spite of the existence of a legislative majority that favors change.

Pivotal politics theory aims at harmonizing two basic facts of U.S. lawmaking: that gridlock in the United States is not constant although common, and that coalitions are greater than simple majority and regularly bipartisan. It is based on a preference-based nonpartisan model that explains why divided government may not necessarily produce gridlock and lower legislative productivity. The theory’s key argument is that veto players driven by their individual preferences are pivotal actors in the U.S. legislative process. This is in contrast with party-centered theories that stress the importance of partisanship in affecting lawmaking, gridlock and legislative productivity and social choice theories such as median voter theorem that stress centrifugal forces in creating policies. The theoretical model recognizes that legislation in the United States must pass many veto players before it becomes law. The players include legislators and a president functioning in a bicameral legislature. We simplify in Figure 1 to a unicameral legislature (we can see the two houses agreeing on a single line through the joint committee system) where each player has an ideal point along a unidimensional liberal–conservative policy space. Players prefer a policy over the status quo if that policy is closer to their ideal point. According to the theory, policies are adopted according to the preferences of players who are at crucial pivot points in the policy space, rather than those who are at median position. This happens because in the U.S. lawmaking process the president’s right to veto and the right of extended debate (filibuster) temper the politicians’ capacity to enact policies. The pivot-point legislators are those who can overturn or uphold a veto when the president disagrees with the position of the legislature, or who can break a filibuster if the president and a majority of the Senate agree but a significant number of senators favor status quo. Figure 1 illustrates the key idea behind the pivotal politics theory more clearly. In this example, there are 11 legislators and a conservative president in the legislature. The key pivots are the filibuster pivot and the veto pivot, whose ideal points are represented on the liberal– conservative policy space. The other two players are the president and the median voter, with their respective ideal points also depicted on the policy space. The president is on the right side of the median voter, and therefore, the veto pivot is the

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Liberal

< 2/5 > = 3/5

Figure 1

Conservative

> = 2/3 < 1/3

Filibuster Pivot Median Voter

Veto Pivot

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President

Pivotal actors with a conservative U.S. president

Source: Based on Keith Krehbiel, Pivotal Politics, Figure 2.2, p. 23. University of Chicago Press (1998). Copyright 1998 by University of Chicago Press. Used with permission.

legislator whose ideal point and all ideal points toward his left equal two thirds of the legislature. Thus, the fourth voter from the right is the veto pivot. Similarly, with the president being on the right side of the median voter, the filibuster pivot is the legislator whose ideal point and all ideal points on his right equal three fifths of the legislature. Here, the filibuster pivot is the seventh voter from the right. The pivotal politics theory also captures the tendency of U.S. lawmaking to gridlock where the president opposes policy change that congressional majorities favor in light of the two-thirds override provision. Krehbiel’s model produces a gridlock interval that represents a set of status quo policies that cannot be defeated despite the median voter and the majority of legislators favoring the new policy. This interval is affected by the median of the House, the president’s ideal point, the veto and the filibuster pivots, and the status quo policy. A policy change happens only when the status quo lies outside this gridlock interval, and gridlock happens only when the pivotal player chooses the status quo over the proposed policy. Thus, unless the status quo policy is the same as the median voter’s ideal point, gridlock represents a situation when a legislative majority cannot change the status quo even if it wants to. Krehbiel’s empirical findings demonstrate that the size of the gridlock interval substantially affects legislative productivity, while whether the government is divided or unified has limited or no effects. This substantially overturned standard views about gridlock and the nature of power relations in Washington, D.C., politics. Pivotal politics theory also provides a measure of presidential power based on the president’s success in persuading pivotal legislators in vetooverride situations. The empirical analysis using this measure finds a positive influence of postwar presidents over legislators in the veto situation.

Before Keith Krehbiel’s pivotal politics theory, it was generally believed that divided government contributed to legislative gridlock and low legislative productivity. Pivotal politics theory, however, implies that gridlock in U.S. lawmaking occurs more as a result of a need for supermajority support to pass laws, rather than because different parties formally control the executive and legislative branches. Pivotal politics theory had been criticized because it does not include uncertainty and dynamic interaction of players, and assumes a unicameral legislature and nonpartisan lawmaking. This has led to attempts to integrate the pivotal politics approach with that of partisan politics to explain the level of gridlock. For example, Fang-Yi Chiou and Lawrence Rotheberg find that the explanatory power of their empirical model improves when factors representing both pivotal and partisan politics are included. Rekha Diwakar See also Coalition Theory

Further Readings Chiou, F. Y., & Rothenberg, L. S. (2003). When pivotal politics meets partisan politics. American Journal of Political Science, 47(3), 503–522. Krehbiel, K. (1998). Pivotal politics: A theory of U.S. law-making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

PLURALISM Pluralism is a thesis about power in society that developed in the 1960s in response to elite theories, though we can trace its roots back to the

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beginning of the 20th century. At its most basic, pluralism is the thesis that political power in society is spread around a number of different groups who tend to be influential in different issue areas. So while pluralists might recognize that there are elites within groups, there will be competition between those elites and the groups they represent over the distribution of social resources.

Early Pluralism We can trace pluralism back to the work of Arthur Bentley in his 1908 book The Process of Government. In response to Karl Marx’s class theory, Bentley offered the idea of group theory. He suggested that society is made up of a set of potential groups: that is, people who have some feature in common, say black hair. They become an actual group when this feature becomes an interest: that is, when it affects their welfare. Thus if blackhaired people were targeted for higher taxes, say, then they would become an actual group. Thus groups (or actual groups) are sets of people who share interests. In contrast to Marxist class theory, where exclusive groups face each other in mutual antagonism, group theory posits lots of crosscutting cleavages, because people are members of many groups, each potentially in conflict. Thus individuals as well as society as a whole have to trade off some of their interests for others. Bentley argued that we can see democratic politics as the pressure of groups attempting to secure their interests, and we can see governmental output as the result of this “parallelogram of forces.” In the 1950s David Truman revitalized these ideas (in his 1951 book The Governmental Process) and suggested that we can see the influence of interest groups pressuring government in Bentley’s terms. Later still, in the 1980s the Chicago school of interest group theory, notably Gary Becker and Donald Wittman, mathematically formalized and defended this account.

group. He then derives propositions about the optimal size of the group system. In his model, the weight of each group’s political pressure is a type of production function that depends on the number of members and total political expenditure. Each group calculates its own optimal lobbying efforts, taking other groups’ lobbying efforts as given. An equilibrium will result, given the size of the expected benefits to each and given their expected lobbying efforts. The model assumes that the benefits to be handed out are zero sum—what one side gets the other will not—and he assumes government will balance their budgets. The strongest groups will win out, but Becker, and Wittman following him, argue that the greater the number of groups the more equal will be the process. Becker’s argument is entirely at odds with that of Mancur Olson who, in his 1982 work The Rise and Decline of Nations, suggests that the more groups there are, the greater the losses to society, largely because there will be greater decision costs, and social policy will take longer to produce. He argues that each group will fight to get a larger slice of a fixed pie, but in doing so will ensure that the pie is smaller than it would otherwise have been. David Truman was enormously influential in U.S. political science and on the mainstream behavioralist view that to understand public policy one had to examine the interest group arena. Prior to the behavioralist revolution, most political science was dominated by studies of political institutions from a legal–constitutional perspective. However, the behavioralists argued that most of the action occurred not in the executive or legislature but outside of their formal processes through interest group pressure. This was the period when public opinion surveys were taking off, industry and consumer groups were getting organized (as well as environmental lobbies later in the 1970s). There followed a host of studies of the political process throughout the democratic world that concentrated upon the pressure or interest group lobby.

Later Applications Becker utilizes general equilibrium theory to produce his efficiency account of group activity. He suggests that in a democracy groups support their preferred candidates, oppose those they do not like, and control free riding within their own

Pluralism and Equality Pluralism does not require all groups to be fully mobilized. As long as politicians recognize that there is a strong set of opinions among their electorate—a specific group holds strong views on

Pluralism

a subject—then that politician has an interest in promoting those views in order to help secure his or her reelection. Pluralism came to be associated with a celebration of American democracy, but critics argued that groups were not equally organized or represented. Minority groups will always lose out to larger, better-organized ones. Furthermore some groups are excluded from the political process altogether. In fact, one of the most notable pluralists, Robert Dahl, was explicit that only “legitimate” groups would be represented within pluralism, discounting, for example, communists as having any influence on American policy. He was also explicit that pluralism did not imply that all interests are equally represented. For Dahl, representation seems to be some function of (1) the intensity of preference, (2) the relative size of the group, and (3) the degree of mobilization. To a large extent the third category depends upon the first two. In pluralist accounts such as Bentley’s that assume general equality, the degree of influence of a group is directly related to the intensity of preference and the size of the group. This means that of two opposing groups who care equally about an issue the larger will win, but pluralists maintain that democratically speaking that is how it should be. However, it also follows that small groups that have an intense interest in some outcome might prevail over a larger, relatively indifferent group. Again there seems to be some justice in such an account. However, the arguments of Mancur Olson in his The Logic of Collective Action (1965) suggest that this outcome might not occur. Olson argues that all groups face a collective action problem, because the larger the group the greater the costs of mobilization. Furthermore, the relative costs of mobilizing for poorer people in society are much greater than for richer people or organizations such as firms. Thus the pluralist parallelogram of forces seems canted in favor of richer smaller groups. So one set of criticisms of pluralism is that, under the cover of arguments that suggest some rough equality of bargaining between groups in society, the rich will in fact prevail. Moreover, while it might seem appropriate that groups that hold more intense views should prevail over larger groups that care less about any single issue, the nature of this collective action problem can mean a suboptimal outcome for society as a whole. This is

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argued most forcefully by the early regulation theorists of the Chicago school of economists and the Virginia public choice scholars.

Suboptimality George Stigler, Richard Posner, and Sam Peltzman of the Chicago school argued that most regulation did not really exist for the public interest. They suggested that, rather than regulation of industry occurring as a result of irate consumers demanding protection, most actually originated from industry. Their argument is that industries with a large number of members faced a collective action problem in trying to operate private cartelistic practices. Regulation by government would ensure that it was harder for industry members to behave competitively and would create barriers to entry from potential rivals outside; so government sells price fixing, restriction of entry, and other services in return for campaign contributions. Sam Peltzman considered the consumer side and saw that it was in the interest of consumers to lobby against suboptimal regulation, but consumers faced a bigger collective action problem because there are so many of them, and they have less to offer politicians—only one vote per consumer. The Virginia school told a similar story about rent seeking. Rent seeking is the political activity of groups that devotes resources to obtaining special rights granted by governments. Such redistribution is not necessarily suboptimal, but the Virginia school argues that rent seeking is socially suboptimal because the gains from rents are dissipated entirely by the rent-seeking activity itself. They argue that the expenditure of resources to gain a transfer is a social cost because there is no social welfare gain through that expenditure. Rent seekers will be prepared to pay up to the amount of the transfer to ensure that the transfer occurs. Furthermore, like the Chicago school, the Virginians argue that the most successful rent seekers are firms, and they impose a transfer from consumers and taxpayers. Pluralism is both a positive theory and one with strong normative roots. It is supposed to be a theory about how the political process works in a democracy, though Bentley’s theory could also be applied to nondemocratic states in the sense that in any oligarchy there will be competing interests that

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will expend resources in order to gain the most from state policy. On its normative side, pluralism is supposed to reflect the way in which a fully working democracy should operate—that is, with different groups bargaining over the distribution of resources. Inequality of result is compatible with pluralism, though the theory does imply that great inequality will not occur. Dahl suggests that as long as institutions exist that provide avenues for groups to enter into the pressure process then we have a working form of institutional pluralism, even if not all groups are equally represented.

Network Versions Later forms of pluralist thought developed into policy network and policy community analysis. In these models different issue areas form different types of policy network. Some are relatively open and fluid policy networks, where many groups are represented. In some areas policy will be contested, and government policy might be unstable as sometimes some groups win and sometimes others do. However, in other issue areas the network will be a tight policy community with a relatively small number of groups represented. These groups will largely agree over the rules of political contestation and over the direction of policy, only discussing the detail. Scholars also suggest that some policy networks are dominated by professional organizations, such as those of doctors or lawyers, that tightly regulate policy so that the public has little say. Network analysis thus allows that in some domains policy will be determined by a small policy elite, but in other issue areas there will be greater openness and contestation. However, network analysis has never really explained why some issue areas should be open and some closed, or how one type of policy network should be transformed into another. More radical critiques of pluralism concentrate upon the assumptions underlying its model of power. These critiques suggest that behavioralism assumes that individuals are aware of their own interests and are able to represent them. However, radical critics argue that people are not aware of their own interests and the interest group system merely operates to give the impression that democratic processes operate. In fact the real bargaining occurs among elites behind closed doors, while the

capitalist economic system ensures that the concerns of capital will always remain foremost within the structure of the interest group system. Keith Dowding See also Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton; Capture Theory of Regulation; Collective Action Problem; Community Power Debate; Dahl, Robert A.; Domhoff, G. William; Dowding, Keith; Interests; Mobilization of Bias; Networks and Communities; Relative Autonomy of the State; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Dahl, R. A. (1982). Dilemmas of pluralist democracy: Autonomy versus control. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Olson, M. (1982). The rise and decline of nations. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Polsby, N. W. (1960). How to study community power: The pluralist alternative. Journal of Politics, 22, 474–484. Wittman, D. (1995). The myth of democratic failure: Why political institutions are efficient. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

POLICE STATE The concept of a police state has its roots in 18thcentury Prussia, although its contemporary usage is derived primarily from the organization of the National Socialist state in Germany during the 1930s. A police state is generally one in which the police come to assume many of the functions traditionally held by other social institutions. Police states are also typically antithetical to liberal ideas concerning the separation of powers that oversee and regulate police functions. Police states are best characterized as possessing a decidedly unbalanced institutional arrangement of power such that police are able to act in an unchecked fashion. This entry summarizes the historical development of the term police state within the context of the transition from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism in Germany. The term police state is a translation of the German term polizeistaat, and was one of three

Police State

phrases used in the 18th century to jurisprudentially characterize nation-states. The term was used again within the Weimar Republic to describe a system of administration thought necessary for the maintenance of state stability. The power of the state in relation to its neighbors was seen as necessary to the complementary interests of maintaining order and guaranteeing political stability to citizens. Consequently, the system of administration was marked by a bureaucracy responsive to the demands of state leaders in regulating economic and political expansion. The interests of the state were also promoted as superior to the individual interests of citizens, because individual interest was contingent upon order and stability. While the early conceptualization of a police state could not be considered liberal, neither was it characterized by the excessive dominance of police institutions that would eventually typify more contemporary conceptualizations. Early references to the polizeistaat emphasized its promotion of an orderly and predictable government through economic self-sufficiency and political might. The term was devoid of reference to abusive and oppressive police institutions or the arbitrary enforcement of rules and regulations that often coexist. After National Socialism became the dominant state ethos in Germany in 1933, the general concept of what defines a police state changed to reflect the historical realities of Nazism. In short, the administrative organization of Weimar Germany was dismantled in favor of more centralized system of governance. The police were granted power without the restrictions of external oversight or control such that no other state entity could challenge the institutional legitimacy or authority of the police. The evolution of German governmental administration into a form whereby the police came to dominate all other social institutions can be traced through a series of policy enactments. In the mid1920s, private police entities worked at the behest of the National Socialist party, where they were charged with enforcing order at party meetings and rallies. They also protected the party from its many enemies, both real and imagined, within the party itself and in the Weimar Republic. When the National Socialist party assumed power in 1933, along with the abolition of traditional

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liberal–democratic institutions the private party police transformed itself into the German state police. This occurred in the midst of menacing threats from party leaders against those opposing the ideologically charged positions of the new regime. Furthermore, the new institutional arrangement had dire implications, as the new state police had no inclination toward the type of administrative rationality that characterized the police under Weimar. In 1936, the police were centralized and unified under the control of Heinrich Himmler, who also instituted a secret police that was given absolute authority to arrest those presumed to be enemies of the regime (now functionally equivalent to the state) without appeal or oversight. Enemies of the party were transformed into enemies of the state, and the list of purported enemies the police sought to control grew proportionately with that expansion in power. The transition toward the dominance of police in the institutional balance of power within German society occurred rather quickly and undermined the ability of other social institutions to develop mechanisms aimed at challenging that authority. The judiciary was rendered impotent in overseeing or challenging the authority of police, who could take those seen as potentially threatening to the regime into “protective custody,” a euphemism that often meant a trip to a concentration camp, torture, or death. Because business owners and tradesmen “could” potentially be operating for subversive purposes, the police were given the authority to regulate and approve applications for business licenses, further expanding the scope of their authority. The army, which in Germany had traditionally been used to quell domestic disturbances, saw their authority strictly limited to engaging foreign powers in war. Furthermore, the police were given the authority to rule over conquered and occupied territories, and military commanders who protested were either blackmailed or blackballed. Even the party itself was subject to the overwhelming authority of the police apparatus, evident in the murder of dissenting party members in what has become known as the Night of the Long Knives. What differentiates a police state from an authoritarian one is that, in the case of the police state, the police come to dominate all other social institutions. In contrast, within authoritarian

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regimes the police are typically subordinate to the interests of the party. In a police state, terror is used as a weapon—first against dissenting members of its own ranks (party members within the historical context of the Nazis) and then against society at large. The hallmarks of a police state are a variety of institutions aimed at controlling dissent while providing the illusion of enforced order: concentration camps, forced labor, and mass deportations. The police come to view themselves as the only legitimate institution in society, and view all others as suspect or potentially hostile. One of the defining moments in the development of a police state occurs when the party itself loses its hegemonic control over ideology and the state, becoming submissive to the authoritative demands of police institutions. Douglas J. Dallier See also Authority; Balance of Power; Domination; Fascism; Fear, Use of; Legitimation; Organization of the State; Security

Further Readings Chapman, B. (1968). The police-state. Government and Opposition, 3, 428–440. Payne, H. C. (1952). An early concept of the modern police state in nineteenth century France. The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 43, 377–381.

POLICY ENTREPRENEURS Traditional neoclassical economic theory was silent about how new products and processes emerge in firms and markets. The theory of the entrepreneur who spots gaps in the market was developed to cover this lacuna. Similarly, there is a long-standing interest in why policies emerge at the times they do; one answer is they emerge through the activities of the policy (or political) entrepreneur. John Kingdon notes that such is the seeming unpredictability and fast-moving character of events that policy makers are often unable to explain in retrospect why a particular measure is put in place at a particular time. Scholars

believe that while chance has a role to play, it is the influence of certain actors in the policy process who happen to be in the right place at the right time, who use their positions to advocate their preferred policy choice. The policy entrepreneur metaphor is now widely used in the study of public policy, in particular to describe how innovation takes place. These people are entrepreneurs in the sense that they get a benefit from the policy being adopted, which pays them back for spending such a long time in the wilderness of lobby groups and advocates, where they do not get much reward for their efforts. Policy entrepreneurs can be from outside the institutions of the state, such as the heads of specialist lobby groups, or parts of think tanks, or even academics who develop a particular specialist interest or hobby horse. But they can also operate within institutions, as do bureaucrats and legislators, and even the outsiders tend to have official positions, such as sitting on expert committees. The common feature is that these people are not neutral—they have a position and they want to get it adopted. The literature concurs that it is mainly luck that has to be on the side of the policy entrepreneur—a fortuitous combination of circumstances that allows the entrepreneur to put forward the preferred policy position and advance it on the agenda, so that the proposal in effect attains a momentum of its own through the process of positive feedback. What this means is that sometimes old policies are picked out of the garbage can almost at random, and the entrepreneur just tries to manage the choice so that his preferred policy is picked. In the lexicon of power, they are lucky rather than powerful. But skill does play its role, especially in the early stages. Policy entrepreneurs need to be adept at presenting arguments in ways that appeal to the current concerns of the moment: they need to know who to lobby and when. They must outwit their many opponents who also lack structural power. Most of all they must know when their time has come, when the window of opportunity has opened so they can push their case. Once they have done this and the upswing is in motion, they can sit back and reap the rewards of fame, official recognition, and even office. Thus, for the policy entrepreneur it is not “gaps in the market” that they spot, as much as the propitious

Political Legitimacy

times at which to try to get a policy on the agenda and through to legislation. Peter John See also Agenda Power; Agenda Setters; Entrepreneurs; Pluralism

Further Readings Baumgartner, F., & Jones, B. (1993). Agendas and instability in American politics Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kingdon, J. (1984). Agendas, alternatives, and public policies Boston: Little, Brown. Mintrom, M. (1997). Policy entrepreneurs and the diffusion of innovation. American Journal of Political Science, 41, 738–770.

POLITICAL ENTREPRENEURS See Policy Entrepreneurs

POLITICAL LEGITIMACY Political legitimacy is what grants those in power the general consent required to govern. It encompasses the belief among a governed population that governance is proper, correct, and right. Legitimate governing actors are treated by those they govern as justifiably holding authority and exercising political power. Political legitimacy thus often provides an obligation to comply with the commands of authority. Deficient political legitimacy conversely implies a reduced obligation to comply with the commands of authority. This entry will discuss empirical versus normative political legitimacy and transparency, accountability, representation, participation, lawfulness, fairness, effectiveness, and appropriateness in governance. Political legitimacy deals with the qualities of governing actors and their relationships to those they govern. Governing actors and those they govern can be both individuals, states, or organizations. Government, institutions, and officials are often the governing actors. The organizations and

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citizens subject to their authority are the governed. States can also be the governed within global governance, where intergovernmental or supranational organizations are the governing actors. Political legitimacy also applies beyond the relationship between governing actors and the governed. We can examine the legitimacy of decision-making procedures, policies and laws, political systems, social orders, or organizational structures. Political legitimacy is a quality or characteristic that arises from how these aspects of governance are configured or practiced. Political legitimacy is closely related to the idea of authority, but the two terms are not synonymous. Authority is the power to make decisions, issue commands, and perform actions that affect the governed. It also refers to agencies or administrative units of government. It is possible for authority, in either sense of the word, to lack political legitimacy.

Empirical Versus Normative Political legitimacy can be empirical or normative. Empirical political legitimacy refers to people’s beliefs regarding political authority and their obligations to obey its commands. It is an inductive or descriptive concept that involves surveying people to determine how much political legitimacy they ascribe to governing actors. Empirical political legitimacy thus depends on assessments of beliefs and perceptions to explain why the governed obey governing actors. Max Weber (1864–1920) proposes an influential empirical interpretation of legitimacy in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Weber outlines three main sources of legitimacy based on beliefs that encourage obedience to authority: traditional, charismatic, and legal. Traditional authority arises from tradition or custom and is accepted as long as people have faith in the political order or at least do not challenge it. Charismatic authority arises from the personal charm or personality of leaders and is accepted as long as the governed have faith or belief in them. Legal authority arises from rationally created rules or legally defined offices and is accepted as long as those governed trust in the legality of the rules or offices. Normative political legitimacy pertains to benchmarks of acceptability regarding political

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authority and justifications for complying with its commands. It is a deductive or theoretical concept that involves investigating governing structures and actors to determine how much political legitimacy they should have. It is normative because governing actors are required to achieve minimum standards to be considered legitimate. Normative political legitimacy depends on theoretical evaluations of governing actors to explain why there is a moral obligation to obey their commands. John Rawls (1921–2002) presents a normative interpretation of legitimacy in Political Liberalism. He argues that legitimacy makes weaker demands than justice. Legitimacy pertains primarily to governance while justice generally pertains to broader social and economic arrangements. Governing actors can therefore be unjust but still legitimate. Rawls outlines the idea of an overlapping consensus whereby different but reasonable factions within society could agree on fundamental aspects of a legitimate political order. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls stresses the importance of fairness for ensuring the legitimacy of governance. If conditions or standards of fairness are not achieved by governing actors, then any obligation to obey their commands is reduced. Considerable disagreement surrounds the precise nature of legitimacy because of confusion between different interpretations. It is possible to interpret legitimacy as a combination of empirical and normative elements. Empirical interpretations may neglect beliefs about how governing actors are justified rather than whether they actually are legitimate. The normative interpretation may conversely neglect actual historical processes of justification and legitimation. The approach used here separates legitimacy into component elements or characteristics and examines each separately. These elements can be used to help explain perceptions and beliefs about legitimacy, as well as prescribe requirements for achieving and increasing legitimacy.

Transparency Transparency is the degree to which governance is clear, open, and accessible. This requires being honest about failures as well as achievements. Transparency helps build social trust in governing actors, which is a key component of both descriptive and normative legitimacy. If governance processes

remain hidden, then it is impossible to evaluate political legitimacy or grant meaningful consent. Consenting to authority generally requires knowledge about how that authority operates. People need to know about the where, what, who, when, how, and why of governance. Lack of transparency leads to a lack of trust because people may not be sure what governing actors are doing. Achieving basic transparency is also required for other components of legitimacy such as accountability and representation. It would be impossible to maintain accountability in a democracy without transparency because people need to know about the activities and decisions of their representatives to hold them accountable.

Accountability Accountability is the degree to which political actors can potentially be exposed to sanctions for their actions. It refers to and presupposes a relationship between governing actors and the governed, or between agents and principals. Both of these can be individuals, groups, states, or organizations at any level of governance. Legitimacy requires the ability to hold governing actors accountable and impose sanctions if they counter public wishes, do not attain accepted standards, or fail to perform their responsibilities. Accountability is a key component of representative democracies, in which voters can remove incumbents or vote for other candidates in the next election. Ruth W. Grant and Robert O. Keohane point out that there is a legitimacy deficit in global governance because of weak accountability. In the context of global governance, agents are intergovernmental organizations and states are their principals. Grant and Keohane argue that agents are obliged to conform to fixed standards and report their activities to their principals, and the principals have the right to judge their agents against those standards and evaluate whether they have fulfilled their responsibilities.

Representation Representation is the degree to which governance reflects the interests and desires of those governed. Legitimacy requires that governing agents act with the interests of the governed in mind. As a result,

Political Legitimacy

representatives who are connected to their voters and actively seeking to achieve their desires and needs will have greater legitimacy than officials who are not. Representation applies to the demographic composition of governance as well as to an ideological convergence between governing actors and the governed. This means that there should be congruence between the identities, values, and attitudes of representatives and their constituents. A governing group of individuals with similar backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses as those they govern will have greater legitimacy than a group that is extremely different in significant ways. Ethnic heterogeneity can be a problem for representation because different groups may have divergent ethnic values and desires. Governing officials may derive legitimacy by reflecting the ethnic identities of those they govern. Establishing a legitimate political system in pluralistic and divided societies is difficult because governing actors may not be able to represent all factions. A large population size can also hinder political legitimacy because it is difficult to adequately represent the interests of so many people. Without adequate representation, the concerns and needs of the governed are not addressed, and the political legitimacy of governing actors and structures will suffer.

Participation Participation is the degree to which governance includes and involves the governed. This may range from tacit consent to direct involvement in decision making. Legitimacy generally requires that the governed have an opportunity to be involved in decisions that affect them and engage with governing actors. Governance that excludes those affected by its decisions and actions will reduce its legitimacy. From an empirical perspective, participation in a political system can be seen as a predictor of legitimacy evaluations. The most common formal participation occurs when citizens periodically elect their democratic representatives. Stronger participation would occur in a direct democracy where the public might set agendas, make policy decisions, establish laws, and even staff the bodies of government. Other variations include consensus democracy— where as many opinions are taken into account as

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possible—and deliberative democracy—where the focus is on public consultation and deliberation. An essential legitimating feature of all these systems is their emphasis on participation. John Locke (1632–1704) points out in his Second Treatise on Civil Government that the legitimacy of governing actors depends in part upon the continuing consent of the governed. This weak form of participation is essential for the social contract to form and maintain a political community. Without participation in governance, people will withdraw their consent and not feel obliged to obey the commands of authority. Fritz Wilhelm Scharpf outlines the related idea of input legitimacy in Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? He argues that the public should have some participatory involvement with decision-making processes that lead to laws and rules. Input legitimacy addresses the participatory quality of legitimacy and holding governing actors accountable. Because most contemporary democracies are of the representative variety, participation is likely to work closely with representation and accountability to form legitimate governance.

Lawfulness Lawfulness is the degree to which governance is exercised in accordance with established laws, legal procedures, rational laws, and clear principles. Lawfulness requires that governing actors obey the law and that governance be conducted legally. Accusations of illegitimacy often arise when governing actors violate laws or fail to fulfill legal requirements. Conversely, laws that are immoral or unjust could possibly be disobeyed without harming legitimacy. Max Weber points out that acquiescence to the law and its concomitant legal actors, institutions, precedents, offices, and reasoning is perhaps the most common source of legitimacy. Lawfulness is a foundational component of most legitimate governments and governing actors. It is so important for legitimacy that the terms are sometimes used synonymously. One of the most essential requirements for legitimacy is respect for human rights. A common way for governments to lose legitimacy is to not respect the human rights and freedoms outlined in the Geneva Conventions and the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These important documents

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of international law set standards for legitimate conduct with regard to human rights and freedoms.

Fairness Fairness is the degree to which governing actors and structures treat the governed equitably and impartially. Legitimacy is often associated or even equated with justice, but justice is an exceedingly complex topic in itself. The simplified variation for ensuring justice is to guarantee equality and impartiality. This helps to protect people from arbitrary actions by governing actors and to uphold individual freedom and liberty. Fairness is important because governance that sustains relative deprivation, structural poverty, systematic discrimination, or gender inequality is commonly associated with a lack of political legitimacy. Poverty reduction thus has legitimating effects upon the governing actors seen as promoting it. There are at least two types of fairness: procedural and substantive. Fairness is of course more complex than this, but these two variants are useful conceptual tools. Substantive fairness generally focuses on systems and structures, whereas procedural fairness generally focuses on procedures and processes. Both variants are important and deficiencies in either will usually result in legitimacy deficits. Procedural fairness pertains to the creation and enforcement of rules and standards. It is achieved when rules, regulations, laws, and policies are created impartially and implemented and enforced universally. Rules and standards created and enforced with favoritism or discrimination will negatively impact legitimacy. Substantive fairness pertains to the outcomes of decision making and structural distributions of power. It is achieved when decision-making outcomes are impartial and structural arrangements are equitable. Decisions or systems that bestow disproportionate power on some individuals or groups while systematically marginalizing others will adversely affect legitimacy.

Effectiveness Effectiveness is the degree to which goals are accomplished efficiently and the outcomes are useful. It refers to the capacity of governance to solve problems without wasting resources. Effectiveness is output oriented and pertains to the efficacy of

policies, rules, and decisions. Political systems and governing actors both obtain legitimacy by successfully achieving collectively desired objectives and providing for public welfare. An example of an important determinant of effectiveness for states is the financial satisfaction of its citizens. Higher average income levels usually reflect superior public welfare in areas such as health and education. Achieving economic growth will thus tend to increase the legitimacy of governing actors seen as responsible for the policies and decisions that make it happen. Fritz Wilhelm Scharpf uses the term output legitimacy to denote the idea that legitimacy is obtained by effectively and efficiently achieving public goals and solving problems. It refers to the degree of problem-solving effectiveness, efficacy of decisions and solutions, and acceptance created by the implementation of these solutions. Output legitimacy is closely related to the more participatory idea of input legitimacy, because increased public consultation and involvement will usually lead to more effective outcomes. The concept is often used in the context of the European Union to advocate structural appropriateness for power configurations and decision-making decentralization across multiple levels of governance. Output legitimacy is thus concerned with participation and structural appropriateness to the extent that they achieve its primary concern of effectiveness.

Appropriateness Appropriateness is the degree to which governance structures, procedures, actors, and actions are suitable for their respective roles and purposes. Appropriateness thus deals with what is right and proper in governance. Yet agreeing on what these terms mean is in itself a significant conceptual dispute. One of the challenges is that different societies and factions may consider different things to be right and proper. Appropriateness can be structural or behavioral. Behavioral appropriateness pertains to norms of appropriate behavior and is affected by the actions or conduct of officials or governance agencies. Norms are generally understood to be standards of appropriate behavior applicable to actors in a given context. In the context of governance, corruption, falsifying information, conflicts of interest, and

Political Parties

treachery generally contravene norms of appropriateness. Governing actors that violate norms of appropriate behaviour will see their legitimacy undermined. Conversely, actors that perform their expected roles and tasks in an appropriate manner will maintain or increase their legitimacy. Structural appropriateness deals with power configurations, actor qualifications, and decisionmaking procedures. Power configurations refer to the structures of governance, degrees of centralization or decentralization, and checks and balances on authority. Arrangements that excessively centralize power or are not structurally conducive to achieving the common good will reduce legitimacy. Actor qualifications refer to criteria such as educational background or professional experience. Actors that lack specialization in their areas will see their legitimacy reduced. Decision-making procedures refer to the mechanisms for making choices and rulings. Procedures that are unsuitable for their particular area of governance will have less legitimacy. Andrew James Klassen See also Authority; Deliberation; Governmentality; Leadership; Organization of the State; Sovereignty

Further Readings Beetham, D. (1991). The legitimation of power. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Buchanan, A. (2010). Human rights, legitimacy, and the use of force. New York: Oxford University Press. Grant, R. W., & Keohane. R. O. (2005). Accountability and abuses of power in world politics. American Political Science Review, 99(1), 29–43. Nagel, T. (1987). Moral conflict and political legitimacy. Philosophy and Public Affairs 16(3), 215–240. Rawls, J. (1996). Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice (Rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as fairness: A restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

POLITICAL PARTIES Political parties largely exist in order to compete for political power by participating in elections,

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and they provide a coordinating mechanism among voters, candidates, legislators, ministers, and other key actors in a political system. The role of political parties in a coalition government represents a specific application of power studies in political science. Modern parties of the kind we see today emerged only in the 19th century following the expansion of suffrage in Western democracies such as Britain, France, and the United States. In his classic work, V. O. Key Jr. points out that parties play three core roles in a political system: partyin-the-electorate, providing informational shortcuts to the electorate and acting as the party of campaign; party-in-government, organizing and coordinating legislative mechanisms; and party-asorganization, aggregating and representing public opinion and negotiating between the public and the government. Parties tend to play a more dominant role in democracies, especially the ones that follow a parliamentary as against a presidential constitutional system. Parties cater to the self-interested behaviors of voters, candidates, and legislators. For example, legislators engage in opportunistic politics by defecting from a party, splitting it or joining another party when these options serve their objectives. Collective dilemmas such as collective action are inherent in democratic politics, and therefore, to be useful and be sustainable, parties need to offer equilibrium solutions to these collective dilemmas. Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan proposed that parties emerge due to the presence of social cleavages and the need to cater to the interests of different sections of the society. Party formation and survival are also closely linked to electoral rules and the way in which seats in the legislature are distributed and decided. Maurice Duverger formulated propositions now known as Duverger’s Law, according to which a single-member plurality system is likely to lead to a two-party system, while multimember proportional representation system favors a multiparty system. Political parties vary in terms of size, ideologies, and the way they appeal to the electorate. Leftwing parties believe in more state intervention, while right-wing parties favor a limited role of the state in the provision of goods and services. Parties that are more centrist in their ideology tend to

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follow more liberal policies. Parties can be elitist, mass-based catering to a wider section of the electorate, or “catch-all,” which try to appeal to voters across various social cleavages. Some parties are more democratic, holding regular internal elections and members’ conferences, while others are more hierarchical and centralized. Spatial models of issue voting have been proposed to study how the positions of parties and voters shape the patterns of electoral competition and voter choice in a polity. In these models, both voters and parties are located at their ideal point in a multidimensional space, where each dimension represents a substantive electoral issue. The proximity model postulates that parties will converge toward the position of a median voter and adopt moderate positions on issues. The directional model, on the other hand, assumes that parties holding intense views have an advantage over other parties. Scholars have also developed unified models, which contain both proximity and directional components, to study patterns of party competition. Parties compete with and respond to other parties, and the party system resulting from these interactions forms a part of the larger political system. In a single-party system such as that in China, the governing body identifies itself as a party whose membership provides exclusive benefits. In two-party systems such as that in the United States, parties tend to be ideologically inclusive, and it is extremely difficult for a third party to be successful. In fragmented party systems such as is found in Germany, parties often need to work with each other to form coalition governments. In a coalition government, a party’s power to influence policies and affect the outcome of a vote in the legislature may not correspond with its share of seats. The power indices approach has been suggested as a means to measure the actual power of parties in such a situation. Power indices are based on different types of winning coalitions, which have been used by scholars in constructing measures to ascertain the power of parties in coalition situations. Lionel Penrose was a pioneer in proposing the concept of a power index in the 1940s. In this context, voting in the legislature is a weighted voting game between parties based on weights and a quota that determines the minimum votes to guarantee a win. A party is considered pivotal if it

can turn a losing vote into a winning vote or a winning vote into a losing vote. Such an event is usually called a swing. The Penrose power index (also called the absolute Banzhaf index) value represents the probability of a swing for a particular party given that all possible combination of parties are equally probable. The Penrose index is an a priori power index, which means that it measures the formal voting power of a party when all theoretically possible coalitions are considered possible. Many other power indices have been proposed and are based on different assumptions. The important thing to note is that smaller parties can have disproportionately high influence in the times of coalition governments, because their support becomes pivotal to sustaining a majority of the government in the legislature. Parties can use their power to get policies of their choice implemented, get ministerial berths, membership of influential committees, and influence key government appointments. The insights from power index theory also highlight the incentives that parties have to engage in party splits and hard bargaining based on their pivotal position in a coalition situation. Rekha Diwakar See also Coalition Theory; Collective Action Problem; Dominant Parties; Elections; Legislative Power; Pivotal Politics; Power Indices; Spatial Analysis

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power. Cheltenham. UK: Edward Elgar. Lijphart, A. (1994). Electoral systems and party systems. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lipset, S. M., & Rokkan, S. (Eds.). (1967). Party systems and voter alignments. New York: Free Press. Ware, A. (1996). Political parties and party systems. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

POLITICAL THINKING

AS

POWER

Thinking politically is identifiable—as are all forms of thinking—through speech, text, and

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nonverbal signs. These contain features relating to the attempted formation and transmission of power to listeners and readers, whether successful or not, and whether conscious or not. The power aspect of thinking politically is the endeavor to intensify the impact of a text or utterance, and it is displayed in four modes: rational persuasiveness, rhetorical attractiveness, emotional appeal, and threats, all discussed below.

Language and Power To explore thinking from the perspective of political theory is to focus on the texts (and to a lesser extent on the verbal utterances) that people produce; in particular—though not exclusively—on texts produced for collective consumption. A central task of the political theorist is to map and analyze patterns of thinking about power. That has three aspects: We can think and converse about power, we can affect human conduct and social processes through language, and we can also express power in our written and oral discourses. The study of thinking politically focuses on the last aspect: the forms of power embedded in texts and speech that result from the manner in which they are produced, organized, and focused. Examining the manner in which text or oral discourses are produced, organized, and focused is distinct from examining discourse or behavior. Such analysis is also distinct from exploring the impact of text upon the behavior of people. Such analysis does not consider the power relationships and reactions that follow from the enunciation of messages and their actual consumption, nor does such analysis consider the concrete physical acts associated with power. Such analysis is also detached from standard discourse analysis, which aspires to identify the role of political language in domination and oppression. Rather, the analysis refrains from attributing either blame or praise to the ubiquity of power. Finally, such analysis focuses not on the production process of power in speech and writing but on the textual product of thinking itself, a product permeated with power elements. All texts are expressions of power and in that sense political, to the extent that they endeavor to influence their consumers and may change, or reinforce, the views, arguments, and ideological configurations of their potential consumers. Specific texts that

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deal with the organization of government and collectivities are merely the most pronounced and dedicated political texts. The success or failure of power devices is highly significant for political scientists, sociologists, and students of ideology. But we can also capture the attempted power properties of texts and utterances, properties they possess well before they are read or listened to by others. Utterances and writing are fashioned to become inevitable transmitters of power from the moment they are produced. Without the power devices that expressed thought contains, it would be unable actually to exercise power when confronted with a contested position it sought to alter or protect. Speech and texts are interventions in the world through which power is directly superimposed on the discourse itself, and indirectly superimposed on the consumers of the discourse. As a practice capable of transmitting power, political thinking possesses two main attributes: its performative features and its intensity. The idea of the performativity of a text borrows from J. L. Austin, and refers to the force of the author’s intentions when performing an act of speaking. Austin emphasizes illocutionary force (what one does in performing an utterance) and perlocutionary force (what effects are produced on an audience as a consequence of saying it). For analysts of political thinking, illocutionary force is the more pertinent to understanding the power attributes of thought, because power is located in the discourse itself prior to its perception and reception by listeners and readers. The reception of speech and text is crucial to other aspects of power discourse. But in studying a text as an instance of thinking politically we single out two attributes as central to understanding its power components: the anticipation of its reception by the speaker or writer, and its intended targeting. That said, textual analysis is also sensitive to unintentional and concealed power signals incorporated in a text or utterance. For instance, the sequence in which a text is constructed may not be entirely deliberate, and the use of argumentative conventions—stating the problem, or enticing the reader through a striking opening metaphor—may simply reflect the author’s socialization into common patterns of discourse. The chief performative aspect of political thinking is to serve as an intensifier. The political

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understanding of intensity as a macrofeature of thinking needs to be differentiated from three other phenomena. First, it includes, but extends beyond, the micromeaning of intensifier in linguistic theory, which refers specifically to insertions in a text that highlight a phrase (very, urgently). Second, it should be distinguished from psychological investigations of power in language that associate intensity with the duration of the impact that a text or speech carries. Third, power in thinking should not be confused with thinking about power, as in Lord Acton’s dictum “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Rather, it constitutes a major power practice intrinsic to language—it does something with and to a text. Language is designed to have a communicative effect, much of which lies in the contents of the message. But verbal and oral communication concern not only ideas; nor do they merely describe and evaluate. They also contain modulators that are tagged on to thought, description, and evaluation, sieving and weighting these three by means of contrivances that vary their emphasis and thus activate and sharpen the consumption of certain messages. The endeavor to make an impact, and hence the potential actually to exercise power on others, may of course not be realized, may be realized ineffectively, or may be realized in a manner and direction that was not intended. But it is always present in linguistic communication.

Categories of Power Four major categories of power as intensification are evident in a discourse, though not all concurrently: the rational persuasive force of the arguments it contains, the rhetorical attractiveness of its presentation and vision, the emotional appeal it employs, and the menace of its tone. The four categories overlap and intersect in many ways. Some scholars would include them all under the heading of rhetoric; certainly for Aristotle the first three were. But the classification is intended to bring out their different features. Rational Persuasiveness

The rational sway of an argument requires the assessing of two features. The first is the persuasiveness (or dissuasiveness) of the substantive

argument on two levels: (1) making a case through cogency, coherence, validity, proof, and intellectual forcefulness. Many of those criteria are assumed to be objectively determinable, yet they will still vary in different contexts and cultures; and (2) making a case in terms of reasonable and/or ethical arguments located in ideologies and epistemologies in which certain values are invested with irresistible mobilizing force. The ideologies identify the substantive attractiveness of the message; the epistemologies are the “user-friendly” authenticators of the code of meaning through which the message is conveyed. Thus “human rights” can be the alluring value; liberalism can be its ideological framework; and a belief in the universality of ethics the epistemological vehicle that makes the propagation of rights a general norm. Because rational argument is directed at the intellect, some scholars of power regard it therefore as an instance of influence rather than power. That distinction cannot hold. Influence is always a conscious application of the power of argument. The second feature of rational persuasiveness is a notable undercurrent that aims to win over the consumer of the utterance or text by employing not just rational and ethical argument, but the most efficient, compelling, or professionally influential language required to accomplish impact in each case—the rationality of means rather than of ends. The communicator has a target audience or readership in mind and tailors the text to their anticipated frames of reference and to their assumed optimal receptiveness. That is a measure of intensity—the heightening of the substantive and epistemological impact of the text. For instance, political theorists are the main constructors and purveyors of highquality political thinking. Because many of them are committed to theories of justice, a topic that has recently commanded much professional respect, it helps to couch any argument in terms of justice. In addition, they need to adopt the kind of specialized language, with its conventions of argumentation and presentation, that is taken seriously by their colleagues. They are unlikely to succeed in getting their professional analyses and prescriptions accepted if they employ emotional threats, a verbal performative that may be effective in a family, in which affective ties constitute an epistemological framing, but will hardly be welcome in determining the transmission of knowledge.

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Rhetorical Attractiveness

The rhetorical attractiveness of the text or utterance relates to the effectiveness of the clothing of the argument, aesthetically, technically, and structurally. In this context the term rhetoric denotes not a body of rules of public speaking, or the study of such rules, but the devices and embellishments introduced into discourse in order to make it more imaginatively or aesthetically attractive. In that sense, utterances and texts are never absent of rhetoric, but not all rhetoric is deliberately designed. As with rational argument, rhetoric may search for the most apposite formulations that could be expected to work on a susceptible consumer. Rhetorical intensity is the attempt to augment the effect a text or speech has on its consumers through seducing their senses in a visceral or pleasureproducing manner. Though some commentators regard rhetoric as insincere, that has little bearing on the analysis of discursive power. The attempt to inject a text with effective power lies in the desire to elicit the reaction of its targets, not in the sincerity of the power wielder. Metaphors or tropes are particularly significant forms of rhetoric. Their widespread method of redescribing something familiar as something initially unfamiliar (e.g., a “glass ceiling” for limits to occupational mobility) is an imaginative intervention in a semantic field. Directness and immediate language can also convey power through giving voice to certainty and commitment. Both rational persuasion and rhetoric discharge the key political role of ranking, establishing a hierarchy of priorities in a given message. Ranking is a form of intensification because it creates a pattern of the distribution of meaning, by according different import to parts of the message, often by means of a structural sequence: a newspaper’s front page. However, ranking can also intensify through rational or emotional tags attached to words and concepts, thus raising their salience— an example would be allocating urgency to a plan or prescription. In texts that employ concepts central to the realm of politics, some concepts may already emit intensity through their core meaning, while others may accrue intensity only within certain ideological settings. An instance of the first is claiming a right—human, natural, social, or legal—as a prioritizing and protective device intended to bolster

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the status of a given good, such as life or welfare. An instance of the second is the concept of liberty, whose intensity will have to be constructed through the languages of rational or rhetorical persuasion, and depends on its location in ideologies that place liberty at their center. Emotional Appeal

The emotional appeal of a discourse stems from both the immediate and the more durable passion of political language that attaches itself to psychological or visceral features of human beings. It intensifies discourse not through the latter’s content or presentational aspects but through the arousal of additional nonverbal reactions in the speaker or writer. Those may then be transmitted to an audience or readership, through which similar or dissimilar emotions—or perhaps none relevant to the intended discourse—might be stimulated in parallel. The attachment of emotional intensifiers to political arguments, discourse, and conceptual arrangements lends them weight and prominence. The history of political thought is replete with emotional attachment to the ideas and visions thinkers wish to promote and, as with rhetoric, the deployment of those emotions can also be manipulative. That is particularly so in ideological mode, because from some, but not all, ideological perspectives, all methods of control over political language are fair. Most important for our purposes, political concepts are accompanied by, and intersect with, emotional heighteners, which serve as further power organizers of messages. The linking of self-determination and patriotism is a typical example. Spoken language contains emotional signs that are absent or mitigated in written texts. Intonations reflecting anger, anxiety, or pride will intensify the delivery of a speech act and may exert power on its consumers that cannot be reproduced in writing. Parliamentary debates and public oratory—in which rhetoric and emotion can overlap—offer a further dimension to the attempted exercise of performative force through an utterance. While gaining the force of immediacy, speech loses the power of durability that texts possess. Threats

Menace normally refers to a more general and vague atmosphere of deliberately instigated danger.

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But in the context of power in thinking, its specifically relevant form is a threat. Although threats may be subsumed under the previous categories of rational and emotional ways of exercising power, they nevertheless merit separate consideration. The act of threatening—proclaiming the intention to harm—is one of the most immediate and pressing exercises of power. It constitutes the verbal equivalent and frequently the precursor of force or violence in physical and institutional practice. It therefore comprises a major subclass of power, albeit in linguistic form. Unlike the other three categories, which identify intensifier components embedded in categories (reason, rhetoric, and emotion) that also contain much broader dimensions, a threat is wholly and directly an instance of highintensity power. Nor is a threat an attempt to exercise power but its actual exercise, though even then it may fail. Power in thinking is a variable, not a constant, and the above categories assign differential and fluctuating weight to the elements of a message. The criteria of variable intensification will themselves often be vague or indeterminate. Even when thought to be clear by the producers and consumers of political language, they may be markedly contestable. What increases the persuasiveness of an argument (additional proof, subscription to dominant paradigms?), the attractiveness of its language and structure (poetic ability, cultural resonance?), the passion of its mood (rawness, enthusiasm?), or the looming constrictiveness of a threat (temporal immediacy, magnitude?) needs to be closely investigated in the comparative ideological, epistemological, and cultural settings in which they occur. Michael Freeden See also Ideology; Language and Power; Persuasion; Rationality; Rhetoric; Threats

Further Readings Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Edelman, M. (1977). Political language: Words that succeed and policies that fail. New York: Academic Press. Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power (2nd ed.). Harlow, UK: Longman.

Ng, S. H., & Bradac, J. J. (1993). Power and language: Verbal communication and social influence. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

POST-FORDISM Post-Fordism is a thesis of neo-Marxist regulation theory. In Marxist thought the economic system determines the political system. Capitalism determines a specific form of liberal state, but that state will change when capitalism falters—as it must do, according to Marxists, because of its internal contradictions. In regulation theory, capitalism tends toward crises but also has means of avoiding them through internal change. There are two elements in this story. Regimes of accumulation are the systems of production and consumption, while modes of regulation are the legal systems and conventions of society that accompany them. In the 1980s, the regulation school identified a change in the regime of accumulation. Regulationists argued that Fordist modes of production were changing to post-Fordist modes. The Fordist mode (taking its name from Henry Ford, who first introduced the moving production line) relates to the mass production of consumer products. Mass production transformed society, particularly in the postwar years, as it brought to consumers all sorts of products from washing machines to telephones, from televisions to cars. Fordist techniques required masses of workers in large factories carrying out soul-destroying and menial tasks. The goods produced from this process, however, satisfied materialistic consumers and hid the underlying structures of inequality and power in society. However, as the public became satiated with consumer products and a more educated workforce demanded higher remuneration and better work conditions, capitalism started to face a crisis. The response, in part made possible by new technological advances, first in the form of robotization within factories and then through computer and information technology, transformed the workplace. Mass-produced goods no longer required such large workforces; moreover, these technological advances also enabled greater specialization of products. First, higher levels of unemployment and then new service industries

Postmodernist View of Power in International Relations

changed the nature of production. Manufacturing processes changed as firms contracted out and franchised noncore and then core aspects of their production. Mass production and consumption were changed to flexible specialization. Through advertising, business led consumers to demand more specialized products, and started to target groups of consumers rather than trying to sell the same product to everyone. These changes in regimes of accumulation also led to changes in the mode of regulation. In part, government itself changed. The post-Fordist production methods in capitalist enterprises changed the forms of government itself. Large line bureaucracies were transformed into new agencies. Government privatized its activities and contracted out core activities to companies—to manage their information technology, tax collection, road maintenance, housing, prisons, schools, and so on. With these new work practices came new contracts for employees, job security even in the state sector was reduced, and a new underclass created that could no longer find employment now that Fordist production lines had been closed. The new politics was no longer concerned with class issues of redistribution but directed toward regulation and managing risk. The regulationists’ story is one of capitalism transforming itself in order to maintain the traditional status and power hierarchies. One of the criticisms of post-Fordist theory is a traditional critique of Marxism: that it is not falsifiable, as any change in society is described as a new means by which capitalism can reign triumphant. It has also been accused of exaggerating the degree to which production processes have changed and of concentrating too much upon specific examples. Post-Fordism as a theory had its heyday in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, though the types of processes it describes have continued to develop in the new century. Keith Dowding See also Jessop, Bob; Marx, Karl; Marxist Accounts of Power

Further Readings Ash, A. (1994). Post-Fordism: A reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

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Jessop, R. (1995). The regulation approach, governance, and post-Fordism:Alternative perspectives on economic and political change? Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

POSTMODERNIST VIEW OF POWER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Any definition of a “postmodernist view” in international relations (IR) would hardly do any justice to the diversity of views and approaches existing in postmodern IR theorizing. Yet, it can be confidently argued that postmodern approaches to power in international relations, as in many other academic disciplines, have been influenced heavily by the thought of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and especially his writings on discourse, disciplinary power, governmentality, biopower, and resistance. The discipline of international relations has traditionally been dominated by a material, capabilitybased, instrumental, and top-down understanding of power, which is the approach adopted by realism, the dominant school of thought in IR. The dominant realist approach to power has been challenged both by neoliberal and Gramscian approaches. The former focuses on the importance of socialization and “soft power” (see, for instance, the work of John Ikenberry and Joseph Nye) while the latter focuses on Gramscian hegemony (i.e., on the mechanisms through which a ruling class transforms its own interests and values into “common sense” for all the members of a society) and its reproduction. It can be argued that while neoliberal and Gramscian approaches depart from the material and capability-based realist approach to power, they seem to share with the latter, if in different degrees and ways, an instrumental and top-down understanding of power. Postmodern approaches, on the other hand, offer a radically different understanding of power. For postmodern approaches power is a relation, not a commodity or a capability; power is dispersed and diffused, and it is activated from all the constitutive elements of the body politic, rather then being unidirectional, centralized, and controlled and exercised by a single actor (e.g., a king, a state, a ruling class, a coalition of states); thus, power is not something that operates or is used instrumentally in a top-down way, but a force that

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operates bottom-up. Similarly, power is not a force that is exercised instrumentally upon its target audience, violating that audience’s autonomy from an exterior point. Rather, as mentioned above, power is a force that is enacted by each and every individual; power is thus a force that attempts to regulate life from within. Power, then, is a productive phenomenon—it is not only produced by the interaction of different actors/subjects and forces, but it also generates and produces actors/subjects and forces. In this way power can be thought as both a condition of existence as well as an object of resistance in the multidimensional universe of international relations. Based on this conceptualization of power, the key question for postmodern IR is not who has power in international relations, but how does power operate and how is it exercised? Thus the postmodernist view and analysis of power in IR is guided by the question how rather than who. In postmodern analyses the concept of discourse is central. (Foucault defines a discourse as a set of practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.) Discourse is a key analytical tool that allows postmodern scholars to identify institutionalized forms of power relations in world politics, and to examine their disciplinary power and the dispersed social practices, rules, principles, institutions, or structures through which such power relations operate. The aim of this research is to identify and interrogate how specific interests or power relations have been institutionalized and are reproduced. The nature and implications of the interplay between specific discourses and identity/reality formation is a focal issue here. David Campbell, for instance, has analyzed how U.S. identity has been written and rewritten through foreign policies and practices that operated in its name, and Steve Smith has attempted to demonstrate how IR as a discipline helped to produce the tragic events of September 11, 2001. After the end of the 1990s, postmodern analysis of power in IR centered on the concept of biopower. The publication of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri was instrumental in this shift. Hardt and Negri, drawing on Foucault, defined biopower as a form of power that becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord. What is directly at stake in this form of power is the production and reproduction of life itself.

Postmodern scholars claim that such an understanding of power is crucial if we are to understand the dispersed, diffused, and deterritorialized ways in which power operates in world politics today, and if we are to influence or change the existing structures of power. Similarly, they argue that the traditional state-centered IR approaches fail to take into account the conditions of existence and change of the existing global order. In this regard, focusing on the United States or any other state as the core of power and hegemony in international relations obscures rather than clarifies how power and hegemony operate in contemporary world politics. Critics have argued that the postmodernist approach to power renders power as a concept analytically useless. They contend that if power is as dispersed and diffused as postmodern scholars claim, then it is of no importance in the analysis of international relations—if power is everywhere, then power is nowhere. In this way, critics argue, postmodern analysis is fundamentally regressive. By diffusing hegemony at the level of the subject, it loses sight of where power really lies in world politics. It obfuscates the power relations that exist in the international system, and it hides the role and function of the hegemonic power within this system. Postmodern scholars respond that their analysis empowers rather than weakens individuals. Their focus is on lives lived and the actually existing people on which (power) politics is based, rather than on abstract structures of power that lie “out there” and are produced, as if by a remote control, by a distant hegemon. Andreas Antoniades See also Biopower; Empire; Foucault, Michel; Gramsci, Antonio; Governmentality

Further Readings Campbell, D. (1998). Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity (Rev. ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Der Derian, J., & Shapiro, M. (Eds.). (1989). International/intertextual relations: Postmodern readings of world politics. Lexington, MA: Lexington. Larner, W., & Walters, W. (Eds.). (2004). Global governmentality. London: Routledge. Smith, S. (2004). Singing our world into existence. International Studies Quarterly, 48(3), 499–515.

Poulantzas, Nicos

POULANTZAS, NICOS (1936–1979)

Nicos Poulantzas was a Greek political theorist who spent his most productive years in Paris from 1960 until his suicide on October 3, 1979. He held several posts at universities in Paris—his last as professor of sociology at Vincennes University— but his work defied conventional disciplinary boundaries in its concern to critique contemporary capitalism. A committed member of the Greek Communist Party of the Interior, he was also active and influential in theoretical and political debates on the French Left. While remaining faithful to the basic methods and tenets of Marxism, Poulantzas changed his position on the state and political strategy several times in response to major disputes and contemporary events. Outside France he was best known for his analysis of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state and, subsequently, for his analysis of the state as a social relation. Crucial in the former regard was his debate in New Left Review with another Marxist theorist, Ralph Miliband, conducted over several years, on the capitalist state (see “Miliband– Poulantzas Debate”). But his most enduring contributions came later, with the development of his argument that the state (or, better, state power) is best seen as an institutionally mediated condensation of the changing balance of class forces. Following his legal studies in Athens, which included political science and sociology, he completed a doctoral dissertation in 1965 on Marxist legal philosophy and legal theory from a Sartrean perspective. He then turned to political theory, focusing on the nature of the capitalist state and political struggle. He was much influenced by Antonio Gramsci, the prewar Italian communist activist and theorist, and by postwar Italian Marxist thought. He was particularly impressed by Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony—the exercise of political, intellectual, and moral leadership—as the key feature of class power in advanced capitalist democracies, which he saw as based economically on possessive individualism and politically on individual citizenship in a national state. He also highlighted Gramsci’s claim that the state apparatuses, broadly conceived, are critical in

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mediating and organizing a power bloc (a durable coalition of dominant economic and political class forces) and disorganizing subordinate classes. This view was soon integrated into a broader perspective on the state’s role in capitalist societies influenced (not always to the good) by the French structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar. The most developed presentation of this approach is Political Power and Social Classes (French edition, 1968; English translation, 1973). Poulantzas then began a slow retreat from the immobilizing effects of structural Marxism and turned increasingly to more strategic issues—such as the nature of fascism and military dictatorships, the changing contours of imperialism and social class relations, and the role of parties and social movements in modern capitalism. This productive period of study and struggle is evident from his three books on Fascism and Dictatorship (1972/1974), Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1974/1975), and Crisis of the Dictatorships (1975/1976). His final studies increasingly addressed problems posed by the self-evident crisis in European Marxism as social theory and as a guide to practice—integrating some of Michel Foucault’s arguments about power as a social relation and Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on space and spatiality, critiquing France’s neoconservative “new philosophers,” and debating representative and direct democracy. His last, and greatest, work was State, Power, Socialism (1978), which, according to his own immodest claim, presented the central ideas of the hitherto unfinished Marxist theory of the state. The key to this theory was the notion that the state is a social relation (rather than a thing or subject) and that state power is therefore best interpreted as the material condensation of the changing balance of forces. In addition, this text provides rich and insightful comments on the spatiality and temporality of the capitalist state, the mental– manual division of labor and official discourse, the changing political forms of the capitalist type of state, new forms of state intervention, and arguments about the necessity of a democratic transition to democratic socialism. Politically, Poulantzas was initially committed to democratic politics, converted to Marxism– Leninism, then became a left Eurocommunist, and, eventually, supported a multiparty radical democratic politics, cross-class alliances, and an independent role for social movements. These

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commitments are quite explicit in State, Power, Socialism. The driving force behind this political as well as intellectual reorientation was, above all, political events in Greece and France. Poulantzas wanted to understand how changes in imperialism affected national states and class struggles in Europe; to analyze the prospects of left Eurocommunism and the Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left) in France; to address the problems of a democratic transition to democratic societies after the mid-1970s crisis of the Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish dictatorships; to understand the emerging crisis of state socialism; and to identify and contest the trend toward authoritarian statism in northwestern Europe. As he watched these various events, issues, and trends, he often found his theoretically derived expectations about key economic and political trends confirmed. But he was also caught unawares by surprising shifts in political conjunctures. These included May 1968 in France and its aftermath, the Greek coup d’état in 1969, the collapse of the Greek junta in 1974 due primarily to internal contradictions that had been intensified by popular struggles, and the fall of the Union de la Gauche triggered by the French Communist Party in 1977. These events prompted him to reevaluate the possibilities of class struggle, the nature of normal and exceptional capitalist states, the relational character of state power, the leading roles of the communist party and working class in struggles for socialism, and the revolutionary potential of popular–democratic struggles and new social movements. He was forced to rethink his basic theoretical ideas and applied theoretical-strategic concepts and, thereby, he reached his distinctive theoretical account of the state as a social relation and his distinctive strategy for a democratic transition to democratic socialism. Bob Jessop See also Foucault, Michel; Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemony; Miliband, Ralph; Miliband–Poulantzas Debate

Further Readings Jessop, B. (1985). Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist theory and political strategy. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Poulantzas, N. (1978). State, power, socialism. London: Verso.

POWER, COGNITION, AND BEHAVIOR Being in a powerful or a powerless social position has a fundamental impact on the way individuals perceive others, how they make judgments, and how they behave. Individuals who control others often pay less attention to their subordinates, act more quickly, prioritize more, more easily attain desired outcomes, and behave in more extreme ways as compared to individuals who do not possess power. These tendencies occur even in contexts that are seemingly unrelated to the bases of their power holding. For example, having power in an organizational context affects social perception, decision making, and behavior in other contexts outside the organization. Studies in which participants are randomly assigned to powerful and powerless roles in the laboratory demonstrate that power directly affects basic cognitive processes and the individual’s mind-set. The effects of power on judgment and behavior derive from the ways power affects information processing. Power increases the ability to process information selectively by treating some information as relevant and other as irrelevant, as well as the ability to process information flexibly to meet situational demands. Compared to powerless individuals, powerful individuals change their focus of attention more in response to the context. These effects are associated with the greater freedom to act at will and the lesser constraints that powerful individuals experience. This entry discusses the effects of power on basic cognition and then examines the ways in which various styles of processing information can affect behavior.

Power Affects Basic Cognition We are surrounded by information. To be able to respond to the environment and pursue our goals we process some information more extensively than other information. This phenomenon, called selective attention, enables reasoning, perception, and action. What exactly we pay attention to is determined on a moment-to-moment basis and depends on our desires, expectancies, needs, and goals, as well as on the characteristics of the environment itself.

Power, Cognition, and Behavior

A central feature of power is that it directly affects attention, enhancing the ability to process information selectively. This feature was demonstrated by Ana Guinote in a series of laboratory studies in which participants were randomly assigned to powerful roles (i.e., roles that required them to evaluate others and determine how much others earn) or powerless roles (i.e., roles that required participants to perform tasks and be evaluated by others) and performed cognitive tasks. In comparison to those who were assigned to powerless roles, participants assigned to powerful roles more easily focused attention on the central features of an object or a scene and ignored detail and peripheral information such as the surroundings of the object. For example, using the framed line test, developed by Shinobu Kitayama and his colleagues, participants were asked to observe a square frame with a vertical line inside the square, and then to draw a line in a blank square frame, usually of a different size. When the task was to draw a line that had exactly the same length as the line that they originally saw, participants assigned to a powerful role made fewer errors than participants assigned to a powerless role. Participants assigned to a powerful role were therefore better able to ignore the background of the line than could participants assigned to a powerless role. However, when the task was to draw a proportionate line in a blank square frame, that is, a line that was in the same proportion to the size of the blank square frame as the sample line was to the size of the sample square frame, powerful and powerless participants were equally as accurate, and no differences in their performance emerged. Powerful participants can therefore ignore or take into account background and detail information depending on the situation, whereas powerless participants cannot ignore this information, even when the task requires that they do so. Another task that found greater distractibility in powerless individuals required participants to identify on a computer screen whether common objects were upright or inverted. All objects had handles, which was irrelevant to the task at hand. In this task, powerless participants showed delays in their responses when irrelevant information (such as the handles of the object) distracted them from their deliberative responses. Powerful participants showed know such delays.

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Studies using visual search tasks also contribute to identify the cognitive mechanisms that underlie power. These tasks help identify whether power operates through the means of the individual’s ability to focus attention, or more generally improves any perceptual task. In a series of studies conducted by David Wilkinson, Gerhard Reese, and Guinote, participants were required to identify a target among distracting information, for example, an upside down T among Ts in different positions. The results demonstrated that power does not promote perceptual ability in general. Power only affects performance on tasks that require active attention and inhibition of peripheral information. This tends to occur when attention is driven by the motivations of the person (e.g., a person who is motivated to pursue a goal will more easily detect goal-relevant information in the environment). When features in the environment can be easily identified without the use of active attention, for example, when they are salient, power does not affect performance. Research has also shown that powerful individuals are less distractible by peripheral information in perceptual as well as conceptual tasks: that is, these effects of power on basic cognition occur for tasks that involve the perception of stimuli in the environment as well as for tasks that require activating some concepts in the person’s mind and inhibiting other concepts that the person has also stored in memory. The ways we process information form the basis for our perceptions, judgments, and behavior. Therefore, the effects of power on the way individuals process information affect virtually any domain of human functioning. For example, power affects social perception through the tendency to process information selectively, considering some features of social targets more than others. Depending on the situation, powerful individuals may focus on the attributes of others that help them attain their goals or focus on what more easily comes to mind, such as stereotypes. In contrast, powerless individuals attend to various sources of information and have more complex social perceptions. Researchers such as Susan Fiske have argued that this occurs because powerless individuals pay more attention to others in order to increase predictability and control. In the next section we will focus on the ways power affects behavior.

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Implications for Behavior The way that powerful and powerless individuals process information has three major implications for behavior: increased readiness to act, prioritization, and behavior variability. Readiness to Act

A central signature of power is that it facilitates action. Authors like Dacher Keltner and Adam Galinsky demonstrated that power leads to disinhibition, whereas powerlessness leads to inhibition. Powerful individuals more readily make decisions and prioritize different desires, thereby turning them into goals; more easily initiate goal-directed action once decisions are made; and more easily take action geared toward their goals, once they strive for a goal. Conversely, powerless individuals procrastinate more across all phases of goal pursuit. Powerful individuals not only more easily initiate behavior targeted at their goals, they also respond more readily to environmental stimuli. For example, powerful individuals move an annoying stimulus more readily than powerless individuals. In interactions with others, powerful individuals talk longer and interrupt others more. These responses are associated with the way power affects their focal attention. Because powerful individuals are focused on dominant information associated with their desires, goals, or expectancies, or with salient aspects of the environment, they can respond more readily than can powerless individuals who attend to different types of information and have less clear priorities. Attention to different types of information without clear priorities leads to indecision and delays in action. In contrast, a clear focus on the information that is relevant for action promotes faster responses and more unequivocal behavior. Powerful roles often require quick action and decision making. Powerful individuals’ cognitive processes are adapted to these needs—as is generally the case, cognition serves the individuals’ adaptive action in the relation with the environment. Prioritization

In addition to facilitating action, power also affects what individuals actually do: because

powerful and powerless individuals attend to different types of information, and information processing underlies behavior, their behavior choices are also different. Powerful individuals respond in line with what is more dominant in the situation, for example, their goals, needs, or simply what the environment affords. In contrast, powerless individuals respond not only to the dominant aspects of the situation but also to peripheral, unrelated aspects. Guinote conducted research examining behavior across various situations. Different situations activate different goals: for instance, a work context usually activates work goals, and a leisure context activates entertainment. Powerful individuals respond, however, more unequivocally in line with the goals activated by the situation than do powerless individuals. Powerful individuals work more and entertain themselves less at work, and entertain themselves more and work less in a leisure situation. Powerless individuals give less priority to behavior that is applicable to the situation. They work relatively less and entertain themselves more in a work context, and continue to think about work in a leisure context at the expense of entertaining themselves. The behavior of powerless individuals exhibits therefore less clear priorities than the behavior of powerful individuals. This occurs both when goals are activated by the situation and when goals derive from an act of will. Behavior Variability

One consequence of the greater attunement of powerful individuals to prominent aspects of the situation, and greater flexibility in the way they process information, is that they change their behavior more across situations than do powerless individuals. For example, participants who were assigned to a powerful role and asked to plan activities for the weekday and the weekend planned more routine activities and fewer leisure activities for the weekday, and planned more leisure activities and fewer routine activities for the weekend than did participants assigned to a powerless role. Thus, powerful participants changed their behavior more from one situation to another than did powerless participants. Greater responsiveness to the environment leads, therefore, to greater changes in

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the behavior of powerful compared to powerless individuals. Another source of greater variability in the judgment and behavior of powerful individuals derives from their greater reliance on feelings and subjective experiences. Not only the content of our thoughts but also subjective experiences, such as the ease or difficulty in recalling information or generating thoughts, affect judgments and behavior choices. This tendency is, however, stronger for powerful individuals than powerless individuals. For example, Mario Weick and Guinote asked managers (i.e., powerful individuals) and employees (i.e., subordinates) to recall either 2 or 10 past instances of leisure time. Afterward they asked them how happy they were with their leisure time and their work–life balance. Managers who generated 2 past instances of leisure time were happier with their leisure time and their work–life balance than managers who were asked to generate 10 past instances of leisure time. Because recalling 10 past instances was more difficult than recalling 2 past instances, managers who recalled 10 past instances concluded that they were not very happy with their leisure time. In contrast, employees were not affected by the number of instances that they recalled. In other words, the ease or difficulty in recalling events of past leisure time did not affect the judgments of the employees but affected the judgments of the managers. Because inner states and feelings often change from one situation to the other, powerful individuals are more likely to change their judgments and behavior across situations than are powerless individuals. Although powerful roles often require decision making, power does not always lead to stable, logical, and accurate judgment and decision making. Greater behavior variability in powerful compared to powerless individuals was also found when power was defined in the context of intergroup relations in the laboratory. Guinote, Judd, and Brauer assigned participants randomly to small groups, so that the members of some groups were given the task to evaluate and determine how much others earn, whereas the members of other groups were given the task to solve problems and be evaluated. Participants were videotaped while working together and introducing themselves to the groups.

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The videotapes were then shown to observers who rated each participant along several personality traits. Half of the observers were informed about the power relations between the groups and the other half was not. Variability in the personality traits of the individuals in powerful and powerless groups was then assessed through the ratings of the observers. As predicted, members of powerful groups were rated in more variable ways than members of powerless groups. This occurred regardless of whether observers knew about the power relations between the groups, showing that individuals assigned to a powerful group acted objectively in more variable ways than individuals assigned to a powerless group. The analyses of the self-presentations showed that powerful individuals took more time to introduce themselves to the group, mentioning a higher number of personal interests and traits than powerless individuals. Powerful individuals also used a more abstract language, defining themselves in a more traitlike, individuating way (e.g., “I am sociable”) as compared to powerless individuals, who defined themselves more in relation to external circumstances (e.g., “I go out with friends”). A more unequivocal, extensive and individuating selfpresentation is one of the factors that leads observers to perceive powerful individuals in more variable ways. In sum, power affects the relationship of the individual to the environment, increasing freedom from constraints and agency. It follows that cognition changes in adaptive ways, promoting the ability to process information selectively and promoting flexible information processing across situations. These cognitive mechanisms in turn promote readiness to act, prioritization, and more variable behavior in powerful than in powerless individuals. Ana Guinote

Further Readings Guinote, A., Judd, C. M., & Brauer, M. (2002). Effects of power on perceived and objective group variability: Evidence that more powerful groups are more variable. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 708–721.

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Guinote, A. (2007). Behavior variability and the situated focus theory of power. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology, (Vol. 18, 256–295.) New York: John Wiley. Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110, 265–284.

POWER

AS

CONTROL THEORY

In the social psychology of interpersonal and intergroup power relations, power as control (PAC) theory emerged to explain how relative power motivates individuals to heed or ignore others. Based originally on principles of motivated social cognition, Susan Fiske and colleagues developed the theory through laboratory, survey, and later neuroscientific studies. Its influence extends to the theories of Dacher Keltner and colleagues concerning power as disinhibition. This entry defines PAC, examines how situations can determine a sense of PAC, and discusses the use of power for good or ill. People attend upwards. In dyads, groups, and organizations, powerful people command notice but do not necessarily reciprocate. This simple observation underlies most social dynamics of power. Power, in this view, consists of control over valued resources. People attend to those who control resources, in an effort to predict, at least, and control, if possible, their own outcomes. People who hold resources thus create social forces, for good or ill, affecting both self-interest and otherinterest. Power frees its holders from constraints, while constraining those under its hold. Person and situation combine, in Kurt Lewin’s famous social psychological formula, to predict responses to power, as to any other social force.

What Is Power as Control? Viewing power as outcome control fits Harold Kelley’s and John Thibaut’s early perspective on power as the ability to affect another’s reward– cost outcomes. David Kipnis held a related view. Fiske, along with Eric Dépret, defined power as symmetrical outcome control and elaborated its link to a core social motive for control, that is,

needing to perceive a contingency between actions (what one does) and outcomes (what one gets). Keltner, Deborah Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson later explored how holding resource control disinhibits the (by definition, less contingent) power holder and inhibits those who are more contingent but less powerful. Rather than defining power by its probable effects, such as influence, the power-as-control definition places power within the social structure. Those who control resources may or may not try to exert influence and may or may not be successful if they try. The PAC definition focuses on a structural factor (power over), regardless of whether the powerholder tries and the target chooses to cooperate (power to). Power is always relative. Control over outcomes varies in formality, stability, and legitimacy. For example, organizations designate formal ranks and resource control (e.g., supervisor–subordinate), whereas society implies informal social rank through ascribed roles (e.g., caste systems). More stable forms of control (e.g., physical dominance) contrast with less stable ones (e.g., rotating leadership). Legitimacy varies by bases of power (e.g., perceived merit vs. arbitrary happenstance), reminiscent of John French and Bertram Raven’s theory of the bases of power. Formal, stable, and legitimate power allow more influence and harsher tactics, accord to theories of Raven and of Kipnis. Informal and unstable power facilitate soft tactics. The nature of the controlled outcomes matters less than the degree of control over them and their value. Outcomes (rewards and punishments, approached and avoided end states) run the gamut from physical to economic to social. Physical outcomes include food, health, safety, pleasure, and pain. Economic outcomes involve monetary and material goods, as well as positions (e.g., jobs) that provide them. Social outcomes encompass an individual’s societal and interpersonal well-being. Social outcomes depend on meeting people’s core social motives, synthesized by Fiske from the personality and social motivation literatures as BUC(K)ET: Belonging, Understanding, Controlling, Enhancing self, and Trusting others. First is social belonging (acceptance by others), arguably essential to people’s survival in both ancestral and current times. Belonging motivates a range of social behavior, as

Power as Control Theory

documented by Mark Leary and Roy Baumeister, and belonging plays a particular role in power, as noted by Theresa Vescio and Mark Snyder. Controlling another individual’s apparent membership in the in-group is intensely motivating. Other social outcomes that facilitate belonging all acquire value as means of belonging. Some social motives underlie important social outcomes through more cognitive channels. Socially shared understanding codifies the group’s norms (informal rules for behavior), which indicate and maintain acceptance. Giving such information (or not) provides the key to belonging, so facilitating socially shared understanding is a clear source of power. Providing or withholding from others a sense of controlling their own outcomes is itself a desired outcome that motivates people. That is, a power holder can facilitate people’s sense that contingencies are systematic or arbitrary, encouraging or undermining their own sense of efficacy. Finally, more affective outcomes that power holders may control include enabling other people’s self-enhancement, providing bases for their selfesteem or optimism about self-improvement. Support, respect, and liking all enhance the other’s self. The other affective outcome enables people’s social trusting, which creates benign expectations about the in-group. Controlling people’s sense of social trust can be a powerful incentive that power holders control. Witness the effectiveness of politicians who shrink the circle of trust by fomenting xenophobia or who expand it by encouraging intergroup harmony. The social outcomes— belonging, understanding, controlling, enhancing, and trusting—together constitute strong social incentives held by the powerful.

Situations Can Determine a Sense of PAC Interdependence means that people depend on each other for valued outcomes. Asymmetrical outcome control is power. If people need to predict and control their own outcomes, then powerless people must attend to those who control those outcomes. The power-as-control theory focuses on attention and attempted accuracy, from the bottom, along with neglect and lack of constraint, from the top. In the next two sections, the power relationship will be examined, first from the top down, then from the bottom up.

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Attention and Attempted Accuracy Upwards

For the powerless, their dependence means that they must observe the powerful to understand the contingencies for receiving valued outcomes. Manipulating outcome dependency reliably makes the powerless attend to the powerful, especially to their unexpected qualities, because those are the most informative things about them; the powerless view the power holders in more individuated and idiosyncratic, especially dispositional, ways, according to a program of research by Fiske and her colleagues Eric Dépret, Ralph Erber, Stephanie Goodwin, Steven Neuberg, Don Operario, Janet Ruscher, Laura Stevens, and Vincent Yzerbyt. In research on symmetrical outcome dependency, people reliably attend to the person who controls their outcomes, especially noticing the most diagnostic (unexpected) information; they make dispositional attributions and reach impressions idiosyncratic to their own perspective. This attention leads subordinates to view power holders as unique personalities. Subordinates better recall their superiors’ nonverbal behavior than vice versa, as Judith A. Hall shows. Their perceptions are not necessarily more accurate, but they are motivated by a need to feel that they are accurate. Fiske et al.’s initial work on symmetrical outcome dependency had confounded self-dependency with responsibility for the other, as when teammates or competitors both depend on and control each other’s fates. However, subsequent PAC studies showed the same attentional and accuracy motivation effects for asymmetrical outcome dependency, here defined as power. Motivation to be accurate mediates the effects of outcome dependency on subordinates’ impression formation. Consistent with accuracy motivation, less powerful negotiators ask more diagnostic questions of their partners as a result of greater accuracy and impression motivation, according to Carsten De Dreu’s research. Although less powerful people are motivated to believe they are accurate, of course they may or may not actually be more accurate. At a minimum, people reliably attend upward more than downward, consistent with the effort to control (or at least predict) their own outcomes, the main mechanism of the PAC model. Sometimes this upward attention and dependency increases the tendency of subordinates to go along with the wishes of power holders. The

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powerful do tend to influence the subordinate, as suggested by the conflation of power (outcome control) and influence in the literature. In John Copeland’s research, power holders are more able to influence subordinates to confirm their expectancies about them because subordinates are motivated to have an agreeable interaction. As Snyder and colleagues show, subordinates are motivated to get along with power holders and power holders are motivated to get to know their subordinates. When getting to know entails a stable impression, such power holder motivations merely confirm expectations, both perceptually and behaviorally. Even in close relationships, less powerful partners adjust to more powerful partners, becoming more emotionally similar over time, as shown by Anderson, Keltner, and Oliver John. In decision-making contexts, as Berdahl’s research shows, the less powerful tend to go along with the preferences of the more powerful, unless going along violates a strongly held belief. Downward Neglect and Vulnerability to Stereotyping Subordinates

Snyder’s finding that power holders are motivated to form an efficient but not necessarily accurate impression implies that powerful groups indeed can be less accurate. Powerful people are freed from constraints imposed by external control, so they can operate as they would by default. Because superficial forms of impression formation, such as stereotyping, operate as an automatic default, the powerful are vulnerable to engaging in stereotyping and discrimination, unless otherwise motivated. Their position of power does not typically motivate them to individuate others, so they may stereotype by default. Besides being unconstrained, as predicted by PAC, power holders may be more actively motivated to neglect or oppress their subordinates in order to maintain the status quo. Goodwin and Fiske’s extension of the power-as-control theory emphasizes that control can be maintained through stereotyping by design. That is, power holders may operate not only by default but by design. Power holders can actively use negative stereotypes to legitimate their privileged position. Some evidence fits this interpretation. Power holders use stereotypic categories more than individuating traits,

and this stereotypic focus holds especially for negative stereotypes and for illegitimate power positions, consistent with the idea that threatened power holders use demeaning stereotypes to legitimate their positions. The first experiments to show general self-serving effects of power, by Itesh Sachdev and Richard Bourhis, used the minimal group paradigm, in which people are arbitrarily assigned to in-group and out-group, and then have the opportunity to distribute rewards. Given explicitly manipulated power, the more powerful group members discriminated against subordinate group members; they felt comfortable and satisfied in doing so. When status (prestige, skill) was manipulated orthogonally to outcome control and group size, both power and status predicted discrimination, especially for numerical minorities. High-status minority power holders discriminated the most, and low-status minority subordinates discriminated the least, even showing out-group favoritism. As power levels increase, evaluations of others become increasingly negative, and evaluations of the self become increasingly positive, according to research by John Georgesen and Monica Harris. All these results fit power holders who actively justify the status quo hierarchy, especially under threat. Note that high- and low-status minorities both give resources to the higher-status groups. The twist here is that even subordinates justify the hierarchy. Other research supports the claim that power holders neglect or even abuse subordinates, by default or by design. Sexual harassment constitutes a form of power abuse studied by John Bargh, Paula Raymond, John Pryor, and Fritz Strack. Among men with a proclivity to sexually harass (individual differences in a scale of Likelihood to Sexually Harass), subliminally priming power caused them to find a female subordinate more attractive. The link between organizational power (i.e., control over economic outcomes) and sexual harassment has long been known. The first and most widely recognized form of sexual harassment—quid pro quo harassment—involves an organizational superior promising or threatening work-related outcomes to a subordinate in exchange for sexual cooperation. In addition to control over economic outcomes, however, sexual harassers can use control over physical and social ones (i.e., their relative physical

Power as Control Theory

might and social status) to harass targets. This helps to explain “contrapower harassment,” in which subordinate males sexually harass their female superiors. It also explains why men who are particularly concerned with protecting their status as men are most likely to harass, and why women (and men) who threaten male supremacy are most likely to be targeted, according to research by Jennifer Berdahl and by Anne Maass. Whether by default or by design—that is, regardless of the intent—the power holders’ control over resources hugely impacts subordinates. In cross-gender interactions documented by Vescio, Snyder, and colleagues, powerful men praise powerless women but withhold resources from them; women treated this way feel angry, and their performance suffers. Male subordinates treated similarly by a powerful man also feel angry, but it apparently motivates them to perform better. The fit between the stereotypes and the power positions seems to matter. That is, because female stereotypes include weakness, their stereotype fits the subordinate position as well as influencing strategies that patronize them as subordinate. Power interacts with gender once again, in this case reinforcing male dominance. High-status groups particularly justify the status quo system, although low-status groups also do, to a surprising degree, as John Jost shows. All over the world, samples endorse a strikingly consistent link between groups’ societal status and their alleged dispositional competence, according to surveys by Amy Cuddy, Fiske, and Peter Glick. Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto’s social dominance theory also documents legitimating myths that maintain the hierarchy. Clearly, both low- and high-power people systematically defend the societal bases for existing power hierarchies. Unconstrained, power holders especially can justify their disproportionate control over outcomes.

Power for Good or Ill? Power holders control valued outcomes, so they are unconstrained by others and are free to act as their impulses dictate, for good or ill. Power holders’ behavior indeed is more variable than others, as Ana Guinote and Charles Judd show. Consistent with this perspective, according to Berdahl, people who are situationally powerful are more likely than

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those who are not to speak their mind, see others as liking them, and experience more positive relative to negative emotions. Situationally priming power makes people more likely to take action, whether it is pro- or antisocial in nature, as shown by Adam Galinsky, Gruenfeld, and Joseph Magee. Similarly, Keltner and colleagues show the disinhibition from holding power, consistent with PAC. Hence, power holders may act not only by default to maintain the status quo hierarchy, but if their personality, personal values, or type of power so dictate, they may use the freedom of power to act for the good of others. For example, communally oriented power holders are freer to act on their sense of responsibility for others, as Serena Chen, Annette Lee-Chai, and Bargh show. Sometimes the helping motivation can help, but sometimes it can take a paternalistic form and undermine the subordinate (see work by Irene Frieze, by Glick and Fiske, and by Pratto). A variety of individual differences can prime more pro- or antisocial responses to power. Similarly, situations that prime interpersonal concerns can orient power holders toward individuating and caring for their subordinates, whereas priming an organizational exchange-related focus orients them more toward self-interest, as demonstrated by Jennifer Overbeck and Bernadette Park. Effectively, person and situation combine in control over resources, to explain the use of power for good or ill. Susan T. Fiske See also Fiske, Susan; Hall, Judith A.; Jost, John; Power To and Power Over; Trust

Further Readings Fiske, S. T. (1993). Controlling other people: The impact of power on stereotyping. American Psychologist, 48, 621–628. Fiske, S. T., & Berdahl, J. (2007). Social power. In A. Kruglanski & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford. Fiske, S. T., & Dépret, E. (1996). Control, interdependence, and power: Understanding social cognition in its social context. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology (Vol. 7, pp. 31–61). New York: John Wiley.

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Goodwin, S. A., Gubin, A., Fiske, S. T., & Yzerbyt, V. (2000). Power can bias impression formation: Stereotyping subordinates by default and by design. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 3, 227–256.

POWER

AS INFLUENCE

See I-Power

POWER

AS

PRIZE

See P-Power

POWER ELITE The concept of power elite was first spelled out by C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), an American critical social theorist of the post–World War II era. The power elite is a composite set of interrelated circles that, by virtue of their position at the top of the three layers (political, corporate, and military) of the American social system, make decisions that have both national and international consequences. The concept was primarily intended to respond to two theories that, according to Mills, have inadequately addressed the issues of power structure and distribution in the United States. Adherents of the ruling-class theory, because of their economic determinist stance, disregarded both the relative autonomy of noneconomic institutions and institutional interdependence. On the other hand, pluralists, failing to see the three levels of power that have emerged in postwar America, mistakenly assumed that in the United States power is spread out among competing groups. Based on his institutional approach, Mills paints a different picture. For him, being part of the power elite is only marginally related to personal charisma; nor does power emanate from the possession of economic or symbolic capital alone. The latter are meaningful only within an institutional context. Extricated out of institutional settings, the power elite become too dispersed at best or too ordinary

at worst to influence society effectively. Mills, accordingly, focused on the key social organizations that have played a critical role in the United States. All other institutions are consigned to a secondary level or even molded by the three major institutions. Of these, the economic, political, and military institutions have become the most decisive ones in the postwar United States. It is within the economic, political, and military orders of the American social context that the power elite assert their authority. In the economic order, Mills notes that big corporations have replaced small scattered economic units, resulting in the formation of a corporate elite who both control the few hundred corporations and make critical economic decisions. To the extent that their true nature cannot be understood without linking them with the other two elites, the power of the corporate elite is transeconomic. Most importantly, it is the permanent war economy that sustains their influence. In the political order, the role of the federal government has expanded, thereby diminishing the power of the states. The expansion is so extensive that virtually every fabric of American society is affected by it. The enlargement, according to Mills, did not merely involve sheer quantitative expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus. Rather, the augmentation exhibited a qualitative growth, with the important consequence of organically linking business and government. Consequently, the ascendancy of corporate individuals into the political realm has given the “political directorate” a more influential position than it ever had in the political history of the United States. In the military order, high-ranking generals have assumed power with a social significance not limited within the confines of their institution. This is largely because, after World War II, the military became the most expensive aspect of American society. Moreover, what has given prominence to the military order is the almost pervasive influence of “military metaphysics.” The metaphysics encourages Americans to see no solution other than militaristic ones to the problems that surface within the international political and economic field. Although the power elite come from different and relatively autonomous social orders, they are a unified group. They share common values and interests. By virtue of their desire to maintain their vested interests and their important positions in

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the major institutional domains, the power elite have a good reason to defend the existing political, economic, and social orders, especially the essentials of a permanent war economy. Their unity is enhanced because they have the same organizational experience and similar educational, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. This in turn has provided the institutional basis for them to interchange positions within existing social orders. Although their unity cannot be explained by structural processes alone, it would be a mistake to assume that the power elite are formally organized, nor do they maintain their interests by way of conspiracy. Once the elite become cognizant of their interests and the structural opportunities at their disposal, they do indeed get the most out of the latter. The most active of them go as far as creating both formal as well as informal conditions intended to promote the interests of their group. Be that as it may, the power elite are not in total control. There are also two other levels (the middle and the bottom) that social scientists need to pay attention to, even though the ascendancy of the power elite has relegated them to a secondary and tertiary level respectively. Congress has an important place at the middle level. However, Mills is quick to note that Congress does not operate such a political balance, but rather the balance is created as result of the negotiations carried out by various “veto groups.” The pluralist assumption that multiple centers of power act as checks and balances fails to take into consideration the historical changes that have taken place following World War II. Because the three major sectors of the American society have entrenched themselves in the social system, they have succeeded in demoting the old balance to a middle level. As a result, the middle level failed to act as a political space where important issues are deliberated and ultimately decided. Things are much worse at the bottom level. The bottom level marks the disappearance of the public and the appearance of mass society characterized by political apathy and fragmentation. This is further exacerbated by the absence of truly independent organizations that seek for changes of the social system. Alem S. Kebede See also Community Power Debate; Hunter, Floyd; Mills, C. Wright; Pluralism; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power

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Further Readings Domhoff, W. G., & Ballard, H. B. (Eds.). (1968). C. Wright Mills and the power elite. Boston: Beacon. Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

POWER INDICES If a group of persons—an assembly, for example, a committee—makes decisions by vote, one may wish to measure various types of voting power of the group as a whole or of any of its members: for example, the a priori probability that a given voter will be decisive in a division (i.e., the collective act of voting), or the value of a particular voter’s vote to a potential briber, or the probability of an act being passed by the assembly. The need for voting power indices is twofold, having both prescriptive and descriptive purposes. Thus, in designing a representative assembly one may wish to know how much (a priori) voting power a delegate ought to have given the number of people he or she represents; or one may wish to know how much (a priori or a posteriori) voting power a delegate actually has or had in a given assembly. Most of what follows highlights some of the milestones in the evolution of the theory of a priori voting power and discusses how it ought to be quantified. The development of the theory was bedeviled by two phenomena. First, ideas were reinvented several times over, because researchers were often unaware of work published earlier. Second, the meaning and implications of some of the basic concepts were widely misunderstood. As a result, during much of its history as an academic discipline, the evolution of the theory was tortuous, advancing by fits and starts. Following this historical survey the entry will discuss briefly some of the problems associated with measuring a posteriori, as well as actual, voting power.

Early History As far as we know, the first published work on voting power was by Luther Martin, a Maryland delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Martin feared that the voting power

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of the large states in the U.S. House of Representatives would be disproportionately large compared to that of the small states, assuming that the representatives of each of the 13 states would always vote as a bloc. In a pamphlet published the following year he exposed the fallacy of equating voting power with weight (in this case size of a voting bloc), and made an attempt—albeit unsystematic and somewhat crude—to measure voting power. Martin’s approach is broadly based on the notion of I-power, namely the ability of a voter— merely by means of his vote—to affect the passage or defeat of a proposed act. Significantly, this first contribution to the measurement of voting power was made by a politician, thereby showing that voting power measures are not mere mathematicians’ fancies but are of practical political and constitutional importance.

Comments on the Main Voting-Power Measures As each of the main voting-power measures has a separate entry in this encyclopedia, we will only comment here briefly on them. The Penrose Measure

As far as we know, the first properly scientific discussion of voting power is a 1946 paper by Lionel Sharples Penrose in which he proposes a probabilistic measure of absolute voting power. According to Penrose, the power of a voter “can be measured by the amount by which his chance of being on the winning side exceeds one half. The power, thus defined, is the same as half the likelihood of a situation in which [he] can be decisive,” that is, in which the remaining voters are so divided that the given voter can tip the balance (p. 53). Thus, the power of voter v is defined as rv – 1/2, where rv is the probability that the outcome of the division goes the way v votes. Penrose posits random voting on the part of the other voters, who are assumed to be indifferent. Although he does not define this explicitly, he is clearly using the a priori Bernoullian model, in which all 2n possible divisions of the set of n voters into yes and no camps are equiprobable. He then considers a two-tier voting system, such as the newly established United Nations— in which a set of constituencies of different

sizes elect one representative each to a decisionmaking assembly of spokesmen. He argues that an equitable distribution of voting power in the assembly is the square-root rule: “The voting power of each nation in a world assembly should be proportional to the square root of the number of people on each nation’s voting list” (p. 57). From the context it is clear that he is assuming representatives always vote according to the majority opinion in their respective constituencies. In his 1952 booklet, Penrose makes several significant innovations regarding voting power, including the following. First, in the preface he justifies the aprioristic assumption of random voting: Since the future decisions of an elected representative cannot be easily predicted, voting is actually much more at random than it appears to be to the voter. Thus, the general theorems which can be established by using the assumption may be more often valid than might at first be supposed. (Preface)

Second, he modifies the definition of voting power, making it now double that of the 1946 paper: 2rv  1. This is identical to the so-called absolute Banzhaf measure . We shall refer to the identity v  2rv  1 as Penrose’s identity. Third, in the appendix he outlines a proof of an approximation formula for the voting powers of voters under a weighted voting rule (with quota set at half the total weight), provided the number of voters is large and the weight of every voter is small compared to the total weight. Implicit in this formula is an important theorem about the limit behavior of weighted voting rules: as the number of voters increases (while existing voters retain their old weights) then—subject to certain conditions— the ratio between the voting powers of any two voters approaches the ratio between their weights. Thus Penrose not only laid the foundations for a mathematical theory of voting power, but got quite far in developing the theory. His work should have been seminal; but the seed fell on stony ground. His ideas were largely forgotten and many of them were subsequently reinvented by, and credited to, others. Until the late 1990s his name is hardly mentioned in the mainstream literature on voting power. The long period of amnesia had a detrimental effect on the development of the theory

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for almost half a century: it was not only delayed, but distorted and confused. The Shapley–Shubik Index

In 1953 Lloyd Shapley defined and characterized a value for cooperative n-person games. Although Shapley himself does not claim this explicitly, he seems to imply that this Shapley value (as it came to be known) is a predictor of players’ expected share in a fixed prize equal to the worth of the grand coalition. Indeed, this is how the Shapley value is widely interpreted by game theorists. Lloyd Shapley and Martin Shubik (S&S) proposed in their 1954 paper an index of a priori voting power that is a direct application of the Shapley value to so-called simple games. This is clearly an instance of what we called players’ a priori P-power. Because Penrose’s work was unknown to most readers of S&S, the latter were credited with inventing the theory of measurement of voting power. Because S&S presented the theory as a branch of cooperative game theory (CGT), it was generally accepted as such. The view of voting power theory as a branch of CGT was credible to mathematicians and others, partly because the binary decision rules—the most basic structures to which any such theory must apply— are formally isomorphic to the simple games of CGT. This CGT view of voting power was further reinforced by S&S’s emphatic (but false) claim that “any scheme for imputing power among the members of a committee system either yields the power index defined [by them] or leads to logical inconsistency” (p. 789). But the intuitive P-power notion underlying the S&S index is quite different from the I-power notion underlying Penrose’s measure. As Penrose’s work was unknown or forgotten, the notion of P-power dominated. I-power was largely either totally ignored or—worse—conflated with P-power. In hindsight it seems that even without knowledge of Penrose’s work it could have been suspected that, whether or not the S&S approach is valid, it cannot possibly be the only way to formalize voting power. The telltale difficulties or anomalies of an exclusive P-power notion include the following, in increasing order of importance.

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1. The so-called improper simple games make no sense in CGT (except as components of proper composite games) but can serve as decision rules for certain purposes. 2. The CGT approach, which presupposes bargaining and binding agreements prior to the actual play, makes no sense for ordinary (and especially secret) voting. But voting power surely must be meaningful in such cases. 3, The S&S index is inherently a purely relative measure: it can only quantify a given voter’s relative share in the sum total of the quantities imputed to all voters under the given decision rule. It says nothing about the absolute power of a voter (a concept that is close to meaningless in the S&S approach). For example, intuitively it seems clear that a member in a seven-member committee has a smaller—or at any rate a different—amount of absolute power under the unanimity rule than under the ordinary majority rule. But the S&S index assigns to the voter the same value, 1/7, in both cases. 4. In CGT the total payoff is a private good divided exclusively among the winners. But this makes no sense in many, perhaps most, decision-making situations, where the outcome of a division is not the acquisition of any private good by the winners, but a public good (or bad) that may benefit (or harm) all the voters and others, possibly in an open-ended way (i.e., not a constant sum). As we shall see, this last point was eventually picked up by James Coleman.

It is worth mentioning that the S&S index can also be arrived at via completely different routes and obtained as a measure of I-power (rather than of P-power, as originally obtained by Shapley and Shubik). Thus, in 1977 Philip D. Straffin derived this index under his homogeneity assumption. However, when obtained in this way the S&S index, albeit a measure of I-power, is not a truly a priori measure, as it assumes in effect that the voters act like identical clones. The Banzhaf Index

John F. Banzhaf III independently reinvented some of Penrose’s most important ideas. His

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general approach is indeed quite similar. However, his definition of voting power, and his justification of it, went through a gradual evolution. In his first paper, in 1965, Banzhaf does not speak in probabilistic terms but purely in terms of the number of voting combinations (i.e., of divisions) in which a given voter can affect the outcome. Indeed, he pointedly disclaims any probabilistic assumptions. However, without such an assumption he is unable to justify assigning equal weight to all combinations. In this paper Banzhaf does not actually propose, let alone use, the measures of voting power— absolute and relative—attributed to him. The measure he proposes is the crude Banzhaf score (also known as the Banzhaf count); and he does so merely in passing. He is mainly concerned with the ratio of the power of one voter to that of another. According to Banzhaf, The appropriate measure of a legislator’s power is simply the number of different situations in which he is able to determine the outcome. More explicitly, in a case in which there are N legislators, each acting independently and each capable of influencing the outcome only by means of his votes, the ratio of the power of legislator X to the power of legislator Y is the same as the ratio of the number of possible voting combinations of the entire legislature in which X can alter the outcome by changing his vote to the number of combinations in which Y can alter the outcome by changing his vote. (p. 331)

In his second paper, in 1966, Banzhaf repeats essentially the same definition of his measure as in his 1965 paper (the number of combinations in which a given voter can alter the outcome) but now qualifies this measure as “relative.” This time he justifies assigning equal weight to all combinations by arguing that “because a priori all voting combinations are equally possible, any objective measure of voting power must treat them as equally significant” (p. 1316). In the third paper, in 1968, there is a further shift. The language is more overtly probabilistic, and he distinguishes between a priori power “inherent in the rules governing the voting system and the distribution of population” (p. 308) and actual power. He says explicitly that “a person’s

voting power is measured by the fraction of the total number of possible voting combinations in which he can, by changing his vote, alter the outcome of the group’s decision” (p. 307). If we take the term fraction literally, then this is precisely the measure  proposed by Penrose 16 years earlier, which would come to be known as the absolute Banzhaf measure. The so-called relative Banzhaf index (commonly denoted by ), obtained from the crude Banzhaf score (or from ) by normalization so that its values for all voters of an assembly add up to 1, was invented by Banzhaf’s followers, most of whom improperly treated it as though (like the S&S index) it quantifies a voter’s share in some fixed quantity. A common practice, when comparing the positions of a given voter v under two alternative decision rules, was to infer that v was more powerful under that rule for which the Banzhaf index assigned v a higher value. This is an error because the Banzhaf index measures v’s relative share in the total absolute power of all voters, which is not fixed. A change of decision rule may lead to v having more absolute power, but a smaller relative share in the total power. In their invaluable 1979 study, Pradeep Dubey and Lloyd Shapley note that the common normalization of the Banzhaf score is “not as innocent as it seems.” Instead, they propose, and study in the rest of the paper, another normalization that seems to them “in many respects more natural,” namely , which they call the swing probabilities. This major understatement was unheeded by most users of the Banzhaf index. Rae’s Index

Douglas W. Rae’s 1969 paper is probabilistic, explicitly using a model similar to the Bernoullian model described in connection with Penrose, with one difference: as he assumes that the proposal on which the assembly divides is always proposed by one of its members, he excludes the division in which all voters vote no. He considers only symmetric weighted rules—those in which all voters have equal weights. He is interested in the probability of four kinds of event regarding a generic voter, named Ego, and a random division of the assembly of voters on a proposal:

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A: Ego supports the proposal, but it fails; B: Ego opposes the proposal, but it is adopted; C: Ego supports the proposal, and it is adopted; D: Ego opposes the proposal, and it fails.

Rae seeks to minimize the probability of A  B, which is tantamount to maximizing the probability of C  D. Ignoring the slight difference between Rae’s probability space and the more usual Bernoullian one, then the latter probability for voter Ego is equal to rEgo, which, by Penrose’s identity, equals 1/2(Ego  1). But Rae does not appear to be aware of Banzhaf’s (let alone Penrose’s) closely related work. Coleman’s Measures

In 1971 James Coleman took up the fourth objection mentioned above to the S&S index— based as it is on the notion of P-power—being the sole measure of voting power. He starts by recalling the CGT origin of the S&S index as a special case of the Shapley value. He then adds that This general orientation is somewhat different . . . from the usual problem of power in a collectivity, for the usual problem is not one in which there is a division of the spoils among the winners, but rather the problem of controlling the action of the collectivity. The action is ordinarily one that carries its own consequences or distributions of utilities, and these cannot be varied at will, i.e. cannot be split up among those who constitute the winning coalition. Instead, the typical question is the determination of whether or not a given course of action will be taken or not, that is, the passage of a bill, a resolution, or a measure committing the collectivity to an action. (p. 272)

In the last section of his paper he outlines the probabilistic model implicitly assumed by him— “equal probabilities of positive and negative votes by each member, and independence of votes among members”—which is precisely the Bernoullian model implicitly assumed by Penrose—and explains the difference between the notion, based on this model, of “formal power, as given by a constitution” (i.e., a priori power) and actual behavioral power.

