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The concept of power
Abstract
What is “power”? Most people have an intuitive notion of what it means. But scientists have not yet formulated a statement of the concept of power that is rigorous enough to be of use in the systematic study of this important social phenomenon. Power is here defined in terms of a relation between people, and is expressed in simple symbolic notation. From this definition is developed a statement of power comparability, or the relative degree of power held by two or more persons. With these concepts it is possible for example, to rank members of the United States Senate according to their “power” over legislation on foreign policy and on tax and fiscal policy.
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Research works printed but not linked: 8
- French, 1956, A formal theory of social power, Psychol. Rev., 63, 181, 10.1037/h0046123 · DOI · Paper page
- Lasswell, 1950, Power and society
- Luce, 1956, A game theoretic analysis of Congressional power distributions for a stable two-party system, Behav. Sci., 1, 83, 10.1002/bs.3830010202 · DOI
- March, 1955, An introduction to the theory and measurement of influence, Amer. pol. Sci. Rev., 59, 431, 10.2307/1951813 · DOI · Paper page
- March, 1956, Influence measurement in experimental and semi-experimental groups, Sociometry, 19, 260, 10.2307/2785767 · DOI
- Shapley, 1954, A method for evaluating the distribution of power in a committee system, Amer. pol. Sci. Rev., 48, 787, 10.2307/1951053 · DOI · Paper page
- Simon, 1953, Notes on the observation and measurement of political power, J. Politics, 15, 500, 10.2307/2126538 · DOI
- Weber, 1925, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 2
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Metadata
- Authors
- Dahl, R. A.
- Venue
- Behavioral Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2007-01-17
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 201-215
- ISSN
- 1092-7026 (ISSN-L)
- 0005-7940
- 1099-1743
- OpenAlex
- W1965349186
- Cited by
- 3,863
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 388.37
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- doi.wiley.com/10.1002/tdm_license_1.1 (tdm, 3149 d)
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- Dahl, R. A. (2007). The concept of power. Behavioral Science. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830020303
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
