Social Power and Political Influence

James T. Tedeschi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351489812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The nature of social power, the ability of individuals to affect the behavior and belief of others, is central to any understanding of the dynamics of change in our society. It is therefore surprising that social scientists, and especially social psychologists, have devoted relatively little attention to the subject and have accumulated relatively little knowledge about it. But this gap may be more apparent than real argues James T. Tedeschi; there has in fact been a great deal of research on many aspects of interpersonal influence. What is missing is the kind of consensus about an operational definition of the concept of power that would bring this work usefully into focus. The purpose of Social Power and Political Influence is to bring together the best work of scholars from many disciplines in order to organize, develop, evaluate, and interpret scientific theories of social, political, and economic power. The contributors are drawn from anthropology, political science, sociology, and social psychology. They illustrate a variety of approaches, ranging from ethnographic case studies to mathematically formalized models. Presenting theory and methods, these chapters treat in provocative and creative ways such important problems as the factors that affect the use of power and the nature of response to its use, the linkages that affect the flow of power between individuals and social systems, the consequences of attributions of power by actors and observers, and the implications of trust as an alternative to explicit influence. This in-depth scholarly sampling of research and theory will be of great interest to everyone concerned with the scientific study of social and political power and the influence processes. The interdisciplinary nature of the topic itself and of the work represented here make Social Power and Political Influence an important contribution for students and scholars in many fields, from social psychology, political science and sociology to communications, management science, and economics.

I
Attributions of Power

1 Power and Probability

William A. Gamson

The area of interpersonal power is beset by a handicap that analysts of community, national, and international power have been able to avoid. The handicap is the apparently innocent assumption that interpersonal power should be thought of as the power that one individual has over another. Even when it is recognized, as it frequently is, that such power relations may be a two-way street, the assumption remains a straitjacket.

The problem with thinking or power as a relationship between people is that it deprives the discourse of an intellectual apparatus that has proved very useful in talking about power relations in larger units. Only the slightest change is necessary to make this apparatus available. First, let's speak of power over behavior rather than power over a person. This means that we relinquish our claim to be dealing with changes in attitudes, values, learning, and other internal states except insofar as we must invoke such concepts to explain the mechanisms by which power operates on behavior. We leave the domain of explaining changes in internal states to other subfields of social psychology --moral and cognitive development, value and attitude change, and the like.

Second, let's think about the behavior being explained in a specific way--as the decisions or the choice among alternatives that an individual makes. This is hardly any limit at all because it is a simple matter to cast most behavior in these terms. Virtually any action may be viewed as an implicit choice among possible alternatives even if the other members of the decision set were never consciously considered. Many choices will be trivial ones of little interest or concern, so we must specify the domain that is important to us--the choice of a political candidate to vote for, the decision to take a job or buy a product, the choice of a policy to advocate and support, and so forth.

What I am proposing is that we redefine the task of an interpersonal power analysis. Instead of attempting to make statements about how much or what kind of power A has over B, we should speak instead of how much and what kind of power A has over a specified domain of B's decisions. The dividend we receive for this change is the employment of the highly useful conceptualization of power as a change in probability.

The Probability Conception of Power

The explicandum for interpersonal power analysis is the set of decisions that an individual makes. But only part of the explanation lies within the realm of power. Many effects on a person's decisions may have nothing to do with the behavior of other actors but may reflect his internal states, natural events, the physical environment, and so forth. Clearly, a power explanation has certain more specific characteristics.

For an intuitive feeling of where the explanation lies, I like the story about the man who enthusiastically and repeatedly threw bits of newspaper in the street. One morning, a woman who had watched this performance for several months approached him and asked him what he was doing. "I'm throwing this paper down to keep the elephants out of the streets," he told her. "But there are no elephants in the streets," she reproached him. "That's right," he said triumphantly, "Effective, isn't it?"

Clearly, the exercise of power must imply some change over the kind of decision that an individual would make in the absence of its exercise. But what of a situation in which I would probably have voted for Candidate X anyway but became more certain of the decision as a result of a conversation with a respected friend? Surely there is some kind of influence or power being exercised here, but can one say that my decision was altered if I probably would have voted the same way anyhow?

We can say this quite easily if we conceive of the exercise of power as an act which increases the probability that I will choose a preferred alternative of the influencer. To conceive of influence as a shift of probability is one of Robert Dahl's (1957) several magnificent and seminal contributions to the area of power analysis.In the example above, my probability of voting for Candidate X was, let us say, .7 before talking to my respected friend and .9 after the conversation. The shift from .7 to .9 in the probability of my choice represents the exercise of power or influence.

It will be useful to have some specific terms to refer to these probabilities in a more general way. First, we need to refer to the probability that a person will choose a given alternative before the alleged exercise of power has occurred. Let's call this the before probability or P_b. Second, we need to refer to the probability that a person will choose a given alternative after the alleged exercise of power has occurred. Let's call this the after probability or P_a. Power has been successfully exercised if and only if there is a difference between P_a and P_b.