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Coleman defines three key concepts: the power of a collectivity to act; the power of a member to prevent action; and the power of a member to initiate action. Rephrased in probabilistic terms, the power of a collectivity to act can be defined as the probability A of an act being passed; the power of member a to prevent action as the conditional probability a of a being critical, given that the act is passed; and the power of a to initiate action as the conditional probability *a of a being critical, given that the act is blocked. However, by this time the P-power notion of voting power, advocated by S&S, had become dominant. Coleman’s critique of this notion and his advocacy of the notion that we have called I-power was largely ignored. This attitude was no doubt encouraged by the mistaken view that Coleman’s technical contributions of 1971 merely replicated Banzhaf’s work, of which he was apparently unaware. As we pointed out above, the dominance of the P-power notion led to the widespread error of regarding voting power as an inherently relative quantity. This in turn encouraged the practice of relativizing any proposed measure so that the values for all voters in a given assembly would add up to 1. Thus, for example, the relative Banzhaf index—rather than the Penrose or absolute Banzhaf measure—came to be regarded as the principal alternative to the S&S index. Because the relativization of both  and * yields the Banzhaf index, it seemed to show that they were all essentially one and the same. It was not understood that relativization of the Coleman measures—as well as of the Penrose–Banzhaf measure—involves great loss of information. Three Other (Minor) Indices

The Penrose–Banzhaf measure and the S&S index are by far the most important measures of a priori voting power, in the sense of being the most robust mathematical formalization of the two alternative preformal notions. They are also the most widely used (although in the case of the former, the relativized Banzhaf index is often used). In this subsection we discuss three other, less important, indices that have been proposed. The Deegan–Packel (D-P) index, proposed in 1978 by John Deegan Jr. and Edward W. Packel, is

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squarely and explicitly based on the notion of P-power, as can be seen immediately from the very title of the 1982 version of their paper: “To the (minimal winning) victors go the (equally divided) spoils.” Thus the D–P index shares the same preformal notion with the S&S index. But, unlike the latter, it relies for its justification on a specific bargaining model. Namely, D–P assumes that only minimal winning coalitions are formed, that they do so with equal probability, and that if such a coalition is formed it divides the (fixed) spoils of victory equally among its members. The assumption that only minimal winning coalitions are formed is defended on the grounds that any noncritical member whose removal would leave behind a coalition that can still win would be ejected by the remaining members who would not wish to share the spoils with a freeloader. This argument—whether or not it is convincing—is plainly based on the notion of P-power. No convincing justification is offered for the other two assumptions (equal probability for all minimal winning coalitions and equal division of spoils). However, because this bargaining model—like all known bargaining models for cooperative games, even simple ones, with more than two players—is neither realistic nor intuitively convincing for at least some of the games in question, the D–P index suffers from severe pathologies that make it unattractive as a credible measure of voting power. In particular, it may display the paradox of weighted voting where a voter whose weight is smaller may have more power than a voter with a larger weight. The Johnston index was proposed by R. J. Johnston, also in 1978. Following a critique of the Banzhaf index by Laver (who misinterpreted it as an index of P-power), Johnston responded by altering the index slightly as follows. For each winning coalition containing critical members, instead of assigning one unit of score to each of these members as Banzhaf does, he divides a single unit—treated as though it were a quantum of payoff—equally among all critical members of the coalition, as Laver suggested. Then he relativizes the scores accumulated by the voters. The resulting Johnston index was thus obtained by grafting on a perfectly good index of I-power (the Banzhaf index) a slight correction motivated by the ideology of P-power—a hybrid that lacks coherent justification. Finally the Public Goods Index (PGI), also known as the Holler–Packel index, was proposed

by Manfred J. Holler in 1982. Like the Johnston index, it is a hybrid. But in this case the “slight correction” goes in the reverse direction. The starting point is the Deegan–Packel index, which as we saw is explicitly based on the notion of P-power. But it is modified as follows. For each minimal winning coalition, instead of dividing the single unit (representing a quantum of payoff) equally among all the coalition’s members, each member is now awarded the entire unit. This is justified on the grounds that the payoff is a public good. This index, too, suffers from the weighted voting paradox.

Critical Reevaluations Some developments in the theory of a priori voting power that gathered pace during the 1990s pointed away from CGT and suggested that the former theory cannot be regarded as a mere branch of the latter. Two issues were critically reexamined. First, it was pointed out that the formal structure of a cooperative game—let alone a so-called simple one—is inadequate for representing certain decision rules, including some important real-life ones, to which, intuitively speaking, the notion of voting power ought to apply. Second, examination of the (so-called) paradoxes of voting power and discovery of new ones led to a fresh appreciation and elaboration of the critique mounted in 1971 by Coleman and to a reevaluation of the foundations of the theory of voting power. These two issues are addressed briefly in the following two subsections. Nonbinary Decision Rules

Until the 1990s, work on voting power was concerned almost exclusively with decision rules that are binary in a double sense: each voter must choose between exactly two inputs; and a division of the voters must have one of two outputs. Normally, the two possible inputs are a yes or a no vote; and the two possible outputs are adoption or rejection of the proposed act. However, the same format can be used for decision rules in which an input is a vote for one of two competing candidates; and an output is the election of one of these candidates. In reality, there are more general decision rules. We shall say that a decision rule is of type (j, k) if each voter has j possible inputs and there are k possible outputs (j, k 2). Thus, the (doubly)

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binary decision rules of the preceding paragraph are of type (2, 2). The most important type of rule other than (2, 2) is undoubtedly (3, 2), where the added possible input is abstention. In fact, this type is probably more common in real life than (2, 2), because in legislatures and other decisionmaking bodies abstention is usually treated as a tertium quid, whose effect is different from both a yes and a no vote. This makes it all the more surprising that this type of rule—like all types other than (2, 2)—was for so long ignored by voting power theorists. As far as we know, the first to address a non(2, 2) rule from the viewpoint of voting power was Peter Fishburn in his 1973 book. His treatment is very brief and concerns a rather special class of (3, 3) rules, for which he defines a generalization of the Banzhaf index. The true pioneer of systematic study of voting power for non-(2, 2) rules is Edward M. Bolger, who started to address this topic in 1983 and returned to it in a series of papers published between 1986 and 2002. Bolger’s work is concerned with generalizing the Banzhaf and S&S indices to (j, k) rules for arbitrary j, k 2, in which the k outputs are not ordered. In his 1993 paper Bolger points out that the UN Security Council voting rule should not be modeled as a (2, 2) rule, because abstention by a permanent member does not block a resolution. As is well known, the current actual rule is that a resolution on substantive matters passes provided at least nine members vote for it and no permanent member votes against it. However, the UN Security Council rule had been widely misrepresented in the voting power literature as a (2, 2) rule. This holds also for the decision rules of the U.S. Congress. This point is not just a matter of using the wrong theoretical model for these rules; the actual real-life rules are erroneously stated in this literature. A recent conceptual advance is the correct definition and characterization of ordered (j, k) weighted rules. For the (2, 2) case, this is a rather obvious matter; but for the general case it is highly nontrivial. The problem was solved by Josep Freixas and William Zwicker in 2003. The Foundations Reevaluated

In a paper published in 1995, Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover showed that the Banzhaf

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index  suffers from the bloc paradox: it is possible for a voter to lose power (as measured by ) as a result of annexing the voting rights of another voter. Because it is intuitively clear that a voter annexing the voting rights of another voter cannot genuinely lose power thereby, Felsenthal and Machover concluded that  should be disqualified as a reasonable index of a priori voting power. Moreover, in that paper they expressed the view that the S&S index—which was the only index not susceptible to any of the (genuine) voting-power paradoxes known at that time—is the only reasonable index of a priori voting power. It took them three years to reverse their position. In a 1998 paper written jointly by Felsenthal, Machover, and William Zwicker, the distinction between I-power and P-power—foreshadowed by Coleman in 1971—was made explicitly for the first time. In that paper it is also shown that the S&S index (but not the Penrose–Banzhaf measure) suffers from a severe form of the so-called bicameral paradox, which seems to be a genuine pathology. The authors therefore concluded that this may disqualify the S&S index as a reasonable measure of P-power. They were now of the opinion that the fact that  displays the bloc paradox does not disqualify it as a (relative) index of I-power, because it is merely a relativization of , which is not itself susceptible to the bloc paradox. That an annexation may cause the annexer to lose relative I-power is an interesting nontrivial phenomenon. But there is nothing unreasonable about it: the annexer is not really weakened but actually gains absolute I-power. However, some of the remaining voters may also gain power, so much so that the annexer’s relative I-power is reduced. As for a priori P-power, the S&S index still seems to be the most reasonable candidate for measuring it—provided the notion of P-power itself can be coherently formalized, which is somewhat doubtful.

Measuring Actual and A Posteriori Voting Power The aforementioned historical survey focused entirely on indices of a priori voting power. As stated above, this type of power, particularly a priori I-power, is concerned mainly with the ability of an individual voter to affect the voting outcome

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given the decision rule. It ignores factors such as an individual voter’s preferences, the issues voted upon, or affinities and disaffinities between voters—and hence it considers all 2n possible divisions of n voters between yes and no camps to be equally probable. It is also assumed that all n voters vote independently of one another and no cooperation among voters is admitted. (Of course, voters can form a bloc; but then we have a new decision rule, in which the bloc is a new individual.) However, these two assumptions are not tenable when one wishes to measure types of voting power that we call actual and a posteriori voting power. Actual voting power takes into account the preferences of the voters on all the issues to be decided, as well as the probability of each kind of such issue coming up for decision. In measuring this type of power, one must take into account the affinities and disaffinities between voters, because one can no longer assume that they act independently of one another, motivated only by their preferences on the issues. Two formidable questions arise regarding the measurement of this type of power: how one can discover all these data with sufficient accuracy, and how—even if we had the data thanks to some crystal ball—they are to be modeled mathematically. There are quite a few papers in the literature that propose such models, but they all seem to make somewhat arbitrary and simplistic assumptions. We define a posteriori voting power as the power of the voter inferred from the data of past divisions, when abstraction has been made of the content of the matters voted on. Here we have no need of a crystal ball; all we need are statistics of past divisions—which may indeed be readily available. Of course, strictly speaking, any measure of power based on this can only apply to the past. In either case, a notion of non–a priori voting power, whether actual or a posteriori, must be completely general, that is, applicable to all possible configurations. Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover See also Coleman Index; I-Power; Penrose Voting Power Measure; P-Power; Public Goods Index; Shapley Value; Shapley–Shubik Index; Square Root Rules

Further Readings Banzhaf, J. F. (1965). Weighted voting doesn’t work: A mathematical analysis. Rutgers Law Review, 19, 317–343. Banzhaf, J. F. (1966). Multi-member electoral districts— Do they violate the “one man, one vote” principle? Yale Law Journal, 75, 1309–1338. Banzhaf, J. F. (1968). One man, 3.312 votes: A mathematical analysis of the Electoral College. Villanova Law Review, 13, 304–332. Bolger, E. M. (1983). The Banzhaf index for multicandidate presidential elections. SIAM Journal of Algebra and Discrete Mathematics, 4, 442–458. Bolger, E. M. (1993). A value for games with n players and r alternatives. International Journal of Game Theory, 22, 319–334. Coleman, J. S. (1971). Control of collectivities and the power of a collectivity to act. In B. Liebermann (Ed.), Social choice (pp. 269–300). New York: Gordon and Breach. Deegan, J., & Packel, E. W. (1978). A new index of power for simple n-person games. International Journal of Game Theory, 7, 113–123. Dubey, P., & Shapley, L. S. (1979). Mathematical properties of the Banzhaf power index. Mathematics of Operations Research, 4, 99–131. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (2005). Voting power measurement: A story of misreinvention. Social Choice and Welfare, 25, 485–506. Felsenthal, D. S., Machover, M., & Zwicker, W. (1998). The bicameral postulates and indices of a priori voting power. Theory and Decision, 44, 83–116. Fishburn, P. C. (1973). The theory of social choice. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Freixas, J., & Zwicker, W. (2003). Weighted voting, abstention, and multiple levels of approval. Social Choice and Welfare, 21, 399–431. Holler, M. (1982). Forming coalitions and measuring voting power. Political Studies, 30, 262–271. Johnston, R. J. (1978). On the measurement of power: Some reactions to Laver. Environment and Planning A, 10, 907–914. Laruelle, A., & Valenciano, F. (2008). Voting and collective decision-making: Bargaining and power. New York: Cambridge University Press. Penrose, L. S. (1946). The elementary statistics of majority voting. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 109, 53–57.

Power Laws Penrose, L. S. (1952). On the objective study of crowd behaviour. London: H. K. Lewis & Co. Rae, D. W. (1969). Decision rules and individual values in constitutional choice. American Political Science Review, 63, 40–56. Riker, W. H. (1986). The first power index. Social Choice and Welfare, 3, 293–295. Shapley, L. S. , & Shubik, M. (1954). A method for evaluating the distribution of power in a committee system. American Political Science Review, 48, 787–792. Straffin, P. D. (1977). Homogeneity, independence, and power indices. Public Choice, 30, 107–118.

POWER LAWS A power law is a statistical relationship in which the probability of observing a particular “size” of some event is inversely proportional to some power (exponent) of that size. Let y be the size of the event—say the Richter measurement of an earthquake, or the number of acres destroyed in a forest fire—then Pr(Y  y)y and Pr(Y  y)  Cy where C is a constant and  is the power law exponent. This relationship is scale invariant in the sense that the same  and C describe the probability of a particular magnitude of event no matter how large or small the size in question. Hence notice that, if Y is power law distributed, large events will tend to be relatively rare, while small-sized events will be relatively common. A feature of power laws is that log(Pr(y))  log(C)  xlog(y) in which case a (log-log) plot of log(Pr(y)) versus log(y) will be a straight line. Consider Figure 1; here, some simulated power law data are displayed for which it is (approximately) true that Pr(y)  0.5xy-2.5. That is, C = 0.5 and   2.5. In Figure 2 we take logs of both axes and then impose a linear regression

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line. The correlation between the two (logged) variables (the R2 for the regression) is typically very high, and is 0.945 here. Power laws are regularly seen in the physical sciences where there are a wide variety of extremely diverse examples, some of which have particular names; for example, the Stefan–Boltzmann law concerns energy radiation, and the inverse square law describes the gravitational pull between objects. Such laws are fairly rare, and rarely discussed, in the social sciences. Power laws are seen in complex system models, which are used to describe complicated networks of some kind. Examples include the U.S. power grid, a beehive, and an advanced industrial economy. The individual elements of these networks—like bee-to-bee interaction—may be impossible to measure and observe directly, so system-level observations are the norm. Successfully asserting power law behavior for a particular system requires a large amount of data (typically hundreds of observations) with a wide variance (from very small magnitudes to huge ones) and the careful ruling out of other possible density functions such as the lognormal and various versions of the exponential function. The estimation of  is usually performed via maximum likelihood with goodness of fit to the power law distribution verified with a Kolmogorov– Smirnov test. A classic example discussed in political science was given by Fry Richardson, a mathematician active in the postwar period. Richardson considered international and domestic cases of “deadly quarrels” (wars, murders, etc.). Using a logarithmic scale with categories of 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, he classified the various events by their casualty numbers. So, for example, World War II with over a million casualties was placed (with the Great War) into the 7 bin. He discovered a remarkable regularity: for every tenfold increase in the size of the event—for example, a move from bin 3 to bin 4, or from bin 6 to bin 7—the number of such events decreased by around 2.5 times relative to the previous category. This result, with   2.5, has proved stable in the face of new data, and has been extended to the study of terrorist acts. A closely associated phenomenon, Zipf’s law, relates the frequency of an event to its rank. Originally formulated in the study of linguistics,

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Power law with simulated data: Pr(y) = 0.5xy−2.5

Note: Notice that small events are common—that is, they occur with a high probability—while huge events are very rare.

it implies that the prevalence of the use of any word in a language is inversely proportional to its rank—in terms of the word’s position in a frequency table. Thus, the nth most frequent word appears n times as often as the most frequent. In (American) English,  is one and the fit to Zipf’s law is evident: the is the most common word, which appears in 7% of all word occurrences, while of is the second most common, appearing in 3.5% of occurrences, and and is in third place at around 2.3%. Another well-studied example of this phenomenon in the social sciences is that of town sizes (in the United States): there are hundreds of towns with relatively small populations, but only a couple of megacities—New York and Los Angeles—that have over 10 million inhabitants. By definition, the log-log plot that implies Zipf’s law holds for a particular system must have a slope of one. Pareto’s law is another such relationship, but concerns the probability of events larger than y.

The original application concerned societal income distributions, and the observation that the number of incomes above a certain level is some inverse power of the level in question. With reference to this application, the law is also known as the 80–20 rule (also, the Pareto principle) in that 80% of the wealth in a given society is owned by 20% of the population. Benford’s law refers to the probability distribution of digits (the numbers 1 through 9) appearing in lists drawn from real-life data such as textbooks or insurance claims. In particular, denoting a digit any as d 2 f1; . . . ; 9g, the probability of observing   1 particular d is proportional to log10 11 . d Hence, 1 occurs with probability 0.30, 2 appears with probability 0.18, 3 with probability 0.13, and so on. “True” data will contain the above distribution of digits, but individuals entering tax or ballot returns are not typically aware of this pattern. Hence, a comparison of potentially falsified returns

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Power law log-log plot

Note: Notice the linear relationship between the axes. R2 = 0.945.

versus an expected distribution of digits from Benford’s law allows public policy analysts to detect fraud. Attention in recent times has focused on theories to explain complex system power laws. Physicists have given system-level accounts such as selforganized criticality, which describes a network as moving toward an equilibrium state in which even small perturbations can have large (and perhaps unexpected) effects. A sandpile metaphor is often used: dropping sand grain by grain onto the pile may have no effect until a critical grain is added and an avalanche ensues. One alternative is highly optimized tolerance, which supposes that a system is externally engineered for optimization in the face of changing environments. Social scientists have taken a different tack by using actor focused microlevel models that imply macrolevel power law behavior. Arthur Spirling

Further Readings Cederman, L.-E. (2003). Modeling the size of wars: From billiard balls to sandpiles. The American Political Science Review, 97(1), 135–150. Gabaix, X. (1999). Zipf’s law for cities: An explanation. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114(3), 739–767. Richardson-Fry, L. (1960). Statistics of deadly quarrels. Pacific Grove, CA: Boxwood.

POWER MOTIVE The power motive (also called n power, the need for power, or power motivation) is the operationally defined psychological term for what is often called the desire for power, the will to power (Nietzsche), the aggressive drive (Freud), or striving for superiority (Adler). The notions that power is a basic goal in human social life,

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and that individuals differ in the extent to which they seek power, can be found in many ancient and modern systems of thought. Power comes in many different forms, and people who want it usually try to get it through a variety of different means. Often they succeed. However, power as a motive must be distinguished from other power-related concepts such as: social roles that permit or demand the exercise of power, skill in getting or using power, feelings of power, and values and beliefs about how power should be exercised. The power motive is usually measured by analyzing the content of spoken or written text, scoring images of one person or group having impact on the behavior or emotions of another, or measuring concern for prestige and reputation as representing the potential for such impact. This scoring system can be applied to stories that people write to the Thematic Apperception Test (or Picture Story Exercise) or other imaginative texts; for political leaders or historical figures, it can be applied to transcripts of documents such as speeches or press conferences. Even such cultural products as popular fiction, diplomatic documents, or corporate annual reports can be scored. People scoring high in power motivation tend to make themselves visible. In groups, they are active in defining agendas and encouraging participation. They accumulate prestige possessions. They build alliances, especially with less well-known people of lower status. In school, they tend to emerge as student leaders; as adults, they are drawn to occupations (such as business executive, journalist, professor or teacher, and psychologist) that give them legitimate scope to sanction and direct the behavior of others. When provoked, they are capable of verbal and physical aggression. If combined with low responsibility, the power motive is associated with “profligate” impulsive (and ultimately self-destructive) behaviors such as extreme risk-taking, drinking and drug use, and sexual exploitation. When it is combined with high responsibility or self-control, however, the power motive predicts being an effective manager who is able to create high morale and a climate of organizational clarity and team spirit among his or her subordinates. The power motive is important in political leadership. U.S. presidents whose inaugural addresses scored high in the power motive are

highly rated by historians and scholars of the presidency. They are judged as making “great decisions,” communicating effectively with the public, and combining combative skill with humor. Humor and their ability to enjoy power scrimmages appear to buffer them against the problems, stresses, and frustrations of politics. Their associates and subordinates describe them as charismatic. Evidence from both experiments and archival studies suggests that the power motive is especially aroused or provoked by threats. In fact, it appears to be closely linked to sympathetic nervous system activity, which drives the body’s fight-or-flight behaviors in response to challenges, and the secretion of testosterone in competitive situations. As a result, chronic high scorers are more vulnerable to challenge-related stress, cardiovascular problems, and impaired immune system functioning. Consistent with these findings, the power motive is associated with conflict escalation and war at the national or collective level. In both experimental and archival studies of crisis diplomacy, power motivation was negatively associated with making concessions. In negotiations, power-motivated people are confrontational and exploitative rather than rational and cooperative, especially when they perceive an advantage. Yet often they appear not to enjoy exercising their advantage: some research suggests that high levels of the power motive are related to negative emotions such as boredom and an inability to feel pleasure. It may seems paradoxical to suggest that people who want or need power may not really enjoy having it; however, such a notion is consistent with some modern theories of addiction, which distinguish between brain mechanisms of wanting and liking. It would explain why (at least in men) power is often fused with sexuality to become sexual exploitation; or why some powerdriven people are quickly bored and so driven to seek ever larger “doses” of power in a futile quest to experience pleasure. There is some uncertainty about the origins of the power motive. One theory, often associated with the psychologist Alfred Adler and political scientist Harold Lasswell, holds that striving for power originates as (over)compensation for early perceived weakness, lack of power, or being the target of others’ power. Thus, both playground bullies and brutal dictators are thought to be

Power To and Power Over

responding to early power deprivation. Another theory suggests that power motivation results directly from early reinforcement of power behaviors, especially aggressive ones. Currently there is some research support for each theory and therefore no clear consensus about how people develop high levels of this motive. David G. Winter See also Lasswell, Harold; Leadership; McClelland, David; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Testosterone, Power and; War

Further Readings McClelland, D. C. (1975). Power: The inner experience. New York: Irvington. Schultheiss, O. C., Wirth, M. M., Torges, C. M., Pang, J. S., Villacorta, M. A., & Welsh, K. M. (2005). Effects of implicit power motivation on men’s and women’s implicit learning and testosterone changes after social victory or defeat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 174–188. Winter, D. G. (1973). The power motive. New York: Free Press. Winter, D. G. (2002). The motivational dimensions of leadership: Power, achievement, and affiliation. In O. Feldman & L. Valenty (Eds.), Political leadership for the new century: Personality and behavior among American leaders (pp. 25–47). Westport, CT: Praeger.

POWER TO

AND

POWER OVER

The expressions power over and power to have appeared quite recently in theoretical debates about power. Their usage conforms, at a very general level, to the distinction between two interpretations of power: power over refers to an asymmetrical relation between two or more actors, while power to consists in the ability of the actors themselves to carry out certain specific outcomes. This entry presents various definitions of these terms and discusses the theoretical debate surrounding them.

Definitions Although different theoretical perspectives propose different criteria for the definition of the two

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concepts, it is possible to identify some common traits. The various usages of power over all agree in interpreting it as a relation between actors, specifically as a relation of social causation. Much has been written about the connection between the concept of power and that of social cause: for some authors the two concepts share the same extension; according to others, power is instead to be considered the specific kind of social causation resulting from the intentions of the power wielder. Power to is also explicated in terms of causation. However, the difference lies in the fact that while power over means causing behavior on the part of others, power to refers to the ability to cause certain outcomes or states of affairs. Moreover, power to is a dispositional concept: it refers to the capacity actors possess to bring about specific outcomes, not to their action of producing those results. By contrast, the concept of power over is described as both actual and potential: the phenomenon of power is identified both with the fact of agents actually affecting the behavior of another, and with their having the ability to do so at some future time. Lastly, while power to is commonly interpreted as a property of individuals or of groups, power over has been attributed, by different approaches, to individuals, collectivities, institutions, and social structures. It is worth noticing that, though the origin of the distinction lies in theoretical efforts to clarify the very meaning of the concept of power, the expressions power to and power over have recently enjoyed a new lease on life within critical approaches and feminist theories, serving to indicate two distinct forms of power. In the latter cases the distinction between the two expressions relies on normative criteria: while power over is thought of as necessarily conflictual and is mostly used as a synonym for domination, power to is regarded as a consensual and intrinsically legitimate form of power. Among the various contributions to the study of power, power over is undoubtedly the predominant interpretation. Conceptual analyses that are normally indicated by the expression power over define it as a relationship in which one actor is able to obtain compliant behavior from another actor. They make reference to conceptions of power that, following the Weberian tradition, regard it as equivalent to social control and influence.

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Dahl and Lukes

In the contemporary literature about power, probably the most influential definition is the one offered by Robert Dahl (1975): “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” In Dahl’s account, power is assimilated to an actual or potential relation of social causation: it consists in a relation in which an actor intentionally and successfully acts—or is able to act—to modify the behavior of another actor. The same interpretation of power in terms of power over is assumed by all the participants in the debate that Steven Lukes labeled the three-dimensional view of power. In Power: A Radical View, Lukes analyzes Dahl’s conception of power, together with that of two of his most important critics, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz. He labels them respectively the one- and the two-dimensional views of power, and he himself proposes the so-called three-dimensional view. Despite the differences among the three approaches, Lukes claims that they share a common core: they all consist in different applications of the same underlying concept of power, according to which “A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests” (2005, p. 30). They diverge, instead, over the relevant interpretation of interests: while Dahl focuses his analysis on subjective interests understood in terms of preferences expressed through political participation, the second view also includes those subjective interests that are excluded from the political debate. Lukes goes even farther, focusing, in addition, on the real (or objective) interests of which individuals are not aware. Lukes’s analysis, then, explicitly highlights the conflictual nature of power. Moreover, it assumes power to be an intrinsically evaluative concept: if exercising power means acting against the interests of someone, the concept of power virtually collapses into the concept of harming. Power over, then, in Lukes’s account, becomes a synonym for domination. It is worth noticing that in the second edition of Power: A Radical View, Lukes partially changes his mind. He recognizes that power over should be interpreted as a broader concept than that of domination: some exercises of power can play in favor of the interests of the subjects, or at least not damage them, as in the cases, for example, of parenting or teaching. Concerning

the nature of the power wielder, Lukes’s analysis consists in an attempt to bridge the gap between methodologically individualist and structuralist approaches to power. He suggests that power is not necessarily wielded intentionally, but that it can be exercised by actors who are unaware of the consequences of their actions, or even through inaction. According to Lukes, then, locating power should consist, in these cases, of fixing responsibilities, that is, in the identification of those who could have acted otherwise. Pitkin

The main interpretation of power in terms of power over has been challenged by a number of accounts aiming at clarifying, through the reconstruction of the etymological origin of the term and its current usage in ordinary language, the very meaning of power. The introduction of the expressions power over and power to is due to Hanna Pitkin, who, in the same years as those of the threedimensional debate, offered an understanding of power in terms of ability. Pitkin underlines the need to distinguish between those situations in which an actor has power over another actor, which occur only when that actor gets the other to do something, and those in which an actor has the power to accomplish something by him- or herself. This second case, labeled power to, corresponds, in her view, to the prevailing use of the term. The very meaning of power, then in her account, is to be interpreted in terms of being able to. Morriss

The most comprehensive and influential analysis of power in terms of power to, however, is the one proposed by Peter Morriss in Power: A Philosophical Analysis. Power, in his interpretation, is explicitly defined as an ability to act and to bring about outcomes. In contrast with the prevailing literature, Morriss gives evidence of the dispositional nature of power. Having power refers to certain relatively enduring capacities of individuals, to certain kinds of dispositional properties individuals possess even if these capacities are never put into action. Just as being soluble is a dispositional property of sugar, which it conserves even if it is never put into water, so power is a

Power To and Power Over

capacity of an individual even when it is never exercised. To further clarify the dispositional nature of the concept of power, Morriss distinguishes between ability and ableness—a word, virtually unused in contemporary English, that represents the noun for able. Ability is the capacity of doing something under certain hypothetical conditions, while ableness is the capacity one has when such conditions actually occur: poor people are physically able to eat caviar, though they do not have the ableness to do so. The distinction between ability and ableness has nothing to do with the traditional distinction between actual and potential power, although it may recall it. It identifies two distinct meanings of being able to—that is, of potential power—the first referring to all the possible outcomes we could bring about if certain conditions occurred, the second referring to the narrower set of outcomes we are actually able to bring about under actual conditions. On the basis of this distinction, Morriss recognizes that what is normally meant by social and political power is specifically a form of ableness, because the investigation of power in a society is concerned with those abilities that people possess in that specific time and place, with the current distribution of resources and opportunities. Under this interpretation, then, power does not consist in a social relation. This point is clarified by Morriss’s attempt to distinguish between the concept of power and that of influence. In doing so, he focuses on two possible meanings of power, those covered by the concepts of affecting and effecting. While affecting consists in having an effect on something, in altering it, effecting consists in bringing about something. According to Morriss, power bears no necessary relation to affecting other people; affecting covers the semantic field of the concept of influence. The meaning of power is instead concerned with effecting: power consists, then, in the ability to produce certain outcomes. It is the concept of influence that indicates a social relation, while power only implies the causation of certain results. For Morriss, then, power is power to. In fact, the usage of the expression power over is not common in everyday language: we normally ask ourselves which kinds of power people have and what they have the power to do; we very rarely wonder over whom people have power. At the same time, when

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we say that “A has power over B,” we normally imply that A has the power to make B do a lot of important things, rather than only one thing or a few insignificant things. In this latter sense, the relation described by the concept of power over collapses into the idea of “being in somebody’s power.” Dowding

Other accounts of power do not consider power to and power over as competing concepts. They suggest, instead, that both should be included in order to offer a comprehensive understanding of power. For Keith Dowding, for example, power to and power over are to be interpreted as two analytically distinct parts of the overall definition of power. He refers to power to in terms of outcome power and to power over as social power. According to him, outcome power is the more basic interpretation of power: having power over someone necessarily includes some kinds of power to act. In addition, his approach underlines that both outcome and social power are related to the production of certain effects. While outcome power is defined in terms of the abilities an actor possesses to bring about certain outcomes, social power is interpreted as the ability of an actor to deliberately change the structure of incentives—by which is meant the full set of costs and benefits attached to certain behaviors—of another actor, in order to bring about certain outcomes. What characterizes social power, then, is the deliberate action of the power holder that aims to change the incentive structure of the power subject. (When an actor exercises his or her outcome power, another actor’s incentive structure could be affected, but, in this case, this result will not be deliberately chosen.) According to Dowding, then, social and outcome power are two possible forms that political power can take. But while the former consists in a relation between actors, the latter need not involve more than one actor: outcome power becomes political power only in the case in which its exercise produces side effects that conflict with other actors’ interests. Feminist and Empowerment Theorists

The usage of the expressions power over and power to has recently been taken up in normative

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political theory, in particular among feminist and empowerment theorists. Here, the usage of these terms does not refer to competing conceptions of the very notion of power, but generally indicates two different normative interpretations of power. In feminist theory, power to and power over are regarded as two totally distinct forms of power: power over is the illegitimate domination exercised by men over women, while power to consists in the legitimate power that women can acquire in order to face male domination. This distinction is inspired by, and partly recalls, Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of power. Arendt distinguishes between power and violence: every exercise of power of one person over another consists in a form of violence, and it does not deserve the label power; power deserves this name only when it is legitimate, that is, only when it consists in the ability of the group to act collectively. Some authors, proceeding from this normative perspective, propose a further distinction: they suggest a quadripartite analysis of power where by power over is meant the actual, illegitimate distribution of power in society and power to, power with (the ability to act together), and power from within (the individual’s awareness of her or his own capacities that motivate the action) are different aspects or phases of the process of empowerment. In feminist theory, the most complete analysis of the distinction is that proposed by Amy Allen. Allen also sees power over as an ability of an actor to affect others but she sees it as the ability to constrain the choices of another actor or set of actors in what she calls a nontrivial way (1999). Following Lukes, she claims that the exercise of power over is not necessarily intentional, because it can be exercised in routine ways by actors who are unaware of their power: this is so in most cases of male–female power relations. Although in feminist theory the expression power over is mainly used interchangeably with that of domination, Allen proposes a distinction between the two concepts: domination is a subfield of the concept of power over, referring only to those occurrences of power over in which power is explicitly exercised in a way that is detrimental for the power subjects. Power to, by contrast, is explicated in terms of the concept of empowerment: Allen suggests that

the two terms can almost be used as synonyms. Power to is interpreted as the ability to attain certain ends; nonetheless, in her account this expression only indicates the power to act acquired by subordinate groups despite their subordination, particularly in the case of women against male domination. In her interpretation, power over and power to (together with power with, the collective exercise of power to) are analytically different aspects of power that show a high degree of interrelatedness: in the case of women’s empowerment, power to can be exercised by women in order to achieve a more legitimate distribution of power, that includes the obtainment of some sort of power over men. However, these different aspects of power can all be interpreted on the basis of a more general and abstract concept of power: for Allen, as for Pitkin and Morriss, having power means “being able to.” But, unlike the other two scholars, she reserves the usage of the expression power to only to a subfield of being able, specifically, to the power acquired by a subordinate individual or group through the process of empowerment. Pamela Pansardi See also Ability; Ableness; Community Power Debate; Dahl, Robert A.; Domination; Dowding, Keith; Feminist Theories of Power; Freedom; Lukes, Steven; Morriss, Peter; Power With; Social Power; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Allen, A. (1999). The power of feminist theory: Domination, resistance, solidarity. Boulder, CO: Westview. Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1970). Power and poverty: Theory and practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Dahl, R. A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioral Science 2, 201–215. Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). London: MacMillan. Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A philosophical analysis. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Power to Initiate Action and Power to Prevent Action

POWER POWER

TO INITIATE TO

ACTION AND PREVENT ACTION

These terms, which pertain to the general topic of voting power measures, were introduced by James S. Coleman in 1971. Coleman observed that the most commonly used measure of voting power at the time, the Shapley–Shubik power index, is based on cooperative game theory and assumes that players seek to form a winning coalition whose members divide up some fixed pot of spoils. But, he pointed out, that usually decisions made by committees or other collectivities do not have that character, rather the spoils are indivisible. For example if the members are choosing whether to provide themselves with a public good, there are no winnings to divide—regardless of how each member votes, he or she will bear the same consequences (though different members are likely to evaluate them differently).

Because a voter’s expected share of the spoils itself measures voting power, Shapley–Shubik power within any group necessarily sums to 1. But, Coleman observed, the power of collectivities to act may vary greatly. A body that uses a unanimity rule to initiate action often fails to act because unanimity is difficult to achieve, while one that uses simple majority rule is in some sense as likely to act as not. While voting power within each body is equal, in a meaningful sense all members of the majority-rule group are more powerful than those in the unanimity-rule group. This kind of example led Coleman to distinguish between two apparently distinct but closely interrelated faces of individual voting power: the power to initiate action and the power to prevent action. In describing how Coleman formalized these concepts, it is useful to have at hand a specific example of a five-member weighted voting body. By voting yes or no, five voters can partition themselves into 16 complementary subsets (or coalitions), so altogether there are 32 distinct coalitions (including the coalition of all and its empty complement), and each voter belongs to half of them. Suppose that voter A has 3 votes, B has 2 votes,

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and C, D, and E have 1 vote each and that a quota of 5 votes is required to initiate action (from which it follows that 4 votes is sufficient to prevent action). It can be checked that there are five minimal winning coalitions, each of which has the required 5 votes to initiate action but would fall below the quota if any member left the coalition: {A,B}, {A,C,D}, {A,C,E}, {A,D,E}, and {B,C,D,E}. It can be further checked that eight additional coalitions have more than 5 votes, giving a total of 13 winning coalitions. A voter i is critical to a coalition S if i belongs to S and S is winning but S − {i} is not (or, equivalently, if i does not belong to S and S is not winning but S − {i} is). Every member of a minimum winning coalition is critical to it, but some or all members of more inclusive coalitions fail to be critical. It can be checked that A is critical for 11 winning coalitions, B for 5, and C, D, and E for 3 each. Coleman’s power of the collectivity to act AN is simply the fraction of all coalitions that are winning; in our example, AN  13/32  .4063. With respect to an individual voter i, Coleman’s power to prevent action Pi is the fraction of winning coalitions for which i is critical; in our example, PA  11/13  .8462, PB  5/13  .3846, and PC  PD  PE  3/13  .2308. Coleman’s power to initiate action Ii is the fraction of nonwinning coalitions for which i is critical; in our example, IA  11/19  .5790, IB  5/19  .2632, and IC  ID  IE  3/19  .1579. While they may seem to lack theoretical justification, these fractions have intuitive and useful interpretations in terms of probability. If we know nothing about the voting situation other than its formal rules, our a priori expectation must be that everyone votes randomly, that is, as if independently flipping fair coins. In this random voting or Bernoulli model, each partition of voters into complementary sets has an equal probability of occurring, and each coalition in each complementary pair is equally likely to vote yes, so: (i) the power of the collectivity to act is the probability that the collectivity acts; (ii) voter i’s power to prevent action is the probability that, given the action is initiated with i’s support, i can prevent it by switching his vote to no; and (iii) i’s power to initiate action is the probability that, given that the

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action is prevented with i in the opposition, i can initiate it by switching his vote to yes. It is surprising that Coleman did not propose an overall measure of individual voting power Di, because one readily suggests itself—namely, the fraction of all coalitions to which i belongs for which i is critical; in our example, DA  11/16  .6875, DB  5/16  .3125, and DC  DD  DE  3/16  .1875. Di is the probability that, whatever the outcome of a vote, voter i can reverse it by switching his or her vote—that is, the probability that i casts a decisive vote. If the collectivity has maximum power to act (i.e., if half of all coalitions are winning), as under majority rule with an odd number of voters, Pi  Ii  Di; more generally, Di is the harmonic mean of Pi and Ii and, provided complementary coalitions cannot both be winning, Ii  Di  Pi. While Coleman was evidently unaware of the Banzhaf voting power measure that had been proposed a few years earlier, Di is simply the absolute Banzhaf power measure and, if Pi, Ii, and Di are rescaled so that the power of all voters adds up to 1, they are equivalent to one another (because they have the same numerators) and to the relative Banzhaf index. Just as the absolute Banzhaf measure is more informative than the relative Banzhaf index, the two Coleman measures are together more informative than the absolute Banzhaf measure alone. Coleman’s analysis of voting power attracted relatively little attention, but in their recent comprehensive and (perhaps) definitive history and analysis of a priori voting power concepts, Felsenthal and Machover give considerable credit to Coleman’s analysis—especially his conceptual critique of the Shapley–Shubik index—for clarifying the differing theoretical underpinnings of the Shapley–Shubik and Banzhaf measures. Nicholas R. Miller See also Banzhaf Voting Power Measure; Coleman Index; Shapley–Shubik Index

Further Readings Coleman, J. S. (1986). Control of collectivities and the power of a collectivity to act. In J. S. Coleman, Individual interests and collective action: Selected essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Reprinted from B. Lieberman (Ed.), Social Choice, pp. 269–300, New York: Gordon and Breach)

Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

POWER TRANSITION THEORY Power transition theory is a theory about the probability of war between nations, or groups within nations, based on the changing nature of their relative powers. Balance-of-power theories of international conflict suggest that the international system will remain peaceful if no nation is allowed to acquire much greater strength than any other nation. If any nation or bloc of nations significantly increases its powers, then in order to ensure continuing peace another bloc needs also to strengthen in order to provide a countervailing force. Contrariwise, according to the hegemonic stability thesis a large hegemon is conducive to peace. The hegemon does not itself feel threatened by others and can police conflicts between other nations. Those in the hegemonic stability camp believe there are severe dangers in balance-of-power theories, because the near-parity of power might encourage risk takers to go to war or lead one side to believe that its power is greater than a near rival’s and attempt to defeat them. Both these viewpoints take a static stance toward the prospects of peace. Power transition theory can encompass both views in a more dynamic perspective, as it suggests that major conflicts are often a result of a transition in power where a dominant nation or group within a nation faces a rising challenger. Abramo Organski introduced the power transition theory in his book World Politics in 1958. While associated with realism in international relations, power transition theory is not exclusively realist because, as first set out, it is not entirely concerned with power relations. The propensities of nations to engage in armed conflict are related to the satisfaction that they have with the status quo within the international system. Nations are concerned with general patterns of diplomatic, military, and economic relationships between countries. Organski describes a stable international order as one where all countries know what kind of behavior to expect from others and understand how these relationships ought to be

Power With

governed: that is, they share similar normative concerns. He does see a role for a dominant nation, but power transition theory does not require one, needing simply that the ordered state of affairs is acceptable to all. The probability of conflict arises when some nations become dissatisfied with the world order. As some nations become stronger, they might wish to challenge the accepted nature of the diplomatic and economic relationships. They might be prepared to engage in saber rattling or actual armed conflict, but more specifically the dominant nations might feel threatened as these relationships alter. The changing expectations can lead to conflict. Thus there are two factors involved in power transition theory: first, that a challenger nation has gained in power, and second, that it is dissatisfied with the world order in some way. Originally Organski used his theory to explain the major wars between dominant nations in the international system, but later, with Jacek Kugler, applied the thesis more broadly, analyzing data from 1860 to 1975. Organski and Kugler suggested that conflict was likely within 20 years of a power transition. They split their data into six periods, measuring the relative strength of nations by gross national product (GNP). They examined conflict by set of dyads where any two states for which the smaller’s GNP was more than 80% of the larger were considered to be relatively equal. Where one grew larger than another during the period, then in their terms it surpassed the other. They found that, in their data set, no wars occurred between major power pairs in which the two nations were equal and neither surpassed the other. Where powers were unequal, around 13% of their dyads went to war; where they were equal with one surpassing the other, 29% went to war. They conclude that there is support for the power transition theory. Reanalysis of their work by others has found support for their conclusions. However, how strongly power transition theory is supported by the quantitative data depends upon the measure of power of nations that is adopted. Most use GNP, but some studies also use the Correlates of War data (http://www .correlatesofwar.org/datasets.htm) on nations’ strength. Furthermore, the transitions of power that have occurred in the modern period do not seem to lead to armed conflict as frequently as they once did. This demonstrates at the very least that other factors—such as international organizations,

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increasingly global trade, and democratization— have affected the propensity of nations to go to war. Power transition theory has also been applied to internal conflict and civil war. Where there are significant ethnic subgroups whose economic power increases, or whose population rises significantly in relation to the dominant group, this will also alter the balance of power within a nation. If the subgroup is dissatisfied with the economic or political situation, internal conflict might result. Studies that have examined demographic shifts in populations suggest that power transition theory is better supported than balance-of-power theories. However, analysts also note that many other factors not included in power transition theories are also important when studying civil wars, notably the existence of other groups, special interest groups, and external trade relations. Keith Dowding See also Anarchy in International Relations; Balance of Power; Bargaining in International Relations; Civil War; War

Further Readings Duffy-Toft, M. (2007). Population shifts and civil war: A test of power transition theory. International Interactions, 33, 243–269. Organski, A. F. K. (1968). World politics (2nd ed.). New York: Knopf. Organski, A. F. K., & Kugler, J. (1980). The war ledger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Soysa, I., Oneal, J. R., & Park, Y.-H. (1997). Testing power-transition theory using alternative measures of national capabilities. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41, 509–528.

POWER WITH In the last decades, the usage of the locution power with has emerged in a number of contributions to the study of power. Accounts of power with have been proposed predominantly by feminist theorists and social activists in order to describe a form of power that consists in the collective action of the group. Power with, then, widely recalls Hannah Arendt’s conception of power as “the ability to act in concert,” and in the

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P-Power

same way it is interpreted as a legitimate form of power. In this sense, it has been used mainly in opposition to the concept of power over; the latter interpreted as the illegitimate power wielded by the dominant group over the powerless mass. Power with, instead, is normally connected with the notion of empowerment, and it consists in that form of power that may arise when people try to resist and overturn a situation of domination. Feminist theorists, in particular those focusing on the idea of self-empowerment—intended as the process in which powerless individuals succeed in acquiring the power to help themselves—define power with as the capacity to act together in order to obtain collectively what is impossible to obtain alone. Janet Townsend, analyzing the processes of empowerment in groups of women in rural areas of Mexico, defines power with as the power emerging from the collaboration within the group. Acting together not only empowers the group in order to obtain collective goals, but empowers each participant in the group, giving her a new awareness of her capacities through the experience of collaboration. Social activist Julia Kraft, connecting the concept of power with to the idea of empowerment, offers a wider interpretation of its role in the redistribution of power within societies. Power over, interpreted as domination, is the form taken by the actual distribution of power. The power of groups that fight against political oppression is, on the contrary, power with. But power with is not only the form that power acquires when oppressed groups struggle to obtain a redistribution of power. It is, in Kraft’s account, the form of power that should completely replace power over, because it provides a more legitimate base for the reallocation of power in the society: acting together not only empowers people in order to overturn a particular situation of domination, but teaches them how to live collectively, sharing the equal ability to shape their lives. In her analysis of feminist interpretations of empowerment, Amy Allen relates the concept of power with with that of solidarity. She proposes to distinguish among power over, power to, and power with: the power of acting together cannot be described by the concept of power to, because it does not consist only in obtaining certain specific goals; nor can it be described by the concept of

power over, because it does not consist merely in acquiring power over those who are in a position of dominance. According to her, however, power with is a descriptive concept that does not necessarily refer to a legitimate form of power: it could be used to indicate, for example, the power exercised by a military group over a population. In feminist theories, then, power with is used only to refer to that specific and legitimate kind of collective power that can be interpreted in terms of solidarity. In the process of empowerment, solidarity emerges when women act together—organizing themselves in feminist groups or movements—in order to foster the common purpose of overturning the system of domination. Pamela Pansardi See also Collective Action Problem; Feminist Theories of Power; Power To and Power Over

Further Readings Allen, A. (1998). Rethinking power. Hypatia, 13(1), 21–40. Kraft J. (2000, June-August). Power-with, not powerover. Peace News, p. 35. Townsend, J., Zapata, E., Rowlands, J., Alberti, P., & Mercado, M. (1999). Women and power: Fighting patriarchies and poverty, London: Zed Books.

P-POWER P-power is the notion of voting power as a voter’s expected relative share, under a given decision rule, in a constant sum of transferable utility (or prize) to be distributed among the voters. This is contrasted with I-power. The terms I-power and P-power were introduced by Dan S. Felsenthal, Moshé Machover, and William Zwicker in 1998, but the conceptual distinction was first made by James S. Coleman in 1971. The most important distinctive attributes of P-power and of situations in which it is appropriate are as follows. First, a division of the voting body on a bill is—or is equivalent to—a play of a cooperative game with transferable utility, in which the winning coalition of players–voters that succeeds in

Preference- Versus Nonpreference-Based Concepts

getting the bill passed takes possession of the entire prize and distributes it among its members as payoffs. These payoffs are private goods. Second, P-power is essentially a relative quantity. The sum total of the P-powers of all the voters is constant, and by an appropriate choice of utility units can always be assumed to equal 1. In particular, under any symmetric decision rule—for example, unanimity and simple majority—the a priori P-power of each voter is 1/n, where n is the number of voters. Third, bargaining and binding agreements among voters prior to a division on a bill is taken to be an inherent part of the procedure of decision making. Thus, P-power is not directly applicable to secret voting. The measurement of P-power thus depends on a solution of the bargaining problem. Because there is no known compelling and generally agreed solution to the bargaining problem—especially where unanimity of all the players is not required for striking a bargain—there are several competing indices of P-power, each suffering from more or less serious defects inherited from the general bargaining solution on which it is based. It is even arguable that the intuitive notion of P-power cannot be formalized and quantified coherently. The most mathematically elegant, well-behaved, and widely used measure of P-power is the Shapley–Shubik index, which is the Shapley value for cooperative games applied to the special case of simple games (binary decision rules). Another, much less well-behaved measure of P-power is the Deegan–Packel index. Indices that seem to be based on hybrid notions of P-power and I-power have been proposed by R. J. Johnston and by Manfred Holler. Moshé Machover and Dan S. Felsenthal See also Bargaining; Coleman, James S.; Felsenthal, Dan S.; I-Power; Public Goods Index; Machover, Moshé; Shapley–Shubik Index; Shapley Value; Simple Games; Strategic Power Index

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998).The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

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Felsenthal, D. S., Machover, M., & Zwicker, W. (1998). The bicameral postulates and indices of a priori relative voting power. Theory and Decision, 44(1), 83–116.

PREFERENCE- VERSUS NONPREFERENCE-BASED CONCEPTS In recent years it has become customary to say that classical power measures, such as the Shapley–Shubik and Banzhaf indices, suffer a major drawback in that they do not take into account player preferences. The corollary of this lack of preferences criticism is that classical power indices—based on simple games rooted in cooperative rather than noncooperative game theory— are insensitive to the strategic aspects of power and therefore are inappropriate for a positive analysis of the distribution of power in institutional structures. The upshot of the criticism has been the development of so-called strategic power indices that are based on noncooperative games in order to fill this apparent lacuna. Such indices also renew attempts to introduce preferences or strategic considerations into the classical power measures and represent an attempt to find a unified framework that brings together cooperative and noncooperative approaches. To obtain an intuitive grasp of the problem, consider the three-player simple game with winning coalitions fa; b; cg, fa; bg, and fa; cg. Assume that a can make the following ultimatum offer to either player b or c: accept a tiny share of the spoils or be prevented from taking part in a winning coalition. If the players are rational and have utility functions that are monotonic in the spoils, and that there is no way to credibly enforce a blocking coalition fb; cg that could extract concessions from a, the noncooperative game-theoretic equilibrium will be that whichever of players b or c that a approaches first will accept A’s pittance of an offer. After all, something, however small, is better than nothing for rational self-interested agents. The conclusion that theorists such as Stefan Napel and Mika Widgrén draw from this example is that, given the pittance or nothing at all that b or c will receive under these two solution concepts, it is only reasonable to deduce that they must be more

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Prime Ministerial and Presidential

or less powerless because both of these players are robbed of the power commonly associated with their swing potentials. Yet, the absolute Banzhaf index and the Shapley–Shubik index, for   instance, yield respective power vectors of   2 1 1

3 1 1 ; ; 4 4 4

and 3; 6; 6 , values that are radically at odds with a competitive analysis. Despite the intuitive appeal of the example, it is fundamentally mistaken. The reason hinges on a conceptual issue: what we mean by a power ascription. Ordinarily speaking, a power ascription refers to a person’s ability: what a person is able to do. In the game-theoretic context that we are discussing, the ability in question is to effect (or force or determine) outcomes of the game. That is, a player has a strategy that, if chosen, will make a decisive difference to the outcome. This basic definition is the same for a power index based upon a simple game and one that is ostensibly based upon a noncooperative game. The difference lies in the specification of the ability. In a simple game the ability is turning a winning coalition into a losing coalition or vice versa and thereby being decisive for the acceptance or rejection of a bill, while in a noncooperative game the ability is specified in terms of shifting the equilibrium in one’s own favor. Here lies the core of the problem. The intuition behind applying noncooperative games to the analysis of power is that if a player is able to determine the outcome of a game but only by playing a dominated strategy, that is, playing a strategy that is not a best reply to any other, it makes no sense to ascribe power to this player for this ability. In other words, if a player can change the outcome only by doing something that he or she would never rationally choose to do, it is equivalent to saying that the player cannot determine the outcome with that strategy. Ergo, the player is powerless for this scenario. This is exactly what is hinted at in the example above. However, the identification of a dominated strategy depends on specification of a player’s preferences, and the fact that a player may not want to do something does not make them powerless per se; that player only powerless to improve he or she is standing, given particular preferences. To see this, suppose you observe a his or her toddler lying facedown in a wading pool, but you do not rescue the child because you do not like getting your clothes wet.

However true your abhorrence for wet clothes may be, you cannot use this as a defense of your powerlessness to save the child. Rather, you must be able to show that you were powerless, that something prevented you from being able to step into the wading pool—such as a morbid fear of water or some other cause of immobility such as old age. The basic conceptual problem of preferencebased concepts of power is the conflation of power with decision making. That is, there is a major difference between determining what agents will do and what they can do. Evidently, preferences are relevant for determining the value of power, for predicting what agents may do with their power, or for relating it to concepts such as well-being; but from this it does not follow that preferences are necessary for the analysis of power per se. Matthew Braham See also Game Forms, Power in; Noncooperative Games; Simple Games; Strategic Power Index; Voting Power

Further Readings Braham, M., & Holler, M. J. (2005). The impossibility of a preference-based power index. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 17, 137–158. Napel, S., & Widgrén, M. (2004). Power measurement as sensitivity analysis—A unified approach. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 16, 517–538.

PRIME MINISTERIAL AND PRESIDENTIAL Power relationships in the executive and vis-à-vis the legislature are structured differently in parliamentary and presidential democracies. In presidential systems, presidents, combining the roles of head of state and head of government, are dominant in the executive, but due to an institutional separation of powers they have to find majority support for their policy preferences on an issueby-issue basis in the legislature. In parliamentary systems, the power of prime ministers is much more circumscribed in the executive but their government enjoys majority support in the legislature (although this may need careful maintenance in

Prime Ministerial and Presidential

the case of coalition governments where coalition partners’ wishes have to be taken into consideration or where minority governments are supported by nongovernmental parties in the legislature on the basis of issue-by-issue negotiations). Because in presidential systems the executive and the legislature are voted into office independently from each other, two constellations may occur: unified government, where the president and the majority of members of the legislature belong to the same political party or party bloc; and divided government, where party-political orientations of the executive and the legislature diverge. Divided government has become the norm in the United States in recent decades, with at least one chamber deviating from the president’s party orientation. There are two schools of thought as to whether this matters. The traditional view is that effects are huge, because party politics leads to policy gridlock. Divided government makes purposeful presidential action based on an agenda next to impossible. Legislators with a different partypolitical orientation not only have divergent policy preferences, they also have a strategic interest in seeing the presidency of a political opponent fail. The opposite position is taken by David Mayhew. In a study of major policy initiatives in the United States since World War II, he finds that in terms of policy outputs there is no dramatic difference between unified and divided governments. The U.S. president has always to overcome considerable obstacles no matter how Congress is composed in party-political terms. The necessity of putting together a coalition of actors is a fact of political life whether government is unified or divided. Stalemate situations following from the partypolitical complexion of the executive and the legislature may be more problematic in less stable presidential systems than the United States. In a famous article, Juan Linz has argued that policy gridlocks are a major cause of the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America. This view has increasingly been challenged in recent years. It has been pointed out that empirically there is no systematic relationship between minority presidencies and regime crises. Latin American presidents have increasingly learned the art of coalition politics in order to find majority support for their measures. In cases where seeking a compromise

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is costly, many presidents have extensive decree powers at their disposal. Prime ministers in parliamentary democracies have a securer power basis in the legislature. In most cases they come into office as a result of majority support in the legislature—either as a single-party government or as a coalition government. However, minority governments are formed surprisingly often—in about one third of cases. Minority governments are most often formed based on longer-term agreements between government parties and so-called legislative support parties with regard to essential parliamentary votes. Sometimes legislative support has to be sought virtually on a day-by-day, issue-by-issue basis. Obviously, majority coalition and minority governments increase the need to negotiate and in that way constrain the power of a prime minister beyond the extent that is to be found in cases of single-party governments, in which prime ministers have to take into consideration intraparty policy differences. However, if cabinet durability can be understood as a crude measure of the executive’s power, it is not the case that coalition and minority governments necessarily reduce this any more than intraparty constraints do in the case of single-party majority governments. The power of prime ministers and their party depends less on their seat shares in the legislature than on their policy position regarding the major issue dimensions of the party system. A small minority government may be in a relatively safe and advantageous situation as long as it is located in a relatively centrist position and has potential coalition partners on both its left and right sides. Unlike presidential systems, in which the president is both the head of state and the head of government, parliamentary systems have a dual executive. Alongside the prime minister as head of government, there is a president (elected directly or indirectly) or a monarch as head of state. In most cases, the head of state has mainly ceremonial functions. When it comes to political substance, presidents are given purely reactive tasks such as formally appointing those candidates to offices who were chosen by the government. However, in exceptional circumstances even constitutionally ceremonial heads of state may unwillingly become power brokers overnight, for example if an election leads to an unclear outcome and the head of state has to decide who shall

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Principal–Agent Relationship

form the next government or whether there shall be a new election. A third type of executive–legislative relation, semipresidentialism, was suggested by Maurice Duverger, deriving from constitutional practice in the French Fifth Republic. According to this proposal, semipresidentialism is characterized by (1) directly elected presidents as head of state who (2) have considerable powers at their disposal, inter alia the right to choose and appoint a prime minister and to dissolve the parliament, but where (3) the government still depends on the confidence of the majority of the members of parliament, as in parliamentary systems. By this definition, a large number of established democracies such as Austria, Finland, France, Ireland, and Portugal as well as newly democratic countries (Bulgaria, Poland, and Slovakia) and hybrid and authoritarian regimes in Africa and Asia would have to be counted as semipresidential. The problem with this category, however, is that executive–legislative relations and power relationships in the executive in these political systems in practice vary dramatically, as a comparison of Austria with France or of France with and without “cohabitation” (i.e., if the president and the prime minister belong to the same party-political orientation or not) makes clear. Even supporters of the proposal to use this third type accept that semipresidentialism is mainly a descriptive category that should not be used as an explanatory variable in the analysis of governance structures or of the performance of political systems because the effects of this specific type of dual executives are mainly dependent on other factors. Most recently, some authors have argued that prime ministerial government becomes increasingly presidentialized. There are three versions of this thesis: (1) As a consequence of the internationalization or transnationalization of politics, especially in the case of the member states of the European Union, prime ministers have increasingly won power at the cost of their cabinets. However, empirical findings in that regard are weak so far. (2) Executive–legislative relations in parliamentary democracies have developed toward a form of quasi-independence because legislators become more and more independent in their behavior, even if that means that members of parliament vote against their own government and

risk its resignation. There are indeed signs of a loosening of the cohesiveness of parliamentary parties in some countries, but there is still a huge divide between occasional party rebellions and a separation-of-powers situation such as that in the United States. (3) Prime ministers increasingly adopt a presidential style of politics. They accept the way the media wish to present political affairs, pursue a personalized style of communication with the voters, and occupy a leadership role in those policy areas they think are currently most salient, pushing the formally responsible cabinet ministers into the background. André Kaiser See also Coalition Theory; Executive Power; Legislative Power

Further Readings Elgie, R. (2004). Semi-presidentialism: Concepts, consequences and contesting explanations. Political Studies Review, 2, 314–330. Linz, J. (1990). The perils of presidentialism. Journal of Democracy, 1, 51–69. Mayhew, D. R. (2005). Divided we govern: Party control, lawmaking, and investigations, 1946–2002 (2d ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Poguntke, T., & Webb., P. (Eds.). (2005). The presidentialization of politics: A comparative study of modern democracies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Shugart, M. S., & Carey, J. (1992). Presidents and assemblies: Constitutional design and electoral dynamics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

PRINCIPAL–AGENT RELATIONSHIP The principal–agent model represents situations in which a supervisor (principal) delegates a task to a supervisee (agent) who has specialized knowledge about the task but also has objectives that are different from those of the principal. This is what occurs, for example, between an employer and an employee, between legislators and bureaucrats, between regulators and regulated firms, between voters and public officials in a representative

Principal–Agent Relationship

democracy, and between managers and stockholders. In such situations the principal cannot directly accomplish some specific tasks and needs to delegate them to the agent, who acts on behalf of the principal. The agent has superior private information that can be of two types. If the agent has superior information regarding the characteristics of some goods (e.g., their quality) or one or more of his or her own characteristics that are relevant to the task (e.g., skills, preferences, honesty), then the principal faces a problem of adverse selection. If the agent can take actions (e.g., the effort exercised in pursuing the task or the act of accepting a bribe from a third party to underperform) that are unobserved by the principal, then the problem is moral hazard. Because of the conflicting interests, the agent has to be compensated in order to be induced to act according to the principal’s preferences. The principal’s problem is therefore to design a contract that selects the right type of agent (to solve adverse selection problems) or that provides the agent with the right incentives, that is, induces the agent to act according to the principal’s objective (to solve moral hazard problems). This process goes under the name of mechanism design. In the absence of asymmetric information, the principal and the agent could stipulate a contract in which the payment for the agent is made contingent on the actions or type of actions of the agent. This would be the first best outcome. With asymmetric information, however, the problem is more complex, and it will usually be impossible to reach the first best. Asymmetric information induces an agency cost because providing the right incentives to the agent is costly. This is a special form of transaction cost that only allows the players to reach the second best, an outcome that is Paretodominated by the first best but that can be considered optimal given the added informational constraint faced by the principal. When there is adverse selection, agents of the “good” type can try to convey information on their quality (or the quality of the products they try to sell) by acquiring a costly signal (signaling). Alternatively, the principal can propose a menu of contracts, trying to infer the quality of the agents from their choice of contract (screening). In any event, agents of inferior quality have an incentive to mimic the behavior of better agents. The problem

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is illustrated by Michael Spence in 1973 in a signaling model of the labor market in which education is used as a signaling device by workers with (innate) high skills. Education levels work as a signal of skill only if education is more costly to acquire for less skilled individuals. This assumption is also known as the Spence–Mirrlees condition, or single-crossing property, because the indifference curve (in this case mapping in a wage–education diagram) of the low-ability worker (or, in general, of the seller of bad products) crosses the corresponding curve of the high-ability worker once from below. In other words, a variable can be used as a signaling device only if it is manipulable by individuals and if we can expect it to be related in the right way (i.e., it is more easily obtained by good types) with the characteristic of interest. Two kinds of equilibria can emerge. In a separating equilibrium all workers with high productivity choose an education level that is higher than that chosen by less productive workers. Firms pay a higher wage (corresponding to workers’ anticipations) to people with a higher education, correctly assuming that they have higher productivity. In a pooling equilibrium, all workers have the same education level and get the same wage. The outcome depends on the distribution of skills among workers, on the costs of education, and on the beliefs of agents. Another possibility is that the principal tries to distinguish the different type of agents by proposing a menu of different contracts. In the model of Michael Rothschild and Joseph Stiglitz in 1976, an insurance company offers different contracts in order to separate high-risk from low-risk individuals. The role of education in Spence’s model is played here by the willingness to afford more risk, because risk is more costly for people with higher probability of having an accident. Hence, the cost of separating (by getting incomplete insurance) is lower for agents with low risk of accidents. This is again the Spence–Mirrlees condition. To analyze the case of moral hazard, consider the owner of a piece of land (the principal) and someone who is using the land to produce potatoes (agent). The amount of potatoes produced at the end of the year depends on the effort exercised by the agent and on the weather during the year. Assume also that the principal lives on a different continent and has no way to find out about the

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weather on his plot of land. The problem of the principal is then to design the appropriate reward scheme for the agent in order to maximize his or her own return, that is, the difference between the revenue from selling the potatoes and the payment to the agent. The possible reward schemes range between two extremes. At one extreme, the principal could pay a fixed wage to the agent, then sell the potatoes and keep the revenue. At the other extreme, he or she could rent the land to the agent for a fixed amount of money (that does not depend on the final output) and then let the agent keep all the revenue from the sale of the potatoes. These contracts differ not just in the way the reward is distributed but also in the incentives they provide to the agent and in the way the risk is distributed. In the first case agents have no incentive to provide any effort in cultivating the land and bear no risk: he or she is unaffected by weather conditions. In the second case the agent’s incentive to provide effort is maximized, but the agent also bears all the risk. If both principal and agent are risk-neutral then this is the optimal contract. It is, however, often assumed that the agent is more risk-averse than the principal. A risk-averse agent is willing to accept more risk only if appropriately compensated, that is, if the risk is offset by a higher expected reward. The fundamental trade-off faced by the principal is therefore that incentives can only be provided by letting the agent bear some risk: hence, giving incentives to the agent (and therefore generating more output) also means having the agent bear more risk (and therefore having to pay him or her more in expected terms). With a risk-neutral principal and a risk-averse agent the optimal contract involves some risk sharing between the two. The principal–agent model has been widely used in political science to analyze accountability problems of the sort that occur in the relationship between legislators and bureaucrats, or in that between voters and politicians. In this second example, the principal is a representative voter who tries to get his or her preferred policies enacted, and the agent is a politician who tries to be reelected. The incentive scheme that the voter can use is obviously much coarser that the sort of reward schemes that can be implemented in other situations: it consists essentially of the decision whether or not to retain the agent. An important

conclusion of this class of models is that the perspective of being reelected acts as a discipline device for incumbent politicians (the performance effect). There is also a selection effect, in the sense that better types will generally have more chances to be confirmed in office. Empirical work by Tim Besley and Anne Case in 1995 finds that gubernatorial term limits have significant effects on economic policy choices, which confirms that incumbent governors facing the perspective of reelection behave differently from “lame duck” governors. Valentino Larcinese See also Adverse Selection; Manipulation; Moral Hazard

Further Readings Akerlof, G. (1970). The market for lemons: Qualitative uncertainty and the market mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84, 288–300. Barro, R. J. (1973).The control of politicians: An economic model. Public Choice, 14, 19–42. Besley, T., & Case, A. (1995). Does electoral accountability affect economic policy choices? Evidence from gubernatorial term limits. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110, 769–798. Rothschild, M., & Stiglitz, J. (1976). Equilibrium in competitive insurance markets: An essay on the economics of imperfect information. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90, 629–650. Spence, M. (1973). Job market signaling. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87, 355–379.

PRISONER’S DILEMMA The prisoner’s dilemma is a classic game used to illustrate the potential suboptimality arising from lack of cooperation. Its name refers to a situation in which two suspects are arrested and charged with a crime. The police, who lack sufficient evidence to convict the suspects unless at least one of them confesses, hold the suspects in separate cells and explain the consequences of the actions they may take. If neither confesses, both will be convicted for minor offences and sentenced to 1 month in jail. If both confess, both will be sentenced to jail for 6 months. Finally, if one confesses

Prisoner’s Dilemma

but the other does not, the confessor is immediately released and the other is sentenced to 9 months—6 for the crime and 3 more for obstructing justice. This situation can be represented in the following game theoretical format: Prisoner 2

Prisoner 1

CONFESS

DO NOT CONFESS

CONFESS

(6,6)

(0,9)

DO NOT CONFESS

(9,0)

(1,1)

The payoffs are all negative because they represent months in jail. It can be seen that, regardless of what Prisoner 2 does, Prisoner 1 is always better off confessing, so confessing is his dominant strategy. Because the game is symmetric, confessing is likewise dominant for Prisoner 2. Hence, we should expect both players to confess and spend 6 months in jail each. The strategy profile both confess is an equilibrium in dominant strategies and is the only Nash equilibrium of this game. Nevertheless, both confess is Pareto-dominated by the neither confesses outcome, so the two prisoners end up spending 6 months in jail, while a better alternative for both (1 month in jail) was available. Notice that both prisoners are perfectly informed about all the elements of the game and that even knowing in advance what the other player is doing does not lead to the superior outcome. Even if Prisoner 1 chooses first and Prisoner 2 observes his or her choice, Prisoner 2 is still be better off confessing, regardless of Prisoner 1’s choice. Anticipating this, Prisoner 1 still confesses. The problem is that Prisoner 2 cannot commit to not confessing if Prisoner 1 does likewise. Hence, solutions to the problem have little to do with information: the roots of the dilemma lie in the particular nature of the interaction coupled with the lack of coordinating and commitment devices, that is, without appropriate institutional arrangements. The prisoner’s dilemma is therefore a metaphor of the collective action problem, whereby all agents have an incentive to free ride on the behavior of other agents and, by doing so, generate inefficient (i.e., Pareto-dominated) outcomes.

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Hence, rational outcome–oriented individuals playing individually optimal strategies may fail to realize commons interests. The prisoner’s dilemma (and its multiplayer variant) illustrate that Adam Smith’s invisible hand does not operate in all strategic interactions. Sometimes explicit coordination, backed up by the ability to make credible commitments or by sanctions of some kind, is required to realize common interests. However, tacit cooperation may be achieved in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, that is, if the same prisoners play the game many times. If the prisoner’s dilemma is played a fixed number of times known to both players, both confess in each period is the only Nash equilibrium of the iterated game. If, however, the game between the same players is repeated an infinite or unknown or random number of times, the possibility of cooperation to realize common interests emerges. Cooperation becomes possible because the players benefit from reciprocity and have therefore an incentive to be “nice” in order to obtain a nice behavior in return. One possible strategy in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma is to cooperate in the first round and continue to cooperate as long the opponent cooperates too. Only after the opponent fails to cooperate does the player switch to defection, and then does so forever. More forgiving versions of this strategy require retaliation for defection only for a given number of periods. The most forgiving version is tit for tat, according to which a player cooperates in the first period and thereafter reciprocates whatever the other player did in the previous period. If both players play any such strategy (or more generally any “nice” strategy, i.e., in which one is never the first to defect), the result is a Nash equilibrium in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, producing mutual cooperation in each period. More generally, cooperation is more likely to emerge when the players are patient enough and therefore care about future outcomes (i.e., they have a high discount factor). This result can be generalized in the so-called folk theorem, which shows that, when the players are sufficiently patient, all outcomes above the individually rational payoffs can be sustained by some strategy. Hence, the iterated prisoner’s dilemma shows that cooperation among selfish and rational players is not an oxymoron. The possibility of reciprocation and the anticipation of future valuable

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Propaganda

rewards render cooperation a perfectly rational behavior. Valentino Larcinese See also Chicken Games; Collective Action Problem; Game-Theoretical Approaches; Public Goods

Further Readings Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Hardin, R. (1971). Collective choice as an agreeable n-prisoner’s dilemma. Behavioral Science, 16, 472–481.

PROPAGANDA In colloquial usage, propaganda is a pejorative term applied to forms of mass communication, most commonly those forms employed by those in power to manipulate or influence public consciousness so as to increase or maintain their position of power. The scientific study of propaganda has been hindered by the lack of a uniform or standard definition, which scholars have found difficult to formulate given the enormous differences between types of propaganda that have been identified. The following entry will detail some of the characteristics of conceptualizations of propaganda and highlight some of the types of propaganda that scholars have identified. In addition, the possibility of a scientific analysis of propaganda will be considered. Scholars have developed concrete definitions of propaganda only reluctantly, and none has been universally adopted and employed in scientific analyses of mass communication. One of the problems in formulating a definition is that the term has traditionally been applied uncritically to forms of communication that the speaker disapproves of. To complicate matters, in some languages the term has a value-neutral or positive connotation; in the English language the term most often has a negative connotation. The lack of a standard definition of the concept has meant that many forms of mass communication have been scrutinized as propaganda regardless of their

political context. Unfortunately, it has also precluded falsifiable scientific analysis. Despite the lack of a standard definition of propaganda, scholars have identified some characteristics that many forms and definitions of propaganda have in common. First, propaganda typically involves promoting the interests of the messenger over the interests of the consumer of information. Second, propaganda tends to evince an indifference to the truthfulness of the messages it conveys; it is valuable insofar as the message is effectively transmitted. In this vein, propaganda often neglects the totality of information in the interest of promoting an ideology, cause, or movement. Third, propaganda typically involves elements of manipulation, deception, or suggestion. Furthermore, in order for a communication to be considered propaganda, this manipulation usually must be conscious on the part of the messenger. Fourth, propaganda is often used as a tool to gain or maintain power, be it political or otherwise. Fifth, propagandists tend to use emotionally charged imagery and wording so that consumers will respond passionately and favorably to their message without scrutinizing the verisimilitude of its intellectual content. Some scholars have also noted that propagandistic messages are often preceded by the imposition of myths or stereotypes that render the consuming audience more receptive. Nazi Germany might be a case in point. The types of messages that have been considered propaganda vary depending upon who is receiving the message and how it has been communicated. A detailed analysis by Jacques Ellul in 1973 identified and juxtaposed eight different mutually exclusive categories of propaganda that have been used historically. Ellul’s formative analysis highlights the degree to which the concept of propaganda does not comport easily with the formulation of a standardized definition. Political propaganda refers to that carried out by an identifiable body (be it a political party, governmental agency, or interest group) that has discrete goals and uses deliberate methods in conveying its messages. Ellul juxtaposed this with sociological propaganda, which does not fit the popular conceptualization of what constitutes propaganda, is not necessarily organized, does not lead to mass action, and is often imperceptible. It circumscribes and creates habits and lifestyles that integrate

Proper Simple Game

social life, for example promoting the benefits of the lifestyle endemic to the hippie movement of the 1960s. Agitation propaganda is most visible in nature and frequently involves the vilification of an outgroup. This type of propaganda is usually aimed at inciting political revolution, and is often used to elicit mass support and sacrifice in the interests of a prescribed political end. Ellul juxtaposed this with integration propaganda, which seeks to socially unify individuals so that they can more fully participate in society. This type of propaganda is often associated with the collectivist movement of Mao Zedong. Vertical propaganda corresponds to what most consider classic propaganda in that it is disseminated from officials in positions of authority toward ostensibly subjugated masses. The information issued by the office of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, fits this description. In contrast, horizontal propaganda is usually produced from within the ranks of mass movements, with leaders acting passively to allow participants to condition themselves with information and data that are frequently distorted or unidimensional. Irrational propaganda also fits with most popular understandings, and consists of emotional appeals used to influence consumers of information. In contrast, rational propaganda gives the appearance of legitimate communication aimed at disseminating truthful information, concealing its intent with misleading or misinterpreted analyses, often using a facade of scientific analysis as a ruse. The consumer of this particular type of propaganda is often incapable of independently assessing the legitimacy of the information communicated, accepting its validity on the basis of faith in the logic of legitimate scientific analysis itself. Other scholars have posited that editorial decision making and outright censorship constitute a form of propaganda evident in the crafting of journalist reports and academic textbook curricula. In Benthamite fashion, scholars exploring the social–psychological dynamics underlying the transmission of propagandistic messages have generally presumed that propaganda works by creating the impression that acceptance of the information has some bearing on prospects for future happiness. Analyses of propaganda usually

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differ from the studies of the effects of mass communication in that they typically entail an analysis of the impact of psychology and/or ideology. Scientific analysis of propaganda flourished during the 1930s, but waned in the United States subsequent to the confluence of McCarthyism and a patriotism that was itself founded on propaganda. Since that time, propaganda has been studied within the context of many disparate scholarly traditions, which is unfortunately to the detriment of the development and adoption of a uniform standard definition essential to the task of conducting falsifiable scientific analyses. Douglas J. Dallier See also Coercion and Power; Exploitation; Fear, Use of; Ideology; Influence; Language and Power.

Further Readings Ellul, J. (1973). Propagandes. New York: Vintage. Marlin, R. (2002). Propaganda and the ethics of persuasion. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press. Silverstein, B. (1987). Towards a science of propaganda. Political Psychology, 8, 49–59.

PROPER SIMPLE GAME A simple game is called proper if the complement of any winning coalition of the game is a losing coalition. This property was first dealt with by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in their key book of 1944. Proper simple games are among the most widely studied typologies of game and are commonly used to describe voting situations. Preliminary definitions with a view to introducing the proper simple game concept will be given below, together with an indication of the main peculiarities of these games. This will be followed by an example. Let N5f1; 2; . . . ; ng be a set of players. A cooperative game on N is said to be expressed in characteristic function form if a function v (the characteristic function) is given that assigns a win v(S) to every coalition S  N under the condition vðØÞ 5 0 . The game characterized by v is usually called the game v. A game v is called superadditive if

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Proper Simple Game

vðS [ TÞ $ vðSÞ 1 vðTÞ for all disjoint coalitions S, T of N. A game v is said to be simple if its characteristic function assumes values only in the set f0; 1g: vðSÞ 5 0 or vðSÞ 5 1 for all coalitions S  N . In the first case the coalition is said to be losing; in the second case, winning. All simple games have two properties: U each coalition is either winning or losing (given that, by definition, neither can be winning and losing at the same time); U the empty set is losing: v( )  0 (given that each simple game is a game in characteristic function form).

Further properties that a simple game v may have are: A. the coalition of all players is winning: v(N)  1; B. no losing coalition contains a winning coalition; C. the complement of any winning coalition is a losing coalition;

rules, whereas other simple games represent procedures that may present contradictions, deadlocks, or both. One particular category of proper simple games is that of proper weighted majority games. These games help establish the distribution of power between the members of an assembly on the basis of possible majority coalitions that could be formed. Let each ith member (i = 1, . . . , n) be assigned a nonnegative weight wi that expresses votes, or seats, shares, and so on. Let q be the majority quota that must be achieved for a decision to be made. Let wS be the total weight of the coalition S, for all S  N: wS  S wi . i2S The weighted majority game [q; w1, w2, . . . , wn] is the simple game defined as:

1 if wS $q vðSÞ5 0 if wS\q: Clearly, this presupposes q  wN . Furthermore, if q is greater than wN/2, then the game is proper and is called a proper weighted majority game.

D. the complement of any losing coalition is a winning coalition.

Note that, for games satisfying properties A and B, property C is equivalent to C. if S and T are two different winning coalitions, then S \ TØ .

A proper simple game is defined as being a simple game that satisfies properties A, B, and C (or C). All simple games that do not possess at least one of these properties are known as improper simple games. Property C (and the corresponding property C) is very important in measuring power, given that it prevents any confusion that might result from allowing separate winning coalitions to make simultaneous decisions. It can be proved that every proper simple game is superadditive. Every proper simple game that also satisfies property D is said to be a strong (or decisive) proper simple game. Property D prevents the paralysis that might result from allowing losing coalitions to obstruct decisions. Thus, strong proper simple games represent efficient group decision

Example Consider the four-person simple game defined on the set N  {1, 2, 3, 4} as follows: the winning coalitions are exclusively those made up of three or four players. It is easily verified that this is a proper game inasmuch as the complements to N of all winning coalitions are losing. The game is also strong, given that the complement of each losing coalition is winning. An analogous game may be considered, where all two-player coalitions are also winning. It is easily verified that this is an improper game, as it does not respect condition C. Izabella Stach See also Minimal Winning Coalition; Simple Games; Voting Power; Weighted Majority Game

Further Readings Felsenthal, D., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Owen, G. (1995). Game theory (3rd ed.). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Psychological Empowerment Shubik, M. (1984). Game theory in the social sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press. Von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

PSYCHOLOGICAL EMPOWERMENT Psychological empowerment is commonly understood as a mechanism by which people can gain greater control over their lives, take a proactive approach in their communities, and develop critical understandings of their sociopolitical environments. It has been a topic of study across several branches of applied social science, including community psychology, social work, public health, and community development. In the ecological tradition—which views psychological processes as situated within multiple layers of aggregation (e.g., family, community)—psychological empowerment has been theorized as the psychological component of a construct with reciprocal relationships between multiple levels of analysis. Specifically, empowerment has been a topic of study at the psychological, organizational, and community levels. This entry is focused on psychological empowerment, yet an ecological understanding means that it is not possible to understand psychological empowerment as a purely individual level process or outcome.

Conceptualization and Measurement The term empowerment has been used intermittently over the past few decades for various political and ideological purposes. In many cases, it has been vaguely or superficially applied. This entry discusses psychological empowerment as it has been theorized and studied empirically in the applied social sciences. One tension has emerged between conceptualization and measurement of psychological empowerment: debate over the distinction between a feeling or a psychological sense of empowerment and the real ability to operate with social power. With these distinctions in mind, the most commonly used conceptual framework for psychological empowerment consists of three components: (1) intrapersonal

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(emotional), (2) interactional (cognitive), and (3) behavioral. The intrapersonal (emotional) component of psychological empowerment has been the most widely studied. The sociopolitical control scale, which measures leadership competence and policy control, is used in most studies. A high level of intrapersonal psychological empowerment indicates self-perceptions of control, efficacy, motivation, and competence in the sociopolitical domain. The interactional (cognitive) component of psychological empowerment has been studied as knowledge of the source, nature, and instruments of social power. This includes the understanding that social power is most effectively exercised by groups rather than individuals, that conflict is a common outcome of the exercise of social power, and that those with power use it to reward their friends and punish their enemies, to include and exclude people from decisions or information, and to shape public perceptions and ideology. The behavioral component of psychological empowerment has been conceptualized as community or citizen participation. An unsettled issue is whether psychological empowerment should include a behavioral component or participation should be treated as a distinct but strongly related variable. Many studies show that participation is related to the intrapersonal component of psychological empowerment, but it appears to be less strongly related to the interactional component. One relevant factor here may be uncertainty regarding how to measure community participation or the other components of psychological empowerment. For instance, the types of activities that are included in measures of community participation have tended to vary across studies, and most measures are simply summations of a variety of civically focused behaviors. However, lack of covariance between components of psychological empowerment may also have to do with the complex and sometimes paradoxical nature of empowerment processes. Several studies have shown relationships between empowerment, participation, and other psychosocial variables (e.g., psychological sense of community) in relationships that are moderated by other variables, including demographic characteristics and the different roles that people play in processes. Furthermore, most researchers agree that processes of

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Public Goods

psychological empowerment unfold in ways that require context-specific study.

Applications Psychological empowerment has been effectively used as an outcome variable for intervention processes including grassroots community organizing, education, health promotion, community development, and prevention programs. In addition, empowerment theory provides a value orientation for the design and implementation of processes emphasizing democratic participation, collaboration, and sociopolitical cognitive development. The ecological specificity of empowerment research has provided insights into interrelationships between psychological dynamics and settings at the organizational and community levels. At the organizational level, an empowerment orientation emphasizes the development of processes and structures that encourage participation, including collective decision making and the existence of opportunities to play meaningful roles in organizational processes. At the community level, it encourages collective action to access resources and challenge existing power structures. Empowerment approaches to design, implementation, and evaluation of community interventions and processes continue to hold promise across many areas of practice.

Future Directions Empirical research on psychological empowerment has revealed group- and setting-level characteristics that encourage psychological empowerment. It has also demonstrated relationships between other psychosocial variables—including sense of community, social cohesion, and collective efficacy—and psychological empowerment. Yet relatively little is known about the processes and outcomes that are common across contexts versus those that are context-specific. More longitudinal studies are needed. In addition to community and organizational contexts, future research should address the relational contexts of psychological empowerment processes and outcomes. Social network analysis provides a promising tool for this type of research. At this point, psychological empowerment has been studied most often in adult populations in the United States. Recent and ongoing research increasingly

seeks to understand the dynamics of psychological empowerment in more diverse populations and age groups. For instance, psychological empowerment of young people is an emerging focus in research. Finally, more study is needed on the impacts of empowering processes and outcomes, and the extent to which empowerment—at each level of analysis—alters real power relationships. Brian D. Christens See also Interdependence Theory; Leadership

Further Readings Perkins, D. D. (2010). Empowerment. In R. Couto (Ed.), Political and civic leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Peterson, N. A., Lowe, J. B., Hughey, J., Reid, R. J., Zimmerman, M. A., & Speer, P. W. (2006). Measuring the intrapersonal component of psychological empowerment: Confirmatory factor analysis of the sociopolitical control scale. American Journal of Community Psychology, 38(3–4), 287–297. Rappaport, J. (1981). In praise of paradox: A social policy of empowerment over prevention. American Journal of Community Psychology, 9(1), 1–25. Speer, P. W., & Peterson, N. A. (2000). Psychometric properties of an empowerment scale: Testing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral domains. Social Work Research, 24(2), 109–118. Zimmerman, M. A. (2000). Empowerment theory: Psychological, organizational and community levels of analysis. In J. Rappaport & E. Seidman (Eds.), Handbook of community psychology (pp. 43–63). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.

PUBLIC GOODS Public (or collective) goods are commodities that are contrasted with private goods. They are of particular interest because they have features that mean they are often suboptimally supplied. That is, markets often do not provide the number or amount of such goods that the public would ideally want. They are subject to collective action problems. We might say that collective action problems occur because goods often display elements of publicness. A public good can be defined

Public Goods Index

by two conditions: first, public goods are jointly supplied (or nonrival), which means that one person’s consumption does not reduce the amount available to others. For example, the nation’s defense force protects my neighbor equally with myself from aggression by other nations, and my neighbor’s consumption of that protection does not reduce my protection. Second, public goods are nonexcludable, which means that the consumption of the good by one person automatically makes it available to other group members. If I sweep the snow and ice away from the front of my house so I do not slip, I also enable others not to slip when they walk by my house. We can say that a pure private good is rival and excludable while a pure public good is nonrival and nonexcludable. So if we have a group with i members and a good x where the total amount of the good x available is X, the consumption feasibility constraint is:

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state intervention. However, while some stateprovided goods, such as national defense, display a high degree of publicness, many state-provided services are private. Education, health, and most welfare services are private goods publicly supplied. The state supplies such goods for reasons of equity, not suboptimality as such. Keith Dowding See also Collective Action Problem; Public Goods Index

Further Readings Cornes, R., & Sandler, T. (1996). The theory of externalities, public goods and club goods. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Samuelson, P. A. (1955). Diagrammatic exposition of a theory of public goods. Review of Economics and Statistics, 38, 350–356.

if x is a private good then  Xi  X if x is a public good then xi  X Let i  2 (it is a group of two members) and X  x1   x2 (the first expression is what one person consumes, the second what the second person consumes). Then if   1 we have a private good. If   0 then we have a public good. And if 0    1 then we have a mixed good. Most goods display some characteristics of both public and private goods; the more public they are, the more subject they are to suboptimal supply. When we consider collective action problems we often think in terms of pure public goods; but most goods are mixed goods, and collective action problems occur in relation to the degree to which goods displays publicness. So while we might explain collective action problems in terms of pure public goods, the problems themselves translate to mixed goods. Public goods are important when considering the power of groups, because the greater the degree of publicness of a good for a group the greater the coordination that is required for that group to be able to supply the good. The degree of publicness affects the power of the group. Paul Samuelson provided the first modern discussion of public goods in the 1950s. He suggested that their existence provides a justification for

PUBLIC GOODS INDEX The Public Goods Index (PGI) measures the power distribution in committees, parliaments, and hierarchical organizations. The index was introduced by Manfred Holler and axiomatized by Holler and Edward W. Packel. In contrast to most other power indices, the PGI explicitly considers political outcomes to be public goods. It measures the potential of an individual member i of a political body N to contribute to the selection of a public good x. As such it builds on Max Weber’s definition of power as chance that an “actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance”: that is, power does not depend on what an actor wants to do but what he or she can do. The public good perspective implies that (a) every voter will “consume” the same political outcome (i.e., the same level of provision of the public good x), and (b) only decisive sets “matter.” Property (a) does not require that all voters like the chosen political outcome x equally but that each has to consume x and cannot be excluded from its consumption. Nonrivalry in consumption applies, so everyone consumes x irrespective of other members of the society.

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In order to clarify property (b) we define S, T, R, and K as subsets of N and call them coalitions. The elements of the decisive sets M(v) are defined such that M(v)  {S N | v(S)  1 and v(K)  0 if K S}. Here v(S)  1 and v(K)  0 imply that S is a winning coalition and K is a losing one, respectively, thereby defining the simple game (N, v). M(v) is identical with the set of minimum winning coalitions of (N,v). Each element in M(v) represents a different political outcome. If S is M(v) and S is a strict subset of T, then it is assumed that the political outcome of T is identical to the political outcome of S. Consequently, T can be neglected when it comes to measuring power, because members in T but not in S do not contribute to the determination of x. This argument also applies if both S and R are elements of M(v) and proper subsets of T. Again, T does not count for measuring power. Note that this does not mean that T never forms but, if it forms, it does so on the basis of “luck” (or ideology), not power. Let ci(v) be the number of coalitions S such that S is a decisive set and i is an element of S. Then the value of the PGI for player i, hi, is given by

/

n

hi ðvÞ 5 ci + ci so that + hi ðvÞ  1 i2N

i51

Applying this formula to voting game v°  (51; 35, 20, 15, 15, 15), where the decision rule d°  51 and the vote distribution w°  (35, 20, 15, 15, 15) gives the power distribution h(v°)  (4/15,

2/15, 3/15, 3/15, 3/15). It is apparent that the PGI is not locally monotonic (LM) in voting weights: this example illustrates the “paradox of weighted voting.” The fact that the PGI does not satisfy LM has been viewed by some as a defect that should lead to rejection of the measure. But a closer analysis shows that game v° induces the violation of LM because it does not guarantee a winning coalition. In the case of five players (or less) PGI does not violate LM if the voting rule is decisive and proper such that a single winning coalition result is assured. Holler and Napel argue that it is a defect in decision rules or, more general, the design of the voting body, not in PGI itself that results in a violation of LM, and it is actually an attraction of the PGI that, contrary to the more popular power measures due to Shapley–Shubik and Banzhaf, it highlights such a peculiarity, perhaps even defect, of the voting body. Manfred J. Holler See also Power Indices

Further Readings Holler, M. J. (1982). Forming coalitions and measuring voting power. Political Studies, 30, 262–271. Holler, M J., & Napel, S. (2004). Monotonicity of power and power measures. Theory and Decision, 56, 93–111. Holler, M. J., & Packel, E. W. (1983). Power, luck and the right index. Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie (Journal of Economics), 43, 21–29.

Q QMV provisions (stated in the Treaty of Nice of February 26, 2001, which came into force in May 2004 when 10 new member states joined the EU) differ from the previous QMV rules in three respects. First, the degressive weighting was redesigned by allocating to the 15 existing members and the 12 then-prospective members a new set of weights. Second, the quota of this decision rule was raised in the 27-member scenario to nearly 74% of the total weight (255 votes out of 345). Third, in addition to the usual quota condition for passing a bill, two further conditions were imposed: those member states supporting the bill must be a majority of the members, and their population must be at least 62% of the total population of the EU. However, detailed computation shows that the effect of these two additional conditions on the members’ voting powers is very small indeed. This is because out of the huge number of possible voting configurations (divisions of the CM as between yes and no voters) there are very few that meet the quota of the degressive weighted rule, but fail to satisfy the two additional conditions. The second change made at Nice, raising the quota from the traditional 71% to 74% for the 27-member scenario, seems almost trifling. But in fact it is momentous, because potentially it makes passing bills considerably more difficult.

QUALIFIED MAJORITY VOTING Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) is the official European Union (EU) term for the decision rule employed by its Council of Ministers (CM) for most of its decisions. Basically, QMV is a weighted decision rule: each EU member state is assigned a weight (a number of votes); and for a bill to pass, the total weight of the member states voting for it must equal or exceed a set quota (also known as the threshold), constituting a specified supermajority of the member states’ votes. The weights and quota were first set for the original six members in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, and up until the 2001 Nice Treaty they had to be reset with each successive enlargement of the EU (1973, 1981, 1985, and 1995). So far there has been no explicit general formula prescribing how the weights and quota should be set. Rather, with each enlargement the allocation was renegotiated ad hoc. Nevertheless, there was a fairly stable implicit pattern. On all five pre-Nice occasions, weights were allocated according to a so-called degressive (or subproportional) principle, whereby the more populous states were assigned greater weights, but less than proportional to their population size. The quota was chosen as the integer closest to 71% of the total weight. However, in view of the prospective enlargement of the EU from 15 members in 1995 to 27 during the following 12 years, the Nice EU Intergovernmental Conference of December 2000 thoroughly redesigned the QMV rule. The new

Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover See also I-Power; Penrose Voting Power Measure; Square Root Rules; Weighted Voting 543

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Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (2004). Qualified majority voting explained. Homo Oeconomicus, 21(3–4), 573–595.

QUARRELING PARADOX The quarreling paradox is that a player of a simple game may actually increase his power by rendering himself unable to join any coalition containing certain specific opponents. Moreover, the powers of two players may both increase when they “quarrel,” that is, when each refuses to join any coalition containing the other. This phenomenon contradicts the intuitive notion that power depends on freedom to act; by reducing freedom, quarreling should also reduce power. Simple cooperative games are useful models of group decision processes in which different individuals have different roles. A subset of players, or coalition, is winning if it can make a decision on behalf of the group; it is losing otherwise. To specify a simple game, simply identify all winning coalitions. When the Shapley value for cooperative games is applied to a simple game, it called the Shapley– Shubik (SS) index, and measures a player’s importance (or power) in the group decision process. A player’s SS index value can be interpreted as its expected “points” in a model of play in which an ordering (permutation) of players is chosen at random and the first player whose support converts the set of all preceding players to a winning coalition is awarded one point, while all other players receive zero. A player’s (absolute) Penrose– Banzhaf–Coleman (PBC) index can be interpreted as its expected “points” in a model of play in which a subset of the players is chosen at random and each player in the subset is awarded one point if it belongs to the subset and its removal changes the subset from winning to losing; otherwise, it receives no points. Other indices are defined by other models of play. Models of play can be adapted to a context in which some coalitions cannot form, as the quarreling scenario supposes. When thus recalculated, a quarreling player’s value on common indices may increase. For example, consider a weighted voting

game in which players A, B, and C have two, one, and one votes respectively, the quota is three, and players B and C quarrel. Then the SS indices of B and C rise from 1/6 to 1/4, because orderings in which B and C both join the coalition before it gains winning status are excluded, and their (normalized) BCP indices rise from 1/5 to 1/4, because coalitions including both B and C are excluded. Steven J. Brams called this phenomenon the paradox of quarreling members. Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover point out that the quarrelling paradox is different from other paradoxes of voting power in that it requires an ad hoc extension of the calculation (to remove coalitions containing two or more quarrelers but retain all others). They suggest that quarreling is incompatible with many concepts of power; for example, policy-motivated individuals have preferences about outcomes (e.g., to pass or defeat a bill) and not about each other. They argue also that the paradox may not be so surprising in that the strategy of reducing one’s own freedom to act (e.g., by “burning bridges”) is widely practiced. Moreover, if one quarreling player never joins a coalition to which the other belongs, this restricts the coalition opportunities of nonquarreling players as well. While the quarrelling paradox does not distinguish among power indices, and its practical meaning is in doubt, it nevertheless provides useful insights into power indices, and power. Marc Kilgour See also Paradox of New Members; Power Indices; Shapley–Shubik Index

Further Readings Brams, S. J. (1976). Paradoxes in politics. New York: Free Press. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

QUEER THEORIES

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POWER

To “queer” power is to seek to expose the limitations, unstable foundations, and power-laden

Queer Theories of Power

assumptions of the “straight” political, psychological, cultural, and economic discourses that govern us. Queer theories assume that truth, nature, and fact are not, contrary to conventional wisdom, pregiven and universally valid but are discursive constructions. Reclaiming a pejorative term (for nonheterosexuals and other “deviants”), queer theories provide far-reaching critiques of and challenges to the dualistic, essentialist, and heteronormative discourses that constitute our lives at all levels, from the intimate and everyday to the global. With similarities to, but going farther than, nongender postmodern theorizing, queer approaches to power seek to subvert the apparent naturalness of the “straight” authorities, hierarchies, and discourses residing in the socioeconomic systems that govern us. Theorists such as Eve Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Gayle Rubin, David Halperin, and Judith Butler have linked the sexual and material in ways that challenge conventionally held gender stereotypes and norms. Examining the constitution and effects of social discourses of sex, many queer theorists echo Michel Foucault’s concern for the ways in which the repressive moral discourses that emanate from Western political, economic, and judicial institutions of social authority constrain and control bodies (through, for example, modern science, medicine, and technology). Their critiques, part of a thriving corpus of contemporary critical theorizing, deconstruct the dualities of sex and gender, homosexuality and heterosexuality to reveal the high political stakes involved in projects that question the “natural” causal relationship among sex, gender, and sexuality. A successor to, and to some extent a replacement of, lesbian and gay studies, queer theories emerged, initially (in the late 1980s) as a challenge, first, to the homogenizing discourse of (homo) sexual difference (which was criticized as a rather white, male, middle-class model of analysis), and, second, as part of a social movement to give voice to and represent marginalized sexualities. The very word queer itself reflects the potential instability of all forms of identity: queer is less an identity than a critique of the formation of (apparently stable and noncontradictory) categories of identity. As such, queer theories include a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, assertions, and claims. Deployed to designate the delimitation of

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identity (i.e., the potential for identity to be multiple and even infinite, as opposed to fixed and invariable), “queer theory” is a way of pointing ahead by rejecting restrictive contemporary arrangements, resisting homophobia and heterosexism, and reimagining future politics, but one that never knows in advance precisely at what or where to point. The proliferation of queer theoretical research in recent years represents a shift in society’s engagements with the world, particularly in our engagements with and experiences of power. For queer approaches, power is prolific but also both intensely intimate and impersonal. Each of us is surrounded by overt and tacit sexual norms, which impact on our lives in numerous and diverse ways. These norms are produced and reproduced through prevailingly heteronormative relations of power, hierarchy, and privilege embodied in mechanisms of governance (institutions such as the education system, modern medicine, mental health care, the military, the penal system, and corporate industry, which institutionalize, regulate, and reproduce heterosexuality as natural and unmarked). As physical and psychological standards against which the human body and its behaviors are measured, social norms constitute what is considered normal and natural about a person. Productive and reproductive (of themselves, social identities, regulatory apparatuses, mechanisms of control, and life opportunities) these norms are also repressive: the bounds of what may be considered normal, acceptable, and decent in Western liberal society are continually policed (such that we police ourselves) through a variety of mechanisms of regulation, control, and (if need be) exclusion. Paying specific attention to the sexual norms and codes that privilege certain types of behaviors, identities, representations, and bodies, queer theories challenge very basic, but intimately held, assumptions about who we are and what we do. Queer theories thus represent a novel commitment to subverting, at the most basic level, dominant standards of behavior and classifications of gender and sex identity. Constituting a more generalizable critique of heteronormative power and its effects, queer approaches can, however, be said to exist “beyond” sexuality in the sense of representing all “nonstraight” work that is, as David Halperin suggests, at odds with the normal. Queer

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theory need not necessarily define itself as homosexual or bisexual (or even straight): it is more a series of reflections on, than a single theory of, the ways in which we as simultaneously consumers, producers, educators and learners, are subject to and object of a bewildering array of socioeconomic productions, representations, norms, conventions, stereotypes, and life opportunities. Importantly, the ways in which we negotiate and respond to these convey a great deal about prevailing relations of power.

Queer Theory in Practice: Some Examples For queer approaches, heterosexuality is a social, political, and economic construct, not the pregiven basis for human interaction that it is made to seem. Despite, however, modern science’s “discovery” of numerous types of bodies, mixing together conventionally “male” or “female” anatomical components, the notion that there is only one “normal” way to be a woman or a man persists in Western medicine and society, which continue to advocate that there are only two sexes and that heterosexuality alone is “normal.” Heteronormative structures, institutions, and policies (particularly common, but no longer limited, to Western, liberal democratic societies) understand bodies as “naturally” distinct according to the arrangement of their sexual organs. In official political, socioeconomic, and medical discourse, there are only two types of sexed person, man and woman, with “genders” ultimately produced by and dependent on the “natural” distinction between male and female (“masculine” and “feminine” are rarely understood as entirely distinct from male and female bodies). “Sexuality” is assumed to be an “identity category” that is assigned according to one’s “gender” and the “gender” of those one is sexually attracted to. Because gender is seen to result from sex, so too sexuality can be defined according to “same” or “opposite” sex attraction. The effects on all people (gay, straight, transsexual, transgender, hermaphrodite, undecided, etc.) of binary, oppositional, and restrictive discourses are many and varied. The policing of human bodies and identities is a serious and deleterious process, with effects ranging from tacit discrimination to more overt, and potentially lethal,

forms of social (and also physical, psychiatric, and medical) stigmatization, mistreatment, and exclusion. For example: the oppositions to new methods of gynecological surgery in early 20th-century Western society, which were instigated not for feminist reasons, but on the grounds that operations threatened to “unsex” women by destroying their most important social role, namely motherhood; survey evidence from the United States, Canada, and Australia, although not extensive, suggests that homosexual or bisexual individuals, particularly youths, are significantly more likely to attempt and commit suicide; Health Canada’s newly instituted policy, in late 2007, banned all sexually active gay men from donating organs, regardless of their HIV status; the vitriol unleashed in the mid1990s at scholar and sexologist Anne FaustoSterling’s suggestion that the two-sex, two-gender taxonomy is outdated (she advocates a five-sex taxonomy). Opposition came largely from the Christian right in the United States and also from other sexologists working in the United States and other countries where it is common practice to have operated to assign a “sex” to an intersex baby within 24 hours of its birth. The prevalence, however, of sex-based birth “defects” (estimates suggest that the frequency of various categories of intersexuality are as many as 17 intersex children for every 1,000 born) suggests that conventional standards of bodily “normality” may be way off the mark. Those whose sexual or gender identities are less easily read as fixed and binary essence have long been characterized as of questionable nature or character and discriminated against accordingly. Reading overtly “queer” and nonheterosexual behaviors, practices, and bodies as unnatural, abnormal, deviant, or abhorrent, Western society has attempted in many and various ways to remedy the deviancy, intervening to correct physically (through medical and psychiatric procedures), to socially exclude, or to shame into secrecy. Queer theories instead caution us to be more attentive to the multiple, unstable ways in which people may be like or different from each other. In counseling us to think “otherwise,” an important intellectual and practical space can be opened for renegotiating identity. Penny Griffin

Queer Theories of Power See also Feminist Theories of Power; Foucault, Michel; Gender, Role of Power in; Heterosexism, Role of Power in

Further Readings Abelove, H., Barale, M. A., & Halperin, D. M. (Eds.). (1994). The lesbian and gay studies reader. London and New York: Routledge.

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Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. London and New York: Routledge. Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Jolly, S. (2000). “Queering” development: Exploring the links between same-sex sexualities, gender and development. Gender and Development, 8(1), 78–88.

R RACISM, ROLE

OF

POWER

European. This construction enabled them to own the mixed-race offspring of coerced sexual encounters. Subsequently, it has enabled European Americans to define their racial in-group narrowly, overexcluding multiracial Americans. Increasingly, however, the old definitions are giving way to postracial definitions of more and more Americans as mixed race. And in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas, racial definitions vary by culture. However, in most countries, darker-skinned people are disadvantaged relative to lighter-skinned people. People reify and essentialize the socially constructed definitions of race, exaggerating their fragile biological basis as representing a fixed categorical divide. In the United States, European Americans who view race in more biological terms also endorse opinions correlated with racial prejudice. For the powerful group, justifying a racially unequal status quo follows from the alleged essence of supposedly distinct racial groups. Once identified with a particular group, people favor their own in-group, a well-established phenomenon across most human groups. In a zerosum, fixed-pie context, favoring one’s own group means disadvantaging the other group. The evidence for in-group advantage in allocating rewards (e.g., jobs) is stronger than the evidence for overt hostility to the out-group for most people who are not extremist ideologues. Nevertheless, the result of in-group favoritism is discrimination against the out-group. Discrimination matters only if one controls valued resources. Hence, bias against lower-power groups (by the powerful) carries more impact than

IN

Racism is bias (prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination) on the basis of perceived ethnicity. Most often, it targets groups who apparently threaten the societal default, more powerful (usually majority) group. Power matters to racism because bias by the majority against the minority is not functionally equivalent to bias by the minority against the majority. Hence, a more complete definition of racism adds to the opening sentence: “as directed against less powerful groups.” Racism, then, is prejudice plus power.

Racism Is Prejudice Plus Power Four kinds of evidence support this analysis of racism: (1) power guides the construction of racial categories; (2) people—especially the more powerful groups—view socially constructed racial categories as real and essential; (3) people favor their own racial groups; and (4) power plus prejudice makes in-group favoritism asymmetrical in its consequences. This analysis combines the social psychology of categorization, in-group favoritism, and power as control, as well as the sociology and politics of categorical divides in society and its institutions. Power directs societal categories of race. In the United States, the interests of white slaveholders created the one-drop rule, whereby a person with any evident African ancestry is categorized as black, even if the person’s heritage is half or more 549

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bias against powerful groups (by the less powerful). Thus, powerful majority (white) bias toward less powerful minorities (people of color) fits the definition of racism.

How Power Functions in Extreme Racism Resources controlled by powerful racial groups are both tangible and intangible. More extreme prejudices view less powerful racial groups as threatening the status quo in which the more powerful group controls these resources. One type of prejudice focuses on perceived threat to dominant values. Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)— identified by Bob Altemeyer as a more precise, modern version of Theodor Adorno, Else FrenkelBruswick, Daniel Levenson, and Nevitt Sanford’s 1940s–1950s authoritarian personality—views out-groups as having deviant values. The allegedly threatened values include the work ethic, sexual control, and law and order. Scores on RWA correlate with racial prejudice all over the world. Paralleling the RWA’s focus on threat to values is a focus on perceived economic threat. Social dominance orientation (SDO)—identified by James Sidanius and Felicia Pratto—views out-groups as competing for scarce resources in a tough, competitive world. Because some groups allegedly must dominate others, people scoring high on SDO prefer that their racial in-group remain on top. SDO also correlates with racial prejudice internationally. The combination of high RWA and SDO profiles most extreme racial bigots, some of whom commit hate crimes.

