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Power in world politics.

• Stefano Guzzini Stefano Guzzini Uppsala University, PUC-Rio de Janeiro, Danish Institute for International Studies
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.118
• Published online: 20 April 2022

The concept of power derives its meanings and theoretical roles from the theories in which it is embedded. Hence, there is no one concept of power, no single understanding of power, even if these understandings stand in relation to each other. Besides the usual theoretical traditions common to the discipline of international relations and the social sciences, from rationalist to constructivist and post-structuralist approaches, there is, however, also a specificity of power being a concept used in both political theory and political practice. A critical survey of these approaches needs to cast a net wide to see both the differences and the links across these theoretical divides. Realist understandings of power are heavily impressed by political theory, especially when defining the ontology of “the political.” They are also characterized by their attempt, so far not successful, to translate practical maxims of power into a scientific theory. Liberal and structural power approaches use power as a central factor for understanding outcomes and hierarchies while generally neglecting any reference to political theory and often overloading the mere concept of power as if it were already a full-fledged theory. Finally, power has also been understood in the constitutive but often tacit processes of social recognition and identity formation, of technologies of government, and of the performativity of power categories when the latter interact with the social world, that is, the power politics that characterize the processes in which agents “make” the social world. Relating back to political practice and theory, these approaches risk repeating a realist fallacy. Whereas it is arguably correct to see power always connected to politics, not all politics is always connected or reducible to power. Seeing power not only as coercive but also productive should neither invite one to reduce all politics to it nor to turn power into the meta-physical prime mover of all things political.

• relational power
• structural power
• political realism
• constructivism
• post-structuralism
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Michel Foucault
• Steven Lukes

Introduction: Which Power?

For the battle-proof reader of analyses in the discipline of international relations (IR), “power in world politics” may immediately evoke proclamations of what power really is and where it lies, who has it and who endures it. It may also connect to a specific self-understanding of the field, which thinks of itself as being deserted by possible utopias and reform, forever caught in a world inevitably characterized by power politics, a tragedy not manageable by the faint-hearted and which the world can only ignore at its peril.

For its crucial place in the observation and practice of world politics, it comes as no surprise that there is no “usual” definition of power . But there is more to power’s multiple meanings than the different theories that may reframe it or the different practical understandings of power negotiated in international diplomacy. Its multiple meanings result from the specific role power has in discourses where it connects many different phenomena in various domains. It stands in for resources or capabilities, status, and rank, cause and its effect (influence), for rule, authority, and legitimacy, if not government, then again for individual dispositions and potentials, autonomy and freedom, agency and subjectivity, as well as for impersonal biases (e.g., the power of markets or symbols) or, as bizarre as it might sound at first, for symbolic media of communication. And this is not an exhaustive list.

As this short list shows, power informs not only the language of practitioners and explanatory theories but also of political theory; indeed, it is systematically intertwined with our understanding of politics. For power has become closely connected to the definition of the public domain ( res publica ) in which government is to be exercised.

Moreover, this interrelation of power and politics has become self-conscious in present-day world politics. The last decades of the 20th century have witnessed a double movement in the practitioners’ understanding of power. On the one hand, the contemporary agenda of international politics has exploded. For major diplomatic corps, it now includes virtually everything from monetary to environmental relations, from human rights to cyberspace. With this multiplication of international political domains, there is more “governance,” which means more international “power,” because actors have been able to consciously order and influence events that were not previously part of their portfolio. On the other hand, however, practitioners have been anxious for quite some time because power and actual control seems to be slipping away from them. Power is ever more “abstract, intangible, elusive” ( Kissinger, 1969 , p. 61, 1979 , p. 67). It has “evaporated” ( Strange, 1996 , p. 189). Indeed, the ease with which public debates have seized on topics like the structural forces of globalization, the dilemmas of an incalculable “risk society,” or the awe, if not sense of powerlessness, when confronted with the planetary range of governance problems induced by climate change, testify to the increasing concern that exactly when the world’s expanding agenda would need it most, actual power eludes leaders. Paradoxically, or perhaps not, the expansion of governance is accompanied by a sense of lost control. 1

Hence, “power in world politics” cannot be confined to an unequivocal encyclopedia article. Instead, the conceptualizations of power in their respective domains become central (for a more detailed justification, see Guzzini, 2013b ). Consequently, this article will make no further definitional effort to find a generally acceptable view of power (as did, e.g., Dahl, 1968 ). Although the following is informed by such undertakings when avoiding definitional fallacies, such attempts are, as a general strategy, less appropriate for an encyclopedia and probably not possible for such a contested term like power , as previous concept analyses have shown (as, e.g., Baldwin, 2002 ; Barnett & Duvall, 2005 ; Berenskoetter, 2007 ; Guzzini, 1993 , 2016 ). The interest here is not reducing the analysis of power to a single definitional core; rather, it is exploring the variety of usages and how they relate to each other.

The first section, “ Realist Power Analysis ,” looks at realist understandings of power that are heavily stamped by political theory, in particular when defining the particular ontology of “the political.” The second section, “ Power as Influence ,” then follows liberal and structural power approaches that use power as a central factor for understanding outcomes and hierarchies while generally neglecting any reference to political theory. Finally, the third section, “ The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes ,” looks at attempts to understand how power is understood in the constitutive but often tacit processes of social recognition and identity formation, of technologies of government, and of the performativity of power categories when the latter interact with the social world, that is, the power politics that characterize the processes in which agents “make” the social world.

Realist Power Analysis: The Distinctive Nature of World Politics and Its Explanation

Knowledge of world affairs was initially tied to the group practicing it. Actors observed themselves and distilled maxims of action from historical experience. While historians, sociologists, and macroeconomists look at their fields with an external expertise, the knowledge of international politics stems from the way diplomats and generals came to share practical lessons of the past (and this may also apply to the early days of law and management studies). Hence, the first way to think about power in world affairs is by following the meaning and purpose of power in the language of international practitioners.

And since it is fair to say that realism is the translation of that language into a codified system of practical maxims ( Guzzini, 1998 , 2013a ), analyzing classical realism provides such a bridge. For (many) classical realists, power is constitutive of politics—world politics in particular. It is part of a theory of domination. It is, moreover, related to the idea of government, not understood in its steering capacity, but in what constitutes political order. Finally, through the idea of the reason of state, power is related to the normative ideal of an ethics of responsibility as included in the “art of government.”

It is only in the disciplinary move where realism was to become a school of thought in the establishment of IR as a social science that the analysis of political order was translated into a rational theory of the maximization of power, or, put differently, where a theory of domination was subsumed under an explanatory theory of action. In this move, the purpose and understanding of power is narrowed and as this section will show, fraught with internal tensions.

The Nature of Power and the Definition of World Politics

A central tenet of classical realism is to look at the constitution of political order. That order is not defined in the Aristotelian sense of a polity organized around a common purpose, the common good, but in terms of the necessity of domination. This necessity of domination, in turn, explains why government has to be understood in a Machiavellian manner, that is, interested in the management of power. Indeed, 18th-century Europe experienced an increasing reduction of the meaning of politics to Machtkunst (approximately, the art/craft of power/governing) so typical of realism ( Sellin, 1978 ).

If order is understood mainly through the art of domination, then it becomes easier to understand why for Max Weber, in many regards the prototypical political (not IR) realist, physical violence and its control are, in turn, connected to the idea of politics and power. The threat or actual use of violence is the characteristic that sets politics aside from economics, law, or other spheres of social relations ( Weber, 1921–1922/1980 , pp. 531, 539). For realists, politics has specific tasks that can ultimately be resolved only through physical violence ( Weber, 1919/1988a , p. 557). Therefore, behind power, understood as the specific means of politics, stands the possibility of physical violence ( Weber, 1919/1988b , p. 550). A polity is based on domination, which is possible through the control of physical violence, which, in turn, constitutes, not the only means, but the politically characteristic and ultimate, means of power (for a detailed discussion, see Guzzini, 2017a ).

Classical realists stood squarely in this tradition but, as Hans Morgenthau and Raymond Aron respectively show, took different cues from it. Morgenthau added a Nietzschean twist. Just as for Weber, politics is struggle ( Weber, 1918/1988a , p. 329), but it is derived from human nature: The lust for power ( Morgenthau, 1946 , p. 9) or the drive to dominate ( Morgenthau, 1948 , p. 17), which is common to all humans. This adds an ontological status to power as being one of the fundamental drives of humans. This also explains why, for Morgenthau, whatever the final goal, power is always the immediate one ( Morgenthau, 1948 , p. 13), that is, the inevitable means. From there, Morgenthau builds an ultimately utilitarian theory of international relations that understands action in terms of the maximization of power and a foreign policy strategy of gauging power in an ethics of responsibility. Just as for Weber (for this argument, see Wolin, 1981 ), Morgenthau’s theory is ultimately guided by his political theory and ontology. In this, power constitutes the links among this political ontology, his explanatory theory, and a foreign policy doctrine (for a detailed account and critique, see Guzzini, 2020 ).

Also, Aron derives from Weber, but he does not follow Nietzsche in the way Morgenthau does, nor in the way Weber occasionally did himself when he fused national value systems with a view of an existential struggle, his eternal combat of gods ( Weber, 1919/1988b , p. 604f.). Aron is highly critical of such a position ( Aron, 1967 , p. 650). He starts from the idea that the international system has no world government comparable to the Weberian modern state, and, without a legitimate monopoly of the means of violence, it is in a “state of nature.” He is clear that this state of nature is not to be confused with a state of “war of all against all.” It refers to a sometimes highly conventionalized realm that is not part of a biological but a human order ( Aron, 1966 , pp. 482–483). Indeed, the parallel existence of a civil society (with a government) and an external sphere of multiplicity is something that has always existed and defines the backdrop against which politics is to be understood. Although without a Nietzschean touch, here, too, the management of violence and power becomes the constitutive principle of world politics as power politics, in which collective violence is not antithetical but fundamental to it. The best one can aspire to is a politics of the “art of the possible,” connected to this very particular responsibility that falls on political leaders to use the reason of state correctly.

Power in Realist Explanations

When moving from political to explanatory theory, power turns from being an ontology of order and politics to being an explanatory variable. Given its central place in realism’s political theory, it is perhaps normal that it would also acquire a central place in its explanatory theory. The drive for domination is translated into a utilitarian theory of power, security, or rank maximization. Power as part of a “vertical” theory of domination, as in realist, elite theories (e.g., Robert Michels or Vilfredo Pareto), becomes subsumed under a “horizontal” theory of action and its effects.

Such a move affects the underlying understanding of power. Power is understood either as capabilities/resources or, indeed, as their effects (influence). Resourceful actors (regular winners) are poles of power, and the configuration of those poles gives the main characteristic of the international order, namely its polarity. The government of world order is hence but the result of these two steps of the argument. This leads to two typical theoretical applications. Starting from the micro level of analysis, actors are seen as maximizing relative power or rank with the effect that this competitive behavior ends up in an always precarious balance of power. Starting from the macro level, the given polarity of the balance of power provides systemic constraints for internal balancing (arms race) and external balancing (alliances) that actors may ignore only at their peril.

This translation into a utilitarian theory of action, however, produces a series of conceptual problems. For being able to empirically identify a “maximization” of power or any “balance” of power, there must be a measure of power that indicates what is more or less, what is maximized. In other words, it requires a concept of power akin to the concept of money in economic theory, as also argued by John Mearsheimer (2001 , p. 12). In this analogy, the striving for utility maximization expressed and measured in terms of money parallels the national interest (i.e., security) expressed in terms of (relative) power. And yet, this central assumption has been challenged both by early realist critiques and institutionalist approaches.

Raymond Aron opposed this aggregated concept of power and the underlying power–money analogy ( Aron, 1962/1984 , pp. 99–102). Utilitarian economics trades on the possibility of integrating different preferences within one utility function. This is made possible by the historical evolution toward monetarized economies where money would fulfill the function of a shared standard of value. But in world politics, power does not play the same role. There is no equivalent in actual politics (and not just in theory) to money; power does not “buy” in the same way; it is not the currency of world politics. Even supposedly ultimate power resources like weapons of mass destruction might not necessarily be of great help in buying another state’s change in its monetary policies. More power resources do not necessarily translate into more purchasing power ( Baldwin, 1971 ). Without a precise measure, however, it is not clear when power has been maximized or when it is balanced, and whether this was intended in the first place ( Wolfers, 1962 , p. 106). Realist theories based on power are indeterminate, as Aron insisted.

