Drugs and Digital Market
The War on Drugs, State-Corporate Crime
Power & Inequality
What are the Definitions
Drawing on the contributions from the World Social Science Report 2016, Challenging Inequalities: Pathways to a Just World, this article examines the relationship between economic inequality and political participation.
Using the lens of the 'power cube' approach (see www.powercube.net), we argue that understanding the impact of inequality on political participation requires moving beyond the study of its impact on more conventional forms of participation found in voting and 'voice' through established or formal democratic processes.
Indeed, this relationship is also influenced by hidden and invisible forms of power, at multiple levels from the local to the global, which affect the rules of the game as well as individuals' aspiration to participate, shaping whether, where and how citizens engage at all.
Despite the power of inequality to shape its own consensus, recent evidence also points to the emergence of levels and forms of resistance to inequality outside of traditional channels of participation, which in turn help to expand and prefigure notions of what the new possibilities of change might be.
Exploring these dynamics, the article concludes with a brief reflection on possible lessons for activists, policymakers and scholars working to understand, unravel and challenge the knotty intersections of inequality, power and participation.
Many years ago, I (John Gaventa, one of the co-authors) found myself living and working in a mining valley in the rural United States (US). The situation was one of glaring inequality: one company owned 90 per cent of the land, through a secretive corporate empire, based in the UK, at the top of which sat a Lord Mayor of London, then one of Britain's wealthiest men.
Corporate wealth sat side-by-side with desperate poverty, poor schools, lack of health care, a degraded environment based on unchecked practices of fossil-fuel extraction, and a generally poor quality of life. In my PhD dissertation, later to become the book Power and Powerlessness (1980),
I asked the question: in a situation of glaring inequality, why does challenge to that domination not occur? Under what conditions and against what obstacles does rebellion through citizen action begin to emerge?
In that study, I traced how concentration of economic wealth in the hands of a few was translated into political power, which allowed the rich absentee landlords, through their local elites, to shape decisions and the rules of the game to their advantage over a period of a hundred years.
Building on the work of Steven Lukes on the three dimensions of power (Lukes 1974), I argued that power was exercised not just in the visible public sphere but also through hidden means, creating obstacles to participation of the powerless, and over time, contributing to their internalisation or acceptance of an unjust and unequal status quo.
Today, we find ourselves facing similar patterns of the concentrations of wealth and of growing inequality – only now at a global scale. By now the data are familiar to us all: 62 people own as much as the poorest half of the world population (Oxfam 2016).
These disparities continue to grow: the top 1 per cent of the world's population has received 50 per cent of the total increase in global wealth since 2010, while the wealth of the poorest half of the world's population has fallen by nearly 40 per cent (ibid.).
The World Social Science Report, Challenging Inequality: Pathways to a Just World, documents the impact of this trend on broad issues of poverty and growth, health, education, the environment and conflict, concluding that 'unchecked inequality could jeopardise the sustainability of economies, societies and other communities'
Inequality
Such patterns of rising inequality have generated significant global concern. Calls for reducing inequality or for creating a more equitable world have been at the forefront of statements by business leaders in Davos and by civil society leaders and have fuelled a range of diverse political and social movements.
Not only is 'reducing inequalities' a standalone goal of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; Goal 10), but also the cross-cutting commitment of the SDGs to 'leaves no one behind' itself represents a cross-cutting ambition to address inequality in each of the SDGs.
But while the concern with inequality is rising, we see less recent empirical work that focuses on the question: how do changing patterns of inequality1 affect patterns of power (Stewart 2011)?
Understanding these relationships is critical not only for researchers but also for activists and policymakers. If inequality is linked to power, and if inequality is changing rapidly, are patterns of power and participation also changing?
What is the relationship between economic inequality and civic and political inequalities; that is, inequalities of power that preclude those at the bottom from exercising voice and influence over their futures, and that enable those at the top to influence future scenarios in ways that benefit themselves?
What are the implications of growing inequality for new forms of civic and political action? (For further discussion, see Gaventa 2016.)
In this article, we (a) briefly examine two contrasting views on the relationship of inequality and participation; (b) re-examine this relationship through the lens of the 'power cube' approach, outlined by Gaventa (2006) in the IDS Bulletin on power ten years ago; and (c) explore the implications of this analysis both for the study of power and for strategies of civic and political action.
Exploring two contrasting theses
The debate on whether and how inequality affects participation is not a new one. However, very broadly speaking, there are two different views. On the one hand, there are those who argue that high inequality inhibits participation. On the other hand, there is the counterargument that inequality can itself generate new forms of collective action.
High inequality inhibits participation
For many decades, this argument has been the prevailing one, especially in American political science. In the US, the classic work, Participation in America:
Political Democracy and Social Equality (Verba and Nie 1987), argues that we face a participation paradox: those most likely to participate are those who are higher on the social economic scale, whereas those who might most need to participate, to challenge inequalities, are the least likely to do so.
More recently, the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, in a report on the right to participation of the very poor, made a similar argument at a more global level:
'Material deprivation and disempowerment create a vicious circle: the greater the inequality, the less the participation; the less the participation, the greater the inequality' (Carmona 2013: 5, quoting Council of Europe 2013).
