Re-focusing on Political Power

Rationale 1. For much of the last two decades the study of political power has been unfashionable in political science, in contrast to its centrality in political sociology and in pluralist political thought from the 1950s to the 1970s. There were several contributing influences involved in this declining salience and visibility, especially: (a) Power came to be seen as a surprising complex and overly contested (perhaps ‘essentially contested’) concept, whose meaning could not be agreed between rival schools of thought. Especially important here were cleavages between - Resource-orientated conceptions of power, traditionally the stance of Marxism and elite theorists; versus Conditional or coalitionality-orientated conceptions, stressed in Weberian and pluralist approaches, and culminating in ‘power index’ studies and game theory - Conflictual, ‘power over’ conceptions, seeing power as essentially about overcoming the resistance of others, a view strongly developed in all Marxist, Weberian and ‘realist’ international relations analyses, but integral also to e.g. ‘power index’ studies; versus Co-operative, ‘power to’ conceptions, seeing power as a catalyst or medium for realizing collective social projects, a view developed by Parsons and Luhmann, and normatively by Arendt and feminist thought (b) In consequence, methods for devising operational measure of power were difficult to formulate and could not secure widespread agreement. (c) The main empirical indices developed were ‘power indices’ claiming to capture ‘a priori’ power in weighted voting situations. These are deliberately ‘low information’, aspatial measures. They were widely seen as outclassed by the kinds of ‘high information’ measures developed in game theory and the theory of coalitions, which take account of the spatial positioning of actors. (d) Some of the later influences in the theory of power stemmed from Foucauldian themes stressing the embedding of power relations into language, social interactions, and the development of myriad institutions (professional, cultural, religious, social as well as formal political relations and state operations), creating a highly distributed net of governmentalities. Fruitful though such conceptions were, they nonetheless tended to shift attention away from the state and key power relations per se, dissolving their study in the analysis of large social wholes. Social power came to be seen as pervasive, but in the process the analysis of political power’s key specific sites and major concentrations was largely de-emphasized. 2. Recently however, a renaissance of work focusing on political power has been made possible by a number of key intellectual developments: - The 2011 publication of the Sage 'Encyclopaedia of Power' (edited by K. Dowding) demonstrated the far greater theoretical pooling of ideas that has come about in recent decades, especially the concerting of a complex concept of power as both ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ (in Foucauldian terms, both ‘repressive’ and ‘productive’); and integrating across both resources and conditional views of power. The diagram below shows this new intellectual space. [Apologies: this form does not accept any kind of graphics. We're happy to send a copy separately] - The founding of the dedicated Journal of Power which has fueled a good deal of new work and encouraged work in the Foucauldian stream to address more political science topics. - Increasing recognition in the field of coalition studies and the analysis of party competition that ‘power indices’ offer valuable ‘low information’ measures of coalitionality. - Increased technological capability for analysing large number weighted voting situations from better IT solutions and the availability of sophisticated programs for computing ‘power indices’, notably the Warwick University ‘Computer Algorithms for Voting Power Analysis’ site by Dennis and Robert Leech (at http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~ecaae/ ) - A growing recognition that as political science moves into the ‘big data’ era, it will be important to be able to analyse many large datasets where it is inherently highly unlikely that we will ever have precise spatial information about the positioning of actors and blocs in competition. Yet accurate data of this kind is needed to even begin to operationalize game theoretic predictions. In such cases ‘low information’ measures (such as the coalitionality scores generated by ‘power indices’, and improvements on them) can be very insightful. Proposed Panels 3. The section will have four component panels as follows: A. The political theory of complex power (Panel Chair: Dr Peter Morriss, Galway, tbc) B. Getting better at measuring power/ Methods for power (Panel Chair: Prof Keith Dowding, ANU) C. Resources, coalitionality and power (Panel Chair: Prof Patrick Dunleavy, LSE) D. The empirical insights from power analyses (Panel Chair: tbc) As the panel titles make clear, we welcome contributions that shed new light on: - The political philosophy and theory of power, both normative and analytic, especially those contributing to the modern, integrated concept of power, and spanning across a wide range of theoretical traditions and impulses. - Methods for better quantifying aspects or dimensions of power, especially new or improved ‘low information’ measures best suited to widespread ‘big data’ or larger research database analyses. - Methods or approaches for creating more multi-dimensional measures or estimates/analyses of power, especially those that capture or operationalize better the joint ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ character of political power. - New developments in jointly considering the roles of resources and coalitionality in fixing the power of actors. A specific application area is likely to be in coalition formation and party system evolution, especially measures of ‘power’ in legislatures, government formation and party competition. - Empirical treatments that show the value-added from power analyses, including both ‘big data’/large N applications and qualitative/case study approaches. Overall, we seek to re-focus the attention of European (and other) political scientists on the usefulness of power analysis, and to foster and include a wide range of new developments from different parts of the discipline.