In response, realists could insist that diplomats have repeatedly been able to find a measure of power, and hence the difference is just one of degree, not of kind (see the answer to Aron by Waltz, 1990 ). Yet, even if actors could agree on some approximations for carrying out exchanges or establishing power rankings, this is a social convention that by definition can be challenged and exists only to the extent that it is agreed upon, as acknowledged by Morgenthau (1948 , pp. 151–152) himself. Power resources do not come with a standardized price tag, and no type of resource is generally convertible (“fungible”). And if power is not providing a standard of value, then neither analysts nor actors know when and how some action is maximizing power nor how these maximizations “add up” to polarity. If one cannot reduce world politics to solely one of its domains (war and physical violence), and if one cannot add up resources into one pole, then the assessment of polarity is no longer clear—and with this the assessment of the type of international order and its causal effects. The measure of power is internal to a diplomatic convention whose stability is not granted; a point that later power analysis has developed (see “ Power as Convention: Performative and Reflexive Power Analysis ”).

It is here where the mix of the normative and explanatory stance of realism pulls the concept of power in opposite directions. The insistence on the almost impossible measurement of power, so important to realists from Morgenthau to Wohlforth (2003) , is crucial for realist practice. It instils the realist maxim of a posture of prudence in the diplomats, reminding them that they “cannot and should not be sure.” Yet, this indeterminacy makes the explanatory theory unfalsifiable; there is always one way to twist power indicators and understandings to make the story fit. In this way, using the central role of power to translate an ontology of order into a utilitarian explanatory theory led to problems for classical realism at both the micro and macro levels of analysis in terms of rank maximization and polarity analysis. At the same time, it provided the backdrop against which new conceptualizations developed.

Power as Influence: Relational and Structural Power in World Politics

International relations (IR) proceeded in its conceptualizations of power mainly with the purpose of fine-tuning the role of power in explanatory theories; political theory fell by the wayside. So institutionalists were aware of the indeterminacy, as well as at times the tautology, of a concept of power that IR scholars used as both a capacity and its effects. One of the possible remedies consisted in qualifying the very idea of a capacity were it to retain a distinctive causal effect. Another was to open up the black box of the translation process from power as control over resources to power as control over outcomes.

This focus on dyadic interaction reduces the initial purpose of understanding domination to understanding influence in different outcomes, and then to its aggregation. A theory of domination was not just subsumed under a theory of action; it seemed to get lost altogether. A series of scholars tried to counter this tendency. They identified a problem in the explanatory attempts to relate power only to the level of interaction. Instead, they conceived of power in “structural” terms to reintegrate more vertical components of domination into the analysis of power. Whereas the more institutionalist answer uses a relational understanding of power to qualify capacities as actual influence over outcomes, the structuralist answer was to include more non-agential or non-intentional factors into the analysis of outcomes to recuperate a sense of in-built hierarchical relations. More problematically, however, both approaches do more than just widen the analysis of power relations; they also tend to import this widening into the concept of power itself, as if a reconceptualization alone were sufficient for a comprehensive analysis of power.

Relational Power and Liberal Institutionalism

Power is not in a resource; it is in a relation. This stance was forcefully exposed by Robert Dahl (1957 , pp. 202–203) in political theory and by David Baldwin (1989 , 2016) within IR. Such an innocuous-looking statement is very consequential. In its behavioralist twist, such a relational approach tends to focus on actual influence understood as the causal effect of one actor’s behavior on another’s behavior. And it tends to look for the conditions that make this influence possible in the first place.

Both Dahl and Baldwin treat power and influence, capacities and their effects, interchangeably. That may sound odd, because most Western languages use two different words that capture different, if related, ideas. And yet, it is quite logical if one thinks about power as a central concept in (linear) causal explanations, as much of IR does. IR is interested in outcomes. If power were just in resources—latent, potential, and hence potentially “powerless” in affecting outcomes—then, so the story goes, why should one care about power in the first place? Scholars and practitioners wish to understand the actualized capacity to affect outcomes, that is, being able to impose one’s will or interests as the Weberian tradition has it. Indeed, for Dahl that understanding is the main way to understand “who governs” in an empirically controllable manner ( Dahl, 1961/2005 ). Government is constituted by the actual steering effects of elites where certain interests prevail. Dahl could relate power as influence on behavior to the wider understanding of the domestic political order. Influence in a behavioralist theory of action was aggregated to an analysis of government that discloses whether its elite is unified or multiple. Translated into IR, however, the absence of a world government means that IR scholars were left with the theory of action. When thinking world political order, influence is all there is.

Therefore, much of the analysis came to focus on the conditions that make such influence possible and the specific situational context which constitutes that certain resources come to constitute capabilities to affect outcomes. Understanding the relation crucially comes before the analysis of power therein. Bachrach and Baratz (1970 , pp. 20–21) provide a telling example to show the difference a relational approach makes. Let us assume a soldier returns to his camp. The guard asks him to stop or she will shoot. The soldier stops. Hence, the guard exercised power as influence. And yet it is not clear how. It could have been simply through the threat of using her arms. But it could also be because the soldier followed the rule of obeying an order, independently of the arms and the threat. Without a close analysis of the relation, indeed the individual motives, one would not know the kind of power relation this represents. But let us further assume that the soldier does not stop. The guard shoots. Now, it is ambivalent whether this shows an exercise of power. On the one hand, one could say that she succeeded in stopping the soldier from coming too close to the camp. On the other hand, the threat was clearly not successful. As Waltz (1967/1969 , p. 309) once noted, the most powerful police force is one that does not need to shoot to get its way in the first place. The exercise of power may paradoxically show the powerlessness of its alleged holder. And one can twist the example even further. Suppose the soldier had decided to take his life, and, by advancing, forced the guard to do it on his behalf. In this case, it was the returning soldier who got the guard to do something. Power was on his side in this asymmetrical relation. As the example shows, knowing resources is insufficient to explain the direction in which power is exercised; one needs to know the motives and values of the actors, as well as the general normative system involved. Indeed, once one knows them, the power relation could turn out to be reversed.

In IR, there have been three prominent ways to deal with this relational aspect. David Baldwin almost single-handedly introduced Dahl’s approach into IR. In the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, he became increasingly tired of analyses in terms of “conversion failures” or what he also called the “paradox of unrealized power” ( Baldwin, 1979 , p. 163), where the allegedly more powerful actor lost. If power means influence, it cannot fail. If it does, it means that power was either wrongly assessed or, more fundamentally, wrongly understood ( Baldwin, 1985 , p. 23).

Baldwin was most interested in qualifying the specific context in a relational approach. He shared Aron’s critique of what he called the lacking fungibility of power, in which power simply does not have the same standard of value function as money does in real economies ( Baldwin, 1979 , pp. 193–194, 1993 , pp. 21–22). As a result, he insisted that a relational approach to power requires the prior establishment of the specific “policy-contingency framework” within which power relations are to be understood: the scope (the objectives of an attempt to gain influence; influence over which issue), the domain (the target of the influence attempt), its weight (the quantity of resources), and the cost (opportunity costs of forgoing a relation) must be made explicit. Resources consequential in one policy contingency framework are not necessarily so in another. Scholars who do not see this multidimensionality and persist in the “notion of a single overall international power structure unrelated to any particular issue-area” are using an analysis that “is based on a concept of power that is virtually meaningless” ( Baldwin, 1979 , p. 193).

A second approach worked by checking the translation between the two classical power concepts in this interactionist tradition, namely control over resources and control over outcomes. Whereas Baldwin packaged much into situational analysis to uphold causal effects of behavior/policy instruments, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (1977) downgraded a direct link between resources and outcomes that is hampered by bargaining processes and other effects during the interaction. They did, however, also qualify this process for a better assessment of what counts as a power resource in the first place. They expressed the relational component of power in terms of asymmetric interdependence. In this way, power as influence over outcomes is connected, but not reducible, to the resources possessed by one actor, yet valued by the other, and/or by resources of A that can affect the interests of B. Moreover, not just any effect is significant. In their distinction between sensitivity interdependence and vulnerability interdependence, they gave a more long-term twist to it because the mere capacity to affect B (sensitivity) is only ephemeral if B can find alternatives. Only if such alternatives cannot be found (vulnerability, understood in terms of the elasticity of substitution) is the relation asymmetric in a more significant sense. This way of defining power keeps the link to resources but denies a direct relation from resources to outcomes and qualifies what makes them constitutive by specifying the particular dyadic interaction.

Finally, Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power ( Nye, 1990 , 2007 , 2011 ) adds yet another aspect to the liberal analysis of these power relations. His emphasis on softer resources that can be influential depending on the context is not the original part; indeed, Baldwin’s power analysis was very much driven by his attempt to show that economic sanctions, and in particular positive sanctions (carrots, not sticks), can be influential. Rather, what specifically characterizes soft power is the focus on the mechanisms via which actors can have effects. In a way akin to structural power approaches (see “ Structural Power and Dependency ”), as well as classical realist definitions, the analysis of power starts from the receiving side: soft power lies in the capacity of “attraction” of an actor, which means that its analysis starts from those attracted.

In all three approaches, the epistemic interest consists in revalorizing foreign policy instruments in which military resources or coercive mechanisms are not necessarily the most influential; indeed, no resource has such general capacity. Baldwin opens up for positive sanctions and issue-area-specific resources. Keohane and Nye invite policies that avoid long-term vulnerabilities in interdependent relations or, even better, tie all countries into mutual vulnerabilities to moderate their behavior. And Nye’s soft power focuses on foreign policies that would make countries more attractive and, hence often get their way without much further ado. These approaches respond to a vision of an international order fragmented into different issue areas or international regimes.

The innumerable policy-contingency frameworks become confusing however: They make analysts lose sight of the forest for all the trees. With power as influence having subsumed domination under a theory of action, international order and hierarchy got lost. To see the whole forest, Keohane and Nye (1987) envisaged developing a generalized theory of linkages. And yet, precisely because of the lacking fungibility that makes power logics not reducible to each other across regimes, such a theory of linkages is not possible within this theoretical framework. If it were, the fragmentation could be subsumed under a meta-regime that effectively substitutes for a linkage theory.

This leaves the institutionalist approaches open to two further developments intrinsic to a relational approach. First, taking fungibility seriously excludes a single international power structure, as Baldwin pointed out, and, hence severs the link between power and international order. Just as in Dahl, the international order appears pluralistic. But the agent and interaction centeredness of such an approach does not persuade those for whom the absence of intended agential or interaction effects does not yet imply an absence of power or domination. For them, the relational approach needs to be complemented, if not superseded, by a more structural approach. Second, as Bachrach and Baratz’s (1970) illustration shows and as soft power further develops, the concept of power looks different if its understanding starts from the position of the alleged power holder or the recipient/subaltern. Add to this that interests or values, present in a relation, cannot be understood individually because norms or conventions, indeed meanings, are not private but intersubjective, and one ends up with a relational approach that connects power to shared understandings and norms. No longer agent centered, power analysis experiences a turn to material and ideational structures of power.

Structural Power and Dependency

In social and political theory, Steven Lukes’s seminal approach distinguishes three dimensions of power: a direct behavioralist one (Dahl), an indirect one about the many issues excluded from the actual bargaining (Bachrach & Baratz), and a third dimension where it is the “supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have” ( Lukes, 1974 , p. 27). Here, the absence of conflict does not necessarily indicate the absence of a power relation, but possibly its most insidious form. Lukes derives this approach from Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony. Domination is not simply imposed from above but must be won through the subordinated groups’ consent to the cultural domination they believe will serve their own interests. It works through a naturalized “common sense.” At the same time, Lukes is not merely interested in the origins of domination in the common sense shared by the subordinate. Rather, as a philosopher of liberal democracy, he sees the purpose of power analysis as being connected to what this tells us about individual autonomy or actual freedom ( Lukes, 1977 ) or, in a more structural fashion, how structures “shape fields of possibility” for agents, as Hayward (2000 , p. 9) puts it. The more material component of this structural analysis has inspired the approaches in international political economy (IPE) taken up in this subsection; the intersubjective mobilization bias and endogenization of identity and interest formation will be the subject in the final major section “ The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes: Social Recognition, Technologies of Government, and Performativity ”.

