Session 3: Unidirectional Power

It goes without saying that power is a vast word with several connotations which make it problematic to look at power relations empirically because there will be several definitional issues: what one person conceives as powers, others may not, etc. One of the key problems in defining power relationships is that power is not unidirectional, in the sense that, as the Dahl describes, power is not only from C to R, from the leader to the domain, but the other way around as well. This reverse relationship is extremely important today when democracy has been, to an extent, established as the preferred system of governance. The line between the ruler and the ruled has been expunged by the fact that the ruler derives his power from the ruled. Across the globe, there is also a growing realization of the power of the people which has manifested in several ways such as the Arab Spring, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Therefore, it is hard to define power relationships in a unidirectional sense and a better approach may be to do an impact analysis where each stimulus or cause is judged by the impacts it generates from the top to the bottom and also the other way around.