How Power Functions in Ordinary Racism The majority of citizens in modern developed countries do not view themselves as racists and reject the extreme views of those highest on SDO and RWA. Instead, they are well-intentioned but often inept and uncomfortable in cross-racial interaction due to the continuing extreme racial segregation of American and other multiracial democracies, as documented by Douglas Massey. Racism in most majority members takes various subtle, unexamined forms that nonetheless maintain their privilege. David O. Sears, John B. McConahay, and Donald R. Kinder’s symbolic racism focuses on opinions

correlated with race but having apparently nonracial motives (e.g., against busing to desegregate schools, opposing affirmative action to create a diverse workforce); symbolic racism reflects a cluster of political opinions that all happen to disadvantage minorities and privilege majorities; it predicts race-based voting. Ambivalent racism, documented by Irwin Katz and R. G Hass, emphasizes the resentment felt by whites toward blacks on the grounds that the latter supposedly deviate from mainstream work ethic values, but also pities blacks as disadvantaged. Circumstances and values determine which pole of the racial ambivalence emerges. Aversive racism, shown by Samuel L. Gaertner and John F. Dovidio, reflects well-intentioned whites’ avoidance of their own potential racism, leading them to avoid contact with blacks. Because they disavow their own unconscious racism, it leaks out in nonverbal behavior, in situations that supply a nonracial excuse for avoidance, and on measures that assess automatic responses. Racial responses often dissociate people’s wellintentioned, more controlled, antiracist beliefs from their more automatic, unconscious, culturally racist associations, as Patricia D. Devine discovered. With the right values, experience, goals, and capacity, however, whites can overcome even automatic racist responses, refusing to rest on power and privilege. Susan T. Fiske See also Power as Control Theory

Further Readings Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Dovidio, J. F., Glick, P., & Rudman, L. A. (Eds.). Reflecting on “The nature of prejudice.” Malden, MA: Blackwell. Massey, D. S. (2007). Categorically unequal: The American stratification system. New York: Russell Sage. Operario, D., & Fiske, S. T. (1998). Racism equals power plus prejudice: A social psychological equation for racial oppression. In J. L. Eberhardt & S. T. Fiske (Eds.), Confronting racism: The problem and the response (pp. 33–53). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Rationality

RATIONALITY Rationality is a disputed concept in the social sciences that has been used in different ways in discussions of power, interests, freedom, and related concepts. In this entry, rationality will be discussed in two guises: first, instrumental rationality, as used in rational choice theory; second, substantive rationality, as used in continental philosophy. In reality there are important variants in both instrumental and substantive rationality, and I will elide many distinctions within each. The discussion will focus on how rationality bears upon discussions of interests, freedom, and power.

Instrumental Rationality Instrumental rationality is a normative concept: what is instrumentally rational is the best means to achieve an end. It is not meant to convey anything about the superiority of some ends over others. Thus, a rational choice is a conditional imperative pertaining to some end. We might judge that end to be crazy, immoral, or substantially unreasonable. With regard to instrumental rationality, however, the value of the end is irrelevant. One of the important results of examining human action through instrumentally rational eyes is that rational individuals might well act in ways that are against their collective interest. Individual rationality can lead to collective irrationality. This result, also known as the collective action problem, can be seen in game theory in games such as the prisoner’s dilemma and chicken games. Rationality in rational choice theory itself is in fact a purely formal concept that allows for predictability or interpretation of agents’ actions. Rational choice theory is a methodology that is based on three definitions or conditions that constitute rational choice and from which we can draw revealed preference. Rational choice theory assumes that individuals can order their preferences over states of the world (or objects) with the base relation R. We define an R relation as one where the agent either prefers the first alternative to the other or is indifferent between them, and it can be read as “at least as good as.” Rational choice theory is then defined by three conditions concerned with preferences that are required for

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rationalizing or interpreting the behavior of agents. Preferences must be reflexive, complete, and transitive. If an individual’s preferences are reflexive, then for any alternative x within a domain A an individual i either prefers or is indifferent between x and x itself (for all x 2 A, x Ri x). From the preference relation R (weak preference), the preference relations P (strict preference) and I (indifference) can be defined. (Subscript i stands for the individual and lowercase letters for social states or objects. The uppercase letter A stands for the set of alternatives.) Second, completeness implies that any item in domain A must enter into the preference ordering so that for all alternatives x, y 2 A, either x Ri y or y Ri x (or both). In other words, either individual i prefers y to x or is indifferent between them. Transitivity means that for any triple of alternatives x, y, z 2 A, if x Ri y and y Ri z, then x Ri z (which means that if i weakly prefers x to y and y to z, then the player must weakly prefer x to z). These conditions allow for the weak axiom of revealed preference (WARP), which enables rationalization, interpretation, and explanation of behavior. The claim is that any interpretation of behavior, whether given by the analyst or the agent, if the action is rationalizable (recognizable as a reason) must abide by these conditions. The idea of these conditions is that given some set of behaviors by some individuals, we can gain insight into their beliefs and desires. One way of thinking of this idea is to think of a triad of belief– desire–action. If we know people’s beliefs and desires, we can predict or explain their actions. That is, we can say they behaved thusly because of the specific beliefs they hold and the desires they have about how the world should be. If we see their behavior and know their beliefs, we can understand their desires; likewise, if we see their behavior and know their desires, we can predict what their beliefs must be. Rationality in rational choice is thus a methodological device to explain the world. Moreover, given what we know about individuals in some situations, we can use that knowledge to predict how they should behave in other situations. Rationality in this sense is not used directly to draw inferences about power. However, it can be used to try to explain how power structures operate. For example, realizing that individually rational persons will not necessarily act in their

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collective or group interests can help us to understand how groups of people can appear powerless in the face of major problems that threaten their very existence. It can help explain why some groups who do not necessarily appear more powerful manage to prevail simply because of structural reasons that enable them to overcome their collective action problems more easily. It can thus help us to understand the structural features of society that mean that certain systemic outcomes tend to appear. It can help us model systemic power or systematic luck, which privilege some groups over others. Some accounts of power specify that by definition power is used against human interests. That is, they suggest that when action is taken in the interests of someone, then that is not a power relationship. Or conversely, if people act to achieve ends that they find desirable but in fact are against their interests, we must conclude that a power relationship has been involved in the generation of those false desires. Given that instrumental or procedural rationality is agnostic over the worth of specific outcomes, it does not itself comment upon the nature of human interests. Thus, accounts of power that involve some objective notion of interests are, at first blush, anathema to writers utilizing procedural rationality. For such writers power is some objective or causal relationship between sets of agents and outcomes (power to); and sets of agents and other agents (power over). However, because they recognize that rational choice is a normative concept that specifies efficient means to given ends, such writers can recognize that individuals might have conflicting ends; or might behave in ways that do not serve their interests as they see them. Furthermore, rational choice analysis does not privilege individuals’ own reasons for action. For example, someone might honestly claim to prefer red to white wine or, to cite a more serious issue, to “care about the environment.” However, revealed preference analysis might demonstrate that the person chooses white wine far more often (and in contexts where red wine is appropriate) or acts in ways that damage the environment, belying the stated preferences. Rational choice analysis privileges revealed preference (through action) over stated preferences. Instrumental rationality can be used in straightforward normative contexts. Given that we can

use the methods of revealed preference (or rational choice) theory to examine what individuals’ preferences are, we can also infer what those preferences might be in other situations and contexts. We can infer what people’s beliefs might be under different informational constraints, or what their desires might be if they had had different types of experiences. These inferences allow writers in the instrumental rationality tradition to theorize about how society might be structured to equalize power and serve human interests to a greater extent. Those in this tradition normally maintain the neopositivist distinction between positive or explanatory analysis and normative analysis. Often those using instrumental rationality assume that agents in their models are self-interested. This merely means that within the terms of the roles the agents take in the model they are assumed to act instrumentally to achieve aims associated with that role. For example, politicians in a democracy act so as to get reelected, mothers act to protect their children, environmentalists act to protect the environment, and so on. This self-interest assumption might be kin- or gene-oriented in many common models of human behavior; or be directed toward group interests in models where the identity of the self is given in terms of the identity of the group. Within instrumental accounts of rationality are accounts that pay greater attention to human cognitive limitations. Herbert Simon introduced the notion of bounded rationality, which takes into account the constraints of time and search costs. Cognitive psychologists have argued that we have evolved to make decisions within certain frames, and rather than logically working through decisions we follow rules and cognitive biases that served us well when facing problems in our evolutionary past similar to those we face now. Out of those contexts, however, these rules and heuristics that guide our thinking might lead to suboptimal outcomes and irrational behavior as seen in objective terms.

Substantive Rationality Substantive rationality is related to values and appeals to ethical norms. Those working within the paradigm of substantive rationality have a theory about what is rational and what

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cannot be rational. They take their lead from Immanuel Kant, who tries to give an account of practical reason that includes unconditional reasons for action: that is, they are not instrumental in any regard. Kant distinguished the hypothetical imperative, or instrumental reasoning, from the categorical imperative or universal law of human behavior. The formula of universal law is that one should act only in accordance with that maxim through which one can at the same time will it to become a universal law. The easiest application of this universal law is truth-telling: it is not possible to universalize the idea of always lying, because then lying would have no point. Any categorical imperative, according to Kant, will provide reason for acting according to the universal principle or maxim. However, Kant calls his most significant works critiques of reason. His critique of pure reason is that we cannot attain knowledge by pure reason alone, but we must use our experience of the world. Our moral world cannot just be set by pure reason, he suggests, but must itself be put before a tribunal and judged. These thoughts could lead to the radically relativist or postmodernist ideas that reason has no authority, and some who critique the Enlightenment project of reason as the basis of our understanding look back to such critiques. However, the Kantian influence that is more familiar in political theory in the past 40 years comes via John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Scanlon, and all those influenced by them. They follow Kant’s justification of reason of moral principles or principles of justice that reach those people who share a given vision of the world. For Rawls and Scanlon, principles of justice can be formulated for those sharing a general liberal outlook. For Habermas, communicative rationality is a process of dialogue and deliberation in which each person leaves behind his or her personal viewpoints to come to common understandings. The ideas are Kantian in that those who propose certain actions or institutions must do so giving reasons that are acceptable to others, both in thought and in their action. Through these processes, rationality will provide substance. It is not merely a validation of action for outcomes that have no further justification. In none of the writers mentioned are the principles they suggest for justice or for moral action derived from pure reason itself, as is sometimes suggested by critics. Rather, the substance in

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their conclusions for action is derived from reflections upon the empirical world and, indeed, from what people want from that world. However, it is the principles of rationality in the form of impartiality and recognition of the views of others that drive their conclusions. In Scanlon, for example, the principle is that any reason that one gives for one’s own position must be one that cannot be reasonably rejected by another. Thus the claim “My God says we should do x” can be reasonably rejected, because someone else might claim “My God says we should do y.” If the former cannot be reasonably rejected, neither can the latter. Substance is formed not by the claims that are being made, but by the rationality of the principles of logic (noncontradiction) and a recognition of what constitutes reasonableness. This latter is very controversial, with some critics claiming that what is reasonable for one person is unreasonable for another. These writers, however, trade upon the idea that all humans share some interests, and do see the world in similar ways. Principles of reasonable action are therefore generated through rationality. Substantive rationality has a strong relationship with issues of power and freedom. For some, the Kantian line is that a person can only be free if he or she follows the dictates of reason. Reason is what makes us human; not to follow its principles means we are not free. Freedom in this sense is not necessarily making choices after due consideration of alternatives (though it does not discount that where it is appropriate), but following the universal laws of freedom. Others, who believe that such accounts of substantive rationality are inherently flawed, see almost the opposite. According to them, because there can be no way of rationalizing conventions in the Kantian manner, all such principles and all attempts to reach reasonable agreement are, in reality, simply power struggles. Liberal Kantians have been subject to specific criticism in this regard, accused of cloaking a specific hegemonic project of imposing liberal values on a culturally heterogeneous world in the words of universalistic rationality.

Relationship Between Rationality and Power There is no straightforward relationship between rationality and power. Rationality in a rationalchoice sense can be used to model and try to

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explain relationships of power between agents. It can try to explain manipulatory techniques, or the utility of different forms of resource in strategic contexts. Rationality in the substantive sense makes a greater claim to be an alternative to power in social relations, transcending conflictual power and perhaps aiding consensual power. On the other hand, there are those who suggest that rationality is a form of power that can be debilitating. Bent Flyvbjerg in his Rationality and Power argues this most forcefully. At one level, Flyvbjerg’s book can be read as a case study set in the town of Aalborg, in which planners, through their technical expertise, manipulate information and use their authority to force through planning decisions they favor. Flyvbjerg shows how they are not merely neutral arbiters who advise government and the people, but have their own interests and are subject to political pressures themselves. In itself that would be a simple story of how ”technical rationality,” or we might just say information and expertise, is a resource that can be used by the unscrupulous to get what they want or what those who put pressure on them want. Flyvbjerg makes a much grander claim, however. In a Foucauldian spirit, he claims that the rational knowledge of town planners is itself rationalization, which is power. That is, he claims that power corrupts any kind of rationality to the extent that there can be no unbiased rationalization of the planning study. He tells the story from the inside—what the actors claim they were doing, as they saw it—but then claims to reveal from the outside, through a theory of rationality as power that influences, what those actors were actually doing. In doing so he connects the concept of power and the rationality of planning practice, and claims that there can be no objective story of how planning serves established elites and the existing power structure or the manner in which it might be resisted. Flyvbjerg’s account, after all, in his own lights must also be a rationalization serving his own interests in the matter. So we have three possibilities connecting rationality and power: the rationality that we assume to provide interpretations of what actors think they are doing and to model strategic actions that can give us a picture of the power structure; an account that ties rationality to freedom and hence to the power of individuals to consensually increase their

power as a collective; and an account that denies that we can rationally reconstruct either from the agents’ own perspectives or our own anything that is not itself already implicated in a power struggle. Keith Dowding See also Barry, Brian; Chicken Games; Collective Action Problem; Consensual Power, Theories of; Domination; Dowding, Keith; Flyvbjerg, Bent; Foucault, Michel; Free Will; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Habermas, Jürgen; Interests; Lukes, Steven; Power To and Power Over; Prisoner’s Dilemma; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Brown, H. I. (1988). Rationality. London: Routledge. Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Rationality and power: Democracy and practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O’Neill, O. (1989). Constructions of reason: Explorations of Kant’s practical philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

RAVEN, BERTRAM (1926– ) Bertram H. Raven is a social psychologist widely considered one of the most important researchers on interpersonal influence and social power. His work has been applied to areas including organizational power relationships, health psychology, close relationships, education, confrontations between political figures, and religion as a mechanism of social control. He has authored or coauthored over 85 papers, chapters, and books. Most cited is the bases of power theory, which he developed with John R. P. French Jr. This is the most common model of interpersonal power in the social psychological and industrial/organizational literature. Raven’s recent work has focused on his power/interaction model of interpersonal influence—a further development of the original bases of power model. Raven also has a long-term interest in interdependence in group problem solving. One of six children, Raven was born in Youngstown, Ohio, to Russian Jewish immigrants

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in a Yiddish-speaking home. A precociously accomplished musician, Raven was most interested in a career in music until drafted into the army in 1944 at age 18. Here he took a course called Psychology and Life and fell in love with psychology. After his discharge, he entered Ohio State University, completing his BA in two years (1948), and MA (1949) in one on the GI Bill. His desire to become a social psychologist was ignited by taking his first course in social psychology with Donald Campbell and by reading Kurt Lewin and early issues of the Journal of Social Issues. Entering the PhD program in social psychology at the University of Michigan, Raven received a research assistantship with Leon Festinger at the Research Center for Group Dynamics. Raven completed his doctoral dissertation with John R. P. French Jr. in 1953 after Festinger (then his dissertation advisor) left for the University of Minnesota. While continuing to work with French, Raven stayed on at the Research Center for Group Dynamics as a research associate with a lectureship in psychology. After traveling to the Netherlands on a Fulbright scholarship, he met his future wife Celia while vacationing in Israel. After a position at the RAND Corporation, in 1956 he accepted a position at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and has been a professor there ever since. Currently professor emeritus, his research and teaching continue. At UCLA he has been director of the Survey Research Center and the training program in health psychology, and has chaired the department of psychology for 5 years. In 1966 he was instrumental in starting the UCLA Upward Bound program. He has also served as a visiting professor at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the London School of Economics, the University of Washington, and the University of Hawaii. He has served as external examiner for the University of the West Indies. Awards include two Fulbright scholarships, a Guggenheim fellowship, a senior NATO Science Fellowship, an NIMH fellowship, and the Kurt Lewin Award for relating social psychological research to social action. He is a fellow in the American Psychological Society, the International Association of Applied Psychology, and five divisions

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of the American Psychological Association. He has received special recognition from the Los Angeles city council and mayor, and the California state legislature and governor. Gregg J. Gold See also Bases of Power; French, John R. P., Jr.; Influence; Lewin, Kurt and Power; Social Power

Further Readings French, J. R. P., Jr., & Raven, B. H. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research. Raven, B. H. (1992). A power/interaction model of interpersonal influence: French and Raven thirty years later. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 7, 217–244. Raven, B. H. (2001). Power/interaction and interpersonal influence: Experimental investigations and case studies. In A. Y. Lee-Chai & J. Bargh (Eds.), The use and abuse of power (pp. 217–240). Ann Arbor, MI: Sheridan.

REALISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Power occupies a leading role in the study of international politics, especially in realism. The objectivity in the realist theoretical paradigm is predicated on power being the central element in examining interstate behavior. Power is dynamic and thus has to be analyzed within the context of its evolution in international realist thought. From classical realism, in which behavior of states is assumed to be based on the insatiable human appetite for power, to the debate in neorealism regarding whether the ultimate goal of the state is power or security, and to neoclassical realism’s attempt to restore the centrality of the state and power as a transforming agent in intra- and interstate behavior, power is therefore an important concept in the study of realism in international relations. Power emerged as the central concept in international politics from the debate between utopians

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and realists in E. H. Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis. The danger of such utopianism or idealism lies in the blatant disregard for power in international conduct by European statesmen during the interwar years (1919–1939). Carr underscored the importance of power by stating that “politics are then, in one sense, always power politics.” Thus military power and power over opinion are crucial in examining a state’s ability to mobilize the populace to harness resources to wage war, which is the ultima ratio in international relations. In Politics Among Nations, Hans J. Morgenthau’s central thesis is that international politics is a struggle for power. The insatiable appetite for power has its roots in human nature and thus is reflected in the behavior of states. States seek to maximize power because it is the ultimate goal. The objectivity in realism lies in defining the national interest in terms of power. A state pursues policies of status quo, prestige, and imperialism to maintain, demonstrate, and increase power, respectively. Classical realism’s reliance on human behavioral assumptions to explain interstate relations became a point of contention and ushered in a new generation of realists introducing a more scientific approach to the study of international politics. The landmark statement in neorealism is Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics. This approach to the study of international politics is based on the anarchic nature of the international system: states are primary actors seeking to survive and the distribution of capabilities defines the polarity and hence the international structure. Survival in international anarchy became a prerequisite for state action. Power is considered a means to an end in neorealist thought, as opposed to the classical realist assumption that it is an end in itself. The impulse to survive outweighs state strategies seeking to maximize power. Waltz constructed a status-quo–oriented theory based on the assumption that states try to maintain a balance of power in which they can pursue minimal security for maximal chances of survival. Security is best assured when states maintain their positions in the international system. Acquiring too much power can be self-defeating because intensifying the security dilemma results in increased costs for survival. The end result is the formation of a new international equilibrium in which increased capabilities are required to attain the

basics: survival. Thus, maximizing power results in diminishing returns. While survival under anarchy remains a central concept in neorealism, a view known as offensive realism emerged that challenges the assumption that state behavior is basically defensive. International politics is not about preserving the status quo but political change, especially the behavior of great powers. That states seek to maximize capabilities to promote hegemonic aspirations became the central thesis in John Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics. The variety of strategies informed by defensive and offensive realism and the debate between power and security underscore the dominance of neorealism in explaining interstate behavior. Neoclassical realism seeks to restore the state as the primary actor in theories of international politics. Neoclassical realists recognize that the distribution of power affects interstate behavior. However, changes in relative power at the international level are also transmitted through intervening variables to the domestic level. While power, according to classical realism, is inherent in human nature, neoclassical realists think of power as a state’s transforming agency. Power changes the internal character of the state, its ambitions, and its perceptions of the world. A state seeks to enhance its relative power to further its objectives, and ultimately seek more control over its destiny. Johnson Y. K. Louie See also Anarchy in International Relations; Bargaining in International Relations; Compliance (International); Constructivist View of Power in International Relations; Defensive Realism

Further Readings Carr, E. H. (1964). The twenty years’ crisis. New York: Harper & Row. Mearsheimer, J. J. (2001). The tragedy of great power politics. New York: W. W. Norton. Morgenthau, H. J. (1954). Politics among nations (3rd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, G. (1998). Neoclassical realism and theories of foreign policy. World Politics, 51(1), 144–172. Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Realist Accounts of Power

REALIST ACCOUNTS

OF

POWER

In the explanation of realist accounts of power given here, as the term realism is used in the philosophical sense. Realist notions of power have other meanings in international relations. A good starting point for understanding the realist approach to power is Jeffrey Isaac’s claim that all three sides in the three faces of power debate (that is to say, including Lukes’s radical view) reduce power to the regular behavior between two parties. Moreover, they remain within the framework of A having power over B or A making B do something it would not otherwise do. Realist approaches to the question of power have three criticisms of the limitations of such approaches. First, they see power as power over but not as power to. Second, they wrongly focus on the behavior of agents. Third, according to Jeffrey Isaac they conflate the possession of power with the exercise of power. The first argument can be highlighted by taking the French and Latin terms for power—pouvoir and potere. In these cases, power means to be able to do something. This sense of power to rather than power over rests on a concept of power as enabling, something that for realists is usually rooted in a set of structural conditions. This requires attention to be paid to the underlying structural conditions that enable behavioral interaction. According to Isaac, the realist view of power requires us to look at social agents by looking at the relatively enduring social relations in which they participate. He defines this as social power, the capacities to act possessed by social agents by virtue of their positions in society. Power, understood in this sense, is thus a capacity, either constituted by, realized by, or emergent from the social relations we are engaged in. The realist approach to power should therefore be considered structural in the sense that it focuses on the sociostructural preconditions for the operation of power. If we are to look at the power of agents, then we must understand this in terms of the social relations in which they are embedded. Such a view also sees power as a causal concept. However, this does not imply causality in the positivist sense of contingent effects, but in the sense of the necessary properties and intrinsic powers of

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social agents. Power is seen as the capacity to perform a particular act, or as Isaac puts it, the capacity to perform intentional activities and engage in normatively constituted practices. This view of power has some similarities to poststructural approaches like Foucault’s. Power is seen as enabling as well as constraining. Emphasis is placed on how power is socially distributed and dispersed, how it has no one single center but is present in all social relations, and how it is something strategic in the sense that it is constantly negotiated and renegotiated in the context of the complex social relations and practices that actors are engaged in. In realist accounts, power is often taken to mean powers. This is particularly so when emphasizing causal processes and the properties of structures. In describing causal processes, philosophical realists might refer to these as tendencies on the basis that such powers may or may not be exercised, depending on a particular set of circumstances, counteracting processes, and so on. Such powers might be emergent in the sense that the properties and possibilities of entities are rooted in but not reducible to a particular structure or stratum. Here we see that notions of power or powers can be applied to structures as well as to agents. Indeed, even if the focus is on agents, this should be seen in structural or causal terms. Human powers, for example the ability to talk and express ideas, are emergent from certain physical (biological) and social conditions, but are expressed in their own unique and irreducible way. The realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar makes a distinction between power1 as “the transformative capacity intrinsic to the concept of action as such” and power2 as “the capacity to get one’s way.” The latter is against either the wishes or real interests of others. The expression real interests should be noted, because real interests are not the same as perceived interests and may be located “out there’ in the real structure of the world. Bhaskar goes on to define power2 struggles as hegemonic struggles against structurally instantiated forms of domination, exploitation, and control. Overcoming power2 relations requires the transformatory power of human praxis. Above all else, a realist approach to power stresses the importance of social ontology, relating power to the complex structure of the world out

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there and to the underlying structures and causal processes that it is embedded in and emergent from. This does, however, lead to some confusion as to how the concept is used. In particular, it is important to distinguish between power understood as the ability to do something, and the idea of powers as the properties that allow us to do it. Jonathan Joseph See also Foucault, Michel; Realism in International Relations; Structural Power; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Bhaskar, R. (1993). Dialectic: The pulse of freedom. London: Verso. Isaac, J. (1987). Power and Marxist theory: A realist view. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

REFERENDUMS Referendums provide institutionalized opportunities for citizens to express their opinions on particular policy issues. In democratic systems, referendums may be regarded as alternative channels of articulating citizens’ views as opposed to representative mechanisms involving parties and elected representatives. There are, however, different views of the role of referendums in political systems. In Benjamin Barber’s book Strong Democracy, referendums and popular initiatives were regarded as central elements of participatory democracy in which citizens themselves take the responsibility for their common political destiny. The most frequently raised objection to the use of referendums is that they allow incompetent and irresponsible voters to make decisions instead of the more competent representatives. Furthermore, parliamentary representatives have arguably better capacities for deliberation and, most important, they can be held accountable at elections. When analyzing the role of referendums in political systems, certain institutional differences need to be taken into account. First, referendums may be used at different levels of governance. Apart from national politics, referendums are also

used at the subnational level, for example, in municipal decision making. Second, in terms of their outcomes, referendums may be either binding, which means that the popular vote is the final stage in the decision-making process, or advisory, which means that the final decision is made by another authority, typically by a parliamentary majority. Third and most important, referendums have different roles in political systems depending on how they are initiated, that is, how the decision to hold a referendum is made, and how the agenda is set, that is, how the issue submitted to a referendum is defined. The initiation and agenda-setting procedures largely determine the extent to which governments can control the use of referendums. In many countries, a parliamentary majority or the president may make a decision to hold a referendum on a particular issue. When this is the case, the incumbent government can usually control both the agenda and the initiation of the referendum. The terms optional and government-initiated have been used in the literature to refer to this category of referendum. Sometimes these types of referendums are only advisory, which leaves the formal decision-making competence to the representative bodies. However, there are only a few cases in which the representatives have made a decision contrary to the outcome of a referendum. Therefore, advisory referendums also tend to be binding de facto. Optional or government-initiated referendums have been used at the national level in such European democracies as Sweden, the United Kingdom, and most notably France, where the president has a crucial role in initiating referendums. These referendums have often been used to settle issues dividing governmental coalitions and parties, or to resolve problematic issues that threaten the electoral success of governmental parties or the president. In general, these kinds of referendums help to strengthen the position of those political actors—parties or the president— that are in office. There are, however, also other types of referendums that are not as much under the control of the government and that, indeed, tend to limit the powers of the incumbent government. Referendums may be used as ex post checks on laws already passed by the parliamentary majority. Michael Gallagher and Piervincenzo Uleri have used the term decision-controlling referendums for

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these types of referendums, in which governments can control the agenda but not the initiation of a referendum. The first type of decision-controlling referendum is held because of a constitutional requirement for a referendum on particular types of laws, typically on constitutional amendments. These so-called mandatory referendums are used for all constitutional changes in Australia, Denmark, Ireland, and Switzerland, among other nations. In federal states such as Australia and Switzerland, constitutional amendments require a double majority (a majority of voters in the majority of states). The second type of decision-controlling referendums includes ex post referendums initiated by particular political actors. These referendums are either abrogative or rejective, depending on whether the law submitted to a referendum is already in force or only passed by the parliament but not yet enacted. In Denmark, a parliamentary minority can initiate a rejective referendum on a law that has recently been passed by the parliament. In Switzerland, a number of voters can initiate abrogative and rejective referendums on recently passed laws. Compared to mandatory referendums that are held on particular types of laws, rejective and abrogative referendums are only held on laws that raise active opposition either in the parliament or among the electorate. For this reason, governments may try to avoid these referendums by taking the opposition views into account in the drafting and passing of laws. In all aforementioned types of referendums, the proposed law to be submitted to a referendum is drafted like any other law, which means that government controls the agenda of the referendum. Only referendums based on popular initiatives allow citizens themselves to formulate the proposed laws to be voted upon. Therefore, such referendums open the political agenda to issues raised by opposition parties and by such outsiders to representative politics as popular movements. In general, popular initiatives are relatively rarely used in national politics. The most frequent user of popular initiatives is Switzerland, where initiatives are used at national, cantonal, and municipal levels. Popular initiatives are also widely used in some states of the United States. In recent decades, there have been debates concerning whether referendums could be used to reinvigorate citizens’ participation in established

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Western democracies where traditional forms of representative democracy seem to be losing their appeal for citizens. However, governments tend to be cautious with respect to constitutional reforms that involve major changes in the balance of powers. Despite growing demands for referendums and initiatives, it seems that those parties that are frequently in office are not willing to adopt referendums of a sort that are beyond governmental control. Consequently, constitutional reforms involving decision-controlling referendums or popular initiatives tend to be either obstructed or watered down. Maija Setälä See also Agenda Power; Elections; Voting; Voting Power

Further Readings Barber, B. (1984). Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gallagher, M., & Uleri, P. (Eds.). (1996). The referendum experience in Europe. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Setälä, M. (2006). On the problems of accountability and responsibility in referendums. European Journal of Political Research, 45(5), 701–723.

REGIME THEORY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS International regime theory suggests that power is dispersed among many different agents, including states, international organizations, multi-national companies, and so on, that operate as tacit coalitions under similar understandings of procedures and desirable outcomes. It was at the heart of a dispute that raged among mainstream scholars of international relations (IR) during the 1980s and early 1990s. The intense debate surrounding it sowed some of the seeds of social constructivism in IR, a current that was to emerge in the mid1990s. Although not always recognized as such, power in world politics was at the heart of the discussion. Stephen Krasner formulated a now widely used definition of an international regime: principles,

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norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given issue area. For example, the international trade regime was long guided by the principle of maximizing global wealth, supported by the norm of free trade, the principle of reciprocity, and the practice of granting most favored nation status; and sustained by multilateral diplomacy in the form of interstate trade talks organized by the World Trade Organization and lasting many years, resulting in a massive, comprehensive package deal. The concept of international regimes, introduced by John Gerard Ruggie, originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the wake of the emerging dissatisfaction with classical realism’s dominance over IR. Realism was criticized for (among many other things) ignoring the global economy and nonstate actors such as transnational corporations (TNCs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). In 1977 Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye put forward their framework of complex interdependence as the major alternative to realism. International regimes were an essential ingredient of their approach. Keohane and Nye emphasized a pluralist perspective in which, across different international issue areas, power might be dispersed among many different actors rather than concentrated in the hands of a few major states. International regimes were the governing structures regulating interdependence within such an issue area. International regime theory thus started as an alternative to realism and served as an instrument to help describe the specific distribution of power and recognize relevant actors within a global issue area. Over the next two decades, international regime studies became quite popular, describing developments in specific issue areas related to the environment, finance, human rights, security, and technology, as well as trade.

Research Focus Research into international regimes has primarily focused on three research themes: how to account for the origins and continuity of international regimes; how to explain the specific contents of an international regime; and how to describe and account for the effectiveness or lack thereof of a regime. Three different approaches offer alternative answers to these questions. The power-based

approach explains international regimes in terms of the distribution of power between the most salient actors in an international policy domain. A regime is founded, maintained, altered, or abolished when this serves the most powerful actors. It is effective to the extent that these powerful actors are prepared to ensure compliance. From this perspective the current trade regime can be expected to be adjusted to meet the interests of newly powerful countries such as Brazil, China, and India. In principle, the power-based approach would allow for the possibility that smaller states or nonstate actors dominate a regime because they hold specific resources in a given policy domain. For instance, Christer Jönsson demonstrated that the United Kingdom, despite no longer being a great power, dominated the international civil aviation regime for decades after World War II because of the United States’ dependence on British air bases for the effectuation of its nuclear deterrent. Yet most power-based regime studies maintain a statist perspective. The best-known power-based approach is the hegemonic stability theory (HST). HST claims that a hegemon will both start and continue investing in international regimes because regimes offer the possibility of generating support from other states without having to resort to (threaten with) sanctions. Through regimes, a hegemon also helps produce collective goods for the world community. At the same time, HST argues that a hegemon will not tolerate a regime that works against its vital interests. Studying regimes from the perspective of HST, Robert Keohane found (in After Hegemony) that regimes continue to exist even after a hegemon’s decline. This observation ushered in the interest-based approach to regimes. Scholars using the interest-based approach argue that rational actors pursuing absolute gains will engage in long-term cooperation. Applying game-theoretical models, they demonstrated that when actors recurrently meet in similar situations, they will be able to develop trust in each other. In the context of world politics, international regimes offer such a setting of repeated, trust-building meetings. Effective regimes may thus even produce situations in which actors are prepared to forgo short-term advantages in order to preserve longterm cooperation. This also explains why longterm cooperation may continue despite shifts in

Regime Theory in International Relations

the distribution of power induced by a hegemon’s decline. Interest-based studies became the backbone of regime studies. They mainly focus on states that succeed in engaging in long-term cooperation under the conditions of anarchy thought to exist internationally. Regime studies thus were at the heart of the debate between neorealists and neoliberals in the 1980s and 1990s: international regimes could help states escape from neorealism’s central condition, the security dilemma produced by anarchy. Interest-based regime studies thus help to explain the continuity and effectiveness of regimes. They have more difficulty explaining the founding and the specific contents of regimes. Because they focus on opportunities for absolute gains, they tend to put less emphasis on the role that power plays. Yet power relations remain important in accounting for the timing of a regime’s start and (changes in) its specific norms, rules, and procedures. The knowledge-based (or cognitivist) approach to international regimes focuses on the preference formation of states. This sets its practitioners apart from scholars working from the power- and interestbased perspectives, who take states’ preferences as given and fixed. Relaxing the assumption of given and fixed preferences and focusing on the impact of actors’ ideas allows the power of nonstate actors to be taken into account. Knowledge-oriented regime scholar Peter Haas introduced the notion of epistemic communities: loose transnational networks of like-minded players supporting a specific substantive policy rather than reproducing the material interest of the state or organization they represent. This makes it possible to account for the specific contents of an international regime. Because they recognize that states may learn from the effectiveness of a regime and fundamentally alter their policy preferences, knowledge-based regime studies offer an additional explanation of a regime’s (lack of) effectiveness and continuity. Because of the attention they pay to the effect of (individual or organizational) leadership (e.g., in the work of Oran Young), they also give an alternative account of a regime’s origins. Knowledgebased regime studies also found that through regimes new actors may be empowered: the acceptance of certain norms or specific decisions by states or IGOs to invite actors to conferences may in particular empower nonstate actors, such as

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NGOs. Through this mechanism human rights and environmental organizations now have access to the current Doha trade talks. These autonomous effects of regimes set knowledge-oriented scholars apart from their power- or interest-oriented colleagues and contributed to the growing strength of social constructivism in the mid-1990s as well as the increase in studies that focus on the independent role nonstate actors like IGOs and NGOs can play in world politics.

Is There a Future for Regime Theory? Since the mid-1990s regime theory seems to have run out of steam. This trend is related to four developments within IR theory. First, rationalist accounts of international regimes (both powerand knowledge-based) tended to focus on the conditions under which states can escape the security dilemma caused by international anarchy. Although highly successful, these studies returned to the original realist position of a world dominated by rationally behaving states. Rationalist regime theory thus seemed to ignore its own original raison d’être: challenging the concentration of power in the hands of a few (great) states. Second, knowledge-based regime analyses have been taken over by the research agenda of contemporary social constructivism. Constructivists put emphasis on the causal role of ideas and norms in world politics. They thus usher in actors other than states that may exercise power in different arenas, such as (networks between) IGOs and NGOs. Third, since the advent of globalization, scholars of critical international political economy have seized the field of issue areas related to the global economy, traditionally a field where many regime studies were conducted. They tend to discard regime theory as supporting the position of the current hegemon. Finally, globalization encouraged IR scholars to employ a new term, governance, to examine the issue of the reduced freedom of maneuver for states. Governance, though a much woollier term, superseded the concept of international regime in popularity. All in all, international regime theory has contributed to the refinement of studies of cooperation under anarchy and helped IR to surf political science’s neoinstitutionalist wave. Because its framework put norms and ideas center stage and

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allowed attention to nonstate actors, it also ushered in social constructivism and critical international political economy. However, its banner proclaiming that power may be dispersed among many actors, not necessarily states, is now carried by the latter two intellectual currents rather than by the more rationalist-oriented pluralists. Bertjan Verbeek See also Anarchy in International Relations; GameTheoretical Approaches to Power; Neoliberalism; Neorealism

Further Readings Axelrod, R., & Keohane, R. O. (1985). Achieving cooperation under anarchy: Strategies and institutions. World Politics, 38(1), 226–254. Breitmeier, H., Young, O. R., & Zürn, M. (2007). Analyzing international environmental regimes. Cambridge: MIT Press. Krasner, S. D. (Ed.). (1983). International regimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rittberger, V. (Ed.). (1995). Regime theory and international relations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

REGIME THEORY URBAN POLITICS

IN

Regime theory became a favored way of analyzing the power structure in urban communities in the 1980s. It recognizes that urban development is the centerpiece of most city governments. Regime theory characterizes the different styles by which local political officials form coalitions around development issues. Initially, several types of regimes were identified. In directive regimes, local officials control the major planning and growth issues. These types of regimes were thought to dominate in U.S. cities in the 1950s and early 1960s. They gave way during the 1960s to mid-1970s to concessionary regimes where business and growth still dominated but social initiatives grew up through sustained pressure group activity at local, state, and federal levels. Concessionary regimes themselves gave way

under the fiscal pressures of the mid-1970s. The fiscal crisis of city government allowed developers and business once more to take control of city politics. The so-called conserving regimes recreated the development credos of the earlier period, though the politics were led more by the developers than local politicians. Other regime types were identified in the United States. The pluralist regimes were seen to dominate in the Northeast and Midwest in the 1950s and 1960s. Pluralist regimes here might be identified with directive regimes. Federalist regimes might be another name for the concessionary regimes that replaced the pluralist regimes in the Northeast and Midwest. Entrepreneurial regimes were seen to operate throughout the postwar period largely in the South and West. These regimes are led by dynamic mayors working closely with developers and business. Regime theory is seen in Clarence Stone’s book Regime Politics, which is a detailed account of the governance of Atlanta, Georgia, from 1946 to 1989. Stone uses the idea of a regime to explain how mayors with different characters and different bases of electoral support came to promote development in very similar ways. He argues that because development is so important to the local economy, and therefore electoral success, each mayor needed to form a coalition with local business and outside developers. Sustaining that coalition required the continued implementation of business development strategies if only to fund welfare and redevelopment for the urban poor. Stone sees within this process a form of systemic power that structures the incentives of leading politicians and that forces them to pursue certain policies or structurally suggests what policies they should pursue. In Stone’s sense, regime theory can be seen as an application of the collective action problem. The two logics of collective action suggest that larger, more diffuse, and poorer groups find it harder to mobilize than tighter-knit, smaller, and richer groups. Developers form the latter group, which is easier to organize, while the general public constitutes the former. Thus, developers are able to get development onto the political agenda far more easily than the public can influence the course of development. Regime theory can also be seen as a development of growth coalition theory, a neo-Marxist account of the way in which economics dominates

Relational Power

local politics and the logic of reelection. Because reelection is enhanced by a buoyant local economy, and development enhances the local economy, politicians are always keen on new development initiatives. In other words, the coalition of local politicians and developers is a natural one, in which developers might be seen as systematically lucky. In this sense, regime politics can be seen as a marriage of political economy and pluralism. Pluralism suggests that different coalitions rule at different times, and political economic approaches suggest local development issues will dominate local politics. In Stone’s regime analysis, development dominates but different interests do form around that central policy plank. The regime concept has now been applied more broadly, though more descriptively. Outside of the United States, the central state is much more dominant, even in local politics. Greater central planning restrictions tend to give less scope for discretion to local politicians and to developers. Major developments usually require the central state to agree, and so development issues dominate less at the local level. However, Stone-style analysis has been applied to many cities outside the United States, and development regimes have been identified. Other regime types have also been identified, including maintenance regimes, which attempt to maintain the fabric of the city and the coalition intact; middle-class progressive regimes, most common in rich enclaves in major cities, which attempt to halt major development, and are often dominated by environmental concerns; mass mobilization or working-class regimes, which force development in urban renewal, and are normally seen as existing only for short periods; service delivery regimes, which develop in the wake of new public management and concentrate upon providing a more efficient delivery of local services; and hyperpluralist regimes, a label applied to short-term chaotic political situations and effectively implying the absence of a regime. The fact that the regime idea is a flexible label that can be brought out to apply to different types of local politics and can be underpinned by different models of political power in the state (pluralism, elite theory, Marxism) probably explains its great appeal to diverse urban specialists. However, the application of the label regime to the politics, especially short-term politics, of any particular

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coalition rather misses the strength of the regime concept as an explanatory device. The essential idea of a regime is that it is a relatively long-lived coalition of interests that continues beyond the specific holders of major political offices and their electoral bases. It is designed to explain how the specific structure of politics, and especially though not exclusively development, creates a long-run coalition transcending the specific policy issues of the day. Keith Dowding See also Collective Action Problem; Elite Theories; Growth Coalitions; Pluralism; Structural Suggestion; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power

Further Readings Dowding, K. (2001). Explaining urban regimes. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(1), 7–19. Stone, C. (1989). Regime politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

RELATIONAL POWER For the advocates of the relational approach to power, relational power is not just one type of power—power as applied in a relationship. Rather, it is a basic characteristic of all power. In a relational understanding of power, power is not the possession of a person, nor does it correspond to a mere production of effects; it is constituted within a social relation. Only by knowing the respective value systems and beliefs specific to the relationship can the analyst make an attribution of power. Such a view has important consequences for the analysis of power in that it significantly differs from approaches that either regard resources as the locus of power or hold that attributions of power can be reduced to a study of agents’ resources. But the conceptual solution also produces, in turn, several internal problems. One difficulty derives from the way the relational approach links power to causality, which results in a tendency to look for power as a master cause in the

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analysis of behavior and outcomes. To assume that role, the very assessment of power has to factor in all situational qualifications of the respective social relationship under analysis, which can result in exaggerating the role of power. A second and related problem has to do with the possibility of giving an overall picture of power in a society. Initially, the conceptual move to relational power was meant to criticize simple and aggregate “lump” concepts of power, justifiably requiring a domainand situation-specific analysis of power instead. But when the research program based on relational specificity is pushed to its conclusion, the analysis risks undermining any aggregate view of power within a polity.

The Relational Concept of Power The relational conceptualization of power takes place in the context of post-Weberian definitions of power. Max Weber had defined power as any chance (and not probability, as often translated) within a social relation to impose one’s will also against the resistance of others, no matter what gives rise to this chance. For Robert Dahl, A has power over B to the extent that A can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do. Hence, the main characteristic of a relational approach is that it locates power in a human relationship, thus distinguishing it from the sheer production of effects (power in nature). At the same time, relational is not to be confused with relative. It does not mean that once the resources are taken into account, there is something more in the power relationship. Such relational concepts of power are opposed to views that see power in terms of its resources or instruments: power exists in and through a relation, it is not the possession of any agent. In a famous example, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz illustrate this with reference to a situation in which a sentry levels his gun at an unarmed intruder, whom he orders to halt or else he will shoot. If the intruder stops, it seems the threat has worked: the sentry has exercised power. Bachrach and Baratz deny that this is necessarily so. If the intruder was also a soldier, he or she might obey because that is what a soldier does when receiving an order from a sentry. The alleged power resource was ineffectual here, because it was the intruder’s

value system that made the intruder obey, not the gun. On the other hand, if the intruder does not obey and is killed, we may again not be seeing a power relationship. Strictly speaking, the killing of the intruder is not power, because the intruder apparently valued entering the base more than his or her own life; the killing only shows the ultimate powerlessness of force (violence) in the face of a suicide attack. (In a more strictly Weberian reading, however, it would be fair to say that the sentry exercised power in imposing his or her will—not to allow anyone unauthorized to enter the base— against the resistance of the intruder.) Pushing the example to its extreme, the intruder may have wanted to commit suicide but gets the sentry to do it for him or her. In this case, the intruder, by being shot, exercises power over the sentry. The central point is that no analysis of power can be made without knowing the relative importance of conflicting values in the mind of the power recipient, if not also of the supposed power holder. The capacity to sanction and the resources on which the sanctions are based are a part of power analysis, but in themselves are insufficient for an attribution of power because what counts as a sanction in the specific power relation is itself dependent on the specific values in the minds of the people involved. Thus, a relational conception reads power relations through the eyes of the subject of power or, more precisely, looks at all the actors involved as potential subjects of power relations. For this reason, Carl Friedrich’s rule of anticipated reactions has retained its prominence in relational analyses of power. Politicians who win most of their political battles may be seen as powerful; but such victories may also express powerlessness insofar as they only come about because politicians carefully chose the few insignificant fights in which they anticipated standing a chance of winning. Hence, by concentrating on the recipient of exercises of power, relational approaches also stress the latent power of actors who do not necessarily need to exercise power—all it takes is that the recipients adjust their behavior in preempting real or even imagined (negative) sanctions, whether or not the power wielder is even aware of this in every case. The causal link from sanctions to the altered behavior of the recipient is upheld, but the explanation is shifted from the recipient of power to its wielder, not the other way round.

Relational Power

Causality and Power Opposing a concept of power that is possessive— in other words, the reduction of power to the possession of instruments or resources—can be done in a number of different ways. To demonstrate the implications of the relational view for the understanding of causality and its use in analyses, a comparison with a strict dispositional conceptualization is useful. Peter Morriss’s cogent version of a dispositional approach defines power as neither resource nor vehicle, nor as an event or its exercise, but as the capacity to effect an action. In this conception, the stress is on the effecting of outputs, not the full analysis of outcomes. The relational component of a social analysis is not denied, but postponed until after the assessment of power as such. Hence, this dispositional view does not tie power to resources, nor does it tie it causally to the explanation of social outcomes. Causality is to be established elsewhere. Indeed, for Morriss, power itself does not explain events. The relational approach to power is based on a quite different intuition. For Robert A. Dahl, Felix Oppenheim, and David Baldwin, all defenders of a relational approach, the interest in power and its close connection with the concept of influence stems from the possibility that power can be used as a kind of core causal variable. For Oppenheim, saying that B was influenced by A is no mere description, but also a partial explanation of B’s conduct: actor B did something because of A’s power. Hence, the analysis posits that power plays a role in a causal chain that explains behavior. Because it is so closely connected to the notion of causality, relational power analysis needs to avoid the usual tautologies that conflate power with either poles of the causal chain, that is, that equate power with either outcomes or resources used by actors to effect outcomes. The proposed solution is twofold. First, the very assessment of what has to count as either the power resource or basis of power (and not just an instrument or vehicle) must be defined and qualified by the particular type of power relation under analysis. Relational analyses do not assume a high fungibility of power resources. (A good is fungible if it is of such a nature as to be freely replaceable by another of like nature or kind without decreasing in value.) As a result, the analysis of power has to delimit

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carefully the domain within which a policy instrument can be assumed to have effect, that is, to count as an actual power resource in the first place. Secondly, because the analysis is based on the values of the actors in the power relation, especially if individual actors are analyzed, the actual values of the actors need to be factored in before we can identify what can count as a power resource or base in this particular relation, and not just in a general domain. In addition, skill and motivation must also be added before we can establish the basis of power. All this is necessary to maintain the causal link between the basis of power and the outcome. This avoids, almost by definition, the risk of nonfalsifiability prominent in those studies that are marred by what Baldwin called the paradox of unrealized power. In the paradox, even powerful actors can lose against less powerful ones because they did not, for one reason or the other, use all their power. When allegedly overriding power does not translate into influence, it is not because an actor lacks sufficient power, but because of conversion failures (a lack of political will, for example). Some power gets lost on the causal path, and power analysis degenerates into finding conversion failures, with the result that the same outcome is explicable by appealing to either of two opposite causes (power or powerlessness). Therefore, no outcome can falsify the initial power assessment. The value of the resources identified by these accounts does not vary with the evidence and any evidence that does not fit in terms of the claims made is explained away with reference to incompetent agency: power resources never fail, only politicians. However, in a relational conceptualization of power, power is causally connected to outcomes, and hence this cannot be: bases of power do not fail, otherwise they could not to be considered such to start with. And so the very definition of what can count as a power resource needs to be made far more comprehensive and situation-specific in order to maintain a close causal link. It was not that power failed, but that the analyst did not qualify it correctly. This tendency to heavily qualify the understanding of the very power resources or bases of power is further exacerbated by the need to analyze power relations from the receiving side. As noted above, the analysis does not start from the power wielder, but the power recipient. In understanding

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the behavior of that recipient, power is said to play a role. By tying the concept of power to influence in a causal scheme, the tendency must be to look for all possible factors that may have influenced the recipient’s behavior. But then, rather than focusing on the power wielder’s capacity to get someone else to change behavior—that is, the manipulative and agency-oriented view prominent in the underlying relational definition of power—the power analysis strives for a fairly comprehensive view of all the factors that influence the recipient’s behavior. By understanding power as causal influence, the temptation is then great to incorporate ever more of those causal factors into the very assessment of power. It is therefore no coincidence that Baldwin ends up adding even social norms to his catalogue of factors that define the specific environment within which power analysis takes place. Pushed to its extreme, such analysis will embed so much into the qualification of the basis of power that only purely contingent factors—luck, in Keith Dowding’s approach—are left as causes outside of power.

The Aggregation Problem Besides causality, a second important issue raised by the relational understanding of power is the issue of aggregation or generalization. Ever since his initial salvo against power-elite approaches, Dahl has castigated what he called the “lump” concept of power, in which all possible resources are added up to establish a single measure for an actor. This argument is of particular significance in international relations, where it undermines the widely used balance-of-power theories. Such theories invoke the distribution of power as the main source of our understanding the behavior of the state and how states effect the international system. To establish the distribution of power in the international system, the analyst must locate the general poles of power. These poles, in turn, can be defined either in purely military terms or in terms of the combination of the different resources that states can employ. In the first case, a relational approach would show that the military is not necessarily the most significant resource in all domains, and hence it is not possible to reduce the international power structure to a single index or measure in terms of military power. Given the fungibility

problem, any simple addition of other types of resources can no longer be identified independently of the domain, scope, and the values of the agents or the other factors that need to included in the power assessment. As a result, balance-ofpower analyses must assume a unified and general international power structure, which a relational approach can show not to be workable in principle. Without a “lump” concept, general balanceof-power theories cannot work. But pushed to its logical conclusion, such a relational understanding then seems to imply that complete analyses in which all the factors have been included are possible only for very circumscribed cases. In other words, as Dahl points out, this means that there could be as many power structures in any political system as there are individuals who impute different intentions to other actors. However, in placing so many requirements on the definition of power and in breaking down power analysis into many autonomous small power analyses, a relational approach risks losing sight of the overall picture. The problem is not just that the generalization about bases of power across domains cannot be taken for granted, but also that the aggregation of powers that is necessary under this approach for understanding a polity as such may no longer be possible. Hence, even though the theory was developed in the context of the analyses of community power, later theoretical developments of the relational power view seem to make it increasingly difficult to answer the question “Who governs?” for a polity in general. Stefano Guzzini See also Balance of Power; Bases of Power; Causal Theories of Power; Dahl, Robert A.; Determinacy; Dowding, Keith; Fungibility of Power Resources; Resources as Measuring Power; Weber, Max

Further Readings Baldwin, D. (1989). Paradoxes of power. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Dowding, K. (1996). Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Guzzini, S. (1993). Structural power: The limits of neorealist power analysis. International Organization, 47(3), 443–478.

Relative Autonomy of the State Guzzini, S. (2000). The use and misuse of power analysis in international theory. In R. Palan (Ed.), Global political economy: Contemporary theories (pp. 53–66). London: Routledge. Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A philosophical analysis. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. (Original work published 1987)

RELATIVE AUTONOMY OF THE STATE The autonomy (or relative autonomy) of the state thesis is a reaction both to pluralist accounts of power in society and to Marxist accounts of the domination of capital in state theory. Pluralism was itself originally a radical thesis about democracy that argued that true power or influence existed not in the executive (office of the president or prime minister) or the legislature but comes about through various pressures that are exerted on those institutions through various organized and unorganized groups in society. In some versions of pluralism, the institutions of the state are mere ciphers for all of these interests, and in a democracy politicians will carry out those demands that are strongest among all the groups. In other versions of pluralism, the government does have its own preferences, but it operates as a group like any other in society, sometimes getting its way, sometimes not. Whichever group is strongest in some issue area will determine the policy for that area. In Marxist accounts of the state, power resides in the hands of capital, and the economic structure determines the politics of the nation. The relative autonomy of the state thesis argues that while pluralist and capitalist pressures exist and seem to influence the state, the state does have its own interests, and in fact it is those interests that determine policy. In Theda Skocpol’s famous phrase, “bringing the state back in” allows us to see that the state does have strong interests that it promotes for its own sake. In neo-Marxist accounts, the state is an entity or agent in its own right. In more mainstream accounts of the autonomy of democratic state, autonomy resides in sets of state actors. Eric Nordlinger, for example, suggests there are three forms of state autonomy: (1) strong, where state

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actors proceed on their own preferences, even though these preferences clearly diverge from those of society; (2) medium, where state actors change the preferences of society to conform to their own; and (3) weak, where state actors’ preferences do not diverge from those of society. In the latter case we cannot tell whether pressure group interests determine policy or not, but it is reasonable to assume the state acts on its own preferences. Nordlinger suggests that we might find democratic states that by and large conform to one or other of these types. More often, however, we will find a state taking on different forms in different issue areas. Thus, at times we can see state actors rejecting the demands of major organized interests in society—for example, they may push through regulatory procedures or specific taxes that industry opposes. In the medium form we can see government officials arguing for specific policies: politicians on the stump, radio, TV, newspapers, or the Internet; senior bureaucrats giving sage advice through similar media; or experts working for government stating why certain regulations are necessary. In some countries, governments also spend vast amounts on advertising and promoting government policy. Governments also, in Patrick Dunleavy’s terms, “preference shape.” That is, they change the preferences of people by their policies. For example, in the United Kingdom the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher sold off state housing, privatized state industries, and changed the preferences of people toward a homeowning shareholding society more interested in interest-rate levels than in welfare policy. The third category, the weak state, has generated criticism of the autonomy of the state thesis because it seems to make it unfalsifiable. Critics say we are bound to find some examples of state officials pushing through policies against the wishes of dominant groups in society, but there are many examples of groups seemingly getting what they want. If state autonomy theorists simply claim that these are interests shared by the state, then the thesis can never be falsified. State autonomists reply that we can examine such cases carefully to see whether state officials had expressed preferences in disagreement or in agreement with dominant groups and judge whether these cases fit the thesis. Furthermore, they suggest, one can also usually find some nonstate actors whose preferences fit

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those of the state, so pluralist accounts are subject to the same critique. Nordlinger gives a series of 47 autonomyenhancing strategies that states adopt; we can combine them into four general types of stratagems. First, the state employs its capital resources to change preferences or overwhelm opposition. Second, the state uses its authority to mediate conflict between other groups in order to pursue the state’s own interests. It does this by giving precedence to those groups that share its interests and supporting them in distributional struggles. Third, the state uses its control of information to shape other actors’ preferences and to control information about its policies. For example, a government might pass legislation as demanded by some groups, but then underfund the programs or not enforce regulations. With new informational forms, this strategy is becoming increasingly problematic for states. Finally, the state is able to manage the agenda through its legislative programs. Nordlinger’s version of the autonomy of the state is closer to mainstream political science because it recognizes state preferences through the preferences of state actors, such as politicians, civil servants, local government officials, and so on. Neo-Marxist versions of the thesis react not so much against pluralism as against Marxist accounts of the power structure as dominated by capital. In neo-Marxist accounts of relative state autonomy, the state has preferences that might diverge from capitalist interests, but it can only partially pursue those interests the needs of capital must remain paramount for democratic politicians to ensure a buoyant economy and their reelection prospects. In these variants, the state can only be relatively autonomous of the demands of capital, which will always dominate the power structure. Globalization has caused problems for state autonomy theses, because the power of the world economy reduces state power. However, state autonomists argue that the state is still the most powerful actor, and works against global capitalist forces through international organizations whose views reflect those of the major world states. Others argue that these supranational organizations are creating their own interests and bases of power distinct from those of states. Keith Dowding

See also Agenda Power; Agenda Setters; Bureaucratic Power; Business and Power; Corporatism; Elite Theories; Globalization; Growth Coalitions; Jessop, Bob; Miliband–Poulantzis Debate; Organization of the State; Pluralism; Post-Fordism

Further Readings Jessop, B. (2007). State power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Nordlinger, E. A. (1981). On the autonomy of the democratic state. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Skocpol, T. (1985). Bringing the state back in: Strategies of analysis in current research. In P. B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, & T. Skocpol, (Eds.). Bringing the state back in. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

RELIGIOUS POWER Reference to power of one sort of another is remarkably common in the study of religion. For some early anthropologists, the recognition of power or magical powers in extraordinary things, events, or individuals was the primordial experience out of which religion developed. In some of its forms, religion can be seen to share with magic this belief in a numinous power inhering in particular objects or persons. Common ideas about the evolution of religious traditions regard such beliefs as belonging to their primitive stage, however much they might continue to subsist within the ambit of the so-called higher religions. A critical shift is generally assumed to have occurred during the so-called Axial Age, from circa 600 BCE, when notions of transcendence began to displace more material concerns such as the coming of the rains or protection from disease from their central place and substitute for them a distinctive concern for salvation. In Ernest Gellner’s account this shift coincided with the development of sacred texts and the emergence of groups of religious specialists: priests, scholars, prophets, and other religious virtuosos. From this time on religious power—as invoked or exercised by religious specialists—could be distinguished from political, economic, and other forms of ideological

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power. In modern times, the power exercised by religious specialists has been constrained as processes of differentiation progressively removed the polity, the economy, society, and culture from their sphere of influence. The late 20th century, however, has seen a resurgence of the use of religious power by fundamentalist or revivalist movements, as for example in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Following Michael Mann and Gianfranco Poggi, religious power can be seen to derive most distinctively from the authority claimed by, or conferred on, religious specialists in matters of belief, so that religious power might be considered a species of power that derives not from the use of force (as with political or military power) or the deployment of material incentives (as with economic power), but from influence over the formation of beliefs, norms, and values and over their role in guiding action. This perspective, with its emphasis on creed and meaning, is sometimes thought to underestimate the power and influence that in traditional societies derives from religious specialists’ control over cultic practices and the interpretation of law. Among the monotheistic religions, the latter can be seen to be of great consequence in Islam and Judaism, for example. In traditional societies, religious power derived in large degree from the successful exercise by religious specialists of the claim—either unmediated, in the case of individuals who could claim charismatic status, or mediated, as with the holders of office in religious institutions—that they could authoritatively determine correct belief and/or decide on correct observances. The efficacy of such authority could be measured by the extent to which their pronouncements were respected and the judgments for which they provided the rationale were successfully enforced—typically on their behalf or at their behest by the wielders of political or material power. In some cases, of course, even within the Christian tradition, where the spiritual and the temporal were typically understood as belonging to different spheres, the holders of religious power were also themselves occasionally the holders and exercisers of political, economic, and military power; thus the various crusading orders of the medieval period, such as the Knights Templar or the Teutonic Knights, were religious orders that under papal authority exercised the full

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range of temporal authority within their own jurisdictions. The development of the modern state, especially from the time of the Reformation, the CounterReformation, and the 17th-century wars of religion in Europe, eventually tamed the religious power of the religious specialists (in the case of Western Europe itself, the ecclesiastical hierarchy headed up by the pope). Secular rulers on both sides of the border between Protestants and Catholics that fell across Europe successfully asserted their authority in matters of religion and the church. This virtual nationalization of religious power by territorial authorities did not, however, lead immediately to the dissolution of religious power: in the early modern period up to the French Revolution, almost all European polities took the form of confessional states. It can even be claimed that throughout this period—one that in Eastern Europe could be seen as continuing into the early 20th century—religious power continued to be underwritten by the instrumentalities of state power, albeit on the state’s terms. With time, however, state authorities relaxed their use of and support for religious power as religious pluralism advanced and both the feasibility and utility of enforcing religious uniformity declined. European modernity became instead more and more associated with emancipation from the imposition of religious authority, and the introduction of reforming measures, first, of religious toleration and, later, of something approaching full religious freedom. From the start of the 20th century, religious power in the established religious traditions tended to decline exponentially in most of Europe, while in the rest of the world it tended to retain much of its strength and from the 1970s on, even became resurgent in some regions. The most striking manifestations of this resurgence have been the events surrounding the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent spread of Islamic fundamentalism in both quietistic and militant forms, the significant impact of the New Christian Right on electoral politics in the United States, and the rapid spread of missionary movements of different traditions in Latin America, Africa, and even Asia. At the start of the 21st century, which in this connection might be dated from September 11, 2001, religious power has again started to affect the world dramatically by inspiring and linking with radically discontented

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insurgent groups of individuals committed to the use of force and terror. John Madeley See also Ideology; Mann, Michael; Weber, Max

Further Readings Gellner, E. (1988). Plough, sword and book: The structure of human history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mann, M. (1986). The sources of social power: Vol. 1. A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

REPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS Reputational analysis is a method that has been used by some researchers to measure reputation, a key power resource. It was used first in the analysis of urban politics as a way to establish which local actors were most influential in any given community. The rise of electronic resources that indicate the extent to which individuals and organizations are visible, known, and influential means that there is now considerably more scope than ever before to estimate the reputation of policy actors. This entry reviews the rise and fall of reputational analysis as a way of measuring the potential power of political actors and considers how widespread use of the Internet could reinstate the concept. Reputational analysis was most popular in community power studies carried out in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. It involved assessing the reputation of local policy actors by asking other actors who they believed to be most influential in a given locality. The original way of carrying out reputational analysis (as used, for example, by Floyd Hunter in his study of urban elites in Atlanta, Georgia) was to compile a list of potential influential individuals, who were then asked to rank other members of the list according to the likelihood of their influencing a series of issues. Those receiving the highest rankings were then interviewed and asked for their list of influential persons, continuing the ranking process; the members of the final nominated subset were then

described. Hunter worked to identify individual actors with general influence, but other researchers (such as Terry N. Clark) have studied actors who are influential in specific areas or in specific social and political networks. The method was favored for its simplicity of design and the potential for replication and was further used to specify reputational networks of influence in various policy settings. Reputational analysis was much criticized at the time, particularly by pluralists, who argued that the selection of the list was biased and that the results merely reflected a commonly held view of the most powerful individuals in a locality, rather than bearing any relation to the actual distribution of power. Others have argued that there is evidence that perceived and actual influence are highly correlated; if an actor is perceived to be powerful, then that perception is a resource in itself and part of his or her reputation. But the strongest critics of reputational analysis, such as Robert A. Dahl, argued that decisional analysis, in which a number of key issues are selected, participants in decision making identified, behavior studied, and relative influence appraised in identified outcomes, was more effective in establishing “who governs.” The two techniques tend to produce different results; later authors have combined both approaches to obtain a more complete picture. However, more recently, two developments have led to a reinstatement of the concept. First, the development of the rational choice perspective within political science, applying economic methods to political behavior, reinstated the concept of reputational analysis. In economics, reputation is a central concept in bargaining theory, and firms dedicate massive resources to safeguarding their reputations, including the employment of public relations firms describing their expertise as “reputation management.” From this perspective, where policy actors (such as political leaders, states, organizations, or interest groups) are engaged in strategic interactions with others, the possession of a powerful reputation is identified as a key power resource along with authority, information, and monetary incentives. Second, the potential for measuring reputation is much greater than in Hunter’s day due to changes in current research technologies and, more recently, the Internet. Even from the early 1990s, the development of electronic databases of print

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media enabled researchers to extract a set of reputedly influential policy makers in any functional area and to map quantitatively the scale of any actor’s reputation. At its simplest, such an analysis would involve calculating the number of citations of a given actor in a range of electronic media, for example, while controlling for negative coverage that might detract from an actor’s reputation. Although reputations calculated in this way do not fully measure reputation in Hunter’s terms, it is clear that a media reputation is in itself a power resource, enhancing an actor’s ability to influence the behavior of others. Since use of the Internet has become more widespread, even more possibilities for estimating reputation have evolved. Search results, for example, provide a rich source of data to estimate an actor’s importance in an online world. If the name of an individual or organizational actor is keyed into a search engine such as Google, the search results returned may be repetitive or contain information about similarly named individuals, but with advanced search tools such results could be analyzed to obtain a deeper understanding of the actor’s reputation. More specialist applications, such as Google Scholar or citation databases, can be used to estimate influence in specific subfields. Likewise, for an organization or individuals with their own website, blog, or social networking profile, visibility can be assessed by measuring the number of in-links pointing to the site from other sites. Such visibility can be used as an indication of reputation for both individual and organizational actors, and as with the media, can be regarded as a power resource in itself. The search algorithms of the largest search engines are a closely guarded secret, but definitely rely to some extent on the number and nature of in-links pointing to a site. Given the fact that most Internet users do not follow search results beyond the first page, appearing in the first 10 results is crucial to any actor’s reputation. The growth of “reputation systems”–systems that collect, distribute, and aggregate feedback about participants’ past behavior—are another way in which reputational analysis might be carried out in the age of the Internet. Such systems are most well known for helping users of applications such as eBay or Amazon.com to decide who to trust or what books to read, but might also be used to estimate levels of influence. So,

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for example, there are databases of experts where those who have used the services of such experts are given an opportunity to feed back their views on the quality of service they have received. Such feedback information can then be used to estimate reputation. With the proliferation of such online tools and literally millions of articles and commentaries discussing online reputation, it is perhaps surprising that there has been as yet no concurrent revival of reputational analysis in political science. Helen Margetts See also Community Power Debate; Hunter, Floyd; Internet and Power; Resources as Measuring Power

Further Readings Clark, T. (1968). Community structure and decision making. San Francisco: Chandler. Dahl, R. (1958). A critique of the ruling-elite model. American Political Science Review, 52, 463–469. Dowding, K., Dunleavy, P., King, D., Margetts, H., & Rydin, Y. (1995). Rational choice and community power structures. Political Studies, 43, 265–277. Hunter, F. (1953). Community power structure: A study of decision makers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rose, A. M. (1968). The power structure. New York: Oxford University Press.

RESOURCES

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MEASURING POWER

In 1969 John Harsanyi wrote two influential articles that defined power in terms of opportunity costs. These costs are to be covered by actors’ resources. However, the intention was not to equate power with resources, but rather to equate the measurement of an actor’s resources to the measurement of an actor’s power. While power is generally defined as an ability, and resources usually considered the means to an ability, this does not preclude measuring one in terms of the other.

Probability and Opportunity Costs The main move in Harsanyi’s articles was away from the assumption we can measure power in

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terms of probability to the idea that we can measure the strength of an actor’s power in terms of opportunity costs. Robert Dahl takes up the former position. He thinks power can be measured in terms of the number of people one has the ability to influence (extension), what they can be influenced to do (scope), and the probability of success (amount). Probability is the important variable here because the scope and extension of an action will also be subject to a probabilistic calculation. For instance, the extension and scope of a media outlet’s power will rest entirely on how their information is interpreted and received, yet the reaction from the public or their readership can never be anticipated perfectly. The greater the probability that their publication’s scope and extension will be broad, the greater their power. The Shapley– Shubik index, for example, attempts to measure the power of a voter by the probability that that voter will be the pivotal voter in an election outcome. (The pivotal voter can be defined as the last member counted of a winning coalition.) The greater the probability the voter will be pivotal (i.e., the smaller the group of voters, assuming each vote is equally weighted), the more power each voter will have to affect the electoral issue. It is important to note that Dahl does in fact include an actor’s resources (power base) and the means of power (specific actions like threats and offers) as constituents of the power relation. In the Shapley–Shubik index, one’s vote can be seen as a resource. Nevertheless, these constituents do not directly factor into measurement. Each vote is counted as a variable in a probability calculation of power, not as an indicator of power itself. It can be inferred from the means and resources an actor has that that actor will probably be able to influence a lot of people in a lot of ways. However, there is no way these resources should measure power directly. It seems here that there was—and still is—a concern with the vehicle fallacy, identified by Peter Morriss, which is to equate power with its vehicle. The vehicles of power are the means and resources required to wield it. However, if one wants to quantify power in a satisfactory way, Harsanyi believes more variables are required for its measurement. Dahl’s account seems to leave two big holes, one descriptive and one explanatory. Descriptively, it does not account for a situation where an actor could technically

perform an action but refrains because the costs attached to the action are too great. Intuitively this should indicate a lack of power, but it does not according to Dahl’s formal definition: the scope, extension, and amount remain the same. Leaders of great armies have vast power in extension, scope, and amount. Suppose, however, that they are captured by enemy forces and held at gunpoint with the ultimatum to radio their troops to pull back to a strategically undesirable position or take a bullet to the head. It would be misleading to say they have just as much power now as before being captured. We must factor opportunity costs in to power analysis to describe this situation properly. The commander does not have the power to refuse because the costs of noncompliance are too high. Harsanyi thought it was necessary to factor in another dimension of power—strength—if power was to serve an adequate explanatory purpose. One of the main analytical purposes of power theory is the modeling of individual choice situations. We need to be able to explain decisions in terms of the power that actors can have over decision makers. The strength of the power that the commanders’ enemy has gives a good indication why commanders would choose to tell their armies to withdraw. So to adequately explain why B decides to obey an order from A, it is necessary to assess the opportunity costs to B of noncompliance. Because these opportunity costs measure the incentives B has for yielding to A’s influence, they can be expressed as the strength of A’s power over B. Harsanyi factors both the strength and cost of power into his definition of power: “A’s power over B should be defined not merely as an ability by A to get B to do X with a certain probability p, but rather as an ability by A to achieve this at a certain total cost u to himself, by convincing B that B would have to bear the total cost v if he did not do X” (Harsanyi, 1969a, p. 228).

An appeal to opportunity costs is built into the definition of power, yet power is still defined in terms of ability. It should also be noted that the opportunity costs are reciprocal. A’s attempt to influence B will cost A, because the techniques A is able to use are costly (some more so and others less so.) However, it is difficult to measure power

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and so come to an adequate explanation of a social situation based solely on opportunity costs. The picture is not yet complete. We need to know how decisions were influenced; simply knowing that cost structures were altered is usually not enough. The enemy threatened the commander, and this explains why the commander chose to withdraw the army. Saying simply that the commander thought it would be costly to have done otherwise says almost nothing. Generally, whenever actors act, they believe the action is the best option of those available—otherwise they would not have done it—and so any other action (a2) might be considered costly vis-à-vis the best option (a1) to the extent of the expected utility gained from performing a2 minus the expected utility gained from performing a1. According to Harsanyi, there are four main ways A can manipulate the opportunity costs of B: by supplying information, by appealing to legitimate authority, by providing conditional incentives, or through unconditional incentives. Conditional incentives are threats, offers, or combinations of the two (“throffers”) that A attaches to a given action. These include offers of money if B behaves in a certain way and threats of violence if B does not act in a certain way. Unconditional incentives involve placing a reward or punishment (or both) for actors to carry out an action, no matter whether the action is eventually performed or not. These might take the form of government taxes on cigarettes, which hold whether or not individual actors end up purchasing any. The higher the perceived costs for B of B’s noncompliance, the greater is A’s power over B. Effective information and effective appeals to legitimate authority by A increase the costs for B not to perform the action A is attempting to get B to perform. The costs here are subtler, but the logic remains the same. Suppose B is a judge. A might hand the judge conclusive information that a man whose trial he or she is presiding over is guilty of a heinous crime in the hope the judge will convict the man. However, this information, for various reasons, is deemed unfit to be presented at trial. The judge is now torn between convicting a dangerous criminal or upholding proper court procedure. A has succeeded in increasing the judge’s costs of noncompliance; A has exerted power over the judge in order to get the judge to convict the man. An appeal to legitimate authority appears to

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be an appeal to a generally accepted moral argument. Individuals tend to agree that a state needs a police force and so are usually willing to recognize the police’s authority. Citizens are influenced to accept and obey the police by an appeal to this moral argument. The costs of noncompliance might include compromising one’s consistency or rationality, if one values this consistency. (Admittedly, it is harder to analyze an appeal to legitimate authority in terms of opportunity costs, but this does not mean it is impossible to do so.) These techniques are costly, and an actor’s resources must cover these costs. If any of these techniques are going to be credible, they usually need to be backed up with resources. A must have the resources to carry out a threat or honor an offer if B is to believe that A can and will affect the costs of B’s noncompliance. Appeals to legitimate authority will only be effective if A genuinely does have a legitimate authority in B’s opinion. Information will only be credible if it stands up to some standard of truth. Both Harsanyi’s and Dahl’s definitions relate specifically to power over somebody else (sometimes called social power) rather than power to affect outcomes (often called outcome power). We might, then, say we are dealing with social resources rather than natural resources. Social resources are those resources we might use to exert control over other actors—that is, resources that might influence others when utilized. Money, for instance, is a social resource because other actors want it. Actors tend to do things, and do things they would not otherwise have done, in order to get it. The more money A has to entice another actor with (providing society attaches a value to money), the greater the strength of A’s power. Legitimate authority and credible information are social resources because they elicit respect and consideration in actors. However, this does not commit the vehicle fallacy by saying power is an actor’s resource. Rather, we are saying that power is ability, and a way to measure this ability is by measuring the social resources actors have at their disposal. Given that we are thinking of power in terms of an ability, natural resources that produce social resources must also be included when measuring one’s ability. Say an actor possesses a machine to fabricate bank notes. While the machine is not a social resource in itself, what it produces is. If A has a money-fabricating machine, then A has the

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ability to use this fabricated money if required. Similarly, an actor who owns a large media empire has the resources to produce the social resource of credible information, but the media empire is not a social resource in itself (at least in this case).

Rational Stubbornness and Indeterminacy Keith Dowding, following a similar thesis, notes a few limitations to the approach sketched above. These limitations stem from the fact that actors can impose costs on another actor by being rationally stubborn. Consider a case where A threatens B. Suppose t1 is the measure of disutility B suffers if A’s threat is carried out, u1 is the utility of A carrying out its preferred action, and u2 is the utility of carrying out the action coercively suggested by B. It is tempting to say the threat would be effective if A is rational and t1  u1  u2. The extent to which A can maximize t1 can be called the strength of A’s power. However, carrying out the action is not necessarily rational for A despite the fact that t1  u1  u2 holds. Certainly, this would be the case if there were no costs to A to make the threat. Yet in most cases there is a cost involved in honoring a threat and also in making one (though the costs of making one are usually minimal). The power over relation is reciprocal. Actors would not make threats if they knew the threats would not be effective or, depending on the costs, highly unlikely. Therefore it is often rational for B not to comply with A so as to build a reputation for stubbornness, even when t1  u1  u2. If A knows that B has a strong reputation for noncompliance with sizable threats, A is unlikely to threaten B because of the costs involved in making and carrying out the threat. It should also be noted that developing a reputation has multiple uses. Returning to the example of A trying to use information to influence B (the judge), B might refuse to heed the information provided by A, despite believing it, and put himself or herself into the morally undesirable position of letting the criminal walk free in order to create a reputation only ever considering information presented in court. This way the judge might avoid being placed in such a position in the future. It is also quite rational to develop a reputation for honoring threats. Threats can always be bluffs, but if the threat is not successful and a bluff is exposed, the force of future threats will be compromised.

Threats are costly to honor, so a good reputation might sometimes cover the cost of the threat. In this sense, reputation can be conceived as a social resource itself. It covers the cost of threats. Of course, there are times where it is irrational to develop a reputation. For instance, in most cases it would be irrational to develop a reputation for enduring the punishment of death—unless one considers oneself a martyr—because there will be no chance to benefit from it in the future. Rational stubbornness adds an element of indeterminacy into Harsanyi’s model. If an analyst had perfect information, and it is known that for A’s threat over B, t1  u1  u2, the rational individual might still refuse to comply. It might be more rational to create reputational resources to utilize and appeal to later. Yet the more resources actors have, the greater their ability to influence other actors and withstand counterinfluence from these actors. In fact, Dowding believes that the model’s indeterminacy is its strength. The resource approach is not used to describe a particular power game perfectly, but it is used to provide an outline for an explanation of all games in society and to pick up statistical trends and patterns where they arise. We can measure the more intangible resources like reputation and social networks empirically through interviewing elites, surveying the public, and collecting data from media outlets. The more tangible resources like capital wealth, income, and education can also be easily codified. When the resources of an actor do not indicate the outcome, we can assume rational stubbornness, irrationality, or collective action problems (for group situations). To identify the correct assumption we must probe further into the particular issue by empirical means. William Bosworth See also Authority; Capability; Dowding, Keith; Harsanyi, John C.; Morriss, Peter; Power Indices; Power To and Power Over; Threats; Throffers

Further Readings Dahl, R. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioral Science, 2(3), 201–215. Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Harsanyi, J. (1969a). Measurement of social power, opportunity costs, and the theory of two-person

Responsibility bargaining games. In R. Bell, D. V. Edwards, & R. H. Wagner (Eds.), Political power: A reader. London: Collier-Macmillan. Harsanyi, J. (1969b). Measurement of social power in n-person reciprocal power situations. In R. Bell, D. V. Edwards, & R. H. Wagner, (Eds.), Political power: A reader. London: Collier-Macmillan. Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A philosophical analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

RESPONSIBILITY Responsibility is essential to our moral and political lives. Judgments of responsibility for what lies in the future or for past acts underlie praise, blame, and legal punishments. Without a belief that persons are responsible agents, our interpersonal world would look very different. Yet the precise meaning and conditions of responsibility are contested, and some people argue that the whole idea is misplaced given a naturalistic understanding of the world. The term responsibility is used in many ways. In one sense, it merely describes a particular causal relationship: “the spark was responsible for (caused) the fire.” In another, it describes persons with particular characteristics—“She is a responsible woman”—meaning that she has certain personal characteristics (she is mature, sensible, a woman of judgment, etc.). Finally, it can describe a certain relationship of answerability: to be responsible for something is to be answerable for that thing to some person or institution. It is this final, relational sense of responsibility that is most important in moral and political philosophy. One can be responsible for things that lie in the future. Parents, for example, are commonly held responsible for the upbringing of their children. When we fail to attend to our prospective responsibilities, we can be held retrospectively responsible for that failure, that is, responsible for what we have done or failed to do in the past. Of course, such judgments also have positive analogues. We can be praised for having done what we were responsible for doing. The critical issue concerns the conditions that allow judgments of responsibility to be properly made. The first and most important condition is one of control. I am responsible for something only if it is

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within my control. Some philosophers—so-called hard determinists—deny that we can have any such control. If determinism is true, and all events are necessarily caused and unavoidable, then I do not exercise the right kind of control. But, if determinism is false, and events are uncaused and random, then I still do not have control over them. Hence, I lack freedom or responsibility, and we should rethink our categories of moral judgment. Most philosophers agree that events have causes, but deny that responsibility requires countercausal control (control that evades causes). Instead, they argue that what is involved in control is being, in some sense or other, the source of an action and that action arising from a certain kind of reasoning. Thus, for example, when an agent hits another, and is called to answer—held responsible—for doing so, there are a number of things he could say. He could, for example, appeal to the fact that his hitting was caused by certain brain events triggering certain movements in his muscles. However, that is not the kind of account that is being sought. What is being sought are the reasons for his action, and here it makes all the difference whether his reply is that he was angry and wished to hurt the other person or that he reasonably believed the spot on the other person’s face to be a poisonous spider and he was trying to save a life. Causation makes no significant difference in the three stories; what does make the difference is the agent’s capacity to act on reasons that we can attribute to him. Although the idea that responsibility is a matter of calling people to account (positively or negatively) for the reasons on which they acted has widespread appeal, it leaves two residual interconnected worries. First, we might be concerned about the robustness of any judgment that an agent’s reasons can properly be attributed to her. Consider someone who is brought up all her life in a racist society in which nonwhites are regarded as subhuman. If she comes to believe this, and to act in accordance with it, we might worry about whether she is properly held to answer for her beliefs (particularly if this involves the imposition of suffering on her as punishment). Second, the claim is that an agent is to be held responsible for what she can control—in the sense of the results of her actions or omissions where those followed from her reasoned behavior—but the results of actions are

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subject to luck. If assassins can be called to account—held responsible—for the deaths of their victims when they are successful, why should it make any difference if at a later date they behave in exactly the same way but fail because of a freak gust of wind that blows the bullet off course? These kinds of worries may mean that responsibility will remain philosophically problematic. We may never resolve the issue in a way that leaves no residual worries about the appropriateness of judging people worthy of praise or blame. Perhaps this is no bad thing. Holding people to account for their actions—and, in particular, punishing them as a result—is a serious matter and one that is subject to the vagaries of power relations (it is, for example, usually victors who get to hold the defeated to account and not the other way around). There may be something inherently ambiguous in our practices of holding responsible, which is all the more reason to go on thinking about the problem. Matt Matravers See also Control; Determinism; Free Will; Freedom; Luck; Luck, Brute

Further Readings Duff, A. (1998). Responsibility. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy (Vol. 8, pp. 289–294). London: Routledge. Feinberg, J. (1970). Doing and deserving. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fischer, J., & Ravizza, M. (1998). Responsibility and control: A theory of moral responsibility. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kutz, C. (2002). Responsibility. In J. Coleman & S. Schapiro (Eds.), Oxford handbook of jurisprudence and philosophy of law (pp. 548–587). New York: Oxford University Press. Matravers, M. (2007). Responsibility and justice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

REVOLUTION The relationship between power and revolution raises important questions about the nature and scope of politics, the possibilities for freedom, and the legitimacy of violence. Complicating the

treatment of these questions is the historical experience of revolution and the seeming paradox between the moral failures of successful revolutions— on the model of the Russian Revolution—and the strategic failure of moral causes: the Spanish Revolution is the outstanding example. According to Hannah Arendt’s view of the relationship, genuine revolutionary action is directed toward the creation or protection of the political sphere, the space for public freedom, where power is institutionalized in a complex network of self-governing bodies (organized horizontally and vertically). On this view, most modern revolutions—the American Revolution is the possible exception—are not revolutionary at all. Wrongly equating politics with a set of social or economic demands—for particular systems of rights or social justice—revolutionaries have used violence to initiate programs of reform, usually suppressing the autonomous political institutions that establish spontaneously in the course of rebellions. The result is that they destroy the public spaces that provide the necessary precondition for freedom and in which power is properly vested. Socialist theory provides a different view. Contrary to Arendt, socialists argue that the political ends of the revolution can be linked to other goals—economic and social—and understand power as a necessary instrument of revolutionary change, not just its object. Whether the process of transformation is defined in terms of class struggle (as Marxists would have it) or in broader terms of oppression (Mikhail Bakunin’s position), socialist theory typically suggests that revolution is about the forcible removal of barriers to emancipation. Disagreement has traditionally turned on the identification of these barriers, the proper location of revolutionary power, and the means of their removal. The Leninist view, premised on the idea that the difference between schools is a matter of means rather than ends, is that revolutionary change depends on the capture of political power in the state and the effective use of the instruments of state violence to eradicate the threat of counterrevolution. The anarchist critique counterposes revolutionary change to the capture of political power: revolution consists in the abandonment of the state and the organization of networks composed of autonomous local bodies (primarily worker organizations, for anarcho-syndicalists).

Revolutionary Cell Structure

Like Arendt, anarchists argue that power is properly vested in these bodies and that self-governing associations are a necessary precondition for freedom. However, they also argue that the proper functioning of the network depends on the abolition of exploitation. Anarchists disagree about the extent to which the organizational links between revolutionary groups should be institutionalized in formal structures. Platformists (followers of Nesto Makhno, the Ukrainian civil war guerrilla) argue for such institutionalization. Arguments about revolution and power have taken on a new significance since the protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle and the subsequent rise of the alter-globalization movement. Activist literature focuses on two related problems: how to sustain revolutionary movements while refusing to seize control of or enter into state power, and how to ensure that the use of violence does not compromise the realization of revolutionary goals. The experiences of the Russian and Spanish revolutions provide the historical context for the discussion of the first question. While the lesson of the Bolshevik coup is that popular revolutionary movements are prone to be sucked into power vacuums, the lesson of the Spanish Revolution is that the attempt to use power to protect popular revolution only makes revolutionaries complicit in its destruction. Some activists have argued that the pitfalls of both might be avoided by the adoption of a strategy of neglect, on the model of the Zapatista movement in the Chiapas region in Mexico. The strategy rejects futile engagement in armed struggle and suggests that the issues raised by revolutionary power might be sidestepped by encouraging popular forces to turn their backs on the state. The second question, the use of violence to achieve revolutionary ends, remains a subject of fierce debate. Arguments revolve around the extent to which the process of revolutionary change affects or prefigures the outcome. If, pace Lenin, revolutionary actions are understood to be prefigurative and one of the ends of revolution is the abolition of violence, how can revolutionaries justify the use of violence to secure this end? In the postwar period, some activists have argued that they cannot. This view, influenced by pacifism and the antinuclear movement, holds that revolutionary violence is a contradiction in terms, because

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violence is incompatible with the revolutionary forms of organization in which self-government is central. Moreover, the recourse to violence is said to encourage practices and behavior that replicate those found in the state. In order to achieve revolutionary change, it is necessary to adopt evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary processes. Others, holding fast to the idea that violence is a legitimate means of revolutionary change, reject the distinction between evolution and revolution. Their position is that the concept of violence itself rests on notions of legitimacy that revolutionaries contest—and that tyranny, not harm, is the relevant criterion in determining the acceptability of revolutionary acts. In other words, whereas nonviolent activists equate power with revolutionary violence, so-called class struggle activists suggest that it is possible to distinguish power from violence and to defend revolutionary force for as long as power is located in nonstate organizations and exercised without domination. Ruth Kinna See also Anarchism, Power in; Arendt, Hannah; Bakunin, Mikhail; Revolutionary Cell Structure

Further Readings Arendt, H. (1965). On revolution (2nd ed.). New York: Viking. Holloway, J. (2005). Change the world without taking power. London: Pluto. Franks, B. (2006). Rebel alliances: The means and ends of contemporary British anarchisms. Edinburgh, UK: AK Press.

REVOLUTIONARY CELL STRUCTURE Revolutionary cell structures are classically associated with a tradition of antistate radicalism that has its origin in the 18th century. The idea of the cell developed from the confluence of two strands of thought: the first informed by a practical concern with secrecy and the second from a concern with efficiency, discipline, and the need to overcome fragmentation in revolutionary movements. Traditionally, the organizational model of the cell

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was strictly hierarchical, but cells are now also associated with fluid, vertical forms of organization. The central issues raised by cell structures for the analysis of power are function and relational. In the modern period, the idea of revolutionary conspiracy is usually identified with the French revolutionary Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf and that of the hierarchical, secret revolutionary cell with the 19th-century Russian revolutionaries Sergei Nechaev and Peter Tkachev. Because both conspiracy and hierarchy are also associated with Jacobinism, these elements are sometimes confused, but power is conceptualized differently by the conspiratorial revolutionary and the advocate of cell structures. In the conspiracy, power might be exercised equally, as it was in Babeuf’s case. In the second, power is not only concentrated in a central body but exercised in accordance with strict codes of practice, backed by equally strict sanctions. The suspicion of critics is that conspiracies and cells are designed to secure the conquest of political power and that in different ways both forms of organization replicate the existing decision-making structures. A second concern is that even if this is not their primary function, the likely divorce of the conspiratorial elite—formalized in the cell—from broader social movements results in an inequality of power that is likely to be institutionalized in any process of change: Babeuf’s Secret Directory attempted to rouse popular support for insurrection but was nevertheless insulated from this audience. Tkachev’s plans were based on an assumption of mass conservatism and passivity. In the 1960s, the idea of the cell influenced a number of terrorist groups: the Black Panthers reissued part of Nechaev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary. But in light of the Soviet experience, vanguardism and revolutionary elitism fell into disfavor. The cell structure metamorphosed into the network of affinity groups—vertical organizations with no clear centers of power. In the alterglobalization movement, radical animal rights and antiroad activism, the idea has been to create leaderless and, in some cases, memberless organizations. Central cell regulation is replaced by “hallmarks” of association, and programs of action are largely abandoned. In these groups, power flows horizontally. In other groups, notably Al Qaeda, the central power source and organizational structure are maintained but as a feature rather than a

requirement of the organization, and power flows horizontally as well as vertically. In both cases, the openness of the cell is the secret of its success, because the shifting nature of the organization enables activists to operate openly but invisibly. Ruth Kinna See also Anarchism; Bakunin, Mikhail

Further Reading Nechaev, S. (1973). Catechism of a revolutionary. In M. Confino (Ed.), Daughter of a revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin-Nechaev circle (pp. 221–230). LaSalle, IL: Library Press.

RHETORIC How to combine political rule with freedom, or at least how to minimize oppression, are questions that have often puzzled political thinkers. One popular response to these questions is to suggest that government should rest on persuasion rather than coercion. It is claimed that persuasion, unlike force, leaves the capacity for choice intact, and so is not an exercise of power. Yet, while rhetoric does not involve the use of force, it is often thought of as a tool that can be used by skillful orators to manipulate people into supporting whatever course of action best suits the orator’s interest. For those who adopt this view, rhetoric seems more like coercion than respectful persuasion, and thus some maintain that if arbitrary and oppressive rule is to be avoided, we should purge public discourse of rhetoric. Thus, debate about the value of rhetoric tends to focus on whether it can be thought of as a weapon or a tool, and if so whether it is a weapon that must be used if a just and stable state is to be maintained. Disagreement about whether rhetoric should be thought of as a manipulative tool can to some extent be explained by disagreement about how it should be defined. Aristotle, one of the earliest supporters of rhetoric, defined rhetoric broadly as speech in public that is intended to persuade, and contrasted it to speech intended to teach. However, effective persuasion in the public forum tends

Rhetoric

to be characterized by particular persuasive techniques, for example appeals to the emotions, and later Roman and Renaissance writers identified rhetoric with these techniques. Defining rhetoric as the “science of speaking well” encouraged them to think of rhetoric as a powerful tool or weapon. Tacitus, in his Dialogus de oratoribus, explains that the mastery of rhetoric “leaves you perpetually armed” and able “to strike fear and terror into malignant enemies” and the ability of great orators to argue either side of a case equally effectively was widely celebrated. However, this understanding of rhetoric alarmed many later writers who worried that if rhetoric was a weapon that could be used to defend or attack almost any position, then it would be used by good orators to manipulate and mislead. Thus, Thomas Hobbes insisted that the goal of eloquence “is not the truth but victory, so that truth is only obtained by accident.’ Yet Roman and Renaissance humanist writers maintained that the art of rhetoric was an essential part of public life. Their defense of rhetoric was in part based on the claim that rhetoric is necessary to motivate people. Cicero worried that “wisdom in itself is silent and powerless to speak” and he maintained that “eloquence is indispensable if men are to persuade others to accept the truths that reason finds out” (1949, p. 6). However, although it is widely accepted that rhetoric is an effective motivator, it is not clear that this should lead us to commend rhetoric. The problem is that if rhetoric is seen as a weapon that can be used by skilful orators to gather people behind any cause, there is no guarantee that they will use it to motivate people to defend the right cause. The civic humanists seem to have simply dismissed this worry that good orators might use their skills to manipulate and promote factional interests. Quintilian, an important Roman writer on rhetoric, insisted that only a good man could be a good orator. However, given the emphasis the Romans placed on the ability of good orators to argue either side of the case, it is hard to see why they did not worry that rhetorical weapons could be used by bad citizens. Indeed, it seems that the best response to worries about the misuse of rhetoric would be to deny that rhetoric is a weapon that can be turned to any purpose, and to insist that the art of rhetoric will lead us to better answers. And in fact, in spite of their emphasis on the arms

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metaphor, there is some evidence to suggest that Roman writers did precisely this. For example, in De Oratore Cicero suggests that effective ornamentation reveals rather than disguises an argument’s true attractions. One possible explanation of why at least later classical rhetoricians might have believed that rhetoric reveals rather than disguises is offered by Quentin Skinner. He suggests that they drew on Augustinian claims that human spirituality is inherently affective and passionate to argue that rhetoric could help us to adopt the correct emotional response. Emphasis on the importance of affective development is also found in 18th- and 19th-century Romanticism; in this work the connection with rhetoric is explored more fully. For example, John Stuart Mill argued that Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy suffered from his lack of emotional maturity. Moreover, he maintained that poetry or eloquence was the medium through which feelings were expressed and emotional capacities developed, and that the best eloquence and poetry was that in which feeling was most effectively conveyed. Once we accept that better answers are ones that stem from greater emotional development, and that eloquence can be seen as an attempt to give a true expression of the human soul, then we start to see why Romantics like Mill argued that in a broad rhetorical debate better answers would triumph: we are more likely to be convinced by oratory that gives a better and more subtle representation of our emotional life. This noninstrumental view of rhetoric can be also be traced in the work of later writers influenced by Mill. For example, J. A. Hobson maintained that while more subtle and sophisticated positions may lack immediate appeal, when people are encouraged to reflect on more stimulating and explosive arguments, a “sense of artificial dupery and doping” will spoil the efficacy of these “bright visions” (1926, p. 248). Thus, on this view rhetoric is a respectable and respectful form of persuasion and not a tool that can be turned in any direction. More recently theorists influenced by Michel Foucault have offered a quite different defense of rhetoric. Like the Romantics, they maintain that arguments and discourses have important nonlogical features, and that they rest on emotional or cultural assumptions. They also accept that rhetoric offers the best way to question these assumptions

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and modify the discourse. However, they reject the Romantic belief that the answers that people find more convincing on reflection should be thought of as better or truer. While the Romantics argued that rhetoric could be thought of as a form of reasoning, Foucauldians maintain that all reasoning is rhetoric. Thus Foucault reintroduces the classical metaphors of weapons and struggle and gives them a much broader scope, maintaining that “the history which bears and determines us has the form of a war.” In Foucault’s view, all forms of argument involve the exercise of power: powerless persuasion is a myth. Therefore, the question of how to establish a power-free and reasonable way of organizing our life together is misplaced. Foucault explains that while the traditional question asked by political theorists was how the discourse of truth is able to fix limits to the rights of power, he believes we should rather ask “What rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of the discourse of truth?” (1994, p. 210). Julia Skorupska See also Argument, Power of; Discourse; Foucault, Michel; Hobbes, Thomas; Manipulation; Perceptual Symbols of Power; Persuasion

Further Readings Cicero. (1949). De Inventione (H. M. Hubbell, Ed. & Trans.). London: Heineman. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge. Brighton, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M. (1994). Two lectures on power. In N. B. Dirks, G. Eley, & S. B. Ortner (Eds.), Culture/ power/history: A reader in contemporary social theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hobson, J. A. (1926). Free thought in the social sciences. London: George Allen & Unwin. Skinner, Q. (1996). Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

RIGHT-WING AUTHORITARIANISM Right-wing authoritarianism is a measure of ideology or psychological orientation with respect to how an individual perceives authorities in society, particularly as those authorities stand in relation

to potential sources of dissent. The measure was developed by Robert Altemeyer as a refinement of existing metrics of authoritarianism that were originally developed to understand the motivations underlying support for the National Socialist movement in Germany. The measure is important in that it highlights the personality characteristics of individuals who are both predisposed to supporting the status quo and antagonistic toward contrary or dissenting points of view. Consequently, it is a measure targeted at understanding the social and psychological dynamics behind populist movements that have supported the most malevolent totalitarian regimes throughout history. This entry summarizes Altemeyer’s (1981) conceptualization of right-wing authoritarianism and discusses some of the critiques of the measure. Right-wing authoritarianism is a personality or ideological variable typically used in the scholarly fields of political science and psychology, and is often articulated synonymously with the terms authoritarianism and authoritarian personality. It is most often associated with individuals who are politically conservative, espouse fundamentalist religious beliefs (whatever their doctrine of choice), are oriented toward the maintenance of “law and order” (over embracing behavioral diversity), and supportive of nationalistic or ethnocentric sentiments (in defiance of cultural relativism). Altemeyer developed the measure after becoming dissatisfied with the predictive ability of the F-scale (Fascism scale, developed by Theodor Adorno and colleagues), which was informed by Freudian psychology and included nine attitudinal measures related to authoritarianism. Right-wing authoritarianism involves the covariation of three attitudinal and behavioral variables that tend to cluster together. All three are necessary (and no less than three is sufficient) for an individual to be classified as having an authoritarian personality. First, the measure includes the construct of authoritarian submission. This is designed to identify individuals who are highly submissive to authorities they perceive as legitimate within society. Altemeyer defines legitimate authorities as those in society who are legally or morally authorized to preside over the behavior of others. A critical feature of his formulation involves the notion of perceived legitimacy, a construct whose importance was noted most prominently within Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments

Right-Wing Authoritarianism

during the 1960s at Yale. Consequently, the submissive component of right-wing authoritarianism is not contingent upon an authority actually possessing or wielding power. Also important is Altemeyer’s consideration that submission is not tantamount to blind obedience, because authoritarians can sometimes disagree with the decisions and policies of those in authority despite their propensity toward the contrary. What is most important is that, all other things being equal, authoritarians are more likely to submit to authority than nonauthoritarians. Altemeyer cites empirical evidence that indicates authoritarians are more likely to submit to established authorities whether they agree or disagree with the political orientation of the leaders in question. Thus, there need not be a correspondence of right-wing authoritarianism with any particular ideological form of authority, be it conservative or liberal in orientation. Second, right-wing authoritarianism includes a measure of authoritarian aggression, which is described as a general aggression directed at outgroups perceived to be targets that are sanctioned as such by established authorities. Altemeyer defined aggressiveness as a predisposition to cause harm to someone. Because prejudice is conjectured to be a conventional outlet for those predisposed to aggression, xenophobically motivated aggression is debatably higher in authoritarian individuals. Historically, the targets of such aggression have been relatively powerless groups in society: homosexuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and social or political noncomformists. In addition, authoritarian individuals are typically predisposed toward retributively controlling the behavior of others through punishment, and usually support capital punishment as a legitimate enterprise. Third, authoritarians have a tendency toward conventionalism, defined as a high adherence to the social norms endorsed by authorities in society. This construct captures the degree to which authoritarians believe they know what constitutes acceptable behavior on the part of others. In most Western societies, what constitutes conventional, acceptable, prosocial behavior is generally compatible with the Judeo-Christian tradition. A consequence of this tradition is that authoritarians tend to favor the universal applicability of “God’s law” in fundamentalist fashion, irrespective of the particularities of any specific religious doctrine. As a result,

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attitudes concerning sex and what constitutes the “proper” institutional structure of the family tend to fall along conventionally conservative lines. Conventionalism is also displayed in an authoritarian tendency toward nationalism and patriotism, denying the validity of cultural relativity. Social norms are not seen as conditional or relative to the authoritarian individual, instead they are seen as social imperatives for all mankind. Scholars have noted that there is no leftist or liberal orientation possible within the conceptualization of right-wing authoritarianism. Obedience to and admiration for those in authority is a necessary condition of the authoritarian personality, and those leftists and dissidents who have gone far enough to engage in malevolent behavior in support of their cause typically share no such sentiment toward sources of legitimate authority. Historically, leftists and dissidents have been neither submissive nor conventional in their orientation concerning authority. Critics of the right-wing authoritarianism construct contend it is a measure indistinguishable from traditional metrics of political conservatism. They also contend it ignores the importance of dynamics involved in selecting groups targeted for persecution. Although alternative measures have been proposed, the importance of right-wing authoritarianism is measured by the degree to which it can predict authoritarian behavior. This is an important endeavor because, as a state of mind, authoritarianism can create a public sentiment that is favorable to the imposition of totalitarian regimes (e.g., Nazis in Europe). Right-wing authoritarianism has also been implicated in the mind-set of those who intimidate journalists, dissidents, and conscientious objectors to repressive governmental administrations and policies. Consequently, those who espouse an authoritarian orientation do so at the expense of promoting the freedom of critical intellectual discourse. Douglas J. Dallier See also Adorno, Theodor; Authoritarian Personality; Hierarchy; Ideology; Symbolic Power and Violence

Further Readings Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper & Row.

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Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Crowson, H. M., & Hestevold, S. (2005). Is political conservatism synonymous with authoritarianism? The Journal of Social Psychology, 145, 571–592. Stone, W. (1980). The myth of left-wing authoritarianism. Political Psychology, 2, 3–19.

RIKER, WILLIAM H. (1920–1993) William H. Riker was one of the most important of the postwar U.S. political scientists, influencing several generations of scholars in the direction of rational choice theory. His work spanned the issues of federalism, coalition theory, democratic theory, and his invention of heresthetics. He also contributed several important articles on power and was the first to bring the Shapley–Shubik power index to bear upon the issue of coalition formation in legislatures. His work on democratic theory founded what became known as the Rochester school (after Rochester University, where he taught most of his life). Riker’s articles on power made a distinction between ego-oriented power—the ability to increase your own utility by manipulating outcomes—and other-oriented power—the ability to decrease another’s utility by manipulating others. It is a variant of the more standard distinction between outcome power and social power. His work here is important for its recognition that for ego-oriented definitions power always exists in social relations because it refers to outcomes; so for any outcomes we can always assign power to someone. Riker applied the Shapley–Shubik index of power to coalition formation. In his book The Theory of Political Coalitions he argued that politics was essentially zero sum; that is, the spoils of government mean that whatever one party gains the other loses. Thus if there is no single party that commands a majority in a legislature, the coalition that forms must share the spoils between them. In his model, the spoils of winning is office. Parties will seek to form the smallest winning coalition— that is, the smallest coalition that still commands a majority in the legislature—because that way each party will be able maximize the number of cabinet seats it enjoys. In this model, as in the Shapley– Shubik power index, small parties that are required

for a coalition to win will have as much power as larger parties in the coalition. This counterintuitive result ensured the book’s success and its controversy. For well over 30 years political scientists measured actual coalitions against Riker’s predictions. They demonstrated that (a) not all coalitions are minimum winning ones, and (b) the spoils of office tend to be split up among winning parties in proportion to the number of seats each holds in the parliament. However, minimum winning coalitions form more often that one would expect by chance, which suggests there is some truth in Riker’s simple model. Coalition theory has advanced enormously from Riker’s argument, produced in 1962. Far more sophisticated and empirically accurate models now exist, but these could not have been achieved without the inspiration provided by Riker’s original contribution. Riker’s work on the social choice problems of democracy has been equally influential, and the Rochester school equally controversial. Riker introduced the social choice problems that bedevil our understanding of democratic results to many generations of political scientists, even if his own arguments about what these mean do not receive universal assent. It has been said of Riker, as of Thomas Hobbes, that he is more interesting when wrong than most of us when right. Keith Dowding See also Coalition Theory; Heresthetics; Manipulation; Power Indices; Shapley–Shubik Index; Social Power

Further Readings Riker, W. H. (1962). The theory of political coalitions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riker, W. H. (1969). A test of the adequacy of the power index. In R. Bell, R. N. Berki, & R. H. Wagner (Eds.), Political power: A reader. London: Collier-Macmillan. Riker, W. H. (1969). Some ambiguities in the notion of power. In R. Bell, R. N. Berki, & R. H. Wagner (Eds.), Political power: A reader. London: Collier-Macmillan.

RIOTS A riot is an action of public disorder that extends beyond the actions of mob or those of a

Riots

demonstration. Riots are unruly acts of violence, often temporary but outside of any everyday activity. Riots result in damage to property and persons who may or may not be part of the riot and may involve people who were not connected to the original reason for which the group assembled. Demonstrations for or against some political object such a government law can be peaceful or might break down into a violent confrontation without constituting a full-blown riot. Mobs might also become violent without indiscriminately damaging property or injuring people. A lynch mob is a mob and might take morally dreadful actions, but can be conducted in an orderly fashion. Riots by their very nature are not orderly and not directed. Urban riots are not confined to modern occurrences. They date back to biblical times, occurring even in the ancient cities of Gomorrah and Rome. In the United States, riots have occurred since the 1700s. Rioting by lower-class urban citizens even helped start the American Revolution. In early U.S. history, riots occurred in such cities as Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. During period from the 1830s through the 1850s, over 35 serious riots and many minor riots occurred. The government of George I in the United Kingdom passed the Riot Act in 1713 to declare any group of more than 12 people to be unlawfully assembled and have to disperse. “Reading the Riot Act” involved making a proclamation to the assembled crowd, ordering them to disperse within one hour or be arrested. The act was not finally repealed until 1973. Riots are preceded by a history of tensions between groups. An increase in tensions often results in minor occurrences of violence. A precipitation of tension-filled incidents triggers riots. In the case of race riots, the most common type is the communal riot. In this case a subordinate group, or those supporting a subordinate group, contests the power that another group has over the subordinate group. Riots are a response to the perceptions of or feelings about an event or existing social injustice. Riots often occur when groups of people have lawfully gathered for some protest purposes, but can form at any time where there is tension and there has been some precipitating event. Urban race riots occurred after the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and after the jury acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King in Los Angeles. Prison riots have

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been precipitated when prisoners reacted to existing oppressive or inhumane prison conditions. Another common type of riot is the commodity riot, in which the rioters commit acts of looting and property damage. Commodity riots in the United States reached a peak in 1967, when 41 major riots and 123 lesser riots occurred. In reaction to this surge in riot activity, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. This committee identified five main determinant factors that lead to a riot. Power is the first significant determinant of a riot. When powerlessness is combined with alienation, hostility may result. These attitudes create ingrained resentments. Often these resentments lead to the feeling that violence is needed to change the authoritative system. Other factors leading to rioting include discrimination and segregation, which exclude many minorities from the economic benefits of a good education, employment, and housing. Other factors that lead to rioting include segregation laws or practices, feelings of isolation, destroyed opportunities, and frustration. Burning, looting, the destruction of property, and killing are among the negative effects of rioting. Rioting can have some positive albeit shortlived effects. Federal funds are often sent to riot ravaged areas for restoration, job creation, or educational programming. Rioters might have a temporary feeling of having achieved an effect by conveying their feelings about a given issue. Riots in themselves rarely achieve the goals of those who came together to make a stance, though they do bring issues to the attention of authorities. Reports on prison conditions and on urban poverty and race problems have followed serious riots. Some political theorists such as Iris Marion Young have suggested that violent protest sometimes is the only response to oppression and, in a sense, is a signal or the first statement in later dialogue. Debra Lucas See also Revolution

Further Readings Gilje, P. A. (1996). Rioting in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Young, I. M. (2001). Activist challenges to deliberative democracy. Political Theory, 29, 670–690.