In IR, there have been several attempts to understand power beyond dyadic relations and bargaining by reaching out to a structural level of power (for the following, see Guzzini, 1993 ). Some of them are still very much in line with Bachrach and Baratz’s approach of seeing power not only in direct confrontation but also in indirect agenda setting, yet applied here more fundamentally to the rules of the game. Thus Stephen Krasner’s use of “meta-power” in his Structural Conflict refers to developing countries’ use of institutions and regimes not just as a lever against powerful states but also as a way to affect the rules of global liberalism. “Relational power refers to the ability to change outcomes or affect the behavior of others within a given regime. Meta-power refers to the ability to change the rules of the game” ( Krasner, 1985 , p. 14).

Susan Strange’s take on power overlaps to some extent but goes further. She uses structural power to refer to the increasing diffusion of international power, in both its effects and its origins, due to the increasing transnationalization of non-territorially linked networks. Structural power is, on the one hand, a concept similar to Krasner’s intentional meta-power: The ability to shape the structures of security, finance, production and knowledge ( Strange, 1985 , p. 15). Here, power is structural because it has an indirect diffusion via structures, that is, because of its diffused effects. On the other hand, it is structural because it refers to the increasingly diffused sources and agents that contribute to the functioning of the global political economy ( Strange, 1988 ). Taken together, the provision of global functions appears as the result of an interplay of deliberate and unintended effects of decisions and nondecisions made by governments and other actors. The international system appears as if run by a “transnational empire” whose exact center is difficult to locate because it is not tied to a specific territory, but whose main base is with actors in the United States ( Strange, 1989 ). A more vertical theory of domination reappears in this specific asymmetry: Even though actors in the United States might not always intend or be able to control the effects of their actions, the international structures are set up in a way that decisions in some countries are systematically tied to, as well as can fundamentally affect, actors in the same and other countries. This becomes visible when looking at power relations not from the standpoint of the power holder and intended action or intended effects, rather from the receiving side, where neither matters primarily. Whereas Krasner focused on the hidden power of the weak, Strange emphasizes the tacit power of the strong.

Lukes’s focus on autonomy is echoed in the emphasis on questions of in/dependence by dependency and Gramscian scholars. For Stephen Gill and David Law, structural power refers to “material and normative aspects, such that patterns of incentives and constraints are systematically created” ( Gill & Law, 1988 , p. 73). This clearly defines a form of impersonal power, where the impersonal material setting is nearly synonymous with the functioning of markets, and the normative setting corresponds to a form of Gramsci’s historic bloc ( Cox, 1981 , 1983 ). As a result, contemporary world politics is seen as a Pax Americana in which the analysis of transnational elites plays a major role for understanding domination ( Van der Pijl, 1998 ). The view from the periphery is central for dependency scholars. Autonomy in international relations is often translated in terms of sovereignty, yet another power-related concept. Dependency theories stem from the awareness that formal sovereignty did not bring much control for many countries in the Global South of their political processes ( O’Donnell, 1973 ) and their class formation and “associated-dependent” ( Cardoso & Faletto, 1979 ) or “crippled” economic structures ( Senghaas, 1982 ), where the structural effects of global capitalism rules through the workings of states and firms ( Dos Santos, 1970 ).

It is not by coincidence that most of these approaches are from what came to be called IPE in the late 1970s. They attribute power to nonstate actors and, indeed, to structures like global capitalism. By doing so, they politicize economic relations whose effects are not God-given or natural but the outcome of political struggles—struggles whose domination effects are left unseen in bargaining power approaches ( Caporaso, 1978 ). In this way, IPE is not just about international economic relations; its focus on structural features of domination redefines the realm of world politics itself.

Yet, while these approaches undoubtedly enrich power analysis by including indirect institutional, non-intentional, and impersonal practices and processes, they also risk overloading the single concept of power in the analysis when trying to keep power as the main explanatory variable ( Guzzini, 1993 ). William Riker distinguished between power concepts informed either by necessary and sufficient or by recipe-like (manipulative) kinds of causality ( Riker, 1964 , pp. 346–348), or, put differently, power concepts driven by analyzing either outcomes or agency. Baldwin, following a manipulative idea of power, needed to heavily qualify the situational context to keep the causal link between certain policy instruments and their effect, that is, power as influence, with the problem that such approaches tend to ignore non-manipulative factors in the analysis of power and domination. Structural power concepts include them, but then they tend toward a necessary and sufficient explanation in which all that affects the asymmetrical outcome is not just related to power but is included in the concept of power itself, as if the whole analysis of power were to be done by the factor/variable of power.

This raises a series of broader concerns for understanding power. First, it is clear that power needs to be disentangled from the potential tautology of being both resources and their effects. Indeed, it is better thought neither as a resource nor as an event (influence) but as a disposition, that is, a capacity to effect ( Morriss, 1987/2002 ) that does not need to be realized to exist. Second, it seems that reducing political theory to explanatory theory played a bad trick: The phenomenon of power in its many ramifications gets shoehorned into power as a central explanatory variable that is becoming the wider and more encompassing the more the analysis wishes to take the seemingly endless list of factors into account to understand political order. That invites a strategy of decoupling the analysis of power relations and the concept of power: More factors than power may enter the analysis of power relations ( Guzzini, 1993 ). But it could also imply something more fundamental, namely, that power is not to be used as a causal explanatory variable at all. In this context, Peter Morriss writes that power statements “ summarise observations; they do not explain them” ( Morriss, 1987/2002 , p. 44, emphasis in the original). Put differently, if it were to be used in explanations, the underlying vision of causality would have to be altered; a more dispositional understanding of causation in the social world would allow power a place in explanatory theories that would turn multifinal or indeterminate ( Guzzini, 2017b ) and which would be applicable to both agential and structural effects. Also here, the concept/factor of power would not exhaust all there is to say about power relations.

The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes: Social Recognition, Technologies of Government, and Performativity

So far, power has been understood either as an agency concept that focuses on agent dispositions, or as asymmetrical effects of action in social relations, or as dispositions of structures, which systematically mobilize biases, dis/empower agents materially, authorize their acts, and make certain actions un/thinkable in the first place. The rise of constructivism and post-structuralism and the establishment of international political sociology (IPS) pushes power analysis to take these relational and constitutive processes a step further. What distinguishes these approaches to power in IR is the different underlying process ontology and a social relationism that “presumes a non-essentialist view of social reality” ( Bially Mattern, 2008 , p. 696). A relational ontology takes its starting point not from units as fixed items that then interact, but from the relations through which their actual properties are continuously constituted (for IR, see Guillaume, 2007 ; Jackson & Nexon, 1999 ; Qin, 2018 ). The analysis focuses on the profoundly political processes that constitute subjects, their identities, as well as material and intersubjective contexts, that is, “how the world is made up,” in which power appears as an emergent property of such relations and processes ( Berenskoetter, 2007 , p. 15). This ontological shift characterizes three different research agendas in contemporary power analysis.

A first research line reframes the understanding of power in a more sociological analysis through a theory of action that is no longer utilitarian but based on the fundamental role of social recognition. The analysis of power is based on a certain vision of human nature, in that humans are viewed as profoundly social, their very identity constituted through the multiple spheres of recognition in which they live. This means, however, that power does not come out of a given drive that finds its expression in asymmetrical social interaction but resides in the constitutive processes that make up the identity of international actors and “govern” the practices that define membership and status in international society.

Second, the Foucauldian lineage of power analysis connects power analysis back to political theory. There, rather than seeing in the evaporation of agency control a sign of diminishing power, it looks at the mechanisms that keep the order together, or the “technologies of government,” where government is to be understood as all that which provides political order.

Finally, a third research line, often informed by the previous two, deals with the understanding of power when connected to the idea of the construction of social reality. There, power analysis is tied to the study of performativity, that is, the way discursive practices help create the subject they presuppose, as is prominent, for instance, in feminist theories and in the study of reflexivity, that is, the interaction between our knowledge and the social world. Perhaps unexpectedly, it is this line that connects power analysis back to the world of diplomatic and other international practice because it looks at the social conventions that establish proxies for power and the power of those conventions in world politics.

Having connected explanatory theories with both political theory and practice, this can be seen as a return to the initial realist concern with the nature of politics and order. It surely improves on the links between the three domains. But it risks repeating a realist fallacy. Whereas it is arguably correct to see power always connected to politics, not all politics is always connected or reducible to power. Seeing power not only as coercive but also productive should neither invite one to reduce all politics to it nor to turn power into the metaphysical prime mover of all things political.

The Power Politics of Recognition and Identity

As mentioned, IPS is a second answer to the attempt to theorize domination not reducible to a theory of action. In this tradition, power in world politics is not about steering capacity and agent influence. It is about the informal and often tacit ways in which order and hierarchy (stratification) is produced. Rather than seeing in soft and normative power simply mechanisms of institutionalization and socialization, it sees in them identity-constituting processes that end up constituting the borders of international society and its authorized members.

In a first research agenda in IPS, power is framed not within a utilitarian theory of action but in a social theory of recognition ( Pizzorno, 2007 , 2008 ). Using recognition for theorizing action and society can be derived from a series of sociological traditions, such as from Mead (1934) and Schutz (1964) to Berger and Luckmann (1966) , from Ricoeur (2004) , or from different post-Hegelian traditions ( Honneth, 1992 , 2010 ; Taylor, 1989 , 1992 ) and has informed IR scholars ever since the sociological turn (e.g., Ringmar, 1996 , 2002 ). There are two social theories of recognition that have been prominent in the rethinking of power relations in IR: Bourdieu’s field theory and Goffman’s symbolic interactionism, in particular his approach to stigma.

Bourdieu’s is still primarily a theory of domination organized around three fundamental concepts: habitus, practice, and field, which constitute each other (for a succinct presentation, see Guzzini, 2000 , pp. 164–169; Leander, 2008 ). Bourdieu’s concept of capital is the closest to the concept of power, sometimes used interchangeably. But it is only one element in the more general theory and analysis of domination (for a more detailed analysis, see Bigo, 2011 ; Guzzini, 2013c ). For the present purpose, it is important to stress Bourdieu’s relational understanding of power that is closely tied to phenomena of recognition. Hierarchies in fields are constituted by the distribution of capitals that are specifically relevant to the field. As previous relational approaches to power, Bourdieu’s theory of capital is relational in that it is never only in the material or ideational resource itself, but in the cognition and recognition it encounters in agents sharing the field and constantly negotiating their status within the field. Yet Bourdieu adds a further intersubjective component because his relational analysis of power insists on the complicity, or as he sometimes prefers to call it, the connivance, that exists between the dominating and the dominated. For this, he mobilizes a theory of symbolic action and symbolic power. Symbolic capital is the form that any capital will take if it is recognized in a strong sense, that is, perceived through those very conceptual categories that are, however, themselves informed by the distribution of capitals in the field ( Bourdieu, 1994 , pp. 117, 161). “Doxic subordination” is hence the effect of this symbolic violence, a subordination that is neither the result of coercion or asymmetrical interdependence nor of conscious consent, let alone a social contract, but of a mis(re)cognition ( méconnaissance ). It is a symbolic, and hence most effective, form of power. It is based on the unconscious adjustment of subjective structures (categories of perception) to objective structures. And so, according to Bourdieu, the analysis of “doxic acceptance” is the “true fundament of a realist theory of domination and politics” ( Bourdieu with Wacquant, 1992 , p. 143, my translation).

The initial usage of Bourdieu in IR had applied such misrecognition to the field of world politics itself, indeed to its very constitutive practices as applied by its realist elite. From early on, Richard Ashley tied the understanding of power to a social theory based on how relations and recognition constitute agency ( Ashley, 1984 , p. 259). Ashley tried to understand the specificity of international governance by using Bourdieu’s phrase of the “conductorless orchestration of collective action and improvisations” ( Ashley, 1989 , p. 255). He argued that, despite realist claims to the contrary, there is an international community under anarchy—and that it exists in the very realists who deny its existence ( Ashley, 1987 ). This community is all the more powerful in the international system as its theoretical self-description conceals its very existence by informing the common sense, shared in particular among practitioners: the power of the common sense.

