|
Call for Papers on "Power Reconsidered" Dahl's publication of "The Concept of Power" in 1957, prodded the discipline to consider how power-- getting it, using it, taming it - was a central feature in political life. We ask the discipline, 50 years later, to again consider whether and how the concept of power informs our scholarship. And just as Dahl worried that the then dominant legalistic approach had obscured fundamental relations in society, we seek a discussion about how we should theorize about power, in the context of a growing hegemony of institutional approaches in the discipline. In the past decade, we have borrowed freely and with great profit from microeconomics, mathematics, history, and cognitive psychology. While such recent preoccupations have proven enormously fruitful and important in adding both rigor and a keen appreciation of political life, we propose that it may be appropriate to rethink power, in the context of our now deeper understanding of social and political institutions. Our hope is first, to stimulate careful thought about how best to conceptualize and to study power in the wake of the analytical and methodological revolution of the past several decades. For example, the methodological individualism which has realigned political science may well be ripe for an engagement with the "faces of power" controversy. Our burgeoning interest in the economics of information, signaling under uncertainty, and prospect theory might all be turned toward illuminating who wins in decision-making, agenda-formation, and preference-formation. To take another example, power in institutional settings appears relevant to such recent inquiries as the role of pivots, cut points, payoffs, and vetoes, the formation of political cartels, the ubiquity of principal-agent problems, and elite polarization and the return of partisanship among democratic electorates. We suggest that these topics resonate with the study of power in ways that await valuable exploration and development. Second, we invite fresh empirical description of power and its uses, and fresh application of our discipline's increasingly potent and analytical tools to striking and significant patterns and cases in the uses of authority. Such work might be historical and/or developmental tracing the origins of institutions or may ask about the effects, if any, of a particular institutional design. For instance, in advanced democracies, enlarged participation co-exists with growing income and wealth inequality; in the state-system, nation-states sit uneasily between supra and sub-national commercial and labor-market institutions even while weapons proliferation underscores the centrality of state violence in international life; and in much of the world liberalism and democracy are ideals that political entrepreneurs and ordinary people use for various ends. We suggest that conceptual and methodological reconsideration of the use and abuse of power can reframe these and many other emergent phenomena, thus fostering progress in the development of the discipline. Third, and not least, we hope to engage the normative as well as positive sensibilities of political scientists. Political philosophy and its history offer enduring insights into political power. Ancient theory's preoccupation with the interplay between regime and individual character, medieval theory's preoccupation with the perquisites, limits, and ethics of office, and modern theory's preoccupations with limiting the role of religion, containing the application of violence and coercion, the development of public law, contract and consent, institutional design, emancipation, and the inscription of power in seemingly private domains of life all constitute rich resources for the reconsideration of political power and its actual roles in political life. Equally important is the recent and energetic revival of liberal theory that teaches us not to read power into everything, thus underscoring that, conceptually, political power is a contested term. Although power is not everywhere, it must be somewhere, and we need reliable criteria for knowing its location, scope, and effects. In sum, we encourage members of the discipline to rethink the theoretical status of power in their own empirical work and urge theorists to revaluate their models in light of empirical examples of the effects of authority relationships. The understanding of both the theoretical bases of power and its empirical effects provides the focus of the 2006 meetings. Our hope is that this dialogue will enliven our work and prove an important dimension of analysis for all members of the association. |
Join/Renew Now!
Contribute
Contact APSA