Power is a crucial, if essentially contested, concept. Its nature and exercise in democratic politics are not always easily grasped. Understanding who holds power, how it is used, and the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed, is critical in any political system. In eighth episode of Democracy in Question?’s second season, AHCD Director Shalini Randeria meets with Professor Steven Lukes to figure out how to map power in politics.

What characterizes the nature of power today? For Professor Lukes, there are three dimensions of power. The first power “consists in winning, it is a matter of who prevails. And you can observe that by observing people in conflict and see who wins, and then you can count the number of wins”. The second is about “who controls the agenda of politics […] The media, how issues get put into the forefront, and others get sidelined or ignored”.

The third refers to “how people's ideas, their preferences, their desires are formed. How people become not just aware of what's going on but come to see what they care about”. It is, Professor Lukes argues, an essential piece to understand the world today: “this whole issue of what you call populism and the way in which people are voting against their own interests, what does that mean? How is it that people can pursue or endorse policies which plainly are doing them in and doing them harm?”

Professor Lukes continues: “One mistake that was present there right at the very beginning of the power debate was to think that power always has to be sort of deliberate, and manipulative, and people trying to prevail over other people. It's not like that. I think power is often exercised or in place in a very routine and unconsidered way.” This is the case with social media, where power is exercised in “the shaping of beliefs and preferences, how people see their world. […] And what's also very important here is the power of distraction. The power of people just getting endlessly distracted from what they would otherwise care about by all that's possible now”.

Download the podcast's transcript HERE

Steven Lukes has recently retired as Professor of Politics and Sociology at New York University, and has held professorships at the London School of Economics and the European University Institute in Florence.

Shalini Randeria is the Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Rector of the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and Excellence Chair, University of Bremen (Research Group: Soft Authoritarianism).