S preferences is enhanced by their tendency to filter new information subconsciously, accepting as true those notions or facts that affirm existing beliefs while dismissing those that do not. This unintentional and often unrecognized bias predisposes individuals to reject change, and may also exacerbate tensions with other actors in the same policy subsystem who hold conflicting beliefs and policy preferences. The ACF assumes that policy making in most countries is conducted by specialists who can be subdivided according to their preferences into advocacy coalitions. When major policy changes do occur, they are usually made possible by one or more of the following factors: (1) policyoriented learning (i.e., the acquisition and application of new knowledge relevant to existing policies), (2) external shocks (a necessary but not sufficient path to change, an external shock can be defined as change that is beyond the control of actors in a particular policy subsystem, such as a natural disaster, socioeconomic shift, regime change, etc.), (3) internal shocks (such as a disaster with immediate relevance to the policy subsystem; e.g., a chemical spill), and (4) negotiated agreements (situations in which long-term conflict between coalitions is resolved by mutual consent). Since 1988, the ACF has been applied in over 100 empirical studies of policy change and constitutes one of the major empirical efforts at examining power in complex policy situations. Sabatier has applied his expertise in policy making, implementation, and bureaucratic behavior to several case studies in the field of environmental policy, including analyses of the U.S. Forest Service,

SABATIER, PAUL (1944– ) Paul A. Sabatier is a political scientist and professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. Sabatier is best known for his research on policy change and implementation, and particularly for the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), which he developed in conjunction with Hank Jenkins-Smith. Sabatier earned a BA at Austin College, and an MA and PhD at the University of Chicago. He began his academic career at University of California, Davis, in 1972 and has served as a visiting scholar at a range of institutions, including Institut d’Éducation, Université de ParisDauphine (France), Universität Bielefeld (German Federal Republic), and Nuffield College of Oxford University (United Kingdom). In conjunction with Daniel Mazmanian, Sabatier received the 1997 Aaron Wildavsky Award from the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science Association in recognition of his enduring contribution to policy studies. The ACF idea was first published in an article in Policy Sciences in 1988 and updated in 1993, 1999, and 2007 to reflect new findings from empirical applications of the framework. The goal of the framework is to explain how changes in beliefs can be translated into policy shifts over long periods of time (10 years or more). Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith argue that major policy change is rare, because individuals have very stable beliefs and policy preferences. The stability of individuals’ 585

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watershed management partnerships, and land use and air pollution in both the United States and Europe. Jessica Templeton See also Blocking Coalition; Power, Cognition, and Behavior; Trust

Further Readings Sabatier, P. A. (Ed.). (2007). Theories of the policy process (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sabatier, P. A., & Jenkins-Smith, H. (1993). Policy change and learning: An advocacy coalition approach. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

SCOPE Scope refers to the dimension of behavior affected by the exercise of power. The observation that someone has power does not tell us very much unless it also specifies answers to the following questions: With respect to whom (domain)? And with respect to what aspects of behavior (scope)? Some have even suggested that it is virtually meaningless to attribute power (or influence) to someone without specifying the scope. The power of a given actor often varies from one issue to another. Thus, the president of the United States has more power with respect to American foreign policy than with respect to the speed limit in California. The United States of America may have sufficient power to conquer and occupy Iraq, but it may lack the power to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis after doing so. Japan may exercise a great deal of influence with respect to international trade negotiations, but it may have much less influence when it comes to nuclear arms control agreements. Specification of the scope of influence is important for scholars because it affects the clarity of scholarly communication. Is the United States a hegemon? Do men dominate women? Are poor people powerless? Is the ruler a dictator? Fruitful debate of such questions is unlikely without specification of the scopes to which such questions refer. Understanding that power may vary from one scope to another is also important for practical

reasons. The power resources needed to affect some scopes may be quite different from those needed to affect other scopes. Thus, threatening another country with nuclear attack may be an effective way to deter it from attacking your country; but threatening voters with nuclear annihilation is likely to be counterproductive with respect to winning a democratic election. Variations in the power of actors from one scope to another also complicate the measurement of power. If actors can be powerful with respect to some scopes and weak with respect to others, how does one add up the power of various actors in order to determine the overall distribution of power? The problem of determining a single overall distribution of power is analogous to ranking the ability of athletes from different sports. How does one compare the athletic ability of a runner, a biker, a weightlifter, a swimmer, an archer, and a boxer? It may be more useful to describe different athletes as champions with respect to their particular sport. Likewise, it may be more useful to identify different distributions of power with respect to different issue areas than to try to add them all up in order to identify a single overall power structure. David A. Baldwin See also Domain; Resources as Measuring Power

Further Readings Dahl, R. A., & Stinebrickner, B. (2003). Modern political analysis (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lasswell, H. D., & Kaplan, A. (1950). Power and society: A framework for political inquiry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

SCOTT, JAMES (1936– ) One of the marks of outstanding scholars is that their work elicits response outside their areas of study. James C. Scott, who is currently the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science at Yale University, is one such scholar. Although he is a political scientist by profession, his erudition has made an impact on social scientists of various

Scott, James

persuasions. Scott is responsible for spelling out a number of concepts including moral economy, weapons of the weak, hidden and public transcripts, infrapolitics, state legibility, high modernity, and others. These concepts were not merely the result of a critical exegesis of existing theories. Although he is well versed in theory, the concepts that he has originated have emerged as a result of a thorough study of empirical data that he has gathered. These concepts have opened new venues in the study of peasant studies, social movements, social revolutions, social change, discourse analysis, and more. Scott’s chief concepts of relevance to the social theory of power include moral economy, weapons of the weak and hidden transcripts, and seeing like a state. Scott’s early work deals with the social phenomenology of insurrection. Here his primary focus was on the reasons for peasant rebellion. Without undermining the importance of structural factors, such as the development of Western capitalism and the rise of the modern state, Scott provides an agent-centered analysis of peasant insurrections. However, his view has few similarities to theories with subjectivist assumptions, such as relative deprivation theory. Critical in Scott’s analysis is the idea that the moral economy of peasants is based on subsistence ethics, a loose system of morality wherein the livelihood of the peasant occupies center stage. Peasants, according to Scott, are less interested in the maximization of profit; their chief concern is on the reduction of risk. Peasants prefer to deal with landlords who take the lion’s share of the produce but who are flexible during times of crisis than a state that imposes uniform taxation in order to stabilize its income. Peasant insurrection, accordingly, is occasioned when the ontological security of the peasant is challenged as a result of the actions of the interventionist modern state. Extending this idea, Scott makes a critique of the Marxist concepts of false consciousness and hegemony. Both concepts are intended to explain acquiescence by way of the hegemonic order’s ability to penetrate the habitus of the dominated. Adherents of these views, overemphasizing the capacity of the powerful to manufacture consent, focus on spectacular, overt, political conflicts, while giving short thrift to subtle forms of resistance. The latter, which are often discursive in nature, takes place within the “free space” of

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friends and relatives. The war of words against the rich may not be as dramatic as foot dragging, pilfering, arson, sabotage, and individual boycotts. The poor may appear deferential, conforming, and submissive in front of the upper class. But the dominated are not merely mystified by the hegemonic order. Oppression may be perceived as inevitable but not as just. Hence, even when peasants are not openly revolting, they are involved in hidden transcripts, activities that are beyond the purview of public gaze. If social inquiry has failed to understand this dynamic, it is because social scientists assumed that social conduct is primarily characterized by concurrence and unity and have limited themselves to the examination of public transcripts. Scott, accordingly, insists that social researchers need to focus on the infrapolitics of the dominated, especially when the balance of power is tipped toward the powerful. Far from being a safety valve for reducing social tension, the infrapolitics of the powerless are a prelude to forthcoming organized actions. Charisma in this sense is an outward manifestation of what has been brewing behind public transcripts. However, Scott is quick to note that what happens in the symbolic universe has its roots in the objective relations between different groups of people. But symbolic forms of resistance are by no means an automatic reflection of objective conditions. Symbolic struggles are reactions based on interpretations of material conditions. These interpretations pass through a “normative filter” before they assert themselves as ideological conflict. Scott’s recent work deals with the nature of high modernism involving the state. Based on case studies of 18th-century Prussian forestry, modern city planning in Brazil, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, collectivization of agriculture in Soviet Russia, villagization in Tanzania, and others, Scott examines how the social engineering of the states resulted in social disaster. At the apex of these processes is the modern state, which defines itself as a metasocial institution. Scott gets much more specific than this, though. He notes that the debacles were caused by the superimposition of an administrative uniformity on the counters of manifold social dimensions, the absence of a robust civil society that acts as a counterweight to political society, a state that promotes modernization under duress, and a high modernist ideology that relegates all but

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scientific rationality to a secondary status. From these observations, Scott draws conclusions that have important policy implications. First, planners need to consider the social condition of their respective countries rather than blindly following the social principles applied in other countries. Second, there must be institutional mechanisms that prohibit members of the ruling party from protecting their vested interests at the expense of the public. Third, short-term goals should not be carried out without regard for long-term results. Finally, real-life complexities must not be ignored for the sake of simplification, however convenient they might be. Alem S. Kebede See also False Consciousness; Habitus; Hegemony

Further Readings Scott, J. C. (1976). The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

SEA POWER The great American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan does not define the phrase sea power very explicitly, even though he coined it himself. What he meant by the phrase must largely be inferred. Such ambiguity is common and sometimes impedes communication. People use the same words but often seem to mean somewhat different things by them. When it comes to sea power some focus on navies, while others include the civilian uses of the sea as well. Sea power has to be seen both as an input and an output. The obvious inputs are navies, coast guards, the marine or civil maritime industries

broadly defined, and, where relevant, the contribution of land and air forces. As an output, sea power is not simply about what it takes to use the sea (although that is obviously a prerequisite). It is also the capacity to influence the behavior of other people or things by what one does at or from the sea. This approach defines sea power in terms of its consequences, its outputs rather than the inputs, the ends rather than the means. Moreover, sea power concerns the sea-based capacity to determine events both at sea and on land. As that other great master of maritime thought, Sir Julian Corbett, frequently remarked, the real point of sea power is not so much what happens at sea, but how that influences the outcome of events on land. In recent years, indeed, there has been a marked shift in naval attention from power at sea, to power from the sea. From this bald summary of the conclusions of Mahan and Corbett, two conclusions can immediately be drawn. The first is the simple point that there is more to sea power than gray-painted ships with numbers on the side. Sea power also embraces the contribution that the other services can make to events at sea, and the contribution that navies can make to events on land or in the air. Sea power also includes the nonmilitary aspects of sea use (merchant shipping, fishing, marine insurance, shipbuilding and repair, etc.) because these contribute to naval power and because they can also influence the behavior of other people in their own right. This is a useful reminder that the sea is far more than a medium for the exercise of political power; it is also a rich source of resources, the major means of transportation for international trade, a means of communication, and a crucial physical environment. The sea, in short, really matters. Second, sea power is a relative concept, something that some countries have more of than others. The real issue is the matter of degree. Nearly all countries have a degree of sea power, whether it be through their naval strength, their shipbuilding, their skills in marine insurance, their capacity to supply seafarers, or a combination of all of these characteristics and others. But the point is that some countries have more sea power than others, and it is that relationship that is strategically significant in peace and in war. The emphasis on the relative nature of sea power has important consequences. It follows that

Second Face

the strategic effectiveness of sea power depends importantly on the strengths and weaknesses of whom it is exerted against. The amount of sea power a nation has is therefore often best recognized in terms of those who are in potential conflict. Because of this, as Colin Gray shows so eloquently, sea power, in some circumstances, merely enables a conflict to be won by air and ground forces; in others (such as the United States’ Pacific campaign against Japan in World War II) it was the executive and decisive form of war. Seeing sea power as a relative concept is also a convenient means of putting an end the curiously long-lived misapprehension that it is the exclusive property of a handful of largely Western countries. It is not, and never has been, although some of them have certainly been more maritime than most. Geoffrey Till See also Gunboat Diplomacy; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Gray, C. S., & Barnett, R. W. (Eds.). (1990). Seapower and strategy. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.

SECOND DIMENSION See Second Face

SECOND FACE The second face of power is the power to influence others through non decision making. Non decisionmaking power is the power that groups and individuals have to control the debates and to make certain issues unacceptable for discussion in moderate public forums. Proponents of the second face or dimension of power such as Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz took exception to the onedimensional view of power proposed by Robert Dahl, Nelson Polsby, and Raymond Wolfinger in 1970. Bachrach and Baratz claimed that the

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one-dimensional view understood power in far too narrow a fashion and gave a misleadingly sanguine pluralistic picture of U.S. politics. Power is enforced along the second dimension when an individual or group “creates or reinforces barriers to the public airing of public conflicts” (Bachrach & Baratz, 1970, p. 8). Not only can power be enforced by exerting decision-making power, it can also be enforced by controlling and setting the norms, values, and design of the decision-making procedures so that they “operate systematically and consistently to the benefit of certain persons and groups at the expense of others” (Bachrach & Baratz, 1970, p. 43). The second dimension of power remains primarily behavioralist. While Bachrach and Baratz argue that the limiting of public debate can occur through nonaction, they argue that the decision not to act is a form of action. In this understanding, nonaction is the suppression of potential challenges to the status quo. Because of this, proponents of the two-dimensional view hold that potential issues should also come under scrutiny when studying power. This is another difference between the one-dimensional view and the twodimensional view, as the first face of power only looks at issues that manifest themselves in public debate, while the second face looks at issues that were prevented from being discussed. Steven Lukes points out that this view allows for the “redefining of the boundaries of what counts as a political issue” (2005, p. 25). However, like the one-dimensional view, the two-dimensional view looks only at observable conflicts of interests and conflicts, which are embodied in express policy and subpolitical preferences. Advocates of the one-dimensional view such as Wolfinger and Polsby argued that without decisions that are observable we have no warrant for claiming power exists. However, Bachrach and Baratz did not claim that non decisions are not observable in principle, merely that the methods of the one-dimensional writers do not allow us to discover them. In that sense the second face shares the ontology of the first-dimensional view, namely that power only exists in situations of conflict. The difference is that with non decisions that conflict is kept out of the public eye. Lukes argues, however, that power can exist even in the absence of conflict and thus neither the first nor the second face approaches make any attempt

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to observe the uses of power through inaction. This is what led Lukes to state that the twodimensional view of power is only a qualified critique of the behavioralist approach. Joseph Angolano See also Dahl, Robert A.; Elite Theories; Foucault, Michel; Lukes, Steven; Pluralism; Third Face; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1970). Power and poverty: Theory and practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd Ed.). London: Palgrave. Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.

SECURITY Security is a contested concept. Its empirical and value-laden meaning will vary, often fundamentally, with the interests, values, and assumptions about human and state behavior of the observer or analyst. This discussion identifies five leading and contending schools of security theory and practice. These include realism, neorealism, liberal institutionalism, classical liberalism, and Marxism. They advance opposing explanations of the sources of conflict and, specifically, how and why states use force or coercive threats, or eschew these means, in their striving to induce other states and actors to accede to their aims and preferences, most notably the assurance of their security. Other important conceptions of security are discussed elsewhere in the encyclopedia.

Foundations of Security and Security Studies Four key theorists may be credited with having laid the theoretical foundations of traditional conceptions of security. The first, and most important, is Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century philosopher. Writing against the background of the internecine English civil wars of the 17th century, Hobbes

sought to find ways to limit force and appeals to violence in resolving differences between members of a civil society. He surmised that under conditions of scarce resources, which he posited to be an inescapable human condition, individuals would clash violently over the allocation of wealth, power, status, and prestige; over whose cultural or religious values should predominate as legitimate claims to rule; and over a host of other trivial and significant interests in dispute between humans as they evolved through time and changing social conditions. Hobbes asserted that men lived perpetually in a natural state of war of all against all. Their preferences did not converge. To get their way, humans were compelled to pursue power to impose what they wanted on others. Their reliance on force as the final arbiter of their claims against each other propelled them toward a common end point of pure violence. That end point held for all humans regardless time, place, or circumstance. This profound insight established Hobbes as the foremost theorist of security. Unless the tendency toward violence were checked by what Hobbes termed a Leviathan, human life would inevitably be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” for everyone. For Hobbes, only a Leviathan that possessed overwhelming awesome material power to impose order on this incessant struggle could ensure the escape of humans from permanent insecurity, Max Weber, a leading sociologist at the turn of the 20th century, modernized Hobbes’s theory of security and his prescriptive solution of a Leviathan. Weber defined the Leviathan as the modern state, a view universally acknowledged today. The state was invested with a monopoly of legitimate violence over a defined territory. This afforded this humanly contrived unit of political organization the requisite material power and legitimacy to impose order and provide security for those over whom it exercised its sovereign authority. Both Hobbes and Weber owe much of their understanding of security to Thucydides. This Greek historian, who chronicled the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BCE, is the third important contributor to the classical understanding of security. Of particular interest is Thucydides’ recounting of the Melian dialogue in The Peloponnesian War. The Melians, a colony of Sparta, lived in peace with Athens for centuries.

Security

Athens rebuffed their request to remain neutral in the war. The Athenians insisted that the war dictated that all previous assumptions of peaceful relations between Athens and Melos were now reduced to the imperatives of force driving the struggle with Sparta and its allies. The Melian dialogue epitomizes what Hobbes would later predict to be the result of any human exchange in which force would arbitrate actor differences—in this case the clash between Athenians and Melians over neutrality in the Peloponnesian War. When human conflicts are reduced to war, unchecked by any other limitation, the annihilation of one of the parties or both in the struggle or the submission of one actor to the other are the logical end points of violence to resolve a conflict, the fate that awaited the Melians for opposing Athenian rule. The fourth foundational source of security theory is Karl von Clausewitz, a German military theorist of the 19th century. In On War, Clausewitz posited, much like Hobbes, the end point of pure war as the termination of armed conflict between states. Pure war reduced a conflict between states to a duel in which a state or states sought to eliminate or compel another state or alliance to submit to its will through violence. Clausewitz, who unlike Hobbes was concerned more about the relations of states than of citizens and the state, revised Hobbes’s endgame by introducing the notion of real war. States were capable, through reason and restraint, of arresting their armed conflicts short of pure war. Clausewitz assumed that states fought wars for defined political and moral purposes. For him, violence was neither an end in itself nor beyond the capacity of humans to limit and control. To make sense of war as states actually employed it as an instrument, Clausewitz described war as “politics by other means.” Unless guided and constrained by the political objectives that animated the resort to force, war would degenerate to its pure form. From a political and moral perspective, that endgame was senseless. Clausewitz’s insights that wars tend toward real rather than pure war and, implicitly, that war should serve human ends, now inform the vast enterprise of strategic studies. Most states, most notably great powers, are engaged ceaselessly in developing complex plans to use or threaten force to prevail in conflicts with rivals.

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Research universities, so-called think tanks, and international institutes around the globe conduct analyses both of the causes of domestic and international security problems and of how they can be resolved. They search for ways to achieve politically feasible objectives through the discrete and calibrated use of force and coercive threats. Strategic studies in this instrumental sense should be distinguished from security studies, with which they are often and misleadingly confused. The focus of the former is on the development of state strategies that employ both the soft and hard power of the state to secure its preferences in its relations with other states, whether rivals, neutrals, or allies. Central to these efforts is the role of force and coercion. The pragmatic aim of the strategist is to produce a strategy that utilizes the scarce resources of the state to maximize its security (and nonsecurity) interests at least cost and risk.

Prevailing Schools of Security Studies Our concern is with security studies, not strategy, as a branch of international relations. Both are tributaries of the social sciences. In contrast to strategic studies, focused on winning strategies, prevailing security schools of thought seek rather to explain how and why states use force or decide, conversely, to reject these coercive instruments to get their way in their conflicts with other states. The most prominent school is realism, which relies on the foundational ideas of security of our four theorists. The iconic presentation of this school of thought is Hans J. Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations, which first appeared shortly after World War II. Morgenthau identified several key assumptions generally shared by most realists today. Central to realist theory is the state as defined by Weber. The decentralization of discrete monopolies of legitimate violence, embodied in the state and the state system, compels statesmen to pursue power, most notably military force, to be able to impose their preferences on other states whatever the issues dividing them. Echoing both Hobbes and Thucydides’ Athenians, Morgenthau suggests that statesmen sometimes both think and act in terms of their state’s interest defined in terms of its power to achieve its ends. States are prompted, too, to develop and maintain a balance of power against expansionist states

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that strive to dominate other states and the state system. This tendency of states to balance against aspiring hegemons trumps ideology or political affinity. As Morgenthau concludes, the evidence of history bears this out. Morgenthau’s understanding of realism does not exclude forms of power other than military force from playing a role in regulating and ensuring state security interests. As the subtitle of his volume, The Struggle for Power and Peace, indicates, Morgenthau’s brand of realism posits the need of states to use other, nonviolent forms of power to exercise influence and to ensure the independence and autonomy of the state. Among the most important of these are economic and technological means. These are supplemented by appeals to international law and moral principle, diplomacy, and reliance on international institutions to check the struggle among states from descending to the Hobbesian endgame or Clausewitz’s pure war. Seeking to put realist theory on a more scientific footing, some thinkers, like Kenneth Waltz, have narrowed the assumptions on which classical realism rests. Rather than the pursuit of power, these neorealists insist that the physical security and survival of the state, not the pursuit of power, is the key factor determining state behavior. States are alleged to be concerned primarily with their relative power status in the state system, particularly as that status is determined by the overall distribution of military capabilities across the states of the system. Neorealists reduce the broad and differentiated notion of power held by realists like Morgenthau to the purported causal impact of a decentralized system of states on state behavior. The multifaceted power relations of states with each other are understood as subordinated to the imperative of state security within an anarchical state system that cannot be surmounted. States either adapt to this anarchical constraint or they will be punished, subordinated to hegemons, or simply eliminated as Poland was at the end of the 18th century by the empires of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. The complexity of the realist conception of security is further evidenced by two other prominent components of this school of thought. Both are more optimistic than neorealism about the ability or likelihood of states to limit violence and avoid war. Robert Axelrod uses game theory to

provide evidence that rivals can mutually learn to cooperate rather than defect and conflict. Using the technique of a tournament, experts in security were asked to develop different strategies to maximize their gains over losses in competition with rivals. The results of these multiple games yielded the result that a simple tit-for-tat strategy provided the optimal strategy for all participants. This suggested that rivals could learn to cooperate to their mutual advantage in orchestrating their pursuit of individual security under conditions of rivalry. Rational actors could avoid the Hobbesian endgame or Clausewitz’s notion of pure war. The so-called English School, which accepts the assumption of egoistic, selfish state actors, arrives through a different path of analysis at the same position as game theorist like Axelrod in his The Evolution of Cooperation about the possibilities of cooperation over conflict in achieving state security. According to the realist perspective of the English School, states form a society. They are not isolated entities. This society is held together by several shared values that provide the basis for a primitive governance of state relations. All states value their independence and autonomy. They also support a state system built on the decentralization of legitimate force. The system is ruled by the principle of a balance of power, both soft power and especially hard power, that resists and ultimately prevents the development of a unipolar, hierarchical system that would undermine the security of the member states. No Leviathan is needed for stability. This system is also presumed to provide the precondition not only for peace but also an international order within which private property, respect for contracts, and a global market exchange system, additional supports for peace, can flourish and prosper. Liberal institutionalism (LI) is a third school of security theory. It attempts to bridge, if not reconcile, the competing assumptions about state security behavior of realism and liberal thought, which is addressed below. States, while still egoists, are presented as ensnared in what LI theorists characterize as a system of complex interdependence. States are not confined to direct exchanges with other states. They work through multiple channels, such as global markets, to achieve their aims. Hard power, like military force, is complemented by soft power in the form of economic and technological

Security

prowess and ideology. State decision makers are confronted by multiple issues. They are viewed as no less concerned about making absolute gains, like favorable trade accords, than they are about relative power gains that impinge directly on state security. Nonstate actors also have a significant impact on state security interests; examples include terrorist organizations (Al Qaeda) and nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations (Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, respectively). States have an incentive, according to LI, to regulate their behavior through the creation of institutions. These comprise rules, principles, and norms of behavior that ensure states not only a measure of reliable and enhanced security but also the achievement of other central state interests. Institutions like the World Trade Organization or NATO foster mutual awareness of the benefits of cooperation and the costs of defection. Information about state behavior relaxes the fears of unforeseen security threats posed by another state. The transaction costs of exchange for mutual benefit of state and nonstate actors engaged in this complex system of interdependence are also substantially reduced without the necessity, as the English School also stipulates, of a hegemon to order state behavior. A pure form of LI is classical liberal theory. While this body of thought is largely associated with a theory of markets, this school of thought has significant implications for the development of a theory of state security. Liberals, beginning with Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, assume that egoistic rational actors pursuing their particular material interests in free markets can actually promote public good and peace. This assumption stands realist assumptions on their head. The reconciliation of competing actor interests is resolved in what Smith identified as the “invisible hand” of the market. This assumption of converging preferences and the promotion of peace through rational calculation of self-interest assumes two interdependent forms. The first is straightforward. Producers and consumers achieve maximal gains if their exchanges are consensual. Coercion precludes the optimal gains that they can achieve by cooperation because the use of force by one actor exacts an economic gain from another without providing a material benefit to the disadvantaged actor. The incentive to

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provide material benefits is quashed and the increased wealth that the actors would enjoy is precluded. Once actors, notably states, grasp the benefits of potentially unlimited material gains in voluntary exchanges through open and free markets, war, the epitome of coercion used to resolve differences between states, loses much of its raison d’être. Immanuel Kant, writing at the end of the 18th century, advanced a theory of perpetual peace that combined not only the insights of classical economic theory but also Kant’s original contribution to security theory. As for the first point, Kant, drawing on classical theory, was quite explicit about the peace-promoting effects of commerce: The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people, and it cannot exist side by side with war. And of all the powers (or means) at the disposal of the power of the state, financial power can probably be relied on most. Thus states find themselves compelled to promote the noble cause of peace, though not exactly from motives of morality. (Kant, 1970, p. 114)

Kant understood that human preferences are not reducible to material gains and losses. Human concerns are broader and deeper. To meet this larger set of potential clashes between individuals and between states, Kant posited the gradual coming into existence of a global system of republics as the precondition for perpetual peace. Republics based on popular will would provide individuals a political regime within a state through which differences would be resolved through consent, not coercion. The habit of consent and compromise would then gradually be transferred to state relations. The significance of Kant’s thinking for relations between states can be summed up in the widely acknowledged aphorism used by social scientists and security theorists that “democracies do not fight.” Karl Marx, writing in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, developed a theory of conflict and how to solve the challenge of human and state security that rejected the liberal trust in global markets. According to Marx, liberals were correct in their understanding that the Industrial Revolution was a new stage in the evolutionary development of producing wealth and human welfare.

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Its superiority in producing wealth ensured the destruction of the feudal system on which social production rested until the onset of industrialization. He agreed, too, that global markets, championed by liberal theory, were the logical complement to this revolutionary change in human social production. Where he departed radically from these classical assumptions turned on the distribution of wealth that arose from reliance on the means of production ushered in by industrialization. Marx contended that those few who owned and controlled these means of production would capture most of the wealth of these productive forces at the expense of global labor. (Today this phenomenon is associated with the rise and spread of multinational corporations.) Capitalists would also possess power to ensure their security. The state and its coercive mechanisms were tributary to capitalist interests and control. According to Marxist thought, labor, not capital, was the source of wealth. The wealth produced by industrialization belongs exclusively to the laboring class. However, global capitalist markets inevitably and ineluctably distributed wealth unequally and inequitably. Thus two classes, capitalists and laborers, arose. The clashes of these two classes over wealth and power create a permanent and enlarging crisis in global capitalism. The very success of capitalism in developing a more productive system of production dooms this social system. It paves the way for the global ownership of the means of production in the hands of labor, led by an international communist movement. The triumph of a communist world system would then ostensibly resolve the issue of inequality and result in perpetual peace. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of its centralized, state-controlled economic system and the adaptation of communist China to capitalist global markets would appear to decisively undermine Marxist theory. That might well be a premature conclusion. The inequality of wealth generated by markets within and across states continues to create conflict and violent struggles between haves and have-nots. The market system, while theoretically built on consent, has the effect of allocating not only more wealth but also more political power to the capitalist beneficiaries of market operations. If world peace and

security are problematic outcomes of a global world order resting on communist rule, the Marxist insight of inequality and the global exploitation of labor as intrinsic to unregulated global markets continues to have considerable explanatory power that also serves as an incentive to mobilize national and international movements to challenge the capitalist system and classical economic theory. There is little likelihood in the foreseeable future that the rival claims of these schools of security will be resolved in favor of any one of these positions. Each can marshal historical evidence and data to provide partial support of its theoretical and practical claims. Those who wish to assess these contending notions of security are invited to proceed along two paths. First, each school provides probing critiques of the claims of its rivals. Second, the work of two groups of scholars who attempt to evaluate the explanatory and predictive power of these schools should be consulted. Behaviorists rely on the protocols and practices of the physical scientists to empirically test these claims. Constructivists not only challenge behavioral methods as insufficient to assess the claims of these schools but also insist that security systems are human creations. They rest on nonmaterial psychological and epistemological assumptions of human behavior. These intangible sources of power can purportedly transform the material conditions that apparently, but misguidedly, explain the security dilemmas confronting individuals and states, posited by the leading security schools of thought. Edward A. Kolodziej See also Anarchy in International Relations; Balance of Power; Bull, Hedley; Constructivist View of Power in International Relations; Hobbes, Thomas; Idealism in International Relations; Morgenthau, Hans J.; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Baldwin, D. A. (1997). The concept of security. Review of International Studies, 23, 5–25. Bull, H. (1977). The anarchical society: A study of order in world politics. London: Macmillan. Kant, I. (1970). Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch. In H. Reiss (Ed.) & H. B. Nisbet (Trans.), Kant’s political writings (pp. 93–130). Cambridge, UK:

Security Dilemma Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1795) Keohane, R. O. , & Nye, J. S. (1989). Power and interdependence (2nd ed.). Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. Morgenthau, H. J. (1985). Politics among nations: The struggle for power and peace (6th ed.). New York: Knopf. Wendt, A. (1992). Anarchy is what states make out of it: The social construction of power politics. International Organization, 46(2), 391–425.

SECURITY DILEMMA In international relations theory, the security dilemma refers to the difficulty of increasing a state’s security without simultaneously (and inadvertently) decreasing the security of other states. Coined by John H. Herz in a 1950 article, the term has become an integral part of explanations of how peace-seeking states may blunder into arms races, crises, or wars. For example, a state may seek to increase its own security and deter outside aggression by building up arms. A neighboring state, witnessing the buildup, will misinterpret the move as preparation for future aggression; feeling threatened, it will attempt to increase its own security by acquiring arms. The first state’s suspicions about its neighbor’s belligerence are confirmed, leading to an arms race, increase in tension, or war. Conflict in this case is a product of mutual misperceptions and miscommunications that arise not only from the cognitive failures of policy makers but also from the inherent difficulty of credibly conveying peaceful intentions while building up arms or establishing buffer zones. In the domestic realm, as Robert Jervis points out, people can seek to increase their security in ways that do not threaten others—for instance by putting bars in their windows or avoiding high-crime areas. Sovereign states, on the other hand, rarely have such options available to them. What Herz called the “tragic implication” of the security dilemma is that uncertainty and fear about the intentions of other states can lead to war even when all sides are desperate to avoid one. Several factors can mitigate the dangers associated with the security dilemma and help induce

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cooperation among states. One is the recognition that the dilemma exists in the first place. Failure to recognize it as such leads to two related problems. First, statesmen will not realize that their own attempts to increase security—even if done for genuinely peaceful reasons—will inevitably threaten other states, despite all assurances to the contrary. Second, they will fail to recognize that other states may arm because they fear attack, seeing their attempts instead as symptoms of aggression. A state that genuinely sees itself as peaceful, and assumes that others do as well, will wrongly conclude that any objections to their own arms buildup must mean that those who object are belligerent. The difficulty here lies in credibly conveying what the policy makers may take for granted: that outsiders should not feel threatened by the state’s attempt to increase its security. Of course, merely recognizing this problem does not eliminate the dilemma. Even if policy makers recognize that others may simply be trying to increase their own security, and even if they take into account how their own attempts to do so may be misperceived by others, they cannot rely on the promises and sworn good intentions of others to maintain their security. The problem becomes not a failure of communication or empathy, but instead a failure to credibly commit to peaceful intentions in the absence of an external enforcer. (A functioning collective security system is thus another factor that can make the security dilemma more or less acute. A state will feel less threatened by a neighbor’s arms increases if it believes that collective security agreements will deter potential aggressors. In this case the security concept takes the role of an external enforcer.) In certain situations, an acute awareness of the security dilemma can actually increase the chances of conflict. This happens if aggressors are perceived to be misunderstood security seekers. Hitler’s belligerence in the 1930s was initially met with little resistance precisely because European statesmen were intensely aware of the possibility that Germany was merely acting as a security-seeking status quo power. The fact that the security dilemma was felt to be less acute after World War I than beforehand did not prevent the outbreak of another global conflict. In a foundational 1978 article, Robert Jervis argued that two factors are crucial in determining

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Security Dilemma

the severity of the security dilemma. One is whether offense has the advantage over defense; the other is whether an offensive posture can be distinguished from a defensive one. The security dilemma is more acute when offense holds the advantage and conquest is relatively easy. When offense has the advantage, a nation eternally poised on the brink of foreign conquest will be more suspicious of others, is more likely to interpret moves by others as aggressive, and is constantly tempted to attack preemptively when facing a threat (real or perceived) lest it be attacked first. In a world of offense dominance, ambiguous signals are more likely to be interpreted as threats, and crises more likely to escalate because of mutual insecurity. Relatively secure states, by contrast, can take a more leisurely view of threats. States that do not feel as readily threatened by their neighbors—due to geographic isolation, for instance—will not feel the need to cajole or threaten others to safeguard their own security. Britain’s foreign policy in the 19th century, especially as contrasted with the foreign policy of continental states, reflects this distinction. Unlike Austria, surrounded by great powers and vulnerable to internal unrest, Britain could afford to take a more relaxed view of minor disturbances and revolutions within the European state system. Geography is thus an important factor in determining whether offense or defense has the upper hand; in a world of impregnable border defenses the security dilemma is greatly ameliorated. Oceans, mountains, rivers, and buffer zones all serve to ease the security dilemma by giving advantage to the defense. In a world of total offense dominance, the only sure way for even peace-seeking states to increase security is through preemptive aggression and expansion. In such a world, even a small increase in one’s own security can threaten others. On the other hand, in a world where defense dominates, where it is easier to protect or hold territory than to conquer or destroy it, even large increases in a state’s security will only slightly decrease the security of others. When conquest is impossible, spiraling arms races are readily perceived as inefficient, insecurities associated with international anarchy are ameliorated, and unnecessary conflict can be avoided. Offense dominance, by contrast, greatly increases what Thomas Schelling called the “reciprocal fear of surprise attack,” increasing the incentives for arms

races in the long term, and incentives for preemptive or preventive first strikes in the short term. Technology, therefore, is another factor that determines whether offense has the advantage over defense. When offense is believed to possess technological superiority, as was the case before World War I, there is a greater incentive to strike first in order to preempt a potentially debilitating attack. Although the origins of World War I remain a subject of vigorous academic debate, the mistaken belief in offense dominance among European statesmen of the time is often cited as one of its major causes. According to this line of thought, the Franco-Prussian war instilled in policy makers the belief that the next conflict would be short, cheap, and decisive, its outcome favoring the aggressor rather than the defender. Thus the run-up to World War I created incentives for spiraling arms races, and once war seemed inevitable, all sides had a strong temptation to act preemptively. Because nuclear weapons render defense impossible, mutually assured destruction paradoxically resembles a world where defense dominates. The incentives for a first strike disappear, because the attacking state ensures its own destruction through retaliation (provided that a second-strike capability is maintained). Defense becomes relatively cheap, and the security dilemma becomes less acute. It is for this reason that some academics and policy makers view mutually assured destruction as an effective and credible instrument of peace among security-seeking states. The second factor mitigating the dangers of the security dilemma, according to Jervis, is the difficulty in distinguishing defensive weapons from offensive weapons. If it can, a state can increase its own security without threatening the security of others. The use of purely defensive weapons or fortifications allows others to differentiate between aggressors and security seekers. In practice, however, such distinctions are extremely difficult to make. A fortress built for purely defensive reasons can still be used to shelter offensive forces or serve as a forward base for attacks, especially if built close to the border. The emphasis on offense–defense theory within the environment of a security dilemma shifts the emphasis from considerations of pure power to considerations of military capability. As Charles Glaser argues, focusing on military capabilities can

Separation of Powers

explain state behavior ignored or contradicted by theories that focus only on power. While anarchy remains a constant, the variation in the amount and intensity of cooperation across space and time becomes easier to explain when examining the relationship between offense and defense under the security dilemma. Although the concept of the security dilemma originated within international relations theory, the term has since been applied in explaining ethnic conflicts and civil wars within states. In the same way that uncertainty about the intentions of other states may lead a state into unwanted conflict, uncertainty and the accompanying fear of other groups can lead to spirals of intrastate violence in those situations in which the central government is unable to provide security (such as in failed multiethnic states), thus replicating the condition of anarchy on a domestic scale. Vsevolod Gunitskiy See also Anarchy in International Relations; Offense/ Defense Dominance; Prisoner’s Dilemma; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Glaser, C. L. (1997). The security dilemma revisited. World Politics, 50(1), 171–201. Jervis, R. (1978). Cooperation under the security dilemma. World Politics, 30(2), 167–214. Roe, P. (1999). The intrastate security dilemma: Ethnic conflict as a “tragedy”? Journal of Peace Research, 36(2), 183–202.

SEPARATION

OF

POWERS

The separation of powers is usually understood as a constitutional doctrine that separates government into autonomous institutions responsible for performing distinct functions. The most common system separates government into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. According to this model, the legislative power creates laws, the executive power enforces laws, and the judicial power interprets laws. Each branch theoretically

597

performs only its own function, and the individuals working within each branch should not concurrently work in another branch. The main justification for separating powers between independent branches is to prevent any individual or group from accumulating excessive power and ruling tyrannically. The separation of powers is typically implemented in conjunction with a system of checks and balances. These are methods, often included within a constitution, for each branch to counter and restrain the power of the other branches. Common checks include executive veto of legislative bills, legislative impeachment of the executive, and judicial overrule of executive and legislative actions. How these checks contribute to balances between the different branches is debated, because balancing power presupposes the ability to measure it, and each branch has jurisdiction over different types of power. It is nevertheless generally acknowledged that including a system of checks and balances alongside the separation of powers helps prevent one branch from dominating the entire government. Confusion surrounds the separation-of-powers doctrine because governmental power has devolved into functions and areas. The classic functions are legislative, executive, and adjudicative. These are also frequently referred to as powers. Areas that are separated out include electoral affairs, civil service management, and auditing. These are also referred to as specialized tasks. The institutions responsible for particular areas often exercise multiple functions. The term separation of powers is ambiguous because it can refer to dividing overall power, functions, or areas. It is thus important to be clear about which way the term is being used. Governments can be separated into branches based on sharing or balancing overall governmental power. This is most nearly achieved in parliamentary systems, which have government branches that are separate but perform multiple functions. For clarity, think of this version as the separation of power, where power is conceived of in the singular. The practice of having branches perform multiple functions is also referred to as the fusion of powers, although technically the fusion of functions might be a more accurate term. Governments can be separated into branches based on the types of powers or functions they perform. This is most closely achieved in presidential

598

Sexism, Role of Power in

systems that have independent executive, legislative, and judicial branches that more or less exclusively perform their respective functions. For clarity, think of this version as the separation of functions. This is the usual meaning of separation of powers. Governments can be separated into branches based on the areas of government they are responsible for. This occurs in modified systems that include additional branches alongside the typical three. The added branches sometimes perform multiple functions. For clarity, think of this version as the separation of areas. This is a less common application of the doctrine at the branch level, although it is common for governments to have semiautonomous agencies that perform multiple functions within particular areas. Early intimations of the separation of powers appeared in ancient Athens and Rome, but these precursors did not establish divisions based on the performance of functions. The different bodies of government combined functions but restrained and balanced one another, making the origins of the doctrine a separation of overall governmental power. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) first noticed different kinds of power in government (deliberative, judicial, and executive), but did not argue for separations based on these distinctions. In the Politics he explains that government should be composed of organs established on democratic, aristocratic, and monarchic principles to represent these respective elements of society. This is the idea of a mixed government (or mixed constitution) in which different segments of society counteract and balance one another to prevent tyranny. The practice of separating the bodies rather than the functions of government continued through the Middle Ages in Europe, as overall power was divided between monarchs, nobles, and courts. Modern separation-of-powers doctrine is usually attributed to the intellectual contributions of Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and his seminal work The Spirit of the Laws of 1752. Montesquieu examined the English political system and drew upon the work of John Locke (1632–1704) to argue that branches should be established to perform the functions of government. The authors of the U.S. Constitution refined existing ideas to create three branches of government that perform legislative, executive, and judicial functions. This separation of powers

established the closest approximation to the separation-of-functions version of the doctrine, but Montesquieu did not argue for a system of complete separation. James Madison (1751–1836) also pointed out in The Federalist that checks and balances between the branches of government were necessary to limit the abuse of power. Theory and practice of the separation of powers differ because cooperation and interdependence between the branches is necessary to make government work effectively. Andrew James Klassen See also Bicameral Legislature; Federal Structure

Further Readings Fairlie, J. A. (1923). The separation of powers. Michigan Law Review, 21(4), 393–436. Vile, M. J. C. (1998). Constitutionalism and the separation of powers (2nd Ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

SEXISM, ROLE

OF

POWER

IN

Sexism is a bias or prejudice based upon gender categorization that comprises beliefs (e.g., stereotypes about women and men), emotions (e.g., more negative or positive feelings toward one sex), and behavior (e.g., discriminatory hiring practices) that promote and maintain gender inequality. As social role theory notes, gender hierarchy both fosters and, in turn, is reinforced through sexist beliefs, emotional reactions, and behavior. In societies across the globe, as a group, men tend to have more structural power than women (i.e., to dominate the most powerful positions in business, government, and other important social institutions). One of the most robust findings in prejudice research is that dominant groups promote belief systems (such as sexism and racism) that justify and perpetuate their dominance (e.g., by portraying members of a subordinated group as incompetent and therefore unsuited to wield power). Sexism is an example of this general rule. Because sexist stereotypes serve to justify a gendered division of labor, they are not only

Sexism, Role of Power in

descriptive (expectations about what men and women are typically like), but prescriptive (exhortations about how men and women ideally ought to be). This prescriptive element drives a system of social rewards and punishments that help to shunt men and women into roles that reinforce gender hierarchy. Although rooted in a gendered division of formal roles, sexist beliefs and practices also diffuse into unstructured social interaction. Because men are more readily associated with status and strength, whereas women are associated with deference and weakness, daily social interactions favor men’s exercise of power and promote distaste for powerful women. Thus, men are more likely than women to emerge spontaneously as leaders among peers, both because men are more likely to elicit deference and because dominance is more socially acceptable when exhibited by men. In contrast, women who enact a high-power style are disliked and devalued, a phenomenon known as the backlash effect. Power relations between the sexes (and, consequently, the nature of sexism), however, are complicated by the degree to which the sexes are intimately interdependent due to heterosexual attraction and reproduction. Although women are an oppressed group, they have frequent and intimate interaction with men. Further, women’s roles as objects of men’s sexual and romantic longings, as wives, and as mothers of men’s children, makes women indispensable in most men’s eyes and can lend women indirect power through their close relationships with men. Due to intimate interdependence, power differences between the sexes are justified, in part, through an idealization of women who enact social roles that serve men’s needs (e.g., homemakers). Although sexism is popularly viewed as being overtly hostile toward women, subjectively favorable sexist beliefs, emotions, and behaviors toward women also act to promote male dominance by reinforcing a division of labor that cedes structural power to men and confines women to low-status roles. Such “benevolent sexism” represents an often overlooked aspect of how male power is maintained. Viewed as harmless or even desirable by many women (as well as men), benevolent sexism punctures women’s resistance to inequality by promising men’s protection, affection, and provision if women accept conventional female roles.

599

Endorsement of benevolent (as well as hostile) sexism is associated with greater gender inequality in cross-national comparisons (e.g., a more unequal ratio of men vs. women in high-power positions in business and government). Thus, although both male and female perceivers endorse more subjectively favorable overall stereotypes of women than of men, the content of these stereotypes justifies the different social roles men and women occupy. Women are idealized as especially nurturing, warm, and kind—all subjectively favorable traits—precisely because these are the traits associated with and required for women’s conventional, subordinate role as homemakers or for the low-status occupational support roles that are disproportionately held by women (e.g., secretarial staff, nurses, and domestic workers). In contrast, even though stereotypes about men are less subjectively positive, this is due to the preponderance of traits (e.g., arrogance, competitiveness, and callousness) that, though dislikable, are associated with powerful, high-status roles. In daily social interactions, affectionate but condescending attitudes toward women promote patronizing behavior (often couched as “chivalry”) that buttresses men’s greater power and influence. Examples include overhelping that presumes lesser competence (e.g., assuming that a woman cannot operate a piece of machinery), the use of diminutives (e.g., “little lady”) that are overtly affectionate but imply lower status, or invasions of personal space (e.g., touching) that are more likely to be directed downward toward lower status individuals. In short, sexism consists of both subjectively hostile and benevolent ideologies and practices that act to maintain gender hierarchy (power differences that favor men over women). Hostile forms of sexism elicit punishment toward women who seek equality or the powerful roles that are conventionally the province of men. Benevolent sexism acts in a complementary manner, patronizing women by rewarding them with affection and resources in exchange for remaining in conventional female roles that support and enable (rather than challenge) men’s power. Peter Glick See also Feminist Theories of Power; Social Dominance Theory

600

Shapley Value

Further Readings Eagly, A. H., & Karau, S. J. (2002). Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review, 109, 573–598. Eagly, A. H., Wood, W., & Diekman, A. (2000). Social role theory of sex differences and similarities: A current appraisal. In T. Eckes & H. M. Trautner (Eds.), The developmental social psychology of gender (pp. 123–174). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (2001). An ambivalent alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications of gender inequality. American Psychologist, 56, 109–118. Vescio, T. K., Gervais, S. J., Snyder, M., & Hoover, A. (2005). Power and the creation of patronizing environments: The stereotype-based behaviors of the powerful and their effects on female performance in masculine domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 658–672.

SHAPLEY VALUE The Shapley value () is one of the best known solution concepts of cooperative game theory. It supplies a reasonable expectation of the share-out of the global winnings among players and a fair division in normative contexts. This value was introduced by Lloyd Stowell Shapley in 1953 for superadditive n-person cooperative games in characteristic function form. It was a decisive contribution to cooperative game theory because the previous approaches did not guarantee (as the Shapley value did) existence and uniqueness of a solution. Shapley abandoned the previous methods based on dominance in favor of a particular model of bargaining, and the solution was characterized by a system of axioms. A 1954 work by Shapley and Martin Shubik applied the Shapley value to the special case of simple games, thereby introducing the Shapley– Shubik power index, which became a basic concept in voting game theory. Since 1953 other values have been proposed along the lines introduced by Shapley but based on different bargaining models and/or sets of axioms. In what follows, definitions will be introduced, the axioms will be illustrated, and the formula for the Shapley value will be presented and clarified with an illustrative example. Using the same example, the bargaining model that leads to that

value will be explained. Further developments in relevant research will be briefly noted.

Definitions Let N5f1; 2; . . . ; ng be a set of players. A cooperative game v on N is expressed in characteristic N function form if a function v : 2 ! R (the characteristic function) is given, which assigns a value v(S) to each coalition S  N where vðØÞ 5 0 . A game is superadditive if vðS [ TÞ $ vðSÞ 1 vðTÞ for all disjoint coalitions S, T of N.

Axioms The Shapley value i for player i is based on four axioms. (In his original presentation, Shapley merged the first and third axioms into a single carrier axiom.) 1. Efficiency: all resources available to the whole coalition N are distributed among the players (i.e., S fi ðvÞ 5 vðNÞ). i2N

2. Symmetry: if players i and j have symmetrical roles in v, then fi 5 fj . (For example, if we transform the game v into the game v where the only change is that player 1 assumes the label “2” and player 2 assumes the label “1,” 0 0 then f1 ðvÞ 5 f2 ðv Þ and f2 ðvÞ 5 f1 ðv Þ .) 3. Dummy player: if a player i does not bring any contribution to any coalition S  N (i.e., player i is a dummy player), then fi ðvÞ50 . 4. Additivity: if a game is the “sum” of two games, v and v, defined on the same player set N, the win for each player i in the cumulative game is the sum of the winnings achieved by him or her in the two separate games: 0 00 0 00 fi ðv 1 v Þ 5 fi ðv Þ 1 fi ðv Þ for all players i 2 N.

Formula It can be demonstrated that a unique function exists that respects the four axioms listed above. This function, the Shapley value, is: ðs 2 1Þ ! ðn 2 sÞ ! ½vðSÞ 2 vðS\figÞ n! SN

fi ðvÞ 5 + i2S

for all i 2 N ,

Shapley Value

where s is the number of members in the coalition S. The formula assigns each player i the sum of the contributions vðSÞ 2 vðS\figÞ made by him to all possible coalitions S  N , each multiplied by the coefficient ðs 2 1Þ!ðn 2 sÞ! , where n!  1, 2, . . . , n n! with the convention 0!  1. An Example

Consider the three-person game: v( )  v({1})  v({2})  v({3})  0, v({1, 3})  1, v({1, 2})  v({2, 3})  2, v({1, 2, 3})  3.

First consider the contributions of player 1 to the various coalitions. The only coalition of a single player to which player 1 contributes is composed of the same player 1. Player 1’s contribution to coalition {1} is the difference between the value of that coalition (v({1})  0) and the value of the same coalition without player 1, that is, the empty coalition (v( )  0), so the contribution of player 1 to a single-player coalition is null. There are two 2-player coalitions to which player 1 contributes: {1, 2} and {1, 3}. The contribution made by player 1 to the coalition {1, 2} is v({1, 2})  v({2})  2  0  2, the contribution made by player 1 to the coalition {1, 3} is v({1, 3})  v({3})  1  0  1, so the contribution of player 1 to two-member coalitions is (2  1)  3. This contribution is multiplied by the relative coeffiðs 2 1Þ!ðn 2 sÞ! cient (where n  3 and s  2), that n! is, 2 2 1Þ!ð3 2 2Þ!=3!  1/6 so the product is 1/2. There is only one coalition of three players: {1, 2, 3}. The contribution of player 1 to this coalition is v({1, 2, 3})  v({2, 3})  32  1. The relative coefficient is worth ð3 2 1Þ ! ð3 2 3Þ!=3!  1/3, so the product is 1/3. In total, player 1 obtains 1(v)  0  (1/2)  (1/3)  5/6. Analogous calculations give 2(v)  4/3, 3(v)  5/6. The sum of the winnings of the three players is 18/6  v(N)  3.

Bargaining Model A derivation of the Shapley value from a bargaining model will now be given, using the same

601

example. The model consists of the formation coalition N by means of the successive addition of players. Suppose that the three players enter an empty room in random sequence one after the other. The order in which they enter is given by the six equiprobable permutations of three players (see the first column of Table 1). Furthermore, it should be supposed that each player, on entering the room, receives the contribution that he or she brings to the coalition being formed. For example, player 1 enters the room first. Being the first player to enter, he or she receives the contribution vðf1gÞ 2 vðØÞ 5 0 . Player 2 then enters the room and approaches player 1 to propose forming a coalition with that player. The contribution player 2 brings to the coalition is v({1, 2})  v({1})  2. Finally, player 3 enters and offers to join the coalition already formed {1, 2}. The contribution player 3 brings to the coalition is: v({1, 2, 3})  v({1, 2})  3  2  1. If every player who enters the room joins the coalition, he or she is given a payoff equal to the amount he or she brings to the coalition being formed. Thus, the share-out of the global winnings v(N)  3, assigned to players 1, 2, and 3, is respectively 0, 2, 1. However, the order in which players enter the room might be different: for example, player 1 enters first, followed by player 3, who unites with player 1, and then, finally, player 2 enters to join the coalition. In this case too, the share-out of v(N) assigned to the players is respectively 0, 2, 1. There are, of course, another four possible sequences for entering the room. Table 1 illustrates all the possible sequences and the relative payoffs. If all equiprobable sequences for forming the coalition are taken into account, the winnings expected by each player are based on the marginal contribution each brought to the various coalitions multiplied by the probability that each finds himself or herself in a pivotal position (i.e., in addition to an existing coalition). In this case the probability is 1/6 for each player. For example, player 1 is pivotal once in the first row (for the formation of coalition {1}, starting from the empty coalition ); once in the second row (for the same reason); once in the third row (for the formation of {1, 2}, starting from {2}) and so on to the end, for a total of six times. The fourth column of Table 1 illustrates the weighted contributions of the players to the various coalitions. These contributions are weighted with the probability of pivotality: 1/6. The total relative to player i gives the expected

602

Shapley Value

Table 1

Calculation of the Shapley value

Permutation of the Players

Sequence of Coalitions

Players’ Contributions

{1, 2, 3}

Weighted Contributions

1

2

3

1

2

3

{1} {1, 2} {1, 2, 3}

0

2

1

0

2/6

1/6

{1, 3, 2}

{1} {1, 3} {1, 2, 3}

0

2

1

0

2/6

1/6

{2, 1, 3}

{2} {1, 2} {1, 2, 3}

2

0

1

2/6

0

1/6

{2, 3, 1}

{2} {2, 3} {1, 2, 3}

1

0

2

1/6

0

2/6

{3, 1, 2}

{3} {1, 3} {1, 2, 3}

1

2

0

1/6

2/6

0

{3, 2, 1}

{3} {2, 3} {1, 2, 3}

1

2

0

1/6

2/6

0

5/6

8/6

5/6

Totals i(v)

payoff i. In this case it is 1(v)  5/6, 2(v)  4/3, 3(v)  5/6, as already seen in the calculation using the Shapley formula. A mathematical formulation of the above is now given. Let  be the set of all permutations (i.e., orderings) on the set of players N. Consider a generic ordering  2 . Suppose that the player labeled as “i” is in the jth position of this ordering. For each player i, Sip denotes the coalition formed by all the players who are from the first to the jth position in such ordering . The marginal contribution of player i with respect to that order  is vðSip Þ 2 vðSip \figÞ . If the n! permutations are equiprobable, then the average marginal contribution of player i in the game v is fi ðvÞ 5

  1 + vðSip Þ 2 vðSip \figÞ n! p2P

for all i51; 2; . . . ; n which is Shapley’s definition of the value. The initially introduced formulation can be obtained from the one just presented. It is sufficient to consider that when the ith player enters the room he or she is neither interested to know in which order the ðs 2 1Þ players already present entered the room, nor in which order the remaining ðn 2 sÞ players will enter. In other words, player i is not interested how the coalition of ðs 2 1Þ members was formed by the players who arrived before him or her nor how the coalition will evolve when ðn2 _ sÞplayers enter later. Therefore the marginal contribution

vðSÞ 2 vðS\figÞ given to the ith player of the coalition S being formed is presented in the summation ðs 2 1Þ times. In this way, the initial formulation ðn 2 1Þ! of the Shapley value is obtained.

Research Developments Of Shapley’s four axioms, only additivity has been disputed. In fact, combining two games may generate a third game in which the strategic position of the player i might be difficult to correlate to that which he has in the two component games. In their classic 1957 book, Robert Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa expressed the view that the additivity axiom is a flaw in the concept of value, though a less negative view was later expressed by Roger Bruce Myerson. Problems connected to the axiom of additivity have led to other game values. In 1975, Pradeep Dubey proposed an axiomatization that can extend the Shapley value to nonsuperadditive games. Other axiomatizations have been proposed by H. Peyton Young in 1985, Sergiu Hart and Andreu Mas-Colell in 1989, and Youngsub Chun in 1989. The Shapley value of a superadditive game is an imputation that may fall outside the core of the game. However, in the case of convex games, the Shapley value belongs to the core. In 1993, Elena Inarra and Jose M. Usategui proposed two classes of games (average convex games and partially average convex games), that strictly include convex games where the Shapley value lies in the core.

Shapley–Shubik Index

Shapley has also proposed a geometrical approach to his value. He found that his solution is the barycenter of the imputation set for all two-person games, three-person constant-sum games, and arbitrary symmetric games. This result, however, is not generally valid for all other games. In 1990, Gianfranco Gambarelli proposed a different formulation of the Shapley value that allowed for the construction of a simplex of the n-dimensional Euclidean space with particular properties; the barycenter of this simplex coincides with the Shapley value. This formulation also permits an efficient algorithm for automatic computation of the value to be constructed. Another interesting aspect arises with the application of the Shapley value to coalition structures where players demonstrate strong preferences for certain alliances rather than others. The earliest result in this field can be credited to the Nobel Memorial Prize winner Robert John Y. Aumann in joint work with Jacques H. Drèze in 1974. Important related contributions have been made by Guillermo Owen and R. B. Myerson, both in 1977. Finally, it should be noted that the Shapley value includes numerous applications also relating to cost allocations. Cesarino Bertini See also Banzhaf Value; Core of a Game; GameTheoretical Approaches to Power; Shapley–Shubik Index; Tijs Value; Value of a Game

Further Readings Dubey, P. (1975). On the uniqueness of the Shapley value. International Journal of Game Theory, 4, 131–139. Luce, R. D., & Raiffa, H. (1957). Games and decisions. New York: John Wiley. Myerson, R. B. (1991). Game theory. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Shapley, L. S. (1953). A value for n-person games. In H. W. Kuhn & A. W. Tucker (Eds.), Contributions to the theory of games II (pp. 307–317). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shapley, L. S., & Shubik, M. (1954). A method for evaluating the distributions of power in a committee system. American Political Science Review, 48, 787–792.

603

SHAPLEY–SHUBIK INDEX The Shapley–Shubik index () is one of the best known and widely used measures of a priori voting power. This index, introduced in 1954 by Lloyd Stowell Shapley and Martin Shubik, is an application to the special case of simple games of the Shapley value introduced in 1953. After providing some preliminary definitions, the index will be defined, an illustrative example will be provided, and certain properties of the index will be discussed. Let N 5 f1; 2; . . . ; ng be a set of players. A cooperative game v on N is said to be expressed in characteristic function form if a function v : 2N ! R (the characteristic function) is given, which assigns a value v(S) to every coalition S  N where vðØÞ 5 0 . A game v is called superadditive if vðS [ TÞ $ vðSÞ 1 vðTÞ for all disjoint coalitions S, T of N. A game v is said to be simple if vðSÞ 5 0 or vðSÞ 5 1 for all coalitions S  N . In the first case, S is losing, in the second case, winning. In a simple game, a player is said to be pivotal for a particular coalition if the coalition is winning with the player and losing without him or her. In a weighted majority game each member (i  1, . . . , n) is assigned a nonnegative weight wi that specifies its voting weight, that is, its votes, seats, shares, and so on, and there is a quota q greater than half of the total weight that must be achieved for a decision to be made. Let wS be the total weight of the coalition S, for all S  N: wS  S wi . The i2S weighted majority game [q; w1, w2, . . . , wn] is the simple game defined as:

vðSÞ 5

1 0

if wS $ q if wS \q:

Let  be the set of all permutations (orderings) of the n players of N. Consider a generic permutation  2  and let player i be in the jth position of this ordering. Suppose that the coalition S, formed by all players who are from the first to the jth position in such ordering, is winning, while the same coalition without player i is losing. In this case the player i is the pivot for permutation . Let pi be the number of times player i is a pivot in all possible permutations of N. The Shapley–Shubik index assigns to each player i the quotient of pi and the

604

Shapley–Shubik Index

n!, that is, the number of ( n(n  1)(n  2) . . . ·1) possible permutations of N. The Shapley–Shubik index can also be deduced from the general formula of the Shapley value. Let s be the number of members of the coalition S. The Shapley value of player i is: ðs 2 1Þ ! ðn 2 sÞ ! fi ðvÞ 5 + ½vðSÞ 2 vðS\figÞ n! SN i2S for all i 5 1; 2; . . . ; n .

Table 1

Calculation of the Shapley–Shubik index (first method) Position of the Pivot

II

III

IV

DCAB

BDAC

ABCD

DCBA

DBAC

ACBD

CDAB

ADBC

BACD

CDBA

DABC

BCAD

ADCB

CABD

DACB

CBAD

If v is a simple game, the marginal contribution ½vðSÞ 2 vðS\figÞ can only be 1 (if player i is crucial for the coalition S) or 0 (elsewhere). Hence:

BDCA DBCA

ðs 2 1Þ ! ðn 2 sÞ ! ci ðsÞ n! SN

fi ðvÞ 5 +

ABDC BADC

for all i 5 1; 2; . . . ; n

ACDB

where ci(s) is the number of coalitions of s members for which i is pivotal.

CADB BCDA CBDA

Example Consider the four-player weighted majority game where votes are distributed as follows: 10 to player A, 10 to player B, 20 to player C, and 30 to player D. Suppose also that more than 50 votes are needed to carry a motion. The power of each player can now be calculated using the Shapley– Shubik index. Starting from the empty coalition, to each coalition formed of only one player add any one of the three remaining players. The ways of forming the coalition of all players are 4!  4·3·2·1  24. For example, players might form into a coalition in this order: A, C, D, B. Player D is the pivot in this ordering, as D’s entry into the coalition transforms the previously losing coalition {A, C} into the winning coalition {A, C, D}. The subsequent entry of player B is not pivotal as the coalition was already winning. If we repeat these steps for all permutations, the situation in Table 1 is obtained. In each of these 24 orderings the pivot is in bold italics. Note that the pivot is never present in the first position of the permutation, as no single player has a number of votes greater than

50. Players A and B are pivotal twice, C is pivotal 6 times, and D for 14 times. Thus the Shapley– Shubik index value for each player is: 2 , 2 , fB ðvÞ 5 24 24 6 , 14 . fC ðvÞ 5 fD ðvÞ 5 24 24

fA ðvÞ 5

A derivation of the Shapley–Shubik index from a bargaining model is now given, using the same example. Suppose that the four players enter an empty room one after the other, following the order given by their 24 possible permutations. When the pivot player enters the room, he or she has no interest in knowing the order in which the ðs 2 1Þ players already present entered; neither is he or she interested in the order in which the remaining ðn 2 sÞ players will enter the room. The only relevant information is which player is the pivot and what that player’s position is in the permutation. This position indicates the size of the

605

Shapley–Shubik Index

winning coalition, which is formed with the arrival of the pivot player. Consider, for instance, permutations DCAB and DCBA. Knowing the order in which players A and B arrive after him or her is not important for pivot player C. It is, however, important that pivot player C has been pivotal in making the coalition of the two players D and C winning. Analogously, taking into consideration the permutations ACDB and CADB, pivot player D is not interested in knowing whether player C joined player A, or vice versa, but in knowing that he or she is the third player to join. The same reasoning can be applied to the permutations ABCD, ACBD, BACD, BCAD, CABD, CBAD where for pivot player D it is not important what happened before D entered. What is important is that the pivot player is the fourth player to enter. The situation for all permutations is summarized in Table 2. Table 3 shows the coefficients ci(s) (i.e., the number of coalitions of s members where player i is pivotal). Player A is not pivotal for any single-player coalition, nor for any two-player coalition, nor for the four-player coalition (cA(1)  cA(2)  cA(4)  0), while A is crucial for a three-player coalition

Table 2

(cA(3)  1). The same consideration can be made for players B, C, and D. Therefore: 2 fB ðvÞ 5 fA ðvÞ 5 24 1 fC ðvÞ 5 ½ðð1 2 1Þ ! ð4 2 1Þ !  0Þ 4! 1 ðð2 2 1Þ ! ð4 2 2Þ !  1Þ 1 ðð3 2 1Þ ! ð4 2 3Þ !  2Þ 1 ðð4 2 1Þ ! ð4 2 4Þ !  0Þ 5 fD ðvÞ 5

6 24

1 ½ðð1 2 1Þ !ð4 2 1Þ !  0Þ 4! 1ðð2 2 1Þ ! ð4 2 2Þ !  1Þ 1 ðð3 2 1Þ ! ð4 2 3Þ !  3Þ 1 ðð4 2 1Þ ! ð4 2 4Þ !  1Þ 5

14 . 24

Clearly, Shapley–Shubik index values always sum to 1. The Shapley value is characterized by four axioms: (1) efficiency, (2) symmetry, (3) dummy player, and (4) additivity. The first three axioms

Calculation of the Shapley–Shubik index (second method)

DCAB DCBA

C

CDAB CDBA

D

BDAC DBAC

A

ADBC DABC

B

ADCB DACB

C

BDCA DBCA

C

ABDC BADC

D

ACDB CADB

D

BCDA CBDA

D

ABCD ACBD BACD BCAD CABD CBAD

D

606

Table 3

Shareholder Voting Power

Calculation of coefficients ci(s) ci(s)

Player

s1

s2

s3

s4

iA

0

0

1

0

iB

0

0

1

0

iC

0

1

2

0

iD

0

1

3

1

apply to the Shapley–Shubik index, but the fourth does not, as a game obtained by combining two simple games may not itself be a simple game. In 1975, Pradeep Dubey constructed an axiomatization of the Shapley–Shubik index on the class of superadditive simple games and simple monotonic games, replacing additivity with a modularity axiom. Since then several other axiomatizations have been proposed. The Shapley–Shubik index has been classified by Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover as a so-called P-power measure, that is, the power to share a purse or prize. This index possesses various significant properties, including belonging to the core (in the case of convex games) and monotonicity. With regard to the latter, the Shapley–Shubik index has been proved to be locally and globally monotonic. Local monotonicity means that, in every weighted majority game, if player i has a greater weight than player j, then the power index of player i is not lower than the power of player j; global monotonicity means that if the weight of player i increases and all other weights decrease or remain unchanged, then the power of player i does not decrease. In contrast, the normalized Banzhaf index is locally but not globally monotonic. Several methods are available for computing the Shapley–Shubik index in large-scale weighted majority games. The first, proposed by Irwin Mann and L. S. Shapley in 1962, used an efficient algorithm based on generating functions and has been implemented by Jesús Mario Bilbao and others. In 1972, Guillermo Owen introduced the multilinear extensions of games and described an approximation method for computing the Shapley–Shubik index. Dennis Leech, in 2003, proposed a modification of this method especially useful for large games. In 1986, Gabriella Arcaini and Gianfranco Gambarelli and, later in 1996, G. Gambarelli, developed particularly efficient

algorithms to describe the variations on the index following variations in weights among players (for voting swings, buying shares, etc.). A problem arises with the application of power indices to political situations in which some members prefer to form certain alliances rather than others. A modification of the Shapley–Shubik index in games with a priori unions was developed by Guillermo Owen in 1977, and others have made further contributions along these lines. Izabella Stach See also Computer Algorithms for Power Indices; I-Power; Pivot Player; P-Power; Shapley Value; Voting Power; Weighted Majority Game

Further Readings Dubey, P. (1975). On the uniqueness of the Shapley value. International Journal of Game Theory, 4, 131–139. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power. Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (2005). Voting power measurement: A story of misreinvention. Social Choice and Welfare, 25(2–3), 485–506. Shapley, L. S. (1953). A value for n-person games. In H. W. Kuhn & A.W. Tucker (Eds.), Contributions to the theory of games II (pp. 307–317). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shapley, L. S., & Shubik, M. (1954). A method for evaluating the distributions of power in a committee system. American Political Science Review, 48, 787–792.

SHAREHOLDER VOTING POWER It is a general rule that voting rights in a corporation are allocated to its shareholders in a way that is proportional with their equity shares. This is intended to enshrine a natural principle that the distribution of decision-making power should mirror the distribution of capital invested. However, this ideal is often not achieved. Studies using voting power analysis and empirical evidence from capital markets both have shown that many companies are effectively controlled by a large minority shareholding if the distribution of the

Simple Games

remaining share ownership is widely enough dispersed, as is typical in the United Kingdom and the United States. A single 30% shareholding has invariably working control, and a 20% holding is enough for control in many cases. On the other hand, where ownership is very concentrated and there are few shareholders, as in many continental European companies, shareholder voting power often bears little relation to ownership, as is typical in small weighting voting systems. Two extreme examples illustrate the point. The first example involves a company with three shareholders, two of whom own 49% of the shares each, with the third owning 2%. All three members have the same power (with a normalized Banzhaf index of 33.33% each), because any decision requires any two members to pass. The second example involves a company with one large shareholder with a 30% holding and 70 small shareholders with 1% each. Here the large shareholder is almost totally dominant with almost total power: almost all decisions taken by simple majority require his or her support and the normalized Banzhaf index is 99.05%, while that for each 1% shareholder is 0.0136%. In both these cases, voting power is distributed very differently from share ownership. Shareholder voting was one of the earliest applications of voting power indices discussed in the literature; it was one of the examples given in Lloyd Shapley and Martin Shubik’s first paper. Shapley later developed the theory of oceanic games specifically to deal with the particular characteristics of shareholder voting games, where typically there are many small players with infinitesimal weights—a model that is a reasonable limiting approximation to many U.S. corporations. Shareholder voting is a good context in which to compare the performance of different power indices because we have some empirical evidence— from market experience—about company control. Dennis Leech has compared the results of the Shapley–Shubik and Banzhaf power indices for shareholders in a large sample of corporations and found that the Shapley–Shubik indices calculated were implausible. For example, a large shareholder owning 40% of a company in which all the other shares are widely held in holdings of infinitesimal size, has virtual control and its power index should be very close to 100%. But its Shapley– Shubik index is only 66.67%, whereas its

607

Banzhaf index is almost 100%. This leads to the conclusion that the Shapley–Shubik index is deficient and that in applied work one should use the Banzhaf index. Dennis Leech See also Simple Games; Voting Power; Weighted Voting

Further Readings Leech, D. (2002). Shareholder voting power and ownership control of companies. Homo Oeconomicus, 19(3), 345–371. Leech, D. (2002). An empirical comparison of the performance of classical power indices. Political Studies, 50, 1–22.

SIMPLE GAMES In a simple game, every coalition is either winning or losing. The concept was first explicitly introduced by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in their key work from 1944, though clearly the basic idea goes back much farther. Simple games are among the most widely studied types of games, and the terminology associated with simple games is especially useful in describing voting rules. A simple game may be described by the list of coalitions (subsets of players) that are winning, where this list satisfies these conditions: 1. the empty coalition (of no players) is losing; 2. the grand coalition (of all players) is winning; and 3. if coalition S is winning, any more inclusive coalition (i.e., any superset of S) is also winning.

A coalition S a minimal winning coalition if (a) S is winning, but (b) the loss of any member converts S into a losing coalition. A dummy is a player who does not belong to any minimal winning coalition. A dictator is a single-player (minimal) winning coalition. Given the superset property above, a simple game can be more concisely described by adding a description of its minimal winning coalitions to the list of conditions.

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Small Worlds, Power in

A simple game is proper if:

Further Readings

4. the complement of every winning coalition is losing.

Shapley, L. S. (1962). Simple games: An outline of the descriptive theory. Behavioral Science, 7, 59–61. Von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

(Improper games, in which disjoint coalitions may both be winning, have analytical utility.) A simple game is strong if it is proper and also: 5. the complement of every losing coalition is winning.

Complementary losing coalitions are sometimes called blocking coalitions. A one-player blocking coalition is said to have veto power. Strong simple games have no blocking coalitions. A simple game is weak if there is at least one player who belongs to every winning coalition. Each such player has veto power. If the intersection of all winning coalitions is itself a winning coalition, that intersection is the unique minimal winning coalition and all players outside the intersection are dummies. If the winning intersection contains several players, there is a bargaining game among these players. If the winning intersection contains a single player, that single player is a dictator. A weighted majority game is a simple game such that every player can be assigned some numerical weight, and a numerical quota can be fixed such that a coalition is winning if and only if the total weight of its members equals or exceeds the quota. A voting rule not ordinarily described as a weighted voting system may in fact be equivalent to a weighted majority game (e.g., that of the United Nations Security Council). However, not every simple game is a weighted majority game or equivalent to one. A weighted majority game is homogeneous if it is possible to assign weights and a quota such that every minimal winning coalition has a total weight equal to the quota. Solution concepts introduced for cooperative games in characteristic function form are also valid for simple games. In particular, the Shapley value becomes the Shapley–Shubik power index in the case of simple games. Gianfranco Gambarelli and Nicholas R. Miller See also Homogeneous Weighted Majority Games; Minimal Winning Coalition; Proper Simple Game; Voting Power; Weighted Majority Game; Weighted Voting

SMALL WORLDS, POWER

IN

The classic example of the small-world phenomenon is the legendary six degrees of separation whereby it is suggested that everyone is connected to everyone else in the world by no more than six connections. In theoretical terms, small-world theory is an application of the formal analysis of networks. Social (actor-based) networks ranging from very large networks concerning mass action or social movements through to policy-forming networks consisting of only tens of elite actors, can be used to understand power issues. Much of our understanding about the nature of power within a network stems from understanding transmission characteristics of the network. Whether the transmission involved is that of influence, information, or other tangible or intangible resources, the formal analytical questions are similar. Analytically, the essence of small worlds is that despite high cliquishness or clustering of a network, the path lengths to all other actors (not just those in each actor’s locality) can still be very close to the short paths seen in a random network. Small world theory exposes starkly the difference between what network structures may “look like,” perhaps looking very localized or clustered, compared to their true structural capacity, which may be globally very efficient despite such clustering. Only formal analysis can reveal if a network is small world or not; with the discovery of its technical parameters, much about a network’s capacity is revealed. One of the most interesting aspects of small world networks is that the actors, observing their local connections, cannot know if it is a small world or not. This has some important implications for the ability to exercise power within a network if the actors cannot be aware of the global structure from their own local observations. There

Small Worlds, Power in

are also open questions about the extent to which it is possible for actors to exercise an ability to create a small world network; it is unclear whether such network geometries systematically evolve by mutually incentivized local actions or occur by chance. Small-world networks have been widely studied recently in many fields that use network analysis, and the implications within each field are often dramatic. It is important to note, however, that smaller networks can mean less dramatic results, but theoretical work using simulation on networks of a comparable size to elite actor networks has shown that they can be large enough to be able to distinguish limited small-world properties. The most informative work on the theory of small worlds was contained in a 1998 paper by Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz that, perhaps surprisingly given the mathematical approach they take, throws open the door to a world of applications and further investigation. They start off by showing how a regularly arranged network, where every actor is linked only to his or her nearest neighbors, contrasts with a random network where there is no locality at all and network links can occur to anyone, anywhere. The movement from the highly clustered regular network in which everyone only knows immediate neighbors, to the random network in that anyone knows anyone with equal probability is conceived of through rewiring the network. This rewiring effectively introduces shortcuts that can be assumed to occur, replacing a link, with probability p. When this probability is 0, no links are rewired and the graph stays regular; with p set to 1, all the links are rewired and a random network results. Somewhere in between, curious things happen. In the regular, clustered, network, everyone at any point of the graph only knows people who already know several of his or her contacts. Even his or her contacts’ contacts, whom he or her does not know, are still well connected in his or she locality. However, this regular arrangement means that in order to discover a connection to the vast majority of the nonlocal actors in the network, the number of steps needed is generally very high. In fact, most of the network is only reachable through multiple step connections. This gives the network a long average path length.

609

The random graph has, not surprisingly, the contrary properties. There is very little cliquishness, and rarely will any one contact of an actor know many of his or her other contacts. However, average path length for the whole network is short because there are so many links cutting across every part of the structure. Watts and Strogatz show that as the rewiring factor, p, increases, these two characteristics change in a counterintuitive fashion: the average path length for the whole network drops rapidly as just a few rewirings are made, while the cliquishness remains high for much longer before falling away. In 2000, Massimo Marchiori and Vito Latora published a method that considers the two elements of the global and local levels in small worlds as efficiency measures that apply to metrical networks (with valued links) as well as binary (1/0 links) networks. Interestingly for power studies, they conceive the networks in terms of information propagation by playing transmission efficiency off against fault tolerance. They also introduce the notion that the introduction of shortcuts is not without cost. A small world is a relatively clustered network in which, surprisingly, anyone in the network can be reached through relatively few steps. While the theoretical implication of understanding observed differences in outcomes between small world and other networks are considerable, the need to have complete information on a network to be able to calculate the parameters has meant that so far the use and development of such theoretical constructs has been limited. Stuart Astill See also Elite Theories; Networks, Power in

Further Readings Marchiori, M., & Latora, V. (2000). Harmony in the small-world. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, 285(3–4), 539–546. Watts, D. J. (1999). Networks, dynamics, and the smallworld phenomenon. American Journal of Sociology, 105(2), 493–527. Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998). Collective dynamics of “small-world” networks. Nature, 6684, 440–442.

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Social Breakdown

SOCIAL BREAKDOWN Social breakdown is a term describing the decline (both long- and short-term) of the cultural and civil institutions of a society or civilization; if the breakdown is not slowed or stopped, complete social collapse may ensue. There is no one explanation for this phenomenon. In some circumstances, there may be a single reason, but in most, many individual factors work together. Possible political and economic causes include the following: UÊ Economic disparities, inequalities, and impoverishment. This problem is common to most cultures, but its relative influence depends upon the culture in question. For instance, income disparity is not as important in the West as it is in certain African, South American, and Asian countries. Throughout the former, social welfare programs exist to prevent social breakdown; in the latter, there is no safety net protecting the people from poverty. UÊ Little hope for socioeconomic growth or improvement. When individuals feel that, regardless of their effort, the future is dismal in terms of attaining a minimal level of socioeconomic stability, they are more likely to engage in activities that help cause social breakdown. For instance, an inner-city youths drops out of high school due to the belief that their location, race, education, or other factors only permit them to work for minimum wage at fast-food restaurants; they begin selling drugs instead, believing there is no other means to achieve a financially independent life. UÊ A high rate of unemployment. This has been problematic for all countries at some point in their past. Arguably, the period of greatest destitution in American history occurred in the 1930s during the Great Depression, an era when at its worst one in five Americans were out of work. UÊ Lack of quality educational facilities. UÊ Urban drift and the resultant growth of shantytowns in the urban areas. These reached their peak of prevalence in the West during the Industrial Revolution, but are still common throughout Africa and parts of Asia.

UÊ Increasing crime rates and lawlessness. The more crime a country has, the higher the taxes the populace incurs as the government must spend more money on law enforcement and the construction of jails and penitentiaries. This is not inherently destabilizing unless crime is rampant throughout all sectors of society. In scenarios like this, it is possible that government leaders have a vested interest in keeping criminals out of jail, because the two are often partnered, as they are in the Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe. UÊ The widespread prevalence of alcohol and substance abuse. These are problems particularly acute in the United States. While alcohol is legal and relatively inexpensive to purchase, its abuse causes untold numbers of deaths each year due to alcohol-related driving accidents, as well as causing emotional, financial, marital, and educational problems. Certain drugs, like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, are illegal; thus, using the substance means one must necessarily break the law. If the government’s laws regarding drug use are strict, many citizens will likely be incarcerated for the use, not the selling, of the substance. In addition, because the substance is illegal, sales will be highly profitable (if enough people desire the substance, as is the case for cocaine and heroin). Regardless of societal repercussions concerning illicit drugs, once the market is established, it is hard to shut down; hence, it leads to a breakdown of social mores and norms. UÊ Concurrent use of violence to ameliorate differences, thus venting feelings of irritation, deprivation, defenselessness, and resentment. In essence, people use their fists or guns to settle their problems instead of using rationality. Quite often, there is an environmental component to social breakdown, causing a general impoverishment for the citizens of many countries. Several potential factors include: UÊ A very high population growth rate. When a population “booms,” it is often difficult for the social system to adjust. More people means less living space and the concomitant less sanitary living conditions, less food, a greater drain on health care, and so on. UÊ An extremely fragile ecosystem. When there is an overuse or abuse of vulnerable resources, the

Social Capital

frequent result is the destruction or exhaustion of the supply. For instance, during the 1920s and 1930s in the American Midwest, the overuse and misuse of farmland created the devastating dust storms known as the Great Dust Bowl. Millions were left homeless, causing immense problems for the federal government. UÊ Overgrazing. This is a common problem in Third World countries, and was once common in America. It occurs when ranchers allow their animals, usually cattle or sheep, to stay too long in an already delicate setting, allowing animals to eat natural resources that are not quickly or easily replaced. When this occurs, animals die, land erosion ensues, and swaths of arid land are produced. UÊ Lack of easily accessible potable water. Quite simply, without drinkable water, most humans and animals will die of dehydration. UÊ Deforestation. This causes great loss of animal life, as well as erosion, especially in mountainous communities. Mudslides can cause the deaths of many hundreds or thousands of people. One primary cause is the absence of trees, often because of uprooting trees in order to gain more farming land. Social breakdown can result from many factors that destabilize the social fabric, which can lead to total social collapse where all the previous rules and conventions that held society together no longer apply. Stopping social breakdown requires understanding the internal and environmental stresses and finding strategies to ameliorate them. This can sometimes be a long and difficult process. Cary Stacy Smith and Li-Ching Hung See also Civil War; Collective Action Problem; Networks and Communities

Further Readings Andersen, M. L., & Taylor, H. F. (2006). Sociology: The essentials. New York: Wadsworth. Ilusorio, R. (1984). Crisis and paradigm: An enquiry into the causes of social breakdown and a prescription for future resolution. New York: Multinational Foundation. Newman, D. M. (2004). Sociology: Exploring the architecture of everyday life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

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SOCIAL CAPITAL Social capital—networks of associations and the attitudes these foster—is a resource that facilitates solutions to collective action problems. The concept of social capital has become popular across several social science disciplines, including political science, sociology, anthropology, and economics. The central idea of social capital is that relationships between people, and the norms and values these relationships create, can be productive. That is, in the same way that tools or machines (physical capital) or an individual’s education and skills (human capital) can be productive, dense networks of association can facilitate production. Social capital theory posits that the topology of interpersonal relationships—as distinct from anonymous, market-based transactions—can affect societal productivity, broadly defined. For example, repeated interaction between individuals may alleviate the agency problems associated with imperfect information, moral hazard, and the external enforcement of contracts. Evidence from recent research suggests that social capital is important in explanations of such diverse macro outcomes as economic growth, government responsiveness, crime rates, and public health, as well of as micro outcomes such as individual happiness and well-being, academic achievement, and employment success. Two of the most influential theorists of social capital are the sociologist James Coleman and the political scientist Robert Putnam. Much of the proliferation of research on the topic has been spurred by their work. For Coleman, social capital is a capital resource that comes about in relations between persons. Several different aspects of social relations can constitute social capital. These include trust, obligations and expectations, information channels, and norms and sanctions. While Coleman views social capital as consisting of several different entities, they all share the common characteristic of being elements of social structure. Thus, what sets social capital apart from other forms of capital is its focus on social structure. Unlike human capital, social capital does not inhere in individuals, nor is it found in physical infrastructure. In his study of institutional performance in Italy, Making Democracy Work, Putnam argues

612

Social Capital

that the presence of social capital, in the form of civic traditions, is the difference between governments that are efficient and responsive and those that are not. In later work, Putnam turned his attention to civic community in the United States, notably in the book Bowling Alone. While Coleman’s and Putnam’s conceptions of social capital share many aspects, a notable difference is in the normative connotations of Putnam’s work. Coleman offers a more general theory of how interpersonal relationships can be a form of capital. In this way, his work is connected to the theory of repeated games. For Putnam the focus is more explicitly on the connection between interpersonal relationships—and, importantly, the norms that arise from them—and democratic health. One of the early criticisms of social capital, in particular of the work of Putnam, stressed that the concept need not necessarily have the positive outcomes that Putnam and others ascribed to it. Critics argued that there could also be a negative aspect to social capital, pointing out that groups as varied as the mafia, Al Qaeda, and American militia movements all possessed many of the elements of social capital that researchers claimed lead to beneficial outcomes. In part as a response to this criticism, Putnam makes a distinction between bridging and bonding social capital. The former is social capital in the form of social connections that overlap diverse communities of people, while the latter refers to social capital that serves to strengthen the connections between people who are, on some dimension, similar to one another. A distinction has developed between research that focuses on structural elements of social capital and that which stresses attitudinal elements. In the former, following a Tocquevillian tradition, emphasis is put on the role of voluntary associations and other formal and informal networks. In the latter, social capital is seen as an attitudinal property, consisting of norms of reciprocity, cooperation, and trust. It is argued that these attitudes are fostered through face-to-face interaction. Of particular importance is the idea of generalized trust—trust that goes beyond the particular setting or group to society as a whole. The measurement of social capital depends to some extent on whether emphasis is placed more

on the structural or attitudinal elements of the concept. The bulk of work done using social capital has employed survey-based measures. Often the structural elements of social capital are measured with simple survey items asking respondents about the number of organizations they belong to and are active in and how often they socialize with friends, relatives, and neighbors. Survey-based measures are also often used when it comes to attitudinal aspects of social capital such as trust and norms of reciprocity and cooperation. For example, a now-ubiquitous survey item meant to tap generalized trust is: ‘‘In general, do you think that most people can be trusted or that you cannot be too careful when dealing with people?’’ In recent years, scholars have turned to laboratory experiments in the study of these norms, having subjects play various forms of trust games in order to measure attitudes associated with social capital. Since the early work of Coleman and Putnam, the use of social capital in social science research has grown tremendously. At first, much of this research was concerned with issues of measurement and definition and, as such, social capital was more often than not the dependent variable in studies. As the concept has grown in use and scholars have converged on certain definitional and measurement standards, social capital has become more commonly used as an explanatory variable in studies analyzing a wide range of research questions. Daniel Rubenson See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Capital, Neoclassical; Coleman, James S.; Networks and Communities

Further Readings Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94(Suppl.), S95–S120. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Social Dominance Theory

SOCIAL DOMINANCE THEORY Social dominance theory emerged in the 1990s through the work of two social psychologists, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto. It has proved to be a somewhat controversial theory both politically, in what some of its opponents have taken to be its social implications, and scientifically, in terms of how different social dominance theory is from other theories of society. While it is at base a social–psychological theory, important aspects of it rely upon structural or environmental effects and evolutionary thinking. This entry discusses social dominance orientation, social evolution, and criticisms of social dominance theory. Social dominance theory begins with the recognition that all surplus-producing human societies over history have been hierarchically organized. Moreover, these hierarchies tend to be groupbased and involve dominance of one group over another. Men have tended to dominate women; certain kin elites dominate other kin elites; some castes dominate others, and so on. Even in modern societies that profess equality of opportunity, hierarchies of domination exist through professional qualifications, social positions, and the like, which might be justified on meritocratic grounds but perpetuate dominant hierarchical organization. Social dominance theory then tries to explain the perpetuation of this general form—hierarchy and dominance—through structural, evolutionary, and social–psychological factors. Social dominance theory suggests that groupbased oppression is driven by systematic institutional and individual bias. On the one hand, the social organization of society, through schools, religions, firms, and other institutions, disproportionately allocates desired goods—wealth, prestige, status, power, health care, and so on—to members of the dominant groups. Other groups receive the more dangerous or less desirable jobs, lower pay, disdain, and worse health care. Such institutional discrimination is perpetuated, according to the theory, not simply because dominant groups are dominant and powerful and have set up institutions to work to their benefit to extract the greater resources for themselves against the wishes of the dominated, but because they operate with the acquiescence of the underprivileged, who

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accept the mores and ideology of their society that justify the specific distribution engendered. Hence, in some societies the importance of noble birth, caste, or role status is accepted. In modern societies, the position of some is justified by the claim that their high status and high-paying roles are merited by their achievements. This aspect of social dominance theory demarcates it from other theories. In social dominance theory, the degree of acceptance of one’s position in society is termed social dominance orientation (SDO). The structural–institutional factors and the sociopsychological factors in this account operate together to create stable societies of dominance hierarchy. The account by social dominance theory of how they operate together to form such stable hierarchies is a social-evolutionary one.

Social Dominance Orientation We begin by considering SDO, one of the defining and most controversial features of social dominance theory. A person’s SDO score is measured through surveys on his or her attitudes to social equality and to group-based dominance. The surveys conducted to measure a person’s SDO are not straightforwardly generalizable because they are specifically generated with regard to particular status roles and attitudes. In one study, for example, three major ethnic groups among Israeli Jews (Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrachi Jews, and those of mixed Ashkenazi and Mizrachi background) were asked to consider two different sets of group conflicts: first between Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews and then between Jews and Palestinians. When primed to consider the former, much higher SDO was recorded than when considering the latter. In other words, individual SDO scores were relative to the support for social inequality; a person’s SDO is not a simple personality trait but is driven by context. However, Sidanius claims that there are personality traits that can be identified outside of social context. In one study, Sidanius and colleagues compared the SDO scores of four different sets of people: police officers (hierarchy-enhancing role), public defenders (hierarchy-attenuating role), students (mixed intentions regarding future roles), and adults called to jury service (mixed current hierarchy roles). Controlling for other factors such as

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race, class, age, gender, and education (which will also affect SDO) the SDO of police officers was, as expected, higher and public defenders lower than students and the mixed group of jurors. These findings could show that the roles people take on affect SDO (something we would also expect from the social context findings) but might also show that individuals self-select into roles according to preexisting SDO levels. That is, those who believe in hierarchy are more likely to become police officers, whereas those who do not become public defenders. To examine that aspect, Sidanius sampled two sets of students who were asked to rate the attractiveness of four hierarchy-enhancing careers (government prosecutor, law enforcement officer, FBI agent, and working in big business), and four hierarchy-attenuating careers (civil rights lawyer, lawyer for the poor, human rights advocate, and charity worker for disadvantaged groups). Controlling for socioeconomic class and political attitudes, SDO was positively associated with the perceived attractiveness of hierarchy-enhancing careers and negatively associated with hierarchyattenuating ones. Sidanius concludes that the results support the idea that people self-select into roles given their SDO, suggesting there is also an independent personality trait that might be reinforced by role but is separate from it. In a separate set of experiments, Sidanius and colleagues found that institutions reinforce traits. Again using college students, they set up an experiment where students role-played as employers making hiring decisions. The jobs were either hierarchy-enhancing or hierarchy-attenuating, and the students playing job applicants were given vitae that emphasized how much experience they had had in hierarchical situations. The studentemployers chose low-SDO candidates for hierarchy-attenuating jobs and high-SDO candidates for hierarchy-enhancing jobs, suggesting that institutions select for themselves. Interestingly, because men tend to have higher SDO than women, student “employers” tended to select men for hierarchy-enhancing jobs and women for the hierarchy-attenuating roles. Other studies showed that institutional socialization and peer group pressure leads to socialization into roles, that is, to taking on the attitudes expected of those roles. Socialization for the hierarchyenhancing role of police officer led to more hostile

attitudes toward subordinates and members of subservient groups and to more obsequious attitudes toward superiors. These effects have been found even when students are role-playing. Aspects of this socialization can be mitigated by education, and SDO can be reduced when people operate in more egalitarian settings. Thus, social dominance theorists do not maintain that hierarchy dominance is strictly a necessary feature of society, but they do argue that there are reasons why it exists and is perpetuated.

Social Evolution Social dominance analysts claim that hierarchydominance is a standard feature of human society and that this is not mere contingency. Rather, stable hierarchies are socially selected. They claim that more hierarchically organized clans have selection advantages in competing with others for environmental resources. Furthermore, if those hierarchies are settled—that is, there is less internal conflict over roles—such clans will have additional selection advantages. Thus the institution of hierarchy in human societies has an evolutionary advantage, and traits that lead to the stability of such institutions also give genetic advantage. This competitive advantage can lead to a selection process that favors people who will accept the social institutions even when they take on social roles that disadvantage them relative to other members of their clan. The argument is one of social evolution as it allows for selection at different levels, not just at the level of genes. Thus, social dominance theorists see natural selection operating through genes, through biological organisms, and through social institutions. Genetic differentiation between males and females is used to explain the difference in SDO scores between men and women. These differences are based, it is argued, on the different mating strategies of men and women. Social institutions are chosen through competitive pressures at the societal level. Thus, it is argued that hierarchically organized armies where dominance structures are accepted at all levels will have advantages over technologically equivalent ones with less social domination. Firms in competitive markets will have advantages if they are hierarchically organized with accepted dominance levels, and so on.

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These social selection mechanisms operate at the level of the group but will interact with genetic selection mechanisms that select for personality traits that accept social position. Thus the selection mechanisms work in tandem to explain both the nature of hierarchy and the acceptance of dominance hierarchy by those who seem disadvantaged by it.

Criticisms of Social Dominance Theory There are various criticisms of social dominance theory. Some maintain that the theory is ideological and seems to support systems of dominance and inequality. Social dominance theorists deny this claim and argue that understanding why systems of social dominance remain stable is an important tool through which social inequalities can be addressed in ways that will have permanence. Indeed some make links with Marxist and feminist writers with regard to their explanations of and attitudes toward the hierarchy-dominance they identify. More serious criticisms are raised on three related grounds. The first criticism is whether social dominance theory is really different from theories about the authoritarian personality on the one hand and social identity theory on the other. The second criticism is whether social dominance theory can really be scientifically demonstrated. These first two criticisms are related in the sense that distinguishing social dominance theory from other theories is required in order to be able to demonstrate its veracity. Finally, social dominance theory’s evolutionary account is disputed on empirical and conceptual grounds. In accounts of the authoritarian personality, various claims are made. One of these claims is that some people are more subject to commands than others in the sense that they are more accepting of authority, and such people are more likely to be prejudiced against out-groups and more conservative politically in the sense that they are much less egalitarian and more accepting of the social system as it currently operates. In many regards, descriptions of the authoritarian personality seem to coincide with measures of SDO in social dominance theory. Sidanius and colleagues argue, however, that social dominance theory and the theory of the authoritarian personality are conceptually

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distinct in a number of ways. First, the authoritarian personality is often considered a pathological state engendered by oppressive parenting. SDO is thought to be a normal aspect of human personality, socially and genetically selected for group benefit. Second, the authoritarian personality scales are related to the acceptance of in-group hierarchy, SDO to intragroup hierarchy-dominance. Third, the authoritarian personality is a strictly psychological concept, but SDO has both social and psychological components. Finally, the measures of SDO and the authoritarian personality are not identical, and while they produce similar predictions about prejudice against out-groups (such as racial prejudice), those predictions are based on independent grounds. One of the major criticisms of social dominance theory comes from writers who have worked on social identity theory. They claim that the empirical evidence for social dominance theory also supports social identity theory, whereas the extra elements of social dominance theory do not have empirical support, and have only the status of “just-so” stories. Certainly social dominance theory shares many features with social identity theory; indeed, the former is built upon elements of the latter. Social identity theory argues that group identities are created socially for self-esteem, but in social dominance theory self-esteem is not always implied. More importantly, in social identity theory group members always favor other group members over outsiders; but in social dominance theory members of inferior groups might favor members of superior groups. The legitimacy required for that recognition is something that is important in social identification theory. Important to such legitimacy in survey research is that there is the possibility of members shifting groups. This is not so in kinship hierarchies, which social dominance theory sees as examples of the legitimation process. However, there is little strong empirical evidence about how such impermeable group relationships are genuinely viewed by lower-status groups. The evolutionary aspects of the theory do not have any independent empirical evidence. At best the evolutionary story is consistent with the claims of social dominance theory and some of the empirical evidence supporting it. However, tying the theory to evolutionary accounts does not provide independent justification. Social identity critics

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also suggest that their social–psychological theories are further underpinned by structural ones. System justification theory is another theory with close links to social dominance theory. Both suggest that social stereotypes might be consensually shared across groups and use ideas associated with false consciousness. Indeed, the main difference is that system justification theory concentrates upon the dynamics of consensual social ideology; while social dominance theory tends to see various ideologies operating that might bring about social instability. Keith Dowding See also Authoritarian Personality; Domination; Exploitation; False Consciousness; Interdependence Theory; Jost, John; Racism, Role of Power in; RightWing Authoritarianism; System Justification Theory

Further Readings Sidanius, J. (1993). The psychology of group conflict and the dynamics of oppression: A social dominance perspective. In S. Iyengar & W. McGuire (Eds.), Explorations in social psychology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., Laar, C. van, & Levan, S. (2004). Social dominance theory: Its agenda and method. Political Psychology, 25, 845–880. Turner, J. C., & Reynolds, K. J. (2003). Why social dominance theory has been falsified. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42, 199–206.

SOCIAL EXCHANGE THEORY See Exchange Theory

SOCIAL POWER Social power can be defined as the ability to achieve desired outcomes by deliberately changing the incentive structure of others. The concept is one side of an analytic distinction. The other side, usually referred to as outcome power, is the ability to achieve desired outcomes. This distinction was

formalized in Keith Dowding’s 1991 book, Rational Choice and Political Power. At first glance the distinction might seem odd because social power is in fact a form of outcome power. Both involve the ability to get what one wants; social power is just a particular way of going about it. Indeed, there is nothing clearly ontologically distinct about the two concepts, but the distinction is still a useful analytical tool for the study of power in society. This entry defines social power and outcome power and discusses the distinctions between the two.

Definitions Social power, as defined by Dowding, can be described as power over and outcome power as power to. The former must involve a social relation between two or more actors, for if there were only one actor, there would be nobody to exercise power over anyone else. On the other hand, outcome power applies, for instance, to the ability of an isolated person on a deserted island to pick coconuts (he has the power to pick the coconuts.) This is not to deny that a large portion of outcome power, when exercised, affects individuals. In our increasingly globalized world, buying a rug in London could affect the wage of a poverty-stricken rug weaver in Africa. This action has social consequences; however, it is not necessarily a case of social power. Social power involves the deliberate manipulation of incentive structures, and because the reasons for purchasing a rug usually do not include a desire to inflict hardship on others, then this can hardly be said to be a case of the consumer exercising social power over the producer. The use of the term deliberate in Dowding’s definition of social power is therefore to be used in a strict sense. The other aspect of the definition worth elaborating is that it must involve the manipulation of another actor’s incentive structure in the hope that it will bring about some desired end. One might set out to deliberately harm another, but not necessarily to manipulate their incentives for acting. A mafia boss might make the call to eliminate a traitorous employee. The ability to kill this individual is an instance of outcome power, though not of social power because the mafia boss is not exercising power over his employee any more. The mafioso is eliminating the individual’s incentive structure rather than manipulating it. The key

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point here is that the doomed individual is not used as a means to achieve some desired outcome, but is a component of the desired outcome itself (i.e., his death.) Of course, if the boss were attempting to build a reputation that the mafia deal severely with traitors, this reputation might be used to manipulate the incentive structure of other would-be traitors to make them reassess the risk they run by betraying the mafia. However, this reputation would be used as social power to warn would-be traitors, not to warn the unfortunate individual killed to enforce this reputation. This definition implies a resource account of social power. If A can threaten B with a disincentive to act, A can be considered socially powerful so far as the threat is effective in securing A’s desired outcome. Social resources can be defined as the means to affect other actors’ incentive structures. John Harsanyi identifies the possession of information, legitimate authority, unconditional incentives (positive and negative), and conditional incentives (positive and negative) as the four main ways an actor can influence another’s incentive structure. The possession of information can help A persuade B that B’s incentive structure is in fact mistaken by providing more conclusive or new evidence that a position, preferred by A, is in fact more credible than B’s previous position. For instance, lobbying groups often conduct their own research to collect information to persuade the government that the lobby’s desired outcome is also the government’s desired outcome. Legitimate authority—or more precisely, the appeal to legitimate authority—can be used in the same way as information, in persuading other actors to reconsider their incentive structures. Unconditional incentives involve placing a reward or punishment (or both) for actors to carry out an action, no matter whether the action is eventually performed or not. For example, construction of homeless shelters by a government provides incentives for the homeless to stop sleeping on the street; whether they end up using the facilities is a different matter altogether. A conditional incentive is, as the name suggests, only provided if the action is performed. For example, the welfare service might give the homeless an additional sum of money if they consistently utilize the shelters for a few weeks. In order to be successful, these techniques must be credible. This involves a cost. It costs to gather

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good information that appears credible. There are costs involved in gaining legitimate authority and preserving that legitimate authority. Unconditional incentives cost, or require, significant legitimate authority to ensure that disincentives (like taxes) are credible. Conditional incentives might require the cost of honoring the offer or threat. The might is important here because somebody might make a threat that he or she intend, never to honor, and yet that threat still alters the incentive structure of the threatened in the desired manner. The actor requires a reputation to make the threat credible, and often reputations are costly to create and maintain (and a failed bluff may result in a loss of reputation). For each technique, the extent to which an actor’s resources can cover these costs will indicate how much social power the actor holds. The ability to deliberately manipulate the incentive structures of others can be stated in terms of the resources an actor commands. Brian Barry provides an alternative definition for social power, which he believes accords with the term’s everyday use. He defines power, broadly speaking, as “the ability to bring about desired states of the world by acting,” and then defines social power as “the ability to bring about desired states of the world by acting in such a way as to overcome the resistance of others.” In other words, social power exists when there is a clash of wills. In one sense this is broader than Dowding’s definition, because there need not be any impact on an actor’s incentive structure for an action to be thought of as an instance of social power. For example, A might threaten B not to perform a certain action, yet B does not believe the threat will be carried out and so performs the action anyway, well aware that A does not want B to do so. Given that B overcomes A’s resistance, B is exercising social power by Barry’s definition. Even if the threat was legitimate and A honors it by shooting B, B’s defiance should still be explained as an exercise of social power. Resources, therefore, are irrelevant to this description of social power. In another sense, Barry’s definition is narrower: he excludes concepts like persuasion and authority. This is because his idea of social power does not exhaust all uses of persuasion and authority. When an actor is being manipulated and is unaware of the manipulation, no resistance can be detected—and so no social power can be detected

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either. The subtle dissemination of propaganda by political parties to unsuspecting voters is therefore not to be confused with an exercise of social power as Barry has defined it. A bureaucrat following strict instructions from a parliament minister would not be following the minister because of social power, as such, if the bureaucrat did not disagree with the minister (though he would not have carried out the instructions if he had not been ordered). Nor does it appear that all conditional and unconditional incentives are forms of Barry’s social power. Smokers who want to quit might support heavy taxes on cigarettes because they would provide the necessary disincentive for them to resist a craving. There is no conflict of interest here. Quite the opposite; this is a case where the individual lacks outcome power to quit and society provides the required conditions to empower him. Smokers might be pleased to hear that their friends threaten them with social ostracism if they continue to smoke because the smokers believe this is the necessary desperate step that must be taken to force them to quit. These examples do not correspond to Barry’s maxim: “In a relationship of social power, one party should stand to gain and the other to lose” (Barry, 2002, p. 11). Returning to Dowding’s definition, when an actor is aware that his or her incentive structure is being manipulated but there is no explicit conflict of interest involved, this will count as an instance of social power. If an individual is listening patiently to a lobby group and is quite willing to consider their views, there is no conflict of interest, and if the lobby group did eventually succeed, they will have deliberately altered the listener’s incentive structure. It might be argued that a teacher teaching a class operates within a similar structure. Social power, by this understanding, may be used to benefit another actor and that actor may also acknowledge this fact. For Dowding, persuasion, authority, and incentives, both conditional and unconditional, are subcategories of social power; for Barry they are entirely different concepts altogether. There is little use trying to explore which definition is the correct one (even though Barry thinks his is the more intuitive), but what can be done is to briefly sketch the analytical possibilities for the two definitions. Barry’s definition of social power does not entail a systematic method to study how actors actually overcome conflict. This, of course, is not

to say that Barry never suggests a method—he does—only that it does not logically follow from his definition of social power. For Barry, the ability to change another party’s incentive structure is certainly an instrument of social power, but not an exercise of social power itself. The concept was designed to maintain the gap between the means of social power and the ability to exercise social power. Consider a threat made by D to E that is expensive to honor. E might rationally refuse to comply even when D has a strong reputation for honoring threats. Despite having the resources to carry out the threat, given the high cost it would be rational for D not to honor the threat if it turned out to be unsuccessful (assuming D’s reputation would not be hurt). E could make an informed guess that this was D’s thinking and so, quite rationally, refuse to comply. Death threats often take this form. Barry’s point is that there is significant indeterminacy between what D can do to E and D’s ability to coerce E into certain action. As such, separating the resources of an actor from the definition of social power factors this indeterminacy into the study of power.