In IR, a Bourdieusian analysis of how such recognition and misrecognition empowers certain agents has been applied to the study of international elites and the constitution of certain (expert) fields (e.g., Bigo, 1996 ). Anna Leander has shown how, in the military field, commercial actors are not just empowered in a trivial sense by having become more prominent, but how misrecognition has endowed them with epistemic power ( Leander, 2005 , pp. 811–812)—Bourdieu calls it épistémocratique ( Bourdieu, 2000 , p. 100)—that locks the field (temporarily) into a new doxa ( Leander, 2011 ). This doxa authorizing arguments and turning symbolic the capital of commercial agents provides, in turn, a vision and division of the worlds that “categorically” preempts ways to press for the accountability of commercial security forces ( Leander, 2010 ). Similar Bourdieu-inspired power analyses have focused on the “doxic battles” ( Berling, 2012 ; Senn & Elhardt, 2013 ) or the “never-ending struggle for recognition as competent in a given practice” ( Adler-Nissen & Pouliot, 2014 , p. 894). Such struggles are always embedded in the logic of practice that constitutes the field: Actors try to win a game whose rules they accept by playing it. Sending (2015) combines these approaches by showing how authority is not given to an actor but is the outcome of a continuous competition for recognition. The constituted authority defines, in turn, what is to be governed, how, and why. Consequently, power phenomena enter this type of analysis twice: Hierarchies within fields are a power phenomenon in themselves while being constituted by the power politics in the practices of recognition.

Bourdieu’s (1989) analysis of symbolic power is closely connected to his concern with the power of classifications (the visions and divisions of the world). Classifications literally make up the social world by organizing the social space, and hence its hierarchy, and by interacting with agent identity and their body ( Bourdieu, 1980 , pp. 117–134). In the analysis of world politics, this has been picked up mainly through Goffman’s (1963) analysis of stigmatization. Ayşe Zarakol (2011 , 2014 ) shows how Turkey’s, Japan’s, and Russia’s integration into the norms of (initially European) international society interacts with their state identity. Stigmatization is a process constitutive of international society, its hierarchy, and its inclusions or exclusions. At the same time, any state recognized as not yet normal or inferior in international society will experience ontological insecurity in the state’s self-understandings. Consequently, all action is necessarily informed by stigma-coping mechanisms, defiantly accepting, negotiating, or rejecting the stigma, but never being able to avoid it (see also Adler-Nissen, 2014 ).

Power practices understood through their interaction with identity processes are also fundamental for Janice Bially Mattern’s concept of “representational force” ( Bially Mattern, 2001 , 2005a , 2005b ). If identity is crucial for interest formation, then it is only a small step to analyzing how diplomatic practices, intended or not, can end up blackmailing actors by taking profit from contradictions in another actor’s self-understandings or between its action and self-representation.

The social ontology of this approach where the other is part of the self, and where action is driven by the need for recognition, thus gives rise to different practices and processes of domination.

Technologies of Government

Foucault reached the analysis of power in IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Ashley & Walker, 1990 ; DuBois, 1991 ; Keeley, 1990 ; Manzo, 1992 ). Foucault’s political theory revises Weber, and his empirical analysis translates Goffmanian sensibilities into a study of discourses and performativity, where discursive practices help create the subject they presuppose. The Weberian lineage is most visible in Foucault’s political theory, which can be seen as a new take on Weber’s stählernes Gehäuse ( Weber, 1904–1920/2016 , p. 171), initially translated as “Iron Cage,” where the development of (Western) capitalism and rationalism created a new modern subject, both emancipated and curtailed. It is the answer to a conservative paradox in modernity: How can the emancipation and empowerment of the citizen lead to more order and control in modern societies?

Here, Foucault develops a dual analysis of modern government. On the one hand, it analyzes the interaction between “regimes of truth” and order, that is, the way government is increasingly a set of practices based on knowledge to administer public and private life, using general “stat(e)”istics and offering services on their base. On the other hand, in a more Goffmanian vein, it looks at the way these regimes of truth, be it in medicine, psychology, education, penal law, and so forth, establish the “normal” and “deviant,” classifications that interact with the subjects who implicitly control themselves by “identifying” with the expectations implied in such classifications. Government consists in constituting the subject through which, in turn, it achieves order (e.g., Foucault, 1975 , p. 223ff.). A branch of postcolonial studies took its inspiration from Foucault to understand how imperial knowledge, for instance in the form of “Orientalism,” constituted the colonial “other” as a “lamentably alien” subject in the first place, making it governable, legitimating its governance, within which the subaltern participates in its own subjugation ( Said, 1979/2003 , respectively at pp. 94, 97, 207 (quote), 325).

It is not fortuitous that Foucault’s analysis of power comes in terms of “government,” which is also a semantic component of the French pouvoir (and not puissance ). Its focus is on the changing mechanisms and technologies in the provision of political order. It shares this focus on order with classical realists but takes a completely different approach. It does not base its analysis in the human lust for power or the inevitable clash of wills, all given before the analysis. The ubiquity of power is not to be found in the struggle for resources that define human relations, but in the impersonal processes that constitute the subjects and their relations in the first place ( Brown & Scott, 2014 ).

Such an approach to government makes the study of world governance its most obvious field in IR. And yet, such study has been mainly conducted in a Weberian way within neoliberal institutionalism (for a comprehensive reconstruction, see Zürn, 2018 ). This school tends to think governance mainly in terms of agency (who governs?), scope (what?), and normative content (for what?), raising issues of the various networks of actions, their steering capacity, and their legitimacy and contestation. Foucauldian approaches see governance constituted by its mechanisms (how?) (for a discussion of these four problematiques of governance, see Guzzini, 2012 ), be they the political economy of populations, the constitution of insurance and risk management ( Lobo-Guerrero, 2011 , 2012 , 2016 ), or, indeed, the governmentality constituted by the increasing globalization of the fields of practice within which subjects subject themselves to varied “techniques of the self” ( Bayart, 2004 ). It is through the analysis of those rationalities of government that one can understand agency and scope in the first place.

Such a focus on modes and mechanisms problematizes governance differently. First, it does not assume a public realm (the states), markets, and civil society as something given prior to analysis, but studies how liberal rationalities of order have diffused and enmeshed all of them, producing hybrid authority (for a more IPE-inspired analysis, see Graz, 2019 ). Firms have to comply with corporate social responsibility and the state apparatus to become efficient in terms of new public management. By inventing new indices of productivity, such neoliberal practices constitute the public realm as a firm-like actor in the first place. And order is achieved through ever-new standards and accounting devices that work through their very acceptance by, for example, governments that need to be rendered “accountable” in such a way ( Fougner, 2008 ; Löwenheim, 2008 ).

For the same reason, Foucauldian analysis of nongovernmental organizations insists that, rather than seeing in this global civil society an anti-power or new power, “it is it is an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government” ( Neumann & Sending, 2010 , pp. 5, 17, 115; emphasis in the original). Rather than comparing the relative power for the assessment of rank and hierarchy, an analysis of governmentality concentrates on the new mechanisms through which (self-)regulated behavior, and hence order, is achieved. And here, nongovernmental organizations are not necessarily a barrier to government located out there with some hegemonic actors; they are themselves, perhaps unwittingly, part of it ( Hynek, 2008 ; Lipschutz, 2005 ; in a less Foucauldian vein, see Bartelson, 2006 ).

Power as Convention: Performative and Reflexive Power Analysis

IPS reconnects not only with the political theory of the nature of order and government but also with the practical concern of its use in world politics. Classical realists plead for prudence in the always indeterminate assessment of power to deal with “the most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness” ( Kissinger, 1957 , p. 206). Akin to previous traditions in peace research, IPS scholars invite practitioners to reflect and potentially counter the discourses and often self-fulfilling processes that constitute and perpetuate social facts. It does not recoil, as classical realists did, from drawing out the implications of the conventional nature of international politics. Confronted with the missing fungibility of resources and the unavailable objective measure of power, Hedley Bull merely declared that an “overall” concept of power used for comparisons is “one we cannot do without” ( Bull, 1977 , p. 114) and pursued the analysis. IPS was to follow up on who “we” is.

For while there is no objective measure of power, there are social conventions to measure power. The understanding of power is not established by the observer, but by the actor. It becomes a social convention. Diplomats must first agree on what counts before they can start counting ( Guzzini, 1998 , p. 231). And those conventions are, hence the effect of negotiations within the diplomatic field and its processes of recognition and, in turn, constitute technologies of government themselves. Understandings of power inform practices and vice versa. Discourses of power are both performative in that they intervene in the social world and reflexive in that such practices re-affect those discourses.

This practical component of power has evolved with political discourse, at least in Western traditions. There are two prominent reasons why practitioners cannot do without an overall concept of power, namely the link of power to responsibility and the conventions of hierarchy that tie rank or status to power.

In our political discourse, the notion of power is attached to the idea of the “art of the possible,” identifying agency and attributing responsibility ( Connolly, 1974 , chap. 3). If there were no power, nothing could be done, and no one could be blamed for it. Therefore, re-conceptualizations of power, both among observers and practitioners, often have the purpose of widening what falls into the realm of power in order to attribute agency and responsibility. Things were not inevitable; not doing anything about it requires public justification. Here the ontological stance of the entire section meets a purpose of power analysis. An ontology that focuses on the constitution of things historicizes and denaturalizes issues ( Hacking, 1999 , pp. 6–7). And in showing how the present was not inevitable, it drags into the open the domination that goes into, as well as the modes of legitimation that follow, social facts. For instance, attributing power to the social fact of gender and the dispositions sedimented in gender scripts denaturalizes their role in the existing sexual stratification and in its reproduction. In short, in at least Western political discourse, attributing power politicizes issues ( Guzzini, 2000 , 2005 ; for an early statement, see Frei, 1969 ).

A second reason why diplomats cannot do without the overall concept of power is the established convention of organizing international society according to different strata, where “great powers” have special responsibilities but also privileges, the most important being “exemptionalism” and impunity. Here, rules, which apply to all others, may apply to them only at their discretion. To establish this special status, proxies of power are agreed to. As in Bourdieu’s field of power, where the conversion rates between different forms of capital are (socially) established ( Bourdieu, 1994 , p. 56), the overall hierarchy is the result of an ongoing fight to establish the rates of convertibility and hence hierarchy of capitals and social groups. It is the struggle for the “dominating principle of domination” ( Bourdieu, 1994 , p. 34).

This interaction between our conventions of what counts as power and political practice, be it rank or behavior, works both ways. Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power was meant not only to describe international relations but also to influence them. If all actors agreed on this understanding of power for attributing rank, then political competition would be about movies and universities, not military bases and economic exploitation. The understanding of power, if shared, changes social reality, here the very nature of world politics. In reverse, countries who wish to influence the conventions can also do this through their acts and their recognition. This is only logical for an actor trying to foster a convention for proxies of power that fit its profile. When Russia privileges hard power and its exercise, downplaying economic welfare or human rights and inciting behavior that strengthens this understanding, it influences the conventions to its benefit. The more others react in kind, the better. One of the reasons Russia is so keen on its “sphere of influence” is that such a sphere allows it to do things that otherwise would be forbidden. And it makes Russia equal to others that claim such a sphere (for instance, the Western Hemisphere for the United States). And precisely because international society knows that impunity is a proxy for rank, it applies economic sanctions and other measures. They are symbolic means in that they are not meant to return matters to the status quo. Yet they are very important ones, expressing a refusal to accept someone as a member of that limited club that has discretion in applying social rules. Obviously, such discretion and acceptance of impunity as a proxy for rank can only thrive when it is shared as a “gentlemen’s agreement” within the club, as during colonial times.

Even if careful scholarly discussion can discard some conceptualizations of power, there is no one root concept that one can unravel simply by digging deeper. Concepts derive their meanings from the theories in which they are embedded, like words in a language, and meet there the meta-theoretical or normative divides that plague and enrich our theorizing. Power is particularly complicated because it is a concept deemed important not only across different explanatory theories, with their underlying and conflicting ontologies, but also across different domains from philosophy to the lifeworld of the practitioner. It is perhaps not surprising that the realist tradition, in IR and elsewhere, has focused on power as a privileged way to link these three domains. This may indeed be one of its defining characteristics.