The simplicity of this definition is deceptive. There are an array of both conceptual and operational problems. The conceptual issues include such nettles as anticipated reactions, the stimulation of counter-activity by one's actions, and negative power. I have had my say on these matters elsewhere (Gamson 1968, pp. 68-91) and have nothing to add here. The operational difficulties are formidable enough and will occupy the balance of this essay.

Operationalizing Power: Objective Probability

One may wonder when confronting the problems of operationalizing the probability conception of power, whether the dividend I have offered with such glowing promises is any blessing at all. If it brings some conceptual clarity, perhaps this is offset by the difficulties of putting it into practical use in research. Perhaps the touted dividend will turn out to be a white elephant which has somehow gotten into the streets after all.

Here's the problem. Imagine that we want to know whether Mr. A exercises influence over the voting decisions of Senator X and, if so, to what degree. Our initial approach to this question might consist of the following easily made observations. We observe the total set of Senator X's voting decisions. We note those occasions on which Mr. A has attempted to influence the outcome of Senator X's vote. We can then calculate two conditional probabilities:

(1) The probability that Senator X will vote for Mr. A's preferences when Mr. A does not attempt influence;

(2) The probability that Senator X will vote for Mr. A's preferences when Mr. A actively tries to get Senator X to do so.

If we have a substantial number of cases in each class, we can compare these conditional probabilities and we should be able to make meaningful statements about the power Mr. A has exercised. More specifically, if the probability of Mr. A's getting favorable votes is higher when he attempts influence than when he doesn't, we have apparent evidence that he has exercised power over Senator X's decisions. Furthermore, the degree of difference between these two probabilities gives us an apparently precise measure of the exact amount of power that Mr. A was able to exercise.

I use the word apparently because this procedure is, in fact, fraught with difficulties. First, there is the problem of the equivalence of decisions. It is simply not true for most purposes that a vote is a vote is a vote. Any comparison of probabilities must assume that there are certain equivalences in the classes of votes being compared. But imagine a situation in which Mr. A is active only on pork-barrel issues while he does not attempt influence on such major policy questions as inflation and unemployment. We must also assume that he expresses his personal preferences to an investigator on the issues on which he is inactive--only thus can we calculate the probability of his getting what he desires in the absence of influence attempts.

How meaningful can it be to compare Mr. As probability of getting his preferred alternative in these two situations--one in which he attempts influence and one in which he does not? We might easily exaggerate his power by the following reasoning: Senator X is personally indifferent and especially open to influence on most pork-barrel issues, but on major policy questions he is constrained by his own opinions and those of his vocal constituents. Since Mr. A is only active on issues that are easy to influence and never tries the hard ones, he may look very powerful indeed. On the other hand, we may just as easily underestimate Mr. A's influence. Perhaps he already agrees with Senator X on most major policy issues and thus has no incentive or need to exercise influence on such questions. On pork-barrel issues, however, he must go all out, since Senator X is generally resistant to special interest legislation. The result in this case will be to reveal Mr. A as having a net minus power score. Mien he is inactive he almost always gets his preferred alternative, but when he is active and tries hard, his percentage of success is much lower.

This example does not seem too farfetched, and yet it leaves our comparisons of probabilities a meaningless shambles. Nor is the problem solved by drawing narrower content categories of decision--for example, tax votes or foreign policy votes. The assumption of equivalency within such categories remains and is just as difficult to meet. Specifically, there must be equivalency with respect to two things for the probability comparisons to be meaningful:

(1) The average before probability (P_b) must be the same for the two classes of decisions--those in which Mr. A attempts influence and those in which he doesn't.

(2) The average degree of competitiveness and attempted influence from others must be the same for the two classes of decisions.

These are extremely formidable equivalency requirements--formidable enough to render the above operation of questionable usefulness in practice.

As serious as this problem is, there is another that is perhaps even more so. The probability definition of power seems to lead us off in a direction that is not really where we want to go. To switch metaphors, it is the wrong tool for the job. What we want is an apparatus that will allow us, among other things, to make power statements about unique, nonrecurring situations. We are led instead to compare classes of decisions so that we can examine the relative frequency of preferred alternatives in the presence or absence of alleged influence.

What does this conception allow us to say about whether Robert F. Kennedy's sympathy call to Mrs. Martin Luther King influenced the outcome of the 1968 election or whether Dwight D. Eisenhower's pledge to go to Korea influenced the outcome of the 1952 election? Or, at an interpersonal level, can it tell us whether Smith's passionate plea swayed the Board of Trustees from its apparent earlier inclination to cut the funds for the new building? Our conception of power ought to allow us to make statements about classes of events that have only one member--the one we're really interested in talking about.

Operationalizing Power: Subjective Probability

To talk about power over a single decision, we must necessarily abandon the notion of objective probability. Objective probability is inseparable from the idea of the relative frequency of a given outcome, and there is no meaningful way of talking about the relative frequency of an outcome on a unique occasion--the outcome either occurs or it doesn't.