Distinction Between Social Power and Outcome Power Analytically distinguishing social power, by Dowding’s definition, from outcome power expands the explanatory scope power can have in social situations. Consider the choice situation of a dedicated worker, X, who is assessing applicants for a new job in the firm X works for. Ceteris paribus, X’s desired outcome is that the position be given to the applicant who would produce the greatest payoff for the firm. Suppose, though, that a wealthy friend wants his good-for-nothing son to get the position, and so offers a monetary bribe to X on the condition that X chooses X’s friend’s son. This monetary bribe is large enough to discount the loyalty that X feels toward the firm, and so X selects the son. An analyst looking at this situation must ask why this dedicated employee made such a decision, because X’s initial preference schedule indicates that he should have selected a more qualified applicant. If we only consider outcome power, we might be tempted to say the partner restricts the ability of the employer to achieve X’s desired outcome. Yet this is simply not the case;

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X’s desires have changed. X still has the ability to get on the phone and give the job to the best applicant, but this is no longer what X wants to do. It is not that the father exercised outcome power and X was unintentionally affected; X was integral in the father’s calculations. Dowding’s definition of social power accommodates the reality of changing preferences. The distinction recommends a two-step method for studying power relations. The first step is sometimes called the snapshot technique, which examines the actor’s choice situation. This involves assessing two different aspects of collective action: (1) a parametric environment and (2) a strategic environment. First, (1) we assume there is no opposition to a group trying to achieve its aims; that is, there are no actors who would attempt to stop X’s shady dealings. The outcome is relatively straightforward at the moment because X has been described as an individual person. If, however, X designated a group of people, say a selection committee, collective action problems could come to the fore. Certain individuals might achieve a greater payoff if they become whistle-blowers and report their group’s shady selection to the firm. The parametric environment measures the group’s outcome power to act appropriately in the first place. Suppose now that the group is disciplined and nobody betrays the group (this is usually achieved by utilizing social power of some sort). The payoff is not secure because the firm could find out. Other actors complicate things further. This is the second aspect—(2)—of the snapshot technique. The severity of the firm’s punishment, the probability of discovery, and the expected payoff would factor in to this strategic interaction, at least for any rational group. This is another way to map the outcome power of X in light of the structural constraints of other actors. As the name suggests, the snapshot technique is ahistorical. Studying the historical development of the choice situation is the second step of the method Dowding’s distinction recommends. The first step does not explain X’s change in incentive structure. There is another force at play here, namely the reason why X wants to select the goodfor-nothing son. An analyst explaining the shady dealings to a board of investigators would be missing a huge piece of the puzzle if he had concluded that X desired the good-for-nothing son to have

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the job, possessed the required outcome power to achieve this desire, and so the good-for-nothing son was selected. X could not be accused of any wrongdoing. It might even be assumed that X genuinely thought the good-for-nothing son was the best candidate for the job. Looking historically at the choice situation, the analyst would uncover the incentive offered to X by the father. The explanation could be probed further by looking at X’s choice situation when accepting the bribe to see why the father’s offer was successful—perhaps, for instance, X was in deep financial trouble. A proper understanding of the social power at play in X’s choice situation requires a historical account of the formation of X’s preference schedule. It might be noted that without this second step, the snapshot technique considered in isolation could simply be a resource-based account of outcomes. In that case, the term power would no longer have much use. William Bosworth See also Agency–Structure Problem; Domination; Dowding, Keith; Exchange Theory; Exclusion; Governmentality; Interests; Lukes, Steven; Mann, Michael; Marxist Accounts of Power; Structural Power; Three Faces of Power

Further Readings Barry, B. (2002). Capitalists rule OK? Some puzzles about power. Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 1, 155–184. Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Harsanyi, J. (1969). Measurement of social power, opportunity costs, and the theory of two-person bargaining games. In R. Bell, D. V. Edwards, & R. H. Wagner (Eds.), Political power: A reader. London: Collier-Macmillan.

SOVEREIGNTY The most succinct definition of sovereignty is that of a power that has no higher power above it. In the shape of the state, sovereignty embodies the idea of supreme decision-making and enforcement authority over a given territory and population. In other words, sovereignty is not about the means by

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which power is exercised, nor the goals to which power may aspire. Rather, sovereignty is about the location of one specific type of power—political power—in relation to other forms of social power (economic power, patriarchal power, etc.). In this way, sovereignty enshrines the autonomy of politics as a distinctive form of human activity. Sovereign commands are law, but by virtue of its autonomy the sovereign is also entitled to break the very laws it creates, and the only party entitled to do so. This claim to ultimate power or absoluteness in political decision making is perhaps one of the most confusing and misunderstood aspects of sovereignty. A claim to absolute power seems both outdated and totalitarian in today’s era of globalization and human rights. This entry discusses the historical and theoretical origins of sovereignty and the concept of sovereignty as absolute and as mediated political power.

Origins: History and Political Theory The idea that the sovereign is subject to no higher power in the making and enforcing of political decisions in a given territory paradoxically leads to the antithesis of sovereignty: international anarchy (the absence of any overarching authority above sovereigns themselves). This means that sovereigns are supreme at home, but only equals abroad. Sovereignty is at once a claim to self-government and an assertion of membership in the society of nations. Therefore, sovereignty is intimately tied up with questions of borders, for boundaries mark the extent of the sovereign’s power. The origins of today’s sovereign states lie in the prolonged history of the consolidation and expansion of state power in the hands of self-aggrandizing European dynasties, who carved out exclusive domains of rule by crushing alternative sources of authority. In this way, a system of states existed before sovereignty became the ruling principle of diplomacy and international law. The immediate concern that inspired modern theories of sovereignty was internal discord. Both Bodin’s Six livres de la république of 1576 and Hobbes’s Leviathan of 1651 proposed similar answers to the dilemma of destructive civil conflict. They both put forward the idea of an ultimate decision-making authority that would safeguard the polity as a stable, united body to meet foreign

threats and suppress internal strife. The idea of a single hub of political obligation undermined the overlapping spheres of authority, rights, and responsibilities that hitherto prevailed in Europe. With their ruthless emphasis on unity, the ideas of Bodin and Hobbes undoubtedly gave succor to an authoritarian conception of the state. But for Hobbes at least, the idea of sovereignty entailed something more. For the idea of a supreme seat of decision making that trumped the privileges of any other section or member of the body politic logically required the prior assumption of a shared ideal of political legitimation. In other words, sovereignty presumed the idea of a unified collective will that flattened social hierarchy by placing all members of the polity on the same level. Hobbes’s theoretical innovation was not, therefore, the idea of popular sovereignty. This idea was already familiar to Europe from republican city-states and the Protestant Huguenots’ challenge to the Catholic French monarchy. Rather, the abstract idea of a representative state was new. Whereas previously sovereignty was seen to reside in the mortal, flesh-and-blood body of the prince (or in its republican variant, in the bodies of individual citizens), Hobbes’s abstracted sovereign, this “artificial man,” embodied a stable, homogeneous, and continuous identity. If Hobbes undermined traditional idioms of popular rule prevalent in Europe at the time, he also decisively entrenched the idea that the people ultimately owed political obligation to no one but themselves. Hobbes channeled all political obligation through a single, abstract sovereign. The logical corollary of this was that political obligation had to be seen as being independent of the form of any particular government (republic, aristocracy, or monarchy). As such, every type of government came to be seen merely as a particular variation of a single theme: rule in the name of the people. One of the problems with Hobbes’s theory was that the unity required to peaceably elect a sovereign presupposed the existence of a sovereign in the first place. Concerned to stem the radical implications of his idea, Hobbes squared the circle by precluding the right of resistance, and sanctifying all preexisting sovereigns as always already legitimate. It is important to stress, then, that sovereignty is not the same thing as democracy. As a figure of obedience, Hobbes’s sovereign expresses the common

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authority of the law over apolitical individuals, confined to a merely private existence. Nonetheless, Hobbes’s idea of a representative state ensured that the interests of the people became the supreme guiding principle of political life. The question of the origins and functioning of representation, and the alienation of political power that it entails, remained a problematic trope that was reworked by subsequent theorists. Jean– Jacques Rousseau tried to resolve the problem in his Du contrat social of 1763, by requiring that “the people” be sufficiently small in number that the sovereign coincided with the citizenry itself. In Rousseau’s vision, there would be a public power independent of any individual’s will, but it would not be institutionalized in the form of an overarching state apparatus that was too distant from the people it was designed to serve. Rousseau’s solution to the problem of political alienation came, then, at the cost of confining the political system of sovereignty to the limits of the city-state. It was left to Joseph Emmanuel Sieyès to overcome these limitations by proposing the idea of the nation: a social body characterized by a complex division of labor, whose constituents were integrated by their reciprocal commercial exchanges. With this idea, Sieyès solved two dilemmas in a single stroke. The idea of the nation provided the conceptual basis for extending sovereignty to a territory larger than a city-state. At the same time, this was a political ideal around which to rally the Third Estate—the productive middle and working classes—to assert its rights against the idle monarchy and aristocracy in the French Revolution. As representation was already contained in the idea of commerce (based as it is on the principle of equivalent exchange), Sieyès made sovereign representation the logical extension of the system of representation familiar to all from everyday life. Through interaction with the Romantic response to the Enlightenment, the nation came to signify not commercial integration, but a group of people who were united by ethnic and cultural ties over and above their unity in a given state. Hence today’s familiar, conjoined term: the (sovereign) nation-state.

Absolute and Mediated Political Power By claiming ultimate power grounded in the consensual will of citizens, sovereignty is supreme and

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collaborative, thereby giving sovereign states their distinctive historical vigor in contrast to other forms of political association. Nonetheless, the principle of a people being indirectly sovereign— sovereign only insofar as they live under a representative state—remains a fiendishly elusive concept. Sovereignty subsumes both the ruler and the ruled, the state and the people. The intangible nature of the idea has led thinkers such as Stephen Krasner to analytically dissect sovereignty into more digestible chunks: for example, Westphalian sovereignty (named for the 1648 peace treaties, and meaning the ability to exclude other actors from one’s domain) and domestic sovereignty (meaning the extent of state control over a given territory). Others have suggested negative sovereignty to characterize those developing countries with all the trappings of formal sovereignty (such as national flags, membership in the United Nations, etc.) but insufficient state power to enforce their rule. The problem with this straining toward greater analytical precision is that it misses the relational character of sovereignty. Another way of saying this is that, to be coherent, the idea of sovereignty must mediate between two forms of power: authority or legitimacy (that reside with the people), and force or coercion (that resides with the state). At the same time, sovereignty is reducible to neither (otherwise the word legitimacy or coercion alone would suffice). The elusive nature of sovereignty is better grasped if we refuse to reify either of its constituent parts, and instead see political power as a relational phenomenon. Under the rule of the modern state, the people are indeed sovereign. But they can only be so through an agency that represents them collectively. Societies are not anthills: people cannot be mechanically coordinated in unison. But individuals are still social. The historic solution to the problem of collective political organization is to alienate individuals’ political power into the vessel of the state, which then provides a means of exercising the people’s will. Hobbes’s words: “A multitude of men are made one person when they are by one man . . . represented. . . . For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one” (Leviathan, Ch. XVI). It is for this reason that political power is relational: with the state as their agent, the people can assess how their collective

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projects are faring. The relational character of sovereignty was captured well in the neat (though historically implausible) idea of the social contract, with which Hobbes described the formation of sovereigns: individuals alienate the liberties they enjoy in a presocial but insecure state of nature to enter under a sovereign’s protection—a relationship that entails mutual obligations (hence social contract). Sovereignty thus presupposes the capacity of a group of people to overcome social divisions by establishing a sense of political unity. In this way, the sovereign unites the ideas of legitimacy and force. The extent to which political power can be independent from other forms of social power (such as economic power or technological resources) is evident in the victorious struggles of many Third World nations against much stronger imperialist powers throughout the 20th century. But in order to mobilize collective political power and to function effectively as the people’s agent, sovereignty requires a single, unified focus of political obligation. As we have already seen, this requires that the state make a claim to absolute superiority over all other sources of political loyalty. Distilling the general will in the form of a single, dominant agency of representation creates a potentially awesome power of social oppression for the state. This takes us back, then, to the question of the absoluteness of sovereign power. It is important to stress that the absoluteness of sovereignty is not about arbitrariness (even though many sovereigns may be arbitrary). Rather, the principle of absoluteness is about shielding the idea of political responsibility. Positing an ultimate authority makes it possible to clarify the process of decision making by attributing responsibility to a specific government or regime. But, crucially, because governments are only the representatives of the people, the principle of sovereignty also makes clear the fact that society is the product and responsibility of the people in general. The extent to which the state fulfills the will of its citizens is of course a practical question that cannot be answered through use of a formal procedure or theoretical discussion, but only in the cut and thrust of political activity itself. Despite this, the abstract nature of the concept of sovereignty means that it is prone to recurrent attack from people dubious of its claims to exercise

supreme power. In recent years, the sovereign state has been called into question by the claims of globalization. Greater economic and social integration and the growth of cross-cutting networks of global governance are seen to be dispersing the concentrated power of the sovereign and undermining its ability to exclusively control a given territory. The problem with these arguments is that they seem to assume that the sovereign claim to supremacy can only be realized in the form of a monolithic, totalitarian super-ministry that dominates every aspect of society within impermeable borders. Given that such a state nowhere exists, this type of sovereignty is an anachronistic fiction. But these claims mistake both the nature of absoluteness and of political power. As we have seen, in contrast to authoritarianism, the idea of absoluteness means that at some point, human responsibility for society and political affairs cannot be deferred elsewhere. In this way, sovereignty enshrines the autonomy of politics as the primary sphere of human decision making. For this reason, ideas that eat away, dodge, or try to transcend the idea of sovereignty are liable to lose grasp of the political—which is to say, the possibility for seeing society as a conscious creation of individuals acting collectively. As sovereignty enshrines the autonomy of politics, it also enshrines the possibility that political power can be used to abolish and restructure social arrangements in line with the popular will. But if sovereignty does indeed offer the potential for clarifying the exercise of political power, it cannot be reified or taken as a given either. This is because political power, by its very nature, is an indefinite and unstable quantum. Political power is contingent on a unified sense of people’s beliefs. As James Madison argued, if political power is rooted in individual belief, the strength of that belief in our obligations will be contingent on how many other people are presumed to share that belief, To be effective, belief (and political power) must usually be sustained by some object or goal. The desire consciously to reshape social relations must be sustained by some imagined ideal of a better society. If there is no such aspiration, then society has less use for or recourse to the principle of sovereignty. This is the link between the decline of ideological conflict witnessed since the end of the cold war and the much-discussed erosion of the sovereign state. As

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the number of ideological options has shrunk (and with it, the possibilities for political debate), government has become a more technical affair, enabling ruling elites to “contract out” various sovereign prerogatives to the technocratic and regulatory bodies of global governance (e.g., the European Union). Nonetheless, the will to self-government enshrined in the principle of sovereignty has overthrown empires and tyrants throughout modern history. For this reason, its power cannot be doubted. The supporters of global governance ignore the slogan “power to the people” at their peril. Philip Cunliffe See also Absolutism; Anarchism, Power in; Authority; Legitimation; Hobbes, Thomas

Further Readings Bickerton, C., Cunliffe, P., & Gourevitch, A. (Eds.). (2007). Politics without sovereignty: A critique of contemporary international relations. London: UCL Press. Bodin, J. (1992). On sovereignty. (J. H. Franklin, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1576) Hinsley, F. H. (1966). Sovereignty. London: C. A. Watts. Hobbes, T. (1968). Leviathan. London: Penguin. (Original work published 1651) Hont, I. (1994). The permanent crisis of a divided mankind: “Contemporary crisis of the nation-state” in historical perspective. Political Studies, 42, 166–231. Krasner, S. D. (1999). Sovereignty: Organized hypocrisy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

SPATIAL VOTING ANALYSIS Spatial voting analysis starts with the identification of a relevant set of policy alternatives called the policy space. Examples of such alternatives are different levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) taxation or different combinations of economic and political integration in Europe. Then the analysis typically assumes that each of several interacting decision makers has a unique most-preferred alternative, referred to as one’s bliss or ideal point, and strives to implement a policy as close to it as possible. In the simplest case of a single

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dimension like “euros per ton of CO2” or “conservatism,” the median voter theorem predicts that, if majority rule is used to select policy, the ideal point of the median decision maker (with an equal number of agents to his or her right and left) is selected, as it can beat any other policy alternative in pairwise majority voting. Such an alternative is called a Condorcet winner. But Condorcet winners, and hence clear predictions, usually do not exist if the policy space is multidimensional. Rather, if alternatives can be freely replaced by others whenever a simple majority of voters so wishes, there is a possibility of perpetual cycling over the entire policy space producing chaotic instability, at least in theory. In practice, there are good reasons to expect agreement on some policy that beats many but perhaps not all alternatives. The policy that beats the most alternatives is a particularly salient prediction and is formally known as the Copeland winner. It is a specific weighted average of ideal points, coinciding with the Condorcet winner, if the latter exists, and having useful geometric properties. Alternatively, a unique prediction for a collective decision may be obtained by studying the procedure to be used to reach that decision. We also need to consider the strategies that are available due to agenda-setting rights—strategic voting and the like, which can lead to the perpetual cycling of winners. Such analysis uses the spatial nature of decision makers’ preferences in an otherwise standard noncooperative game-theoretic framework. Independent of whether spatial analysis uses noncooperative game theory, the Condorcet or Copeland winner, or one of multiple other solution concepts in order to predict a particular outcome or to explain it ex post, it is of interest how this outcome relates to decision makers’ preferences. First, how close is the outcome located to the ideal point of a given decision maker? This amounts to inquiring how successful the agent was in the considered collective decision-making process. Second, it is relevant, especially for interested outsiders, to know how influential or powerful the agent was (or is expected to be ex ante) in bringing about the outcome. Note that the success of enjoying a policy close to or even coinciding with one’s ideal point generally does not imply that one possesses power in the sense of being causally responsible for the outcome; neither does power guarantee any

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particular success. Typically, actors with centrally located ideal points are successful (even if they have little power), while actors with extreme ideal points are unsuccessful (even if they have considerable power). Finding out whether a given decision maker was influential in effecting a certain point in the policy space amounts to conducting a thought experiment: what would have been the outcome if instead of acting according to his given policy preferences, the considered decision maker had acted as if his preferences were different? If a hypothetical change in the given actor’s preferences does not imply any change of outcome, he obviously wields no power—at least given the preferences of the other agents. In contrast, an allpowerful dictator can always select his or her most-preferred policy, so a change of his or her ideal point translates directly into a corresponding change in the collective choice. A change of an ideal point by a less powerful decision maker may translate into a smaller shift in the collective choice in the same direction. Power in spatial models of political or economic interaction can thus be formalized as sensitivity of the collective decision with respect to an individual ideal point: the greater the response to a variation of a voter’s bliss point, the more powerful is a decision maker for a given ideal point configuration. With a precise notion of distance in the policy space, power can be measured with full mathematical rigor as a difference quotient or (directional) derivative. In a two-dimensional setting in which the outcome is the Copeland winner, for example, individual power equals the weight that agents’ ideal points receive when they are averaged (also known as the Shapley–Owen spatial power index). Or in standard single-dimensional spatial voting a decision maker’s power is 1 if he or she is the median voter (because then local preference changes translate into outcome changes one-to-one), but 0 otherwise. The measured variation of the outcome in response to small shifts of an ideal point is closely related to the sort of power that lobbyists care about: if the change of a given decision maker’s preferences regarding the level of a CO2 tax has greater effect than a corresponding change of another decision maker’s position, the former is ceteris paribus a more attractive target. He or she

will be revealed to be the more powerful player not only by theoretical analysis but by the actions of outsiders. The single-dimensional median voter case illustrates that individual power, as identified by the indicated thought experiment, typically depends on the ideal point configuration at hand. It is thus worthwhile to distinguish between a decision maker’s ex post power, considering a fixed profile of spatial preferences, and the ex ante power resulting from consideration of an entire probability distribution over preference profiles. The latter is of interest, first, when ideal points become common knowledge only after possible lobbying. Second, it greatly matters in constitutional analysis and design: for normative reasons, all spatial preference configurations should have equal weight in evaluating the overall power granted, for example, by the European Community Treaty to individual European Union (EU) member states in the European Council or to the Council as an institution interacting with the European Parliament and European Commission in the EU’s key legislative procedures. The power indices most widely used in constitutional analysis of the EU, the U.S. Electoral College, the International Monetary Fund, and others—namely the Penrose–Banzhaf and Shapley– Shubik power indices—amount to consideration of a particularly simple policy space with only two alternatives, 0 and 1, and nonstrategic pursuit of correspondingly dichotomous ideal points. Spatial voting analysis is more general: first, it allows for richer policy spaces and, second, it takes strategic interaction between decision makers seriously. Stefan Napel See also Strategic Power Index; Veto Players

Further Readings Grofman, B., Owen, G., Noviello, N., & Glazer, A. (1987). Stability and centrality of legislative choice in the spatial context. American Political Science Review, 81(2), 539–552. Hinich, M. J., & Munger, M. C. (1997). Analytical politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Napel, S., & Widgrén, M. (2004). Power measurement as sensitivity analysis: A unified approach. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 16(4), 517–538.

Spiral Model

SPENCE, JANET (1923– ) A New Yorker cartoon in which a male character declares to a female companion that she is really stupid and he likes that in a woman launched Janet Taylor Spence’s pioneering foray into gender research. Her 1972 study (with collaborator Robert Helmreich) titled “Who likes competent women?” led to the development of the Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS), which became the most frequently used measure of sexist beliefs. The AWS assesses beliefs that justify power differences between the sexes, including traditional notions about masculine superiority and the patriarchal family; attitudes toward equality of opportunity for women; and norms of “lady-like” behavior, such as modesty and deference toward men, that reflect a low-power, nonassertive interpersonal style. As Spence herself noted, however, the title of the scale is a misnomer because the AWS assesses attitudes about women’s rights and roles, not attitudes toward women per se. In fact, research has shown that the AWS is not strongly correlated to overall positivity or negativity toward women as a group, but rather to traditional, prescriptive attitudes about gender roles. Spence and Helmreich also developed the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ), which assesses two personality trait dimensions: instrumental (task-oriented traits related to agency) and expressive (interpersonally warm, nurturing, communal traits). Stereotypically, instrumental traits are associated with masculinity and expressive traits with femininity. Spence cautioned, however, that gender is a multifactorial construct, with instrumental and expressive traits constituting only one aspect of what people colloquially mean when they label self or others as masculine or feminine. Additionally, physical characteristics, role behaviors, and early identification with one’s gender category all play into conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Spence’s theoretical and empirical work provided a sophisticated counterweight to early gender researchers’ constricted view of the gendered self-concept and gender stereotypes as wholly centered around the distinction between instrumental and expressive traits. In particular, she critiqued Sandra Bem’s notion of psychological androgyny and, more broadly, Bem’s gender

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schema theory, which relied on the expressive versus instrumental distinction as the core of gender identity and gendered perceptions of others. Spence’s AWS and PAQ have documented important shifts in social attitudes from the 1970s to the present time. AWS scores for both sexes show increasing egalitarianism about gender roles, although sex differences continue to persist, with women exhibiting consistently greater egalitarianism than men. The general increase in egalitarianism partly reflects ideological accommodation to women’s influx into paid work, which has led to greater acceptance of instrumental traits among women. As a result, the PAQ has shown an increase in women’s self-ratings on instrumentality over the decades in which it has been administered to student samples. Peter Glick See also Feminist Theories of Power

Further Readings Spence, J. T. (1993). Gender-related traits and gender ideology: Evidence for a multi-factorial theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 624–632. Spence, J. T., & Hahn, E. D. (1997). The Attitudes toward Women Scale and attitude change in college students. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 17–34.

SPIRAL MODEL The spiral model is a concept in international relations that describes how well-intentioned, defensively motivated states can find themselves in an unintended arms race or even war with other similarly motivated states because of the difficulty of assessing state intentions in the absence of a supranational government. This dilemma is caused by the fact that the means one state uses to make itself more secure often have the unintended consequence of making other states less secure. Such an outcome is an example of how individually rational decisions can sometimes result in collectively suboptimal outcomes. In its view of state intentions and of the effects of one state’s armament decisions on other states’ behavior, the spiral model sits in stark opposition to the theory of deterrence.

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Anarchy, or the absence of a centralized government, in the international system is the ultimate source of the unintended outcomes characteristic of the spiral model. A state in such an environment must develop armaments and seek other ways of protecting itself from states with potentially malignant intentions. However, because many weapons that can be used for defense can also be used for offense, other states read these defensive actions as potentially threatening and reciprocate by increasing their own military capacities. This in turn makes the first state more fearful, thereby setting off a spiral of increasing hostility and armament that can lead to war. This situation in which one state’s efforts to improve its own security often backfire by provoking unexpected reactions from other states is often described as the security dilemma. Psychological dynamics—such as the tendency to assimilate discrepant information to previously formed beliefs—may make the dilemma more acute, though its basic roots lie in the structure of the system. Robert Jervis has argued that two variables affect how severe this dilemma is apt to be: (1) the distinguishability of offensive from defensive weapons and (2) whether offensive or defensive weapons have the advantage. Because a central cause of the security dilemma lies in the fact that weapons used for defensive purposes can likewise be used for offensive ends, the dilemma does not theoretically operate during historical epochs when military technology makes it possible to clearly distinguish offensive armaments from defensive. However, making such a clear-cut distinction is rarely possible. Moreover, the dilemma will be especially vicious when existing technology and geography make it easier to conquer than to defend territory. Deterrence theory, in contrast, presents a strikingly different view of state intentions and behavior and starts by making opposing assumptions about the intentions of the potential enemy state. While the spiral model assumes innocuous or defensive intentions on the part of the other state, deterrence theorists assume that this state has malignant or expansionist intentions. In international relations language, the spiral model assumes that the other state is a status quo power, while deterrence theorists view this state as a revisionist power. Because of this deterrence theorists emphasize not

the danger of a misunderstanding between two defensively motivated states, but rather the danger that an aggressor will be emboldened by any conciliatory gesture. According to deterrence theorists, as long as the state’s power level permits, it is often appropriate to take a hard-line stance in response to the potentially threatening actions of another state, lest the other state read attempts at compromise as evidence of weakness and lack of will. The quandary here is obvious: deterrence theorists recommend the same policy measures that the spiral model predicts will lead to an unnecessary increase in hostility and even war. Determining which model is most appropriate in a given situation ultimately depends on forming accurate assessments about the intentions of the opposing state, a notoriously difficult task. The world wars illustrate this challenge. In the eyes of many, World War I is an example of a war caused by the dynamics of the spiral model. It is widely believed that none of the major belligerents desired war, yet war was the outcome of the efforts of the states involved to ensure their own security. In contrast, World War II is believed to have been at least partly caused by the failure of the states that would become the Allies to recognize that Germany had aggressive intentions. Germany viewed the efforts of these states’ to avoid what they perceived as another unnecessary war as evidence of weakness and thus became further emboldened. That the leading policy makers of the time incorrectly assessed Germany’s intentions in each of these two cases illustrates that it is by no means a straightforward task to ascertain whether the policy prescriptions of the spiral model or deterrence theory are appropriate in a given case. Brooke C. Greene See also Anarchy in International Relations; Arms Race; Deterrence Theory; Deterrent Threats; Offense/Defense Dominance; Security; Security Dilemma

Further Readings Glaser, C. (1992). Political consequences of military strategy: Expanding and refining the spiral and deterrence models. World Politics, 44(4), 497–538. Jervis, R. (1976). Perception and misperception in international politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Square Root Rules Jervis, R. (1978). Cooperation under the security dilemma. World Politics, 30(2), 167–214. Levy, J. (1984). The offensive/defensive balance of military technology: A theoretical and historical analysis. International Studies Quarterly, 28, 219–238.

SPROUT, HAROLD (1901–1980) Harold Sprout was a pioneer in the development and promotion of the systematic and rigorous study of international politics. He received a BA in political science from Oberlin College in 1924 and a PhD in political science and law from the University of Wisconsin in 1929. In 1931, he accepted an assistant professorship at Princeton University and remained there until his retirement in 1969. His writings, most of which were coauthored with his wife, Margaret Sprout, focused on naval power, geography, environmental problems, and capability analysis in international politics. During World War II, the Sprouts developed a set of readings for use in officer training programs that came to be used in many American university courses in international relations. These readings were published in 1945 in Foundations of National Power. In 1956 the Sprouts circulated a working paper titled “Man-Milieu Relationship Hypotheses in the Context of International Politics,” which rejected their earlier approach to capability analysis. Whereas earlier approaches, including their own, had emphasized foundations or elements of national power, such as geography, population, weapons, and the economy, the Sprouts now argued that these elements of national power had no political significance whatever unless they were set in the context of a framework of assumptions specifying who is trying to get whom to do what under what conditions. They called this set of assumptions a policy–contingency framework. Almost all previous theorizing about international politics, the Sprouts argued, was based on implicit or explicit assumptions that specified the ability to win conventional wars as the ultimate measuring rod for a nation’s power. The Sprouts contended that the development of nuclear weapons, the continuing rapid rate of technological change, and the increasing importance of nonmilitary variables called into question the classical realist assumptions based on

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military force. A revised version of this essay was published in 1965, titled The Ecological Perspective on Human Affairs, With Special Reference to International Politics. In the 1970s the Sprouts continued their work on environmental problems and were forerunners of the environmental movement. In 1971, they published a widely used textbook titled Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth, which brought together their revised approach to statecraft and capability analysis and their longstanding concerns about the earth and its environment. David A. Baldwin See also Balance of Power; Capability; Realism in International Relations; Relational Power; Resources as Measuring Power

Further Readings Sprout, H., & Sprout, M. (Eds.). (1945). Foundations of national power: Readings on world politics and American security. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sprout, H., & Sprout, M. (1956). Man-milieu relationship hypotheses in the context of international politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Center of International Studies. Sprout, H., & Sprout, M. (1965). The ecological perspective on human affairs, with special reference to international politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

SQUARE ROOT RULES Consider a two-tier decision-making system having the following architecture: at the bottom tier there are m pairwise disjoint constituencies C1, . . . , Cm. Ci comprises ni citizens. The upper tier is a council consisting of a representative Ri from each Ci. Decisions are made directly by the council, where on any proposed bill each Ri votes yes or no— abstention is not admitted as a distinct option— according to the majority view in Ci (ascertained, say, by referendum within the constituency). Thus the citizens are the indirect voters of the system. The ni are assumed to be sufficiently large for the normal approximation to the

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Status

binomial distribution to be usable. In practice, ni 100 is sufficient. In what follows, voting power refers to the Penrose–Banzhaf measure of a priori voting power. Penrose’s square root rule—stated by him in 1946 and rediscovered independently by Banzhaf in 1966—asserts that the (indirect) voting powers of citizens, across all constituencies, is equalized (thus achieving the ideal of one person−one vote) if and only if the decision rule in the council is such that the (direct) voting power of each Ri is proporpffiffiffiffi tional to the corresponding ni . A second square root rule—conjectured by Morriss in 1987 and proved in 1998 by Felsenthal and Machover—asserts that the sum total of the citizens’ (indirect) voting powers is maximized if and only if the voting rule in the council is as follows: assign to each Ri weight wi proportional to pffiffiffiffi the corresponding ni , and let w be the sum of all the wi. A bill is passed if the total weight of the representatives voting for it exceeds w/2; and is defeated if total weight of the representatives voting for it is less than w/2. (It does not matter what the outcome is if the total is exactly w/2.) A third square root rule—proved by Paul H. Edelman in 2004—concerns the special case in which all the ni are equal; the council operates under the simple majority decision rule; and has, in addition to the m constituency representatives, k at-large representatives voting as a single bloc according to the majority opinion among the entire citizenry. The rule asserts that the sum total of the citizens’ (indirect) voting powers is maxipffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi mized if k is approximately ðm1kÞ . The last two rules can be stated equivalently— and suggestively—in terms of the majority deficit, which is defined as follows. In cases where the decision made by the council is contrary to the majority view among the citizens at large, the majority deficit is the margin by which this majority exceeds the minority who agree with the decision. In all other cases, the majority deficit is 0. By a theorem of Felsenthal and Machover, the sum total of the citizens’ voting powers is maximized just in case the mean (i.e., statistical average) of the majority deficit is minimized. Moshé Machover and Dan S. Felsenthal See also Banzhaf Voting Power Measure; Blocking Coalition; Felsenthal, Dan S.; Machover, Moshé;

Morriss, Peter; Penrose Voting Power Measure; Voting Power; Weighted Majority Game; Weighted Voting

Further Readings Edelman, P. H. (2005). Making votes count in local elections: A mathematical appraisal of at-large representation. Election Law Journal, 4(4), 258–278. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

STATUS Status is sometimes used in a particular sense to indicate the position one occupies in a social structure. It is closely related to concept of role and directs attention to expected forms of behavior of any person occupying that role. This use derives from the legal concept of status involving rights and duties and focuses on the individual. The broader meaning of the concept points to esteem, reputation, honor, social rank, and class membership in a given society. This last meaning of the concept is closely related to authority and power. It is crucial to make a distinction, first introduced by Ralph Linton, between ascribed and achieved status. A certain person, by virtue of being a father or a mother, for example, may be expected to meet certain duties, but he or she may not achieve this ascribed goal. It is equally important to understand the notion of status crystallization (or consistency). If it can be said that there a correlation between one’s position in a social hierarchy and the criteria that determine that social status, then there can be asserted to be a status crystallization or consistency; if there is a discrepancy between them, then there is an inconsistency. Two methodological devices, one objective and one subjective, can be used to determine whether there is a consistency or an inconsistency. The concept has its origins in Sir Henry Maine’s distinction between status and contract, but it was Max Weber who introduced the concept and differentiated between status contracts and purpose contracts. According to Weber. status contracts are a feature of precapitalist societies, whereas purpose contracts are made in capitalist society. Weber

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replaced Marx’s concept of class with that of status, which he believed was a more general concept to be used in analytical or descriptive sociology. Some sociologists and anthropologists believe that Weber’s concepts of status and status situation offer a comprehensive view for examining structures of social inequality and power relations between as well as within status groups. Others, however, in particular some sociologists in the United States, find Weber’s concept overly subjectivist. They believe that Weber’s concept has many shortcomings in accounting for growing mobility and complexity. On another front, since the 1930s the Weberian view has been challenged by Émile Durkheim’s structural–Éfunctional theory. There are also sociologists who aim to achieve a synthesis between Marxian and Weberian sociological theory. Overtly contemporary Marxist sociologists, however, prefer to use Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and his analysis of (everyday) culture to analyze the changing social and cultural structures of and power relations in contemporary societies. Do÷an Göçmen See also Caste System (India); Habitus; Hierarchy; Gramsci, Antonio; Hegemony; Marx, Karl; Marxist Accounts of Power; Reputational Analysis; Weber, Max

Further Readings Lenski, G. E. (1966). Power and privilege. New York: McGraw-Hill. Linton, R. (1936). The study of man. New York: Appleton-Century. Packard, V. (1959). The status seekers: An exploration of class behavior in America. New York: D. McKay. Parkin, F. (Ed.). (1974). The social analysis of class structure. London: Tavistock. Weber, M. (1978). Selections in translation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

STRATEGIC INTERACTION IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS The development of the modern state system and the concept of an international system are generally traced to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648,

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which brought to an end the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. Prior to this, while states existed in name, the focus had been on the various monarchs and religious leaders who dominated Europe. The Peace of Westphalia established the principle of sovereignty, which remains a fundamental element controlling international relations today. The establishment of the concept of sovereignty effectively meant that a state’s political leadership (initially, mostly monarchs) had ultimate authority within a state’s borders and that others had no right to intervene in the internal affairs of another state. The result was a system that encouraged the establishment of independent nation-states and the institutionalizing of state interaction through the mechanism of diplomacy. The subsequent colonization of the rest of the world by the leading European states meant that this system became global and was finally institutionalized with the formation of the United Nations. The United Nations Charter has been endorsed by virtually all the states of the world; contained within it is guidance on how force may and may not be used and the responsibilities of states to their citizens. This entry discusses the international system, diplomacy, international law, and institutions that support the international system.

The International System Nevertheless, the international system as it exists today is significantly different from that created in 1648. While states continue to exist and at least formally maintain overall control, they are not the sole actors on the international stage, nor do they retain absolute power. Some actors, such as multinational corporations and political groups, have emerged with varying degrees of influence, while despite the Peace of Westphalia others, such as various religious leaders, have maintained a degree of power. A number of theories have evolved to help provide an understanding of the international system and explain where power lies and how it is used. For much of the period following World War II realism in its various forms tended to dominate the discussion, particularly in North America, but realism’s hold has been increasingly challenged by theories including liberalism, postmodernism, constructivism, and others. Moreover, the post–cold

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war world has witnessed an increasingly globalized and multicultural world with an apparent shift of power and focus from Europe to Asia.

Diplomacy This complex world continuously witnesses strategic interaction in a variety of forms, with diplomacy continuing to play a major part. For as long as there have been separate kingdoms or states, there has been a need for such organizations to be able to communicate with one another. The rules and processes underlying such communication that have developed over time are known as diplomacy. In its widest sense, diplomacy is both the art and the practice of undertaking discussions and negotiations between representatives of groups and states. This can take place at a variety of levels and functions ranging from peacemaking to trade or cultural exchanges. Traditionally, such negotiations were undertaken on behalf of the state by its foreign service or its head of state, but such interaction has increasingly spread across government so that ministries and departments, such as departments of agriculture, now negotiate directly with their overseas equivalents. Moreover, states have increasingly begun to negotiate with nonstate groups such as international organizations (e.g., the International Monetary Fund) and so-called terrorist groups (e.g. the Irish Republican Army). Within this process, the international system has established a series of norms and conventions. For example, many states have agreed to allow embassies (High Commissions in Commonwealth countries) to be established, providing a permanent presence of one state in another. Such embassies are deemed to be sovereign territory: thus the United States’ embassy in London is U.S. land and cannot be violated by the British government; within it, U.S. law is supreme. The reverse is equally true for the United Kingdom’s embassy in the United States. Similarly, states agree to designate officials as diplomats who remain immune from arrest and prosecution and whose travel cannot be restricted. Thus the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St James’s is immune from prosecution in the United Kingdom by the British authorities. The only mechanism a country can use against such diplomats is to expel them by giving them notice to

leave. Such action is extremely political and invariably results in tit-for-tat action—unless the reason is personal indiscretion, in which case the normal mechanism is for both nations to agree informally to replace the individual. Neither can information or other materials conveyed in diplomatic bags from an embassy to its own country be interfered with. All these elements are governed by agreed conventions and law. This does not mean that states do not engage in efforts to gain access to information on each other; diplomatic immunity is regularly used to cover such activity.

International Law The term international law is commonly used to refer to laws that govern the conduct of nations and other actors in the international arena. The key difference from domestic law is the lack of an international police force to implement such laws and only a limited judicial capacity to judge whether such laws have been obeyed. The idea and use of international law are not new and can be traced back at least as far as the Middle Ages. However, the vast majority of international law has developed over the last two centuries, driven partly by events and partly by needs that have arisen as the international system has evolved. Thus the two world wars led to the development of the League of Nations and the United Nations in attempts to help prevent a repetition of such conflicts. Each was designed to help manage the international system and the interaction of states, and each developed a series of organizations that either worked directly under it or in association with it—the World Health Organization, for example. Similarly, the international community has developed law relating to war crimes and crimes against humanity in response to the various atrocities that have taken place across the globe over time. The international community has also used international law to help govern new activities as a way of assisting an increasingly globalized world. For example, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations. Its role is to codify the principles and techniques of international air navigation and foster the planning and development of international air transport to ensure safe and orderly growth. To support this, the ICAO Council agrees

Strategic Interaction in International Relations

a series of standards and recommended practices concerning air navigation, its infrastructure, flight inspection, prevention of unlawful interference, and facilitation of border-crossing procedures for international civil aviation. In addition, the ICAO defines the protocols for air accident investigation followed by transport safety authorities in countries signatory to the Convention on International Civil Aviation, commonly known as the Chicago Convention. It thus serves as a means of facilitating international air travel in the safest possible form.

Institutions To facilitate strategic intervention in international relations, a series of institutions has been set up to help support the international system. These can generally be identified under three broad headings, although some, such as the United Nations, fall into more than one category. To facilitate international trade, the international community has developed a number of economic institutions (e.g., the European Union) that seek to provide maximum economic benefit for their members by opening trade within their organization and regulating trade with those outside it. Such economic blocs also have greater clout in various economic negotiations such as the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT) discussions on global trade. Legal bodies have developed, as discussed above, to help oversee elements of the international system ranging from air transport to human rights and genocide. In reality, the international system cannot function without a normative system of rules, even if such rules have de facto less power than laws passed within a state. The role and use of military force remains an important element of the international system. In theory, the United Nations charter governs the use of force and authorizes the United Nations to use the military forces of its members to provide for collective security. In practice this has not worked; the only case in which the United Nations has made a formal commitment to the use of military forces in a war is the Korean War. Technically, that war is still ongoing, with only a temporary cease fire in place between North Korea and South Korea, and the United Nations command in the

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south is still ready to continue operations should the cease fire break down. With this exception, the United Nations has tended to limit the use of forces to so-called peacekeeping tasks in which forces are deployed under its command (indicated by the wearing of blue berets) with the agreement of the warring factions. The United Nations has therefore sought to take a neutral stance in conflicts and to get the parties involved to reach some form of peaceful settlement. Nevertheless, the United Nations has authorized individual members (e.g., Britain in 1982 against Argentina) and regional security organizations (e.g., NATO in Afghanistan from 2003 onward) to use force. The international system has also seen the formation of various state groupings to provide for regional and global security. The formalities of such arrangements vary. For example, all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have agreed to collective defense and to consider an attack on one as being an attack on all. (To date, the only time such a determination has been made was on September 12, 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States.) Yet Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which defines the formal obligations of NATO members, merely requires them to confer in the event of such an attack, with the presumption that an attack will be deemed to be against all. Other arrangements have involved small groups of states (e.g., the Five Power Pact in the Pacific between the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia) or have been far less formal, such as bilateral security arrangements (e.g., the United States and Japan) or de facto security guarantees (e.g., NATO to Sweden during the cold war). Andrew M. Dorman See also Coercion and Power; Legitimation; Offense/Defense Dominance

Further Readings Brown, C. (2001). Understanding international relations. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Goldstein, J. S. (1994). International relations. New York: HarperCollins.

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Williams, P. D. (Ed.). (2008). Security studies: An introduction. London: Routledge.

STRATEGIC POWER INDEX Power is often conceived in terms of voting power; that is, the extent to which an individual may affect the outcome of a vote. The main measurements developed for this matter are the Shapley– Shubik index and the (absolute) Banzhaf measure. The Shapley–Shubik index focuses on the relative number of times a specific voter turns a losing coalition into a winning one for all possible orderings of voters in the group. The index is developed in the context of simple cooperative games in which the total payoff available to voters is restricted to 1 in case of a winning coalition, or 0 for losing. Voting power is therefore reduced, in the words of Dan Felsenthal and Moshé Machover in 2005, to a voter’s relative share in a fixed prize. This emphasis is the reason why Felsenthal and Machover classify the Shapley–Shubik index as an example of P-power (prize-power). This entry compares the Shapley–Shubik index to the Banzhaf measure and discusses limitations of the indices; alternative approaches, focusing on the strategic power index; and future directions for research. A competing index is Banzhaf’s reinvention of Penrose’s measure from the late 1940s. This index is based on the number of times a voter can alter a group decision by changing his or her vote divided by the total number of possible voting combinations, each of which has the same likelihood of occurring if voters vote randomly. Felsenthal and Machover classify this index as I-power (influencepower) because of its focus on a voter’s potential influence over the outcomes.

Limitations The use of these indices has several limitations. First, the Shapley–Shubik index assumes that all winning coalitions have the same value or total payoff, which is a basic assumption of the underlying theory of simple games. This constant-sum assumption is not very helpful for analyses of different institutional arrangements, because whatever

some players gain others must lose. Second, both measures use only the voting rule in structuring decision making, ignoring other important rules concerning the type of proposals or amendments that can be made and the structure of the agenda for voting on them. Finally, by using permutations, the indices do not capture the possible impact of strategic considerations that players may have in a noncooperative game.

Alternative Approaches For these reasons an alternative approach has been developed, producing a strategic power index. Bernard Steunenberg, Dieter Schmidtchen, and Christian Koboldt first proposed to combine noncooperative modeling of decision making with a measure of a player’s power. Their approach included four distinct elements: (1) the modeling of a decision-making situation using the tools of noncooperative game theory, (2) the definition of a space of preference profiles together with status quo points, (3) a distribution of these profiles including status quo points (i.e., state variables), and (4) the use of an index to measure power based on different states of the world. The first step of this approach is to formulate a game-theoretical model of a policy-making process. Such a policy game consists of all usual elements, including a specification of the players, their preferences, the current state of affairs or status quo, players’ action sets, a possible sequence of moves, the distribution of information among players, and so on. The structural elements of a game constitute what is called a game form, that is, the elements without player preferences and status quo points. In principle, a game form determines who is permitted or required to do what and when in some decision-making situation. A game form may function, at least in the short term, like a riverbed through which motivations flow toward outcomes. Playing a game with the same game form but different motivations may lead to different outcomes. If players have Euclidean preferences, as is assumed, the distances to these outcomes can be regarded as an expression of a player’s success in playing this game. The second step is to define a space of states. Each element of this space describes a state of the world, which could be the actual state—the current

Strategic Power Index

situation or status quo—or the outcome of a decision-making process based on the game form. This space is continuous and embedded in a Euclidean space that has one or more dimensions. The third step is to define the variables that feed into a game form and turn it into a game. The game form, as defined, only includes structural features, but lacks ingredients such as motivations and the status quo. The state variables include players’ most preferred states or ideal points, the status quo, and the outcome that results if the players accept a new proposal. In providing an a priori measurement of power, we need to move away from the specifics of a decision-making situation toward a space in which numerous decisionmaking situations exist. In a measurement of power one does not want to mingle the measurement with any other systematic feature that could bias the power estimate. The state variables are therefore taken as random variables reflecting the hypothetical situation we are exploring. Steunenberg et al. therefore assume that the state variables are independent and equally probable (i.e., the probability mass from which a value is taken is evenly or uniformly distributed). Felsenthal and Machover observe that any asymmetry in the state space leads to an emphasis on some states against others, which could cause a bias in our power measurement. For this reason, the space also needs to be perfectly symmetric, giving equal opportunity to each possible preference configuration including the status quo. These assumptions aim to describe a behavioral veil of ignorance. Behind this veil players do not know what kind of political issues will be discussed in games for which a specific game form is used nor how the participating actors will evaluate them. It therefore seems to be reasonable to use a uniform distribution. This distribution is also used for more conventional voting power indices, which assume that either all coalitions or all permutations of players are equally probable. While it is possible to experiment with different distributions of state variables, this may not fit an a priori measurement of power well. As Sefan Napel and Mika Widgrén note, the more a distribution is expressing current uncertainty about preferences in a specific decision-making situation, the more one is moving toward measuring ex post, rather than a priori, power.

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The last step of this approach is the choice for a measure of power. Steunenberg et al. based their measurement of power on the extent to which a player is able to affect the equilibrium outcome for all possible states of the world. This is done by comparing the performance of a player with that of a dummy. A dummy is a player with preferences for the same space as actual players but who has no decision-making rights in the game form. Moreover, dummy players’ preferences are expressed by their most preferred positions, are independent from those of the other players. Consequently, neither dummy players nor their preferences have any effect on the outcome of the game. They experience some equlibrium outcome that results entirely from the actions of the other players. Using a dummy player as a point of comparison, a player’s success in a game can be distinguished from luck. Because dummy players will sometime be lucky and find themselves close to the equilibrium outcome, they also have a “performance” level in participating in these games. Because dummy players are impotent, their performance determines a baseline above which we can speak of power. The performance of a player is measured by the mean or expected distance between the equilibrium outcome and this player’s ideal point, calculated for all possible combinations of players’ preferences and status quo points. Steunenberg et al. express the power of a player in an index that equals 1 minus the expected distance from equilibrium for a player, expressed as a proportion of the distance from equilibrium for a dummy player. The index, which Steunenberg et al. call the strategic power index, lies in the [0,1] interval and increases with power. By using expected distances, the measure indicates a player’s a priori prospect of winning a game without knowing preferences and status quo points. Felsenthal and Machover characterize the strategic power index as a measurement of I-power, like the Penrose–Banzhaf index. The strategic power index is an absolute measure of power, because it relates the position of a player in a game form to a dummy player, who is by definition powerless. Moreover, they show that the strategic power index is essentially the absolute Banzhaf measure defined in a much more general way. The index not only depends on the game form, but also on the choice of a state space and the joint distribution of the state variables, thereby providing room

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for building into the model information concerning the actual state of the world, the kind of bills, and preference relationships among voters. Napel and Widgrén have developed an alternative calculation using similar components. In their view, the idea of using mean distances in determining power may obscure an individual player’s contribution to the outcome. They suggest a marginal measure of power that is based on the sensitivity of an outcome to the actions of a particular player. If a player’s actions produce no change in the equilibrium outcome, which they treat like a tremble, this player does not have power. Only if a tremble translates into another outcome is a player regarded as powerful. Based on this concept, they propose an alternative measure in which expected marginal change based on trembles is taken as a measurement of strategic power. Because changes are restricted to the [0,1] interval, the measure also varies within this range. A conceptual difficulty of a marginal concept of power is that it focuses on partial changes and disregards the connectedness of players’ preferences in establishing equilibrium. An example may illustrate this point. Assume a simple interaction between a rather progressive agenda setter with a conservative veto player. The existing (status quo) policy is even more conservative, so that the veto player’s indifference point to the status quo is still found between her and the agenda setter. In this case Napel and Widgrén attribute power to the veto player, because if this player marginally changes her preferences, the equilibrium will change accordingly, being based on the veto player’s point of indifference to the status quo. This idea, however, ignores the fact that the veto player’s indifference point equals the equilibrium outcome because of the agenda setter’s progressive preferences. The equilibrium consists of the agenda setter’s best offer to the veto player and the veto player’s best reply to this offer, and, in this case, acceptance. Therefore, the agenda setter is pulling the outcome as closely as possible to his most preferred position, causing the equilibrium to change when the veto player changes her preferences.

Future Directions These strategic measures, which bring noncooperative game theory into the measurement of a priori

power, require further exploration. One issue already mentioned is the choice of the state variables and their distribution. In choosing alternative distributions, the question arises whether these distributions still maintain a veil of ignorance that is sufficient to allow speaking of a priori power. That is, do we know enough about the preferences of players in these distributions such that we cannot really see the power described here as a priori? Another issue is to further develop strategic measures, also in an analytical way. Felsenthal and Machover show that the strategic power index equals the Banzhaf measure only in a perfectly symmetric case, and this might be a fortunate exception. It remains a question how strategic power can be characterized in other circumstances. Bernard Steunenberg See also Banzhaf Voting Power Measure; I-Power; Luck; P-Power; Shapley–Shubik Index; Voting Power

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (2001). Myths and meanings of voting power: Comments on a symposium. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 13, 81–97. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (2005). Voting power measurement: A story of misreinvention. Social Choice and Welfare, 25, 485–506. Napel, S., & Widgrén, M. (2004). Power measurement as sensitivity analysis. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 16, 517–538. Steunenberg, B., Schmidtchen, D., & Koboldt, D. (1999). Strategic power in the European Union: Evaluating the distribution of power in policy games. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 11, 339–366.

STRENGTH

OF

WEAK LINKS

See Strength of Weak Ties

STRENGTH

OF

WEAK TIES

Granovetter’s 1973 paper in the American Journal of Sociology pioneered the use of actor-based

Strength of Weak Ties

social networks for linking the micro and macro levels of sociological theory. It introduced the idea of the strength of weak ties, that is, personal relationships (“weak ties”) are often more important than institutional links (within an organizational hierarchy) in getting things done. Many of the networks he and later writers analyze are related to studies of power; these range from very large networks, concerning mass action or social movements, to policy-forming networks consisting of only tens of elite actors. Granoveter’s original article offers support for many intuitive and counterintuitive notions of power in networks by exploring the importance of weak links that connect one part of a network to another part. The importance of social networks in understanding power is largely related to the transmission characteristics of the network. Whether the transmission involved is that of influence, information, or other tangible or intangible resources, the formal analytical questions are similar. The strength of weak ties offers an insight into the reachability of actors in the network and, crucially, the length and route of the path from one actor in the network to another. Granovetter realized that in many network studies it is the strongest ties that are considered crucial to understanding the nature of the network. He disagreed for two key reasons: first, the tendency of social networks to be clustered (one is more likely to know the friends of one’s friends than an actor drawn at random), and second, the implications of clustering for the distribution and strength of the links. He concluded that weak links are in fact extremely important in connecting clusters of actors through shorter and more reliable paths than a route that consists only of strong links. The work is based on a simplifying assumption that, given any three actors, if two are joined to the third by a strong link there will be at least a weak link between these two. In friendship terms, this would mean that if B and C were both friends with A, then B and C must be at least acquaintances. From this simplification, the conclusion is reached that no strong tie is a direct bridge and that strongly connected, clustered subnetworks will always be linked to each other by weak ties. More precisely, for large networks there may be a long convoluted path around the network, but the weak ties provide a local bridge.

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The weak ties must then be considered important because with transmission along longer paths there is always a cost, whether real costs such as time, money, and so on, or costs in terms of risks of distortion in transmission. In power studies, for example, this distortion of transmission could relate to a lack of precision, which would have implications for the results of influence. The links between cliques can be illustrated by the example of a mass action network creating conditions suitable for a movement to succeed. The utilization of strong ties, perhaps with friends or work colleagues, may never provide a bridge between clusters based on age, ethnicity, faith, or similar factors. Weak ties, such as working or having attended school together, will be much more likely to bridge these clusters. Evidence is cited by Granovetter from some of the experiments in small world theory that attempt to get a message delivered from actor to actor using the shortest chain possible. The work on weak ties is linked directly to a simple notion of power in the understanding of an ego-network (the network representing one actor’s contacts). The influence that one actor can have over another can be dependent on the relations between the two main actors and various third parties; even if such links to third parties are weak, they may radically alter the geometry of power. Granovetter offers an example of neighborhood power structures in the Italian community of Boston’s West End as a suitable illustration of the strength of weak ties. The analysis of how resources are split between maintaining strong ties and creating weak ties can determine how fragmented such a geographically based network is and therefore how well a community can organize to support or oppose issues in local politics. The beauty of the strength of weak ties as an idea is that, given a conception of a power network and a formulation of the ties that exist within it, there can be leverage for many possible hypotheses. For example, in a network that forms policy, an actor may choose to utilize a weak link with a former colleague who is not involved in the policy formation but who currently works in another office where there is a tightly knit group of policy makers that needs to be reached. This short path across a notionally weak link theoretically offers a much more effective path than the conventional strong linked path that only involves

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those directly involved in the policy issue under consideration. Stuart Astill See also Granovetter, Mark; Networks, Power in; Small Worlds

Further Readings Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.

STRIVING

FOR

SUPERIORITY

Striving for superiority [Streben nach Überlegenheit] was a concept introduced by Alfred Adler (1870–1937), an early psychoanalyst who broke with Freud in 1911 over the relative importance of sexual and aggression motives. Over time Adler’s views gradually evolved and broadened. Aggressive drives were elaborated into a will to power by Adler, who sees them often being an overcompensation for feelings of weakness or inferiority. For example, later-born children may strive to surpass their more powerful older siblings. Such strivings are usually neurotic if they reflect poor adjustment to one’s social surroundings. Later, Adler broadened his basic motivational concept still further, into the striving for superiority. Adler saw this striving not as a variable of personality but rather as an innate, universal, and unending human drive found in every individual person, a psychological parallel to physical growth. It originated at the beginning of life and increased over the course of evolution to improve adaptation to the external world. As Adler put it, “The urge from below to above never ceases” (1973, p. 103). The striving for superiority is abstract but becomes concretized in a variety of activities: for example, self-preservation, having and raising children, adjusting to other people and society, and victorious self-assertion. With the concept of striving for superiority, Adler thus combined interpersonal power with power as capacity or ability (e.g., “power of concentration”). Adler realized that people follow different paths to superiority; often there is no way to know which

path is correct. Some paths to perfection are misguided and will fail because they do not fit reality. In this category Adler included many forms of neurotic behavior, such as the need to dominate over others, the need to avoid failure, and excessive dependency. In the long run, Adler believed, natural selection would render these conceptions extinct, as well as people and groups who hold them. In later years, Adler suggested that the striving for superiority is directed by social interest [Gemeinschaftsgefühl], which involves a person’s cooperation and identification with the group. Social interest does not stand in antagonism to the striving for superiority, but rather expands it still further, as people strive to help society as a whole become perfect, an ideal community. Perhaps Adler’s description of striving for superiority as the great upward drive seemed out of date even when he wrote it in the early 1930s— following the carnage of World War I and during the Great Depression, just as Hitler and the Nazis were coming to power. It recalls the optimistic Darwinist beliefs of the pre–World War I years, as for example in Shaw’s 1903 play, Man and Superman. Perhaps this is why psychologists rarely use the term striving for superiority nowadays. David G. Winter See also Adler, Alfred; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Power To and Power Over; Will to Power

Further Readings Adler, A. (1973). On the origin of the striving for superiority and of social interest. In H. L. Ansbacher & R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.), Superiority and social interest: A collection of later writings. New York: Viking. (Original work published 1933) Ansbacher, H. L., & Ansbacher, R. R. (1956). The individual psychology of Alfred Adler: A systematic presentation in selections from his writings. New York: Basic Books.

STRUCTURAL POWER Structural power is particularly hard to define given that the notion of structure has so many

Structural Power

different uses across the social sciences. This entry will look at different understandings of structural power, in particular those found in functionalism, structuralism, Marxist structuralism, and structural realism. However, as a general definition we can say that structural power places primary emphasis on the role of structures in determining outcomes as opposed to the role of agents. Hence the workings of society or a social process can be explained in structural terms while the actions of agents can be explained as the outcomes of structures. Power therefore resides within structures, while the powers of agents are either determined, constituted, or severely limited by the structures that they find themselves inhabiting (although the final section will look at structural power in an enabling sense).

Structural-Functionalism The approach of Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, and others might be termed structural-functionalism. Emphasis is placed on the social system, which is seen as made up of interdependent parts. Particularly important for this approach is the idea of social integration. Durkheim’s approach looks at social order through a combination of structural and normative factors. Social structures reproduce the system and maintain social cohesion. On the normative side, Durkheim stresses the importance of shared values, which are institutionalized. Durkheim considers social integration through his notion of solidarity. Less developed societies depend on mechanical solidarity, which is maintained by collective beliefs, rules, customs, and obligations. Organic solidarity is based on more specialized and individualized social relations. Interestingly, Durkheim claims that the more individualized a society is, the stronger the social bonds may become. Critics of the structural–functional approach focus on its oversocialized conception of human agency, claiming that it leaves little room for active consent. When problems of social cohesion emerge, these are dealt with through system adaptation. Parsons’ system theory, in particular, sees society as a self-regulating, self-adjusting system, and his work places emphasis on stability rather than change and on social norms rather than deviancy. Mechanisms of social control are exercised against

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tendencies to violate role expectations. Power, in these accounts, is something that is more or less taken for granted. Issues of power and domination are transformed into issues about social cohesion and the maintenance of equilibrium. At its worst, these approaches place emphasis on stability and order to the point where inequalities in power, status, and wealth can be justified so long as they contribute to the reproduction of the social system. Critics of this approach will also argue that it emphasizes structure and system to the point of denying human agency.

Structural Realism Systems theory and the so-called behavioralist revolution in American political science have had a major impact on realist approaches to international relations (IR). Structural realism, an account of power found in IR, more often goes by the name of neorealism and is particularly associated with the work of Kenneth Waltz, notably in his Theory of International Politics. It is distinguished from classical realism by its focus on the system or structure of international relations as opposed to the units, namely states, groups, and individuals. For Waltz, the international system is an entity distinct from the units that make it up. He criticizes reductionist accounts that look at the capabilities of the units rather than the system as a whole. This is clearly a criticism of the state-, individual-, or group-based approach of classical realism. Structure, for Waltz, is based on differently juxtaposed units that interact and thus produce different outcomes. Because of the lack of an overarching authority, Waltz defines the ordering principle of the international system as anarchy (rather than hierarchy). But if realists believe that the international system is anarchical, can it also be a structure? Waltz’s solution is to compare the anarchy of the international system to that of the market. He argues that political systems at the international level are analogous to economic markets in the sense that they are individualist, spontaneous, and unintended. Both markets and international political systems form and maintain themselves on the basis of their agents acting in a self-interested manner. Structural power thus refers to the way the system reacts upon the units, forcing them to behave in a particular way. The assumption behind

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Structural Power

this approach is that states (units) are individual, rational actors that carefully calculate their decisions and react to the pressure of the system in a predictable way. Within the rationalist approaches to IR (neorealism and neoliberalism), rational choice theory and discussion of relative and absolute gains have been particularly prominent. However, this raises the question of whether the focus of these approaches is really on structure or on the rationality of actors. If we follow the game theory approach, then structural power should really be called something like the structure of individual decision making. The specific theoretical problem for IR is whether the self-interested behavior of states is due to the compelling structural power of an anarchic system, or, as critics have argued, is Waltz’s notion of anarchy as a self-help system in fact based on a prior assumption of rational, self-interested states? Indeed, this raises another crucial question for theorists of international relations: what kind of structure is involved? The realists and neorealists are adamant that the structure of the international system is made up of nation-states. This makes it almost impossible to develop a meaningful dialogue with those supporting a notion of globalization, given that the two positions have very different conceptions of international structure and its most relevant agents.

Structuralism A very different notion of structure emerges from linguistics and the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, who places emphasis on the role of the system in determining the meaning of words. Saussure argues for a semiology that focuses on the underlying system of language (langue) rather than its expression (parole). This in turn influences anthropology, especially the analysis of kinship and symbolism offered by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structural anthropology is concerned with how meaning is produced within a culture or a community; the cultural system is seen as resembling a language. Anthropologists have looked at how meaning is contained in rites and rituals; structuralism’s concern is with the set of logical principles underlying the sociocultural system. The view is also influential in psychology and psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan, who moves away from

focus on the individual to look at symbolic order. These various forms of structuralism challenge empiricist approaches by proposing the idea of deep structure, irreducible to its effects, and not directly observable.

Marxist Structuralism It is perhaps the importing of structuralism into Marxism by Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas that has been most influential in the study of political processes. The Marxist approach is clearly already structural in various ways, while the notion of power is omnipresent, if undertheorized. Marxism’s main focus is on how the distribution of powers and resources to different classes is based on their relation to the means of production and the ongoing social practices related to production and capital accumulation. This has led Jeffrey Isaac to comment that “Marx’s theory of capitalist production is a theory of power; and his theory of power is a theory of capitalist production” (1987, p. 87). Drawing a sharp distinction between the humanist work of the early Marx and the “scientific” work of the mature Marx, Althusser, in his For Marx, rejects any focus on the human subject in favor of a theory of history based on the development of social structures and the mode of production. These structures, however, cannot be reduced to the mode of production (economic reductionism), but have a relative autonomy. This means that society is a complex combination of different levels, not an “original, simple unity,” as suggested by Hegel or reductionist Marxism, but rather an eternal structurally complex unity. Althusser imports the term overdetermination from psychoanalysis to describe how the social body is created by the various levels and instances that form and animate it. Overdetermination gets at the complex causal powers that structures and social practices possess. Poulantzas, drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci, emphasizes the importance of hegemony as the means by which power is socially constructed. But he does this by emphasizing the structural aspect of hegemony; that is, the state’s role in securing the cohesion of society in the face of the power politics of competing groups and factions. Indeed, Poulantzas, in Political Power and Social Classes, uses the term power bloc to describe

Structural Power

the “contradictory unity of politically dominant classes and fractions under the protection of the hegemonic fraction” (p. 62). Poulantzas is offering a particular solution to the question of how to combine the analysis of class power with that of state power. This is a prominent issue that has troubled many Marxists. The crucial question is whether the role of the state can simply be understood in relation to the process of production or has some sort of autonomy. An instrumentalist approach to the state sees it simply as an instrument of ruling class power. This is best expressed in the Communist Manifesto’s claim that the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. Or is the state, as Poulantzas suggests, a complex condensation of class relations? Both views raise questions about whether the state has any power of its own, or whether state power is only ever expressed through its agents. Poulantzas is himself torn between a structural-functionalist view of the state as securing the cohesion of the social formation, and a relational view of the state as the effect of class struggle. Critics of Marxist structuralism will again point to the reifying effect of emphasizing the power of structures over agents, although Poulantzas, in his later State Power Socialism, moves toward a more relational view of power and the state, particularly in his view that the state is a strategic terrain for the exercise of power. However, in Althusser’s work, subjects are understood as located within social practices and interpellated (constituted as subjects) by the ideologies these practices secrete. This tends to undermine the causal power of agents, something most notoriously expressed in Althusser’s claim that agents are mere bearers of structures, while history, we are told, is a process without a subject. In attacking historicism, Althusser, as well as non-Marxist structuralists, favors a synchronic (structural) explanation over a diachronic (historical) one. As Isaac argues, structuralists like Althusser and Poulantzas emphasize the determining influence of the “relational system of material places” at the expense of the efficacy of the agents who exercise these structurally given powers (Isaac, 1987, p. 86). One might look to Annales historians like Fernand Braudel to restore a diachronic view, although he too clearly favors deep structures over surface events.

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If we take all these views together, a common theme seems to be the idea that structural power is the power that structures have over agents. Critics would see an overemphasis on the role of structure at the expense of agency and human conduct.

Enabling Aspects of Structural Power Seen through the Althusserian, Durkheimian, or neorealist lens, negative views appear of agency as a secondary effect of structural processes. But structural power can also be thought of as the power agents have by virtue of their positions within structures. In this positive sense, structure comes to be seen, not as a reification or as something that simply exercises power over us, but as something enabling, which allows us within certain limits to act in certain ways. Adopting this view of structure as enabling means that power should be understood in the sense of pouvoir in French or potere in Latin; that is, power to rather than power over. Power then comes to mean the capacity human beings have by virtue of the structures they inhabit. One way of seeing power in relation to structures is as transformative power. Anthony Giddens’s notion of structuration emphasizes this by insisting on the mutual constitution and codetermination of structure and agency. Roy Bhaskar’s realist approach also emphasizes that structures are both the necessary condition and the reproduced outcome of human activity. In these senses, human agency has the power to transform structures though only within a given structural context; this context gives agents powers, but also places liabilities and limitations on them. The classic statement of this position is found in Marx’s claim that “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted” (Marx, 1973, p. 146). Social change therefore has to be seen as the product of both structure and agency. Agents have the potential to change structures, but they do so using the powers such structures have conferred upon them and the possibilities that such structural conditions allow. The realist view, in linking power to structure, also argues that powers exist that may or may not

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be exercised depending on the context or circumstances. Power may be latent in the structural context or emergent in new and perhaps unexpected ways. An emergent phenomenon is one that owes its existence to a prior or lower structural level, but that develops its own irreducible properties and powers. These realist approaches to power are structural in the sense that they focus on the sociostructural preconditions for the operation of power. However, it is important to be clear in such discussions whether we are talking of the power that structures have over agents, the power that agents have to change structures, or the powers that agents have by virtue of their relation to structures. Jonathan Joseph See also Althusser, Louis; Determinism; Marx, Karl; Marxist Accounts of Power; Miliband–Poulantzas Debate; Realist Accounts of Power

Further Readings Ashley, R. (1984). The poverty of neorealism. International Organization, 38(2), 225–286. Isaac, J. (1987). Power and Marxist theory: A realist view. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1973). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Moscow: Progress Publishers. (Original work published 1848) Merton, R. (1957). Social theory and social structure: New York: Free Press. Wendt, A. (1992). Anarchy is what states make of it: The social construction of power politics. International Organization, 46(2), 391–425.

STRUCTURAL SUGGESTION The agency–structure problem concerns the relationship between agents and environmental influences. For some writers, power is exclusively a property of agents; for others it is exclusively a property of structures. It is clear that agents act, and that agents such as organizations or collectives act through the agency of people. However, with organizations it can also be clear that the nature of the actions that people take on behalf of the organization might be severely constrained,

and completely enabled by the operating rules, interests, and resources of that organization rather than by what the person believes might be the best actions. In other words, the person’s environment fully determines how that person will act on behalf of the organization. Some writers see all actions carried out by an agent as fully constrained or enabled by the structure in which the agent is located. Structural determinism is the idea that while we might see agency through the actions of people, those actions are fully determined by factors external to the individual. Others dispute the idea that the actions of people are so fully determined. They argue that, while people decide their interests and the interests of those on whose part they might act based upon information received from the world around them, that same information will not lead every person to act in the same way. Structuralists reply that while there might be some noise in the system such that each person does not behave identically in the same environment, behavior is nonetheless largely determined by structure. For example, we might define two elements entering into the explanation of any given outcome: first, the structure composed of institutions, property relations, resources, and technology at any given time t, Rt; and second, a list of every person and their preferences at that time t, Pt. We could combine Rt and Pt to explain Rt  1 or we could combine Rt and Pt to explain Pt  1. In other words, we can use the structure and preferences at one time to explain structure at the next point in time, or we could use them to explain the preferences of everyone at the next point in time. However, if preferences can be fully explained by structure, then they can be left of the explanation. Keith Dowding introduced the idea of structural suggestion in order to overcome the fully determinist nature of structural determination and leave a role for individual agency while recognizing that structures largely determine preferences. Dowding argued that structures suggest actions to people. Sometimes those structures suggest obvious courses of action that few people would not follow, though such “obvious suggestions” are weaker than determination. However, often structures leave open courses of actions—their “suggestions” are not so strong and here we see human action as random and

Structuration

unconstrained. It thus implies a very weak form of structural power. Keith Dowding See also Agency-Structure Problem; Determinacy; Determinism; Luck; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power; Structure-Induced Equilibrium

Further Readings Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Dowding, K. (1996). Power. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press.

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sociological terms such as structure, agency, and power are redefined to make them compatible with the central themes of his perspective. As a result, Giddens’s new formulation has important theoretical implications, his perspective on power being among the notable ones. Also, the relevance of structuration theory is not limited to the author’s discipline, sociology. Social scientists of various persuasions have utilized it to the fullest possible extent, resulting in the redefinition of old social issues and the opening of new venues of social research. This entry presents a critique of social theories and discusses agency and structuration.

Critique of Social Theories

STRUCTURATION Anthony Giddens had a long intellectual engagement with both classical and contemporary social theories before spelling out his own. The critical exegesis that he conducted for more than a decade and a half is not intended to throw out the intellectual baby with the bathwater; nor does he treat theories that preceded his with velvet gloves. He is deeply interested in preserving the positive elements of past theoretical tradition and avoiding those elements that he considers to be critically wounding to social inquiry. Giddens is also interested in incorporating the important assumptions from disciplines outside his area of expertise, such as geography, history, and philosophy. The result of this long effort was structuration theory, an intellectual tool that helps us understand the ontology of social practices arrayed across space and time. The term structuration is borrowed from French to emphasize that social life, more than anything, is a dynamic process. Social inquiry thus is primarily about recurrent social practices and not discrete individual actions or a social reality that acts independently of its acting constituents. The new theory is by no means a mere intellectual hodgepodge gathered from different sources. Giddens is not interested in a paste-pot eclecticism from which no transcending synthesis emerges. In his theory not only are new concepts such as double hermeneutic, discursive consciousness, and practical consciousnesses introduced, even familiar

In the articulation of structuration theory, Giddens has first to examine the strengths and weaknesses of preceding social paradigms that significantly delimited the nature of social inquiry. The two major paradigms that have dominated sociological thinking, according to Giddens, are either agentcentered or structure-centered. Whereas structurecentered perspectives insist that the social whole is ontologically prior to individuals and endowed with the capacity to condition their behavior, agent-centered perspectives focus on the role of individual actions and interpretations in human conduct. Consequently, each paradigm has adopted a methodology and an understanding of the relationship between the individual and society congruent with its assumptions. Structure-centered approaches tend to place emphasis on natural attitude and objectivism. These approaches contend that structure exerts a constraining capacity, and little or none of the social realm is seen as the skillful accomplishment of active agents. In contrast, agent-centered theories are engaged in a theory of social production despite their being phrased in terms of structural or institutional analysis. They have minimized the role of the social to the extent that agents become autonomous actors. According to Giddens, this false antinomy cannot be resolved by mechanically amalgamating the two paradigms or simply using one of them as the dominant paradigm and amplifying it with arguments from the other. Such approaches perpetuate the dilemma of opting between structure and agency. Hence, the best solution is to avoid an

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either-or fallacy and see that agency and structure are inseparable. Thus, in Giddens’s structuration theory duality replaces dualism. Whereas dualism, by separating the inseparable, reduces structure to agency or vice versa, duality assumes that structure is socially constructed and yet is the medium through which human action is constituted. Structure and agency are not synonymous; they are two sides of the same social coin. Without committing himself to the structuralist position that society has the same structure as language, Giddens uses the case of linguistic practices to illustrate how duality of structure operates. Communicative action is a meaningful process only when the individuals involved in it follow the rules of their language; yet by so doing they are not merely conversing, they are also reproducing the organizational essence of the language being utilized. Effective communication may be the intended act; the reproduction of language is not. Similarly, structures are the outcomes of collective actions, while at the same time feeding back social practices that set the condition for forthcoming accomplishments that are not necessarily intended. Giddens, however, distances himself from Robert Merton’s analysis of unintended consequences. In his distinction of manifest and latent functions, Merton privileges societal reasons over individual actions. According to Giddens, this privileging is flawed in two ways: not only does Merton’s analysis undermine the capacity of people to understand the world but he also explains unintended consequences as meeting abstract societal needs. For instance, in his examination of the rain dance among the Hopi Indians of New Mexico, Merton notes that what is seemingly irrational (dancing for rain) fulfils the function of maintaining social solidarity among the Hopi. The analysis assumes that function has a causal role in the stability and reproduction of a society, a quality that all social systems inherently possess. The existence of social activities, accordingly, is ipso facto related to the functional needs that they have to meet. Consequently, in the elaboration of his structuration theory, Giddens took defining the subject matter of social inquiry as the first order of business. If Émile Durkheim had to delineate the domain of sociology to differentiate it from psychology and biology, Giddens’s interest, like his contemporary Pierre Bourdieu, emanates from the

desire to avoid the pitfalls of social physics and social phenomenology, perspectives centered on structure and individual actions, respectively. From Giddens’s vantage point, social inquiry cannot be productive insofar as undue emphasis is placed on the constraining capacity of social structure and the routine processes of social life are given short thrift. Hence, he insists that social analysis need not have either individual action or societal totality as its unit of analysis. Rather, its subject matter is social practice arrayed across space and time. In social practice, members of society are actively involved, and their actions are constituted within the medium of a social environment. Moreover, in social practice individuals are knowledgeable and their actions are recursive. By the latter, Giddens means that human beings are the makers of history who produce and reproduce social activities by the very mechanisms in which they themselves engage. Hence, social practice is not a mechanical repetition of actions about which simple theorems of causation can be framed. Giddens is clearly against a positivist approach that seeks invariant laws of society. Because individuals are active agents, and understanding is the sine qua non necessity for human existence, the very social organizations that human beings construct cannot be subject to the same laws. Social inquiry involves double hermeneutics, the intersection of two understandings, namely, the first-order understanding that permeates the layperson’s discernment of the social world and the second-order metalanguage of social theorists in which social practices are examined from the perspective of strategic analysis or institutional analysis. Each social analysis involves an act of bracketing one of the salient dimensions of social practice in order to detail the social logic of some other dimension. Strategic analysis examines the reflexive processes of social action and the nature of the social actions that actors are involved in; institutional analysis examines the features and development of social systems.

Agency and Structuration Giddens’s notion of agency is much broader than its traditional meaning, in which it is often assumed that agency is limited to an individual. Such a conception fails to see that agency is connected to a configuration of individual actions

Structuration

wherein consciousness is critical. Moreover, although consciousness is central to the understanding of agency, agency need not merely be understood in connection with intentionality. Giddens uses the term agency to refer to the general capacity of individuals to participate in societal activities. In these accomplishments, individuals may not necessarily be participating in social practices based on clearly defined or prearranged plans. Yet they do attend to their actions and the actions of others on a regular basis. That societal actions are the unintended outcomes of agents who regularly attend to their actions suggests that agents are capable of either abstaining from action or actively participating in social endeavors. Hence, actors transform their social life without being certain of future outcomes. Consistent with the foregoing theme, Giddens introduces what he calls a stratification model of the acting self. In this model, there are three types of consciousness: discursive consciousness, practical consciousness, and the unconscious. While there is a “bar” between practical and discursive consciousness on one hand and the unconscious on the other, the relationship between the former two is fluid. Members of society, for instance, can move from practical consciousness to discursive consciousness by enlightening themselves. Of the three types of consciousness, discursive consciousness is the most explicit one. In discursive consciousness, not only do actors know what they are doing, but they are also able to articulate the reasons for their behavior. With practical consciousness, actors know how to act, but they may not be able to explicate the logic of their actions unambiguously. Practical consciousness is tacit knowledge that exists whether or not there is an explicit articulation of an action. Because social life is governed by this important dimension of consciousness, an examination of practical consciousness has a critical place in structuration theory. (In this respect, structuration theory is similar to phenomenology and ethnomethodology and unlike the objectivist social paradigm.) The unconscious is that part of cognition and drive that is not immediately accessible to the actor and often appears in consciousness in a distorted way. Although the concept is borrowed from psychoanalysis, Giddens objects to the view that, by explaining all action in terms of an inaccessible ghostly stream of events, denies

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actors an autonomous engagement in social life. The relevance of the notion of the unconscious is related to what Giddens calls ontological security. Giddens notes that routines give agents a way to “take reality for granted,” and as a result they are able to avert persistent anxiety. When routines are disturbed, actors are thrown off guard and a state of confusion may reign. This was clear in the breaching experiments carried out by Harold Garfinkel and his students. After providing his remodeled version of agency, Giddens offers an equally novel theory of structure. With Giddens, structure is not a constraining power alone; structure also enables. But these features of structure need not be understood to mean that society is a pregiven reality that limits individual actions, or from that individuals take the resources required to empower themselves. The constraining or enabling impact of structure is possible because it is produced and reproduced in social interactions. The force of social structure is embedded within social practices themselves. Yet social structure is a virtual reality that exists in spite of the subject. It exists in the memory traces of individuals that are recursively instantiated in social practices. In congruence with this logic, Giddens makes a distinction between structure and system, a distinction that has been blurred by previous social theorists. Social system refers to a patterning of social relationships across space and time. Social systems evolve unevenly, and it would be a mistake to draw an analogy between them and biological systems, for the latter have a degree of cohesiveness that is not found in the former. Social structure refers to a set of rules and resources that are recursively reproduced in social systems. Rules are generalizable procedures that are put into action in social interactions as a result of which the reproduction of social practices is made possible. Rules are formulaic, and they allow actors to act even when they are not able to articulate those rules clearly. However, rules are ineffective without resources that derive their power either from the dominion of human beings over nature or the dominion that actors exercise over one another. Resources, accordingly, are of two types: allocative and authoritative. Whereas allocative resources are material resources created and utilized in the production of physical artifacts and, most importantly, technologies that allow

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human beings to effectively mediate their relationship with the natural environment, authoritative resources are nonmaterial resources that—through the control of societal activities—augment the capacity of human beings to produce social power. Giddens’s renovated view of structure has important implications for the study of both integration and power. The study of integration assumes two major forms: social integration and system integration. Social integration happens within the limits of face-to-face interaction. On the other hand, system integration ensues when social interaction is extended across extended time and space and the processes therein occur when actors are not in the physical presence of one another. In his theory of power, Giddens draws our attention to the organic connection between social actions and power. Giddens insists that the study of power is not of secondary importance in the processes of social inquiry. Social theorists have mistakenly assumed that power can be examined only when the assumptions of a social theory are spelled out beforehand. Although the concept of power is not epistemologically superior to any other concept, social studies involve the study of power, because power—insofar as it is “the means to get things done”—is implied in any social action. Giddens’s view of power differs from variants of objectivism or structural sociology that presume that social structures act like the forces of nature. Actors are indeed constrained socially, but actions are not mechanical outcomes of external pressures. Actors do possess a transformative capacity to make a difference in activities in which they are involved. Giddens believes that this view of power successfully avoids the problem of subject–object distinction. Dualistic conceptions of power have either emphasized the relationship of means to ends or have assumed that power is inherently the property of social communities or society at large. Giddens is not interested either in eliminating these assumptions as irrelevant or in concentrating on one at the expense of the other. Instead, given his view of duality of structure, both are pivotal. Accordingly, he, like Peter Bacharach and Morton Baratz, views power as having two faces. But he intentionally avoids their language, which, in his opinion, implies a zero-sum view of power. In Giddens’s theory, resources as material and

nonmaterial media that generate power are central, although power itself is not a resource. However, this does not mean that power should merely be understood in its divisive form. Nor is power, as is often assumed, a property concentrated in the hands of dominant groups. Transcending an all-ornothing view of power, Giddens contends that, insofar as power is the ability to intervene in social actions, even the least powerful members of society have the ability to influence their superiors. Hence, despite the socially unequal relationships that exist among groups, the dialectics of control is characteristic of social relations. Alem Kebede See also Giddens, Anthony; Structural Power

Further Readings Craib, I. (1992). Anthony Giddens. New York: Routledge. Giddens, A. (1976). New rules of sociological method. London: Hutchinson. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure, and contradiction in social analysis. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

STRUCTURE-INDUCED EQUILIBRIUM Disequilibrium in collective choice mechanisms based on majority rule has been the subject of much attention in the public choice literature since its discovery by the Marquis de Condorcet in 1785 and more modern treatments by Kenneth Arrow in 1950 and others. This disequilibrium has often been described as cycling, due to the fact that coalition reformation under majority rule can continue through an infinite number of iterations without there emerging a stable coalition—that is to say, a coalition in which the player or players excluded from the winning coalition cannot create a new coalition that will trump the last majoritywinning coalition. Theoretical developments have been proposed in an attempt to find solutions to this disequilibrium. For example, Nash equilibrium describes the set of coalition identities where

Submissive

the outcome for each player cannot be improved by unilaterally changing strategy, assuming other players’ strategies remained locked. Aside from these interesting theoretical developments, Gordon Tullock drew attention to the fascinating empirical observation that, despite the theoretical certainty of disequilibrium in majority-rule collective decision making, in practical settings where majority rule is exercised coalitions and preferences remain highly stable. The traditional predictions from public choice theory failed to make sense of this empirical reality. Structure-induced equilibrium is a way of accounting for this inconsistency. If majority rule does not lead to cycling, then it must be the intervention of institutions that prevents such cycling from occurring. Tullock explains that agenda setters in legislatures— that is, individuals with the power to arbitrate the order of votes—are an example of structureinduced equilibrium because this authority prevents indefinite reiterations of coalition formation and also allows for enforcement of rules of order, such as a prohibition on failed bills receiving repeated attention. Recent studies have explored the presence of structure-induced equilibrium with respect to committee voting and agenda rules in the U.S. Congress. Adam Packer See also Agenda Setters; Coalition Theory; GameTheoretical Approaches to Power; Nash Equilibrium

Further Readings Arrow, K. (1950). A difficulty in the concept of social welfare. Journal of Political Economy, 58(4), 328–346. Tullock, G. (1981). Why so much stability? Public Choice, 37(2), 189–204.

SUBMISSIVE Psychologically speaking, a submissive, introverted individual is one who is often easy prey for those more inclined toward aggression. Many submissive adults receiving psychotherapy stated that, in childhood, they often felt a deep sense of

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shame, though they had done nothing wrong; likewise, they reported feeling guilty much of the time, for no apparent reason. In essence, beginning at an early age, submissives feel that no matter how hard they strive for success, they will always be at the bottom (many reported detesting team sports because they were always the last to be chosen), and while they may “play the game,” they know they will lose and that their performance will be embarrassing. Hence, the “way out” of a cruel existence is to seek love, compassion, and protection from those who are stronger. Low self-esteem is a universal personality trait for submissive individuals. They dread having any demands made upon them for fear that their incompetence will be on display for everyone to see, even if the potential reward is substantial—a primary reason few submissives are found in positions of power or authority. In romantic attachments, they tend to be “needy,” requiring much love and affection in order to overcome their selfdoubts, while placing any hopes for future happiness and success in the hands of the loved one. Due to their never-ending quest for love, happiness, and security in the arms of someone strong, submissives are often vulnerable to physical and emotional abuse. In general, they are willing to suffer degradation if they feel that the loved one (or boss, protector, friend, etc.) will take care of them. Sadly, many of the battered and abused seeking treatment at human service agencies are submissives. Surprisingly, many submissive individuals possess an aggressive side as well, though it is completely submerged. However, if he or she is continually frustrated by never receiving the desired love or protection, then an all-consuming vindictive rage may erupt. If such an incident occurs, those accustomed to seeing the individual as shy, retiring, and quiet are likely to be shocked at the ferocity displayed. It usually takes years of disappointment for someone with this type of personality to “explode,” and because it takes little positive reinforcement for a submissive to feel better about himself or herself and/or the situation he or she might be in, the extreme version of this scenario does not take place often. Being submissive is not, in and of itself, a problem; it only becomes so when an individual feels

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unhappy about how his or her life has transpired. With proper therapy, submissives can change and live their lives assertively. Cary Stacy Smith and Li-Ching Hung

Further Readings Ajzen, I., & Manstead, A. (1988). Attitudes, personality and behaviour (mapping social psychology). London: Taylor & Francis. Segal, D. L., Coolidge, F. L., & Rosowsky, E. (2006). Personality disorders and older adults: Diagnosis, assessment, and treatment. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley. Sperry, L. (1995). Handbook of diagnosis and treatment of the DSM-IV personality disorders. London: Routledge.

SUBORDINATION Subordination is the acceptance of a hierarchical order in which one group of persons is dominated. It pertains to a classification of elements into lower subcategories or subclasses, such as occurs in a system of social stratification. Those on the higher level of social stratification, the superordinate, possess more power and have greater access to a variety of privileges and resources. The superordinate is a person or group that dominates another. The subordinate group is the group being dominated. Each group can only exist in conjunction with the other. The dimensions of social stratification include economic status, wealth, power, and prestige. While the superordinate group has superior access to material resources, prestige, and power, the subordinate group has limited access. The elite, superordinate groups control a large portion of the means of production including land, herds, water, capital, and business enterprises, and thus exhibit a greater sense of power. The control of the means of production by superordinate groups is found both in developing and in industrialized nations. Throughout history and in different cultures, subordinate roles are determined by such socioeconomic indicators as gender, age, race, ethnic background, economic status, or social and

professional distinctions. These social structures create inequalities in the distribution of power between the superordinate and the subordinate groups. Those who are literate, have a particular religious affiliation or military status, or have a prominent place in a large bureaucracy maintain a dominant role and have the power to control the subordinates. For example, in many cultures those with a higher level of education may consider those with a lower level of education to be subordinate. They then exercise power over the uneducated. In other cultures, women are subordinate to men, children are subordinate to their parents, and various cultural groups may be subordinate to others within nations or states. In businesses, front-line staff and other nonskilled laborers are often considered subordinate to managers or supervisors. In Western societies, an accepted act of dominance, or civilized oppression, is common. It is caused by distortions in human relationships and contributes to social ills such as crime, poverty, and unemployment. The people in these unfavorable situations have unequal access to power. Differing degrees of power and social status create subordination. Superordination is a form of direct power that one person or actor has over another. Consequently, privileged people are empowered. They play a large yet unnoticed role in relationships that can lead to moral subordination; that is, where one person not only is submissive to another but feels his or her inferiority is justified. When this disproportionate power is accepted by a society, it can bring about inappropriate privileges for the oppressor, leaving little for the subordinate. Submission may be attractive to some subordinates because they lack the personal characteristics to assume a position of power or authority. In these cases, subordination may be uncontested because it is a common or accepted practice. In other cases, subordinates may align themselves with one who has power to in the hope of sharing in the spoils. They then benefit from the dominant authority without taking responsibility for exercising it. Debra Lucas See also Domination; Social Dominance Theory

Substructure and Superstructure

Further Readings Mason, P. (1970). Patterns of dominance. New York: Oxford University Press.

SUBSTRUCTURE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE The distinction between substructure (or base) and superstructure is central to the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883), particularly to his theory of historical materialism. The key claim, formulated most extensively in The German Ideology (1845), is that society’s substructure (for Marx the economic infrastructure) holds deterministic supremacy over all other noneconomic elements, the superstructure. So to understand power, the focus must be on political economy, in particular on what Marx called a mode of production. A mode of production is composed of two key elements, the forces of production and the social relations of production; the structural relationship between them is, dialectically speaking, one of contradiction. The continuous transcendence of these instabilities is what drives the teleological trajectory of history. Briefly, the existing social relations initially aid the development of the forces of production. As this development progresses though, inconsistencies inevitability emerge. The existing productive relations now hold back further development. At such times there is a radical transformation in the relations of production; this amounts to a social revolution—new economic structures, better suited for furthering the development of the productive forces, take the place of the old economic structures that by now have become their “fetters.” In sum, the development of the forces of production shapes both the productive relations and a mode of production conditions, and explains the superstructure and its forms of consciousness, crucially the law and the state. Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is probably still the best-known critique of Marx’s view. For Weber, instabilities in a mode of production are not necessarily the sole cause of epochal historical change. His objection to the one-sided materialism of Marx is that it is

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just as likely that capitalism emerged through a change in a religious ethic (specifically, the predestination of Calvinism), which is a superstructural element, and therefore not through an underlying materialist current as proposed by Marx. A further critique is that not all noneconomic phenomena in the superstructure are affected by economic factors. There are many features of political life that, the argument goes, are not directly connected to the dynamics between the forces and the relations of production. So, in contrast to Marx’s thesis, the superstructure is seen to be autonomous and not emerging inevitably from the mode of production. It may be, though, as G. A. Cohen argues, that not all noneconomic phenomena need be accounted for in economic terms; economic structures explain only the noneconomic phenomena that effect productive relations. In a similar vein, Andrew Levine suggests that the base–superstructure metaphor is open to a “softer” interpretation—as what is materially possible, rather than what is historically predetermined. If so, Marx merely exaggerated what is still an extremely valid theoretical claim, that economic dynamics are relevant to the understanding of political structures and institutional detachments. It seems likely that while not all ideas in the superstructure can be reduced directly to economic relations, the latter still has much to offer historical explanations. Ultimately, society’s substructure engenders the kind of superstructural institutions that can and do affect the lives of its people. Chris Wyatt See also Capital, Marxist; Exploitation; False Consciousness; Ideology; Marx, Karl; Marxist Accounts of Power

Further Readings Cohen, G. A. (1978). Karl Marx’s theory of history: A defence. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Levine, A. (2002). Engaging political philosophy: From Hobbes to Rawls. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Marx, K. (1998). The German ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and introduction to the Critique of political economy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Weber, M. (2002). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (G. C. Wells, Trans.). London: Penguin. (Original work published 1905)

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Symbolic Power and Violence

SWING PLAYER See Ability

SYMBOLIC POWER

AND

VIOLENCE

The terms symbolic power, symbolic violence, and symbolic capital are found in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Through this conceptual language, Bourdieu tries to answer the following question: how do stratified social systems of hierarchy and domination persist and reproduce intergenerationally without powerful resistance and without the conscious recognition of those involved? The answer, he contends, is that the dominated internalize their conditions of domination as normal, inevitable, or natural, and thereby misrecognize the true nature of their social inequalities by accepting rather than resisting them. Following the thought of Max Weber on the central role legitimation plays in domination, Bourdieu argues that neither brute force nor material possessions are sufficient for the effective exercise of power. Power requires justification and belief. Bourdieu elaborates and modifies Weber’s concept of legitimation. The language of symbolic power and violence emphasizes the ways that legitimate understandings of the social world are imposed by dominant groups and deeply internalized by subordinate groups in the form of practical, taken-for-granted understandings. Symbolic power is the capacity to impose classifications and meanings as legitimate. Symbolic power takes the form of embodied dispositions—what Bourdieu calls the habitus—that generate a “practical sense” for organizing perceptions of and actions in the social world. The dispositions of habitus incorporate a sense of place in the stratified social order and an understanding of inclusion and exclusion in the various social hierarchies. Symbolic power creates a form of violence that finds expression in everyday classifications, labels, meanings, and categorizations that subtly implement a social as well as symbolic logic of inclusion and exclusion. Symbolic violence also finds expression through body language, comportment, self-presentation, bodily care, and adornment. It has a corporeal as well as

a cognitive dimension. Symbolic capital is the social authority that enables some actors to impose symbolic meanings and classifications as legitimate. Individuals and groups can accumulate symbolic capital through public recognition of their material capital holdings and the social positions they occupy. Two key aspects of symbolic power are its naturalization and its misrecognition. Bourdieu’s symbolic power does not suggest consent, but practical adaptation to existing hierarchies. The practical adaptation occurs prereflectively, as if it were the “thing to do,” the “natural” response in existing circumstances. The dominated misperceive the real origins and interests of symbolic power when they adopt the dominant view of the dominators and of themselves. They therefore accept definitions of social reality that do not correspond to their best interests. Those “misrecognized” definitions go unchallenged, because they appear to be natural and justified. Hence, they represent a form of violence. These properties of symbolic power help explain how inegalitarian social systems are able to be perpetuated without powerful resistance and transformation. Though similar to the Marxian notions of ideology and the Gramscian variant of hegemony—two forms of cultural power most frequently associated with state-created nationalism—symbolic power and violence stress the practical justification of the established order through taken-for-granted assumptions, classifications, and perceptions, rather than specific beliefs, cultural messages, or explicit discourse. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power and violence points to a layer of preexisting practical schemes that make ideological and hegemonic messages palatable. The symbolic power of modern educational systems, for example, lies not so much in explicit justification of privilege by dominant groups but in the idea that differential access to the advantages of education is misrecognized in terms of individual natural abilities and effort rather than in terms of the unequal distribution of inherited cultural capital among social classes. Moreover, in comparison to the Marxian concept of ideology, Bourdieu’s language of symbolic power stresses that culture does not simply reflect underlying economic and social relations but is also constitutive of them. Naming and classification, the capacity to use symbolic forms to form

System Justification Theory

associations and divisions, helps bring into existence and give identity to social groups and define their interrelationships. Culture has a relative autonomy from the economy. Two frequent criticisms have been made. In modern differentiated societies, Bourdieu stresses that the state, through law, official classifications, and particularly education, institutes fundamental frames of reference, perception, understanding, and memory. It therefore monopolizes the means of symbolic violence as well as of physical violence. But in assigning to the modern state a monopolizing function of symbolic power and violence Bourdieu may well underestimate the importance of other sources of symbolic power, such as religion, even in modern societies outside of Europe. Reproduction of social hierarchies likely involves much more than their misrecognition. The degree of acceptance and respect for existing hierarchies may be less deeply internalized in numerous instances than the idea of symbolic violence implies. There may be conscious recognition of inequality that leads to tacit forms of contestation or reluctance to resist for fear of reprisal. Nonetheless, Bourdieu’s perspective challenges the commonly held view that symbolic power is simply symbolic. Symbolic meanings and classifications are a constitutive force in organizing power relations in stratified social orders. Moreover, the concept of symbolic violence is intended to be a critical break with the view that power has become much more benign and less relevant in societies where the most authoritarian and crudest techniques of coercion have been replaced with persuasion, consent, choice, influence, and negotiation. Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic power sensitizes us to the more subtle and influential forms of power that operate through cultural resources and through symbolic classifications that interweave presentation of self and interpersonal relations into prevailing organizational and institutional arrangements. It reminds us that power remains very much an organizing force in modern societies though its forms have changed. David L. Swartz See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Habitus; Ideology; Marx, Karl; Social Capital

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Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (M. Adamson & G. Raymond, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1982) Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine domination (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1998) Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

SYSTEM JUSTIFICATION THEORY System justification theory is a social–psychological perspective that addresses how and why people defend and bolster prevailing social, economic, and political arrangements. The theory holds that there is an abstract system-justifying goal or motive that leads people to see the status quo as fair, legitimate, and just. This goal is a powerful determinant of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors because it satisfies several social and psychological needs, including epistemic needs for consistency, certainty, and meaning; existential needs to manage threat and distress; and relational needs to achieve shared reality with others. By accounting for the psychological appeal of system-justifying belief systems, this theory has shed light on seemingly paradoxical phenomena such as working-class conservatism, disadvantaged minority group members’ conscious and unconscious preferences for members of powerful and high-status groups, enhanced commitment to institutional authorities, and idealization of the capitalist system among the poor. System justification theory has been particularly successful in helping to explain why people in powerless or disadvantaged social positions would support a status quo that is neither in their own nor in their group’s objective interest. System justification theory was originally proposed by John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji in the mid1990s to account for the many observed deviations from hypotheses derived from prevalent theories of social attitudes, intergroup relations, and political psychology. Motives to defend and justify the interests and esteem of the self (ego justification) and one’s social group (group justification) had been

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widely documented, but these failed to account for the observation that people also want to hold favorable attitudes about the social systems that affect them (system justification). The wider implications of the theory were gradually recognized, and over the next 10 years the theory gained scientific ground and empirical support. This entry presents the historical background and an outline of system justification theory, discusses ideological manifestations of system justification, recent developments in system justification theory, and criticisms of the theory.

Historical Background and Outline The origins of the social–psychological notion that people are motivated to believe that they live in an orderly, predictable, and just world can be traced to the 1950s and 1960s. One line of research important to the development of system justification theory concerned cognitive dissonance. According to this theory, people have a general need to bring their beliefs about what is correct into conformity with objective reality (as they encounter it) and will work to reduce dissonance either by modifying their beliefs or by attempting to modify reality. A second line of research, on the belief in a just world, suggested further that people are eager to convince themselves that beneficiaries are deserving of their benefits and victims are deserving of their suffering. System justification theory builds on insights gained from research on cognitive dissonance and just world perspectives. According to cognitive dissonance theory, people who are most deprived should have the strongest needs to reduce dissonance and therefore to justify their own suffering. Indeed, system justification researchers have found that members of disadvantaged groups sometimes provide even stronger support for the social system and its authorities than do members of advantaged groups. In addition to extending and elaborating on insights of cognitive dissonance and just world theorists, system justification theorists address an even broader set of rationalizing mechanisms that are used to bolster the status quo, including stereotypes and full-fledged ideological belief systems as well as online appraisals that are used to justify specific events. The theory not only takes into account post hoc rationalizations of events for

which people feel personally responsible, as also hypothesized by cognitive dissonance and just world theories, but also the rationalization of unintended (as well as intended) consequences of one’s own behavior and the behavior of powerful others. Furthermore, the theory helps to explain how and why people come to embrace outcomes that were initially resisted or opposed as well as social and political events that appear to be inevitable but have not yet occurred. System justification theory posits that people defend and justify existing social arrangements because there are emotional benefits that come from denying or rationalizing the unfair, exploitative, and oppressive aspects of social life. From a psychological perspective, believing that the current regime is despotic or unjust leaves people with a sense of anxiety and hopelessness that they strive to avoid or alleviate. In some cases, system justification tendencies can be strong enough to trump ego and group justification tendencies, in which case people will endorse system-justifying beliefs and ideologies even when they conflict with their own self-interest. Antecedents of System Justification

People from all walks of life appear to engage in system justification, at least to some extent. Psychological investment in the status quo is observed among the rich and the poor, men and women, old and young, heterosexuals and homosexuals, as well as people of diverse national, ethnolinguistic, and racial backgrounds. Although most studies of system justification have been conducted in North America and Western Europe, there is evidence from many other countries that people tend to “anchor” on the status quo and exaggerate the subjective legitimacy and desirability of their own social systems. At the same time, there is variability in the magnitude of perceptions of the system as fair and legitimate due to both dispositional and situational factors. The denial of injustice and oppression has hedonic (or palliative) benefits for all, but those with heightened needs to manage uncertainty and threat are especially likely to embrace conservative, system-justifying ideologies. More specifically, uncertainty avoidance, intolerance of ambiguity, needs for order, structure, and closure, perceptions of a dangerous world, and fear

System Justification Theory

of death have all been found to be positively associated with such ideologies. Cognitive complexity and openness to experience, on the other hand, are negatively associated with their endorsement. Situational factors, such as circumstances of high system threat and mortality salience, tend to enhance the appeal of conservative, system-justifying beliefs. Experimental studies show that threats to the legitimacy and stability of the system lead people to increase their use of stereotypes to justify social and economic inequality and to defend the societal status quo more vigorously. In the United States, increased nationalism, patriotism, and widespread support for conservative government immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, can be explained by the fact that the attacks simultaneously evoked system threat and mortality salience, thereby leading Americans (and others) to show increased system justification.