Initially, realist writings combined the domains of political theory, centered on the understanding of order in the polity, with the domain of explanatory theory by assuming that, in the absence of a genuine world polity, the analysis of capabilities and influence was all there could be and a political practice based on power and prudence. Yet having reduced much of power analysis to the disciplinary expectations of a U.S. social science, in particular political theory fell by the wayside. Liberal and structural scholars exposed the weaknesses in realist power analysis, from the fungibility assumption to the double link between agent resources to influence, and from there to a balance of power, which subsumed domination under action. They redefined the causal (or not) role for power, be it at the agent or the structural level. Finally, with the post-structuralist and constructivist turn, the analysis of power returns to the links between the three domains of ontology, understanding/explanation, and practice through the analysis of the power in the processes that constitute social facts and hierarchical subject positions.

Yet, what all these approaches risk is falling into the trap of a realist fallacy. It may well be that power is intrinsically connected to politics and the political, but not all politics can be reduced to power. Like geopolitical thinkers before (for a critique, see Aron, 1976 ), Foucault has reversed Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is but the prolongation of politics by other means, with the effect of making war the default position of the political. 2 But this can hardly account for all conceptions (and some would add for the reality) of politics. Hannah Arendt, for instance, a thinker close to the realist tradition for not propping her theory up by a banister or for having any post-totalitarian illusion about human nature ( Isaac, 1992 ; Kalyvas, 2008 ; Strong, 2012 ), strongly criticized the tendency “to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion.” And while “power is indeed of the essence of all government,” she redefined power to make it the “opposite” of violence, namely the “human ability to act in concert” ( Arendt, 1969 , respectively at pp. 44, 51, 56, 44). Her take on politics offers a way to include solidarity into our understanding of politics ( Allen, 1998 , pp. 35–37, 2002 , p. 143). She unties the link between power and violence in the realist tradition, whether classical or Foucauldian, and hence the reduction of politics to the means or technologies of control. And, as any reflexive analysis immediately realizes, this geopolitical or Foucauldian reversal of Clausewitz is a self-fulfilling prophecy by producing what its discourses presuppose (see the analysis of “ontogenetic war” in Bartelson, 2018 ) and hence hardly prudent advice for political practice.

This fallacy is but an expression of the temptation that emanates from power for the understanding of world politics. It is the temptation of a shortcut, where the concept of power is conflated with the analysis of all power phenomena, from symbolic violence to dependency, and where the ontology of power encompasses all there is to the nature of politics. In doing so, power is either taken not seriously enough or too much so. Realist explanations in IR have not taken power seriously enough by having one of its most reductionist understandings, as witnessed by the many critiques and developments discussed in this article. At the same time, the political realist tradition has played a bad trick in that it tacitly smuggles into international theory the thinking of politics only in terms of struggle and domination. Power analysis in world politics needs to both apprehend power in its comprehensive nature for its analysis and qualify the role of power in its understanding of politics.

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1. Others would turn the argument around and claim that this diffusion is a new mechanism that constitutes the present form of governance, a rule without steering. See the section “ The Power Politics of Constitutive Processes .”

2. Given Foucault’s own critique of the reduction to command and obedience (as in the Weberian realist tradition) and his nominalist understanding of power ( Foucault, 1976 , pp. 113, 123), the reversal of Clausewitz is not uncritical and surely less so than in some later followers.

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• Published: 06 February 2024

Populism and the quest for political power: the pitfalls to populist electoral success in Canada

• Sirvan Karimi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8952-9503 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  220 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Politics and international relations

Recent electoral inroads by anti-establishment political parties in Europe and around the world have led to the resurgence of the debate on populism. Within the burgeoning theoretical and analytic interpretations of the surge of populism, competing arguments have been deployed. Economic dislocation and the demographic shift within liberal democratic societies have provided fertile ground for the rise of populism. However, the success of these populist political parties, particularly the radical right populist parties, in utilizing prevailing societal resentment is to a great extent conditional upon a perceived threat to national identity. While the vestiges of political distrust and social and economic indignation can be found in Canadian society, the absence of a historically ingrained strong sense of nationhood, consolidation of multiculturalism, the eclipse of class from national political discourse, and the implausibility of resorting to Anti-Americanism as a mobilizing tactic has made it difficult for both Canadian right and left-populist forces to replicate the success of their international counterparts at the national level.

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The politically astounding electoral breakthrough by radical populist political parties in Europe and other parts of the world has reignited the debate on the polarizing propensity of populist political parties and political actors. Polarization is not a relic of extraterrestrial collision that can be dissected and analyzed independently from the growing social, economic, and cultural cleavages within liberal democratic societies. Cultural and socio-economic chasms do not automatically lead to political polarization. Socio-economic cleavages by themselves are empty slots and houses of cards. They only generate demands for radical populist parties and populist actors who in turn appeal to the people and embark on the electrifying political consciousness of those cleavages, hence intensifying political polarization which is perceived as a threat to liberal democratic societies. In this paper, it will be argued that despite the existence of political grievances and socio-economic disgruntlement in Canadian society, the absence of a historically ingrained sense of nationalism, the consolidation of multiculturalism, constraints on class politics, and the inefficacy of resorting to Anti-Americanism as a mobilizing tactic has precluded the electoral success of both the radical left and right-wing populist political forces.

This paper is divided into four parts. Part one reflects on the debate on the concept of populism. Part two discusses the interplay of socio-economic conditions and populism. Part three deals with the historical evolution of populism in Canada. Part four discusses countervailing forces to the success of populism in Canada. Finally, in the conclusion the main themes and findings will be recapitulated.

Populism as a concept

As a popular and contested concept, populism has permeated social science research and political and academic discourse. Depending on the context within which it is invoked, the concept of populism has acquired a chameleon character. Within the emerging exuberant literature on populism, there is no consensus on a single definition of the concept. Richard Hofstadter’s paper, Everyone is Talking About Populism, but No One Can Define It , presented at a 1967 Conference at the London School of Economics, still reflects the reality of the confusion associated with the use of the term populism in explaining political phenomena (Derbyshire, 2016 ; also, Deiwiks, 2009 ). As Noam Gidron and Bart Bonikowski ( 2013 ) have pointed out, the challenge of defining populism lies in the use of the term by researchers from different fields to describe political movements, political parties, ideologies, and political leaders across geographical, historical, and ideological contexts. In their comprehensive literature review of populism, Gidron and Bonikowski ( 2013 : pp. 7–13) identify three interrelated interpretations of populism: populism as a thin ideology with a binary vision of society that promises the restoration of the general will in society; populism as a rhetorical discourse that constructs politics as a struggle between the people and the corrupt establishment; and populism as a political strategy employed mainly by an outsider or an unorthodox political leader striving to gain power through anti-establishment appeals and plebiscitarian linkages. By pitting the “people” against the “elite”, populism can become a potent political force once it is blended with other ideological orientations such as nationalism, liberalism, and socialism. Since their extensive review, numerous scholars have adopted a broad definition of populism that has made it formidable to grasp what it really is. As Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser ( 2018 ) has pointed out, “the best way to deal with the contested nature of the term populism is to work with a minimal definition” (64). Among the competing definitions, the best minimal definitions are presented by Cas Mudde and Kurt Wayland. Mudde ( 2004 ) provides a comprehensive definition that conceptualizes populism as “a thin-centered ideology” that envisages society to be ultimately divided into two “homogenous and antagonistic groups, the pure people and the corrupt elite”, where politics should reflect the general will of the people (543). Wayland ( 2001 ), on the other hand, offers a minimal definition that refers to populism as a political strategy utilized by political leaders to mobilize unorganized and disgruntled segments of society. While Rovira Kaltwasser favors Mudde’s minimal definition, I believe combining these two minimal definitions provides a more encompassing and comprehensive definition of populism. In this paper, Populism is therefore, defined as a divisive discourse intended to restore the general will of society by pitting the people as the oppressed against the corrupt elite (rhetoric adopted by both right and left-wing populist parties) and racial minority groups (utilized by only right-wing populist parties). This definition is also in line with the practical manifestations of the varieties of populism as reflected in the political ascendancy of nativist-nationalistic populism and class-based populism as two ideologically oriented variants of populism in liberal democratic societies (Bugaric, 2019 ; Mudde, 2016 ).

Populism cannot be analyzed independently of the socio-economic environment that determines its momentum. It is, therefore, essential to elucidate the correlation between the dire socio-economic conditions and populist political figures who capitalize on those socio-economic cleavages to sharpen their assaults on the establishment or racial minority groups as the enemy of the people.

Populism and socio-economic cleavages

As a political backlash against the establishment, populism tends to resurface during a specific era when dismal socio-economic conditions question the legitimacy of the existing political order. Most of the early populist movements had been inspired by the demands of farmers and to some extent workers who had become victims of the emerging industrial economy in the nineteenth century (Conway, 1978 ). The social, demographic, and economic transformation accompanying industrialization triggered a tumultuous surge of social discontent which was conducive to facilitating the political coalition between farmers, workers, and urban intellectuals (Penner, 1977 ).

While the economic deprivation of the 1930s was geared to generate an auspicious atmosphere for the appeal of populist slogans, the spectacular economic prosperity accompanying World War II was conducive to making populist slogans less attractive. Post-war social reconstruction which had been designed to integrate the marginalized population through the deployment of national resources to provide social welfare programs, left no latitude for extremists on both sides of the ideological spectrum to threaten the foundations of liberal democracy (Mudde, 2015 ). The institutionalization of demand management, which ensured high levels of employment and the expansion of welfare programs under unparalleled economic growth, not only bolstered the position of the established political parties but also eclipsed both right and left extremists’ criticisms of the political order from the terrain of political discourse. As one of the significant hallmarks of post-war prosperity in Western societies, the welfare state provided moral ground for the promotion of the ideas of social justice, solidarity, and universalism (Brodie, 1995 ). In fact, with the ascendancy of the Keynesian paradigm, a period of diminished policy differentiation and the greatest consensus between the governing social-democratic, liberal, and conservative parties began to prevail.

The Keynesian-ushered post-war economic buoyancy was also accompanied by the gradual liberalization of the immigration policy in a significant number of liberal democracies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other European countries. With the return of prosperity to Europe in the 1960s, which led to the decline in levels of migration from Europe, countries such as the US, Canada, and Australia opened their doors to migrants from non-European countries (Akbari and McDonald, 2018 ). Even West Germany, which had a restrictive immigration policy in place, relaxed its immigration policy at this time leading to the arrival of millions of migrants as guest workers, many of whom went on to gain permanent residency (Hess and Green, 2016 ). Therefore, post-war economic prosperity was conducive to cushioning and mitigating any serious domestic backlashes to the gradual shift in the ethnic makeup of these countries (Green, 1976 ).

The economic crisis of the 1970s undermined the foundation of post-war consensus and triggered waves of economic restructuring across liberal democratic societies. The failure of Keynesian demand management to surmount the phenomenon of stagflation provided an auspicious atmosphere for the New Right to launch a successful theoretical raid on the foundation of Keynesianism that had functioned as a springboard for generous and comprehensive social welfare programs (Brodie, 1995 ). With the ascendancy of neoliberalism, social welfare programs that were installed as palliative measures to deflect the threat of radicalism, came to be perceived by the dominant classes as impediments to capital accumulation (Pierson, 2002 ). While Keynesian demand management had provided a logical basis for the utilization of the capacities of market forces to combat socio-economic inequalities, the identification of it as an obstacle to economic growth dealt a major blow to Keynesianism. (Whitfield, 2001 ).

