Influence

This may be used to manipulate but it can never be associated with coercion. Influence is behind the scenes. Those holding formal power may seek the ideas and opinions of people held to be well-informed, wise and experienced. Such people are influential. Others may approach formal power-holders and convey the wishes, blandishments and threats of pressure groups and other interests. The extent to which influence is important will depend on a country's political culture and the values of its decision-makers. Thus the influence of intellectuals is held to be more important in France than Britain. (Like all statements about power this one is hard to verify.) Many of the factors affecting influence are the same as for power. Strategic location, reputation, skills and the possession of information are clearly important in this respect.

2.1.4 Summary

Power is the central concept in political science and yet it is the most difficult to grasp. It cannot be measured in units: there is no currency of power. Russell's desire for power to be like energy in physics was always unattainable.

Dahl's was the first attempt to systematise the assessment of power and he set out four ways of studying power distribution.

1. By observing those holding formal positionschairpersons, secretaries, etc.in official hierarchies. This neglects indirect behind-the-scenes power where it exists.

2. By using 'judges'shrewd people in positions where they can observe the political scene and evaluate each actor's contribution. But who judges the judges?

3. By studying participation in decisions. Yet participation can hardly be equated with power-holding. Moreover, what about the non-decisions, perhaps the result of the real power-holders keeping issues off political agendas?

4. By attempting to overcome the problem of quantification by assigning scores or marks to the political actors and thus making a league table of power-holdersas carried out by Dahl in his New Haven study of power. Yet there are, as Dahl admits, arbitrary elements in this method. However, beyond that obvious objection is the one that none of the decisions studied were identical and therefore not even the probability tests of the statisticians could be applied.

Mackenzie observes that power has and can be studied by two different methodologies. One is the situational. For example, we can look at the structure of power in a particular country or community. Here political scientists often are asking the question: 'Is power here oligarchic or (in Dahl's terms) polyarchic?' The second methodology is relational. Power is a form of interactivity between people. This leads Mackenzie into a consideration of forms of systems analysis.¹³ Suppose, however, we ask a question about the relationship between democratic politicians and their electorate. Who holds more power and how do politicians get formal power positions? When the latter win elections can it be attributed to their control of material resources such as money and party organisation? Or to their personal magnetism? Or to their shrewd assessment of what the voters want? Do incumbent politicians stay in power by not doing what they perceive would be unpopular with the voters? This would be an invisible inter-action leading to non-decisions being taken! Is it the electorate that holds the power and hands it to the politicians to exert it?

As Allison argues the problem of evaluating power begins with the question of attributability. 'If a person has power, the consequences of that power must be attributable to that person who is responsible for those consequences.¹⁴ There is often great difficulty in assessing who is ultimately responsible for outcomes. Rumours about secret powerholders are rife, giving rise to stories about conspiracies.

Power is a nebulous concept and attempts to define and measure it have not been very successful.

2.2 Legitimacy

2.2.1 How do we know whether a regime is legitimate or not?

It is not enough to cite compliance with a regime's rules and its intermediaries as evidence for legitimacy. Empirically we learn from both distant and recent history that people for the most part comply with the orders of an occupying army, but they hate it. They think its rule wrong and improper. Hence the successful exercise of power does not make it legitimate. Research that set out to discover whether a regime was legitimate or not would proceed through observation and interrogation. A regime that had persisted for a long period would suggest an assumption of legitimacy, but it could not be taken for granted. In 1987 the Soviet Union might have seemed a legitimate regime. Yet by 1990 it had disintegrated, largely from internal pressures. This leads to a second question for political scientists.

2.2.2 How do regimes lose their legitimacy?

We have numerous examples from history of regimes collapsing. Empires are especially prone to collapse. The Roman, Spanish, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Soviet empires all disintegrated. Both outside and inside pressures seem to have contributed to their downfalls. It is doubtful whether empires are ever accepted as legitimate by their subject peoples. Sooner or later they cease to respect the rules and orders of their rulers who find policing them increasingly exhausting, both physically and financially.

Frequently political regimes begin to lose legitimacy when their rulers start to doubt the beliefs and values justifying their rule. New generations of power-holders begin to lose faith in what has been called the 'legitimating myth'perhaps, in the case of empires, the conviction that they are bringing peace, progress, enlightenment and civilisation. The loss of confidence leads to instability. Legitimacy is then threatened. Where the imperial masters have liberal values they will find it difficult, in the end impossible, to deny the same democratic rights and procedures to their subject peoples that they accord to their own people.

Dahl explains legitimacy with the metaphor of a reservoir. As long as it stays at a certain level stability is maintained, but if it falls below that level it is endangered. ¹⁵ In the 1970s some political scientists began to question the sustainability of 'Western democracy'. Dunleavy and O'Leary have summarised the main arguments.¹⁶ One was that the success of capitalism had created a consumer society in which affluence had produced values contrary to the Protestant work ethic which had been fundamental to capitalism. Another was that democratic governments had become too ambitious in their policies and had 'overloaded' themselves with too many functions. They should divest themselves of many of them. A third was that democracy had never been properly extended to people. Both decentralisation and greater political participation were needed.