In academic studies, the main argument of this strand of the literature is that individual endowments in terms of time, money, and civic skills significantly influence the likelihood of political engagement (Verba, Scholzman and Brady 1995).
As a result, rising economic disparities translate into uneven participation in political activities and so unequal involvement in the decision-making process. Inequality and rising disparities may also reduce trust in political institutions and promote a sense of powerlessness, which in turn may contribute to the acceptance of the status quo.
In turn, economic inequalities are reinforced by other intersecting inequalities. As Kabeer writes, 'social, economic and spatial inequalities in turn contribute to political exclusion: such groups are generally denied voice and influence in collective decisions that affect their lives'
Inequality and the forms of power
Drawing on the earlier work by Lukes, as well as by colleagues at Just Associates and others, the power cube approach distinguishes three forms of power: (1) visible power, which is what can been seen in the more open and observable aspects of the political process;
(2) hidden power, through which certain key actors may exercise control through shaping what issues and decisions enter the public arena in the first place;
and (3) invisible power, which includes the psychological aspects of power, including how it affects people's perceptions of what constitutes a legitimate grievance or issue for action in the first place.
The argument is that while some forms of power may be understood by observing who participates, and who wins or loses in debates on public issues, other perhaps more insidious forms of power shape what gets into the public arena by control of the agenda and through shaping what is considered to be a legitimate issue and who are considered the legitimate actors.
These three forms of power map easily onto the differing streams of literature on how inequality might shape participation. For many writers, the focus is on how inequality shapes the possibilities of political voice (Verba et al. 1995).
Here the fundamental concern has been on such questions as who votes or otherwise participates in formal governmental processes, and how socioeconomic inequality affects such participation.
As we have seen earlier, a fundamental tenet of much political science, especially in the US, has been that those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are often the least able or willing to engage (Filetti 2016).
Another variant of this same approach explores more formal processes of political representation, and asks questions about who holds public office, how those in office are affected by their economic status, as well as campaign contributions and lobbying processes, and how networks of economic elites shape their political behaviours (Bartels 2002).
Here an argument is often that political representatives are either economic elites themselves (Gold, Lo and Wright 1975) or are affected by 'political capture' of those elites (Oxfam 2014).
If one focuses on hidden forms of power, however, the focus is less on participation and representation in formal political processes, and more on how economic power shapes the agendas and rules of the game of these processes from the outset.
As Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labour, puts it, growing inequality is shaped less by the behaviour of ordinary citizens, and more by 'the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs' (Reich 2015: 27).
Such a view also builds strongly on ideas of power as the 'mobilisation of bias', where 'some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out' (Schattschneider 1960: 71), leading to the conclusion (in reference to US democracy) that 'the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent' (ibid.: 34–5).
Taking this argument more broadly, post-apartheid South Africa may be seen as a further example of where the formal political process has been opened to greater participation, yet both old and new elites have been able to maintain and gain power through economic decision-making, often behind the scenes (Gaventa and Runciman 2016).
In Russia, the rich oligarchy was able to influence the policymaking process through establishing corrupt relations and manipulating regulation and the legal system to work in their favour during the transition to a market economy (Glaeser, Schenkman and Shleifer 2003).
In Latin America, pandeiros and latifundistas have been historically able to resist redistributive forms of taxation thanks to their strong ties with the political elites.
Engerman and Sokoloff argue that in this society 'the elites were both inclined and able to establish a basic legal framework that ensured them a disproportionate share of political power and to use that influence to establish rules, laws, and other government policies that gave them greater access to economic opportunities than the rest of the population, thereby contributing to the persistence of the high degree of inequality' (2002: 17–18).
The third form of power – invisible power – what Lukes (1974) argued was the most insidious, deals with the shaping of norms and beliefs of legitimacy, for example what constitutes an issue or subject for contention to begin with.
If those at the bottom of the inequality ladder accept the legitimacy – or at least the inevitability – of their position within it, then other forms of power will not be necessary to preserve the status quo, no matter how unjust it may be.
Again, we see evidence of how inequality affects and is shaped by invisible power. Social norms and beliefs may affect aspirations and expectations of the less equal to challenge or move out of inequality.
Some research has argued that people who are marginalised or living in poverty tend to be more pessimistic about their future since they have less opportunities to learn about their abilities and talent (Appadurai 2004; Moreira 2003).
In a context of rising disparities, other research also suggests that poor people may be inclined to think that outcomes or positions achieved by rich people are unattainable to them, thus curbing their aspirations and expectations (Ray 2006).
In a study of Peruvian children, Pasquier-Doumar (2016) shows that socioeconomic status predicts the level of aspiration, a finding that is echoed in studies in Europe as well (Baillargeon and Divyendu 2016).
These processes could in turn lead to inequality traps, with 'individuals at the bottom of the distribution internalising their inability to climb the ladder and, as a result, assuming behaviours that keep them at the bottom' (Justino and Moore 2015: 18).
However, this process is by no means given. In other cases, growing inequalities and shifting social justice norms appear to contribute to greater resistance to inequality (Fukuda-Parr 2016).