Ideological Manifestations of System Justification There are a number of preexisting, well-defined ideologies that people can embrace to bolster the status quo. Over the years, researchers have identified numerous distinctive but related systemjustifying ideologies, including the Protestant work ethic, belief in a just world, meritocratic ideology, fair market ideology, economic system justification, power distance, social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, and political conservatism. These belief systems have in common that they serve epistemic, existential, or relational needs to explain and justify the status quo. The system justification motive affects individuals’ personal relationships, family dynamics, and work lives, as well as their attitudes about society, religion, politics, economics, business, and the law. Consequences of System Justification

The need to justify the status quo produces a variety of cognitive distortions in the service of maintaining the legitimacy of the social system. For instance, experimental evidence suggests that people process and remember information selectively so that they are more likely to arrive at system-serving conclusions. System justification also leads to consensual stereotyping, whereby

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members of both advantaged and disadvantaged groups tend to perpetuate the extant hierarchy by judging the advantaged to be more competent and industrious (and sometimes better overall) than the disadvantaged. System-justifying biases appear to operate at both conscious and unconscious levels of awareness. For example, between 40% and 50% percent of gay respondents and African American respondents show pro-straight/anti-gay and prowhite/anti-black implicit biases, respectively. Outgroup favoritism among the disadvantaged is one of many consequences of system justification. Several studies suggest that system justification serves the palliative function of reducing negative affect and increasing positive affect, thereby increasing satisfaction with the status quo. As Marx suggested with respect to religious belief systems in particular, especially popular systemjustifying ideologies are like “opiates of the masses.” For example, the tendency to embrace meritocratic ideology (e.g., believing that economic inequality is legitimate and necessary in capitalist society) is associated with increased satisfaction and contentment among both the poor and the rich. Further evidence suggests that the adoption of system-justifying beliefs and ideologies reduces uncertainty, anxiety, guilt, dissonance, frustration, and moral outrage brought on by social inequality and other potential system deficiencies. For members of advantaged groups, the perception of being “on top” of society is consonant with the holding of positive attitudes concerning their group and themselves. Members of disadvantaged groups, however, are faced with a potential conflict between their need to justify the system and competing motives to enhance their own selfesteem and group status. Consequently, rejecting egalitarian alternatives to the status quo tends to have negative consequences for the disadvantaged. They experience ambivalence toward their own group and suffer in terms of subjective well-being as measured by levels of self-esteem, neuroticism, and depression. It may be that for members of disadvantaged groups there are trade-offs between the short-term psychological benefits of system justification and its longer-term costs. System justification theory posits that it is not exclusively the coercive power of hegemonic groups that leads people to accept social inequalities. There are also social–psychological sources of

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motivation to maintain inequalities once they are clearly established. Studies show that people go well beyond the information given in seeking to imbue the status quo with legitimacy and beneficence. As long as the current regime is accepted as legitimate and good, it is psychologically difficult to conceive of an alternative system, let alone reasons or methods for engaging in social change. The fact that social change does occur, however rarely, and that people occasionally do revolt against perceived wrongdoings that are endemic to the system suggests that people’s tendency to defend and bolster the system can indeed be blocked or overridden. System justification theory implies that members of disadvantaged groups will engage in social change to the extent that the strength of ego justification or group justification motives exceeds the strength of system justification needs. From a social–psychological perspective, then, the likelihood that an individual will support efforts to change the status quo will depend partially on the interplay of different types of justification processes. It has furthermore been suggested that people will protest only when the system’s legitimacy has been seriously eroded and when alternatives to the status quo become psychologically salient. According to system justification theory, people should be motivated to rationalize a new or emerging regime that begins to take on properties of the status quo as its implementation is seen as increasingly probable. For instance, one study conducted during the week immediately prior to the U.S. presidential election of 2000 showed that regardless of whether participants were Democrats or Republicans, they tended to rationalize the expected outcome, coming to see whichever candidate they were led to believe was likely to win in more favorable terms and coming to see the likely loser in less favorable terms, even if he represented their own party.

Recent Developments in System Justification Theory Among the most significant recent developments in system justification theory is evidence suggesting that system justification can operate as both a conscious and an unconscious goal. For example, research shows that there are multiple functionally equivalent routes to satisfying system justification

needs, such as the endorsement of victim-blaming and complementary victim-enhancing judgments or stereotypes. Threats to the legitimacy or stability of the societal status quo appear to stimulate parallel routes to system justification. These findings provide further evidence the tendency to justify the system functions as a basic goal that motivates people’s behavior. Other recent developments include the discovery that threats to one type of system (e.g., the nuclear family or a local popularity network) can stimulate a spreading activation of rationalization processes that affect attitudes toward other tangentially related systems (e.g., the national government). Criticisms of System Justification Theory

Like other theories in social psychology, system justification theory has been criticized by proponents of rival theories. Some commentators question the existence of a general system justification motive because it seems counterintuitive that the disadvantaged would be motivated to justify the status quo. Previous work has indeed shown that members of disadvantaged groups suffer (in terms of ambivalence, self-esteem, and well-being) from conflict among competing ego, group, and system justification motives. Nevertheless, research shows that there are benefits to system-justifying ideologies, both for the advantaged and the disadvantaged, that may help to explain the complicity of the latter in such ideologies. Future research should seek to determine what factors affect the strength of these palliative benefits of system justification and when they do and do not outweigh the costs. Another common criticism of system justification theory is that research does not definitively establish that people are motivated to justify the way things are. An alternative explanation is that people are passive recipients of ideology or that they are compelled by authorities to comply with the status quo. The fact that self-deception and system threat are both positively associated with system-justifying attitudes suggests that the process is a motivated one. More recent evidence that system justification exhibits goal-like properties strengthens the case for the motivational claims made by system justification theorists. A final criticism of system justification theory is that in seeking to analyze social and psychological

Systematic Luck

barriers to social change, the theory fails to explain how change can occur. According to system justification researchers, in order to understand how and why social change is possible, it is imperative to first understand why it is so rare and why it is almost always accomplished by a deviant, determined minority rather than a majority of citizens. Furthermore, the theme of openness to social change and rapid conversion is addressed in studies of the anticipatory rationalization of seemingly inevitable alternatives to the status quo. The tendency to justify the system is a conservative social and psychological force that both reflects and perpetuates current status, power, prestige, and other social relations. System justification theory accounts for a broad range of empirical evidence pertaining to the causes, consequences, and depth of people’s psychological investments in the existing social system, even when that investment contradicts their own individual or collective self-interest. The system justification motive, it appears, is broadly applicable to understanding a wide variety of social, economic, and political attitudes held around the world. Increasingly, the evidence suggests that there is a motivational dimension to status quo biases that have long been observed in many different areas of application. John T. Jost and Jojanneke van der Toorn See also Authoritarian Personality; Deflected Wants; Ideology; Jost, John; Legitimation; Marx, Karl; Structural Suggestion

Further Readings Henry, P. J., & Saul, A. (2006). The development of system justification in the developing world. Social Justice Research, 19, 365–378. Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25, 881–919. Jost, J. T., & Hunyady, O. (2002). The psychology of system justification and the palliative function of ideology. European Review of Social Psychology, 13, 111–153. Jost, J. T., & Hunyady, O. (2005). Antecedents and consequences of system-justifying ideologies. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 260–265.

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Kluegel, J. R., & Smith, E. R. (1986). Beliefs about inequality: Americans’ views of what is and what ought to be. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world. New York: Plenum. O’Brien, L. T., & Major, B. (2005). System-justifying beliefs and psychological well-being: The role of group status and identity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1718–1729. Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance. New York: Cambridge University Press.

SYSTEMATIC LUCK Systematic luck can be defined as consistently getting what is in one’s interests because of the way society is structured, and getting this without being decisive. The term was first introduced in Keith Dowding’s book Rational Choice and Political Power to explain why some groups tend to get their desired outcomes more often than their resources indicate they should. Their resources might give them the ability to get what they want if they act, but they also might get what they want anyway, without their actions decisively altering the outcome. This is a simple case of luck. The idea that grounds systematic luck is that the luck enjoyed in society is not altogether arbitrary. The reason for getting what one wants without trying is a systematic reason if it is tied to the social location one finds oneself in. Whether an actor is a capitalist, laborer, consumer, producer, developer, bureaucrat, slave, or president, if that position grants what is wanted more often than should expected by a combination of natural luck, resources, and intentional action, then the actor may be thought of as systematically lucky. Dowding coined the term systematic luck for two reasons. The first was to defend a structural account of power that did not lead to a thesis of radical determinism. Dowding argues that power is based on the resources an actor can command. If an actor’s resources indicate what he or she has the power to do, and if we equate power with success, then we should be able to determine how successful the actor will be. Here we have a thesis of radical determinism: one’s resources determine

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one’s success. This is not always the case, though, because some actors might be successful without having much in the way of resources, or even without acting at all. Two gold miners who command the same equipment and the same capacity to work might have varying degrees of success. What separates them is their brute luck. Luck is a theoretical concept used to explain this indeterminacy between power and success. It is not something that can be measured by empirical researchers: we can empirically measure resources—we can measure the wealth, income, education, and the reputation of actors—but there is no single empirical phenomenon that directly indicates luck. Positing luck as an explanatory device is one way to measure power without leading to radical determinacy. Luck, as an explanatory term, must be refined to systematic luck when we think of power in the structural sense. Actors use social resources (as opposed to the natural resources of the miners) to entice other actors to behave in preferable ways. Social resources can be defined as means of enticement, and so must have value to other actors (as objects of want or respect). Governments, for instance, desire to develop their economies to secure the well-being of their populace, and so provide incentives such as low tax rates and less regulation to entice the investment of capital, which will often lead to more jobs and a better standard of living—one of the more valuable social resources. Capitalists who are already part of the economy gain from the low tax rates. They are simply lucky that the government’s interests are in line with their own. It is the government that is utilizing resources (its legitimate authority) to bring about the mutually beneficial outcome, not the capitalists. This is luck in a systematic sense. Social resources are relatively enduring; there are few incentives for anyone who has power to change the allocation of resources, because the very reason they have this power is because of their resources. For example, a government has little incentive to change its status as a legitimate authority. Because resources are enduring, so too are the power structures that go with them. A government’s legitimate authority is usually maintained by protecting the well-being of its community; this well-being, it is often said, requires economic growth. These structures constitute the social system. Therefore, the

kind of luck applicable to a regular beneficiary of this system is systematic luck. The second reason for the introduction of systematic luck as a term was to justify the empirical analysis of power structures. It shows that this analysis is both valuable and possible. Dan Felsenthal and Moshé Machover have argued that probabilistic calculation, if treated properly, can eliminate the need to appeal to luck in empirical analysis. We could say that capitalists have more power to get their way than consumers in light of the fact that they will get more of what they want more often than consumers will. However, systematic luck can also explain why the capitalists are more likely to get what they want. Analyzing the nature of the power structure will do this. To do this, we study the resources of an actor vis-à-vis the resources of other actors, noting both the ways in which that actor could use his or her resources and the ways he or she actually uses them. Social resources, whether tangible, like money, or intangible, like reputation and legitimate authority, can be measured empirically. Reputation and legitimate authority may be analyzed and compared through media sources, elite interviews, and mass surveys. The state could potentially use its legitimate authority to radically centralize the economy. If it did, of course, capitalists would be up in arms and could force heavy losses on the government (the lucky can also be powerful); but here capitalists would be utilizing their resources—they would be acting. The fact that most democratic governments do not centralize the economy, and so do not force capitalists to act, although they could, can be explained by saying capitalists are systematically lucky. Systematic luck can illuminate various debates concerning the influence groups have over policy formation. For instance, pluralists often contend that the existence of nongovernmental groups that successfully influence decision making empirically refutes the elitist and statist models of power. However, this is not necessarily the case, because these groups might be pushing at “an open door.” They might just be systematically lucky. On the other hand, elite theories of government cannot claim empirical verification either, because state policies might also be pushing at the open door of powerful groups in the community. Pluralists

Systemic Power

would have to demonstrate that certain policy formations were not in the state’s interests, and elite theories would have to demonstrate how policy was not in the community’s interests—difficult positions to prove at best. Dowding believes that systematic luck, as an explanatory term, can illuminate further debates in political science such as those concerning regime theory and the growthmachine model. William Bosworth See also Barry, Brian; Dowding, Keith; Luck; Luck, Brute; Systemic Power

Further Readings Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Dowding, K. (1996). Power. Bristol, UK: Open University Press. Dowding, K. (2003). Resources, power and systematic luck: A response to Barry. Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2, 305–322. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.

SYSTEMIC POWER Systemic power is a form of power that indirectly and impersonally privileges one group at the expense of another. One group sees its power to attain desirable outcomes increase at the expense of another group’s power because of the way policy makers are influenced by the socioeconomic system. By virtue of the societal position of their jobs, policy makers are more dependent on some interests than others. The pressures to keep their jobs, to have successful careers, and to create effective policy make them more attentive to the upper strata of society. These biases are not identical with cultural biases, but are specific to policy makers because of their situational location as policy makers in the social system. The term systemic power is used to denote the unintentional power relation between groups.

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The group that benefits does not intentionally act to create or maintain its privileged position. In fact, the argument for systemic power is an argument concerning the behavior of public officials, not the behavior of the groups that comprise the power relation. Accordingly, the term can be used to explain anomalies in some elitist theories of government. Groups might consistently get what they want from institutions, not because they rule by deliberate attempts to affect policy as such, but because their very nature inclines policy makers to depend on them. In this sense, systemic power is a form of power different from agenda setting because there is no conscious action on the part of the empowered group to empower itself (whereas agenda-setting groups consciously try to get their agenda into policy debate). The question remains as to why this constitutes a power relation between the groups privileged and those disadvantaged by the socioeconomic pressures policy makers are subjected to. There is no direct conflict between these groups and so no direct exercise of power over anybody. The groups are in competition, however, because they are vying for the limited opportunity to achieve their desired outcomes, despite perhaps not being aware they are in competition. This opportunity can be considered outcome power: the power to bring about a result. There is an indirect power relation between these groups because the amount of power that policy makers distribute to one group depends on the amount of power distributed to another group. Clarence Stone identifies three systemic inequalities that force policy makers to accommodate the upper strata of society at the expense of the lower: economic, associational (or organizational), and social. The upper strata can provide revenue for institutional maintenance, can organize themselves better (by avoiding many collective action problems through their self-directing hierarchies or small memberships) and so are easier to deal with, and policy makers consider the upper strata to be more interesting and fruitful to work with. In many instances, Stone contends, these inequalities can discount the influence of the vote for elected policy makers, and so public accountability. Benefits that might have otherwise gone to the middle

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or, more acutely, lower strata of society, are redistributed upward because this entails less effort and provides more revenue and a greater social reward for policy makers. William Bosworth See also Agency-Structure Problem; Power To and Power Over; Structural Power; Structural Suggestion;

Structuration; Substructure and Superstructure; Systematic Luck

Further Readings Stone, C. (1980). Systemic power in community decision making: A restatement of stratification theory. American Political Science Review, 74(4), 978–990.

T functions and even “fake departments,” which conceal the operations of the terror system. In the Soviet Union, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) ran the system of terror; in Germany it was run by the by the Schutzstaffel (SS). Because of the concealment inherent to terror regimes, they are clearly identified only after their fall. Cambodia under Pol Pot reveals a picture similar to that of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. During the “zero years” from April of 1975 until January of 1979, hundreds of thousands of people met their deaths. In proportion to national population, even the lowest of the estimates, which range from 400,000 to 1.671 million, is in line with those for Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. Similarly, the state was a façade: apart from the Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea of January 1976, the Khmer Rouge issued neither laws nor decrees. Government was carried out behind the state, Pol Pot himself soon dropping out of the public eye to operate under complete concealment. At the crux of the regime was Tuol Sleng, the main center for interrogation, torture, and execution in Phnom Penh and the nucleus of Norkabal, the secret police system. Other such centers were to be found at regional, district, and commune levels. The records at Tuol Sleng showed that of the 14,499 people held there between April of 1975 and the end of 1978, only four survived. Outside of Phnom Penh, victims met their deaths in mass executions carried out away from the general population.

TERROR REGIMES The essence of a terror regime lies in summary justice. Under summary justice, the innocent as well as the guilty are victims; in terror regimes, the deaths of innocent victims, chosen on the basis of characteristics that no change in behavior can alter, occur on a large scale. Terror regimes are important to the study of power because according to the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, rather than being the epitome of power as naked violence, a terror regime constitutes the form of government in which power is totally absent, destroyed by violence and replaced by a terror system concealed behind a state façade of seemingly normal structures and processes. Arendt’s principal focus was on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, both of which she classified as totalitarian regimes. She identified the onset of totalitarianism as occurring in Germany in 1938 and in the USSR in 1930. She considered Mussolini’s Italy to have been a totalitarian dictatorship because the government ruled through the state, rather than through a parallel system of party organization, and because innocents were not deliberately targeted as victims; guilt and innocence had meaning. At the center of totalitarian regimes are terror systems with concentration camps and labor camps run by the secret police. The state has ostensible, not real power; characterized by lawlessness, it is shapelessly organized through multiple offices duplicating

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Revolutionary Reigns of Terror Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia are terror regimes in their extreme form. Other regimes, such as military dictatorships in league with death squads, are in some ways similar to these but do not constitute terror regimes in the strict sense. There is another type of terror regime, though, one in which the system of terror is less entrenched: the revolutionary reign of terror. In such regimes, revolutionary tribunals or courts are hurriedly assembled to try crimes that violate broadly drawn laws against counterrevolutionary acts. In practice, victims may be executed on the spot without trial, but even when trials are held summary justice is at work, with the accused not having the right to either defense or appeal and the outcome—execution or imprisonment— certain, irrespective of innocence or guilt. Summary justice also lies in the conditions of treatment once arrested: prisoners are left in overcrowded, disease-ridden squalor, often in makeshift prisons. The classic case is the Reign of Terror of 1793− 1794 during the French Revolution, conducted by the Committee of Public Safety, the Committee of General Security, the revolutionary tribunals, and the people’s armies. Under the Law of Suspects of September 1793, suspicion of counterrevolution was sufficient justification for arrest. No evidence, such as carrying arms, was required. The rights to defense counsel, witnesses, and appeal became meaningless and were ended, officially, by the Law of 22 Prairial, June 1794. The most notorious revolutionary prison, the warehouse at Nantes, at one time held 10,000 Vendéans; the most famous and shocking event of the Reign of Terror was the drowning in the Loire River of 2,000 prisoners held captive in makeshift prison barges. The official total of the victims was 17,000, but it rises to 40,000 when prison deaths and executions without trial are taken into account. The Russian revolutionary reign of terror of 1917–1921 also had two committees, Sovnarkom and the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (VtsIK), vying for control. The Cheka (secret police) carried out the terror; by September 1918 they had issued instructions for the arrest of not only a long list of types of counterrevolutionaries, but also the open-ended “all who inspired them.” In the Russian case, the full estimate is

140,000 victims. More recently, reigns of terror have also occurred in the revolutions in China, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Iran.

Explaining Terror Regimes Giving a general explanation for terror regimes is fraught with difficulties. As a form of government, the terror regime is a rare and complex phenomenon, concealment being part of its nature, and only in the case of revolutionary reigns of terror are the causes bound up with the revolution that is taking place at the time. In all cases, however, a dislocated society—one that is where there is a great deal of social and geographical movement (specifically civil war for revolutionary reigns of terror) in combination with economic crisis (brought on in part by government policies)—appears to be a common precondition. Equally in all cases, the policy choices made by the governments as the regimes take hold are crucial not only with respect to the economy but also with respect to the choice to use violence to enforce policies of all kinds. Rosemary H. T. O’Kane See also Civil War; Coercion and Power; Military in Government; Revolution; Terrorism

Further Readings Arendt, H. (1958). The origins of totalitarianism. London: Allen & Unwin. O’Kane, R. H. T. (1991). The revolutionary reign of terror: The role of violence in political change. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. O’Kane, R. H. T. (1996). Terror, force and states: The path from modernity. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Walter, E. V. (1972). Terror and resistance: A study of political violence. New York: Oxford University Press.

TERRORISM Terrorism is a form of political violence that challenges the authority of the state. It arises out of an extreme asymmetry of power between the challenger and the challenged. It is a weapon for the weak. Due to their limited resources and their

Terrorism

scarce social support, terrorists resort to spectacular deeds that make a deep impression on society and have widespread repercussions in the media. Although terrorism has been practiced for at least the past two centuries, its importance has become paramount more recently as a consequence of the Al Qaeda attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. Terrorism is today at the very center of international politics and is a matter of serious concern for most countries. Both scholars and officials are interested in understanding the political, social, and economic conditions under which terrorist organizations emerge and flourish, the strategic logic of terrorist violence, the patterns of target selection, and the counterterrorist policies that states may implement to combat this threat. Scholars rarely agree on a precise characterization of the nature of terrorism. In fact, the field of terrorism studies has been dominated by endless discussion about definitional issues. In a comprehensive analysis, Alex Schmid and Albert Jongman collected more than 100 definitions, and their search of the literature extended only through the early 1980s. They found some common, recurring themes and, based on them, they proposed their own definition. However, this did not end the debate, and the issue is still a controversial one. International organizations, states, and administrative agencies have also provided definitions without reaching a definitive consensus. The debate is politically loaded because the very term terrorism has ominous connotations that groups that practice it and the states that support these groups reject. They prefer other expressions such as revolutionary warfare, national liberation fighting, or holy war. This is aptly summarized in the proposition “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” It is difficult to build theories on terrorism or to carry out empirical analyses if there is no shared understanding about the phenomenon to be explained. Yet, beneath the existing controversy, it is possible to find some core areas of agreement that help to delineate the contours of the terrorist phenomenon. Terrorism, then, is a generic word that is used to refer to certain violent tactics, and terrorist refers to certain actors that carry out terrorist deeds. This distinction between a kind of violence and a kind of actor is customary in the

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literature and helps to clarify the issue under analysis.

Terrorist Violence Most authors consider terrorism to be a form of coercion in which the perpetrators commit a violent act, usually killing some people or destroying property, in order to induce other people to behave in a particular way. Here, coercion works through the distinction between the target of violence (the victim) and the main target (the audience that reacts to the attack). The underlying principle seems to be “to kill a few in order to terrorize the many.” While it is undeniable that this distinction is implicit in every terrorist attack, it is also true that many other violent acts display the same logic. Many acts of war, including the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 by the United States or the bombing of London by the Nazis in World War II, presuppose the difference between the target of violence and the main target. The same can be said about an attack by the mafia or even about some cases of state repression. In all these cases, the killing of the target of violence is intended to instill terror in the main target. One possible way of separating terrorist violence from other forms of violence that are coercive (and not purely destructive) is to focus on the targets of terrorist attacks. Many official definitions, in fact, mention that terrorist violence is directed against noncombatants. According to the Geneva Convention, combatants bear arms and wear uniforms or insignia. This definition was intended for interstate war, in which the combatants are the military. In many terrorist conflicts, uniformed police forces are also considered to be combatants. Noncombatants, therefore, are civilians. From this point of view, terrorism would be distinguished from other types of coercion by specifying that the target of violence is civilians. It is indeed true that many terrorist attacks are directed against civilians. The typical examples are the September 11 attack by Al Qaeda or the bomb that exploded in a train station in Bologna, Italy, on August 2, 1980, killing 85 civilians and injuring more than 200. However, it is not always the case that terrorist attacks are directed against civilians. Those who have studied the terrorist attacks of

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Terrorism

organizations, such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in Northern Ireland, the Red Brigades in Italy, or Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA) in the Basque region of Spain, have found that these organizations targeted combatants in a systematic way. Among the people killed by the PIRA, more than 50% of them were combatants. On the other hand, experts on such movements have pointed out that the vast majority of the fatalities caused by guerrilla activities are noncombatants too. Even in interstate wars, the proportion of noncombatants killed has increased spectacularly in recent decades. Another possibility is to forget about targeting and to focus on the nature of terrorist violence as opposed to other types of violence. In his influential Arms and Influence (1966), Thomas Schelling introduced the distinction between military power and the power to hurt. Military power is based on brute force and it is aimed at destruction or extermination. The power to hurt is based on coercion and is aimed at compliance (inducing others to act in a certain way). In Schelling’s terms, military power consists of taking what you want (territory, weapons, etc.). By contrast, the power to hurt consists of inducing others to give you what you want. Armies and most insurgencies combine to different degrees military power and the power to hurt. What makes terrorism quite unique is that it constitutes a form of political violence exclusively based on the power to hurt. All the tactics that are normally associated with terrorism can be described in terms of inflicting pain rather than destroying the enemy. Assassinations, car bombs, hostage taking, bank robberies, extortion, and selective shootings of security forces or informers are means to inflict pain and ultimately to break the will of the enemy. The technology of terrorism bears little resemblance to that of either regular or irregular warfare. Guerrillas can organize lightly armed bands that enter into small-scale combats with army patrols. Normally, people do not refer to such skirmishes as terrorist acts. In short, terrorist violence is a form of coercion, presupposing the distinction between the target of violence and the main target, whose ultimate aim is inflicting pain rather than destroying the enemy. It terrorizes its audience through the use of the power to hurt.

Terrorist Actors One of the most contentious issues in the debate on terrorism is about the kind of actors that engage in terrorist violence. Can armies or states engage in terrorist violence? Can guerrillas launch terrorist campaigns? The answer would not be so problematic were it not for the existence of terrorist organizations themselves. Why are some insurgent groups categorized as terrorist, if it is admitted that other groups can also carry out terrorist attacks? What is the difference between terrorist organizations and other organizations that are not terrorist but commit terrorist acts? Part of the enduring confusion in the literature is produced by this ambiguity in the usage of the term terrorism. Given the fact that not every actor that engages in terrorist violence is a terrorist organization, it follows that terrorist organizations cannot be defined in terms of the kind of violence that they exercise. Something else is necessary. As many authors have pointed out, members of terrorist organizations do not wear uniforms or insignias. This is not something anecdotal. If terrorists hide, it is because they act within the enemy’s territory. Terrorist organizations are clandestine or underground. Because of their secret nature, terrorists cannot act in the open. Likewise, there is no battlefront in a terrorist conflict. This basic constraint, the lack of their own territory, is what impels these groups to terrorist tactics. They can hijack a plane, ambush a police patrol, put a bomb in a public place, or shoot a politician, but they cannot organize proper military actions. In other words, terrorist organizations resort to terrorist tactics because they are too weak to mount a guerrilla insurgency with its own rural territorial base. The relationship of the terrorists with the population is much more superficial than in the case of guerrillas. Whereas terrorists have to go unnoticed when they move in the city, guerrilla fighters rule in their liberated territory, imposing order and extracting rents from the inhabitants, usually peasants. The conflict between a terrorist organization and the state is highly asymmetric, given the weakness of terrorist organizations. They have to compensate for their lack of military and social power with spectacular violence. When the terrorist organization is seen as an effective one, it may expand its social base of support and obtain concessions from the state.

Terrorism

What about other actors? Many authors admit the possibility that guerrillas also practice terrorism. This is the case when the guerrillas have to act outside of the territory they control, moving into cities and therefore acting under the same constraints as a terrorist organization. The Shining Path in Peru was a guerrilla insurgency that at its peak controlled around one third of Peruvian municipalities. Its violence was typical of any guerrilla insurgency, killing many civilians in order to induce compliance by peasants. But when the Shining Path moved into Lima and set off car bombs, it acted like any other terrorist group. Disagreements are deeper concerning whether armies and states can display terrorist behavior. After all, the historical root of the term terrorism goes back to an episode of state repression: the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. Moreover, states, especially authoritarian ones, repress their own population by means of violent acts that presuppose the distinction between the target of violence and the main target. The main objection against the possibility of state terrorism is that the kind of tactics that states put into practice have little to do with the tactics that are associated with terrorism. States do not explode car bombs, nor do they shoot citizens. Rather, states may repress and terrorize their own populations through massive arrests, internment, torture, summary executions, and mass disappearances. Furthermore, if the possibility of state terrorism is admitted, the thesis that terrorist violence is an instrument of weak rebel groups cannot be held. Some authors do not deny the existence of state terrorism, but restrict their analysis to nonstate groups, suggesting that even if the state can engage in terrorism, it is a kind of terrorism different from that of terrorist organizations.

Types of Terrorism The most common distinction is between domestic and international terrorism. In principle, domestic terrorism is characterized by national terrorists acting within their state borders (e.g., the ETA acting in Spain), whereas international terrorism implies terrorists attacking outside their home territory (e.g., the hijacking of continental flights by the Palestine Liberation Organization). However, there are difficult cases that complicate somewhat

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this classification. The assassination of the American representative of NATO by the Revolutionary Organization 17 November in Greece is considered international terrorism by some researchers and domestic terrorism by some others. Similar doubts are raised when an Islamist terrorist organization in Egypt kills foreign tourists. Should these be considered domestic or international incidents? More important, the irruption of Al Qaeda demands the creation of a third category, that of transnational terrorism. Al Qaeda, unlike Palestinian terrorist organizations, does not have its own natural territory and can attack in many countries. Its social basis of support is not concentrated in any one country, but is spread all over the Muslim world. In terms of aims, the literature refers to two basic kinds of terrorist organizations. On the one hand, there are those that fight for the control of a territory, seeking independence or greater autonomy. Their basic strategy is one of attrition, inflicting pain under the expectation that at some point the state’s resistance will be broken and the state will opt for negotiating with the terrorists or directly withdrawing from the territory under dispute. This is national liberation terrorism. On the other hand, there are revolutionary terrorist organizations that kill under the assumption that violence mobilizes people. They are not interested in negotiating with the state, for they want to destroy the state or to replace it with a new political structure. Their aim is to ignite a mass uprising. It is unclear whether all instances of terrorism can be reduced to either of these types. Al Qaeda seems to be an amalgamation of both these categories. As Stephen Holmes has suggested in a penetrating essay, Al Qaeda fights against foreign occupation of Muslim soil, but the fight is carried out simultaneously in many countries, transforming the national liberation enterprise into a revolutionary project aimed at establishing Muslim governments and eventually a worldwide caliphate. In this case, mobilization is no less important than attrition.

Conclusion Organizations such as Hamas in Palestine have often said that suicide bombers are the counterpart to Israel’s advanced weaponry. Terrorist organizations

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are weaker than other insurgencies that can organize irregular armies and rule in an area liberated from the state’s control. Terrorist organizations are underground. They act within the enemy’s territory. Given their weakness, the kind of violence these organizations exert is intended to inflict pain. Terrorist violence can be understood as an instrument of attrition and as an instrument of popular mobilization. In both cases, violence is based on the distinction between the target of violence and the main target. There is no consensus on whether states can employ terrorist violence. Some argue that the logic of state terror is the same as that of terrorist organizations, but the tactics of violence are quite different in each case. Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca See also Civil War; Fear, Use of; Terror Regimes; War

Further Readings Enders, W., & Sandler, T. (2006). The political economy of terrorism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hofman, B. (1998). Inside terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press. Holmes, S. (2006). Al-Qaeda, September 11, 2001. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Making sense of suicide missions (pp. 131–172). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Schelling, T. C. (1966). Arms and influence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Schmid, A. P., & Jongman, A. J. (1988). Political terrorism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

TESTOSTERONE, POWER

AND

Across many studies in humans, two functional relationships between testosterone and power consistently emerge. First, high levels of testosterone prime individuals to pursue dominance (priming relationship). Second, victories and defeats in dominance contests and other outcomes of dominance interactions drive differential changes in testosterone levels that in turn prime and shape future behavior (reciprocal relationship). Priming

and reciprocal relationships between power and testosterone have been principally documented in men; our understanding of the relationships between testosterone and power in women is less complete. Baseline levels of testosterone prime individuals to pursue dominance. The best evidence for this phenomenon is derived from studies that measure the actual behavior of individuals high or low in testosterone. This line of research shows that those with high testosterone levels engage in behavioral pursuit of dominance and status. For instance, lawyers with high testosterone levels are more likely to be trial lawyers, who visibly argue in front of judge and jury, than they are to work in other capacities. Also, prisoners with high testosterone are more likely to have a history of violent crime and to have other prisoners rate their behavior as tougher. Boys with high testosterone are judged as more dominant and as possessing leadership qualities. These and many other findings document that, in general, high levels of testosterone prime individuals to pursue dominance and status in socially acceptable ways, but that in some cases they can also lead to aggression, antisocial behavior, and sometimes violent crime. It is notable that the priming relationship between testosterone and dominance only emerges reliably when behavioral measures of dominance are employed. However, when questionnaire measures of dispositional power, dominance, or aggression are used, researchers rarely find any relationship between individuals’ questionnaire scores and their testosterone levels. Several reviews of the testosterone literature have therefore concluded that self-report measures of power and dominance are of little value when studying the relationship between testosterone and power. When dominance dispositions are assessed indirectly, small but consistent correlations between individual differences in dominance motivation and testosterone have been found. One method that has been used with success for this purpose is the measurement of individuals’ implicit power motive (nPower), which is defined as a recurrent need to have impact on others. nPower is assessed by content-coding imaginative stories that research participants write in response to picture cues. Although nPower does not correlate with questionnaire measures of dominance, it is positively

Testosterone, Power and

correlated with testosterone, suggesting that high baseline levels of testosterone motivate one to pursue dominance and manifest themselves in aspects of an individual’s personality. Interestingly, nPower also positively predicts many of the same dominance behaviors that high levels of testosterone are associated with (e.g., entering influential occupations, spousal abuse, drug abuse, risk taking, and sexual promiscuity). Such findings suggest that the implicit power motive represents the psychological manifestation of individual differences in testosterone levels. Consistent with the notion of a reciprocal relationship between testosterone and dominance, testosterone also changes as a function of winning or losing dominance contests. For example, it has been found that winners of chess tournaments have elevated testosterone levels, while individuals whose favorite sports teams lose have depressed levels of testosterone. However, contest outcome is not the only variable that predicts changes in testosterone. Indirect measures of power motivation (but again not questionnaire measures of power motivation) often moderate the effect that dominance contest outcomes have on testosterone changes. For instance, there is evidence that changes in testosterone level due to victory and defeat are consistently observed in high-power men, but not in low-power men. There is also some evidence that baseline levels of testosterone as a marker of individuals’ need for power predict how those individuals respond hormonally and behaviorally to contest outcomes. Contest-induced testosterone changes can have two effects. First, increases in testosterone can prime one to engage in another dominance contest, and decreases can make one less motivated to engage in another dominance contest and thus less likely to expend more energy on the costly pursuit of power. In support of this idea, contest-induced testosterone increases predict individuals’ inclination to engage in another contest, whereas testosterone decreases predict behavioral withdrawal from dominance situations. Second, testosterone increases have been linked to reward and reinforcement. Testosterone surges after winning can act as reinforcers for effective dominance behavior. Evidence in support of this idea comes not only from animal studies, in which the effects of testosterone on brain reward centers can be measured

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directly, but also from research on human subjects. Such research shows that victory-induced testosterone increases predict better learning of behavior that was instrumental during the contest, whereas defeatinduced testosterone decreases predict impaired learning of such behavior. It is important to note that in humans, testosterone changes are not necessarily or even frequently induced by the outcome of physical fights, but are more typically elicited by outcomes of subtle, psychological dominance competitions. Chess players and sports fans have testosterone changes, but never actually engage in physical aggression or violence. Yet, from a biological perspective, the testosterone changes that result from psychological contests are the same as those resulting from engagements in physical aggression. While the relationships between testosterone and power are relatively well explored in men, research on these relationships in women is lagging behind and has produced fewer clear-cut findings. A small set of studies using behavioral measures of dominance consistently links high testosterone to dominance (e.g., high-status occupations, aggression, or antisocial behavior) in women, suggesting that the priming relationship between testosterone and dominance holds for both sexes. There is less evidence for a reciprocal relationship between testosterone and dominance in women. Studies in which effects of dominance contests on women’s testosterone levels have been assessed either found no contest outcome effect or, in the case of one study examining the effect on nPower on testosterone responses, testosterone increases in both winners and losers high in nPower. Thus, in women, there is some evidence that testosterone primes dominance, but there is little replicable evidence so far for a reciprocal relationship between testosterone and dominance. Two points are important to consider when studying testosterone and power in women. First, most of the studies have relied on questionnaire measures of dominance as opposed to indirect measures like nPower or observational measures of actual behavior. In men, studies using questionnaires have been equally fraught with problems. Second, estradiol, the other sex steroid, could have a much greater influence over dominance in women. Several studies have documented estradiol’s critical role in female mammalian

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dominance, but few studies have examined the relationship between dominance and estradiol in women. Steven J. Stanton and Oliver C. Schultheiss Further Readings Archer, J. (2006). Testosterone and human aggression: An evaluation of the challenge hypothesis. Neuroscience Biobehavioral Review, 30, 319–345. Mazur, A., & Booth, A. (1998). Testosterone and dominance in men. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 353–397. Schultheiss, O. C. (2007). A biobehavioral model of implicit power motivation: Arousal, reward, and frustration. In E. Harmon-Jones & P. Winkielman (Eds.), Social neuroscience: Integrating biological and psychological explanations of social behavior (pp. 176–196). New York: Guilford Press.

THIRD DIMENSION See Third Face

THIRD FACE The third face of power works to influence the thoughts and desires of individuals so that they will want things that they would otherwise oppose in the absence of power structures. The third face of power entails power as domination. This form of power is the most important and the most insidious, according to Steven Lukes. This means that power can be exercised both consciously and unconsciously and can produce results that are not the intended consequences of those in control. As Lukes explains, “The 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” (2005, p. 25). The ways in which issues are left out of public discussion are also manifestations of the third face of power, because grievances are denied entry by the biased social

structures. According to Lukes, social structures are constantly being mobilized in favor of those in control, and will produce organizational and systemic displays of power that are not caused by the behavior of any group or individuals. Thus, power can be exercised by the patterned behavior that developed over time through acts and failures to act. The three-dimensional view of power makes a clean break from the behavioralist approach used by the one-dimensional and the two-dimensional views. The problem with both the one-dimensional and the two-dimensional views of power is their focus on actual behavior, decision making, and conflict; because of this, they demonstrate a partial understanding of power. Another novelty of the three-dimensional approach is that it looks at ways in which power can be exercised outside of conflict. The supreme exercise of power, then, is to secure the compliance of others by shaping and controlling their thoughts and desires. The most effective form of power, says Lukes, is the power to prevent conflict from arising at all. Looking at the third face of power allows one to look at whether consensus in society is real or manipulated, as well as looking at uses and abuses of power beyond the realm of conflict. Lukes argues that the exercise of the third view of power can be measured empirically, albeit with some difficulties. The third face looks at inaction, and it is difficult to measure something that did not happen. But inaction on the part of a group or individual can directly lead to the nonappearance of an issue, especially when it can be shown that action would have led to its appearance. Second, it is often difficult to determine when power is being exercised when the exerciser is unaware of it. The third difficulty with measuring the third face of power concerns how to attribute the exercise of power to groups and collectivities. However, Lukes argues that these difficulties can be overcome if it can be determined whether the group could have acted differently in a given situation but did not. Joseph Angolano See also Dahl, Robert A.; Elite Theories; Foucault, Michel; Lukes, Steven; Pluralism; Second Face; Three Faces of Power

Threats

Further Readings Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1970). Power and poverty: Theory and practice. New York: Oxford University Press Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power: Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave

THREATS Threats are a coercion mechanism used for or pertaining to the exercise of power. In general, a threat by an actor constitutes a penalty to be applied in the absence ( or occurrence) of a desired (or undesired) choice by some other actor, with the intention that the threatened actor’s behavior will be altered from that which would have occurred had the threat not been present. More formally, consider two utility maximizing agents i and j with preferences over a choice set K with typical elements k and k from which j is selecting. Assume further that the agents have opposing preferences over j’s actions: kPik_ and kPjk. The intention of a threat  by i to j is to ensure that uj(k   )  uj(k). The nature of K could vary widely. An everyday example is the choice (and presumably convenience)

1

peace

attack 2

0 0

capitulate

5 −1

Figure 1

defend

−2 −2

Extensive form game: Player 2’s threat to defend is not credible

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of smoking in an airplane lavatory, with a threat of a $1,000 fine. Threats may be formal, such as those incorporated into contracts for nontimely delivery of a service, or those issued in writing by the United Nations Security Council to rogue nations. They may be also be informal, as in the less routine “Your money or your life” much beloved of 18th-century highway robbers. Notice that, in any case, threats occur when preferences are opposed in some way: if they are congruent—that is, kPi,jk—then the threat is redundant. The success of a threat by i in terms of determining j’s actions depends upon the size (or seriousness) of  and the relative utility for j of k and k. Also, the actions of the threatened party, j, must be observable, directly or indirectly, and it must be believed (at least by j) that the threat will be carried out should j’s actions require it. These issues concern whether or not a threat is credible. We can conflate these two cases by supposing that the implementation of  imposes a (monitoring, psychological, monetary, or other) cost c on i and that ui(k  c)  ui(k). In this case i’s threat is not credible: if j does not choose as i would prefer, i will become worse off by carrying through on the threat and punishing j. For example, parents may not actually be willing to chastise a naughty child after it behaves badly (even though they could observe it perfectly) or a government may not be able to monitor illegal drugs use in private homes (even though it could punish without much psychic cost). Analysts working with game theory have discussed these issues at some length. As an example of a noncredible threat, consider the extensive form game in Figure 1. Here Player 1 chooses attack or peace. Player 2 would like to play defend if 1 attacks, but this is not a credible threat: if Player 2 defends, then he or she is worse off (in terms of a payoff of 2) relative to capitulating (where he or she gets 1). Notice that if Player 2 could commit to the defend threat in some way—perhaps with an automatically deployed missile launch in response to an attack—he or she may be able to avoid an attack in the first place. The cold war strategy of mutually assured destruction, in which nuclear annihilation results from either side attacking, may be an example of such logic. Arthur Spirling

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See also Bargaining; Bargaining in International Relations; Chicken Games; Cuban Missile Crisis; Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power; Throffers

Further Readings Myerson, R. B. (1991). Game theory: Analysis of conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

THREE FACES

OF

POWER

Steven Lukes introduced the idea of the three faces or dimensions of power in a famous short book, Power: A Radical View. The first dimension of power, basic decisionmaking power, is the most straightforward and also the most visible and observable of the three faces of power. It focuses on actual behavior and specific outcomes of decision-making processes. In this view, power is in the hands of those who prevail in decision making. The first dimension of power takes into account only observable conflicts between interests. These interests are observed by the expression of policy preferences, which is revealed by political participation. Proponents of this one-dimensional view of power include Robert A. Dahl, Nelson Polsby, and Raymond E. Wolfinger. The second face of power is in essence the power to influence, or the power of non decision making. Non decision making power is the power that groups and individuals have to control the agenda in debates and make certain issues unacceptable for discussion in moderate public forums. Proponents of the second dimension of power took exception to the one-dimensional view of power, claiming that it reflected a far too narrow understanding of power. Because of this, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz argue that the one-dimensional view gave a misleadingly sanguine pluralistic picture of U.S. politics. Not only can power be enforced by exerting decision-making power, it can also be enforced by controlling and setting the norms, values, and the design of the decisionmaking procedures that consistently benefit certain groups at the expense of others. In contrast with the one-dimensional view, proponents of the twodimensional view hold that potential issues should

also come under scrutiny when studying power. However, like the one-dimensional view, the twodimensional view looks only at observable conflict of interests and conflicts, which are embodied in express policy preferences and subpolitical preferences. Also, the two-dimensional view assumes that non decision making is in itself a form of decision making. Because of this, Lukes says that the two-dimensional view is only a qualified critique of the one-dimensional view. Finally, the three-dimensional view holds that along with the two faces of power described above, there is a third face: power as domination. This form of power is the most important and the most insidious, according to Lukes. The third face of power works to influence the thoughts and desires of individuals so that they will want things that they would otherwise oppose. The problem of both the one-dimensional and the two-dimensional views of power is their focus on actual behavior, decision making, and conflict. According to Lukes, “the bias of the system is not simply sustained by a series of individually chosen acts” (2005, p. 26) but also by the patterned behavior that develops over time through action and failure to act. Lukes submits that the third face of power can also manifest itself in latent conflict as well as actual conflict. According to Lukes, the ways in which issues are left out of public discussion is a manifestation of the third face of power. Looking at the third face of power allows one to consider whether consensus in society is real or manipulated and to examine uses and abuses of power beyond the realm of conflict. In the second edition of his book, Lukes also discusses the idea of domination as presented in the work of Michel Foucault, which has led some to suggest that there is now a fourth face or dimension of power. Lukes’s work has had a tremendous influence on the study of power. In the wake of the first question that Power: A Radical View tried to answer, Lukes’s theory of power has spawned “a number of empirical studies attempting to measure the impact of power’s third dimension on people’s lives” (Dowding, 2006, p. 136). His three-dimensional view of power managed to go beyond what was then the traditional understanding of power and forces scholars to consider the effects of power when it is not overtly seen through

Tijs Value

conflict along with considering the uses of power in actual conflicts. Joseph Angolano See also: Dahl, Robert A.; Elite Theories; Foucault, Michel; Lukes, Steven; Pluralism; Second Face; Third Face

Further Readings Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1970). Power and poverty: Theory and practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Dowding, K. (2006). Three-dimensional power: A discussion of Steven Lukes’ “Power: A Radical View.” Political Studies Review, 4, 136–145. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). London, UK: Palgrave.

THROFFERS The term throffer was coined by Hillel Steiner to characterize an intervention that simultaneously constitutes a threat and an offer. “If you fail to do this job for me, I’ll kill you” is an example of a threat. “Do this job for me and I’ll give you a thousand dollars” is an example of an offer. A throffer that combined these two interventions would be: “Do this job and I’ll give you a thousand dollars; fail to do so and I’ll kill you.” When agent A makes agent B do something that B would not otherwise have done by threatening to impose a negative sanction should B not comply, A exercises power over B by inverting B’s preference order with respect to doing and not doing that thing. This inversion of B’s preference order is effected by A’s attaching a cost (for B) to the consequences of B’s not complying with A’s desire, lowering the overall attractiveness (for B) of this course of action to a level below that of the consequences of compliance. Offers, like threats, constitute successful exercises of power by A over B when they invert the preference order of B with respect to doing and not doing what A desires. The only difference is that they do so by attaching a benefit to the consequences of compliance, increasing their overall degree of attractiveness for B to a level above that of the consequences of noncompliance.

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A throffer does both of these things: it decreases the desirability for B of the consequences of noncompliance while also increasing the desirability for B of those of compliance. For this reason, throffers are, other things being equal, more powerful interventions than either threats or offers, in the sense of being more effective in inducing B to perform actions that comply with A’s desires. The degree of power of an intervention (a threat, an offer, or a throffer) depends only on the size of the difference in degree of desirability that it succeeds in effecting between the consequences of compliance and those of noncompliance. Thus, as Steiner notes, there is no conceptual entailment between an intervention being of a certain kind (a threat, an offer, or a throffer) and its degree of power. For example, the offer “Do this job and I’ll give you a million dollars” is almost certainly more powerful than the threat “Fail to do this job and I’ll stand on your foot.” Nevertheless, A’s adding an effective offer to an effective threat, or vice versa, will always increase the power with which A induces B to comply. Ian Carter See also Coercion and Power; Threats

Further Readings Carter, I., Kramer, M. H., & Steiner, H. (2007). Freedom: A philosophical anthology. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Steiner, H. (1975). Individual liberty. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 75, 33–50.

TIJS VALUE The Tijs value (-value) is a solution concept in cooperative game theory. It presents a reasonable expectation of the share-out of the global winning among players and a fair division in normative contexts. S. H. Tijs proposed this value in 1981 for a particular class of cooperative games called quasibalanced games along with a particularization of that value for simple games. In 1984, in joint research with T. S. H. Driessen, Tijs extended his

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Tijs Value

-value to all cooperative games. This extension does not possess the properties of individual rationality and dummy players, having instead the -value defined for quasibalanced games. Some preliminary definitions follow. The -value and -index will be presented and illustrated with two examples. Certain properties will be given. Let N 5 f1; 2; . . . ; ng be a set of players. A cooperative game on N is expressed in characteristic function form where v : 2N ! R assigns a value v(S) to every coalition S  N under the condition vðØÞ 5 0 . A game is superadditive if vðS [ TÞ $ vðSÞ1vðTÞ for all disjoint coalitions S, T of N. A game v is said to be simple if its characteristic function assumes only the values 0 and 1; in the first case the coalition is said to be losing, in the second case, winning. A simple game is monotonic if v(N)  1 and vðSÞ # vðTÞ whenever S  T  N . Subsequent references to simple games assume monotonicity. The upper vector bv 5 bv1 ; bv2 ; . . . ; bvn 2 Rn and the gap function gv : 2N ! R of the game v are defined respectively as: v

bi 5 vðN Þ 2 vðN\figÞ v v g ðSÞ 5 S bj 2 vðSÞ j2S

for all i 2 N , for all S  N .

Each component of the upper vector is called the marginal contribution of the player with respect to the N. If a game v is superadditive, v bi $ vðfigÞ , so any player prefers his marginal contribution to the amount v({i}) which he can obtain playing alone. Observe that for superadditive games gv ðNÞ $ 0 . Tijs focuses his attention on those superadditive v games where S bj [vðNÞ, so it is impossible to j2N

give everyone at least a marginal contribution. In these cases the vector of marginal contributions bv (upper vector) is preferred by the players, but it is not a feasible solution for the game. So, in all cases v where g ðN Þ[0 and gv ðfigÞ $ 0, the quantity bv is called the utopic payment vector. With respect to bv, the grand coalition N has to make a concession of the quantity gv ðN Þ 5 S bvj 2 vðN Þ in order to j2N

obtain an feasible solution for the game. Tijs suggested that the concession of each ith player, and

then his or her contribution to gv ðNÞ , should be determined by minimizing the value of the gap function with respectto all coalitions  containing v v v v n i. The vector r 5 r1 ; r2 ; . . . ; rn 2 R such v v that ri 5 min g ðSÞ for all i 2 N is called the conS; i2S v cession vector. The class QB of quasibalanced n-person games is defined as: ( v n v QB 5 v 2 G : g ðSÞ $ 0

) v j

v

for all S  N and + r $ g ðN Þ j2N

The Tijs value (-value) of every quasibalanced game v is defined as: 8 v v if g ðN Þ 5 0 > S rj : j2N

If gv(N)  0, each player receives his or her marginal contribution. If gv(N)  0 each player v forgoes his or hershare: g ðN Þ rv . v S rj i j2N

Tijs did not originally make use of the gap function but defined the -value as some feasible compromise between the upper bound bv and some lower bound of the core of the game v. Tijs gave a geometric interpretation of the -value as a unique preimputation for the game v, lying on the segment connecting the upper vector bv and the vector (bv  v). Tijs subsequently proposed an axiomatization of the Tijs value using three axioms: efficiency, the minimal right property, and the restricted proportionality property. This axiomatization is appropriate only for quasibalanced games, and it is not generally valid for the extension of -value introduced by Driessen and Tijs.

Example 1 Consider the following three-person game: v( )  v({1})  v({2})  v({3})  0, v({1, 2})  v({2, 3})  1, v({1, 3})  2; v({1, 2, 3})  3.

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Tijs Value

Table 1

Calculation of the gaps of the coalitions

S v(S)

{1}

{2}

{3}

{1, 2}

{1, 3}

{2, 3}

{1, 2, 3}

0

0

0

1

2

1

3

v j

2

1

2

3

4

3

5

gv(S)

2

1

2

2

2

2

2

Sb

j2S

The marginal contributions of the players with respect to N  {1, 2, 3} are:

( t i ðvÞ 5

1 v j 0

for all

i2J

v v

for all i 2 N\J .

v

b1  v(N)  v(N \ {1})  v(N)  v({2, 3})  3  1  2, v

b2  v(N)  v(N  {2})  v(N)  v({1, 3})  3  2  1, v

b3  v(N)  v(N  {3})  v(N)  v({1, 2})  3  1  2, Sobv (2,1,2),+ bv ¼ 5 and gv ðN Þ 5 + bv 2 vðN Þ 5 j j 2N

v

v It follows: t ðvÞ 5 b 2

g ðN Þ v v rj 5 v r , where S rj j2N

v min g ðSÞ for all j 2 N and gv ðSÞ5 S bvj 2vðSÞ for S; j2S

j2S

all S  N . The steps to calculate the gaps of the coalitions are reported in Table 1: The above gives: 1v  2, 2v  1, 3v  2. Note that in this case bv  v. It can be verified v that v 2 QBv. In fact, g ðSÞ$0 for all S  N and S rvj 5 5 $ gv ðN Þ 5 2 . Then t 5 ð2; 1; 2Þ 2 

Example 2 Consider the following three-person simple game: v( )  v({1})  v({2})  v({3})  v({2, 3})  0, v({1, 2})  v({1, 3})  1,

j2N

5 2 3 5 2 [ 0.

j2N

According to the -index, the veto players distribute the total amount equally among themselves.



2 6 3 6 ð2; 1; 2Þ 5 ; ; . 5 5 5 5 Tijs also proposed a particularization of his value for simple quasibalanced games, called the -power index. Let Jv 5 f i 2 N j vðN\f igÞ 5 0g be the set of veto players of the game v, and jv be the number of elements of Jv. Tijs proved that a simple game v is quasibalanced if and only if Jv ⬆ , that is, the game has at least one veto player. v v Moreover, J 5f i 2 N j bi ¼ 1g for all simple games. The Tijs power index (-index) is defined as follows for all i from 1 to n:

v({1, 2, 3})  1. Construct the set Jv as follows: v({1, 2, 3}  {1})  v({2, 3})  0 → player 1 belongs to Jv v({1, 2, 3}  {2})  v({1, 3})  1 → player 2 does not belong to Jv v({1, 2, 3}  {3})  v({1, 2})  1 → player 2 does not belong to Jv. So Jv  {1} and jv  1. Because the set Jv is not empty, the game is quasibalanced. Then: 1  1 and 2  3  0. In conclusion,   (1, 0, 0). Izabella Stach See also Core of a Game; Owen Value; Shapley Value; Simple Games; Veto Players; Voting Power

Further Readings Driessen, T. S. H., & Tijs, S. H. (1984). Extension and modifications of the -value for cooperative games. In

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Totalitarianism

G. Hammer & G. Pallaschke (Eds.), Selected topics in operations research and mathematical economics (pp. 252–261). Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag. Tijs, S. H. (1981). Bounds for the core and the -value. In O. Moeschlin & D. Pallaschke (Eds.), Game theory and mathematical economics (pp. 123–132). Amsterdam: North Holland. Tijs, S. H. (1987). An axiomatization of the -value. Mathematical Social Sciences, 13, 177–181.

TOTALITARIANISM Totalitarianism is a political system in which people have nearly no independent social or civil rights. They are completely dominated by a powerfully encompassing government. Totalitarianism uses fear and force, as well as strict norms and conventions developed by an ideological apparatus and explicit propaganda, as forms of power to dominate society, so that all political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural beliefs, preferences, and activities are decided by the state. In a totalitarian state, democracy does not exist. Totalitarian ideas oppose democracy and are cynical about its intentions. Totalitarianism is seen as a movement particular to the 20th century, when its political structure was developed; the term totalitarianism was first applied to the regime of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. Totalitarianism is conceptually tied to the fascist and the socialist regimes of Nazism and communism in Germany and the Soviet Union, respectively. They are philosophically similar in that both claim to be universal, to offer a secular substitute for religion, and that their new moral order can save the nation from corruption. Most important, they overpower the existing state order and destroy the customs and traditions of a nation. The term has been applied to other regimes, including national socialist regimes in Argentina, the dictatorship in Chile, and to Franco’s Spain, as well as to Mao’s China and the regime in North Korea. However, none of these achieved the same force as in the classic totalitarian regimes, which perhaps only applies to the latter. In many respects totalitarianism as a social-scientific concept only really applies to Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. The term

takes on an explanatory as well as a descriptive status for many writers in the 1950s and 1960s. The ideology of the Nazi regime was created by Adolf Hitler, who stressed mandatory individual subordination to the state and strict obedience to its totalitarian leadership. He believed that Germans—so-called Aryans—were the superior “race,” and that members of other races, including Slavs but most especially those of Jewish descent, were inferior to the extent that Germany had an obligation to commit genocide against the Jewish population as well as Gypsies and other “undesirables.” He believed in the need to spread this ideology to other nations, thus invoking conflict and war with neighboring countries. Communism in the Soviet Union was inspired by the works of Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin. Marx argued that contradictions in capitalism would lead to its downfall through a workers’ revolution. Marx thought that greed, competition, and fear would be eliminated by creating a society of cooperation with shared goods and services. He believed that under a communist regime the people would be empowered to produce an excess of goods that could be shared among all. Private property, social class divisions, and unequal distributions of wealth and power would not exist. Totalitarianism is different from authoritarianism, despotism, tyranny, and dictatorships because it permits only a single political party. It is more ideological. According to Jaroslaw Piekalkiewicz and Alfred Wayne Penn, we can see in totalitarian regimes what they call an ideocracy, a term that encompasses all political systems that seek to legitimize themselves by an all-inclusive utopian ideology. A totalitarian state attempts to impose its ideology through its proclamation of supreme values. It uses it spiritual and secular power to persuade the people and to dominate the largest sector of the state. In theory, totalitarian regimes expect that the entire population will be converted to their ideology; in practice, they are prepared to subjugate dissenting groups. In the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks attempted to subjugate the bourgeois class. They wanted to organize a mass workers’ revolution against the existing czarist government. In the extreme case of the Nazi regime, select groups experienced subjugation followed by genocide. Totalitarian leaders use their power to suppress all forms of self-expression and other opinions

Trade

contrary to those of the totalitarian regime. All totalitarian groups have a powerfully charismatic leader at the top of an organized hierarchy. They have party members who are as devoted to the charismatic leader as they are to the official party line. They use propaganda to spread their ideologies and powerful scare tactics to ensure compliance of the masses. They control and supervise the people’s actions and movements, ensuring, for example, that internal and external travel is difficult. For these reasons, a totalitarian regime is sometimes referred to as a police state, though that latter term usually has a broader connotation. The development of a totalitarian state requires a powerful ideology that can attract fervent believers who will consider no effort or sacrifice for their cause too extreme. Stalinist ideology was devoted to using the whole people as a collective force for bringing about economic growth through industrialization and mass collectivization of agriculture. Massive steps forward through industrialization and creating whole cities engendered a collective will among the people, while those who protested the darker side of the state were subjected to repression. Under the Nazi regime, Germany’s economic and industrial growth was largely fueled by rearmament, making a second European war almost inevitable. Totalitarian ideologies create the need for constant revolution to inspire people, as well as repressive state forces to destroy opposition. Such regimes need to bind the citizenry together in opposition to something—at first, in opposition to social injustice and economic troubles, but then as they fail to achieve solutions, opposition is directed to forces outside the state, namely other countries. In this way they tend to lead to war. Debra Lucas See also Authoritarian Personality; Authority; Fascism; Fear, Use of; Marx, Karl; Police State; Terror Regimes

Further Readings Arendt, H. (1966). The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Piekalkiewicz, J., & Penn, A. W. (1995). The politics of ideocracy Binghamton: State University of New York Press.

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Schapiro, L. (1972). Totalitarianism. London: Pall Mall Press.

TRADE Trade is the voluntary exchange of goods (including both tangible commodities and products and intangible services) between different agents. The agents involved in trading may be either individuals or collective entities acting autonomously. Through trade, each of the parties obtains a good that they—at least at the moment the transaction is agreed upon— value more highly than the good offered in exchange. The motivation to trade for each of the agents engaged is therefore the difference between what they offer and what they receive in terms of their respective subjective ex ante valuations. Historically, trade has been present since the early stages of human civilization, originally taking the form of direct exchange of goods. Barter has for the most part been gradually replaced by indirect exchange through the use of some form of money—a good accepted as an intermediary by the agents trading. The use of a commonly accepted medium of exchange greatly facilitates trade by drastically reducing transaction costs, allowing value to be stored, and providing a unit of account in which prices can be measured and compared. Monetary prices are essential for the development of a complex economy, but the essence of trade remains the same in indirect exchange: the buyer gives up a certain number of monetary units to receive a good to which he attributes a higher value, and the seller offers the good in order to receive an amount of money that he values more highly than the good. The scope for trade is more reduced in small autarkic societies, as the division of labor and comparative advantage are two of the key factors fostering trade, and both depend crucially on scale. In contemporary complex economies, the nature of what is traded can vary significantly. In many instances, trade implies an actual physical transfer of a good or the execution of a service, but there are also cases in which what is transferred are ownership titles (such as in real estate or a wide range of financial instruments) or specific sets of exclusive rights of use (such as with tradable intellectual property rights).

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Transactional and Transformational Leadership

As a voluntary exchange, trade requires some form of mutual agreement between the agents that engage in the transaction. Nonvoluntary exchanges (resulting from the use of coercion by one of the agents involved and not from mutual consent) therefore do not qualify as acts of trade. An implication of this is that trade requires both wellestablished property rights and a functioning legal framework to enforce those rights and prevent deception and fraud. Given its importance, trade has generally been politically regulated in some way or another in societies throughout history. The type and scope of regulation has varied substantially, but the rationale is usually associated with the desire to pursue specific economic and social objectives. The field of international trade is particularly prone to regulation, because commercial relations between different nations are frequently influenced by political evaluations of the national interest. Hence, for example, the mercantilist doctrines that mostly dominated European trade policy from the 16th to the second half of the 18th century viewed the power of a state as being directly dependent upon the amount of precious metals held by the national treasury. This led to active policies (such as tariffs, subsidies, and other incentives to domestic industries) seeking to ensure surpluses in balance of trade in order to provide a flow of gold and silver into the country. In addition to the use of political power to regulate trade, there are also several important issues of power raised about trading relationships in themselves. Parties involved in a voluntary exchange are generally expected to benefit due to the fact that through trade they are able to obtain goods to which they ex ante attribute a higher subjective value than the goods they surrender. This reliance on subjective evaluation leads some to point out that the supposed benefits of trade may not materialize if significant asymmetries in information exist between agents. In this light, advertising is sometimes characterized as an instrument used by corporations to manipulate consumer preferences in a way that is detrimental to consumers’ objective interests. Others claim that large differences in bargaining power tend to lead to exploitative outcomes, as one of the parties will dominate the other and impose an undesirable outcome on the consumer. An often invoked example is that of the labor market, with workers seen to be in a much

weaker bargaining position than their employers because of being compelled to sell their labor as a commodity in order to survive. Other trade-related issues of power arise in contexts where a specific agent or group of agents has the ability to set the market price according to its interests. In instances where significant market power exists (such as monopolies or monopsonies), trade can be skewed toward benefiting the party that holds that power. Despite the many issues that can be raised about trade in a given market, the most controversial contemporary issues about trade and power arise in connection with globalization and international trade. Some critics of free trade argue that tariffs and other barriers are essential to protect domestic industries and jobs, while others point out that unhampered international commerce is unjust, detrimental to the environment, and exploitative of workers in less-developed nations. Trade is also frequently accused of disrupting non-Western cultures and being a potential threat to their identities. Proponents of free trade argue that the economic benefits of trade are well established both in national and international contexts and point out that globalization has raised living standards in many areas of the world. Furthermore, they point out that commerce promotes peace and that trade often stimulates cultural diversity. Overall, perspectives on trade tend to be closely associated with views on the operation of the free market and on the extent to which it can generate desirable outcomes. André Azevedo Alves See also Capital, Neoclassical; Free Market; Globalization; Invisible Hand; Monopoly Power

Further Readings Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

TRANSACTIONAL AND TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP Generally speaking, a person’s leadership style is based upon his or her own personal traits;

Transactional and Transformational Leadership

however; the way in which he or she achieves his or her goals is determined by available resources and the environment in which the leader finds himself or herself. Building on the work of James MacGregor Burns, Bernard M. Bass (1925– 2007) created one of the most popular typologies of leadership styles. He suggested leadership style can be categorized into two types: transactional and transformational leadership. They relate to different the activities of leaders at different levels. Transactional leadership is largely concerned with middle- and lower-rank leaders and pertains to exchange relationships between leaders and subordinates. Transformational leadership is more concerned with top leaders of a special kind: those who motivate followers to achieve transcendental goals or to meet higherlevel needs involving self-actualization.

Transactional Leadership Transactional leadership deals with motivating people to get the job done. The leader interacts with followers through transactions; the exchange between the leader and follower or employee is important. If the follower meets expectations, the leader rewards achievements. In other words, in return for putting forth efforts and for accomplishing tasks successfully, the follower gains rewards and gratifications. It is worth noting that transactional leadership includes two elements: the socalled contingent reward and management by exception. In the first, the leader exerts control over subordinates. The leader establishes the structure by setting expectations, determining procedures, and controlling and allocating the tasks. Rewards are given for individuals achieving high standards in their work. The contingency rewards approach can be perceived as task oriented, because since it focuses on achieving challenging goals. In management by exception, the leader monitors and controls the realization of tasks performed by followers, intervening only if something goes wrong. Management by exception can be either passive or active. In active management by exception, the leader is constantly picking out mistakes and vigilantly monitoring performance of entrusted tasks. In this perspective, leading is based on the constant process of observation of the work of subordinates. In

673

passive management by exception, the leader tries not to interfere with entrusted tasks and intervenes only when something goes wrong. Types of transactional leaders can be categorized according to their behavioral attitudes using a psychoanalytical approach. Types include the narcissistic leader, the possessive leader, the seductive leader, and the prudent leader. The narcissistic leader exhibits a high level of autocracy and characteristically has features of megalomania, omnipotence, impatience, and conviction of one’s own immunity and immortality. Another characteristic pattern of behavior resulting from a narcissistic nature is an instrumental attitude toward subordinates and events. Such leaders expect complete devotion and dedication from their subordinates because they are convinced that the world revolves around them. Narcissistic leadership is the only style within the typology of transactional leadership where the leader is not focused on relations between leaders and followers. The possessive leader perceives others as objects on which either love or hatred can be bestowed and desires to possess and appropriate subordinates without regard to their humanity. The seductive leader, oriented on emotional issues, desires to charm and seduce followers. Here the leader’s framework of activities is based on the craving to be the follower’s idol. Unfortunately, such leaders have a great propensity toward moodiness and mental instability. The so-called prudent leader is friendly, interested in subordinates’ self-development, likely to be rational, and tends to act consciously to achieve goals. This is the only type of transactional leader to respect subordinates’ decisions, opinions, and personalities. The strategy and activities characteristic of such a leader can establish an atmosphere of calm and harmony in an organization.

Transformational Leadership Transformational leadership, in the Bass model, is a strategy of action in which the leader uses influence in order to change the path of individual aims into the aim of the entire organization. Many effective business leaders adopt this form because it tends to be suitable for almost all types of organizations and because it enables them to tackle challenging tasks and to consider everyone individually. Transformational leader, develop motivation

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Transactional and Transformational Leadership

in their followers by generating a desire to bring about change, and active participation in the company’s life becomes its own reward. The subordinate’s attention is concentrated on the job in hand. This motivation is based on the belief that one is performing something of huge importance. The leader is adept at inspiring people to work toward common goals and creating a shared vision. The model of transformational leadership goes far beyond the common understanding of the word leadership. Such leaders prompt followers to act by motivating, inspiring, and encouraging them to selfdirection. People who are thus encouraged to work autonomously tend to achieve the best results. A sense of independence and the possibility of making choices intensifies their feelings of effectiveness. This causes them to put greater effort into their job and means that they are not afraid of choosing more difficult tasks, which in consequence increases personal satisfaction. What is more, by building a shared vision with subordinates the leader underlines the importance of the members’ role in fulfilling the vision. A subordinate’s belief that he or she has influence over events and the organization’s future is confirmed. Such an attitude reduces the fear of failure while reinforcing faith in one’s own abilities. By contrast, it is worth noting that those subordinates who try to avoid failures by their very efforts to reduce threats inhibit an organization’s development and innovation. Such people do not identify themselves with the company’s vision and possible success. Transformational leadership can be perceived as the set of actions involving planning the paths of changes aiming to carry out the transformation as set out by the leader and imparted to the imagination of the followers. It comprises four abilities: individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence. The first element, individualized consideration, pertains to encouraging the development of individuals’ abilities and competencies. Each member of the group is treated individually, and the leader makes an effort to devote some attention to everyone. The second element, intellectual stimulation, involves encouraging employees to actively participate in organizational life. For example, the leader asks subordinates to actively participate in decision-making processes, involves employees in problem solving, and so on. The leader creates opportunities for

followers to display ingenuity and imagination. The third factor, inspirational motivation, deals with intensifying the relationship between leader and subordinates. This activity bears fruit in the form of employees’ engagement in working toward organizational goals. What is more, by building emotional bonds within the organization, the leader gains employees’ loyalty. The last element, idealized influence, involves the leader’s powerful influence on the whole organizational entity. This concept involves setting a good example. Due to their self-awareness, leaders are able to control and change their own behavior; moreover, they are eager to pursue selfimprovement. Thus, when subordinates are following a transformational leader, everything they meet during the course of their work leads them to increase their knowledge, to discover new opportunities, and to develop their capacities: they change themselves. It should be emphasized that there is no one leadership model that fits every situation and every organization. Transactional leadership that deals with motivating subordinates toward task fulfillment on a day-to-day basis is based on exchange between leader and members. Leadership activities are devoted to the realization of intended aims. Transactional leadership is frequently ineffective due to the fact that it inhibits interactions between the leader and the followers. Continual punishment of subordinates and a fixation by the leader on making improvements do not inspire subordinates. Moreover, there is no fundamental principle that binds both sides. The leader’s effectiveness can be improved by operating on the basis of transformational leadership. In that model, the leader is flexible, consulting, and approachable. What is more, the transformational leader, being a charismatic individual, is able to build a strong emotional bond with his or her followers. The behavioral pattern displayed by a transformational leader strongly influences the actions of subordinates. Not only do leaders inspire followers to implement goal-directed strategies, but to some extent subordinates also influence the leader. Transformational leadership enhances communication within the organization, and enables the creation of a vision consistent with individuals’ hopes and desires. Thus, it seems to be the best tool to create an effective and highperformance workplace.

Trust

The most characteristic feature of transformational leadership is the extraordinary ability to perceive factors leading to transformation. Leaders and subordinates consequently achieve goals to a greater extent and with a wider scope; the organization therefore makes higher profits. The Bass model can apply to business, political, or social situations. Małgorzata Olimpia Bielenia See also Influence; Leadership

Further Readings Bass, B. M. (1990). Bass and Stodgill’s handbook of leadership. New York: Free Press. Bass, B., & Avolio, B. (1994). Improving organizational effectiveness through transformational leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper. Northouse, P. G. (2009). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS See Multinational Corporations

TRUST Trust is a complex phenomenon consisting of behavioral as well as cognitive and affective elements. Trusting behavior is generally characterized by risk. In the most basic case of interpersonal trust one individual—the trustor—is disposed to act in a way such that another individual—the trustee— is put in a position to do something disadvantageous or harmful to the trusting person. A standard example is that of a person, A, entrusting another, B, with something that A values. This will give B discretionary powers that may be used in undesired ways. In trusting, we intentionally accept being vulnerable to the actions of another person. We take these risks even though we might be in a position to rule out such risks. As rational individuals we engage in trusting behavior only if we are sufficiently certain that

675

those trusted will not let us down. This introduces the cognitive element of trust, namely trusting expectations. Persons are said to have trusting expectations if they expect another person not to abuse options given to this person as a result of trusting behavior. Trusting behavior, as well as trusting expectations, may be based on solid information about the situation of the trustee, his or her options, beliefs, and preferences. But trust, in some deeper sense, extends beyond such “pure reliance.” The affective character of deeper forms of trust is difficult to identify, and is the object of some dispute. It can certainly not be reduced to a simple characteristic nonpropositional feel. One way of trying to get a grip on it is by following a conception that can be traced back to Aristotle. An emotional attitude is, by this conception, characterized by the way its holder perceives the world. Two features of the characteristic perspective of a trustor seem to be crucial: first, the trustee is perceived as a person who can be held responsible for his or her acts. Second, the trustee is perceived as someone connected to oneself by shared aims or shared normative convictions. That the trustee is seen as a person driven by compatible motives and committed to certain normative standards is, of course, a source of trusting expectations and thus fosters trusting behavior. Both a personal attitude toward the trustee and normative connectedness in the sense described are without doubt characteristic of deeper forms of trust. They are emotional in that they cannot be understood as the result of rational considerations based on given information. By inducing certain patterns in the way in which the world is represented in thought, they rather form a certain frame for rational considerations. It has been debated whether affective elements of trust can play a decisive role in social interaction. But it seems that even in the distant relationships of economic exchange pure cognitive trust based on rational evaluation of given information may not suffice to establish any significant degree of trustful cooperation. There is considerable empirical evidence that, in fact, some shared normative frame is needed to stimulate and preserve cooperative exchange within groups and between groups. In typical trust relationships, the trustee will gain discretionary powers by the trusting moves of the trustor, who, in turn, can act in such ways just because he or she trusts. So both gain power in the

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Trust

simple Hobbesian sense: trust offers them additional present means to obtain future goods. The possibility of mutual gain is a typical feature of cooperative relationships. Conversely, most cooperative relationships exhibit the typical risks of trust. Thus, trust is an important requisite for social cooperation. The cooperative relationships of a person—his or her possibilities to engage in trusting relations as a trustor as well as a trustee—form an important social and economic asset. They are a central part of what is now called the social capital of that person. Societies characterized by a social structure that allows for a broad variety of cooperative trusting relationships and by a normative frame that encourages engaging in such relationships are particularly successful in several respects. Thus, Francis Fukuyama argues that the economic development of a country significantly depends on the capability of its citizens to enter trustful relationships with relative strangers, and Robert Putnam found that societies with a quality that he calls civicness, which is particularly characterized by private and public trust, are best suited to develop and efficiently make use of liberal democratic institutions. Sociologists claim that with the increasing complexity of the modern world, new and more abstract and impersonal forms of trust arise, reflecting the erosion of crucial prerequisites of interpersonal trust such as traditional bonds and enduring interaction with specific and identifiable others. Although trust in institutions may become more and more important for social cooperation, it seems unlikely that it will displace interpersonal trust altogether. Anthony Giddens names one reason for this: every institution needs a sufficient number of access points—persons who represent the institution effectively and cause interaction partners to transfer their personal trust in them to the institution as a whole. Hobbes thought that no trust was possible in the state of nature. As no one could be sufficiently

certain about the intentions of others, a first-strike policy was rational and cooperation impossible. According to this argument, it is only by the effective execution of sovereign power that the acts of others become predictable and dependable and thus that trust becomes possible. What Hobbes did not notice is that, in general, the execution of sovereign power presupposes the cooperation of at least some other individuals, not all of whom can be directly controlled by the sovereign. Thus, sovereign power itself seems to rest at least to some extent on interpersonal trust. From a modern, liberal point of view, the state is a cooperative enterprise intended to secure the individual interests of its citizens. To prevent the abuse of political power by authorities, efficient institutional control mechanisms are indispensable. Still, because complete control of those in power is hardly ever possible and—considering the complexities and the dynamic of modern societies—may, in fact, seem inappropriate in certain cases, democracy may not be viable without at least some trust in its representatives and institutions. Bernd Lahno See also Collective Action; Cooperation; Principal–Agent Relationship; Reputational Effects; Social Capital

Further Readings Braithwaite, V., & Levi, M. (Eds.). (1998). Trust and governance. New York: Russell Sage. Gambetta, D. (Ed.). (1988). Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations. New York: Basil Blackwell. Khalil, E. L. (Ed.). (2003). Trust: Critical studies in economic institutions (Vol. 3). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Kramer, R. M., & Tyler, T. R. (Eds.). (1996). Trust in organizations: Frontiers of theory and research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

U legislative process could implicate the opposition in the government’s overall performance, and in turn, blur the line of accountability. In other words, for a government to do good it needs to be able to do evil. However, it is not clear to what extent this amounts to an argument against the two-party system itself or for an upper house of limited powers. Defenders of bicameralism dispute the notion that government accountability is a one-stage game that only takes place during an election. One way to make the unicameral system conform to a standard of checks and balances on legislative power is to implement a supermajority rule under which support of two thirds of the assembly is required to pass legislation. This constraint would make it difficult for a “tyranny of the majority” to emerge in which a group of legislators is led by a mendacious or illiberal agenda setter. Moreover, it would ostensibly promote consensus among diverse political groups. Whether this would raise decisionmaking costs is less than obvious because legislating with dispatch is a benefit that may produce impetuosity in equal measure, which, arguably, is a decision-making cost also. Critics of this proposal would contend that constraints on legislative power can be achieved with lower decision-making costs in a bicameral system with a simple majority rule in each house. Supporters of unicameralism remain skeptical, however, because upper houses are often perceived as undemocratically favoring geographical minorities because the district magnitude for upper house electorates in many federal systems remains constant regardless of the population size

UNICAMERAL LEGISLATURE A unicameral system is one in which seats in the legislative branch are recruited for, and allotted to, a single assembly. Unicameral legislatures exist in democracies such as Denmark, Finland, Greece, Israel, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal, and Costa Rica, as well as frequently at the level of subnational government. Unicameralism is correlated to the size of polities by population. In states with populations lower than 100,000, 78% of legislatures are unicameral. Yet in states of over 10 million people, unicameralism becomes increasingly rare. As a concept, unicameralism is situated within the debate over the appropriate exercise of legislative power. Proponents of unicameralism deny the necessity of constraining legislative power by dividing the legislative branch into two houses with separate roles. Some ways in which this argument has been made is with reference to the two-party system or the supermajority rule. The battle lines of this debate lie between the need for assurances against imprudent or harmful legislative activity and the need to reduce decision-making costs and promote democratic practices. It could be argued that unicameral legislatures are appropriate for two-party systems in which voters elect a government based on the superior of two alternatives. Under such a system, government can only be accountable for the deeds it has performed on its own behalf. As such, any intervention by an opposition upper house in the 677

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of constituencies. One could remedy this by manipulating the rules of upper house recruitment. The problem, however, is achieving this in a manner that still allows upper houses to remain distinct in their role from lower houses. Without this differentiation, second chambers become redundant because their existence is premised on the virtue of allowing legislation to receive scrutiny from a variety of perspectives. Adam Packer See also Bicameral Legislature; Legislative Power

Further Readings Lijphart, A. (1999). Patterns of democracy: Government forms and performance in thirty-six countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mueller, D. C. (1996). Constitutional democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES When agents make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and under complex causal relations, their actions can have unintended consequences. These unforeseen outcomes can have profound implications for their own lives and the lives of others, even though the agents are not ordinarily thought to have power over those whom they affect. The concept of unintended consequences was first defined by the sociologist Robert Merton and is applicable to a wide range of issues in the social sciences. They are usually considered to be a result of purposive action, which is action chosen to achieve a specific goal. But habitual action can also lead to unintended consequences. Imperfect information is one of the major reasons why unforeseen consequences emerge. Our actions often have effects that we are unable to predict because we do not understand the complex causal processes surrounding them. Our beliefs about what is the most effective course of action to bring about the preferred outcome may also be in error. Changed circumstances can alter the results of our habitual action, thereby leading to unanticipated outcomes. Human error can also be a cause of unintended

consequences. We may misjudge our actions, or we might carry them out in a manner different from what we planned. These unintended consequences can dilute agent’s outcome power, as they do not have control over all the effects of their actions. At times, they might reach a different outcome from the one they wanted or add other, possibly undesirable outcomes to the one originally intended. Actions by the state often lead to unintended consequences that interfere with its power. This is due to the fact that state legislation and regulation are concerned with highly complex matters. A frequently cited example of how state regulation unintentionally can lead to an increase in undesirable behavior is the rise in organized crime during the Prohibition era in the United States. The unintended consequences of one actor’s actions might also empower or reduce the power of other actors in a way that does not necessarily affect their power. As an example, the highway system in New York was built in such a way that buses from poorer areas, where residents typically cannot afford cars, cannot pass beneath overpasses. While it is unlikely that this was part of the original plans, the construction of the highways has unintentionally reduced the power of those living in poor neighborhoods. Unintended consequences are not always easy to identify. First, it is often difficult to know what actors’ original objectives were. Second, unintended consequences are often the result of complex causal mechanisms, and it may be difficult to tell whether they result directly from an action. Often outcomes have multiple causes; for example, Prohibition was not the only reason for growth in organized crime. Unintended consequences are problematic both for actors whose power relations they change and for scholars, as they complicate the task of identifying causal mechanisms and making predictions. Zsuzsanna Chappell See also Causal Theories of Power; Collective Action Problem; Exercise Fallacy; Non Decision Making; Structural Power; Structuration; StructureInduced Equilibrium; Systematic Luck; Systemic Power

U.S. Electoral College, Power in

Further Readings Dowding, K. (1991). Rational choice and political power. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Merton, R. K. (1936). The unanticipated consequences of purposive social action. American Sociological Review, 1, 894–904.

U.S. ELECTORAL COLLEGE, POWER IN The president of the United States is elected not by a direct national popular vote, but by an electoral college system in which the popular votes in each separate state are aggregated by adding up electoral votes awarded on a winner-take-all basis to the plurality winner in each state. State electoral votes vary with population and at present range from 3 to 55. The U.S. Electoral College therefore generates the kind of weighted voting game susceptible to a priori voting power analysis using the various power indices; in particular, the question arises of whether and how much the power of voters varies from state to state. The U.S. Constitution provides that states have electoral votes equal in number to their total representation in Congress. Each state has two senators, while representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of population (though every state is guaranteed at least one representative). The resulting apportionment of electoral votes gives a distinct advantage to small states relative to straight apportionment by population. The size of the House of Representatives is now fixed at 435 members, there are 50 states, and the 23rd Amendment gives three electoral votes to the District of Columbia, so the total number of electoral votes at present is 435  100  3  538, with 270 votes required for election. (If no candidate receives this required majority, other provisions in the Constitution come into effect.) The Constitution leaves the mode of selection of presidential electors (the officials who actually cast electoral votes) up to each state to decide. Since the mid-1830s, the almost universal state practice has been that each party nominates a slate of elector candidates, equal in number to the state’s electoral votes and pledged to vote for the party’s presidential candidate. The voters choose between the two slates. The slate

679

that wins the most votes is elected and casts its bloc of electoral votes as pledged, producing the weighted voting game noted at the outset. This practice has been widely believed to give larger states an advantage in voting power that in some measure counterbalances the small-state advantage in apportionment. The development in the mid-1950s of the Shapley–Shubik voting power index provided a tool for evaluating a priori voting power in the Electoral College. While it is not possible to apply the Shapley–Shubik index directly to weighted voting games of the magnitude of the Electoral College, early computer simulations indicated that the expected bias in favor of larger states was quite modest. Since then other mathematical and computational techniques have been developed that can provide highly accurate estimates. Moreover, the rival Banzhaf (or Penrose–Banzhaf) voting power measure has since been proposed, which is (arguably) more appropriate than Shapley–Shubik for evaluating a priori voting power. Table 1 shows both the Shapley–Shubik and Banzhaf voting power of states in the present Electoral College, from which it is apparent that (a) the two indices provide very similar estimates of state voting power, and (b) state voting power is approximately proportional to electoral votes, though (c) the largest states—and especially the largest of all (California)—is somewhat advantaged relative to the apportionment of electoral votes. The last column shows the absolute Banzhaf value for each state, which has the following direct and useful interpretation. Suppose we know nothing about the workings of the Electoral College other than its formal rules, so our a priori expectation must be that states vote randomly, that is, as if independently flipping fair coins (the random voting or Bernoulli model). On this assumption, the absolute Banzhaf value is the probability that a state casts a decisive bloc of electoral votes that determines the outcome of the election. However, the 51-state weighted voting game presented in Table 1 is mostly a chimera. As noted above, a U.S. presidential election really is a twotier voting system in which the casting of electoral votes is determined by popular vote majorities within each state. In such a two-tier system, individual a priori voting power is the probability that the voter casts a decisive vote within the state and

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Table 1

U.S. Electoral College, Power in

A priori state voting power in the electoral college

EV

N

EV PROP

S–S INDEX

BANZHAF INDEX

ABSOLUTE BANZHAF

3

8

.005576

.005404

.005456

.022730

4

5

.007435

.007218

.007276

.030312

5

5

.009294

.009038

.009097

.037900

6

3

.011152

.010865

.010920

.045493

7

4

.013011

.012698

.012744

.053094

8

2

.014870

.014538

.014571

.060704

9

3

.016729

.016385

.016400

.068324

10

4

.018587

.018239

.018231

.075955

11

4

.020446

.020099

.020066

.083599

12

1

.022305

.021967

.021904

.091257

13

1

.024164

.023841

.023746

.098930

15

3

.027881

.027612

.027442

.114328

17

1

.031599

.031411

.031157

.129805

20

1

.037175

.037166

.036771

.153194

21

2

.039033

.039100

.038654

.161043

27

1

.050186

.050869

.050119

.208805

31

1

.057621

.058884

.057948

.241422

34

1

.063197

.064988

.063927

.266331

55

1

.102230

.110358

.114021

.475036

538

51

1.000000

1.000000

1.000000

4.166201

EV — Number of Electoral Votes N — Number of States EV PROP — Proportion of Electoral Votes S–S INDEX — Shapley–Shubik Index Value BANZHAF INDEX — (Relative) Banzhaf Index Value ABSOLUTE BANZHAF — Absolute Banzhaf Value Shapley–Shubik and Banzhaf Index Values calculated by ipgenf and ssgenf at http://www.warwick.ac/~ecaae/

that the state casts a decisive bloc of electoral votes, that is, individual voting power within the state times state voting power. Clearly, the first term is inversely related to the number of voters in the state. However, properties of the Banzhaf measure (and probability theory) tell us that it is inversely proportional not to the number of voters in the state, but (to a very good approximation) to the square root of this number. Accordingly individual a priori voting power in the two-tier system increases with the square root of the population of the state (in some degree counterbalanced by the

small-state advantage in apportionment, in small degree reinforced by the large-state advantage in voting power shown in Table 1, and among small states largely hidden by the unavoidable crudeness in apportioning House seats). This effect, first noted with explicit reference to the Electoral College by Banzhaf in 1968, may be dubbed the Banzhaf effect and is related to what Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover call Penrose’s square root rule. Table 2 shows individual a priori voting power in selected states in both absolute and relative terms (scaled so that the voting power of the least

U.S. Electoral College, Power in

Table 2 STATE

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A priori individual voting power in selected states ELECT SIZE

IND VP

EV

STATE VP

IND 2-T VP

REL VP

MT

392,640

.00127334

3

.022730

.00002894

1.000000

UT

970,074

.00081010

5

.037900

.00003070

1.060803

DE

340,488

.00136738

3

.022730

.00003108

1.073857

NH

537,107

.00108870

4

.030312

.00003300

1.140203

OK

1,500,107

.00065145

7

.053094

.00003459

1.195039

AK

272,771

.00152771

3

.022730

.00003472

1.199770

WS

2,329,521

.00052277

10

.075955

.00003971

1.371895

CO

1,870,085

.00058346

9

.068324

.00003986

1.377338

MD

2,302,057

.00052587

10

.075955

.00003994

1.380054

MA

2,756,442

.00048058

12

.091257

.00004386

1.515269

NC

3,498,990

.00042655

15

.114328

.00004877

1.684919

MI

4,317,893

.00038398

17

.129805

.00004984

1.722080

OH

4,933,195

.00035923

20

.153194

.00005503

1.901409

IL

5,394,875

.00034352

21

.161043

.00005532

1.911389

PA

5,334,862

.00034544

21

.161043

.00005563

1.922110

FL

6,951,810

.00030262

27

.208805

.00006319

2.183181

NY

8,242,552

.00027791

31

.241422

.00006709

2.318163

TX

9,066,167

.00026499

34

.266331

.00007057

2.438416

CA

14,715,957

.00020799

55

.475036

.00009880

3.413738

US

122,294,000

.00007215

538

—

.00007215

2.492845

ELECT SIZE — Size of Electorate [2000 Population × .4337, where .4337  2004 Total Presidential Vote/2000 U.S. Population] IND VP — Individual Absolute Banzhaf Voting Power within State [By Stirling’s approximation for n!, VP  (2/πn).5 where n  ELECT SIZE] STATE VP — State Absolute Banzhaf Voting Power (from Table 1) IND 2-T VP — Individual Banzhaf Voting Power in Two-Tier System [  IND VP x ST VP] REL VP — Relative Individual 2-T Voting Power (scaled so that minimum [Montana]  1)

favored voters is 1), while Figure 1 plots the relationship between state population and relative a priori voting power over all states. Voters in the most favored state (California) have almost three and one half times the voting power of voters in the least favored state. (Without the small-state apportionment advantage, this ratio would be about 10 to 1.) The underlying square root rule is indicated in Figure 1, which makes evident the small-state apportionment advantage, as well as the scattering that results as small states fall above or below House seat thresholds and California’s

advantage in state voting power. Figure 1 also shows individual voting power under direct popular vote, which is substantially greater than mean voting power under the Electoral College (also indicated)—indeed, it is greater than voting power in every state except California. Common critiques of the Banzhaf effect in the Electoral College rest fundamentally on the (indisputable) claim that the random voting model is in no way representative of empirical voting patterns. But these critiques overlook the fact that the Banzhaf (and Shapley–Shubik) measures pertain to

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U.S. Electoral College, Power in

4.0

Relative Individual Voting Power

3.5

Individual Voting Power Under Direct Popular Vote

3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5

Mean Individual Voting Power Under the Electoral College

1.0 Voting Power Proportional to Square Root of Number of Voters

0.5 0.0 0

Figure 1

5000 10000 15000 20000 25000 30000 35000 State Population (000s)

A priori individual voting by state under the Electoral College (and direct popular vote)

a priori voting power, measuring the power of states—and, in the two-tier version, of individual voters—in a way that takes account of the Electoral College voting rules but nothing else. A priori, a voter in California is three times more likely to cast a decisive vote than one in New Hampshire. But if we take account of recent voting patterns, poll results, and other information, a voter in New Hampshire may have a greater empirical (or a posteriori) probability of decisiveness in the upcoming election, and accordingly get more attention from the candidates and party organizations, than one in California. If it is only remotely related to empirical voting power in any particular election, the question arises of whether a priori voting power and the

Banzhaf effect should be of concern to political science and practice. Constitution makers arguably should—and to some extent must—design political institutions from behind a “veil of ignorance” concerning future political patterns. Accordingly, they should—and to some extent must—be concerned with how the institutions they are designing allocate a priori, rather than empirical, voting power. The framers of the U.S. Constitution did not require or expect electoral votes to be cast en bloc by states. While party politicians within states initially manipulated the rules for selecting presidential electors for immediate partisan advantage, in due course almost all states moved to the winnertake-all rule that gives rise to the Banzhaf effect. This dominant trend suggests that legislators in large states, operating behind a veil of ignorance concerning its long-term partisan implications, understood that doing so would enhance (insofar as other states had not done the same) or restore (insofar as other states had done the same) the influence of their state and its voters in presidential elections, and legislators in small states then had little choice but do the same. Nicholas R. Miller See also Banzhaf Value; Penrose Voting Power Measure; Power Indices; Shapley–Shubik Index; Square Root Rules; Voting Power; Weighted Voting

Further Readings Banzhaf, J. F., III. (1968). One man, 3.312 votes: A mathematical analysis of the Electoral College. Villanova Law Review, 13, 304–341. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

V VALUE

OF A

function can have values only of 1 (for winning coalitions) or 0 (for losing coalitions). Simple games are especially suited to representing voting situations, and value may be characterized as the voting power index. More generally, concepts proposed as power indices have been generalized as values and vice versa. The Penrose–Banzhaf– Coleman index and the Public Goods Index are examples of the former, the Tijs value of the latter. Some of these concepts have been axiomatically characterized, typically using axioms other than Shapley’s axiom of additivity. More recent studies have defined values for games with a priori unions between players. For the Shapley value, the earliest result was by Robert Aumann and Jacques Drèze in 1974, with later contributions by Roger Myerson. Guillermo Owen and others have proposed an analogous modification regarding the Banzhaf index.

GAME

The value of a game is a solution concept for cooperative games used in both forecasting (e.g., behavioral models) and normative contexts (e.g., fair division). Existence and uniqueness are guaranteed for this solution, which has two interpretations: the outcome of bilateral bargaining and the share-out resulting from bargaining based on the winnings of various possible coalitions. The concept of value of the first type was proposed by Frederik Zeuthen in 1930 for bargaining problems involving two persons. It was further developed by John F. Nash in 1950 and 1953. These solutions were then extended to games with more than two players by John C. Harsanyi in 1959, among others. The concept of value of the second type was introduced in 1951 by Lloyd S. Shapley and formalized by him in 1953. The Shapley value is characterized by four axioms: efficiency, symmetry, dummy player, and additivity. Its motivation was to overcome problems associated with the principal existing solution concept for n-person cooperative games, namely the stable sets introduced by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944. For such sets, neither uniqueness nor existence was guaranteed. The Shapley value, in contrast, guaranteed both existence and uniqueness. In 1954, Shapley, working with Martin Shubik, elaborated a version of the Shapley value for simple games, that is, for games where the characteristic

Gianfranco Gambarelli See also Banzhaf Value; Harsanyi, John C.; Owen Value; Penrose Voting Power Measure; Shapley–Shubik Index; Simple Games; Voting Power; Weighted Majority Games

Further Readings Harsanyi, J. C. (1956). Approaches to the bargaining problem before and after the theory of games: A critical discussion of Zeuthen’s, Hick’s and Nash’s theories. Econometrica, 24, 144–157. Nash, J. F. (1950). The bargaining problem. Econometrica, 18, 155–162. 683

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Variable-Sum Games

Owen, G. (1977). Values of games with a priori unions. In R. Henn & O. Moeschlin (Eds.), Mathematical economy and game theory (pp. 76–88). Berlin, Germany: Springer Verlag. Shapley, L. S. (1953). A value for n-person games. In H. W. Kuhn & A. W. Tucker (Eds.), Contributions to the theory of games II (pp. 307–317). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shapley, L. S., & Shubik, M. (1954). A method for evaluating the distributions of power in a committee system. American Political Science Review, 48, 787–792.

VARIABLE-SUM GAMES A game in strategic form is defined by a set of players, a set of strategies for each player, and a payoff function for player defined over all combinations of strategy choices made by the players. In the event that the sum of the payoffs of all of the players is constant, irrespectively of the strategy choices made, the game is constant-sum and, if the constant is zero, the game is zero-sum. All other games, which are the vast majority, are variable-sum. Two-person zero-sum games have special historical importance, because John von Neumann first proved the existence of an equilibrium in mixed strategies for such games. Von Neumann’s result was extended by John F. Nash, who showed that every (variable-sum) game with finite strategy sets has at least one equilibrium in mixed strategies. This is one of the most important theoretical results for noncooperative games. Variable-sum games are more difficult to analyze than zero-sum ones, and in general it is not possible to find equilibrium strategies for the players: only combinations of strategies correspond to equilibria. The most famous example of this kind is the Battle of the Sexes game (so-called because a couple wish to spend the evening together but one would rather do one activity, say go to the opera, while the other would sooner they both do something else, say go to the ball game). Such a game has two pure strategy equilibria plus one mixed equilibrium. Different equilibria in variable-sum games, in contrast to constant-sum games, typically give different payoffs to the players. Indeed, an equilibrium

may give a payoff to both (or all) players that are inferior to other (equilibrium or nonequilibrium) strategy combinations. The outstanding example of this possibility is the prisoner’s dilemma game, which has a unique equilibrium composed of dominant strategies. This problem is found in many strategic interactions, such as the Cournot oligopoly model, the “tragedy of the commons,” and collective action problems. Repeated interaction may overcome such inefficiency. The so-called folk theorem guarantees that, under appropriate conditions, essentially all of the efficient combinations of payoffs can be achieved as equilibria for the repeated game. The precise result is, however, critically dependent on details like the duration of the game, the fact that this duration is known in advance to the players, and the amount of information available to players on the characteristics of the other players. The fact that, loosely speaking, all of the efficient results can be achieved as equilibria for repeated games points to another difficulty: the indeterminacy offered by the equilibrium condition. This is a leitmotif for variable sum games that is to be found for many classes of games (among which are signaling games, a special case of games with incomplete information). This difficulty has fostered research agendas, generally known as equilibrium selection or refinement and initiated by Reinhardt Selten, that have yet to resolve this indeterminacy. Fioravante Patrone See also Game-Theoretical Approaches to Power

Further Reading Binmore, K. (2007). Playing for real: A text on game theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

VEHICLE FALLACY Vehicle fallacy is a term coined by Peter Morriss from a point made by Anthony Kenny. Both Morriss and Kenny start from the recognition that power refers to a capacity or disposition, not an event or occurrence. Philosophers who have

Veiled Women

investigated how we should understand the meanings of such dispositional terms have started with simple natural powers, such as solubility. To say that sugar is soluble in water, is to say (something like) that if sugar is put into water, it will dissolve. Some philosophers and social scientists have not been happy with this, because the property solubility appears to refer to something unobservable and mysterious, like an immortal soul or a Spirit of the Age driving history. So they have thought that any claim that an object has a dispositional property must really be making a different claim: a claim about observable properties. Thus Willard van Orman Quine said that, when we say that a sugar lump is soluble, we are really saying that sugar has a subvisible structure that makes it suitable for dissolving—even though we might not know what that subvisible structure is. Such a structure is what Kenny calls the vehicle of the disposition, and the vehicle fallacy is thinking that any statement that an object has a particular disposition is not really about the object, but about the vehicle that gives rise to the disposition. Quine thinks that disposition statements are not philosophically acceptable unless they can be rephrased, explicitly or implicitly, to be about some vehicle. Kenny and Morriss disagree, and think that disposition statements are perfectly acceptable as they are. As Stanley Benn pointed out, the power to extinguish a flame is possessed by water, wind, and pyrene foam; all these different things have the same power—the power to extinguish flames. Some doubtless have this power by virtue of a subvisible structure; others do not. Similarly, some political leaders have power because of their charisma, others because of the position they occupy in a social organization. The power is the same, but the vehicles differ. It is important to be clear about what the fallacy is that Kenny and Morriss have identified. They are certainly not denying that sugar’s solubility probably is something to do with its molecular structure. Rather, they are merely claiming that one can understand what is meant by saying that an object has a certain dispositional property, without making any implicit inference as to what might be responsible for this dispositional property. And we need to be able to say that it does have this power, before we can launch an inquiry into how it gets to have this power. Thus, the vehicle fallacy is solely

685

concerned with how we should understand the meaning of a dispositional sentence. Peter Morriss See also Ability; Exercise Fallacy

Further Readings Dowding, K. (2008). Power, capability and ableness: The fallacy of the vehicle fallacy. Contemporary Political Theory, 7, 238–258. Kenny, A. (1975).Will, freedom and power. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A philosophical analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

VEILED WOMEN Debates surrounding the wearing of the veil by Muslim women are becoming increasingly salient in many Western European nations. The Koran maintains that both men and women should dress modestly. However, the most contested issue is that of how women should dress. The two most quoted passages in the Koran relating to women’s clothing outline: Tell the faithful women to lower their gaze and guard their private parts and not display their beauty except what is apparent of it, and to extend their scarf to cover their bosom. Koran, 24:31 (English translation) O Prophet! Say to your wives and your daughters and the women of the faithful to draw their outer garments close around them; that is better that they will be recognized and not annoyed. Koran 33:59 (English translation) However, there is little consensus as to exactly how these injunctions should be interpreted. Traditions of veiling vary widely across Muslim societies and are reflective of cultural as well as religious commitments. Many women do not practice any form of veiling and argue that it is not a religious compulsion but is to be understood more as a cultural practice. In Europe the majority of women

686

Veiled Women

who choose to veil wear the hijab. This is generally interpreted to mean a square headscarf that covers the hair and neck. Other forms of veiling are more concealing, such as the niqab, which covers the entire face, leaving only an aperture for the eyes, or the burqa, which also covers the eyes with a translucent layer of cloth. It is these latter forms of dress that have become most controversial in Western Europe and North America. European countries have responded to the increased visibility of the veil in a number of ways. In France, the veil was prohibited in state schools in 2004 as part of a ban on the wearing of all religious symbols. In 2006, the Dutch and Italian parliaments both debated legislation that would forbid the wearing of dress that concealed the face of the wearer. In Britain, while there is no formal ban on any Islamic dress, state schools are free to set their own uniform policy and may prevent the wearing of the veil. These growing restrictions have been challenged in the form of protests, court cases, and tribunals by some Muslim women who claim that they represent a breach of their human rights. The objections to the veil stem from a number of sources. For some the veil is an issue of gender equality. They regard it as indicative of practices within Islam that are oppressive to women, that enforce their seclusion, deny their rights, and ensure the maintenance of patriarchal control. In other cases, debates surrounding the veil reflect the growing tensions concerning segregation within Western societies. Current policies favoring multiculturalism and the free expression of religious identity over previous policies of assimilation are increasingly being questioned. This is particularly evident in the political climate following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ongoing threat of terrorism and extremism. Such arguments are frequently invoked in debates in the Netherlands. Here the wearing of the veil is regarded as a barrier to successful integration and mutual understanding. In other societies, most notably in France and Turkey, the veil is regarded as an infringement upon longstanding traditions of secular nationalism. In contrast, a multiplicity of reasons as to why Muslim women may choose to adopt or to maintain Islamic forms of dress have been suggested. Some women rebut the charges of oppression directly by maintaining that veiling is an empowering practice. The veil can be understood as liberation from

Western forms of dress that heighten a superficial obsession with the appearance and sexual attractiveness of women. They argue that the veil diverts attention from the outward appearance of the wearer and forces people to engage on the basis of their character and intellect. Moreover, the veil frees women from unwanted sexual advances. It is also suggested, however, that this argument merely serves to affirm a blame-the-victim mentality and fails to address problematic male behavior. Veiling may also be perceived as a central expression of a deeply held religious commitment. Some women regard wearing the veil as a vital part of the Islamic faith. It is an act of worship that reflects the wishes of God and will bring them closer to him. For other women, the practice of veiling may be less a symbol of overt religious expression and more an adherence to cultural norms. It is suggested that young women often seek to fit in with what is deemed acceptable by their peer group, who may wield greater influence in their choices regarding the veil than their parents or their religious communities. Multiculturalism has made the expression of ethnic and religious identities more socially acceptable and sometimes even fashionable, meaning that women no longer feel obliged to adopt mainstream practices of dress. Wearing the veil may also be a direct political statement. An example of this would be the 1979 Iranian revolution when some women started to wear the veil as a symbol of resistance to the Shah’s regime. Following September 11th, 2001, many women reported that they wanted to reappraise and reaffirm their allegiance to Islam. Wearing the veil was one way that they felt they could reclaim a positive identification with their faith. Thus, wearing the veil is not in itself indicative of either oppression or emancipation. Rather it is the particular social, cultural, and political contexts in which the veil is worn and understood that will determine its meaning. Kate Allison See also Feminist Theories of Power; Religious Power

Further Readings Abu-Rabia, A. (2006). The veil and Muslim women in France: Religious and political aspects. Anthropology of the Middle East, 1(2), 89–107.

Veto Players Moghissi, H. (1999). Feminism and Islamic fundamentalism: The limits of postmodern analysis. London: Zed Books.

VETO PLAYERS Veto players are political actors whose consent is necessary to adopt a new policy. Put otherwise, they have veto power, which allows them to prevent a change to the status quo. The concept is crucial to the influential veto player theory developed by George Tsebelis. Building on earlier work in formal modeling and social choice, Tsebelis developed veto player theory to compare political systems in terms of their ability for policy change. A political system with a high number of veto players or with large ideological differences among veto players has high policy stability. High policy stability in turn can lead to government or regime instability as it becomes harder to adapt policy to changing circumstances. Furthermore, high policy stability increases bureaucratic and judicial independence, as acts by these branches cannot be easily overruled by new or more specific legislation. Finally, high policy stability limits the effect of agenda-setting power. The following summarizes the main points of veto player theory, discusses some criticisms of it, and briefly compares veto player theory to Ellen Immergut’s concept of veto points.