The rising economic insecurity in the 1980s and 1990s was exacerbated and intensified by the financial crisis of 2008 which triggered a global recession. The financial turmoil that erupted in the US became a worldwide phenomenon that impacted all segments of the economy from the financial industry to the industrial sector, to housing, and pension funds. In just the first 10 months of 2008, “private pensions in OECD countries reported US$4 trillion losses in asset value” (Impavido and Tower, 2009 : p. 1). Though the emerging levels of economic hardship varied from country to country, the pernicious social and economic impacts of the crisis left an imprint across nations. To tackle and alleviate the severity of the economic crisis, governments across Western liberal democratic societies had to revive Keynesian stimuli to salvage financial institutions and reduce the severity of the recession. However, almost all governments in liberal democratic societies gradually embarked on reactivating austerity measures which had severe impacts on ordinary people (Best, 2018 ). Polarization as reflected in economic hardship, curtailing social welfare programs, and the feeling of vulnerability and uncertainty provided fertile ground for populist propensity to flourish (Armingeon and Guthmann, 2014 ; Bugaric, 2019 ; Cordero and Simon, 2016 ; Mudde 2007 ; Punciman, 2018 ; Rooduijn, 2018 ).

The economic crisis, the ensuing fear of vulnerability, and economic deprivation have historically proven to have the potent potential to engender anti-immigrant attitudes among local populations. In their cross-national studies of 22 countries (Kwak and Wallace, 2018 ) found a positive correlation between experiencing the economic crisis, the financial crash, loss of employment, and perceived immigrant threat. Similarly, in their comprehensive study of the interplay of economic crisis and populism, Algan et al., ( 2017 : p. 309) found that “crisis-driven economic insecurity is a substantial determinant of populism and political distrust” (also Bogliacino and Virginia, 2016 ). Footnote 1 The general polarization as reflected in the decline of the public trust in the political system, political apathy, frustration, indignation, and the fear of a bleak future provided a golden opportunity for unorthodox political parties and political figures with populist inclinations to enter the political scene as the self-declared defenders of the common people.

The rise of neoliberalism and its distributional implications compounded by the financial crisis of 2008 fostered an environment for the prevalence of populist attitudes. However, the social and economic ramifications of growing inequality and economic insecurity did not necessarily determine populism’s political orientations. Growing societal tension as manifested in feelings of economic vulnerability and socio-economic grievances generated the demand for populist leaders. As Dani Rodrik ( 2018 ) has pointed out, the salience of cleavages and narratives provided by political leaders and political parties shaped the political manifestation of societal grievances. Based on this demand and supply notion of the emergence of populism, several researchers have identified two ideologically driven political manifestations of populism (Rodrik, 2018 ; Rooduijn and Akkerman, 2017 ). European right-wing populist parties heavily capitalize on social, ethnic, and cultural cleavages that have propelled these parties to adopt a nativist and nationalist political orientation. By adopting an anti-immigration policy platform, right-wing and nationalist political parties such as Austria’s Freedom Party, Alternative for Germany, the Sweden Democrats, the Swiss People’s Party, the Fidesz Party in Hungary, The League in Italy, the Independent Party in the UK, Vox in Spain, and the People’s Party in Canada have gained significant political momentum which is reflected in their recent electoral stature within their respective countries as well as the European Parliament (Riegert, 2019 ; Lisi et al., 2019 ). On the other hand, left-wing populists such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the United States, Syriza in Greece, and Podemos in Spain mainly highlight economic deprivation and growing income inequality as the basis for mobilizing economically deprived and marginalized people.

Though authoritarian proclivity might be lurking beneath the policy platform of populist political parties and populist political figures, proclaiming to defend the interests of “the people” has been the hallmark of policy declarations of populists from both sides of the ideological spectrum. In other words, populist political parties and populist political actors present themselves as the vanguards of defending the people’s sovereignty to restore democracy. Both right and left-wing populists paint themselves as ardent defenders of democracy though they have different conceptions of what it means. Radical right populists emphasize the direct participation of the people in political processes and the political decision-making process. Due to their nativist and nationalistic inclinations, radical right populists’ notion of the people excludes immigrants and minorities just as under the Athenian practice of democracy certain groups such as women and slaves had been excluded from political participation. On the other hand, radical leftist populists place heavy accentuation on the notion of a classless society which can also be extrapolated from an interpretation of classical democracy (Macpherson, 1966 ). Thus, both radical right and left populists challenge liberal democracy for different reasons. The entrenched pluralism and minority rights protection under the aegis of liberal democracy are despised by radical right populists and are perceived as threats to the maintenance of the general will of society. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of political equality and socio-economic inequality prevailing under liberal democracy is the source of frustration for radical leftist populists who strive to advance an equal and classless society. It is based on these distinctions that some authors have used the terms exclusionary and inclusionary populism to characterize radical right and leftist populist political parties respectively (Bugaric, 2019 ; Mudde, 2007 ).

Despite their differences, both radical right and left-wing populist political parties and political actors excoriate the existing liberal democratic institutions. By capitalizing on the prevailing wave of disgruntlement, indignation, and hopelessness, these ideologically oriented extremist political parties and political leaders have found a propitious environment to embark on challenging the existing political order.

The perceived economic despair and accompanying hostility towards immigrants are two essential conditions that can function as a springboard for populist political parties, particularly radical right populist political parties, to advance their political objectives. However, as can be demonstrated in the Canadian case below, certain intervening cultural and institutional forces can to a great extent decelerate the populist momentum for both radical right and left-populist political forces.

The historical trajectory of populism in Canada

As was pointed out in the previous section of this paper, populism emerged, waned, and resurfaced during a specific era when dismal socio-economic conditions cast doubt on the legitimacy of the existing political order. As a response to socio-economic dislocations and ensuing industrialization in the late eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century, populist movements gained momentum in Canada (Conway, 1978 ). In contrast to the rise of populist-inspired political movements in Europe in the nineteenth century which generally remained marginal, North American populist movements in the nineteenth century were pervasive (Mudde, 2015 ). Most of these populist movements had been inspired by the demands of farmers and to some extent workers who had become victims of the emerging industrial economy and the social transformation accompanying industrialization.

The origin and the rise of both right and left-wing populism (for the summary of major right and left-wing populist political parties, see Table 1 at the end of this section) in Canada can be traced back to nineteenth century Canada which had been inspired by American radical populists. The first populist movement in Canada emerged from an unsuccessful and short-lived alliance between farmers and workers who had been resentful of the industrial and commercial classes dominating Canadian society. The movement was in fact a reaction to the policy measures of the First National Policy adopted by the MacDonald Conservatives in 1879 (Panizza, 2005 ). The explicitly protectionist industrial policy was conducive to enhancing the position of the industrial and financial classes in the East. Politicized farmers and workers were under the impression that they had received an insufficient return on their efforts. The main objectives of the first farmer-labor populist movement were to resist the domination of wealth, advance justice for all members of society, and abolish the fraud and extortion of industrial operations that had been permitted by law (Cook, 1984 ). It was the prevailing conviction of the leading figures of farmers and labor that an alliance between real productive forces committed to economic freedom, cooperation, and democracy could, in the long run, eradicate the forces of privileges, unbridled competition, and monopoly that constituted a menace to the interests of farmers and workers (Cook, 1984 ).

Because of internal division and the return to economic prosperity in the late nineteenth century, the first protest movement gradually lost its political momentum (Cook, 1984 ). The economic vicissitudes associated with industrialization had not only blurred the class lines between farmers and workers but had also facilitated the political coalition between farmers, workers, and urban intellectuals (Penner, 1977 ). The Progressive Party of Farmers in Canada was the main emerging political machine of farmers and workers’ discontent and frustration directed at the established political order for failing to address the interests of these marginalized layers within Canadian society. As the political machine of rebellious farmers and farmworkers, the Progressive Party began to challenge the traditional mode of politics that had mainly been geared to quench the interests of the financial and industrial classes in the East (Avakumuvic, 1978 ). Despite generating enormous wealth and prosperity, the emerging capitalist social relations produced the paradox of plenty in the midst of misery (Finkel, 2013 ). In order to reduce the financial pressures on farmers, the political machine of populism in this era called for major reforms in banking, credit lending rules, and breaking down monopoly and freight rates (Conway, 1978 ). During its second phase in the early decades of twentieth-century Canada, the populist movement made significant political breakthroughs that shocked status-quo political parties. The Progressive Party of Farmers was able to elect 64 MPs across the country in the federal election of 1921 and was catapulted to official opposition status in the House of Commons (Avakumuvic, 1978 ). However, these populist political movements were either absorbed by the established political parties (most of the MPs from the Progressive Party joined the Liberal Party) or metamorphosed into fringe parties such as the Social Credit Party which gained momentum in certain provinces (Lipset, 1971 ). While the adverse implications of industrialization and the subsequent decline in the standards of living during the great depression compelled certain organizations of farmers and workers to form a temporary alliance as manifested in the rise of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) as the political expression of social-democratic populism in 1932, such developments were unable to guarantee a lasting coalition between these two strata. With the return of economic prosperity, the class consciousness of the petite bourgeoisie, particularly of populist farmers, began to shift away from the revolutionary temptation during the economic slump. Populist farmers could not tolerate the revolutionary languages of working-class organizations which in their view was a repudiation of their rugged individualism (Avakumovic, 1978 ).

The social, economic, and political vicissitudes in the 1980s were conducive to providing fertile ground for the resurgence of populism in Canada which came to leave its imprint on Canadian politics for decades to come (Friesen, 2021 ). As the political manifestation of right-wing populism in Canada, the Reform Party entered the political scene in 1987 under the leadership of Preston Manning and was successful in accomplishing a spectacular electoral breakthrough in the 1993 Federal election. In 1997, the Reform Party formed the second-largest party caucus standing in the House of Commons and succeeded in gaining the status of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition in the House of Commons. Certain social, political, and economic developments contributed to the rise of the Reform Party. The political turmoil associated with two decades of failed constitutional negotiations intended to appease Quebec resharpened Western alienation. A significant number of Conservative voters became disillusioned with the Progressive Conservative Party which had sedulously striven to accommodate Quebec. A growing sense of economic vulnerability among Canadians in the 1980s was to a great extent conducive to making Canadian society less receptive to embracing more immigrants and refugees. These conditions provided an auspicious opportunity for the Reform Party to seize the moment and propagate its populist policy measures (Laycock, 2021 ; Jakubowski, 2006 ).

By capitalizing on the prevailing sociopolitical environment of the 1980s and 1990s which was receptive to populist slogans, the Reform Party explicitly called for several major radical political reforms. These reforms ranged from calling for greater fiscal responsibility and lower taxes, to espousing direct democratic measures such as referendum and citizen initiatives, to abolishing the Department of Multiculturalism as well as the concept of “hyphenated Canadianism” (though groups were permitted to preserve their cultural heritage through their own resources), to restricting and subordinating the immigration policy to the exigencies of the Canadian economy (Reform Party, 1993 ; Reform Party, 1991 ; Reform Party, 1989 ). Footnote 2

Obviously, the Reform Party was not successful in restructuring the Canadian Federation along with its populist and ultra-conservative ideological orientation. However, it was instrumental in forcing the governing Liberal government of Jean Chretien to crawl to the right of the center and adopt austerity policy measures intended to reduce spending and allow for the balancing of the budget in the late 1990s. Though the Reform Party was successful in triggering a fundamental alteration in the landscape of party politics as manifested in intensifying Canadians’ suspicion of governments, the status-quo political parties, entrenched special interests, and the sociopolitical reality in Canada, that will be discussed later in this paper, exerted pressures on the Reform Party to gradually modify its original policy stance (Laycock, 2021 ). In order to extend the frontier of its social basis of support beyond Western Canada and hence increase the levels of support in the Eastern part of Canada, the Reform Party embarked on transforming itself into the Canadian Alliance Party in 2000 which finally merged with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 to form the current Conservative Party of Canada. The transformation of the Reform Party and the eventual emergence of the Conservative Party of Canada led to impressive electoral success that enabled the Conservatives to form a national government in 2006. In its quest to expand its social basis of support and hence capture political power at the national level, the Conservative Party gradually moved towards the center of the ideological spectrum. In order to increase its share of votes among ethnic groups in Canada, the Conservative Party gradually moderated its stance on immigration and multiculturalism (Marwah et al., 2013 ). Consequently, unlike its predecessors, the Conservative Party has not only discarded its rejection of multiculturalism but has also supported a relatively expansive mass immigration policy. By harnessing the political implications of the Sponsorship Scandal that had been haunting the Liberal government, the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper’s leadership succeeded in forming a minority government in 2006. Contrary to the expectation of many conservatives, Harper was inclined to run a deficit and resort to a greater level of state intervention in economic activities such as bailing out the auto sector in 2009. Furthermore, under the leadership of Andrew Scheer, the Conservative Party explicitly declared that it would not ban abortion or same-sex marriage. Such policy measures adopted by the Conservative Party were bound to alienate social conservatives and stir up resentment among ardent conservative proponents of neoliberalism who preached for greater fiscal discipline and a restricted level of state intervention in a market economy (Livesey, 2020 ).

