Modern Investigation on the Concept of Power

This essay critically explores the different accounts of power provided by political scientists and the models that these have theorized in order to explain the dynamics underlying its exercise. Initially, the essay will analyse the two mainstream models used in political science, the one presented by Steven Lukes in his Power: a radical view and the one presented by Kenneth Boulding in his Three faces of power. Both these authors build on previous work in order to create a consistent model that attempts to explain the functioning of power. However, these two models have not remained untouched by criticism: the essay will provide a brief description of this phenomenon, with the purpose of highlighting how the object of the controversy in this case is not only the definition of a model to classify power, but the definition of power itself.

The modern investigation on the concept of power starts with the work of Max Weber, who provided a definition of power as the chance of an individual to achieve his own will despite resistance of others. His theory makes an initial distinction between coercion and authority, the former deriving its effectiveness from the threat of punishment or promise of reward, and the latter relying on its legitimacy in order to influence the outcome. Weber identifies three types of authority that differ on the source they draw their legitimacy from: traditional authority, charismatic authority and legal-rational authority (Heywood, 2002). His initial distinction is particularly important towards a deeper understanding of power mechanisms because theorizes a dichotomy that each of us can experience in daily life, namely the fact that an individual can achieve his preferred outcome either by leveraging threat, hence employing a material differential to influence the outcome, or by achieving a social status that puts him or her in a position of prominence in the decision-making process.

This view became rather influential in the 1960s among pluralists, especially in the work of Robert Dahl; his research placed the emphasis on the manifestation of power in observable behaviour (Lukes, 2004) and hence leads him to theorize power as the ability of A to get B to do something that B would not otherwise do. This theory has been criticized for providing an account of power that is only partial; nevertheless, overt power represents a fundamental face of power, and perhaps the one that individuals can more easily experience and relate to, and has been incorporated in subsequent theories. Lukes maintains overt power as the first dimension of his three-pronged system and, in his words, it "involves a focus on behaviour in the making of decision on issues over which there is an observable conflict of subjective interests, seen as express policy preferences" (Lukes, 2004: p.19). Overt power is widely observable in daily life in each situation where the individual's behaviour is constrained by the threat of