Veto Player Theory According to veto player theory, policy stability depends on the number of veto players and the differences among their preferences. Veto player theory distinguishes between institutional and partisan veto players. Institutional veto players are created by constitutional provisions that specify which actors have to give consent to pass a law. Partisan veto players are political actors who enjoy veto power due to political circumstances. For example, the consent of political parties who form the government and have a majority in the parliament are needed in parliamentary systems to enact new legislation. In some instances, other societal actors like interest groups or the military exercise veto power, even though the constitution

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does not assign a formal role in the lawmaking process to them. To identify the relevant number of veto players, one starts with the constitutional veto players and identifies the potential partisan veto players of which they are composed. For example, the constitution might specify that the laws have to be adopted by the government and the two chambers of a bicameral parliament each acting by simple majority. In other words, there are three institutional veto players. However, one has to take into account that none of the three are individual actors and identify the conditions under which the composite parts of each (e.g., cabinet members or representatives) can exercise their institutional veto power collectively. If political parties are able to discipline their members, the question is how many parties are needed to form the necessary majority in parliament and form the government. In our example, three parties may form the center-left government and a majority in the lower chamber, but one opposition party is needed to reach a majority in the upper chamber. Thus, the number of veto players is four, when we take the political situation into account. In addition, one has to consider the possibility of partisan veto players who are not part of the constitutionally designated set of veto players. The number of veto players in a political system can differ not only across time but also across policy fields. A central bank, for example, might be a veto player in monetary policy but lack veto power in other fields. In our example, the government might rely heavily on the political support of a major trade union, giving them de facto veto power on government policy and thus increasing the count of partisan veto players to five. Finally, an absorption rule applies, because some veto players may be redundant, for example because they have identical policy positions. In our example, the Social Democratic Party in government and the trade union might have exactly the same preferences. Thus, the actual number of veto players is four. Veto player theory is a neoinstitutionalist theory, as it holds that policy outcomes can be explained by the preferences of the actors involved and the institutions governing the decision-making process. It is also a rational choice theory of politics, as it assumes that actors maximize their utility. Moreover, Tsebelis relies on spatial models to prove his propositions on the effect of the

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number of veto players and the policy differences between veto players on policy stability. In particular, Tsebelis uses the concepts of a win-set of the status quo and the core. Spatial models build on the notion that both political actors and public policies can be represented as positions in a political space. For example, political scientists as well as political commentary often refer to a position as being leftist or rightwing, which indicates that policy stances can be depicted on a left–right dimension. Thus, political actors judge a policy proposal on how close it is to their most preferred policy (ideal point). Figure 1 provides an example of a two-dimensional policy space with two political actors whose ideal points are depicted as the points A and B respectively. Consider initially a situation in which A is the only veto player and is considering three proposals for a new policy (x, y, z). The location of the policy proposals in the policy space relative to A’s ideal point represent A’s evaluation of these

polices. The closer a policy is to A’s ideal point, the higher is the utility A attaches to this proposal. In Figure 1, A would prefer x to y and y to z (and x to z) based on their distances to its ideal position. To see this it is helpful to draw in indifference curves. Indifference curves form the set of points that yield the same utility as a given policy. If we assume that the policy dimensions are independent of each other and equally important, we can use circular indifference curves (otherwise they would be elliptical). Figure 1 gives the indifference curve of A for policy y. It is constructed by drawing a circle that has A’s ideal point as its center and goes through policy y. A is indifferent between y and any other point on the circle as they are all equally far away from A’s ideal point. Points inside A’s indifference curve vis-à-vis y, such as x, are closer to A’s ideal point than y and hence preferred to y. Points outside the indifference curve, such as z, are farther away from A’s ideal point than y and consequently A would prefer y to them. Note that A’s

Dimension 1 y

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A B’s indifference curve for sq

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A’s indifference curve for y Dimension 2 Win-set of the status quo if A is the only veto player Win-set of the status quo if A and B are veto players

Figure 1

Veto players, win-sets, and policy stability

Veto Players

assessment is purely based on the distances between A’s ideal point and prospective policies, not the direction. Usually, a policy is already in place that defines the status quo. A veto player would only adopt a new policy if it makes him or her better off than the status quo, that is, if it is inside his or her indifference curve vis-à-vis the status quo. In Figure 1, A is indifferent between the status quo and y but would prefer x to the status quo. Policy stability can be gauged by the size of the win-set of the status quo: the number of policies that can defeat the status quo. The larger the win-set, the lower the policy stability. In our initial example, there is only one veto player. Hence, all policies that are preferred by A to the status quo could defeat the status quo. Consequently, the area inside A’s indifference curve vis-àvis the status quo (the simply-hatched area) denotes the win-set of the status quo. If there are additional veto players, a new policy needs the approval of all of them to replace the status quo. Consider a situation in which both A and B are veto players. A policy that can defeat the status quo has to be inside the indifference curves vis-à-vis the status quo of all veto players; otherwise it would fail to get approval by at least one of them. Thus, the win-set of the status quo is formed by the intersection of the indifference curves of A and B vis-à-vis the status quo (cross-hatched area). Note that the win-set of the status quo if both A and B are veto players is smaller than the one for A as the only veto player. Adding a veto player increases policy stability and decreases the effect of agenda-setting power. A veto player has agendasetting power if he or she can make a “take-it-orleave-it” proposal to the other veto players. That player will choose the point closest to his or her ideal position while still being acceptable to the other veto players (i.e., inside the win-set of the status quo). In Figure 1, the outcome will be oA if A is the agenda-setter and oB if B is the agendasetter. The smaller the win-set, the smaller is the effect of agenda-setting power. Another measure of policy stability is the size of the core. The core is the set of points that cannot be defeated, that is, have empty win-sets. Thus there is no policy that all veto players would prefer to a policy that is located inside the core. Consider the scenario in Figure 2, in which A, B, and C are veto players. Policy x has a nonempty win-set. For

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example, policy y would be preferred by all three veto players to policy x. Thus, x is not part of the core. In contrast, y has an empty win-set. There is no intersection of the indifference curves of A, B, and C for policy y. In other words, A, B, and C could not agree on changing policy y as they have diametrically opposed preferences. A wants to move the policy upward and to the left, B wants to move it downward, and C wants to move it to the right. Indeed, all policies that lie between the ideal points of the veto players (dotted triangle) have an empty win-set and thus form the core. Once a policy is inside the core, it cannot be changed (unless a veto player is eliminated or changes his or her position). The bigger the core, the more points cannot be changed and hence the greater is policy stability. Adding a veto player increases the size of the core unless the ideal position of the new veto player lies inside the core of the original veto players. In Figure 3, the core for three veto players A, B, and C is denoted by the cross-hatched area. When a veto player D, whose ideal point lies outside the core of the original veto players, is added, the core grows (by the hatched area to the left) and policy stability increases. In contrast, adding a veto player whose ideal point lies inside the original core (e.g., E), or is identical to the one of an existing veto player, does not change the size of the core, illustrating Tsebelis’s absorption rule. The effect of adding a veto player thus depends on his or her policy preferences relative to those of the original veto players. Policy stability is also affected by the preference heterogeneity of veto players. Increasing the difference between the ideal points of veto players leads to higher policy stability. If C’s ideal point were, for example, to move away from A and B (e.g., to C), the size of the core (and hence policy stability) would increase. Greater policy stability implies more bureaucratic and judicial discretion. Agents charged with implementing policy (e.g., bureaucracy and courts) can depart from a policy as long as they stay within the core because their principals (e.g., the government and parliament) cannot change and overrule these policies. These results were formally derived for individual veto players. Many political actors, however, are collective actors that are composed of members with different policy preferences and do

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A

y

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not decide by unanimity. Using results from the social choice literature, Tsebelis argues that his findings are reasonable approximations for situations involving collective veto players. In order to apply veto player theory, analysts must be able to identify veto players and their policy preferences. In some instances, scholars examining the same political system have come to different conclusions regarding these questions, highlighting the need to justify conclusions carefully. For example, scholars disagree on whether or not opposition parties should be counted in the

case of minority governments. Similarly, there is the question of whether or not all parties in a coalition government should be counted when the coalition includes more than the necessary number of parties for a majority in parliament. Furthermore, one could argue about the role of constitutional courts. More fundamentally, veto player theory describes actors’ preferences only in terms of policy. However, politicians may not be pure policy-seeking actors but may also take into account who can take credit for a new policy, and so forth. Thus, some scholars have argued

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Veto players, the core, and policy stability

for distinguishing between various types of actors with veto power.

Veto Players and Veto Points The consequences of the institutional setting and veto power on policy outcomes have also been addressed by Ellen Immergut’s concept of veto points. In her comparative study of the development of health policy in Western Europe, Immergut stresses the different opportunities the political system presented to the medical profession to thwart reform attempts by the executive. Veto points are created by the constitutional rules that govern where in the decision-making process a veto can be exercised and by political circumstances. For example, parliament represents a veto point if it can overturn the decision of the executive and if it is not controlled by the same party as the executive. Similarly, the electoral arena forms a veto point if there is a possibility of a referendum and the opinion of the electorate has shifted away

from the government majority. Interest groups can utilize these veto points to block legislation. Political systems differ in their set of veto points, which affects the ability of interest groups to influence decision making and subsequently leads to different policy outcomes. Immergut’s theoretical framework is similar to veto player theory in explaining the possibility of policy change in terms of veto opportunities, which are determined by rules of the game and political circumstances. Because of her interest in the role of an interest group (i.e., the medical profession) in a particular policy field (i.e., health policy), her conceptualization of interest groups and their importance differs from that of veto player theory. Rather than being potential veto players, interest groups try to persuade actors to block legislation at existing veto points. Nevertheless, they are crucial for her depiction of the policy-making process. Furthermore, she envisages the decision-making process as a sequence of decisions (or possible vetoes), which draws more attention to the

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temporal dimension of policy making than does veto player theory. Andreas Warntjen See also Agenda Power; Agenda Setters; Spatial Voting Analysis; Veto Power

Further Readings Ganghof, S., & Bräuninger, T. (2006). Government status and legislative behaviour. Party Politics, 12(4), 521–539. Immergut, E. (1992). Health politics, interests and institutions in Western Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kaiser, A. (1997). Types of democracy: From classical to new institutionalism. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 9(4), 419–444. Tsebelis, G. (2002). Veto players: How political institutions work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

VETO POWER An actor has veto power if an outcome cannot be reached without his or her approval. An actor who has veto power can ensure that he or she is not made worse off than under the status quo. A veto player is an actor who has (ex post) veto power. We can distinguish between veto power as a negative power and positive powers such as agendasetting power. Veto power is generally a weaker form of power than agenda-setting. Veto power can have various sources. If an agreement requires unanimity, for example, every actor enjoys veto power. In some instances, specific actors have been granted veto power by law. For example, under the U.S. Constitution, the president has veto power in the legislative process, though it is qualified by the fact that Congress can override it by a two-thirds majority vote in both houses. Each of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council has an (unqualified) veto power. In contrast to such de jure veto power, some actors enjoy de facto veto power even when they are not formally involved in a decision. For example, important social groups (e.g., trade

unions) might exercise de facto veto power over pieces of legislation because parliamentarians rely on their support to stay in office. An important distinction involves the question of when veto power can be wielded. Ex ante veto power, often called gatekeeping power, allows an actor to prevent any action from being taken. For example, it is more or less the case that the U.S. House of Representatives cannot pass any bill on an issue unless the House committee with appropriate jurisdiction has reported a bill to the floor. In deciding whether or not to use its veto power, the committee (or other actor with gatekeeping power) will compare the current policy (status quo) to the likely outcome of a new decision. Actors who expect the outcome of the discussion to be less beneficial to them than the status quo can exercise their gatekeeping power and preserve the status quo. In contrast, ex post veto power gives actors the opportunity to exercise a veto after the end of a decision-making process. Thus, an actor with ex post veto power can effectively choose between the status quo and the outcome of the new discussion. However, ex post veto power can sometimes be used in an offensive, and somewhat ex ante, fashion. For example, a president can threaten to veto legislation passed by Congress if it does not meet his or her stated demands: if this threat is credible, Congress is forced to choose between his or her preferred legislation (if Congress gives in to the threat) and the status quo (otherwise). The effectiveness of any type of veto power depends on the preference configuration of the actors and the location of the status quo. If the status quo is the most preferred policy of the veto player, no policy change is possible even if all other actors involved in the decision would prefer a change in policy. Thus, veto power has a strong effect in this situation. In contrast, if the preferences of the actors are aligned and the veto player agrees with the other actors on the undesirability of the status quo he or she will not use his or her veto power. Hence, veto power would be inconsequential. Spatial voting models provide an analytical tool to compare the effect of veto power based on the preference configuration, the location of the status quo, and the distribution of veto power. Andreas Warntjen

Vote-Maximizing Parties See also Agenda Power; Agenda Setters; Spatial Voting Analysis; Veto Players

Further Readings Moser, P. (2000). The political economy of democratic institutions. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Tsebelis, G. (2002). Veto players: How political institutions work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

VOTE-MAXIMIZING PARTIES Typically, spatial models of voting and elections are based on the behavioral assumption that political parties competing in elections seek to garner the highest number of ballots possible and thereby obtain governmental power. In other words, they are vote-maximizing parties. The Downsian proximity spatial model, and many derivatives thereof, arrive at the median voter convergence result in part by making the vote-maximizing party assumption. Parties, in these basic models, are simply groups of individuals who promote candidates to seek governmental power. Note that, in contrast to more sociological accounts, parties are assumed to propose policy in order to win office, rather than winning office to implement particular policies. Consider Figure 1: here the (approximately symmetric, unimodel) distribution of voters is bisected by the broken line that represents a median (middle) voter’s ideal point. The x-axis is some unidimensional, say “left–right,” space. L represents the electoral position of a party on the left, and R the position of a party on the right. If voters cast their ballots according to a proximity rule—that is, they vote for the party closest to them in space—then party R will clearly win more votes than party L. The outcome, by assumption, is that party R wins governmental office. Notice that vote maximization drives both parties to place themselves as close as possible to the median voter. The model, and the assumption of vote maximization, was originally designed to fit U.S. presidential elections—in which the entire country is the constituency and “winner takes all”—especially for the mid- to late20th century. In these models, vote maximization

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is simply the means to a governmental end; to wit, there is an uncertainty as to whether, independently of actually winning office, more votes are considered a good in and of themselves for parties. Tinkering with the Downsian model in relatively small ways can lead to nonconvergence, even while maintaining vote maximization. Suppose, for example, that voters in the tails of the distribution in Figure 1 disproportionately abstain as the parties move away from them toward the median. In this case, a party may maximize votes by locating away from the median to shore up its base support. Alternatively, theorists have suggested that parties are more complicated organizations than the “black box” logic above suggests. That is, they have “grassroots” members, usually more ideologically extreme and committed than the median voter in the population. If these members have power over the electoral profile of their party, or the party leaders have some other reason to care more about policy than votes, vote maximization may, again, be an overly crude assumption. Both theoretically and empirically, the assumptions of vote-maximizing parties have been deemed appropriate for plurality or majoritarian constituencies (be they districts or nations). Outside of the United States, commentators have discussed vote maximization, median voter convergence, and the proximity model with respect to the elections of Tony Blair in the United Kingdom and Gerhard Schröder in Germany.

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Figure 1

Vote-maximizing parties and median voter convergence

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Directional spatial models posit that voters perceive themselves as on a particular “side” of an ideological scale and consider voting only for candidates on the same side. Importantly, within their side, voters favor the candidate or party most removed (i.e., farther) from their own location. A vote-maximizing party, then, will move away from voters in ideological space and toward extremes. Arthur Spirling See also Minimal Winning Coalition; Pivotal Politics; Political Parties

Further Readings Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York: Harper & Row.

VOTING Voting, which can take many forms, influences the allocation of power at many different levels of office. The most prominent form of voting selects politicians and parties contending for national office and provides ordinary citizens with the opportunity to weigh the performance of incumbents and decide whether to reelect them or vote in new officeholders. This system of reward or punishment gives ordinary people power over the political process by determining how political power is configured for the next few years. While voting in national elections is most conspicuous, citizens have many additional occasions for the opportunity to vote, including state, provincial, or regional elections; local elections; referendums (very common in Switzerland); and initiatives (prominent in California and some other U.S. states). These elections generally attract much lower turnout and attention than national elections, relatively little hinges on their outcomes, and citizens often do not pay much attention to them. Voting can play an effective role in equalizing political participation. Whereas other forms of political participation (such as joining a political party or contacting a politician) are somewhat demanding in terms of time, resources, and skills,

voting is an activity easily available to most citizens. For this reason, many other forms of political participation are skewed toward the wealthy and highly educated. In contrast, voting involves an extremely wide variety of individuals, many who participate in politics in no other way but through voting, and working-class parties often mobilize those who would be excluded from participation on the basis of their resources. Voting, then, is seen by many as the sine qua non of political participation. For ordinary citizens who may not participate in politics beyond the ballot box, it is one of the very few ways they can exert power over their political leaders. Voting is an opportunity for all citizens to express their preferences and voice their grievances. While the origins of voting date back several thousand years, voting rights expanded rapidly in the 19th century, when many countries extended voting rights to those who did not own property, and in the 20th century, when women and many minorities obtained the right to vote and the legal voting age was reduced to 18 in many democracies. In the wave of democratization in the late 20th century, many former subjects became voting citizens. Electoral systems determine how the electorate’s votes are translated into political power. In majoritarian systems, voters typically choose between two major political parties and give one of them governing authority, which it may exercise with little constraint if its majority is large or within narrow limits if its majority is small. In proportional representation systems, such as are common on the European continent, voters typically can choose among several parties; typically, none can govern on its own, forcing parties to form coalition governments. Other institutional characteristics, such as the relatively costly registration laws in many U.S. states, can influence how many (and which) citizens actually vote. In a few established democracies (notably Australia and Belgium) voting is compulsory. In the 21st century, various concerns about voting have arisen. Voter turnout has declined in many established democracies, prompting concerns about who exactly is voting and the representativeness of the active electorate. A particular concern with new and emerging democracies relates to the limitations of voting when not

Voting Paradoxes

accompanied by a free press or a healthy civil society. Another debate concerns the argument that the importance of voting has lessened as a more cognitively capable electorate express themselves in more sophisticated ways. Rather than the relatively low-impact activity of voting, new political actions such as protesting or working together with others on political issues may have a greater and increasing impact. Because of the low impact and infrequent nature of voting in national elections, some have called for greater citizen input between elections by means of protesting, contacting politicians, and other forms of citizen advocacy. Some call for more frequent referendums or other means to formalize these processes by creating direct democracy, wherein citizens have greater input into political decision making. That said, the importance of voting remains unrivalled in terms of the numbers of people who participate. It is the one occasion in the election cycle when most of the public pay at least some attention to politics. For this reason, parties and candidates spend much of their time trying to capture people’s vote. The study of elections—sometimes called psephology—has enhanced our understanding of the reasons why people vote or fail to vote. National election studies, other academic surveys, and commercial and private polling can identify who is voting and identify various influences on the vote such as how trust effects voting and whether people are active in other forms of political participation. Recent comparative surveys focus on cross-national similarities or differences and institutional effects on voting. These studies are becoming more widespread and in the future will considerably enhance our understanding of what motivates voters. Aaron Martin See also Democracy; Elections; Qualified Majority Voting; Voting Paradoxes; Voting Power

Further Readings Franklin, M. (2004). Voter turnout and the dynamics of electoral competition in established democracies since 1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lijphart, A. (1999). Patterns of democracy: Government forms and performance in thirty-six countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Topf, R. (1995). Electoral participation. In H. Klingemann & D. Fuchs (Eds.), Citizens and the state (pp. 27–51). New York: Oxford University Press. Wolfinger, R. E., & Rosenstone, S. J. (1980). Who votes? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

VOTING PARADOXES Voting paradoxes are unexpected and counterintuitive outcomes of voting. Very often one does not actually observe the paradoxes even though they have occurred, because the information needed for the observation is not available. For example, the earliest voting paradox, today known as Borda’s paradox, may occur when plurality voting is used, so that each voter votes for a single (presumably most preferred) candidate; but one needs information about the voters’ preferences over all candidates to discover whether the paradox has occurred.

Condorcet’s Paradox Some paradoxes arise because we erroneously attribute to collective bodies the same properties as we assign to individuals. A case in point is Condorcet’s voting paradox, also known as the phenomenon of cyclic majorities. Even though each individual in a voting body may have a (transitive) preference ordering over the alternatives or candidates, the collective choices based on pairwise majority comparisons may result in a preference cycle: A is better than B, B is better than C, but C is better than A. Suppose that a group of three persons, 1, 2, and 3, is to elect a person from a set of three applicants, Brown, Jones, and Smith, for a position. Suppose that Elector 1 considers Brown best, Jones the second best, and Smith third. Elector 2’s ranking, in turn, is Jones, Smith, Brown, while Elector 3’s preference is Smith, Brown, Jones. As is common in voting bodies, two candidates may be paired in an initial vote and the winner is then paired with the third candidate (and so on if there are more than three candidates), with the candidate surviving the final vote declared the overall winner. Suppose that Brown and Smith are first paired. Elector 1 prefers Brown, Elector 2 Smith, and Elector 3

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Smith. Hence, Smith gets the majority of votes and is paired in the second vote with Jones. Now, Jones gets two votes and Smith one. Hence, Jones is the overall winner. The initial paradox consists in the observation that Brown, eliminated on the first vote, would have beaten Jones. The underlying paradox is that majority preference is cyclical: Brown is beaten by Smith, Smith is beaten by Jones, and Jones is beaten by Brown. Thus any of the candidates can be elected, given an appropriate order for pairing them. This is Condorcet’s paradox, named after the 18th-century French social philosopher Marquis de Condorcet. The method of pairwise majority comparisons where two comparisons are conducted for three candidates, three comparisons for four candidates, and, in general, k − 1 comparisons for k candidates, which underlies Condorcet’s paradox, is based on the mistaken assumption that if candidate A beats candidate B, A also beats all other candidates that B beats. In the above example, even though the declared overall winner Jones defeats Smith—the winner of the first contest—he does not defeat Brown, the loser of the first contest. In fact, Condorcet’s paradox can be expressed as the possibility that no matter which candidate is elected, a majority of voters will be frustrated because they would have preferred another candidate to the elected one.

Borda’s Paradox Borda’s paradox antedates Condorcet’s by some 15 years. It involves a contradiction between two intuitively plausible notions related to winning: one that says that whichever candidate has the most first preferences is the winner, and the other that says that a candidate which beats every other candidate in pairwise majority contests is the winner (if such a candidate exists). A conflict between these two notions is, however, possible. In other words, it is possible that the candidate receiving the plurality of votes is beaten by all other candidates in pairwise majority contests. Consider an example in which nine voters make a choice from among three candidates, Brown, Jones, and Smith, using the one-person−onevote (plurality) method. Let us assume that four voters have the preference ranking Brown, Jones, Smith; three voters the ranking Jones, Smith,

Brown; and two voters the ranking Smith, Jones, Brown. If all vote according to their preferences, Brown gets four, Jones three, and Smith two votes whereupon Brown wins by plurality of votes. Borda’s paradox is uncovered when one observes that Brown would have been defeated by both Jones and Smith in pairwise majority contests. Jones would have beaten Brown with five votes against four, and Smith would have defeated Brown by five votes to four as well. Hence, the plurality winner Brown would have lost in pairwise majority comparisons to any other candidate. In modern terminology, Brown is a Condorcet loser.

Ostrogorski’s Paradox Ostrogorski’s paradox differs from the preceding ones in focusing on the composition of alternatives to be voted upon. Its natural setting is the electoral competition in which parties are identifiable to the voters in terms of their stand on certain central issues, such as private ownership of firearms, legalization of cannabis, prohibition of bullfights, and so on. Each voter is assumed to know which party is closest to his or her stand on each issue. When choosing which party to vote for, the voter is assumed to choose the party closest to his or her opinion on more issues than any other party. The paradox emerges when it turns out that the party that wins the majority of the parliament seats would have lost on all issues had the election been conducted one issue at a time. The paradox bears the name of Moise Ostrogorski, a Russian Ministry of Justice official, parliamentarian, and political theorist whose magnum opus, a two-volume treatise on the organization of political parties, appeared in 1903.

Anscombe’s Paradox Similar to, but not equivalent with, Ostrogorski’s paradox is Anscombe’s paradox. It also occurs in situations involving several issues that are approved or rejected in a sequence. If the simple majority principle is used, it may happen that a majority of voters ends up on the losing side on a majority of issues. Because the majority is by definition capable of determining the voting outcomes, the paradox is obviously an invitation to cooperative voting and vote-trading among the majority.

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However, in large-scale voting this may not be feasible. Anscombe’s paradox was introduced in the 1970s. Of more recent origin is the paradox of multiple elections. To give an instance of this paradox, consider a voting body that consists of three voters. They vote three distinct proposals A, B, and C up or down by a simple majority. Suppose that Voter 1’s voting pattern is no-yes-yes, that is, he or she votes against A, but for B and C. Voter 2, in turn, votes yes-no-yes, and Voter 3 yes-yes-no. Hence all proposals are passed by a simple majority of votes. The paradox is that no voter wanted this outcome: Voter 1 wanted A to fail; Voter 2, B to fail; and Voter 3, C to fail. With three voters and three issues, it may not be surprising that no voter gets exactly the outcome he or she deems best. However, with three million voters, it may come as a surprise. Yet, it may happen in large voting bodies as well; we may simply multiply the voting patterns by any constant we like and get the same outcome.

Monotonicity Paradoxes Ostrogorski’s and Anscombe’s paradoxes, along with the paradox of multiple elections, can be characterized as compound majority paradoxes. Another important class of voting paradoxes consists of monotonicity paradoxes. Monotonicity is a property that characterizes many voting procedures, for example, plurality voting and the Borda count. It is a requirement that additional support for a candidate never harms him or her if no other changes in voter opinions occur. More specifically, under monotonic voting rules, if a candidate wins an election, he or she also wins if his or her support increases, ceteris paribus. The additional support paradox is a possibility present when nonmonotonic voting systems are used. A case in point is the plurality runoff system used in presidential elections in many countries. Under this system each voter is to vote for one candidate. If one candidate receives more than 50% of the votes, he or she is elected. Otherwise, there is a runoff between those two candidates who got most votes. In the runoff each voter votes for one of these two and whichever wins is the winner. This system is nonmonotonic because it may happen that a candidate wins on the second round, but would have lost if he or she had received more votes on the first

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round. This is possible if the overall winner would defeat one but not all possible opponents in a pairwise comparison. Systems that are nonmonotonic are also subject to the no-show paradox. Like the additional support paradox, it is based on hypothetical reasoning. More specifically, it compares the observed voting outcome with one that would have emerged had some group of voters abstained. If the outcome in the latter case would be preferable—from the group’s point of view—to the observed one, then an instance of the no-show paradox has occurred. The no-show paradox is very closely related to the monotonicity one, but not equivalent with the latter. Its significance for the theory and practice of elections is perhaps more marked because the possibility of the no-show paradox seems to undermine the very rationale of voting. If by not voting you may increase your favorite’s chances of being elected (from what those chances would have been had you voted according to your preferences), then the institution of voting as “going to the people” is in serious doubt. The monotonicity paradoxes are procedure specific; some procedures are vulnerable to them, others are not. Systems vulnerable to both types of monotonicity paradoxes include two widely used procedures, namely, plurality runoff and single transferable vote. Monotonic methods, that is, those invulnerable to monotonicity paradoxes, include plurality voting and the Borda count. These are also invulnerable to the no-show paradox.

Intraprofile Paradoxes Another group of paradoxes of voting can be called intraprofile paradoxes. These are procedure specific as well. Perhaps the most dramatic of them is the violation of the Pareto criterion. This criterion states that if in a voting body every voter prefers candidate A to candidate B, then B is not elected. It does not state that under these circumstances A should be elected, but rules out B for the sound reason that there is an alternative that is preferred to it by everyone. Procedures vulnerable to Pareto violations are not common among voting procedures, but there are widely used parliamentary voting procedures—successive and amendment methods—where a violation may occur.

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Violation of consistency is another intraprofile paradox. To define inconsistency, consider a voting body, a set of voter preferences over a set of candidates, and a voting procedure. Suppose that the voter set is partitioned into two subsets and that these subsets cast their ballots separately and the results are computed in both subsets. Suppose, moreover, that the same candidate—say A—wins in both subsets. Consistency is the requirement that under these circumstances the same candidate A should also win if all ballots are counted together, that is, without partitioning. The consistency paradox occurs whenever this is not the case. Unlike the Pareto violation, this type of paradox can occur under several large-scale election procedures, such as the plurality runoff and single transferable vote. On the other hand, plurality voting and the Borda count are consistent methods and thus invulnerable to this paradox.

The Alabama Paradox The electoral systems sometimes give rise to yet another class of paradoxes: those related to representation. The best known of them is the Alabama paradox, which takes its name from an incident in U.S. electoral history in the late 19th century when the state of Alabama was about to rejoin the Union. The number of seats each state had in the House of Representatives was in those days determined proportionally using Hamilton’s formula, which is in Europe better known as the greatest remainders rule. This rule is based on the following equation:

299 seats, but to only 7 seats if the total number of seats were 300. This paradoxical observation was a factor in the eventual abandonment of Hamilton’s formula in the apportionment process in the United States. In some other countries it is, however, still used in the proportional allocation of seats to constituencies.

Conclusion Finally, the very act of voting has been seen as paradoxical. Indeed, the term paradox of voting is sometimes used to refer to the alleged unintelligibility of the widespread custom of going to the polls and casting a vote. After all, the probability that a single vote would have any effect whatsoever on the election outcome is typically very close to zero. On the other hand, going to the polls is accompanied by costs in terms of time and effort. So, why do reasonable people vote? Various calculi have been invented to render the act of voting individually rational. Some of these invoke feeling of regret ensuing from the eventual loss of one’s favorite by a very close margin. Others refer to collectivistic considerations such as the satisfaction gained from performing one’s duty. Theoretically, the incentives to voting may differ in different voting systems. For example, one might expect that systems vulnerable to the no-show paradox provide fewer incentives to vote than those invulnerable to it. One would, thus, expect that the turnout in plurality elections would be higher, ceteris paribus, than in plurality runoff ones. However, empirical observations do not uniformly support such expectation. Hannu Nurmi

V(I) V  S(I) S. Here V(I) denotes the number of voters in state I, V the total number of voters, S(I) the seats assigned to state I, and S the total number of seats in the legislature. Solving for S(I) yields S(I)  (S x V(I)) V, which typically is not an integer. To achieve integer numbered seat allocation, Hamilton’s formula first allocates each state I the integer part of S(I). Because the sum total of seats so allocated is typically less than S, the remaining seats are assigned to states in the order of size of the decimal parts of S(I). It turned out that when joining, the state of Alabama would have been entitled by Hamilton’s formula to 8 seats if the House were to consist of

See also Collective Action Problem; Qualified Majority Voting

Further Readings Balinski, M., & Young, H. P. (1982). Fair representation: Meeting the ideal of one man, one vote. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Brams, S. J. (1976). Paradoxes in politics: An introduction to the nonobvious in political science. New York: Free Press. Fishburn, P. C. (1982). Monotonicity paradoxes in the theory of elections. Discrete Applied Mathematics, 4, 119–134.

Voting Power Nurmi, H. (1999). Voting paradoxes and how to deal with them. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Verlag. Ratliff, T. (2003). Some startling paradoxes when electing committees. Social Choice and Welfare, 21, 433–454. Saari, D. G. (1999). Explaining all three-alternative voting outcomes. Journal of Economic Theory, 87, 313–355. Saari, D. G. (2001). Chaotic elections! A mathematician looks at voting. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society. Saari, D. G. (2001). Decisions and elections. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

VOTING POWER Voting power, in contrast to the number of votes an actor possesses, is the ability of an actor to influence the outcome of voting in a collectivity. While the idea of voting power can be traced at least as far back as a report by Luther Martin in 1787, the first systematic study of voting power was made by Lionel Sharples Penrose in 1946, in the context of a hypothetical distribution of votes in the UN General Assembly. He introduced the concept of a priori voting power, a measurement of the ability of a participant of

Table 1

the voting body to influence the outcome when votes are cast randomly. The share of votes a member of the collectivity casts does not directly determine the power that this voter exercises; that also depends on the configuration of votes allocated to all other members and on the rules of the voting system. Various measures of a priori voting power have been proposed, some of which measure relative voting power and are expressed in normalized form (so that the total power of all voters adds up to 1) and others of which measure absolute voting power. Examples of the former include the Shapley– Shubik index, the normalized Banzhaf index, the Deegan–Packel index, and the Public Goods Index. The prime example of the latter is the Penrose voting power measure, including variants later developed by Banzhaf and by James Coleman. Relative voting power is useful for making comparisons among members of a given collectivity with a fixed voting rule, while absolute voting power allows comparisons among different collectivities and different voting rules. Measuring voting power may give rise to certain paradoxes, and some power measures may be suitable for measuring certain aspects of voting power but not others. In their important work, Dan S. Felsenthal and Moshé Machover distinguish between two categories

The voting power assigned by various power measures under two different decision rules

Power Index

Unanimity

Simple Majority

Tijs index

(1/3, 1/3, 1/3)

(1, 0, 0)

Shapley–Shubik index

(1/3, 1/3, 1/3)

(4/6, 1/6, 1/6)

Normalized Banzhaf index

(1/3, 1/3, 1/3)

(3/5, 1/5, 1/5)

Deegan–Packel index

(1/3, 1/3, 1/3)

(1/2, 1/4, 1/4)

Public Good index

(1/3, 1/3, 1/3)

(1/2, 1/4, 1/4)

(1, 1, 1)

(1, 1/3, 1/3)

Absolute Banzhaf–Coleman–Penrose index

(1/4, 1/4, 1/4)

(3/4, 1/4, 1/4)

Initiate Action index (*)

(1/7, 1/7, 1/7)

(3/5, 1/5, 1/5)

1/8

3/8

NORMALIZED INDICES

ABSOLUTE INDICES Prevent Action index ()

COLLECTIVITY INDEX Index of Collectivity to Act (A)

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that they call I-power and P-power. I-power interprets voting power as the probability of influencing the decisions of a voting body under a specified decision rule, that is, whether a proposed bill is approved or rejected. The original Penrose voting power measure and its derivatives measure I-power. P-power interprets a decision rule as a simple cooperative game with transferable utility and conceptualizes voting power as a voter’s ability to win some share of a fixed total payoff. The Shapley– Shubik index measures P-power (see related entry). Differences among various measures of voting power are illustrated by the following example. Consider a miniature parliament composed of three parties with two, one, and one seats respectively and no ideological or other inclination to form one winning coalition in preference to another. Consider also two decision rules: the simple majority rule and the unanimity rule. In the first case, an act can be approved with at least three favorable votes, while in the second case, an act can be approved only with four favorable votes. Table 1 (p. 699) shows the power of each party under each decision rule under each power measure.

Under the simple majority decision rule, the greater voting weight of the first party translates into greater voting power, though by different amounts under different measures. Under the unanimity rule, all parties have the same voting power regardless of the voting weights (and according to all measures). Cesarino Bertini and Izabella Stach See also Banzhaf Voting Power Measure; Coleman Index; I-Power; Penrose Voting Power Measure; P-Power; Public Goods Index; Shapley–Shubik Index; Simple Games; Voting Power

Further Readings Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (1998). The measurement of voting power: Theory and practice, problems and paradoxes. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Felsenthal, D. S., & Machover, M. (2005). Voting power measurement: A story of misreinvention. Social Choice and Welfare, 25(2–3), 485–506.

W condition: competition and conflict are endemic. Waltz approvingly cites Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who claims that wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them. Like classical realists, Waltz limits himself to developing a theoretical argument, which he illustrates with historical examples to prove his points. In one aspect, however, he definitely stands apart. Whereas classical realists are very skeptical of attempts to develop theories of international relations and very much doubt that our level of understanding of international politics will ever exceed that of common sense, Waltz, thanks to his training in microeconomics, is convinced that a theory of international relations can be constructed. This task he accomplishes in Theory of International Politics. In Theory of International Politics, Waltz lays the foundations of what is now called structural realism or neorealism. He sets out to explain why in international politics different units behave similarly and, despite their variations, produce outcomes that fall within expected ranges. To this end, Waltz adopts a systems approach that turns on the distinction and interaction between, on the one hand, the interacting units, that is, the states, that seek to ensure their own survival, and the international structure on the other hand. It is the structure that allows us to conceive of the units as somehow hanging together and influencing one another. In Waltz’s view, two characteristics of structures are of vital importance for understanding international politics: the principle by which the system is ordered and the distribution of capabilities across the units. With respect to the

WALTZ, KENNETH (1924– ) Kenneth N. Waltz is the author of two books— Man, the State and War (1959) and Theory of International Politics (1979)—that have made him one of the most cited, and controversial, authors in the field of international relations. In Man, the State and War, Waltz argues that scholars attempting to formulate an answer to the question of why war has been unavoidable in the international system until now might be classified into three categories according to the images they employ in giving their answer. The proponents of the first image assume that the causes of war are to be found in the nature and behavior of humankind. War results from the aggressive impulses, the selfishness, and the obtuseness inherent in human nature. Authors employing the second image hold the view that the relationships between states, and therefore questions of war and peace, are determined by the internal structure of those states. Those using the third image consider the anarchical structure of the international system to be the principal cause of war. Waltz acknowledges that his categorization is a bit artificial, as the three images are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, only if the three images are related to one another is it possible to understand the workings of international politics. Man, the State and War firmly stands in what is called the classical tradition in the study of international relations. Classical realists first of all give expression to a pessimistic view of the human 701

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ordering principle, Waltz takes the position that systems are ordered either anarchically or hierarchically. The states system is ordered anarchically. This does not imply that chaos reigns. It merely means that the states system is one of self-help. It lacks an agency that, if necessary, can force states, even the most powerful among them, to abide by the rules and keep their promises. As for the distributional structure, Waltz limits his analysis to two types: a multipolar structure, in which there are more than two great powers, and a bipolar structure, in which there are only two superpowers. He concludes that a bipolar structure is more conducive to peace and international cooperation than a multipolar structure. Waltz’s position that a systems theory can only explain continuity and repetition prevents him from addressing the issue of how the distributional structure can change from one type of polarity to another. The crucial question that remains, of course, is whether Waltz’s theory corresponds to the historical reality of international politics. Waltz himself is not much concerned with developing rigorous tests for his theory, but his work has inspired many students of international relations to devise such tests, especially in connection with Waltz’s version of the theory of the balance of power. This led to a vigorous debate on the empirical validity of Waltz’s theory at the end of the 1990s. Although Waltz claims in Theory of International Politics that states will engage in balancing behavior when confronted with a rising hegemon, the historical record does not bear this out. In his contribution to the debate, Waltz relegated this counterevidence to the status of irrelevant diplomatic lore. All that matters is that a theory is taken seriously, and Waltz was sure that his theory had passed this test. Robert H. Lieshout See also Agency–Structure Problem; Anarchism, Power in; Anarchy in International Relations; Balance of Power; Capability; Morgenthau, Hans J.; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Lieshout, R. H. (1995). Between anarchy and hierarchy: A theory of international politics and international relations. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.

Vasquez, J. A., & Elman, C. (Eds.). (2003). Realism and the balance of power: A new debate. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Waltz, K. N. (1959). Man, the state and war: A theoretical analysis. New York: Columbia University Press Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

WAR We often think of war in terms of organized acts of physical force between states. However, war can be conducted by other political units, be they tribes, nations, city-states, or empires. They employ organized violence against against other political units in order to compel the latter to act more in accordance with their wishes. On the understanding that war is not only between states but also other political units, for the sake of conciseness, in this entry political units will be referred to as states; everything we say also applies to nonstate actors. When states go to war, it is for a purpose. War is a means to an end. As Carl von Clausewitz explained in his On War, the classic treatise on the subject, war is a true political instrument, the continuation of political intercourse carried out by other means. By the use of force, one state aims to weaken the power of another to such an extent that the latter will be prepared to do certain things it otherwise would not have done.

War and other Types of Violent Behavior John Keegan has strenuously objected to von Clausewitz’s identification of war with politics, and Michael Howard has pointed out that the elder Helmuth von Moltke, who probably contributed more than anyone else to the success of the posthumously published On War, believed that war was not so much an instrument of policy a s the inevitable fate of mankind. According to Keegan, the values and skills of the warrior belong to an ancient world that has nothing to do with the relatively modern one of politics and diplomacy. But this is not something that von Clausewitz would have denied. He believed, however,

War

that in the course of time states had succeeded in harnessing this warrior culture for the pursuit of their political objectives. The Clausewitzian approach therefore does not admit of war as an aim in itself: states do not wage war against one another purely for the sake of the excitement that it brings. States do not possess an objectless disposition to making war (although violence for the sake of violence has been quite common in the wars between them). Von Clausewitz stressed that violence is the essence of war, but war is only one of the available forms of violence. Not every attempt by a state to gain another’s active cooperation with, or passive acquiescence in, the efforts of the former to attain its objective needs to be as costly and unsettling as war. Take, for example, the case of a military expedition or pacification. In this situation, a great power uses the means of violence at its disposal in order to “correct” the behavior of a small power. There exists a relation of dependence between the two powers that the great power at least wishes to continue—on its terms, at any rate. The great power does not fight the small power in order to be in a better position to bargain about these terms, but as a means to punish that power. Thomas Schelling has called this the use of pure violence. In such situations, the clearer the relations between the powers involved, the less likely it is that the use of violence will have far-reaching consequences. In the situation just outlined, the smaller power is able to resist the great power’s aggression but with little expectation of success. In the next situation in which the means of violence are being used, the victim also has little chance to defend itself successfully against the attacker. But this time, this is because the victim is insufficiently prepared for the attacker actually to use the means of violence it has, as is often the case with raiding and piracy (forms of one-sided violence that are not uncommon in the international system, as shown by the Spanish expeditions against the Aztec and Inca empires at the beginning of the 16th century). It is characteristic of raiding and piracy that prior to the attack victim and attacker have no (strong) relationship of dependence, and that the latter expects its victim to pose little threat in the future. States indulging in these types of activity are hardly affected by long-term considerations.

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Following Joseph Schumpeter, they may be called warrior nations, the crucial point being that for the members of a warrior nation war is not regarded as an emergency interfering with regular life, but as the form of that life. Finally, war can be distinguished from other acts of violence by the fact that it is a highly regulated type of activity. The combatants comply with all kinds of formal and informal rules. It is very telling in this respect that even the Romans, who fought ruthlessly according to the standards of the time, complained that the pirates who wrought havoc in the Mediterranean Sea around 70 BCE did not respect the normal rules of war.

The Origins of War: Dependence and Conflict of Interest A state is dependent on another state if it is unable to realize a certain objective without the active assistance or passive acquiescence of that other state. The moment the first deploys resources to persuade the other to act in accordance with its wishes, and the other spends resources to resist, an escalation process is set in motion that will continue as long as both are prepared to invest more and more of their power in their attempts to persuade the other to change its behavior. At a certain moment, the process will reach the point at which they will begin to threaten one another with the use of violence, and eventually the point at which one or both will actually use it. The objective of each party’s violent behavior is to reduce the opponent’s power, and in so doing to ensure that the opponent will behave itself more in accordance with their wishes. The upper limit of such an escalation process is reached when it leads to the physical destruction of one, or perhaps both, of the states. When war breaks out, it involves the actual use of means of violence by states that are more or less equally matched. They also will have been dependent on one another for a considerable period of time, and expect this mutual dependence to continue in the future. The war between them constitutes a violent phase in an already long-established conflict with respect to the terms of their relationship of dependence. Each of the belligerents has decided at a certain moment that it is only by the use of violence that the opponent may finally come

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War

to realize that its interest is also served by active cooperation with, or passive acquiescence in, the other’s attempts to reach its objective. The use of force and the manner in which it is being used constitute elements of an ongoing bargaining process. War holds the utmost danger for the international system as a whole because this type of violence is the most difficult for the parties involved to keep under control by themselves. The poor manageability of war follows from the fact that it only strengthens the already existing relationship of dependence between the parties that constitutes the basis of their conflict in the first place. It is true that, at the beginning of the escalation process, both will in the first instance be reluctant to commit themselves too far—a reluctance that will increase, the more is at stake in their conflict. But when neither of them is prepared to give in to the other, each of them, in order to bring about compliant behavior, will (if the issue at stake is sufficiently important) in the course of time invest more and more of its power in means of violence, advancing the moment when one of them will come to the conclusion that only by the actual use of these means of violence will the other be persuaded to see the reasonableness of its demands. If it indeed comes to fighting, then the necessary mobilization of resources and the population will lead to considerable economic and social dislocations. It is because of the ever-present possibility of such a destructive conflict that a state’s power ultimately rests on its ability to fight other such units, either defensively or offensively. It is evident that, seen from this perspective, their decision actually to use the means of violence at their disposal need not have much to do with their original motives—however high-minded or perfidious these may initially have been.

threat to its position of power. Escalation takes place the moment one of the states is able and willing to expend more of its power in an attempt to exploit this opportunity or to eliminate this threat and another one decides to resist this attempt. It is characteristic of escalation that the greater the amount of power the participants have invested in the process at a given moment without result, the more each of them will be prepared to invest still further in its attempts to convince the other that it is also in their interest to act more in accordance to its wishes. An escalation process is self-reinforcing. Accordingly, it is very doubtful that adversaries that have ended up in an escalation process will be able to keep it under control by themselves (because with every round the stakes are getting higher for both of them). The threat that an escalation process will get out of hand only grows when the adversaries find themselves in what Hugh Ward has called “a game of ruin,” a situation in which there is a premium on dangerous behavior. The actual use of the means of violence further diminishes the chances that the adversaries will be able to keep their conflict under control. As von Clausewitz noted, a limited war waged to impose conditions on the opponent can turn into an absolute one to exterminate the opponent, to destroy its political existence. In its initial phase, a war has the character of a mixed-motive game—a game, that is, in which the adversaries realize that, although their self-interests clash, they also share common interests, such as respecting the informal and formal rules of war. But the longer the war continues, and the more of their power the belligerents have invested, the more complete their conflict becomes, the more it takes on the character of a zero-sum game, and the less they will be inclined to respect the rules of war.

War as a Violent Phase in a Process of Escalation

Escalation and Information

When a conflict between states ends in war, the escalation process leading to it was triggered by a change in the environment of those units with possibly far-reaching consequences for their relative power positions. While one state judges this change to provide it with a good opportunity to strengthen its position, another cannot see this change other than as posing a potentially serious

The escalation process that leads to war can only start when changes in the environment of states lead at least one of them to the conclusion that power relations have changed, that the status quo is undermined. Issues that appeared to be settled suddenly seem no longer to be so. This conclusion need not be correct. A dissatisfied power might erroneously conclude that it is now in the position to make a satisfied power accept a change in the

War

terms of their existing relationship. The fact that the dissatisfied power is mistaken can only be established experimentally in light of the way in which the satisfied power reacts (clearly, war is the ultimate test). We might wish that such misconceptions could be avoided one way or another, but a process of trial and error is the only method of finding out that it was a misconception. Georg Simmel once observed that the exact knowledge of the comparative strength of the two parties is the most effective prerequisite for preventing war, but such exact knowledge can often be obtained only by actually fighting. It is precisely the problem of accurately measuring power that, according to Geoffrey Blainey, goes far to explain why wars occur. Besides, we should not lose sight of the fact that the more violent the changes in the environment of the states concerned, and the longer these continue, the more difficult it becomes for them to obtain a more or less accurate understanding of one another’s relative power positions. Poor information also plays an important role in the possible escalation of a conflict between a relatively powerful state and a relatively powerless one. The greater the difference in power between them, and, consequently, the less important the conflict appears to be to the more powerful, the less trouble the latter will take to obtain accurate information about its opponent (the bloody aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 provides a striking illustration of this point). As a result, the probability increases that an escalation of the conflict by the more powerful state will not have the desired effect on the less powerful unit. This uncooperative attitude on the part of the less powerful state brings the credibility of the more powerful one into question, which again increases the chances that the latter will invest even more of its power in attempting to induce the less powerful state to behave.

Escalation and Intervention To judge from the foregoing, it is apparently difficult for two states, once they are caught up in a process of mutual escalation, to keep this process under control. As von Clausewitz showed, theoretically they are driven to the extreme by the internal logic of the process. This may give rise to the impression that it is all to the good that two

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states involved in mutual conflict are not usually so isolated from other states that their conflict will cause no inconvenience to those other states, and that, consequently, the latter will intervene in the conflict. The wider the repercussions of the conflict—for instance, because the conflict threatens to spread to the territory of others, or to cut off their supply of vital raw materials, or results in a massive stream of refugees—the more probable it becomes that other states will intervene. Nevertheless, this impression is only correct in part. It is certainly correct in situations in which there is a single hegemon that intervenes in the conflict with a certain show of strength at an early stage to punish the combatants (intervention-as-punishment). This impression is wide of the mark, however, in situations in which other states intervene in the conflict on a limited scale by siding with one of the contending parties only after the escalation process has been going on for some time. Such intervention-asinterference leads to a further escalation of the conflict, either because the intervening states wish to keep their involvement in the conflict limited, or because the combatants realize that this involvement can only be limited. In the first case, the power preponderance of the intervening states over the original combatants is not great enough. In the second, their power preponderance is potentially great enough, but the threat actually to deploy their power to end the conflict is not credible in the eyes of the belligerents. In these circumstances, intervention by another state, or group of states, merely contributes to the strengthening of the position of one of the combatants, and thus only encourages further escalation; it certainly does not help to settle the conflict.

De-escalation, Information, and Intervention A process of de-escalation can only set in if one or more of the following three conditions is satisfied: (1) the power of the parties in the conflict decreases to such an extent that they are no longer able to maintain their war efforts at the level previously reached; (2) the difference in power between the contending states increases, as a result of which the nature of their mutual relationship becomes clearer; and (3) the anticipated costs of maintaining their war efforts at the level reached previously become prohibitive—such as where another state

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forces, or is expected to force, the belligerents to reduce their war efforts. The diminution of the adversaries’ power might be caused by developments in the war that result in a large-scale loss of earlier investments in weaponry, in soldiers, or even in allies. It may be caused by natural disasters, epidemics, or technological innovations. Technological innovations can not only lead to the obsolescence of part of the belligerents’ weapons arsenal but can also undermine their economic basis. This loss in power implies, on the one hand, that any further investment in the conflict becomes more difficult to bear for the contending parties, and, on the other hand, that they do not have to take the difficult decision to write off a certain investment themselves. Together, these conditions make it more likely that the opponents will refrain from further investment in their conflict and instead will seek to reduce it. The relative power positions of the contending states might diverge more and more because of the way the conflict develops: while one party enjoys success after success, the other experiences setback after setback. Again, technological innovations, natural disasters, or epidemics might also cause this greater divergence in power between the adversaries. The greater the power preponderance of the one state becomes in the course of the conflict, and the more often and more decisively the other is defeated, then the clearer the mutual relationships between the states become. These relationships have to be very clear indeed before the party that is on the losing side accepts that it has in fact lost. The loser has to understand that to continue the struggle is pointless and, as Graham Allison has pointed out, only highly visible costs can have this effect. For this reason, a last effort— an act of pure violence—on the victor’s part is often needed to make it clear to the loser that it really has lost. The increased difference in power between the contending parties also means that something of a harmony of interests develops between them, which makes it easier for them to take the decision to de-escalate their conflict. The state that is on the losing side will, as a result of its relative decline in power, feel more inclined to behave itself in agreement with the wishes of the winning party, while the latter, in view of its relative rise in power, will be in a better position to treat the former leniently.

The third condition for de-escalation relates to the costs to the states of maintaining their exertions at the existing level (let alone of a further escalation) becoming prohibitive. Naturally, a credible intervention in the conflict by another party or parties can also induce the contenders to come to the conclusion that the costs involved in their conflict can no longer be sustained and to start a process of mutual de-escalation.

Technological Innovation and War Innovations in the field of communications (steamship, train, automobile, and airplane) and improvement of infrastructure (docks, railroad networks, road networks, and airports) meant that the manner in which, and the speed with which, allies could come to the assistance of a state that had become the victim of aggression underwent a powerful transformation in the course of the last century— and, after 1945, a very dramatic transformation. Up to the end of the 19th century, the burden of defense during the first phase of the hostilities rested almost completely on the shoulders of the state that had become the victim of aggression. Its allies’ contributions, even where these were neighbors, could initially be little more than minimal. The transport of the necessary troops and putting in place the infrastructure necessary to facilitate this transport inevitably took a considerable length of time. Where the allies were not immediate neighbors of the victim, they could render assistance only indirectly, by attacking the aggressor somewhere else. In these circumstances, allies were important, perhaps even decisively so, but a state that became the victim of aggression had largely to fend for itself as far as the defense of its territory was concerned. This situation altered drastically after 1945. Since then, because of highly improved transport facilities and infrastructure, it has no longer been the case that the state that is the victim of an armed attack will most of the time also have to make the greatest contribution to the defense of its territory. If necessary, allies can be on the spot quickly to take part in the defense, even if they are not neighbors. Until the beginning of the 1930s, the preparations for war by the opponents were geared to fighting a war on the ground. Everything turned on the conquest of territory, or, conversely, on the

Weber, Max

prevention of the conquest of territory. The power of a state increased or decreased in proportion as it succeeded in establishing its authority over a greater or smaller piece of territory through military actions. In the course of the 1930s, the development of longrange bomber aircraft added another method for bringing an opponent to its knees: strategic bombardments of its population and industries. Although it is very much in doubt whether strategic bombardments have actually been successful in this respect, the development of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads since 1945 has dramatically increased the capacity for destruction of the states possessing these weapons. A war between nuclear powers is now primarily about the capability to destroy the enemy, and secondarily about the capability to conquer territory. The most far-reaching implication of this situation is that if a nuclear power were to decide to go to war against another one, this could no longer be in the expectation that its territory would be spared the horrors of war. Robert H. Lieshout See also Clausewitz, Carl von; Mutually Assured Destruction

Further Readings Blainey, G. (1973). The causes of war. London: Macmillan. Clausewitz, C. von. (1989). On war. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1832) Keegan, J. (1993). A history of warfare. London: Hutchinson. Lieshout, R. H. (1995). Between anarchy and hierarchy: A theory of international relations and foreign policy. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar. Waltz, K. N. (1959). Man, the state and war: A theoretical analysis. New York: Columbia University Press.

WEBER, MAX (1864–1920) The German sociologist and political economist Max Weber provided the definition of power that is most often cited in the social sciences: the probability

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that one actor within a relationship will be able to carry out its own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests. As Talcott Parsons noted, this is a distributive notion of power, the power of A over B, which therefore also entails a sociology that focuses on conflict or asymmetrical power relations. It is thus appropriate that the German word for power that Weber used, Macht, has a somewhat menacing connotation, and Weber’s discussion of power reflects the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on his thought. Weber’s notion of power in society is most often contrasted with that of Karl Marx, who saw social change as being determined by economic forces. In Weber’s work, on the other hand, both political power and ideological power can be autonomous. Whether this contrast does the two thinkers justice will continue to be debated. In Weber’s case, it is difficult to settle the question of which type of power is most important because there are many places where he discusses the concept in different ways, and there is no single definitive statement about the relative importance of the types of power in his writings. Still, it is possible to identify three types of power that are important in his sociology: stratification, political power, and the power of ideas or culture. Weber has a tripartite model of stratification— class, status, and party. This way of subsuming power under stratification shows that Weber has a multidimensional view of power whereby class is economic power, status is cultural power, and party is political power. Class and status allow Weber to provide many insightful accounts of how classes and status groups relate to one another in different historical settings. So, for example, he argues that the possession of different kinds of skills, and not just ownership of the means of production as with Marx, are responsible for the life chances of classes in modern capitalist economies. Or again, literati have often wielded power on the basis of what Pierre Bourdieu has called cultural capital, or Weber describes as their monopoly hold on the means of salvation. Still, although Weber’s various concepts are often used, there is no place in his writings where he gives an account of economic or cultural stratification that provides a central theoretical thrust to his analysis of modern capitalism. (For Marx, there are several such places and a clear argument

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about the dominance of economic power.) Weber’s ideas about political power have fared much better, although his notion of party has played only a small part in his own political sociology and subsequent uses of his work. The key concept in his political sociology is his definition of the modern state: the entity that possesses the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within its boundaries. This definition is still widely used and underpins any conception of the state that focuses on force, especially policing and military force, across a particular territory. Apart from the definition of the state, Weber is well known for his sociology of domination or authority, where he identifies three different types that can found across history: charismatic, traditional, and legal–rational. The distinction is based on the kinds of beliefs in legitimate power on which they are based: charismatic authority rests on belief in the personal qualities of the leader—for example, warlords whose prestige is based on victories. This type of authority is fleeting because it can be easily lost and needs to establish itself in a more routine apparatus of power; hence, Weber speaks of the routinization of charisma. The legitimacy of traditional authority rests on belief in the sanctity of the way things have been done in the past, as when kingship receives support from religion. And finally, the distinctive authority of the modern state is based on belief in the rule of law, and thus the officials who are empowered to enforce them. The most characteristic form of modern political power is therefore bureaucracy. Expertise and the control and storage of information are critical to the exercise of this form of power, which is also a feature of modern economic organizations. Christopher Dandeker has elaborated Weber’s ideas about bureaucracy in charting the rising powers of the modern state. Further, bureaucratic power applies to economic organizations, as in the increasingly complex forms of modern business enterprises. Dandeker also notes similarities between Weber and Michel Foucault in respect to bureaucratic power, because knowledge in the form of expertise and control over written records is the source of this type of power. Weber’s most important contribution to the study of power has thus been in the analysis of political power, and his most important descendant here is Michael Mann, who has refined

Weber’s definition of the state and thus of political power. Mann’s account of the rise of the modern state and the growth of bureaucracy emphasizes its double-edged character (see also Dandeker, 1990): on the one hand, the state’s enhanced bureaucratic power may seem like an impersonal apparatus that subjects citizens to ever greater surveillance and intrudes into their everyday lives. On the other, if citizens require services like health, education, and welfare, then they must yield up information about themselves so that the state is able to administer these services. In this vein, Weber’s view of bureaucracy has a pessimistic aspect. He sees bureaucracy as an “iron cage,” a machine-like apparatus that constrains individual freedoms and will become more and more inescapable, with an ever-greater need for more efficient and all-encompassing administrations. Weber sees bureaucratization as part of what he calls the progressive rationalization of the world, whereby rule-bound organizations would be increasingly knowledge based and governed by specialists and officials. Wolfgang Mommsen, one of the foremost interpreters of Weber’s political ideas, has described him as a “liberal in despair,” who counterposed the role of charismatic political leaders and entrepreneurs against this cagelike impersonal political machinery. One of the key shortcomings of Weber’s political sociology is that he did not include the concept of democracy in his typology of political power, even though some interpreters have suggested that it is possible to develop ideas about democracy on the basis of some key passages in his writings. Yet whatever building blocks of a theory of democracy can be found in Weber’s work, the absence of a conceptualization of power sharing or any pluralistic notion of power is a major gap in his political sociology, although this is also a gap in political sociology generally—ideas about power-sharing and pluralism are much more common in political science. Apart from cultural power in the form of status, it is also possible to attribute to Weber the view that powerful ideas shape historical development. And although it is odd to speak of the power of ideas, it would be equally odd to leave out this form of power, because Weber is most famous for his Protestant ethic thesis about the cultural origins of modern capitalism. The Protestant Ethic

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and the Spirit of Capitalism remains Weber’s bestknown work, and many attempts have been made to assess the historical validity of the ideas presented in it. However, it is impossible to assess the Protestant ethic thesis outside out of the comparative historical context in which Weber put it forward. Weber analyzed all of the major world religions and found that among these, only Protestantism promoted what he called inner-worldly asceticism, and hence the rational way of life conducive to capitalist enterprise. Still, the question whether a cultural explanation of the origins of modern capitalism is useful remains much debated. Weber’s conception of power is complex and multidimensional, and it has been used in a variety of ways. His sociology originated a tradition of examining power in terms of conflict between different actors and focusing on how power is distributed; the tradition of power over rather than power to. Apart from yielding a number of concepts that have proved to be useful in the analysis of power, his writings mainly provide rich and detailed comparative historical accounts of the development of, for example, political authority. On the other hand, his writings do not contain a systematic or structural analysis of power, something that still eludes social science generally. Nevertheless, Weber’s work continues to be widely used in sociology as well as in political science. Perhaps it is the flexibility of how his concepts and insights can be used, instead of his own—again, rather pessimistic—account of modern society, which will endure as his most useful contribution to the study of the power. Ralph Schroeder See also Coercion and Power; Domination; Foucault, Michel; Legitimation; Mann, Michael; Marx, Karl; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Parsons, Talcott; Power To and Power Over

Further Readings Dandeker, C. (1990). Surveillance, power and modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Mommsen, W. (1974). The age of bureaucracy: Perspectives on the political sociology of Max Weber. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Schroeder, R. (Ed.). 1998. Max Weber, democracy and modernization. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

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Whimster, S., & Lash, S. (Eds.). Max Weber, rationality and modernity. London: Allen & Unwin.

WEIGHTED MAJORITY GAME A weighted majority game is a simple game in which each player can be assigned some numerical weight, and a numerical quota can be fixed, such that a coalition is winning if and only if the total weight of its members equals or exceeds the quota. The concept is useful for analyzing how voting power is shared among members of an assembly on the basis of possible coalitions that may be formed between them. These members (or players) could be shareholders, representatives of political parties or countries, and so on, each one assigned a certain weight (in terms of shares, votes, seats, etc.). A fundamental finding is that voting power in general is not proportional to voting weight. The formal concept of a weighted majority game goes back to the key book on game theory by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944. Let N  {1, 2, . . . , n} be the set of members of an assembly. Each member i is assigned a non negative weight wi. Let q be the “majority quota” that defines a winning coalition—that is, any coalition S with total weight of q or greater is authorized to take action, for example, make a collective decision, enact a law, and so on. A weighted majority game is defined by these two elements (though sometimes additional information may be taken into consideration, such as a priori unions and different probabilities of coalition formation). In its basic form, a weighted majority game is defined by the formula [q, w]  [q; w1, . . . , wn]. Let us call the total weight of coalition S wS. The quota q cannot exceed the total weight wN, because in this case no decision can be made, and normally it cannot equal or fall below wN 2. (If q  wN/2, the game is said to be improper.) If q  wN , we have a unanimity game, inasmuch as any decision needs the approval of all assembly members. If a simple majority (i.e., anything greater than wN/2) is sufficient, we have a simple majority game.

An Example Consider a parliament with 100 seats distributed as follows: 20 to party A, 30 to party B, and 50 to

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party C, so wA  20, wB  30, wC  50, wN  100. Each decision needs 51 votes (the quota), so no party can decide on its own. The winning coalitions are {A, C}, {B, C}, and {A, B, C}. A player is critical for a coalition if that coalition is winning but becomes losing if the player leaves, and each such coalition is called a swing for the player. In the present example, party A is critical for one coalition ({A, C}), party B is critical for one coalition ({B, C}), while party C is critical for three coalitions ({A, C}, {B, C}, and {A, B, C}). The normalized Banzhaf index credits voting power among the parties in proportion to the number of coalitions for which they are critical: their number of swings. In this case it assigns 1/5 to A and B, and 3/5 to C. (There are other power indices, based on other axiomatic grounds and/or behavioral models, that may assign different distributions of power to the players.) Thus parties A and B have equal voting power, even though B has more seats, and C has three times the voting power than A and B, even though its seat advantage is considerably less. If the majority quota q were 75, the winning coalitions would be {B, C} and {A, B, C}. Party A becomes a dummy, while parties B and C now have equal power. The normalized Banzhaf index is therefore 0 for A, 1/2 for B, and 1/2 for C. Thus it is apparent that relative voting power depends not only on the distribution of weights but also on the decision rule reflected in the quota q. Gianfranco Gambarelli See also Banzhaf Value; Homogeneous Weighted Majority Game; Minimal Winning Coalition; Penrose Voting Power Measure; Power Indices; Qualified Majority Voting; Simple Games; Voting Power; Weighted Voting

Further Readings Von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

WEIGHTED VOTING Most generally, weighted voting is a decisionmaking procedure in which different voters cast

unequal numbers of votes. Controversially, some analysts have portrayed the varying weights (numbers of votes) as connoting different levels of power for the players (voters). Denote the voters as 1 through n and with weights w1 through wn. Then for a weighted voting system, for at least some pair of voters i and j, wi  wj. Though not strictly required, formal discussions of weighted voting typically assume some quota q and designate as winning coalitions those whose total weight meets or exceeds the quota. Theorists denote voting weighted voting systems using the notation {q: w1,w2, . . . ,wn}. Weighted voting systems provide the most interesting application of such voting power measures as those due to Lionel Penrose, John Banzhaf, and Lloyd Shapley and Martin Shubik. Interestingly, they all show that the voting power is generally not proportional to voting weights. Consider, for example, the system {7: 5, 4, 3}. Clearly, none of the three players can win the vote alone, yet a coalition of any two players will garner a victory. As another example, consider the scheme {50: 44.5, 7.0, 36.6, 6.4, 5.4} that describes party control of the German Bundestag immediately after the 1998 federal election. The Social Democrats, with 44.5% of the seats, needed the Greens, who had just 7%, to form a coalition government, so in some sense these parties with highly unequal voting weights had equal voting power. A second general result is that the voting power of players varies with quota size, even while voter weights remain constant; in practice, the direction of the power change can be counterintuitive and it is straightforward to construct examples wherein less powerful players become more powerful as the quota is raised. Broadly speaking, power differentials among the players tend to vary inversely with quota size. In the limit case, weighted voting makes no difference under unanimity rule. Theorists can use the concept of weighted votes to model much more complicated systems. A voting rule not ordinarily described as a weighted voting system may in fact be equivalent to a weighted majority game. For example, the U.N. Security Council has 15 members: 5 permanent members with veto power and 10 rotating members without veto power. Without loss of generality, we can assign a weight of 1 to each of the 10 rotating members. Then the voting system must be

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{q : x, x, x, x, x, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1}. By the rules of the institution, to pass a motion all five permanent members plus four nonpermanent members must agree . Hence 5x  4 q. On the other hand, only 1 permanent member is needed to veto a motion, so 4x  10  q. If we solve 4x  10  q  5x  4 for q and x for we obtain {39: 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1}. That is, the Security Council arrangement is equivalent to a weighted voting scheme with a quota of 39 and a weight of 7 for the permanent members. In practice, weighted voting is typically justified by asserting that some voters have more at stake than others: this can be in strict monetary terms, as is the case of shareholder meetings or the International Monetary Fund, or because some voters represent more constituents, as is the case for the Electoral College in the United States or the Council of Ministers in the European Union. The precise details of the weightings can prove normatively contentious, and political scientists, economists, and mathematicians have analyzed different possibilities—in terms of expected outcomes— using complex computing routines. Arthur Spirling See also Voting; Voting Power; Weighted Majority Game

Further Readings Taylor, A. D. (1995). Mathematics and politics: Strategy, voting, power and proof. New York: Springer.

WIGHT, MARTIN (1913–1972) Martin Wight is considered one of the most influential British scholars of international relations (IR). Interestingly, during his lifetime Wight published only a small number of studies in the field of international politics. Yet, Wight’s teaching at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Sussex left such an imprint on his students (among others, Hedley Bull and Michael Howard) that they preserved his intellectual legacy by expanding and publishing his lecture notes and by the annual Martin Wight Memorial Lecture.

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Wight’s perspective, embedded in his Christian faith, has two premises: first, our thinking about world politics is rooted in traditions of thought that ultimately can be traced to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; second, because the state is an imperfect way to help imperfect man to live the good life, issues of power are also moral issues. Wight distinguishes four traditions. Realism (or Machiavellianism) emphasizes the anarchical nature of international relations. In such a world disputes between states occur repeatedly and are ultimately settled by war. Ethical concerns are irrelevant in such a world. An international society does not exist. Rationalism (or Grotianism) acknowledges the importance of institutions such as international law and diplomacy. These set limits on the way a state exercises its sovereign rights. Ethical concerns are possible, but remain limited to the rights of states. They testify to the existence of some form of international society. Revolutionism (or Kantianism) conceives of world politics as a society of states that pursue mankind’s moral purpose. That purpose could be many things: religion, a classless society, and so on. Ethical concerns are dominant and might even justify the means. Wight’s fourth tradition (inverted revolutionism) is less prominently visible in history, but refers to the rejection of the use of power altogether, such as by the Society of Friends (Quakers). Because of his work Power Politics, Wight is often associated with realism. Yet, to him the unscrupulous struggle for power between states it describes was only a vantage point from which states could be seen as exercising power ultimately based on economic, demographic, and military resources. Different vantage points showed that states could also act from a common culture or based on ethical considerations. In Systems of States, Wight argued that, historically, all systems of state have displayed a common culture. The impact of Wight’s work and teaching can still be traced in modern IR. His detailed analysis of the concept of the balance of power and its manifold meaning is still significant to all IR scholars. His elaboration on the traditions of thought has laid the foundation for various developments in the discipline after his death by pointing out how a perspective on the nature of world politics entails a position on international ethics. In doing so, Wight helped pave the way for Michael Walzer’s 1977

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work Just and Unjust Wars and the debate it sparked; by demonstrating that states under anarchy may invent and observe rules and institutions, he gave ammunition to both neoinstitutionalism, and, later, social constructivism. Finally, because of his historical approach, rejection of social scientific methods, and his interest in the role of culture in world politics, Martin Wight ushered in the blossoming of the so-called English School of international relations. His message that in world politics power and ethics are intrinsically linked still rings true today. Bertjan Verbeek See also Balance of Power; Bull, Hedley

Further Readings Wight, M. (1977). Systems of states. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press. Wight, M. (1986). Power politics (2nd ed.). Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press. Wight, M. (1991). International theory: The three traditions. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press.

WILL

TO

POWER

The will to power is a phrase made popular by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Though rarely used in his principal works, it appears frequently in the selection of posthumous notes and fragments later published, in corrupted form, by his sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, in a volume called The Will to Power. Nietzsche may have been influenced by numerous writers, including Plato who floated the idea of power, meaning the ability to create or undergo change, as a criterion of being (Sophist, 274e), along with the theory that a lack of power made persons and things ugly (Hippias Major, 295e). Cicero, who argued that the lust for power was the strongest of the passions, is another likely influence. Another is Arthur Schopenhauer, whose principal ontological category was the will to live, which was meant to include all active forces in the universe under the category of will. Of course, the fact that the chief characteristic of the god of

monotheism is omnipotence was not lost on Nietzsche, who held that resolve and strength of will are widely admired because they are widely lacking. Nietzsche’s early work employs a hedonistic psychology in which humanity is driven toward pleasure and ruled over by vanity, fear, and habit. In later works, his view is that the organism seeks to increase and discharge its strength. This psychology of power subsumes his old hedonism, so that feelings of pleasure are interpreted as feelings of strength. The good is defined as that which gives one strength. Even laughter is seen as a feeling of one’s own sufficiency or superiority, that is, of one’s strength. Interpretations of Nietzsche’s thinking on the psychology of power differ widely. Some believe he treated power over others as one preference among others, though it is the strongest or most attractive. If so, then Nietzsche could be suggesting that, for example, in a choice between the combinations of high desire satisfaction with a low degree of power or low desire satisfaction with a high degree of power, the latter will be preferred. This view, upheld by many Nazis, treats power as a position of command or control over others, and assigns to Nietzsche what is essentially Cicero’s thesis. Most theorists now reject this construal of Nietzsche. Those who emphasize his concern for personal adequacy and capability point out that a high degree of power over others can be rejected if it implies a low degree of self-mastery. For these theorists, significant power over others or over worldly affairs need not outweigh the demerits of personal inadequacy, because both are aspects of power. Nevertheless, all theorists agree that where Freudians seek to discover what misdirection of sexuality is responsible for a person’s acting or believing in a certain way, the Nietzschean psychologist properly asks what means of experiencing or maintaining a sensation of personal adequacy, agency, or superiority is involved in a person’s acting or believing in a certain way. Nietzsche’s psychological outlook on human nature has enjoyed a wide influence, early instances of which can be seen in the work of Randolph Bourne and Elsie Clews-Parsons. In ethics, the will to power has proved both an inspiration and a source of shame. Nietzsche scholars are embarrassed when the will to power is

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read as advocating or approving of war, tyranny, domination, or rapaciousness. In response, some have developed versions of Nietzsche’s moral thought that leave the will to power out of the picture altogether. Others have downplayed its importance. Walter Kaufmann claims that Nietzsche’s ethics aim at satisfying the will to power through self-control, a position taken more recently by John Richardson. For Maudmarie Clark, power is not to be understood as control, but rather as capacity, and Nietzsche’s ethics aim at maximizing our capacity to successfully pursue ends. In all of these cases, Nietzsche is assigned an ethic of selfimprovement, placing him in the school known as perfectionism. Nietzsche eventually extended his theory beyond psychology and human nature by suggesting that the will to power might faithfully characterize all of life, or even all of reality. The latter claim raises the questions of whether his view is consistent with naturalism and whether it amounts to a version of idealism. Taking up the second concern first, it seems clear that Nietzsche wanted to avoid something that he called idealism. Almost everything he fought against he eventually labeled, or blamed on, idealism. But will is a mental phenomenon, and thus a world that is fundamentally will to power would be an ideal world, not in the popular sense of fully satisfying a desire, but rather in the philosophical sense of treating all of reality as a mental phenomenon. Meanwhile, naturalism consists primarily in eschewing the use of supernatural categories in describing reality. The question of whether a philosophical idealist can be a naturalist is a perennial question because, on the one hand, a universe that is fundamentally mental appears to accommodate a supernatural category in the description of reality, but on the other hand, if there are only mental things, then all of nature is mental, and idealist metaphysics cannot coherently be accused of appealing to supernatural categories. Philosophers have debated whether the most general reading of Nietzsche allows the will to power to be understood as an empirical theory. Some take it to be a metaphysical theory, others treat it as an antimetaphysical theory, while others take it to be an affective or motivational tool. Bryan Finken

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See also Ability; Capability; Control; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Power as Control Theory

Further Readings Bourne, R. (1992). The Puritan’s will to power. In O. Hansen (Ed.), The radical will: Selected writings, 1911–1918. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1917) Clark, M. (1990). Nietzsche on truth and philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond good and evil. (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Random House. Nietzsche, F. (1967). The will to power: (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). New York: Random House. Richardson, J. (1996). Nietzsche’s system. New York: Oxford University Press.

WOLFERS, ARNOLD (1892–1968) More than 40 years after his death, Arnold Wolfers remains one of the most influential experts in the field of international relations. Some of his most important insights were derived from his analysis of the quest for power, which he associated with the realist school in international relations. Wolfers contrasted this approach with indifference to power, which he linked to certain representatives of the idealist school. He made it clear to readers where he came down on the realist−idealist continuum, noting that world affairs are heavily slanted toward struggles for power. But he also criticized the realists for giving insufficient attention to “the policy goals from whence this quest for power springs”(1962, pp. 81–102). This last comment alerts readers to a major theme in Wolfers’s writings—his claim that in almost all circumstances power is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. To treat the quest for power, positively or negatively, outside of the context of ends and purposes which it is expected to serve, therefore, robs it of any intelligible meaning and also makes it impossible to judge its appropriateness or excessiveness. (1962, p. 89)

Wolfers was a reluctant realist: he accepted that as a result of the relationship of major tensions in

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the international system governments usually felt compelled to pursue power in the service of national security. But he also encouraged leaders to be constantly aware of the costs and risks associated with the quest for power. He placed special emphasis on the fact that a nation’s efforts to enhance security were almost always at the expense of other national values. He also warned policy makers that the quest for power in the service of national security can be self-defeating if “the efforts of one side provoke counter-measures by the other” (1962, pp. 158–159). Wolfers also stressed the point that, as a rule, not survival but other national interests are at stake in international politics. This left a wide area of opportunity for mutual accommodation between states. It also meant that leaders had to be careful about when they chose to use power (which he defined as the ability to move others by the threat or infliction of deprivations) and when it was more appropriate to rely upon influence (which he defined as the ability to use power through promises or grants of benefits). It is not surprising, then, that he focused much of his writing on the role of diplomacy in world affairs, even though he recognized that coercive power in the background usually deserves a major part of the credit for successful negotiation. Doug Stuart See also Idealism in International Relations; Realism in International Relations

Further Readings Stuart, D., & Szabo, S. (Eds.). (1994). Discord and collaboration in a new Europe: Essays in honor of Arnold Wolfers. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute. Wolfers, A. (1962). Discord and collaboration: Essays on international politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

WOMEN

AS

POLITICAL LEADERS

Since the mid-20th century, women have increasingly gained access to power as political leaders in

governments across the globe. They have become legislators and executives at national, subnational, and international levels of governing. Several factors affect the power of both men and women as leaders, but looking at women in leadership positions reveals an aspect of power that the study of men alone tends to conceal: whether women attempt to exercise influence or set the agenda, they wield power in a gender-specific environment molded by masculinist norms and expectations. Gender studies have generated the term masculinism to denote the privileged status of conventional masculine attributes. Applied to political leadership, masculinism prefers characteristics such as conviction, confrontation, and combativeness. Christine Di Stefano traces the roots of this preference to an idealized concept of the individual in modern political theory, while Georgia DuerstLahti and Rita Mae Kelly supply ample empirical evidence that demonstrates how masculinism erects obstacles to female political leaders. By contrast, feminalism favors traditional qualities associated with women such as conciliation, cooperation, and consensus building. The degree of masculinism and feminalism varies, but in most political systems most of the time, masculinism prevails and permeates the context of power.

Paths to Power and Representation The careers of female leaders start on a genderspecific path to power. Whether selected by their peers, partisans, or the public, women struggle to satisfy the masculinist expectations of leadership inherent in the combative environment of adversarial systems. In addition, where candidates raise their own campaign finances, as in the United States, low expectations of their success often thwart the ability of female candidates to secure the funds they need to win public office. Among Anglophone nations, only New Zealand has ever managed to rank high on the worldwide list of the representation of women. As of November 30, 2008, New Zealand is 14th, while Australia ranks 32nd, Canada 46th, the United Kingdom 60th, and the United States 69th. Scandinavian systems provide a striking contrast: Sweden ranks 2nd, Finland 4th, Denmark 7th, and Norway 11th; the Netherlands are 5th. Arguably, Scandinavian countries prove more feminalist: with multiparty

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systems, a high degree of consensus, and a large public sector devoted to domestic policy, they value and reward feminalist features of leadership. Certain factors enhance the prospect of women’s representation, as Wilma Rule and Joseph Zimmerman have shown in their cross-national study. Party quotas and some forms of proportional representation (PR) help explain women’s success in Scandinavia and other countries at the top of the list including New Zealand, although New Zealand achieved relatively high levels of women’s representation even before it adopted PR. Since the 1990s, New Zealand has had at least 30% women in parliament and two women prime ministers (Jenny Shipley [1997–1999] and Helen Clark [1999–2008]). The success of women can be attributed to New Zealand’s small size and secondary status in global affairs as well as its influential women’s movement. In the developing world, family ties tend to pave the path to power for women. The daughter of Zulfikar Bhutto, the civilian prime minister from 1971 to 1977, prime minister Benazir Bhutto (1988–1990, 1993–1996) led Pakistan, a country where military and conservative Muslim governments generally dominate. As prime minister of India (1966–1977, 1980–1984), Indira Gandhi followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, Indian National Congress leader Motilal Nehru, and her father Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the independence movement and the first prime minister of an independent India. For several other female leaders in developing countries, marriage established the pathway to a political career, as in the cases of Argentine presidents Isabel Perón (1974–1976) and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (2007-present), as well as presidents Corazon Aquino of the Philippines (1986–1992) and Violeta Chamorro of Nicaragua (1990–1997). In recent years, women have become national leaders in their own right (e.g., Michelle Bachelet in Chile [2006–2010]), and of course it is not only in developing countries that women derive benefits from family. Yet family connections have enabled women to overcome the masculinism that pervades many Asian and Latin cultures, while they also escape the masculinist individualism that often limits women in Western, industrialized countries. Perhaps for this reason, cross-national studies find no connection between a nation’s stage of development and women’s rise to power.

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Legislative and Party Leadership Legislative leadership provides opportunities and obstacles for women who wield power. In adversarial systems that concentrate power in the leadership of two major parties and rely on combat between them, women must satisfy highly masculinist standards, but when they do become leaders, they gain considerable power. In 2007, Nancy Pelosi was elected the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. The daughter of a U.S. Representative, Pelosi nevertheless worked her way up the ranks of the Democratic party. She has demonstrated her “toughness” both in dealing with the opposition and in holding together her own party, as indicated by her success in safeguarding significant domestic programs when a Republican president attempted to abolish them. Other influential women in Congress, such as Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the first African American woman elected to Congress from Ohio, have also been influential. As chair of the House Ethics Committee, she appeared to fulfill the feminalist role of ethical or moral leadership that the mass public and the political elite expect from women. Deliberation in the legislative process permits women to use the power of persuasion to promote their priorities, particularly in feminalist fields of public policy. Furthermore, even in adversarial systems, power is more dispersed and shared in the legislative arena than in the executive. As a general rule, the more concentrated the power, the less likely women will wield it. Few women manage to make it to the top of the major political parties in two-party systems, and when they do, their parties often hand them “the poison chalice”; that is, they are given difficult or minor posts that others do not seek. When a major party plummets in the polls and faces defeat, the party elite sometimes look for a female leader and hope that the novelty—and increased support among female voters—will revive party fortunes. Canada’s first and only female prime minister, Kim Campbell, led for only a few months before the Progressive Conservatives failed to win the general election in 1993. In the United States, the only two women to run as vice presidential candidates from major parties proved similarly situated: U.S. Representative Geraldine Ferraro lost in the 1984 landslide, while Alaska governor Sarah Palin

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joined the ill-fated Republican ticket in 2008. All these women encountered harsh criticism for failing to live up to masculinist expectations: perceived as inexperienced and ill-equipped, they seemed too soft to lead. Women prove more likely to lead minor political parties. Janine Haines became the first female leader of a national political party in Australia (1986–1990), and several women have followed her as leader of the Democrats. In Canada, Audrey McLaughlin (1989–1995) and Alexa McDonough (1995–2003) have led the New Democratic Party. Many of the masculinist rules and norms that obstruct women in older, traditional parties are absent in younger, minor parties. Leaders of minor parties generally wield less influence, but they often can help set the agenda or voice opposition, especially when the major parties fail to address significant issues, collude to cut critical programs, or adopt a controversial course of action.

Executive Leadership and Iron Ladies Between 1960 and 2008, 62 women became national executives. Nine have led in sub-Saharan Africa, 12 in Asia, 4 in the Caribbean, 15 in Western Europe, 9 in Eastern Europe, 8 in Latin America, 2 in the Middle East (Israel), 2 in Oceania (New Zealand), and only 1 in North America (Canada). Women have governed in geographically diverse locations and encountered a range of obstacles and opportunities. In general, the more adversarial the system, the more masculinist its norms and expectations of executive leadership prove to be. Of course, the institutional role of the president as commander in chief and the nation’s superpower status magnify the masculinism of the presidency in the United States. During the 2008 presidential primaries, Senator Hillary Clinton struggled to convince voters that she could fill such a commanding role. Nevertheless, some measure of masculinism characterizes executive leadership in all adversarial systems in English-speaking countries, and women need to develop styles and strategies to show they are capable of being strong, determined, and decisive. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990)—the best known and most influential female leader in the English-speaking world— adopted exactly that approach. Thatcher insisted

that she alone had a remedy for the problems that plagued the United Kingdom, and she described her neoliberal public philosophy in highly masculinist terms by extolling the virtues of rugged individualism and fierce anticommunism. Moreover, she developed a distinctly masculinist style, which she described as “conviction politics,” an approach that shunned conciliation and consensus building and embraced conflict and conquest. Her style evoked the image of Boadicea, the ancient warrior queen, and earned her the appellation “the Iron Lady.” Women often get tagged with the label “Iron Lady.” Even before Thatcher, the title went to the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir (1969–1974) whose firm leadership during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 solidified her reputation for decisiveness and determination. The label has also landed on less successful, short-term executives such as Edith Cresson, prime minister of France (1991–1992), though her critics used it to disparage her and depict her as insensitive to the concerns of ordinary people. Whether Iron Lady conveys admiration or approbation, it reveals the masculinist expectations of leadership, often magnified by a nation’s global status or the degree of concentrated power in its executive. Presidential systems place women at a greater disadvantage because they concentrate power in the hands of a single person rather than in the collective leadership of a cabinet with a prime minister as first among equals. As a result, as Farida Jalalzai has demonstrated, women prove more likely to become executive leaders in parliamentary systems than in presidential ones. Across systems, the political elite as well as the mass public appear to have reservations about a woman wielding power with a high degree of independent authority and discretion. If that continues, then the presidentialization of parliamentary systems, which Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb have documented in their book on the presidentialization of politics, could make it even more difficult for women to become executives in parliamentary systems in the future. Where presidentialization has occurred, it has also diminished the authority of cabinet ministers at a time when more women have been moving into those positions of executive leadership. In the United Kingdom under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997–2007), the Labour Party reserved cabinet seats for women, but Blair

Women as Political Leaders

consistently bypassed the Cabinet and relied on his own advisors at Number 10 Downing Street. Furthermore, he placed all but one woman in charge of feminalist domestic policies such as health and education at a time when neoliberal fiscal constraints required cuts in expenditures. In his first government, only one female minister, Clare Short, Secretary of State for International Development, occupied a post concerning foreign policy, and she resigned in opposition to the Iraq war. Margaret Beckett, who endorsed Blair’s views, later became foreign secretary for a brief period (2006–2007), although she garnered criticism as too soft and subservient to the prime minister. In general, women have moved into cabinet posts when institutional and ideological developments restricted their opportunities to influence the direction of public policy. Moreover, most women continue to occupy ministerial posts that deal with domestic policies, while the more masculinist positions that pertain to national defense remain reserved for men and for the few women who live up to the Iron Lady label. As the scope of power contracts, the number of female leaders increases, and more women have become executives as governors or premiers at the subnational level in large, federal systems such as Canada, Australia, and the United States. Where public service in the national capital requires substantial travel and women continue to bear the brunt of child-rearing responsibilities, state and provincial governments allow women to lead and remain close to their families. While national institutional and ideological trends also limit local and regional leaders, states and provinces often provide laboratories for innovative leaders to test new policies. For women, the state or province can provide a platform to launch a national career, and many women move from their positions as governors or premiers to the national cabinet or other key positions in the administration of the central government.

Ceremonial Executives and International Leadership In several countries, women have become ceremonial executives, positions in which political power proves severely circumscribed, but where some women have discovered creative ways to wield influence despite considerable constitutional constraints on their authority. As ceremonial

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executives, female leaders can escape some of the masculinist expectations of political executives; the president of Ireland, for example, is only nominally the commander in chief. Yet as the female Irish presidents Mary Robinson (1990–1997) and Mary McAleese (1997–present) have demonstrated, ceremonial executives can use symbolic politics to highlight the concerns of marginal groups, promote pluralism, foster unity in times of conflict, and raise awareness of the plight of the disadvantaged at home and abroad. Some female leaders have also moved from the national stage to the international arena. A former prime minister of Norway (1981, 1986–1989, 1990–1996), Gro Harlem Brundtland, became the director-general of the World Health Organization (1998–2003), and President Robinson became the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997–2002). As members of the international group known as “the elders” (former national leaders who work to resolve global conflicts), Brundtland and Robinson demonstrate some of the ways women can advance international peace and enhance awareness of global challenges. In international affairs, female leaders fulfill feminalist expectations of women as peacemakers, while they also seek new ways to engender change on a global scale. Patricia Lee Sykes See also Executive Power; Feminist Theories of Power; Gender, Role of Power in; Leadership; Legislative Power; Political Parties; Prime Ministerial and Presidential

Further Readings Di Stefano, C. (1991). Configurations of masculinity: A feminist perspective on modern political theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Duerst-Lahti, G., & Kelly, R. M. (Eds.). (1995). Gender power, leadership, and governance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Genovese, M. (Ed.). (1993). Women as national leaders. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Liswood, L. A. (1995). Women world leaders. San Francisco: Pandora. Rule, W., & Zimmerman, J. (Eds.). (1994). Electoral systems in comparative perspective: Their impact on women and minorities. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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World Cities

Sykes, P. L. (2009). Incomplete empowerment: Female cabinet ministers in Anglo-American systems. In J. Kane, H. Patapan, & P. Hart (Eds.), Dispersed leadership in democracy: Foundations, opportunities, realities. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

WORLD CITIES Nearly a hundred years ago the term world city emerged in academic literature but, paralleling increasing scholarly attention to globalization, only rose to prominence in the 1980s. The continuing struggle to control the meaning of the term has lead to a confusing proliferation of definitions, which is unfortunate as many of the definitional differences denote only slight shifts in meaning. More confusing is how the frequently used but often ill-defined notion of power applies to world cities and related networks. Coined at the beginning of the 20th century by urban planner Patrick Geddes and resurfacing in Peter Hall’s 1966 The World Cities, the phrase is used by these early writers to rank cities according to a vague notion of importance. In the 1970s and early 1980s, neo-Marxist writers such as Stephen Hymer and John Friedman moved beyond simple ranking by developing various world city hypotheses, introducing explanations of how some cities have power over and the ability to “command and control” other cities. While non-Marxist David Heenan first published an article on global cities in the 1970s, the term only reemerged through Saskia Sassen’s work in the 1990s in which Sassen builds on Friedman’s world city hypothesis. Most recently, Peter Taylor’s team at Loughborough University’s Globalization and World Cities Research Network have offered empirically rich explorations of how a city benefits or suffers in relation to its characteristics and position in the world city network. Each of these four terms is discussed below, with emphasis on how they relate to different notions of power.

World Cities In his 1915 work Cities in Evolution, Patrick Geddes introduced the term world cities to refer to the worlds’ largest cities, their economic importance, and, very briefly, the relationship between these

important cities. However, it was Peter Hall’s 1966 The World Cities that launched the term into the mainstream. By comparing the attributes of cities such as such as London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo, Hall situates these cities atop an urban hierarchy. Hall sees world cities as being the centers of national and international politics, trade, financial services, education, communication, culture, and technology. Unlike the work of more contemporary authors, Hall’s world cities are inextricably linked to the nations in which they are located. Thus, world cities act as the gates through which goods and services flow as they leave and enter the country, with these city hubs allowing host nations to promote national interests both within the country and internationally. Hall’s notion of power is not related to some cities directly controlling other cities, but rather to powerful states using their biggest and most important cities to influence the economic, cultural, and political development of less powerful states.

World City Hypotheses While Geddes and Hall got the world city ball rolling by introducing rankings, the transformation from thinking about cities as tools of their host states to considering the role of world cities in the emerging global economy began with the work of Canadian neo-Marxist economist Stephen Hymer. Writing in response to the rise of multinational corporations, in 1972 Hymer suggested that multinational corporations need to conduct much of their business in person. As such, corporation headquarters were, and would become, increasingly located in major cities so as to be close to important government, media, and economic decision makers. As these top international business leaders began to congregate, a world city system would also start to rise, dominated by New York, London, Paris, Bonn, and Tokyo. For Hymer, these world cities are powerful because they contain a large number of corporate leaders who set the goals and directions of the global economy independent of the goals of the host nation-state. It is crucial to note that Hyman, like all later theorists, does not claim that cities are single entities with distinct preference sets, but rather that some cities contain more decision-making corporate leaders. Thus decisions about the global economy are made in

World Cities

London and New York rather than by London and New York. Apparently unaware of Hymer’s work, David Heenan published Global Cities of Tomorrow in 1977. Like Hymer, Heenan recognizes the fundamental impact of multinational corporations on cities and how these corporations drive particular services to particular cities in order to better facilitate their international expansion. Heenan also suggests that global cities need to develop into stable “command posts” if they are to attract the white-collar workers of the new global economy. Heenan is the first author to use the term global cities in this context. Although Hymer’s world cities and Heenan’s global cities are virtually interchangeable, what differs is each author’s view of the nature of these new relationships: Hymer sees these new developments as negative, while Heenan views them as something to be embraced. Although Heenan’s work was at the cutting edge in the 1970s and published in a highly respected journal, his work is only briefly acknowledged, then almost completely ignored by later world/global city researchers, perhaps because they do not share his procapitalist and proglobalization outlook. While Heenan’s work was neglected, Hymer’s work influenced other authors such as Robert C. Cohen in his seminal 1981 work The New International Division of Labor, Multinational Corporations and Urban Hierarchy. Here, Cohen uses a number of new data sources to track how multinational corporation networks are increasingly shifting from a national to a global focus, with the coordinating centers of the global networks based in a small number of large cities. Where Hymer influenced Cohen, Cohen’s work influenced John Friedman, one of the most cited world city authors. In 1982, Friedman and Goetz Wolff outlined a research agenda, not just suggesting that a few command and control center cities drive the global economy, but also that this new role changes a city’s own internal structure such that the divide between rich and poor becomes more acute. Command and control cities start to pull away from commanded and controlled cities, just as the commanders pull away from the commanded within these cities. Although he claims that it is not a universal generalization about how cities work, Friedman’s 1986 world city hypothesis

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further develops his earlier work and presents seven statements forming the basis of his research: 1. The form and extent of a city’s integration with the world economy, and the function assigned to the city in the new spatial division of labor, will be decisive for any structural changes within it. 2. Key cities throughout the world are used by global capital as basing points in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets. 3. The global control functions of world cities are directly reflected in the structure and dynamics of their production sectors and employment. 4. World cities are major sites for the concentration and accumulation of international capital. 5. World cities are points of destination for large numbers of both domestic and international migrants. 6. World city formation brings into focus the major contradictions of industrial capitalism; in particular, class and spatial polarization. 7. World city growth generates social costs at rates that tend to exceed the fiscal capacity of the state.

In addition to his seven influential statements, Friedman also provides a now-famous map illustrating his world city hierarchy. As shown in Figure 1, here we can see Friedman indicates London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Tokyo as the primary world cities due to their strong links with other core cities, with others being less important due to a smaller number of linkages. For Friedman, world cities, as defined by regional patterns of interaction and not political boundaries, serve as centers through which flow money, workers, information, commodities, and others key components of the global economy. All cities continuously compete to lure business away from other cities and, as such, all cities can be hierarchically arranged based on the number of economic decision makers located within their boundaries. At the top are the command- and -control centers

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World Cities

Western Europe North America Asia China

Tokyo

Seoul

Taipei Hong Kong Bangkok

San Francisco

Chicago

London

Toronto

Soviet Union

Vienna

Madrid Milan

New York

Los Houston Angeles Miami Mexico Manila

Paris, etc.

Caracas

Singapore Rio São Paulo

India Sydney

Australia

Buenos Aires

South America

Johannesburg

Africa

Core primary city Semi-periphery primary city Core secondary city Semi-periphery secondary city Linkages between core cities All other linkages

Figure 1

The hierarchy of world cities

Source: Peter J. Taylor. 2004. World city network: A global urban analysis. London: Routledge, pg. 23. Reprinted by permission of Wiley/Blackwell.

of the global economy (Friedman later labeled these cities global financial articulations), followed by ever-changing lower tiers of cities (later renamed multinational articulations, important national articulations, and subnational/regional articulations).

Global Cities In 1991, Saskia Sassen, the author whose work is by far the most frequently cited in this field, began using the term global cities to purposefully mark a break from past investigations of world cities. Building on work she had undertaken as far back as the early 1980s, Sassen argues that global cities differ from world cities in a number of important ways. Sassen uses the term global cities to move away from Hall’s and Geddes’s more historic view, arguing that the emergence of global cities marks a very different phase in human history due to the city’s place in the new global economy. Sassen also uses global cities to

differentiate her work from that centered on world city hypotheses in that while the latter focus on certain cities as sites from which the global economy is coordinated, Sassen’s global cities are where the economy is not only coordinated but also produced. In other words, it is not just that financial and information services tend to gravitate to certain cities, but that those cities themselves (New York, London, and Tokyo) are the central players in financial services. For Sassen, global cities are not just centers or command and control, but also the first ever global service centers. These two traits in turn shape the global city hierarchy and how cities develop internally. This change might be seen as a move from power over other cities to a power to attract services to their locales, although this second idea is not fully developed by Sassen. Sassen can also be seen to break from past authors regarding the unit of analysis in her studies. Where, like world cities, global cities are hubs in a network, Sassen argues it is not necessary to

World Cities

examine the whole city but rather just the city core, where networks link and production occurs. Viewing cities in this way erases the traditional view of the relationship between city and hinterland, where central business districts extract resources from surrounding suburban and rural areas. So it is not, for example, that all of London controls all of Toronto, but rather that core companies within London’s business district shape what happens to companies within Toronto’s business district. This view also reinforces the idea that uneven development happens between cities and within urban regions.

World City Network The latest development in world city literature concerns the efforts of Peter J. Taylor and his many associates to combines Friedman’s and Sassen’s ideas and evaluate world city networks. From Friedman, Taylor borrows the observation that in the new global economy cities are connected in a new way that transcends national borders; he also makes use of Sassen’s attention to advanced producer services, one of the main products of global cities. Initially, Taylor abandons what he deems the prevalent “hierarchy fetish” and rejects the notion that intercity relations are about cities directly controlling or being controlled by others. Instead, Taylor seeks to discover how cities interact to produce and export services, an idea guided by Jane Jacob’s notion of dynamic cities as centers of innovation. Taylor’s Globalization and World Cities Research Network does produce its own rankings of cities as centers of innovation—those having the potential to be the most innovative cities. Other authors also continue to produce ordered world city lists based on more traditional view of world and global cities, the most extensive perhaps being Arthur Alderson and Jason Beckfield’s list of 3,692 cities arranged according to information from 446 multinational firms.

Conclusion Before various world city hypotheses kicked off an explosion of rankings, world cities were simply densely populated and important urban centers where decisions were made, trends set, and national interests promoted. Early writings, such as those by Peter Hall, did not address the

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distribution of power in a systematic way. The introduction of world city rankings and especially the notion of command and control cities added a more developed idea of power to these rankings. Using a sociological concept of social networks, power is seen as the consequence of relationships between individuals, groups, or organizations, with those that occupy more favorable positions in the networks benefiting from the opportunities and constraints generated by the network configuration. Simply put, New York, London, and Tokyo benefit from the world city network more than other cities because they attract now vital service sector workers and firms and are also centers where service sector innovation occurs. How much these world ranking cities help us understand the world is debated. Friedman and his followers contend that uneven distribution of the centers of multinational corporations allows one nonpersonified city to dictate what happens in other nonpersonified cities. It is hard to see how this notion of command and control is a realistic assessment of how cities interact. Although it may be true that decisions about the global economy are indeed made in a small number of cities, these decisions are not coordinated or directed within these cities but are made by a distinct sets of decision makers. Also, just because the decisions are made in certain world cities does not mean that these decisions always benefit these same cities. For example, corporate heads often decide to relocate headquarters for some benefit or another, a rational move by these actors but an irrational, self-destructive move if these decision makers are seen as part of a group that commands and controls other cities. The work by more recent authors who play down the command and control aspect of world city networks discards the idea that some cities cause events to occur in other cities. However, the whole value of network analysis has been challenged by some authors, such as Keith Dowding, who argue that network analysis has little chance of accomplishing much more than illustrating general features of networks rather than more valuable causal explanations about the world in which we live. Kennedy Stewart

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Wright, Quincy

See also Globalization; Marxist Accounts of Power; Networks, Power in; Power To and Power Over

Further Readings Brenner, N., & Keil, R. (Eds.). (2006). The global cities reader. London: Routledge. Hall, P. G. (1966). The world cities. New York: McGraw-Hill. Sassen, S. (2001). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Taylor, P. J. (2004). World city network: A global urban analysis. London: Routledge.