The Conservative Party of Canada’s gradual crawl towards the center of the ideological spectrum generated a climate of disappointment for radical figures within its ranks and files. The resurgence of populist propensity within conservative circles was manifested in the resignation of Maxime Bernier, a former Cabinet member of the Conservative Party, who went on to form the People’s Party of Canada in 2018. In his political debates, Bernier unequivocally adopted a populist overtone that echoes right-wing populists in Europe.

As a right-wing populist party, the People’s Party appears to be committed to reviving some of the policy measures that had been adopted by the Reform Party. The People’s Party has declared its intention to eliminate multicultural funding, restrict immigration policy, and put more emphasis on skilled immigrants. It aims to enact a Canada-First foreign policy, roll back all environmental protection commitments made by Canada, adhere to fiscal austerity, and safeguard freedom of expression by restricting the definition of hate which it alleges is used to curtail freedom of expression. While it has declared its commitment to promoting democracy and democratic accountability, it has not been vociferous in the adoption of the direct democratic measures that were passionately advocated by the Reform Party. To broaden their electoral appeals, radical right populists in Canada have substituted their criticism of multiculturalism and immigration policy with embracing neoliberal economic policy platforms (Budd, 2021 ).

During the 2021 federal election campaign, The People’s Party capitalized on growing anti-vaccine sentiment and the wave of dissatisfaction over the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though it was shut out of the federal election and failed to capture a single seat in the House of Commons, it nonetheless tripled its share of the popular vote. In the 2021 federal election, the People’s Party received 4.94 percent of the popular vote which was a major success as compared to its share of the total popular vote in the 2019 federal election which stood at 1.6 percent. Emboldened by the astonishing increase in the level of support for the People’s Party, Bernier asserted that his party would be “the only real conservative option for this country” (Baum, 2021 : para 6).

The electoral success of the People’s Party during the 2021 federal election has intensified the concern over the threat of right-wing populism in Canada. Some have interpreted the recent electoral success of the People’s Party as a warning of the arrival of twenty-first-century populism in Canada (Hastings, 2021 ; MacLellan, 2021 ). Given the gradual shift of the Conservative Party of Canada toward the center of the ideological spectrum, it is suggested that the People’s Party might succeed in expanding its social basis of support in the future (Hastings, 2021 ). Such a prediction is predicated on the fact that there is a growing populist attitude among Canadians. In their recent study, Frank Graves and Jeff Smith ( 2020 ) found that 34 percent of Canadians hold a populist outlook. These Canadians happened to be mainly older, less educated, working-class Canadians living mainly in the western part of the country. The political sympathies of Canadian populists lie with the Conservative political forces (Graves and Smith, 2020 ).

It is yet to be seen which direction the Conservative Party of Canada will take under the leadership of Pierre Poilievre who was able to defeat Jean Charest, a moderate and centrist candidate. Throughout his campaign for party leadership in 2022, Poilievre adopted populist language by emphasizing fighting for the “little people” and challenging “established elites” and “gatekeepers” in Ottawa. Despite his fury and combative populist stance that places heavy accentuation on fiscal prudence and small government, he has eschewed attacking immigration policy or capitalizing on racial and ethnic divides. As Eric Kaufmann, an expert on populism, has pointed out, it is a natural proclivity of the populist movement to shift the rhetoric of opposition to the establishment beyond the economic realm to tricky cultural issues which is the hallmark of the People’s Party, but it’s not happened with Poilievre (cited in Thomson, 2022 , para 3).

Populism clearly has roots in Canadian society and Canadian politics. It is not a novel phenomenon. A rise, dwindling, and resurgence have been the hallmarks of populism in Canada. However, there are certain institutional, attitudinal, cultural, and economic variables that have the potential to function as bulwarks against radical populism from both sides of the ideological divide.

Countervailing forces to populism in Canada

Prior to explaining variables that have contributed to the containment and restraining of populism at the national level in Canada (for a summary of these variables, see Table 2 at the end of this section), it is essential to review and assess the impact of institutional variables on the fate of populism. Within the scope of the existing literature on the institutional explanation of populism, there are two main lines of argument. First, with respect to the rise of Euroscepticism which is being molded into a bitter populism in some European countries, it is argued that the formation of some form of European federalism is the most effective response to contain the tide of Euroscepticism (Heine, 2014 ). According to this line of thought, a federal Europe can utilize redistribution as a mechanism to alleviate growing socio-economic inequalities in member countries so that the ability of populist parties to capitalize on social and economic resettlement as a ground to mobilize disgruntled Europeans will be undermined (Eagleton, 2017 ). Reflecting on the rise of populism in the United States, John McGinnis ( 2018 ) has suggested that in order to contain populism, American federalism which has become heavily centralized, must return to its classical version where most of the residual powers were reserved for the states. However, this line of reasoning ignores the fact that while in a heavily decentralized federal system, there is less chance for populism at the national level, populism can still gain ground at the sub-national level as is the case in certain Canadian provinces such as Alberta and Quebec (Young, 2022 ).

The second line of institutional argumentation is the assertion that the form of the electoral method has a significant impact on the electoral prospects for populist parties. It is argued that the proportional representation (PR) system has the potential to not only increase the share of the popular vote but also increase the electoral coalition of populist parties (Becher et al., 2022 ). Accordingly, the PR system is advantageous to fringe parties such as populist parties on two interrelated grounds. First, under the PR system, supporters of populist parties confidently cast their votes for the party of their choice and are no longer engaged in strategic voting (Downes et al., 2018 ). Footnote 3 Second, the percentage of popular votes acquired by parties is automatically translated into the percentage of seats in parliament. In other words, contrary to the situation under the Single-Member Plurality system or the First-Past-The-Post system (FPTP) where there is no direct relation between the percentage of votes and the percentage of seats, votes cast under the PR system are not wasted. While there is no empirical evidence to substantiate the assertion that the PR system fosters extremism (Carter, 2004 ), it is undeniable that PR is advantageous to fringe parties. For example, the People’s Party of Canada which gained 4.95 percent of the popular vote in the 2021 federal election in Canada without gaining a single seat, would have been able to capture 16 seats if the election had been conducted under the PR system. It is asserted by some analysts that the FPTP electoral system forces political parties to moderate their ideological orientation and become pragmatic (Marwah et al., 2013 ). However, this assertion needs to be qualified. First, the FPTP electoral method cannot prevent populist forces from gaining power at the provincial level. Second, the FPTP electoral method may not negatively affect unorthodox political parties even at the national level if their social basis of support is concentrated in particular regions. Such is the case with the Reform Party of Canada which despite its anti-immigration and anti-multicultural stance, was able to emerge as a major political force in the 1993 federal election and established itself as the main opposition party in 1997. However, due to its aspiration to capture national power, the Conservative Party of Canada had to move beyond its Western basis and moderate its stance in order to capture ethnic votes in the Eastern part of Canada, particularly in Toronto and Montreal where there is a huge concentration of ethnic groups.

Thus, institutional variables such as the electoral system cannot by themselves explain the failure of populist forces in Canada. The electoral method is just a mechanism that is influenced by the configuration of other non-institutional variables. Institutional settings might be crucial in shaping political games, however, as Bo Rothstein ( 1998 : p. 306) has pointed out “homo politics cannot be considered as structural -cum- institutional dope”. Without taking into consideration the intervening variables such as nationalism, multiculturalism, regional peculiarity, and electoral mobilization strategies, it would be a formidable task to deploy an argument that the electoral system such as the Single-Member Plurality System can by itself deprive populist parties of electoral ascendancy.

As has already been mentioned, the current electoral system in Canada has not prevented populist electoral successes at the provincial level. Also, as was pointed out earlier, when the political basis of support for a populist political party is concentrated in a particular region or certain regions, the FPTP model cannot prevent a populist political party from becoming a major player in Canadian politics. This was the case with the Reform Party which although it did not capture the bridle of the national government, was instrumental in amplifying the voice of the right and the demand for austerity. It was in fact during the presence of the Reform Party in Parliament that the governing Liberal Party crawled to the right side of the ideological spectrum and adopted the most draconian neoliberal policy measures as manifested in downsizing the public sector, curtailing social programs, and slashing federal transfers to provinces (Johnson, 2006 : pp. 90–94, see also Prince, 1998 –1999). Finally, it would be a tall order for institutionalists to reject a hypothetical argument that in the case of a strong sense of nationalism as the basis for electoral mobilization, the absence of multiculturalism, and the prevalence of regional harmony, a populist political party will not be able to form a national government even under the current electoral system.

Thus, institutional structures cannot be analyzed independently of other variables such as nationalism, multiculturalism, and electoral mobilization strategies which have decisive impacts on electoral outcomes. Populism and nationalism are neither separate nor equivalent. Though they can be analytically distinct, they hinge on “shared foundations of an us-them boundary” (Singh, 2021 : p. 285). Nationalism is defined as a discourse revolving around the nation as a sovereign community that exists within a demarcated space and is constructed around member-non-member opposition. Populism, on the other hand, is a discourse structured on the antagonism between people as an oppressed group, and the powerful elite with populists fighting for the people (De Cleen, 2017 ). Despite being analytically distinct, populism and nationalism have been combined in populist politics.

Within the existing literature on the interplay of populism and nationalism, it has almost become a common assumption that nationalism and populism are complementary (Bonikowski, 2017 ). The correlation between populism and nationalism is not straight. Therefore, their interplay requires further clarification. Maximilian Filsinger et al. ( 2021 ) distinguish between two competing conceptions of nationhood and national identity that have permeated literature on nationalism. Ethnic national identity is built on a strong emphasis on the place of birth, blood, and ancestry. Civic national identity is built on the adherence of individuals to national political institutions, its democratic system, and shared rights-based values. Populism and nationalism are thus to a great extent highly but imperfectly correlated in the speeches of leaders (Jenne et al., 2021 : p. 70). As Filsinger et al. ( 2021 ) have pointed out, the ethnic conception of nationhood is intimately tied to radical right populism whereas there is a weak relation between civic national identity and populism which is mitigated by socio-economic factors.

Thus, the existence of a strong sense of nationalism and the articulation of threats to national identity is indispensable to the successful campaign of radical right populists to mobilize economically vulnerable and politically disillusioned people within a given society against elites, immigrants, and visible minorities (Bonikowski, 2017 ). The presence of ethnically inspired national sentiment that can be channeled into resentment towards those who are perceived to be outsiders, is an effective weapon in the arsenal of radical right populist politicians and political parties. As can be demonstrated, the Canadian conception of nationhood is complicated, ambiguous, and weak. As a frustrated Hugh MacLennan pointed out a long time ago, whether or not Canada has acquired its own unique identity, has become an “everlasting, frustrating, humiliating question” for Canadians (Cited in Baker, 1973 : p. 57). Canadian mainstream politicians have historically striven to reinforce a conception of nationhood that is based on civic values and norms. Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the “gladiator” of Canadian politics whose political philosophy has greatly shaped Canadian political culture, believed that Canadian nationalism should not be based on the national and ethnic characteristics of either English or French Canadians. Instead, he argued that Canadian nationalism should be constructed on neutral civic principles and values (Trudeau, 1968 ). Former Prime Minister, Jean Chretien described Canada as a post-national, bilingual, and multicultural society where diversity has become “a source of comparative advantage and a source of continuing creativity and innovation” (cited in Mobley et al., 2012 , p. 307). In his recent interview published in the New York Times, which sparked a major controversy in Canada, the current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterized Canada as the first “post-national” state and asserted that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” (Lawson, 2018 ).