Subjective probability is a different matter, and I offer it as our salvation. The fact is that we talk all the time about the probability of single events, and we act on these subjective probabilities. A whole industry is built very successfully around such probabilities, and its members would have been happy to quote you precise odds on a wide variety of unique events--the probability that Baltimore would win the world series, the probability that the Detroit Lions would win the Super Bowl, or, lest anyone think I am being frivolous, the probability that Richard Nixon would be reelected.

The first thing we must struggle against is the notion that because a judgment is subjective it is unreliable, unstable, idiosyncratic, or unmeasurable. Subjective probabilities are stable, reliable, and measurable. As a collective phenomenon, they are an objective part of the social world, independent of our whims and wishes.

To make this clearer, let me introduce a new concept--that of the "true" subjective probability of a given event. The true subjective probability is the mean probability of a distribution of subjective probability judgments by informed observers. By an informed observer, I mean one who possesses all the information that is available for forming a judgment. Because there are many factors, the judgments of informed observers will have some variance, but there is reason to expect these judgments to be normally distributed except when the event in question has an extremely high or low subjective probability of occurrence.

It is, of course, not easy to know what this true subjective probability is. Even if we are ourselves informed observers, we may be deviant or idiosyncratic in our judgment. A sample of one to represent the mean of a distribution is inadequate no matter how perceptive the one may be. In short, one's own estimate of the probability should not be used as a measure of the true subjective probability.

Gamblers have an excellent device for estimating the true subjective probability of a given population. They offer odds and adjust them to the way in which the population places its bets. Let us say that they placed the odds at 2-1 against Muskie's gaining the Democratic presidential nomination. If they found that many were willing to bet on Muskie at these odds and few were willing to bet against him, they would lower the oddsperhaps to 3-2. On the other hand, perhaps many might have been willing to bet against Muskie at the original odds and few would take a chance in his favor--then gamblers would have raised the odds, perhaps to 3-1. The shifts in odds were a search for the true subjective probability, and they would stabilize when they reach the mean--about as many people would bet for Muskie as against him. The variance around this mean, of course, is what makes horse races and election bets.

Once the Idea of a true subjective probability has been accepted, we can--with some additional specifications--use it in measurement of the exercise of power. First, if we are interested in power, we must limit our attention to those events which are under the control of targets of potential influence. In other words, the events must be the decisions of men. In studying social power, we are not interested in the subjective probability of whether it will rain tomorrow; we are interested in the probability that the state legislature will pass a proposed no-fault insurance bill, that voters will pass a proposed school bond issue, or that the president will withdraw troops from Europe. To be related to a measure of power, the subjective probability in question must refer to the probability that a particular alternative will be chosen by an actual or potential target of influence.

The most meaningful subjective probabilities are those held by such targets of influence. Even if the target is a single individual, the idea of subjective probability remains valid. To illustrate this, assume that the decision of concern is whether Professor Jones will accept an attractive offer from another university He has promised to give an answer in thirty days, but he is able to tell us that he "probably" will accept the offer. When pressed to be specific, he tells us that there are two chances in three that he will accept Subsequently, his wife is offered an attractive position at his present university and a new interview reveals a change in his subjective probability. He now suggests that he is quite likely to remain at his present job, rating the chances of accepting the competitive offer at only one in five. Here we have a situation in which the target's subjective probability has changed significantly, and we can infer influence even though the actual decision has still not actually been made.

The measurement process is similar when the decision is a collective one. Members of the group are asked to estimate the probability that the decision-making body of which they are a member will act in a particular fashion. Thus, they are asked to report partly on their own actions and partly on their anticipation of the actions of others. They are, in effect, serving as particularly well-informed observers who have two advantages over other observers. First, they have special and unparalleled access to their own reactions, and second, they have a high probability of exposure to the thinking and feelings of other members of the decision-making body.

These advantages distinguish them from other observers only in making them better informed. Empirically, this presumption may turn out to be false in some cases. Some set of observers, by their more systematic efforts and attention, may be better informed than members of the target group on the likely actions of that body. A journalist who regularly covers Congress may be in a better position to know how congressmen are leaning on an upcoming vote than are many members who are junketing, repairing fences in their home district, or otherwise preoccupied. Similarly, the president's analyst may be a better judge than the president himself of his likely decision on a matter in which unconscious impulses are heavily involved.

The point of these examples is to underline the fact that the essential prerequisite for judging subjective probability is being an informed observer of the body making the decision. The focus on the judgments of the decision-making group itself rests on a presumption that may well be discarded in given cases--that a group is likely to be especially well-informed on its own likelihood of taking particular actions.

One final element is necessary to use subjective probability as a measure of how much influence h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction and Overview
• Part I. ATTRIBUTIONS OF POWER
• Part II. THE SOURCE OF POWER AND INFLUENCE
• Part III. THE TARGET OF INFLUENCE
• Part IV. ANALYSIS OF INDIVIDUAL-SYSTEM RELATIONSHIPS
• Part V. POLITICAL POWER
• Part VI. THE MEANS OF INFLUENCE
• Index