WRIGHT, QUINCY (1890–1970) Quincy Wright was among the most productive and influential scholars of international relations, law, and war during his lifetime. The high regard he enjoyed is evidenced by his long-term tenure as editor of the American Journal of International Law and his election to the presidencies of the American Society of International Law, the American Political Science Association, and the International Political Science Association. Wright received his undergraduate degree from Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1912, and his MA in 1913 and PhD in 1915 from the University of Illinois. His professional career was most closely associated with the University of Chicago, where he was a faculty member from 1923 until his retirement in 1956. He continued as a faculty member at the University of Virginia while lecturing around the globe. The complete bibliography of his publications is over 70 typed, singlespaced pages in length. The breadth and importance of Wright’s contributions to international relations theory and practice, international law, and, most notably, to the study of the causes and prevention of war can only be highlighted, not comprehensively surveyed, in the brief compass of this entry. His major legacy is the works A Study of War and The Study of International Relations. A Study of War, a magisterial volume of over 1,500 pages, is remarkable. It is the first systematic survey and synthesis of the principal extant literature on the

causes of war from primitive to modern societies. While A Study of War draws profoundly on the knowledge of the traditional academic disciplines, its principal objective is more practical: to end wars by understanding their causes. This led Wright to approach the problem of war from a fundamentally problem-solving and interdisciplinary perspective. Breaking with tradition, Wright conceptualized war as the converse of peace. If the causes and conditions under which war was prompted could be identified and empirically verified, then remedies could be devised and applied, much like a physician in treating a disease, to inhibit or preclude the eruption of war and limit its duration and destructiveness. It might be said that A Study of War opened the study of war to scientific analysis. By insisting on research protocols used in the physical sciences, Wright blazed the trail for the development of scientific measures, validated by quantitative evidence, to verify contesting propositions or conjectures about the causes of war. He is universally credited to be among the founders of peace science, which is now an established research and teaching discipline at major research universities around the globe. Wright’s The Study of International Relations is also important for its wide-lens conceptualization of the field. While his notion of field theory amounted primarily to an elaborate taxonomy of disciplinary knowledge and professional skills relevant to international relations rather than a theory, he demonstrated that solving the problem of war, or any social ill, has to be driven by the search for knowledge from all quarters rather than be limited to a single discipline or profession. Wright’s capacious understanding of human thought, behavior, and creativity was also a precursor of global studies today. Following Wright’s lead, scholars working in this field resist being confined to prevailing disciplinary paradigms in their efforts to explain globalization as a phenomenon and as a problem confronting the world’s populations. As William T. R. Fox, a student of Wright’s and an internationally recognized international relations theorist, observed, Wright’s scholarship was dedicated to making the world free of war. That could only be accomplished by accounting and controlling for the full scope of human

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action that was disposed either to war or to peace. In the widest sense, Wright “was prescribing for a world society as a whole.” Consistent with Wright’s globalist perspective was the unit of analysis he adopted to guide his pursuit of a verifiable theory of international relations and war. Wright stipulates that the most natural way of looking at people is in terms of individuals on the one hand and the whole human race on the other. As among the most prominent international lawyers of his era, dedicated to eradicating war as an institution, Wright considers humanity as a whole to be his client, a

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commitment that undergirds the global human rights movement today. Edward Kolodziej See also War

Further Readings Wright, Q. (1955). The study of international relations. New York: Appleton. Wright, Q. (1965). A study of war. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Index Entry titles and their page numbers are in bold. Agency, 6–10 agency–structure problem, 10–11 collective agents, 9 determinacy and, 174–175, 181 evolution of human agency, 7–8 habitual versus autonomous action, 6–7 losing agency, 9 norm-based versus instrumental rationality, 6 self-reflection and agency, 8–9 structuration and, 641, 642–644 Agency–structure problem, 10–11 Agenda power, 11–13 agenda setters and, 13 cyclical social orders and, 12 (table) Agenda setters, 13–14, 13 (figure) Aggressive drive, 519 Akerlof, George, 5 Alabama paradox, 698 Alabama voting paradox, 698 Alchemies of the Mind (Elster), 243 Alderson, Arthur, 721 All-Russian Congress of Soviets (VtsIK), 658 Allen, Amy, 524, 528 Allende, Salvador, 100, 418–419 Alliances, 14–17 alliance cohesion, 15–16 alliance motivations, 14–15 animal groups and, 24 collective defense versus collective security, 17 grand coalition, 296 peacetime versus wartime alliances, 16 Allison, Graham, 706 Altemeyer, Robert, 34, 550, 580–581 Althusser, Louis, 17–18, 197, 241, 336, 369–370, 407–408, 499, 638–639 Amazon.com, 571 Ambivalent racism, 550 Ameliorative strategies, 69 American Farm Bureau Federation, 120 American Journal of International Law, 722 American Political Science Association, 163, 722 American Psychological Association, 555 American Psychological Society, 555 American Revolution, 28, 576, 583

A-posteriori voting power, 516 A priori unions. See Owen value; Power indices Aalborg, Denmark, 554 Aalborg Project, 259 Aaron Wildavsky Award, 585 Aberdeen University, 4 Ability, 1–2, 523 Ableness, 1–2 Abram (Abraham), 239 Absolutism, 2–3 Abstract labor, 85 Abyssinia (Ethiopia), 381 Achieved status, 628 Achilles, 478 Ackermann, Bruce, 170 Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 74 Acton, Lord, 46, 494 Adaptation, 348 Additional support paradox, 697 Adler, Alfred, 3–4, 519 Adlerian therapy, 35 Nietzsche and, 447 striving for superiority, 636 Adorno, Theodor, 4–5, 550 authoritarian personality, 33–34, 154 critical theory, 156–157, 159 Marx and, 406 Nietzsche and, 447 rhetoric, 580 Adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), 328 Adverse selection, 5–6, 533 Advisory referendums, 558 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), 5 Affecting, 523 Affuso, Paul J., 55, 471 Afghanistan, 418, 631 Africa, 569 Africa (sub-Saharan), 716 African Union, 331 After Hegemony (Keohane), 443, 560 After the Revolution? (Dahl), 123 After Victory (Ikenberry), 309 Agamben, Giorgio, 73, 253, 291 Age of Discovery, 285

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Index

American Society of International Law, 722 Amin, Idi, 419–420 Analysis, intelligence and, 343 Anarchical Society, The (Bull), 78 Anarchism, power in, 18–19 Anarchy in international relations, 20–22 anarchy and sovereignty, 20 anarchy and the state of nature, 20–22 spiral model, 626 Anaximander, 410 Anderson, Cameron, 504, 506 Anderson, John, 78 Animal groups, power in, 22–25 alliances as a bases for power, 24 animal warfare, 24 basis of, 23–24 correlates and consequences of, 24–25 female leadership among mammals, 246–250 resources and power, 22 Annales, 639 Anscombe’s paradox, 696–697 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, 433 Anti-foundationalists, 337 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism et Schizophrenia (Deleuze, Guattari), 197 Apparatus, 196–197. See also Dispositif Appeasement, 25–26 Aquino, Corazon, 715 Arcaini, Gabriella, 606 Arena of collective action, 462 Arendt, Hannah, 26–28, 133, 418, 524, 527, 576–577, 657 Argentina, 419–420, 631, 670 Argentinian Socialist Party (PSA), 369 Argument, power of, 28–30 Aristocracy, rule and, 31 Aristocratic radicalism, 448 Aristotle, 29, 30–31, 190, 302, 410, 461, 578, 598, 675 Arlington, Lord, 83 Armed Revolutionary Council, 419 Arms and Influence (Schelling), 660 Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit, Foreign Office, 78 Arms race, 31–32 Aron, Raymond, 189, 267, 312 Arrow, Kenneth, 270, 304, 316, 425, 644 Arrow’s theorem, 316 Art, Robert, 267 Art of Political Manipulation, The (Riker), 317 Aryan Nations of Christ, 243 Aryans, 670 Ascribed status, 628 Ashkenazi Jews, 613 Ashley, Richard, 140 Ashley-Cooper, Lord, 83 Asia, 569 Association of Applied Psychology, 555 Assured destruction, 432 Assured retaliation, 182

Asymmetric information, 63 Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS), 625 Attitudinal–historical approach, autonomy and, 41 Attlee, Clement, 376 Attribution process, 347–348 Augustus (emperor of Rome), 214, 216 Aumann, Robert John Y., 603, 683 Austin, John L., 191, 493 Australia, 559, 631, 714, 716–717 Australian National University (ANU), 78, 153 Austria, 443, 592, 596 Austrian School, 217 Authoritarian aggression, 581 Authoritarian liberalism, 291 Authoritarian personality, 32–36 racism, 550 right-wing authoritarianism, 580–583 social dominance theory, 615 Authoritarian Personality, The (Adorno), 32 Authoritarian submission, 580 Authoritarianism, 580 Authority, 36–39 Autonomy, 39–43 alternative accounts of, 41–42 coercion versus, 108 habitual action versus autonomous action, 6–7 importance of, 39–40 Kantian, 40 objections to early hierarchical account, 41 personal autonomy: early hierarchical account, 40–41 relative autonomy of the state, 567–568 Autonomy of the state. See Relative autonomy of the state Availability of information, 347 Aventine Secession, 292 Aversive racism, 550 Axelrod, Robert, 442, 592 Axial Age, 568 Aztecs, 703 Babeuf, François-Noël, 46, 578 Bachelet, Michelle, 715 Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton, 45–46 Bachrach, 45, 123–124, 164, 361, 394, 418, 449, 522, 564, 589, 644, 666 Baratz, 45, 123–124, 164, 361, 394, 418, 449, 522, 589, 666 Back, Kurt, 384 Backlash effect, 599 Bacon, Francis, 259, 365 Bahasa Malaysia, 371 Bakunin, Mikhail, 18, 46, 576 Balance of power, 46–51 alternative views of, 50 assessing the balance of power as system, 47 balance of power as law, 47–48 consequences of, 48–49 empirical record and, 49–50 exploring gender imbalance in leadership, 378–379

Index fungibility of power resources, 266–267 hegemonic power and, 308–309 Morgenthau, 426 neorealism and, 443–444 power transition theory, 526–527 Baldwin, Austin, 232 Baldwin, David, 267, 565–566 Bali, 419 Balibar, Étienne, 370, 499 Balzac, Honoré, 156 Banaji, Mahzarin, 358, 649 Bananas, Beaches and Bases (Enloe), 250 Bandwagon effect, 411, 443–444 Banker, The, 51 Banks, 51–53, 53 (table) Banzhaf. See Banzhaf voting power measure Banzhaf, John F., III, 53–54, 118, 355, 361 Penrose voting power measure, 476 power indices, 511–512 strategic power index, 632 voting power, 699 weighted voting, 710 Banzhaf value, 53–54 Banzhaf voting power measure, 54–55, 511–512 Barabasi, Albert-László, 352–353 Baratz, Morton, 123–124, 164, 361, 394, 418, 449, 522, 589, 666. See also Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz, Morton Barber, Benjamin, 365, 558 Barbosa, Duarte, 90 Bargaining, 55–60 argument and, 28–30 bargaining game, 608 bargaining space, 56–57 bilateral bargaining situation and Nash bargaining solution, 57 (figure) distributive consequences of outside options, 59 (figure) in international relations, 61–64 models of bargaining and bargaining power, 57–60 negotiator’s dilemma, 56 P-power, 529 Shapley value, bargaining model, 601–602 side payments and issue linkage, 60 (figure) Bargaining in international relations, 61–64 bargaining and credibility, 61 bargaining and international cooperation, 62 bargaining and war, 62–64 bargaining at multiple levels, 61–62 bargaining range, 63 (figure) social context and bargaining, 64 Bargh, John, 506–507 Barings Investment Bank, 298 Barnes, Barry, 133–134 Barnett, Michael, 284 Baron, David, 58 Barry, Brian, 64–66, 76, 125, 207, 388–390, 617–618 Barthes, Roland, 191, 370

727

Bases of power, 66–71 defined and explained, 66–69 origins of, 66 power/interaction model of interpersonal influence, 69–71 Basis of dependence, 346 Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA), 660 Bass, Bernard M., 673 Battle of the Sexes, 684 Baumeister, Roy, 505 Baumler, Alfred, 447 Bay of Pigs, Cuba, 100 BBC (British Broadcasting Company), 413 Beale, J., 122 Becker, Gary, 482 Beckett, Margaret, 717 Beckfield, Jason, 721 Behavior. See Power, cognition, and behavior Behavioral Science, 163 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 407 Belgian Socialist Party, 369 Belgium, 471 Bell, J. L., 397 Bem, Sandra, 625 Benford’s law, 518–519 Benjamin, Walter, 154 Benn, Stanley, 685 Bentham, Jeremy, 71, 114, 136, 290, 438, 579 Bentley, Arthur, 482 Berdahl, Jennifer, 506–507 Berelson, Bernard, 412 Berg, Alban, 156 Berlant, Louise, 318 Berlin, Isaiah, 385 Bernoulli model, 525, 679 Besley, Tim, 534 Between Facts and Norms (Habermas), 169 Bevanite Left, 415 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 448 Bhaskar, Roy, 557, 639 Bhutto, Benazir, 715 Bhutto, Zulfikar, 715 Bicameral legislature, 71–72 Big Bang, 179 Bilbao, Jesús Mario, 55, 606 Billig, Michael, 334 Bimber, Bruce, 353 Binding referendums, 558 Biopower, 72–73 feminist theories of power, 255–256 Foucault and, 72–73 other authors, 73 Bipolar structure, war and, 702 Birth of Biopolitics, The (Foucault), 260 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 448 Bismarck, Otto von, 307, 458 Black, Duncan, 317, 359 Black Panthers, 578 Blackmail, 73–74 Blainey, Geoffrey, 705

728

Index

Blair, Tony, 279, 388, 693, 716 Blocking coalition, 74, 608 Boadicea (queen of Iceni Celts), 716 Bodin, Jean, 616–619 “Body bag syndrome,” 463 Bolger, Edward M., 515 Bologna, Italy, 659 Bolsheviks, 88 Bonacich, Phillip, 445–446 Bonacich centrality, 445 Bonding, 612 Boniface VIII, Pope, 20 Bonn, 718 Borda’s paradox, 696 Botwinick, Aryeh, 45 Boudon, Raymond, 338–339 Bounded, 552 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 18, 74–76, 204, 235, 302, 406, 409, 477, 642, 648–649, 707 Bourhis, Richard, 506 Bourne, Randolph, 712 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 446, 612 Bradford University, 104 Brams, Steven J., 55, 271, 276, 471, 544 Bramstead, Ernest, 78 Braudel, Fernand, 153, 639 Brauer, M., 503 Brazil, 418, 463, 560, 587 Breton, André, 409 Bretton Woods, 286, 310, 438 Bribe index, 76–77 Bridging, 612 British Association for International Theory, 78 British East India Company, 285 British House of Commons, 382 British Journal of Social Psychology, 358 British New Left, 415 Brodie, Bernard, 181, 184 Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 717 Brundtland Commission, 281 Brunel University, 207 Bruner, Jerome, 265 BT Center for Major Programme Management, University of Oxford, 259 Buchanan, James, 138, 438 Buck-passing, 444 Buckingham, Duke of, 83 Budget-maximizing bureaucrats, 77 Bull, Hedley, 21, 50, 77–78, 309, 711 Bureaucracy. See Bureaucratic power Bureaucratic power, 79 agenda setters and, 13 bicameralism and, 71–72 budget-maximizing bureaucrats, 77 Weber, 708 Burma, 418 Burns, James MacGregor, 673

Business and power, 79–81, 217–218 “But for” test, 93–94 Butler, Judith, 159, 318, 545 Cabal, 83 Cable, James, 300 Calculus of Consent, The (Tullock), 138 California, 679, 681–682 Call, Lewis, 18–19 Callicles, 322 Cambodia, 657–658 Campbell, David, 498 Campbell, Donald, 555 Campbell, Kim, 715 Canada, 714, 716–717 Cantor, David G., 131 Capability, 83–84 Capital agency and, 7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 75 capital neoclassical, 86–87 Marxist, 84–86 social capital, 611–612 Capital, Marxist, 84–86 Capital (Marx), 85 Capital, neoclassical, 86–87 Capitalist Democracy in Britain (Miliband), 416 Capture theory of regulation, 87–88 Cardoso, Fernando, 173 Caribbean, 716 Carr, E. H., 88–89, 184, 307, 331–332, 556 Carroll, Lewis, 32 Cartel agenda model, 12 Cartwright, Dorwin, 66, 89–90, 265–266, 384 Case, Anne, 534 Case of Wagner, The (Nietzsche), 448 Caste system (India), 90–92 Castells, Manuel, 92 Castro, Fidel, 160 Catechism of a Revolutionary (Nechaev), 578 Categorical imperative, 553 Catherine the Great, 2 Catholic Church, 206 Causal overdetermination, 97 Causal theories of power, 92–96 contingent dependency: “but for” test, 93–94 equivalence thesis, 93 power and causation, 94–96 Causation, 96–99 determinacy and, 174–175, 179–181 relational power and, 565 Ceausescu, Nicolae, 27 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 186 Center for European Sociology, 74 Center for Research on World Political Institutions, 186 Central Intelligence Agency, 76, 99–100 Central Intelligence Group (CIG), 100 Central Powers, as alliance, 15 Centre for the Study of Democracy, Westminster, 369

Index Centre for the Study of Global Governance, 281 Centre for Theoretical Studies, 370 Certainty, 178–179 Chain-ganging, 444 Chamberlain, Neville, 26 Chamorro, Violeta, 715 Chaos theorem, 12, 316–317 Chappell, Louise, 255 Character and Social Structure (Mills, Gerth), 421 Charismatic authority, 37 Charles I (king of France), 3 Charles II (king of England), 83 Charles University, Prague, 186 Cheka, 658 Chen, Serena, 507 Chicago, Illinois, 170, 719 Chicago Convention, 631 Chicken games, 100–101 game matrix for chicken, 101 paradox of omniscience, 273 (figure) Chile, 418–420, 670, 715 China, People’s Republic of, 115, 463, 466, 560 authority and, 35 China Banking Regulatory Commission, 52 coercion and power, 115 terror regimes, 658 Chiou, Fang-Yi, 481 Christensen, Thomas, 442, 444 Christian Democratic Party (Italy), 202 Christman, John, 41 Chun, Youngsub, 602 Church of Scotland, 319 Churchill, Randolph, 166 Churchill, Winston, 71, 166, 376 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Cicero, 579, 712 Cities in Evolution (Geddes), 718 Civil Aeronautics Board, 88 Civil war, 101–103 Civilian–Military Directorate, 418 Clark, Helen, 715 Clark, Maudmarie, 713 Clark, Terry N., 570 Clash of civilization thesis, 139 Class Power and State Power (Miliband), 416 Class theory. See Marx, Karl; Marxist accounts of power Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (Poulantzas), 499 Claude, Inis, 47–48 Clausewitz, Carl von, 103, 591–592, 702, 704–705 Clegg, Stewart, 103–105 Clemenceau, Georges, 381 Cleon (rhetorician), 29 Clews-Parsons, Elsie, 712 Clifford, Thomas, 83 Clinton, Hillary, 351, 716 Coalition Coordination, Communication and Integration Center, 16

729

Coalition theory, 105–108 model, 105–106 solutions and solution concepts, 106–108 Cobden, Richard, 47 Coch, Lester, 90, 266, 384 Cocking, C., 122 Codevilla, Angelo, 343 Coercion, analytic, 108–111 concept of coercion, 108–109 relevance of coercion, 109–111 Coercion and power, 111–116 analytic coercion, 108–111 bases of power, 67 coercion power in animal groups, 23 coercive offer, 113–114 dominant strategies and coercion, 114–115 empires and, 214–215 incentive structures, 112–113 offers versus threats, 113 Coercive diplomacy, 300 Cognition. See Power, cognition, and behavior Cognitivist-based approach to regimes, 561 Cohen, G. A., 647 Cohen, Joshua, 168 Cohen, Robert C., 719 Coleman, James S., 116–117, 354, 390, 511, 513–514, 528, 611–612 Banzhaf value, 53–54 Coleman index, 117–119 computer algorithms for power indices, 130 power to initiate action and power to prevent action, 525–526 voting power, 699 Coleman index, 117–119, 513 Collection, intelligence and, 343 Collective Action, Group Organization and Pluralist Democracy (Dowding), 207 Collective action problem, 119–122 anarchism and, 18 authority and, 38 Castells and, 92 causal theories of power and, 91 cooperation, 143, 144–145 dictatorship, 120 exploitation of powerful and, 121–122 Internet and, 352 power, luck, and, 119–121 Collective agents, 9 Collective goods. See Public goods Collège de France, 74, 259–260 Columbia University, 153, 421 Comintern (Third International), 292 Commission on Global Governance, 281 Commitment problems, bargaining and, 63 Committee of General Security (France), 658 Committee of Public Safety (France), 658 Common deterrence, 182 Communications intelligence (COMINT), 220 Communion, 325

730

Index

Communism Althusser and, 17 Carr and, 89 See also Marx, Karl Communist Manifesto (Marx, Engels), 292, 639 Community Conflict (Coleman), 116 Community power debate, 122–126 Dahl and, 163–164 first phase, 122–123 second phase, 123 structural accounts and theoretical critiques, 123–125 Community Power Structure (Hunter), 122, 212, 329 Compatibilism, 178 Competition state, 465 Complex equality (Walzer), 123–127 Complex interdependency, 560 Complex system models, 517 Compliance (international), 127–129 Compound majority paradoxes, 697 Compulsory heterosexuality, 318 Computer algorithms, 129–133 method of direct enumeration, 130–131 method of generating functions, 131–133 method of multilinear extensions, 131 notation and definitions, 129–130 Comte, Auguste, 155 Concert of Europe, 17 Concrete labor, 85 Condercet winners, 623 Condillac, Etienne, 334 Condorcet, Marquis de, 397, 644, 695–696 Condorcet’s paradox, 695–696 Congo, Democratic Republic of, 121 Congress Party (India), 91 Connolly, William, 222 Conquest of Bread, The (Kropotkin), 367 Consensual power, theories of, 133–137 concept, 133–134 normative implication, 135–137 perspectives on, 134–135 Consent, 137–138 Conserving regimes, 562 Constant capital, 85 Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea, 657 Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, The (Giddens), 134, 280 Constitutional Convention (1787), 401, 509 Constructivist view of power in international relations, 138–141 constructivism, 138–139 constructivism-inspired analyses of power in IR, 140–141 constructivist conceptualizations of power, 139–140 Content analysis, 192 Contingency, 174 Contingency theories, leadership and, 376 Contingent dependency, 93–94 Contingent reward, 673 Control, 141–142

Control of the Arms Race, The (Bull), 78 Convention on International Civil Aviation, 631 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 256 Conventional deterrence, 142–143 Conventionalism, 581 Conversation analysis, 192 Cook, Karen, 446 Cooperation, 143–146 collective action problem, 143, 144–145 natural selection and selfish genes, 145–146 See also Game forms, power in; Game-theoretical approaches to power; individual game theory concepts Cooperative game theory. See Game forms, power in; Game-theoretical approaches to power; individual game theory concepts Coordination, 146–147 Copeland, John, 231, 506 Copeland winners, 623 Corbett, Julian, 588 Core of a game, 147 Core parties, 147–148 Corporatism, 148–150 Corruption, 150–151 Council of Ministers of the European Union, 362, 711 Council of the European Union, 74 Counter-intelligence, 343, 344 Counter-Reformation, 569 Coup d’état, 151–153 explaining coups, 152–153 nature of coups, 152 See also Dictatorship Course in Mathematical Logic, A (Machover, Bell), 397 Covariation of interests, 346 Covert action, intelligence and, 343–344 Cox, Gary, 12 Cox, Robert W., 153–154, 311 Credibility, deterrent threats and, 185 Cremer, Georg, 150–151 Crenson, Matthew, 80, 123, 125, 361 Cresson, Edith, 716 Crisis of the Dictatorships (Poulantzas), 499 Critical discourse analysis (CDA), 192 Critical History of Thought, 260 Critical theory, 154–160, 301 Frankfurt School, 154–157 radical skepticism and renewal of, 158–160 second-generation theorists, 157–158 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre), 407 Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre), 408 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Marx), 402, 407 Croce, Benedetto, 292 Cuba, 100, 160–161, 658 Cuban missile crisis, 160–161 Cuddy, Amy, 507 Cultural capital, 75 “Cultural Revolution” (China), 115

Index Culture industry, 157 Cutler, A. Claire, 429 Cycling, 644 Czechoslovakia, 27 Dahl, Robert A., 45, 95, 123–126, 133, 139, 163–164, 201–202, 306, 373, 393 democracy, 172 exercise fallacy, 229 feminist theories of power, 252 fungibility of power resources, 267 growth coalitions, 299 influence, 342 justice, 360 multinational corporations, 429 pluralism, 483–484 power to and power over, 522 relational power, 564–566 reputational analysis, 570 resources as measuring power, 572–573 second face, 589 three faces of power, 666 Daladier, Édouard, 26 Dandeker, Christopher, 708 Dawkins, Richard, 145 De Dreu, Carsten, 505 De Oratore (Cicero), 579 de Tracy, Destutt, 334 Debord, Guy, 408 Decentering (of subject, of structure), 164–165 Decision making, 514–515 groupthink and, 297–298 Lukes on decision-making power, 393 Decisiveness, Barry on, 65 Deegan, John, Jr., 513 Deegan–Packel (D-P) index, 513–514 Deep structure, of states system, 20–22 Defensive realism, 165–166 Deflected wants, 166–167 Degree centrality, 445 Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), 328 Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 197, 337 Delian League, imperialism and, 340 Deliberation, 167–168 Deliberative democracy, 30, 168–171 contemporary democratic theorists, 169 democracy as dialogue, 168 Habermas’s model, 168–169 practice and problems, 169–170 Deliberative polls, 170 Democracy, 171–172 discourse, 195 prime ministerial and presidential, 530–532 Democracy, Power and Justice: Essays in Poitical Theory (Barry), 64 Democracy and Inclusion (Young), 169 Democracy and Its Critics (Dahl), 163 Demos, rule and, 31 Denmark, 472, 559, 714

Dennett, Daniel, 8, 179 Dependency theory in international relations, 172–174 Depression, dominance motivation and, 329 Dépret, Eric, 504–505 Derg (Coordinating Committee of the Ethiopian Armed Forces, Police and Territorial Army), 419 Derrida, Jacques, 194, 226, 370 Desai, Meghnad, 281 Descartes, René, 156 Desert Storm, 16 Desire for power, 519 Despotic liberalism, 291 Determinability, 174 Determinacy, 174–178 causation and agency, 174–175 contingent necessity and, 175–176 economic determinancy, 176–177 Determinism, 178–181, 263 causation, 179 certainty and probability, 178–179 feeling and being, 180–181 independent power, 181 reactions and addictions, 179–180 Deterrence theory, 181–184 compliance and, 128 conventional deterrence, 142–143 spiral model, 626 See also Conventional deterrence Deterrent threats, 184–186 unilateral deterrence, 185 (figure) unilateral deterrence outcomes, 185 (table) Deudney, Daniel, 309 Deutsch, Karl, 186–187 Deutsch, Maria Scharf, 186 Deutsch, Martin, 186 Development of underdevelopment, 173 Devine, Patricia D., 550 Di Stefano, Christine, 714 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno), 4 Dialogus de oratoribus (Tacitus), 579 Dickens, Charles, 156 Dictatorship, 187–188 absolutism, 2–3 collective action problem, 120 coup d’état, 151–153 fascism, 242–243 fear, 244 media control, 413 terror regimes, 657–658 totalitarianism, 670 Diodotus (rhetorician), 29 Diplomacy, 188–190 Direct enumeration, 130–131 Directive regimes, 562 Disciplinary power, 290 Discipline, 190–191 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 72, 136, 260, 290

731

732

Index

Discourse, 191–196 exclusion, 224 role of hegemony, social antagonism, dislocation, 194–196 theories of, 192–194 See also Foucault, Michel Discourse psychology, 192 Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (Machiavelli), 395–396 Discursive power, 129 Diskin, Abraham, 246 Dispositif, 1, 196–197 Disraeli, Benjamin, 340 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu), 74 Distribution, 56 Distributive justice, 197–201 egalitarian theories of justice, 198–199 justice as fairness, 199 libertarian theories, 200 responsibility-sensitive egalitarian principles, 199–200 theories, critiqued, 200 utilitarian theories of justice, 198 District of Columbia, 679 Divided government, 531 Doctors Talking With Patients/Patients Talking With Doctors: Improving Communication in Medical Visits (Hall), 303 Doctrine of Fascism, A (Gentile), 242 Domain, 201 Domestic life balance, leadership and, 379 Domestic sovereignty, 621 Domestic state power, 462 Domhoff, G. William, 123, 164, 201–202, 213, 298–299, 360 Dominance, 174 Dominant ideology thesis, 383 Dominant parties, 202–203 animal groups and power, 22–23 coercion and, 114–115 dominant strategies and coercion, 114–115 human dominance motivation, 324–329 offense/defense dominance, 457–458 social dominance theory, 613–616 Domination, 203–207 consciousness of domination by the dominated, 204–205 descriptive versus normative senses of domination, 203–204 domination and states, 205–206 domination versus socialization, 205 justice and, 362–363 from macro to micro dimensions, 206 Donnelly, Jack, 309 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” 319 Döring, Herbert, 382 Dovidio, John F., 550 Dowding, Keith, 120, 207, 299, 721 budget-maximizing bureaucrats and, 77 Internet and power, 351

networks and power, 446 power to and power over, 523 resources as measuring power, 574 social power, 616, 618–619 structural suggestion, 640 systematic luck, 653, 655 three faces of power, 666 Downs, Anthony, 77, 422, 473 Doyle, Michael, 214 Drèze, Jacques H., 603, 683 Driessen, T. S. H., 667 Drury, J., 122 Du contrat social (Rousseau), 621 Dubey, Pradeep, 53–54, 512, 602, 606 Duerst-Lahti, Georgia, 714 Dunleavy, Patrick, 567 Duplicative causation, 97 Durkheim, Émile, 75, 177, 280, 302, 393, 629, 637, 642 Dutch East India Company, 285 Dutch Republic, 443 Duvall, Raymond, 284 Duverger, Maurice, 491, 523 Dworkin, Gerald, 40–41 Dworkin, Ronald, 390–391 Dziak, John, 344 e-governance, 210–211 Eagly, Alice, 209–210 East Timor, 419 Eastern Europe, 716 ebay, 571 École Normale Supérieure, 17 Ecological Perspective on Human Affairs, With Special Reference to International Politics (Sprout, Sprout), 627 Ecological relation, 177 Econometric Society, 304 Economic determinacy, 176–177 Economic institutions, defined, 631 Ecuador, 418 Edelman, Paul H., 628 Efficiency, 56, 668 Egalitarianism, distributive justice and, 198–200 Ego-oriented power, 582 1859 Preface, The (Marx, Engels), 241 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx), 292 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 183, 419–420 Ekstrom, Laura Waddell, 41–42 El Salvador, 418 Elections, 211–212 Electronic intelligence (ELINT), 220 Elephants, social structure of, 247–248 Elite theories, 212–213 community power debate, 122–126 essential contested concept of power, 221–223 justice and, 360 power elite, 508–509 Ellis, Albert, 4

Index Ellul, Jacques, 536–537 Elster, John, 86, 144, 243 Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work, A Historical and Critical Study (Lukes), 393 Emotional attitude, 675 Emotional blackmail, 73–74 Empire, 213–217 benefits of empire, 215–216 decolonization and after, 216–217 historical background, 213–214 systems of coercion and control, 214–215 Empire (Hardt, Negri), 73, 498 Empowerment. See Psychological empowerment Enabling Act of 1933, 187 Enforcement school, international compliance and, 127 Engels, Friedrich, 156, 241, 292 English Civil War, 3, 120 English School, 50, 78, 189, 309, 592–593 Enlightenment, 30, 103, 196, 227, 293, 301, 334, 448 Marx and, 405 sovereignty, 621 Enloe, Cynthia, 250 Entrepreneurial regimes, 562 Entrepreneurs, 217–218 Environmental treaties, 218–220 enforcement, 219–220 history of environmental treaties, 218–219 key actors, 219 role of science in environmental policy making, 219 Epistemes, 136 Equality of opportunity, 459 Equilibrium theory, 482–483 Equivalence thesis, 93 Equivalency framing, 261–262 Erber, Ralph, 505 Espionage, 220–221 Essentially contested concept, 221–223 Ethiopia, 419–420, 658 Ethos, 29 Eurocommunism, 500 European Commission, 128 European Community Treaty, 624 European Court of Justice, 128 European Group for Organization Studies, 104 European Journal of Political Economy, 323 European People’s Party (Christian Democrat), 296 European Union, 88, 128–129, 397, 463 EU Common Agricultural Policy, 287 EU Stability and Growth Pact, 128 hegemonic power, 309 hegemony, 315 idealism in international relations, 331 monopoly power, 425 paradox of new members, 471 qualified majority voting, 543–544 See also individual names countries European Union Council, 130

733

European White Paper on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), 430 Evolution of Cooperation, The (Axelrod), 592 Evolution of Cooperation, The (Taylor), 442 Ex ante power, 624 Ex-post power, 623–624 Exchange theory, 223–224 Exchange value, 84–86 Exclusion, 224–228 power, order, and exclusion, 226–228 power and the excluded, 225–226 Executive power, 228–229 Exercise fallacy, 229–230, 427 Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Hirschman), 230, 388 Exit and voice as forms of power, 230–231 Expansion of International Society, The (Bull), 78 Expectancy confirmation, power and, 231–232 Expertise power, 23, 68 Exploitation, 232–236 Marx: surplus labor and surplus value, 232–234 other analyses of exploitation, 234–236 Extended deterrence, 236–237 Extensive form games, 450 External balancing, 47 Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 354 Facebook, 286 Fair division, 239–240 Fairclough, Norman, 192 Falklands, the, 143 False consciousness, 240–242 Farjoun, E., 397 Farquharson, Robin, 272 Fascism, 242–243 Fascism and Dictatorship (Poulantzas), 197, 499 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 546 Fear, use of, 243–245 Fearon, James D., 61–63 Federal Aviation Administration, 88 Federal structure, 245 Federalist, The, 598 Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles (France), 120 Feinberg, Joel, 235 Felsenthal, Dan S., 54, 76, 118, , 245–246, 354, 362, 390, 397, 480, 515, 526, 528, 544, 606, 628, 632–634, 654, 680, 699 Female leadership among mammals, 246–249, 246–250 Feminalism, 714 Feminist international relations, view of power, 250–251 Feminist theories of power, 251–257 from ability to coercion: voluntarist conceptions of power, 251–252 biopower, 255–256 empowerment, 256–257 explaining gender asymmetries: from violence to the microphysics of power, 253–255 gender oppression, 252–253 power to and power over, 523–524

734

Index

Ferejohn, John, 58 Ferguson, Adam, 354 Fernandez de Kirchner, Cristina, 715 Ferraro, Geraldine, 715 Festinger, Leon, 66, 266, 384, 555 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 402–404 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 103 Field, 7 Field of power, 75 Field Theory in Social Science (Cartwright), 89 Fields, 75 Fields, Factories and Workshops (Kropotkin), 367 Financial Services Authority, 52 Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE), 377 Finland, 714 “First-past-the-post” (FPTP) elections, 211 First-strike capability, 257–258 Fishkin, James, 170 Fiske, Susan, 258–259, 501, 504–507 Five Power Pact, 237, 631 Flexploitation, 235 Floor median, 12 Flyvbjerg, Bent, 259, 554 Folk theorem, 535, 684 For Marx (Althusser), 638 Ford, Henry, 496 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Report, 428 Förster-Nietzsche, Elizabeth, 712 Foucault, Michel, 197, 204, 228–229, 254–255, 259, 259–261, 366, 409 anarchism and, 18–19 bioper and, 72–73 Clegg and, 104 community power debate, 125 consensual power, 133, 135–137 critical theory, 158–159 discourse, 192–193 exclusion, 226 gender and role of power, 278–279 governmentality, 289–291 Habermas and, 302 heterosexism and role of power, 318 ideology, 337 Laclau and Mouffe, 370 Marxism and, 406 Morriss and, 427 postmodernist view of power in international relations, 497–499 queer theories of power, 545 realist accounts of power, 557 rhetoric, 579–580 three faces of power, 666 Weber and, 708 Foucault Effect, The (Gordon), 288 Foundations of National Power (Sprout, Sprout), 627 Foundations of Sociological Theory (Coleman), 116–117 Fox, William T. R., 722 FOX News, 413 Fragmegration, 465

Frameworks of Power (Clegg), 104 Framing, 261–262 France, 443, 466, 471, 686, 716. See also French Revolution Franco, Francisco, 670 Frank, Andre Gunder, 173 Frankfurt, Harry, 40–42 Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, 154–157 Frankfurt School, 4, 154–159, 366, 406, 408 Free market, 262–263 Free rider. See Collective action problem Free will, 263–264 Freeden, Michael, 334, 338–339 Freedman, Lawrence, 182 Freedom, 264–265 Freedom House, 211 Freeman centrality, 445 Freire, Paolo, 256 Freixas, Josep, 515 French, John R. P., Jr., 66–67, 69, 90, 265–266, 384, 504, 554–555 French Communist Party, 369, 500 French Fifth Republic, 532 French Revolution, 103, 294, 312, 569 sovereignty, 621 terror regimes, 658 terrorism, 661 Frenkel-Bruswick, Else, 550 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 34–35, 156, 166, 408, 519 Friedman, John, 718–721 Friedman, Milton, 439 Friedrich, Carl, 150, 564 Frieze, Irene, 507 Fromm, Erich, 32, 154 Fukuyama, Francis, 676 Fungibility of power resources, 266–267 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 157 Gaertner, Samuel L., 550 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 217 Galinsky, Adam, 502, 507 Gallagher, Jack, 341 Gallagher, Michael, 558 Gallie, William, 221 Gambarelli, Gianfranco, 55, 603, 606 Gambetta, Diego, 121 Game forms, power in, 269–270 Game-theoretical approaches to power, 270–276 Banzhaf value, 53–54 bargaining and, 56–60 chain-store game, 275 (figure) chicken games, 100–101 core of a game, 147 core parties, 147–148 example: game of chicken, 273–274, 273 (figure) example: paradox of markmanship, 272–273 example: paradox of the chair’s position, 270–271, 271 (figure) game forms, power in, 269–270

Index homogenous weighted majority games, 324 Nash equilibrium, 435–436 noncooperative games, 449–452 Owen value and four-person game, 467–468 power as helpful, 274–275 power indices, 509–516 prisoner’s dilemma, 534–536 proper simple game, 537–538 Shapley–Shubik index, 603–606 Shapley value, 468 (table), 600–603 simple games, 607–608 “threat power,” 276 Tijs value, 667–670 value of a game, 683–684 variable-sum games, 684 See also Coalition theory; Voting; individual names of theorists Game theory. See Game-theoretical approaches to power Gandhi, Indira, 715 Garfinkel, Harold, 643 Gatekeeping power, 692 Gaudet, Hazel, 412 Gaventa, John, 361 Geddes, Patrick, 718 Geertz, Clifford, 336–337 Gellner, Ernest, 568 Gender, role of power in, 276–279 balance of power and, 378–379 Eagly and, 209–210 feminist theories of power and, 253–255 feminist theories of power and gender oppression, 252–253 Foucault on resistance, subversion, domination, 278–279 language, 372 leadership and gender, 377–381 queer theories of power, 544–547 sexism and, 598–600 stereotyping subordinates, 506–507 testosterone and, 662–664 understanding patriarchy, 276–278 women as political leaders, 714–718 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 286, 631 General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games (Harsanyi, Selten), 305 Geneva Conventions, 489, 659 Gentile, Giovanni, 242 George I (king of the United Kingdom), 583 Georgesen, John, 506 German Ideology, The (Marx, Engels), 241, 647 German Social Democratic Party (SPD), 414 Germany, 457–458, 466, 471, 626, 693 Ghana, 418–419 Gibbard, Allan, 269–270 Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem, 316 Giddens, Anthony, 6–7, 133–134, 279–281, 305, 639, 641–644, 676 Gilpin, Robert, 49, 307, 310, 312–313, 442

735

Glaser, Charles, 596 “Glass ceiling,” 378 Glick, Peter, 507 Global cities, 719, 720–721. See also World cities Global Cities of Tomorrow (Heenan), 719 Global Fund on AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis, 282 Global governance, 281–284 definitions, 281–282 rationale, 282 theory and study of global governance, 282–284 Global Governance, 281 Global Reporting Initiative, 430 Globalization, 284–288, 311, 341, 465, 568 historical background, 285–286 modern-day, 286–288 Globalization and World Cities Research Network, 718, 721 Glocalization, 465 Godfather, The (film), 113 Godson, Roy, 343 Goebbels, Joseph, 537 Goffman, Erving, 261 Goldman, Alvin, 95 Gomorrah, 583 Goodin, Robert, 235, 398 Goodman, Paul, 19 Goodwin, Stephanie, 505–506 Google, 571 Google Corporation, 353 Google Scholar, 571 Gordon, Colin, 288 Gorgias (Plato), 322 Gossen’s First Law, 442 Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? (Scharpf), 489 Governmental Process, The (Truman), 482 Governmentality, 288–291 emergence of, 289 forms of power and, 289–290 Foucault’s notion of government, 289 post-Foucault developments, 290–291 Graduate deterrence, 183 Graduate Institute of International Studies, 153 Gramsci, Antonio, 135–136, 153, 195, 205–206, 241, 291–296, 311, 315–316, 357, 405–406, 417, 638 case of Italy and, 293–294 hegemony, 336 hegemony, revolution, and the state, 294–295 Laclau and Mouffe, 370 Marxist tradition and, 292–293 Poulantzas and, 499 status, 629 Grand coalition, 296 Granovetter, Mark, 296–297, 445, 634–635 Grant, Ruth W., 488 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 125 Gray, Colin, 589

736

Index

Great Depression, 285, 381 business and power, 81 Carr and, 88 social breakdown, 610 striving for superiority, 636 Great Dust Bowl, 611 Greece, 418 Greek Communist Party of the Interior, 499 Grieco, Joseph, 443 Griffith University, Brisbane, 104 Grossmann, Henryk, 154 Group theory, 482 Groupthink, 297–298 Growth coalitions, 124, 298–300, 562–563 Growth machine. See Growth coalitions Gruenfeld, Deborah, 504, 507 Grünberg, Carl, 154 Guatemala, 419–420 Guattari, Félix, 197 Guinote, Ana, 501, 503, 507 Gunboat diplomacy, 300, 300 Gupta, Depankar, 91 Gypsies, 670 Haas, Peter, 561 Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 136, 155, 157–158, 160, 301–302, 366, 383, 553 deliberative democracy, 169–170 Marxism and, 406 Habitual action, autonomous action versus, 6–7 Habitus, 7, 75, 302–303, 648 Hacker, Jacob, 81 Hacking, Ian, 138 Haile Selassie (emperor of Ethiopia), 419–420 Haines, Janine, 716 Haldane, J. B. S., 145 Hall, Judith A., 303–304, 505 Hall, Peter, 718, 721 Halperin, David M., 447, 545 Hamas, 661 Hamilton, Alexander, 72 Hamilton, William, 145 Handbook of Political Science, 443 Hands, Gordon, 415 Hanson, C., 122 Hard determinists, 575 Hardin, Russell, 107 Hardt, Michael, 73, 217, 235, 498 Harlow, Harry, 328 Harris, Monica, 506 Harsanyi, John C., 58, 304–305, 351, 571–574, 617, 683 Hart, H. L. A., 98 Hart, S., 107 Hart, Sergiu, 602 Harwood Manufacturing Company, 266 Hass, R. G., 550 Haufler, Virginia, 429 Haugaard, Mark, 133, 305–306

Haugen, Julie, 231 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 157 Hayek, Friedrich von, 177, 438 Health, dominance motivation and, 329 Health Canada, 546 Heenan, David, 718–719, 721 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 315, 402–406, 448 Hegemonic power, 306–312 balance of power, 308–309 collective action problem, 121 discourse, 194–196 Gramsci, 292, 294–295 hegemonic stability theory, 309–310 ideology, 336 liberalism and realism in international relations, 307–308 two forms of realism, 310–312 See also Marx, Karl Hegemonic stability theory (HST), 560 Hegemonic war, 312–315 balance of power and, 49 characteristics of, 313 dynamics and cycles, 313–315 Hegemony, 315–316 hegemonic power, 121, 194–196, 292, 294–295, 306–312, 336 hegemonic war, 49, 312–315 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Mouffe, Laclau), 369–370 Heidegger, Martin, 407, 447 Held, David, 284 Hellenistic Age, 285 Helmreich, Robert, 625 Henkin, Louis, 21 Henley, Nancy, 453 Herding, 411 Heresthetics, 12, 316–317 Herfindal Index, 424 Herman, Michael, 343 Herrschaft, 204 Herz, John H., 595 Hesse, Hermann, 447 Heterocentrism, 318 Heterosexism, role of power in, 317–319, 319 Heydrich, Reinhard, 33 Hidden Persuaders, The (Packard), 478 Hiding, 444 Hierarchy, 319–321 social evolution, 614–615 world cities, 720 (figure) Himmler, Heinrich, 33, 485 Hindenburg, Paul von, 34 Hippias Major (Plato), 712 Hirschman, Albert, 230, 388 Historical bloc, 316 Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), 420 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 406 History of Astronomy (Smith), 354

Index History of Florence (Machiavelli), 395 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 72, 197, 260 History (Thucydides), 29, 322 Hitler, Adolf, 48, 243, 657 appeasement and, 25–26 authoritarian personality and, 32–34 bases of power and, 70 deflected wants, 166 dictatorship, 187 domination, 206 security dilemma, 595 striving for superiority, 636 totalitarianism, 670 Hjelmslev, Louis, 191 Hobbes, Thomas, 3, 30, 47, 321–323, 322–323, 404, 579, 589, 676 anarchy and, 20, 22 authority and, 38–39 causal theories of power and, 92 causation and, 99 Clegg and, 104 collective action problem, 120–121 discourse, 193 feminist theories of power, 251–252 hegemonic power, 309 Riker and, 582 second face, 590–591 social power, 620 sovereignty, 622 Hobson, John A., 341, 579 Holler, Manfred, 323–324, 422, 514, 529, 541–542 Holmes, Stephen, 661 Holocaust. See Hitler, Adolf; Nazi Germany; World War II Holsti, Kalevi, 189 Homer, 156, 478 Homo Oeconomicus, 323–324 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 73 Homogeneity assumption, 511 Homogenous weighted majority games, 324 Homosexuality, 319, 336–337 Honneth, Axel, 157 Honoré, A. M., 98 Hood, Christopher, 445 Horizontal propaganda, 537 Horkheimer, Max, 4, 154, 156–157, 406 Hormones, dominance motivation and, 328 House of Commons (UK), 72 House of Lords (UK), 72 Howard, Michael, 78, 702, 711 Human capital, 86 Human dominance motivation, 324–329 across the lifespan, 328–329 dominance motivation and health, 329 dominance motivation within individuals, 326–328 life in society, 325–326 Human intelligence (HUMINT), 220 Human Rights Watch, 593 Hume, David, 143, 155

737

Hungary, 27 Hunter, Floyd, 361, 570–571 Hunter, Floyd, 122–123, 163–164, 212–213, 329–330 Huntington, Samuel, 138 Hussein, Saddam, 120 Hymer, Stephen, 718–719 Hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis, 328 Hypothetical imperative, 553 ICAO. See International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Idealism in international relations, 331–332 Ideas, 332–333 Identity, constructivism and, 139 Ideological interpellation, 369 Ideology, 333–339 contemporary theories of, 336–338 history of concept, 334–336 ideological power of transnational corporations, 430–431 ideological state apparatuses, 18 ideology versus ideologies, 338–339 knowledge and, 366 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser), 197 Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim), 335 IEMP (ideological, economic, military, political) model of power, 399 Ikenberry, John, 309, 497 Iliad (Homer), 478 Imagery intelligence (IMINT), 221 IMF. See International Monetary Fund (IMF) Immergut, Ellen, 687, 691 Imperial power, 339–340 Imperialism, 340–342 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin), 51 Implicit power motive, 661 Improper simple games, 511 Impure paternalism, 475 Inarra, Elena, 602 Incas, 703 Incentive structures, 112 India, 463, 560 Indifference to power, 713 Individual psychology, Adler and, 3–4 Individuals, human dominance motivation and, 326–328 Indivisibility, 63 Induced forces, 384 Industrial Revolution, 320, 593, 610 Influence, 342 influence strategy and bases of power, 70 influencing agent, 66 I-power, 354–355, 390 Lukes on non decision making, 393–394 (See also Non decision making) manipulation, 398 persuasion, 478–479 power to and power over, 523

738

Index

propaganda, 536–537 See also I-power; Non decision making Information asymmetry, 425 Informational power, 23, 67 Inner-worldy asceticism, 709 Innovative Collaborations, Alliance, and Networks Research Center, 104 Input legitimacy, 490 Inside/outside distinction, 461 Institute for Social Research, 406 Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS), 78 Institutionalism, 283–284, 687 Instrumental rationality, 6, 551–552 Intelligence, 343–345 Intelligence cycle, 344 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, 99 Intensity, of language, 493–494 Intentional stance, 8 Interdependence theory, 345–348 interdependence processes, 347–348 interdependence structure, 345–347 Interest-based approach to regimes, 560 Interests, 349–351 Intergovernmental Conference, 2000, 543 Internal balancing, 47 International Bureau against the Slave Trade, 285 International Bureau of Weights and Measures, 285 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), 630 International Court of Justice, 285 International Framework for Tobacco Control, 430 International Institute for Labour Studies, 153 International Labour Office, 285 International Labour Organization (ILO), 153 International law, defined, 630 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 131, 206, 286, 310, 316, 431, 438, 630, 711 International Political Science Association, 722 International regime theory. See Regime theory in international relations International relations anarchy in, 20–22 bargaining in, 61–64 compliance and, 127–129 constructivist view of power in, 138–141 dependency theory in, 172–174 feminist international relations, view of power, 250–251 hegemonic power and, 307–308 idealism in, 331–332 offense/defense dominance and, 458 postmodernist view of power in, 497–498 realism in, 307–308, 555–556 regime theory in, 559–562 spiral model, 625–626 strategic interaction in, 629–632 women as political leaders and international leadership, 717–718

International Secretariat of the San Francisco Conference of 1945, 186 International Sociological Association, 74, 116 International Telegraph Union, 285 Internet and power, 351–353 Interpersonal Sensitivity: Theory and Measurement (Hall), 303 Intervention in World Politics (Bull), 78 Intraprofile paradox, 697–698 Introduction to Mathematical Sociology, An (Coleman), 116 INUS, 97–98 Invisible hand, 47–48, 263, 353–354, 535, 593, 594 Iowa State University, 89 I-power, 354–355, 390, 515 Machover, 397 strategic power index, 632 voting power, 700 Iran, 418, 658 Iranian Revolution of 1979, 569 Iraq, 464, 705 Ireland, 472, 717 Irish Republican Army, 630 Iron Lady, 716 Irrational propaganda, 537 Isaac, Jeffrey, 557, 638–639 Islam, 569, 686 Ismay, Lord, 14 Israel, 716 Israeli Jews, 613 ISS. See Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS) Issue-framing tactics, 262 Italian Communist Party (PCI), 292 Italian Socialist Party (PSI), 294 Italy, 471, 657, 660, 670 Ivan III (tsar of Russia), 2 Ivan IV (tsar of Russia), 2 Jackman, R. W., 447 Jackson, Matthew O., 63–64 Jacobins, 293 Jacobson, Michael, 15 Jalalzai, Farida, 716 Janis, Irving L., 297–298 Japan, 466, 659 Jena-Auerstädt, 103 Jervis, Robert, 595, 626 Jessop, Bob, 357–358 Jews anti-Semitism, 33, 242–243 Ashkenazi Jews, 613 Israeli Jews, 613 Judaism, 529 On the Jewish Question (Marx), 402, 405, 407 Mizrachi Jews, 613 Johan Skytte Prize, 64 John, Oliver, 506 Johnson, Lyndon B., 583

Index Johnston, Michael, 150 Johnston, R. J., 514, 529 Johnston index, 514 Jones, Jim, 206 Jones, Stephanie Tubbs, 715 Jongman, Albert, 659 Jönsson, Christer, 560 Jos, Philip, 150 Jost, John, 358–359, 507, 649 Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 303 Journal of Power, 126 Journal of Social Issues, 555 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 476 Journal of Theoretical Politics, 207 Joyce, James, 447 Judaism. See Jews Judd, Charles M., 503, 507 Jung, Carl, 447 Jurisdictions and structure-induced equilibria, 359–360 Just and Unjust Wars (Walzer), 712 Justice, 360–363 domination, 362–363 power and democracy, 360–361 powers and welfare, 362 voting power, 361–362 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Rawls), 488 Kafka, Franz, 447 Kalyvas, Stathis, 244 Kant, Immanuel, 29 anarchy and, 22 autonomy and, 40 coercion and, 110 exploitation, 235 on freedom as normatively grounded, 40 hegemony, 315 ideas, 333 Kantian autonomy, 40 Marx and, 404–406 Nietzsche and, 448 rationality, 553 security, 593 Kaplan, Abraham, 201, 373 Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (Carr), 88 Katz, Irwin, 550 Kaufmann, Walter, 713 Keefer, Philip, 447 Keegan, John, 702 Kelley, Harold, 345, 504 Kelly, Rita Mae, 714 Keltner, Dacher, 502, 504, 506–507 Kennan, George, 307 Kennedy, John F., 160, 179 Kennedy, Paul, 312, 463 Kenny, Anthony, 229, 684–685 Kent, Sherman, 343 Keohane, Robert O., 283, 309, 311, 426, 443, 488, 560 Kerry, John, 351 Key, V. O., Jr., 491

KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), 286 Khan, Mushtaq H., 151 Khmer Rouge, 657 Khrushchev, Nikita, 160 Kilgour, Marc, 186 Killer amendments, 12 Kilschelt, Herbert, 414 Kinder, Donald R., 550 Kindleberger, Charles, 310 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 583 King, Rodney, 583 Kingdon, John, 218, 486 King’s Law of 1665 (Denmark), 2 Kipnis, David, 504 Kirchheimer, Otto, 154 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne, 187 Kirzner, Israel, 217 Kissinger, Henry, 307 Kitayama, Shinobu, 501 Kiviniemi, Marc, 232 Klauber, Anne, 304 Knack, Stephen, 447 Knights Templar, 569 Knowledge and Human Interests (Habermas), 406 Knowledge and power, 365–366 Knowledge-based approach to regimes, 561 Koboldt, Christian, 632 Koran, 685 Korean War, 631 Korsch, Karl, 292 Kraft, Julia, 528 Krasner, Stephen, 310, 559, 621 Krehbiel, Keith, 480–481 Kropotkin, Peter, 18, 366–367 Kruglanski, Aric, 358 Ku Klux Klan, 243 Kugler, Jacek, 527 Kuhn, Thomas, 134 Kurer, Oskar, 151 Kurt Lewin Award, 555 Kurz, M., 107 Kyoto Protocol, 127, 340 La Perrière, Guillaume, 289 La Plata River, Chile, 419 Labor. See Marx, Karl; Marxist accounts of power Labour Party (UK), 388, 415, 716 Lacan, Jacques, 159, 194, 407–408, 638 Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, 369–371 Laclau, 159, 193–195, 226, 337, 417 Mouffe, 193–195, 226, 337 Lakatos, Imre, 442 Language and power, 371–372 gender and power, 372 language games, 191 political thinking as power, 493–494 Larcinese, Valentino, 413 Laski, Harold, 415 Lasswell, Harold, 201, 252, 373, 520

739

740

Index

Latin America, 463, 569, 716 Latora, Vito, 609 Lauderdale, Lord, 83 Laver, Michael, 474, 514 Law of Suspects, September 1793, 658 Law of 22 Prairial, June 1794, 658 Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy (Machover, Farjoun), 397 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 412 Leadership, 373–377 exploring gender imbalance in leadership, 378–379 female leadership among mammals, 246–250 gender and role of power, 377–381 interactionist and constructionist accounts, 376–377 normative approaches, 374 power and, 377 psychological approaches, 374–375 situational approaches to, 376 styles of leadership, 375–376 transactional and transformational leadership, 672–675 women as political leaders, 717–718 Leadership and gender, 377–381 exploring gender imbalance in leadership, 378–379 leadership styles of men and women, 380 strategies to increase women’s representation: affirmative action and quotas, 379–380 women as political leaders, 714–718 League of Nations, 17, 49, 88, 307, 381–382, 630 balance of power and, 49 idealism in international relations, 331 League of Women Voters, 330 Leander, Anna, 140 Leary, Mark, 505 Lee, Mayor, 299 Lee-Chai, Annette, 507 Leech, Dennis, 131, 606–607 Lefebvre, Henri, 408–409, 499 Legal bodies, defined, 631 Legislative power, 382–383 Legitimate position power, 68 Legitimate power, 23, 68 Legitimate power of equity, 68 Legitimate power of reciprocity, 68 Legitimate power of responsibility, 68 Legitimation, 383–384 Legitimation Crisis (Habermas), 383 Legitimation through social magic, 477 Lenin, Vladimir I., 33–34, 156, 195, 316, 341, 577 banks and, 51 Marx and, 405 totalitarianism, 670 Leonardo da Vinci, 166–167 Level of dependence, 346 Levenson, Daniel, 550 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 638

Leviathan (Hobbes), 21, 120–121, 322, 590, 592, 620–621 authority and, 39 balance of power and, 47 discourse, 193 feminist theories of power, 251 Levine, Andrew, 647 Lewin, Kurt, and power, 89–90, 265–266, 384–385, 504, 555 Liberalism, 385–388 concepts of power implied, 387 liberal institutionalism and security, 590–591 liberty and private property, 385 nature of liberty, 385–387 neoliberalism compared to, 439–441 realism and, in international relations, 307–308 Liberalism Against Populism (Riker), 316 Liberals and Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity (Lukes), 393 Libertarian theories, 200 Liberty, 385–387 Life space, 384 Lijphart, Arend, 72 Likert, Rensis, 89 Lincoln, Abraham, 317 Lindblom, Charles E., 429 Linton, Ralph, 628 Linz, Juan J., 187, 531 Lions, social structure of, 248 Lippitt, Ronald, 90, 266, 384 Lippmann, Walter, 412 Lipset, Seymour, 491 Liszt, Franz, 448 Little, Richard, 50 Lively, Jack, 171 Locke, John, 29, 315, 333, 385, 404, 438, 489, 598 Lockhart, John Bruce, 343 Logan, John, 298–299 Logic of Collective Action, The (Olson), 119, 143, 483 Logic of Violence in Civil War, The (Kalyvas), 244 Logos, 29 London, 718–721 Looping effect, 139 Lot (Bible), 239 Lothian, Lord, 71 Loughborough University, 718 Louis XIV (king of France), 2, 443 Loyalty, 388 Luce, Robert Duncan, 602 Lucha Obrera (Workers’ Struggle), 369 Luck, 388–390 brute luck, 390–391 decisiveness and, 65 systematic luck, 653–655 Luck, brute, 390–391 Luhmann, Niklas, 235, 383, 391–393

Index Lukács, Georg, 155, 241, 292, 406, 408 Lukes, Steven, 45, 124–125, 133, 135, 164, 175, 191, 204, 305–306, 362–363, 393–394, 522, 589–590, 664, 666 Luxembourg, 471–472 Lyotard, Jean-François, 158 Maass, Anne, 507 MacArthur, Douglas, 70 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 31, 103–105, 190, 259, 292–294, 307, 323, 395–396 Machine, 196–197. See also Dispositif Machover, Moshé, 54, 76, 118, 246, 354, 362, 390, 397, 480, 515, 526, 528, 544, 606, 628, 632–634, 654, 680, 699 Mackie, John, 98 Madison, James, 26, 28, 598, 622 Mafia, 121 Magee, Joseph, 507 Maginot Line, 462 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 588 Mahler, Gustav, 156 Maine, Henry, 628 Maintenance regimes, 563 Major, Brenda, 358 Majority deficit, 628 Makhno, Nestor, 19, 577 Making Democracy Work (Putnam), 611 Malaysia, 631 Man, the State and War (Waltz), 701 Man and Superman (Shaw), 636 Management by exception, 673 Manchuria, 381 Mandatory referendums, 559 Mandeville, Bernard de, 354 Manipulation, 397–399 Manipulatory Politics (Goodin), 398 Mann, Irwin, 55, 131, 606 Mann, Michael, 133, 284, 399–401, 569, 708 Mann, Thomas, 447 Mannheim, Karl, 335–336, 338, 366 Manning, Charles, 78 Manuscripts (Marx), 407 Mao Tse-tung, 33, 405, 537, 670 Maoz, Zeev, 246 March on Rome, 242 Marchiori, Massimo, 609 Marcos, Ferdinand, 187 Marcuse, Herbert, 154, 156–157, 159, 292 Margetts, Helen, 445 Marrow, Alfred, 266 Martin. See Martin index Martin, Hans-Peter, 287 Martin, Luther, 401–402, 509–510, 699 Martin index, 401–402 Marx, Karl, 4, 315, 358, 399–400, 402–405, 405–406 Althusser and, 18 Bakunin and, 46

Capital, 85 coercion and power, 113, 115 Communist Manifesto, 292, 639 consensual power, 135 critical theory, 155, 158–160 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 402, 407 determinacy, 177 The 1859 Preface, 241 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 292 exploitation, 232–233 false consciousness, 241 The German Ideology, 241, 647 Giddens and, 280 Gramsci and, 292–294 ideology, 334–336 On the Jewish Question, 402, 405, 407 Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (Carr), 88 Kropotkin and, 366–367 Manuscripts, 407 For Marx (Althusser), 638 Marx’s Theory of Nature (Schmidt), 406 mechanisms, 410 security, 593–594 status, 629 structural power, 638–639 substructure and superstructure, 647 on surplus labor and surplus value, 232–234 system justification theory, 651 totalitarianism, 670 Weber and, 707 See also Marxist accounts of power Marxism and Politics (Miliband), 416 Marxist accounts of power, 405–409 determinacy, 176 discourse, 195 legitimation and, 383 Marxist capital, 84–86 Marxist structuralism, 638–639 Marxist tradition and Gramsci, 292–293 Miliband–Poulantzas debate, 416–417 relative autonomy of the state, 567 Scott and, 587 structural power, 638–639 See also individual names of theorists Marx’s Theory of Nature (Schmidt), 406 Maryland State Legislature, 401 Mas-Colell, Andreu, 602 Maslow, Abraham, 4, 32 Mass mobilization regimes, 563 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 89, 186, 245, 384 Massey, Douglas, 550 Mathematics for Administrative Decision Makers (Felsenthal), 246 Mathematics of Collective Action (Coleman), 116 Matteotti, Giacomo, 292 Mattern, Janice Bially, 140 Mauss, Marcel, 302 May, Rollo, 4

741

742

Index

May, Todd, 18–19, 316 Mayans, 420 Mayhew, David, 531 Mazmanian, Daniel, 585 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 332 McAleese, Mary, 717 McClelland, David, 409–410 McConahay, John B., 550 McCubbins, Mathew, 12 McDonald’s, 286 McDonough, Alexa, 716 McGuire, William J., 358 McKelvey, Richard D., 12, 359 McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem, 316–317 McLaughlin, Audrey, 716 McNamara, Robert, 432 Mearsheimer, John, 50, 309–310, 314, 556 Measurement of Voting Power: Theory and Practice, Problems and Paradoxes, The (Felsenthal, Machover), 246, 397 Mechanical solidarity, 637 Mechanism design, 533 Mechanisms, 410–411 Media, the, 411–414 Meerkats, social structure of, 248–249 Meir, Golda, 380, 716 Melian Dialogue, 306, 590 Melians, 590 Melos, 591 Membership lethargy theory, 414 Mengistu Haile-Miriam, 419–420 Merton, Robert, 637, 642, 678 Mesocorporatism, 149 Method of historical structures, 153–154 Michels, Robert, 360, 414–415 Middle Ages, 630, 711 Middle-class progressive regimes, 563 Milgram, Stanley, 580 Miliband, Ralph, 415–416, 499 Miliband–Poulantzas debate, 416–417 Military in government, 418–421 explaining, 420–421 fungibility of power resources, 266–267, 565 Mann, 400 military alliances, 14, 16 military force and UN, 631 military personnel in government, 418–419 power elite, 508–509 violence and military government, 419–420 See also Dictatorship Mill, Harriet Taylor, 253 Mill, John Stuart, 227, 361, 385–386, 438, 579 Miller, Nicholas, 269 Miller, Peter, 290 Miller, R. A., 447 Miller, Ruth, 255 Mills, C. Wright, 122–123, 163–164, 212, 360, 419, 421–422, 508–509 Minima Moralia (Adorno), 5

Minimal right property, 668 Minimal winning coalition, 422–423 Minimal winning coalitions, 525 Misrecognition, 75–76 Mizrachi Jews, 613 Mobilization of bias, 423–424 Mode of production, 647 Modelski, George, 312 Modes of accumulation, 496 Molotch, Harvey, 298–299 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 708 Monarchy, rule and, 31 Monopoly power, 424–425 Monotonicity paradox, 697 Mont Pelerin Society, 438 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 228, 382, 598 Montt, Ríos, 420 Moral hazard, 425–426, 533 Moral paternalism, 475 Moral responsibility, free will and, 264 Moral theory, coercion and, 109 Morelli, Massimo, 63–64 Morgenstern, Oskar, 422, 537, 607, 683 Morgenthau, Hans J., 21, 183, 189, 307, 426–427, 441, 556, 591–592, 707 Morin, Edgar, 177 Morriss, Peter, 1–2, 133, 142, 427–428 on bribe index, 76 exercise fallacy, 229 opportunity, 459 power to and power over, 522–524 relational power, 565 resources as measuring power, 572 status, 628 vehicle fallacy, 684–685 Mosca, Gaetano, 360, 414 Mouffe, Chantal, 193–195, 226, 337. See also Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 157 Mugabe, Robert, 319 Multilinear extensions, 131 Multinational corporations, 428–431 ideological power of transnational corporations, 430–431 instrumental power of transnational corporations, 429–430 structural power of transnational corporations, 430 transnational corporations as political actors, 429 Multinational corporations (MNCs), 287 Multipolar structure, war and, 702 Mumford, Michael, 375 Münkler, Herfried, 340 Murdoch, Rupert, 413 Museveni, Yoweri, 319 Muslim Kakwa, 420 Mussolini, Benito, 26, 32, 242–243, 292, 294, 381, 657, 670 Mutuality of dependence, 346

Index Mutually assured destruction, 182, 431–433 Myerson, Roger Bruce, 602–603, 683 MySpace, 286, 352 Nantes (France), 658 Napel, Stefan, 529, 542, 633–634 Napoleon, 103, 315, 334, 443, 457 Napoleonic Wars, 17, 49, 312 Nash, John F., 304, 435, 440, 683–684 Nash equilibrium, 435–436 bilateral bargaining situation and Nash bargaining solution, 57 (figure) chicken games and, 100–101 structure-induced equilibrium, 644 two-player game in normal form, 435 (figure) National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 583 National Clandestine Service (NCS), 100 National Farmers Union (UK), 120 National Fascist Party, 242 National Intelligence Council, 100 National liberation terrorism, 661 National Security Act of 1947, 99 National Security Council (NSC), 99 National Socialism, 4, 485 National Stadium, Santiago, Chile, 419 Nationalism, 436–437 Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Nationality (Deutsch), 186 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Natural selection, cooperation and, 145 Naturalization, 75–76 Nature of Power, The (Barnes), 134 Nazi Germany, 32 Adorno and, 5 appeasement, 25 critical theory, 155 dictatorship, 187 police state, 484–485 terror regimes, 657–658 totalitarianism, 670 See also Hitler, Adolf Nechaev, Sergey Gennadiyevich, 46, 578 Need for power, 519 Negative agenda power, 12 Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 5 Negative freedom, 385–386 Negative sovereignty, 621 Negotiating. See Bargaining Negri, Antonio, 73, 217, 235, 498 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 715 Nehru, Motilal, 715 Neocorporatism. See Corporatism Neoliberalism, 438–441 classical liberalism and neoliberalism compared, 439–441 economic arguments, 439 historical background, 438 public choice theory, 438–439

Neorealism, 441–444 balancing behavior and bandwagoning, 443–444 chain-ganging, buck-passing, hiding, and transcending, 444 core of neorealist research, 442 neorealist assumptions, 442–443 relative versus absolute gains, 443 Nerves of Government, The (Deutsch), 187 NESS test, 94–95, 98 Netherlands, 471, 686, 714 Networks, power in, 444–446, 484, 608–609 Networks and communities, 446–447 Neuberg, Steven, 505 Neumann, Iver, 141 Neurotic Constitution, The (Adler), 3 Neustadt, Richard, 479 New Christian Right, 569 New Deal, 293, 413 New Hampshire, 682 New Haven (Connecticut), pluralism study of, 123, 164, 202, 299, 360 New Industrial State, The (Galbraith), 218 New International Division of Labor, Multinational Corporations and Urban Hierarchy (Cohen), 719 New Left Review, 415–416, 499 New Men of Power, White Collar, Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba, The (Mills), 421–422 New public management, 438 New Science (Scienza nuova, 1725, 1730, 1744), 293 New states paradox, 472 New York (City), 718–721 New York (State), 472, 678 New Yorker, 625 New Zealand, 631, 714–715 Newman, Saul, 18 Nicaragua, 715 Nice Treaty, 2001, 543 Niche theories, leadership and, 376 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 156, 159, 190, 259, 337, 366, 447–449, 519, 707, 712–713 Nietzsche Contra Wagner (Nietzsche), 448 Night of the Long Knives, 485 Niskanen, William, 13, 77 Nkrumah, Kwame, 341 No-cities approach, 432 No-show paradox, 697 Nodality, 445 Noel-Baker, Philip, 78 Non decision making, 45, 449 Lukes on non decision making, 393–394 second face, 589–590 Noncooperative games, 449–452 extensive form game with incomplete information, 451 (figure) extensive form games and imperfect information, 450 (figure) strategic form game, 450 (figure) Nonseparability, 321

743

744

Index

Nonverbal communication and power, 452–456 believed and actual nonverbal communication of individuals higher in power, 454 (table) power and nonverbal communication: believed and actual relations, 453–455 theoretical perspectives, 453 theoretical progress and future directions, 455–456 Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction (Hall), 303 Nonverbal Sex Differences: Communication Accuracy and Expressive Style (Hall), 303 Nordlinger, Eric, 567–568 Noriega, Manuel, 187 Norkabal, 657 Normative power, 129 consensual power, 135–137 domination and, 203–204 instrumental rationality versus, 6 leadership, 374 political legitimacy, 487–488 Scott, 587 North America, 686 North Atlantic Treaty, 631 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 14, 236, 310, 593, 631 North Korea, 210, 631, 666 Northern Ireland, 660 Norway, 714, 717 Nott, John, 143 Nozick, Robert, 108, 354 NSC. See National Security Council (NSC) Nubis, 420 Nucleolus, 107 Nuremberg, 477 Nussbaum, Martha, 84 Nye, Joseph S., 150, 283, 426, 497, 560 Oakeshott, Michael, 461 Obama, Barack, 351 Oceania, 716 Offense/defense dominance, 457–458 factors shaping, 457–458 international relations theory and, 458 security dilemma, 596–597 Offensive realism, 556. See also Defensive realism Office of Strategic Services, 100 Ohio State University, 555 OIF. See Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) Oklahoma, 472 Oligarchy, 31, 414 Olson, Mancur, 119, 121, 143–144, 351, 482–483 Omniscience, 273–274 On Liberty (Mill), 386 On Political Equality (Dahl), 163 On the Jewish Question (Marx), 402, 405, 407 On War (von Clausewitz), 103, 591, 702 Operario, Don, 505 Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), 16 Opium Wars, 285 Oppenheim, Felix, 342, 565

Oppenheimer, Robert, 432 Opportunity, 458–460 Oppression feminist theories of power and, 252–253 subordination and, 646 Option luck, 390–391 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 135 Organic solidarity, 637 Organization of the state, 460–466 how state is contested, 460–461 inside/outside and globalization, 461–463 organizational capability and interdependence, 463–466 Organski, Abramo Fimo Kenneth, 48–49, 310, 312, 526–527 Orthodox Church, 194 Osiander, Andreas, 20 Ostmann, Axel, 324 Ostrogorski, Moise, 696 Ostrogorski’s paradox, 696 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 179 Other backward classes (OBCs), 91 Other-oriented power, 582 Ottoman Empire, 437 Our Global Neighborhood, 281 Outcome power, 582, 655 Output legitimacy, 490 Overbeck, Jennifer, 507 Overdetermination, 174, 638 Owen, Guillermo, 53–54, 131, 466–467, 603, 606, 683 Owen value, 466–470 calculation of Owen values, 469 (tables) calculation of Shapley value, 468 (table) example: a priori unions, 468–469 example: four-person game, 467–468 Own forces, 384 Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam), 316 Oxford Internet Survey, 352 Packard, Vance, 478 Packel, Edward W., 513, 541 Pakistan, 715 Palestine, 661 Palestine Liberation Organization, 661 Palin, Sarah, 715 Panopticon, 136, 290 Paradox of new members, 471–472 Paradox of quarreling members. See Quarreling paradox Paradox of unrealized power, 565 Paradox of voting, 698 Pareto, Vilfredo, 360, 414 Pareto’s law, 518 Paris, 718–719 Paris Commune, 19, 294 Park, Bernadette, 507 Parliamentary Socialism (Miliband), 415 Parsons, Talcott, 6–7, 133, 391, 399, 410 structural power, 637 Weber and, 707

Index Parsons, Talcott, 472–473 Parties, policy-seeking versus power-seeking, 473–474 Parties, strong and very strong, 474 Partisan veto players, 687 Party of European Socialists (Social Democrat), 296 Party of National Reconciliation, 418 Passive revolution, 293 Paternalism, 110, 474–476 Path dependency, 466 Pathos, 29 Patient Education and Counseling, 303 Patriarchy, 276–278 Pax Americana, 309 Pax Britannica, 310, 312 Pax Mongolica, 285 PCI. See Italian Communist Party (PCI) Peace of Westphalia, October 1648, 20, 629 Pearl Harbor, 257 Peloponnesian War, 306–307, 312–313, 590, 591 Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 590 Pelosi, Nancy, 715 Peltzman, Sam, 87, 483 Penn, Alfred Wayne, 670 Penrose, Lionel Sharples, 53–54, 118, 355, 388–390, 476, 492, 510–511 status, 628 strategic power index, 632 voting power, 699–700 weighted voting, 710 Penrose voting power measure, 476–477, 510–511 Penrose–Banzhaf–Coleman Index, 683 People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), 657 People’s National Party (Ghana), 419 Perceptual symbols of power, 477–478 Performance effect, 534 Pericles, 29–30 Perón, Isabel, 715 Perpetual Peace (Hobbes), 22 Persian Gulf War of 1991, 16–17 Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ), 625 Persuasion, 478–479 emotional appeal, 495 rational persuasiveness, 494 See also Influence; Language and power; Rhetoric Peru, 661 Peter the Great, 2 Peterson, V. Spike, 319 Pettit, Philip, 163, 362–363 Phenomenon of cyclic majorities, 695 Philip IV the Fair (king of France), 20 Philippines, 715 Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 404 Phnom Penh (Cambodia), 657 Photographic intelligence (PHOTINT), 221 Picture Story Exercise (PSE), 328 Piekalkiewicz, Jaroslaw, 670 Pierson, Paul, 81 Pinochet, General, 419–420 Pitkin, Hanna, 522, 524

Pivot player, 479–480 Pivotal politics, 480–481, 481 (figure) Plato, 26–27, 29–30, 251, 322, 333, 365, 712 Plekhanov, Georgi, 315 Pliny the Younger, 317 Pluralism, 481–484 Dahl and, 164 Domhoff and, 201–202 early, 482 equality and, 482–483 later applications, 482 network versions, 484 pluralist regimes, 562 suboptimality, 483–484 Poggi, Gianfranco, 569 Poguntke, Thomas, 716 Pol Pot, 657–658 Poland, 592 Polanski, Norman, 90 Polanyi, Karl, 177 Police power, 462 Police state, 484–486, 671 Policy entrepreneurs, 486–487 Policy Sciences, 585 Policy space, 623 Polis, 30 Political bias, bargaining and, 63–64 Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Deutsch), 186 Political entrepreneurs. See Policy entrepreneurs Political legitimacy, 487–491 accountability, 488 appropriateness, 490–491 effectiveness, 490 empirical versus normative, 487–488 fairness, 490 lawfulness, 489–490 participation, 489 representation, 488–489 transparency, 488 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 488 Political parties, 491–492 Political Parties (Michels), 414–415 Political Power and Social Classes (Poulantzas), 416, 499, 638 Political Studies (Barry), 388 Political thinking as power, 492–496 categories of power, 494–496 language and power, 493–494 Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (Morgenthau), 189, 307, 426, 441, 556, 591 Politics (Aristotle), 29, 598 Polity, rule and, 31 Polity Press, 279 Pollock, Friedrich, 154 Polsby, Nelson, 123, 393, 449, 589, 666 Pooling equilibrium, 533 Popper, Karl, 158

745

746

Index

Porter, Tony, 429 Porto Alegre, Brazil, 170 Positive agenda power, 12 Positive freedom, 386–387 Posner, Richard, 483 Post-Fordism, 496–497 Postmodernist view of power in international relations, 497–498 Poulantzas, Nicos, 197, 357, 370, 416–417, 499–500, 638–639 Power: A Philosophical Analysis (Morriss), 427, 522 Power: A Radical View (Lukes), 124, 393–394, 522, 666 Power, cognition, and behavior, 500–504 cognition effected by power, 500–502 implications for behavior, 502–503 Power, Rule and Domination (Clegg), 104 Power and Empowerment (Bachrach, Botwinick), 45 Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Keohane, Nye), 426 Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (Bachrach, Baratz), 45 Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (Lasswell, Kaplan), 201, 373 Power as control theory, 504–508 defined, 504–505 power as good versus ill, 507 situations determining sense of PAC, 505–507 Power as influence. See I-power Power as prize. See P-power Power base, 163 Power (Dowding), 207 Power elite, 508–509 Mills, 122, 163, 212, 360, 421–422 Power Elite, The (Mills), 122, 163, 212, 360, 421–422 Power indices, 509–517 comment on main voting-power measures, 510–514 critical re-evaluations, 514–515 early history of, 509–510 measuring actual and a posteriori voting power, 515–516 political parties, 492 strategic power indices, 529 See also individual names of indices Power/interaction model of interpersonal influence, 68–69, 384 Power laws, 517–519 power law log-log plot, 519 with simulated data, 518 (figure) Power motive, 519–521 Power of assertiveness, 128 Power of recalcitrance, 127 Power of third parties, 69 Power politics, 321–322 Power Politics (Wight), 711 Power1/power2, 557 Power to and power over, 521–524473 ability and, 1 Dahl and Lukes, 522

definitions, 521 Dowding, 523–524 Morriss, 522–523, 427–428 Parsons, 473 Pitkin, 522 power as control theory, 504–505 social power, 616–617 Power to initiate action and power to prevent action, 525–526 Power transition theory, 310, 526–527 Power with, 527–528 Powers of Freedom (Rose), 291 P-power, 76, 354, 397, 511, 513, 515, 528–529 strategic power index, 632 voting power, 700 Pratto, Felicia, 507, 550, 613 Preemptive causation, 97 Preference- versus nonpreference-based concepts, 529–530 Preference shape, 567 Presidential Power (Neustadt), 479 Prime ministerial and presidential, 530–532 Priming relationship, 661 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 395–396 Principal–agent relationship, 5, 128, 532–534 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 292–294 Prisoner’s dilemma, 534–536 Private interest government, 149 Privileged groups, Olson on, 121 Privy Council (England), 83, 298 Probability, 178–179 Problem of authority, 41 Problem of manipulation, 41 Procedural accounts, of autonomy, 41–42 Procedural fairness, 490 Process of Government, The (Bentley), 482 Prohibition, 678 Propaganda, 398, 536–537 Proper simple game, 537–538 Prospect theory, 262 “Protective custody,” 485 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 647, 708–709 Protestant Huguenots, 620 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 18 Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), 660 Provisional Military Administrative Council (Ethiopia), 419 Proximal states, 455–456 Proximity model, 492 Prussia, 443, 484, 592 Pryor, John, 506 Psychological empowerment, 539–540 applications, 540 conceptualization and measurement, 539–540 feminist theories of power, 256–257 future directions, 540 power with, 528

Index Public choice theory, 438–439 Public goods, 540–541 Public goods index, 323, 422–423, 514, 541–542, 683, 699 Public Opinion (Lippman), 412 Public Policy Section, American Political Science Association, 585 Pure paternalism, 475 Pure violence, 703 Purpose contracts, 628 Putnam, Robert, 61–62, 446–447, 611–612, 676 Pythagoras, 410 Al Qaeda, 243, 578, 593, 612, 659, 661 Qin (Emperor of China), 371 Quaderni dal carcere (Prison Notebooks) (Gramsci), 292 Qualified majority voting, 543–544 Quarreling paradox, 544 Quasi-balanced games, 667 Queer theories of power, 544–547 Quest for power, 713 Quine, Willard van Orman, 685 Quintilian, 579 Racism, role of power in, 549–550 extreme racism and function of power, 550 ordinary racism and function of power, 550 racism is prejudice plus power, 549–550 Radical feminist theory, 277–279 Radicalized modernity, 280 Rae, Douglas W., 390, 512–513 Rae’s index, 512–513 Raiffa, Howard, 56, 602 Ramphal, Shridath, 281 RAND Corporation, 131, 555 Random voting, 525, 679 Rapley, F., 122 Rapoport, Amnon, 246 Rational Actor, 116 Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (Harsanyi), 305 Rational Choice and Political Power (Dowding), 125, 207, 616, 653 Rational–legal authority, 37 Rational persuasiveness, 494 Rational propaganda, 537 Rational stubbornness, 574 Rationality, 551–554 instrumental rationality, 551–552 relationship between rationality and power, 553–554 substantive rationality, 552–553 Rationality and Power (Flyvbjerg), 554 Rationality and Society, 116 Raustiala, Kal, 283 Raven, Bertram, 66–67, 69, 90, 266, 384, 504, 554–555 Rawlings, Jerry, 419 Rawls, John, 199, 304, 488, 553

747

Raymond, Paula, 506 Reactance, 71 Reagan, Ronald, 100, 466 Reaganomics, 438 Real war, 591 Realism in international relations, 555–556 idealism in international relations and, 331–332 liberalism and realism in international relations, 307–308 Realist accounts of power, 557–558 defensive realism, 165–166 hegemonic power and, 307–308, 310–312 neorealism and, 441–444 realism in international relations, 555–556 structural realism, 636–637 Reception gap, 413 Reciprocal relationship, 661 Red Brigades, 660 Reese, Gerhard, 501 Referendums, 558–559 Referent power, 23, 68 Reflexivity, 139 Reformation, 569 Regime Politics (Stone), 124, 562 Regime theory in international relations, 559–562 future of, 561–562 research focus, 560–561 Regime theory in urban politics, 562–563 Regimes of accumulation, 496 Regress problem, 41 Reich, Wilhelm, 35, 447 Reification, 460 Reign of Terror (France), 658, 661 Reimann, Kim, 283 Relation of domination, 177 Relational power, 563–567 aggregation problem, 566 causality and power, 565–566 relational concept of power, 564 Relationship-specific motives, 348 Relative autonomy of the state, 567–568 Religious power, 568–570 anti-Semitism, 33, 242–243 coercion and power, 115 veiled women, 685–687 See also individual names of religious groups Renaissance, 711 Rent seeking, 483 Representational force, 141 Representative democracy, 172 Repressive state apparatus (RSA), 197 Repressive state apparatuses, 18 Republic (Plato), 29, 251, 322 Reputational analysis, 570–571 Reputational networks, 570 Research Center for Group Dynamics, 66, 89–90, 266, 384, 555 Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 207

748

Index

Resources as measuring power, 571–575 animal groups and, 22 fungibility of power resources, 266–267 probability and opportunity costs, 571–574 rational stubbornness and indeterminacy, 574 Responsibility, 575–576 Restricted proportionality property, 668 Review of Politics, 148 Revolution, 576–577 anarchism and, 19 Gramsci, 293, 294–295 Revolutionary cell structure, 577–578 Revolutionary Organization (Greece), 661 Reward power, 23, 67–68 Rhetoric, 578–580 argument and, 28–30 Aristotle and, 30–31 rhetorical attractiveness, 495 See also Persuasion Rhetoric (Aristotle), 29 Ricardo, David, 155, 233 Rich, Adrienne, 318 Richardson, Fry, 517 Richardson, John, 713 Richardson, Lewis F., 32 Right-wing authoritarianism, 34, 550, 580–582 Riker, William H., 12, 92, 107–108, 296, 316–317, 401, 422–423, 582 Ring cycle (Wagner), 448 Ring tailed lemurs, social structure of, 249 Riot Act, 1713, 583 Riots, 582–583 Rise and Decline of Nations, The (Olson), 482 Rivera, Colonel, 418 Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 438 Robertson, Ken, 343 Robinson, Mary, 717 Robinson, Ronald, 341 Robinson, William, 311 Rochester University, 582 Roemer, John, 234, 459–460 Rokkan, Stein, 491 Roman Catholicism, 243 Romer, Thomas, 13–14 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 71 Rose, Nikolas, 73, 290 Rosen, Sidney, 90 Rosenau, James N., 281, 283, 465 Rosenthal, Howard, 13–14 Rotheberg, Lawrence, 481 Rothschild, Joyce, 415 Rothschild, Michael, 533 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 315, 367, 404, 621, 701 Rubin, Gayle, 545 Rubinstein, Ariel, 58 Ruggie, John Gerard, 20, 560 Rule, Wilma, 715 Rule of anticipated reactions, 564 Ruscher, Janet, 505

Rusk, Dean, 160 Russell, Bertrand, 93 Russia, 457, 463, 592 Russian Federation, 463 Russian nationalism, 194 Russian Revolution, 154, 294, 576, 587, 670 See also Soviet Union Sabatier, Paul, 585–586 Sachdev, Itesh, 506 Sade, Marquis de, 156 Sample, Ruth, 235 Samuelson, Paul, 541 Sanford, Nevitt, 550 Sankoh, Foday, 374 Sargon of Akkad (Mesopotamia), 213, 215 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 292, 407, 447 Sassen, Saskia, 718, 720 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 191, 638 Scanlon, Thomas, 553 Schachter, Stanley, 384 Scharnhorst, Gerhard von, 103 Scharpf, Fritz Wilhelm, 489–490 Schattsneider, Eric Elmer, 123, 423 Schechter, Michael, 153 Scheler, Max, 447 Schelling, Thomas, 58, 61, 181–183, 186, 244, 596, 660, 703 Schmid, Alex, 659 Schmidt, Alfred, 406 Schmidtchen, Dieter, 632 Schmitt, Carl, 291, 370 Schmitter, Philippe, 148 Schoenberg, Arnold Franz Walter, 156 Schofield, Norman, 359 Scholastics, 302 Scholte, Jan Aart, 282 Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl, 333 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 712 Schoppa, Leonard, 64 Schröder, Gerhard, 693 Schroeder, Paul, 14, 49, 443–444 Schultheiss, Oliver, 409 Schumann, Harald, 287 Schumpeter, Joseph, 177, 217–218, 340, 442, 703 Schutzstaffel (SS), 657 Schweller, Randall, 15, 442 Scientific Revolution, 405 Scope, 586 Scott, James, 586–588 Scottish Enlightenment, 354 Sea power, 588–589 Searle, John, 138 Sears, David O., 550 Second dimension. See Second face Second face, 589–590 Second Treatise on Civil Government (Locke), 489 Secret Directory, 578 Secret Treaty of Dover, 83

Index Securities and Exchange Commission, 52 Security, 590–595 foundations of security and security studies, 590–591 prevailing schools of security studies, 591–595 Security, Territory, Population (Foucault), 72, 260 Security dilemma, 595–597, 626 Sedgwick, Eve, 545 Selection effect, 534 Selective attention, 500 Self-fulfilling prophecy, 411 Self-organized criticality, 519 Self-presentation, 347–348 Self-reflection, agency and, 8–9 Selfish Gene, The (Dawkins), 145 Selten, Reinhardt, 274, 304–305, 684 Semi-Sovereign People, The (Schattsneider), 423 Semipresidentialism, 531 Sen, Amartya, 142, 362 Sending, Ole Jakob, 141 Sensitivity to Nonverbal Communication: The PONS Test (Hall), 303 Separation of powers, 228, 382, 597–598 Service delivery regimes, 563 Set Theory, Logic and their Limitations (Machover), 397 Sexism, role of power in, 598–600 Sexual harassment. See Feminist theories of power; Gender, role of power in; Sexism, role of power in Shakespeare, William, 156 Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 15 Shapley, Lloyd Stowell, 53–55, 131, 304, 600, 602–603, 710 pivot player theory, 479–480 power indices, 511–512 Shapley value, 467–468 shareholder voting power, 606–607 value of a game, 683 Shapley–Owen spatial power index, 624 Shapley–Shubik index, 603–606 Banzhaf voting power measure and, 55 bribe index, 76 calculation of coefficients, 606 (table) calculation of (first method), 604 (table) calculation of (second method), 605 (table) example: four-player weighted majority game, 604–606 pivot player, 479 power indices, 511 quarreling paradox, 544 Shapley value, 600–603 bargaining model, 601–602 calculation of, 602 (table) calculation of Shapley value, 468 (table) Coleman’s measures, 513 research developments, 602–603 Shareholder voting power, 606–607 Shaw, George Bernard, 636 Sheehan, James, 463 Shepsle, Kenneth A., 359, 474 Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, 425 Sheth, D. L., 90

Shining Path, 661 Shipley, Jenny, 715 Short, Clare, 717 Shubik, Martin, 479–480, 511, 600, 603, 607, 683, 710 Shulsky, Abram, 343 Sidanius, James, 507, 550, 613–615 Sieyès, Joseph Emmanuel, 621 Signals intelligence (SIGINT), 220–221 Silk Road, 285 Simmel, Georg, 104, 705 Simon, Herbert, 92, 373, 552 Simple games, 511, 607–608 defined, 324 preference- versus nonpreference-based concepts, 529 proper, 537–539 Sinclair, Timothy, 153 Singapore, 631 Single-crossing property, 533 Six livres de la république (Bodin), 620 Skinner, Quentin, 579 Skocpol, Theda, 400, 567 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 465 Slavs, 670 Slonitz, Ruth, 186 Small worlds, power in, 608–609 Smith, Adam, 233, 323, 353–354, 410, 535 critical theory, 155 neoliberalism, 438, 440 security, 593 Smith, Steve, 498 Snapshot technique, 619 Snyder, Glenn, 15 Snyder, Jack, 442, 444 Snyder, Mark, 231–232, 505 Social breakdown, 610–611 Social capital, 86–87, 446–447, 611–612, 676 Social Democratic Party, 388, 687 Social dominance theory, 613–616 criticisms of, 615–616 social dominance orientation (SDO), 550, 613–614 social evolution, 614–615 Social exchange theory. See Exchange theory Social integration, 637, 643 Social norms, 348 Social power, 582, 616–619 bases of power and, 66 definitions, 616–618 distinction between outcome power and, 618–619 Social system, 643 Social trust, 447 Socialism for a Sceptical Age (Miliband), 416 Socialist Party of the National Left, 369 Socialist Register, The, 415 Socialist Society, 415 Socialization, domination versus, 205 Socially dependent change, 66–67 Socially independent change, 66–67 Society, human dominance motivation and, 325–326

749

750

Index

Society for Free Psychoanalysis, 3 Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 89 Society Must Be Defended (Foucault), 260 Society of Friends (Quakers), 711 Sociolinguistics, 192 Sociological Imagination, The (Mills), 421 Socrates, 322 Soft paternalism, 475 Soft power, 479 Somalia, 121 Sophist (Plato), 712 Sources of Social Power, The (Mann), 399–400 South Korea, 631 Sovereignty, 619–623 absolute and mediated political power, 621–623 anarchy and, 20 origins: history and political theory, 620–621 sovereign power, 290 Soviet Union, 89, 115, 138, 156, 236, 458, 463, 657 authority and, 35 perceptual symbols of power, 477 security, 594 totalitarianism, 670 See also Russia Sovnarkom, 658 Spain, 660, 670 Spanish Civil War, 19 Spanish Revolution, 576–577 Spatial voting analysis, 623–624 Spence, Janet, 625 Spence, Michael, 533 Spheres of Justice (Walzer), 126 Spin/spin doctors, 478 Spinoza, Benedict, 29 Spiral model, 625–626 Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu), 598 Spotted hyenas, social structure of, 249 Sprout, Harold, 627 Sprout, Margaret, 627 Square root rules, 510, 627–628, 680–681 Stable set, 106 Stalin, Joseph, 17, 33–34, 120, 405, 657 Stanford University, 304 State, Power, Socialism (Poulantzas), 499–500, 639 State in Capitalist Society, The (Miliband), 416 State Power (Jessop), 358 State system anarchy in international relations, 20–22 balance of power and, 48 Bourdieu and, 75 domination, 205–206 empires, 213–217 federal structure, 245 Gramsci on hegemony, revolution, and the state, 294–295 ideological state apparatuses, 18 Marx on “state,” 291 organization of the state, 460–466

police states, 484–486 relative autonomy of the state, 567–568 repressive state apparatuses, 18 U.S. Electoral College and power, 679–682 See also Paternalism Statist capital, 75 Status, 628–629 Status contracts, 628 Steffani, Winfried, 382 Steinbeck, John, 125 Steiner, Hillel, 667 Stereotype content model, 258 Stereotyping, 506–507 Steunenberg, Bernard, 632 Stevens, Laura, 505 Stigler, George, 87, 483 Stiglitz, Joseph, 533 Stimulus response, agency and, 7–8 Stockholm Initiative on Global Security and Governance, 281 Stone, Clarence, 124–125, 207, 213, 299, 330, 562–563, 655 Strack, Fritz, 506 Straffin, Philip D., 511 Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty, 433 Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), 183 Strategic form games, 450 Strategic interaction in international relations, 629–632 diplomacy, 630 institutions, 631 international law, 630–631 international system, 629–630 Strategic offense/defense balance, 457 Strategic power index, 529, 631–634 alternative approaches, 632–634 future directions, 634 limitations, 632 Strategy of Conflict, The (Schelling), 61, 244 Stratification model, Weber on, 707 Stratification model of the acting self, 643 Strauss, Leo, 447 Strength of weak links. See Strength of weak ties Strength of weak ties, 634–636 Striving for superiority, 519, 636 Strogatz, Steven H., 609 Stromberg, David, 413 Strong, Maurice, 281 Strong Democracy (Barber), 558 Structural determinism, 640 Structural–Éfunctional theory, 629 Structural power, 636–640 enabling aspects of, 639–640 Marxist structuralism, 638–639 Structural–functionalism, 636 structural realism, 636–637 structuralism, 638 Structural suggestion, 640–641 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The (Habermas), 406

Index Structuration, 641–644 agency and, 642–644 agency–structure problem, 10–11 critique of social theories, 641–642 decentering (of subject, of structure), 164–165 defined, 10 federal structure, 245 incentive structures and coercion, 112–113 interdependence theory and, 345–347 jurisdictions and structure-induced equilibria, 359–360 realist accounts of power, 557 revolutionary cell structure, 577–578 structure-induced equilibrium, 644–645 substructure and superstructure, 647 Structure-induced equilibrium, 644–645 Struggle for Power and Peace, The (Morgenthau), 592 Studies in Social Power (Cartwright), 89, 384 Study of International Relations, A (Wright), 722 Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation (Adler), 3 Study of War, A (Wright), 722 Submissive, 645–646 Subordination, 453–455, 646–647 Substantive accounts, of autonomy, 41–42 Substantive fairness, 490 Substantive rationality, 551, 552–553 Substructure and superstructure, 647 Success, decisiveness and, 65 Sudetenland, 25–26 Suharto, General, 419–420 Sum, Ngai-Ling, 357 Sunstein, Cass, 170 Suppe, Patrick, 95 Surplus labor, 232–233 Surplus value, 85, 232–233 Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish) (Foucault), 197 Sweden, 631, 714 “Swing,” 118, 130, 479, 492 Swing player. See Ability “Swing voters,” 212 Switzerland, 559, 694 Symbolic power and voice, 648–649 System integration, 643 System justification theory, 616, 649–653 historical background and outline, 650–651 ideological manifestations of, 651–652 recent developments in, 652–653 systematic luck, 653–655 System theory, 637 Systemic power, 655–656 Systems of States (Wight), 711 Tacitus, 579 Tactical offense/defense balance, 457 Taiwan, 237 Taliban, 243 Tanzania, 418, 587 Target of influence, 66 Taylor, Michael, 442

Taylor, Peter J., 718, 721 Temporal structure, 347 Terms of Political Discourse, The (Connolly), 222 Terror regimes, 657–658 explaining, 658 revolutionary reigns of terror, 658 Terrorism, 658–662 exclusion versus, 226 terrorist actors, 660–661 terrorist violence, 659–660 types of terrorism, 661 Testosterone, power and, 662–664 Tet Offensive, 464 Teutonic Knights, 569 Thatcher, Margaret, 380, 567, 716 Thatcherism, 293, 416, 438 Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas), 5 Theory of International Politics (Waltz), 48, 426, 441, 443–444, 556, 637, 701–702 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 354 Theory of Political Coalitions (Riker), 582 Theory of Social and Economic Organization, The (Weber), 487 Thibaut, John, 345, 504 Third dimension. See Third face Third Estate, 621 Third face, 664–665 Third Way, 196, 243 Thirty Years’ War, 20, 312, 629 “Thought Reform” (China), 115 Thrasymachus, 322 Threats, 665–666 analytic coercion and, 108 bargaining and credibility, 61 coercion and power, 112, 113 deterrent threats, 184–186 extensive form game, 665 (figure) language and power, 495–496 “threat power,” 276 throffers and, 112, 667 Three faces of power, 666–667 Throffers, 112, 667 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 32 Thucydides, 21, 29, 306–307, 312–313, 322, 590–591 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 448 Tiebout, Charles, 207 Tijs, S. H., 667–669 Tijs value, 667–670 calculation of gaps of coalitions, 669 (table) example: three-person game, 668–669 example: three-person simple game, 669 Tilly, Charles, 400 Times, The, 89 “Tit for tat,” 535 Tkachev, Pyotr Nikitich, 46, 578 Tobin, James, 304 Togo, 418 Tokyo, 718–721

751

752

Index

Top cycle, 11 Topics in Social Choice: Sophisticated Voting, Efficacy, and Proportional Representation (Felsenthal), 246 Toronto, 721 Totalitarianism, 670–671 Toward a Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 448 Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth (Sprout, Sprout), 627 Townsend, Janet, 528 Trade, 671–672 Traditional authority, 37 Tragedy of Great Power Politics, The (Mearsheimer), 314, 556 Transaction cost theory, 414 Transactional and transformational leadership, 672–675 transactional leadership, 673 transformation and interdependence, 347 transformational leadership, 673–675 Transcending, 444 Transnational capitalist class, 464 Transnational corporations, 428–431. See also Multinational corporations Transnational terrorism, 661 Treaty of Dover of 1670, 83 Treaty of Münster, 20 Treaty of Osnabrück, 20 Treaty of Rome, 1957, 543 Treaty of Versailles, 88, 381 Treaty of Westphalia, 312 Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, 104 Triple Entente, 15 Truel, 272 Truman, David, 482 Truman, Harry, 70 Trust, 675–676 Tsebelis, George, 687–690 Tullock, Gordon, 77, 138, 645 Tuol Sleng, 657 Turkey, 686 Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, The (Carr), 88, 307, 331, 556 Two-level game, 61–62 Uganda, 419–420 U.K. Companies Act, 430 Uleri, Piervincenzo, 558 Ultima ratio, 556 Undecidability, 174 Underdevelopment, 172–174 Unfreedom, 291 Unicameral legislature, 677–678 Unified government, 531 Unintended consequences, 678–679 Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left), 500 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 431–432, 437, 443 United Kingdom, 446, 472, 560, 607, 631, 693, 714, 716 United Nations, 17, 186, 288, 310, 340, 593 Conference on Trade and Development, 428

Development Programme, 84 Global Compact, 430 High Commissioner for Human Rights, 717 idealism in international relations, 331–332 UN Security Council, 665, 710–711 United Nations Charter, 629–630 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, 219 United Nations Environment Programme, 219 United Nations General Assembly, 699 United Nations Global Compact, 282 United Nations Security Council, 206, 515, 692 United States, 431–432, 437 neorealism, 443 offense/defense dominance, 458 organization of the state, 466 regime theory, 560 small-world networks, 607 social breakdown, 610 women as leaders, 717 women as political leaders, 714 See also individual names of agencies Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations), 489 Universal Postal Union, 285 Universal pragmatics, 158 University of Michigan, 66, 89, 266, 384 Unpolitics of Air Pollution, The (Crenson), 80, 123 Upward Bound, 555 Uruguay, 418 Uruguay Round of GATT, 286 U.S. Air Force, 432 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 152 U.S. Congress, 12, 425, 515. See also U.S. House of Representatives U.S. Constitution, 401, 679, 682, 692 U.S. Department of Defense, 343 U.S. Electoral College, power in, 130, 362, 402, 624, 679–682, 711 bribe index and, 76 a priori individual voting by state, 681, 682 (figure) a priori individual voting power in selected states, 680, 681 (table) a priori state voting power in, 679, 680 (table) U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 353 U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 88 U.S. Forest Service, 585 U.S. House of Representatives, 72, 510, 679, 692, 698 agenda power and, 12 House Ethics Committee, 715 women as leaders, 715 U.S. Library of Congress, 373 U.S. Navy, 161 U.S. Office of National Estimates, 343 U.S. Senate, 72, 298 Use value, 84 Ustagui, Jose M., 602 Utilitarianism, distributive justice and, 198

Index Value, Marx on, 84 Value of a game, 683–684 Value of the first type, 683 Variable capital, 85 Variable-sum games, 684 Varna-jati system, 90–92 Vehicle fallacy, 684–685 Veiled women, 685–687 Vendéans, 658 Versailles Treaty, 25 Vertical propaganda, 537 Vescio, Theresa, 505 Veto players, 687–692 bicameralism and, 72 core and policy stability, 691 (figure) minimal winning coalition, 423 strategic power index, 634 theory, 687–691 win-sets and core, 690 (figure) win-sets and policy stability, 688 (figure) Veto power, 692–693 game forms, 269 simple games, 608 Vico, Giambattista, 153, 292–293 Victims of Groupthink (Janis), 297 Victoria (queen of England), 214 Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, 319 Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 3 Vietnam, 464 Vietnam War, 463 Violation of consistency, 698 Violence Arendt, 26–28 feminist theories of power, 253–255 military in government, 419–420 pure violence, 703 terrorism, 659–660 war as type of violent behavior, 702–703 war as violent phase in process of escalation, 704 See also War Vita Contemplativa (Clegg), 104 Von Moltke, Helmuth, 702–703 Von Neuman–Morganstern solution, 106 Von Neumann, John, 304, 422, 537, 607, 683–684, 709 Vote-maximizing parties, 693–694, 693 Voting, 694–695 Banzhaf voting power measure, 54–55, 511–512 blocking coalition, 74, 608 computer algorithms for power indices, 129–133 elections, 211–212 game-theoretical approaches to power, paradox of the chair position, 271 (figure) heresthetics, 316–317 homogenous weighted majority games, 324 I-power, 354–355 justice and voting power, 361–362 paradoxes, 695–699 Penrose voting power measure, 476–477, 510–511

753

power, 361–362, 699–700 power indices and, 510–516 qualified majority voting, 543–544 shareholder voting power, 606–607 spatial voting analysis, 623–624 U.S. Electoral College and power, 679–682 vote-maximizing parties, 693–694 voting procedures and game forms, 269 See also Game-theoretical approaches to power Voting paradoxes, 695–699 Alabama paradox, 698 Anscombe’s paradox, 696–697 Borda’s paradox, 696 Condorcet’s paradox, 695–696 intraprofile paradox, 697–698 monotonicity paradox, 697 Ostrogorski’s paradox, 696 Voting power, 699–700 assigned by various power measures under two different decision rules, 699 (table) justice and, 361–362 Machover, 397 Martin index, 401–402 power indices, 509–516 power to initiate action and power to prevent action, 525–526 value of a game, 683 Voting Power and Procedures (VPP) Programme, 397 Wagner, Cosima, 448 Wagner, Richard, 448 Wagner at Bayreuth (Nietzsche), 448 Wall Street Journal, The, 378 Wallace, William, 329 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 173 Walt, Stephen, 14, 50 Waltz, Kenneth, 14, 48, 50, 165, 184, 307–309, 426, 441–444, 556, 592, 637–638, 701–702 Walzer, Michael, 126, 183, 711 War, 702–707 bargaining in international relations and, 62 civil, 101–103 Clausewitz, 103 de-escalation, information, and intervention, 705–706 escalation and information, 704–705 escalation and intervention, 705 hegemonic war and, 312–315 military alliances, 14, 16 military in government, 418–421 origins of war: dependence and conflict of interest, 703–704 real war, 591 technological innovation and, 706–707 types of violent behavior and, 702–703 as violent phase in process of escalation, 704 See also individual names of wars War and Change in World Politics (Gilpin), 312 Ward, Colin, 19 Warner, Michael, 318, 343, 545

754

Index

Warring States (China), 49 Washington Treaty, 236 Watts, Duncan J., 352, 609 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 354, 593 Webb, Michael, 310 Webb, Paul, 716 Weber, Max, 75, 79, 127, 204–205, 383, 399–400, 707–709 Adorno and, 4 anarchism and, 18 authority and, 37 causal theories of power and, 94 Clegg and, 104 consensual power, 133 critical theory, 156 determinacy, 175–177 Giddens and, 280 Luhmann and, 392 Marxism and, 406, 408 opportunity, 460 organization of the state, 465 political legitimacy, 487, 489 public goods index, 541 relational power, 564 second fact, 590–591 status, 628–629 substructure and superstructure, 647 symbolic power and violence, 648 Wednesday Society, 3 Weick, Mario, 503 Weighted majority game, 608, 709–710 example, 709–710 homogenous, 324 minimal winning coalition, 422–423 proper, 538 Weighted voting, 710–711 Weil, Felix, 154, 406 Weimar Republic, 484–485 Weitsman, Patricia, 14–15 Welfare, justice and, 362 Wellmer, Albrecht, 157 Wendt, Alexander, 21 Wertheimer, Alan, 235 Western Europe, 45, 569, 686, 691, 716. See also individual names of countries Westphalian sovereignty, 621 What Is History? (Carr), 89 White, Ralph, 90, 266, 384 Whitt, J. Allen, 415 Who Governs? (Dahl), 45, 123, 163–164, 202, 360 Who Really Rules? (Domhoff), 202 Who Rules America? (Domhoff), 201 Who Rules America Now? (Domhoff), 201 Widgrén, Mika, 529, 633–634 Wight, Martin, 78, 189, 711–712 Wilkinson, David, 501 Will to power, 519, 712–713 Will to Power, The (Nietzsche, Förster-Nietzsche), 712 Wilson, Harold, 78

Wilson, Woodrow, 332, 381, 437 Win-set of the status quo, 688 Winter, David G., 409 Wintrobe, Ronald, 188 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 104, 191, 305, 358 Wittman, Donald, 482 Wohlforth, William, 314 Wohlstetter, Albert, 181–182 Wolfe, Alan, 212 Wolfers, Arnold, 713–714 Wolff, Goetz, 719 Wolfinger, Raymond E., 45, 123, 393, 449, 589, 666 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 253 Women as political leaders, 714–718 ceremonial executives and international leadership, 717–718 executive leadership and iron ladies, 716–717 legislative and party leadership, 715–716 paths to power and representation, 714–715 Wood, Wendy, 209 Woodcock, George, 19 Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Relations, 88 Working-class regimes, 563 World Bank, 131, 286, 310, 431, 438 World cities, 718–722 global cities, 720–721 hierarchy of, 720 (figure) hypotheses, 718–720 world city network, 721 World Cities, The (Hall), 718 World Commission on Dams, 282 World Commission on Environment and Development, 281 World Health Organization, 430, 630, 717 World Politics (Organski), 526 World systems approach, 174 World Trade Organization (WTO), 127–128, 286, 316, 560, 577, 593 World War I, 17, 140, 154, 242, 285, 295, 312, 314, 332, 367, 381 ableness and, 3 alliances and, 15 appeasement, 25 arms race and, 31 balance of power and, 49 idealism in international relations, 332 imperialism, 341 nationalism, 437 spiral model, 626 striving for superiority, 636 World War II, 17, 89, 198, 285, 312, 314, 384, 509, 517, 589 appeasement and, 25 balance of power and, 50 bases of power and, 71 corporatism, 148 critical theory, 155 deterrent threats, 184–185 Giddens, 280

Index imperialism, 341 labor, 266 media, 412 nationalism, 437 neorealism, 443 Pearl Harbor and CIA, 99 regime theory, 560 security dilemma, 596 spiral model, 626 WorldCom, 298 Wright, Quincy, 722–723 Wright, Richard, 98 WTO. See World Trade Organization (WTO) Yale University, 163 Yom Kippur War, 716

Young, H. Peyton, 602 Young, Iris Marion, 169, 252, 583 Young, Oran, 281, 561 YouTube, 286, 352 Yzerbyt, Vincent, 505 Zagare, Frank, 186 Zaller, John, 413 Zanlerigu, David, 419–420 Zapatista, 577 Zeuthen, Frederik, 58, 304, 683 Zimbabwe, 610 Zimmerman, Joseph, 715 Zipf’s law, 517–518 Žižek, Slavoj, 159, 194, 370 Zwicker, William, 354, 515, 528

755