Due to the absence of or weak national identity in Canada, both Canadian radical right and left populists have encountered formidable difficulty in advancing their political goals and objectives by adopting a radical populist platform. The historical legacy of Canadian dualism as reflected in the continuation of the French and English cultural divide, and the gradual shift in the ethnic make-up of Canada which culminated in cementing multiculturalism as one of its defining features, have to a great extent contributed to the lack of or weak formation of Canadian national identity (Belshaw, 2020 ). The competing national visions of English-speaking Canadians envisioning Canada as an unhyphenated nation, and French-speaking Canadians viewing Canada as a compact of two nations, gradually came to be superseded by “a national pluralism in which multiculturalism became “a dominating value” (Belshaw, 2020 : 12.6).

Pierre Elliot Trudeau was instrumental in the shift from Canadian dualism to multiculturalism. Before his arrival on the political scene and his subsequent ascendancy to the pinnacle of power as Prime Minister in 1968, Trudeau had already developed his philosophical and political ideas of check and balance, and the superiority of individual rights over collectivity as the basis for his vision of the Canadian nation (Trudeau, 1968 ; see also Whitaker, 1992 : pp. 132–159). Under the flag of fighting for a united, rights-based, bilingual, and multicultural Canada, Trudeau embarked on a course of action that was not intended to accommodate Quebec nationalists but rather to decelerate the momentum for Quebec nationalism, hence diminishing the bargaining power of Quebec within the Canadian federation. His vision of Canada was further advanced through the entrenchment of the Charter in the Constitution Act of 1982. It was Trudeau’s unwavering conviction that the diffusion and protection of the French language within Canada, which is guaranteed in section 23 of the Charter, would be bound to generate a condition within which “Quebec cannot say it alone stood for French” heritage (Cited in McRoberts, 1991 : p. 153).

The entrenchment of the Charter in the Constitution Act of 1982 was based on the assumption that the provision of a set of subjectively inspiring common values such as equality, equity, justice, and freedom could provide the focus for Canadian nationalism which would, in turn, bind Canadians to the Canadian state (Whitaker, 1992 ; McRoberts, 1991 ). Trudeau assumed that by basing the sovereignty of the people on a set of values common to all, the Charter would function as a nostrum to foster Canadian national identity and hence strengthen Canadian unity (Russell, 1983 ). Thus, multiculturalism and the Charter were assumed to reinforce civic identity as opposed to ethnically based national identity. However, the civic base of national identity promoted by mainstream Canadian politicians and political institutions is not shared by Quebec nationalists and Indigenous peoples who have different and competing images of Canada (Kymlicka, 1998 ). Despite its enchanting attractiveness as an emblem of cultural recognition, multiculturalism has been envisaged by both Quebec nationalists and Indigenous peoples as a deliberate endeavor by Trudeau to relegate them to the status of visible minorities in Canada. Neither Quebec nor the Indigenous peoples have identified themselves as members of ethnic minorities (Cairns, 2001 ). As collective entities, both Quebec nationalists and Indigenous peoples have rebuffed the paradigm of multiculturalism as an ethnonational reflection of Canadian society (Abu-Laban, 1994 ). Quebec nationalists have in fact construed multiculturalism as a surreptitious endeavor by Canada to neutralize and eclipse Quebec’s binary vision of Canada from the terrain of political discourse (McRoberts, 1991 : pp. 27–8).

A recent survey by the Environics Institute for Research ( 2019 ) shows that there is no single source of Canadian national identity and there is no consensus on a shared set of values that can bind Canadians together. Furthermore, in addition to the fragmentation of Canadian identity along race, ethnicity, religion, and language, more Canadians identify themselves with their region or province than with the national state. Given the rapid alteration in the ethnic makeup of Canadian society, it is clear why radical right-wing populist political parties have eschewed launching direct political assaults on ethnic minorities and multiculturalism and have instead limited their criticisms to the official provisions of funds allocated to the promotion of multiculturalism. It would be a formidable task and a miracle for any radical right-wing populist political party in Canada to capture national power without receiving a substantial level of support from the first and second-generation immigrants who constitute almost 40% of the Canadian population as of 2011 (Warnica, 2019 ).

The entrenchment of Canadian multiculturalism that has acquired an iconic status provides an explanation for the lack of significant backlash against immigration policy despite socio-economic cleavages within the country. Contrary to the most industrialized liberal democratic countries that have encountered a major backlash against immigration, Canada, despite welcoming a high level of immigrants each year, has not faced any such major backlash. As has already been pointed out, there is strong and enduring cross-party support for an expansive immigration policy. Since mainstream political parties must compete for racial minority votes, there is no incentive for the established political parties to raise the flag of anti-immigration. Furthermore, Canadian multiculturalism, which has entrenched itself as one of the defining features of Canadian political culture, has to a great extent closed off an avenue for a significant backlash against immigration policy. As sociologist Jeffrey Reitz ( 2014 ) has meticulously asserted “Popular support for multiculturalism as a symbol creates a positive political environment for the development of Canada’s expansionist immigration policy and helps immigrants integrate into the economy and society” (108). According to a 2018 survey by the polling company Ipsos which asked Canadians to rank Canadian symbols and values, most surveyed Canadians placed multiculturalism “right next to the national anthem—and just behind their flag” (Thompson, 2018 : para 2). Footnote 4

Furthermore, the existence of a fractured nationalism, weak national identity, and a greater level of identification with provinces and regions rather than the national state also explains why populist political parties might be successful in finding a niche political market at the sub-national level which is receptive to their populist ideas (Potter, 2019 ). It was due to the populist orientation of current Premier Doug Ford who hinged his populist commitment to reassert the interests of people and clip the wings of special interests associated with the political establishment on a neoliberal-driven policy platform that allowed the Ontario Provincial Progressive Conservative Party to gain political power in 2018 (Budd, 2020 ).

Despite the complexity and ambiguity of Canadian national identity, anti-Americanism is also inscribed into the soul of the Canadian national psyche. As William Baker ( 1970 ) has pointed out, as a recurring theme in Canadian history, anti-Americanism “…is one of the solid legs on which the elusive animal, the Canadian identity, stands” (426). Its roots can be traced back to the events before the commencement of the Canadian Confederation in 1867. With the American Revolution against the British Monarchy, the arrival of the United Loyalists in British North American colonies who were fleeing the American Revolution, and the subsequent threat of American expansionism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, anti-Americanism became a part of the Canadian psyche (Baker, 1973 ). Long before the rise of the Canadian federation, both French and English Canada, despite their historical differences and animosity, were adamant in distinguishing themselves from Americans (Woodfinden, 2019 ; Underhill, 1960 ). Due to the perceived American threat to Canada’s existence, Canadian survival has been often perceived as surviving the American threat of expansionism (Cullen et al., 1978 ). It is due to the continuation of the rehearsal of this historical memory that “a salient dimension of Canadian nationalism is indistinguishable from anti-Americanism” (Cullen et al., 1978 : p. 105). The inclination of Canadians to identify themselves as being different from Americans is an overriding theme in major comparative studies of political culture in Canada and the United States (Stewart, 1994 ). During the late nineteenth and a major part of the twentieth centuries, Canadian politicians of different political and ideological brands occasionally utilized the anti-American aspect of Canadian political culture to attract voters (Fulford, 2001 ).

With a few notable exceptions, right-wing populism in Canada has historically eschewed raising the anti-American flag as a mobilization tactic. As the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, John Diefenbaker who was the Prime Minister of Canada from 1957 to 1963, had adopted a nationalistic populist stance which was manifested in his antipathy for bilingualism, multiculturalism, and special treatment of Quebec (Story and Sheppard, 1998 ). With respect to his foreign policy, his refusal to join the Organization of American States (OAS), his retention of Canada’s relation with Cuba after the Cuban Revolution, his stance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his reluctance to arm American Bomarc missiles with nuclear warheads on Canadian soil, were interpreted by some analysts as a reflection of his anti-American proclivity (Glazov, 2002 ; Newman, 1963 ; Nicholson, 1968 ). On the other hand, Jason Zorbas ( 2012 ) has argued that Diefenbaker’s foreign policy, and particularly Canada’s relation with the United States, was mainly shaped by his nationalism which aspired to retain Canadian autonomy. Diefenbaker’s nationalism reflected Red Tory’s nationalistic quest to preserve Canada’s autonomy in the face of the overwhelming propensity of the United States to turn Canada into a satellite of the American Empire (Staring, 2010 ; Grant, 1965 ). As Zorbas has pointed out, Diefenbaker’s Red Tory’s nationalism should not be construed as anti-Americanism but rather as an endeavor to preserve Canadian sovereignty. Undoubtedly, Diefenbaker’s nationalistic orientation on foreign policy had adversely impacted Canada’s relationship with the United States. It is no wonder that Diefenbaker’s electoral defeat in the 1963 federal election was interpreted by the then-American ambassador to Canada, Walton Butterworth, as a swing to greater stability and cooperation in Canada-US relations. In his assessment of the 1963 federal election, Ambassador Butterworth predicted that Canada would “be more stable, responsible, sophisticated and generally cooperative than any time since 1958” (Cited in McKercher, 2011 , p. 1043).

One may assume that the anti-American ingredient of Canadian nationalism could be harnessed by populist political parties, particularly radical left populism, as a rallying cry to mobilize Canadian voters. It was in fact during the early decades of the second part of the twentieth century that the penetration of American branch plants into the Canadian economy was utilized by left nationalists to put pressure on the government of Pierre Elliot Trudeau to take certain policy measures such as the entertainment with the Third Option and the adoption of the Foreign Direct Investment Review (FIRA) agency to reduce American ownership of leading sectors of the Canadian economy (Marsden, 1997 ; Blocker, 2021 ). Footnote 5 Resorting to this anti-American strategy to challenge the domination of the Canadian economy by American branch plants in the 1950s to mid-1970s was an effective political mobilization tactic utilized by the radical leftist supporters of the Waffle movement who had been guided by economic nationalism (Blocker, 2021 ). Footnote 6

Due to the maturation of the continental economic integration, the historically ingrained anti-Americanism that was prevalent during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century had significantly disappeared by the 1990s (Granatstein, 1996 ). According to Granatstein, the anti-Americanism which reached its peak during the 1988 general election fought on the free trade agreement with the United States, was the “last gasp” of the anti-Americanism ingredient of Canadian political culture. The gradual eclipse of anti-Americanism from the terrain of Canadian political culture was mainly due to the gradual consolidation of continental economic integration and the weakening position of economic nationalism which had been fueled by the fear of the American takeover of the Canadian economy. Footnote 7 Therefore, anti-Americanism purports to be no longer a viable and efficacious option for radical leftist populists in Canada. If the volume of foreign direct investment (FDI) is used as a benchmark to measure the level of economic dependency, then it would be a futile and implausible electoral strategy to invoke the dependency theory to paint Canada as a satellite of the American Empire. Since the 1980s and early 1990s, Canada has become a net outward investor and Canadian businesses have begun to tighten their grip over leading sectors of the Canadian economy. Canadian businesses have begun to extend the scope of capital accumulation beyond national boundaries and Canada has emerged as an “imperial state” in its own right (McNally, 2017 ). Even during the COVID-19 pandemic which brought about major disruptions in economic activities across the globe, Canadian direct investment abroad surpassed foreign direct investment in Canada and the principal destination of Canadian investment abroad remains to be the United States (Statistic Canada, 2021a , 2021b ). As of 2020, “the amount of U.S. FDI [in Canada] totaled USD 422 Billion, a 5 percent increase from the previous year, Canada’s FDI stock in the United States totaled USD 570 Billion, a 15 percent increase from the previous year” (U.S. Department of State, 2022 ).

Given the decline of American ownership of the leading sectors of the Canadian economy, the corresponding increase in outward investment levels by Canadian businesses, and the growing backlash against economic protectionism which is reflected in the soaring support for globalization and international trade among Canadians, resorting to an anti-Americanpolitical strategy to rally Canadians behind a radical policy platform by leftist populist forces is no longer a viable and efficacious option. Footnote 8

One might argue that left-wing populist forces in Canada can, like their counterparts in other countries, champion progressive social and economic measures to rally socially and economically marginalized layers within Canadian society. However, the latitude for the left to emphasize class politics is constrained. The inveterate conflict between Quebec and Canada and the ongoing regional discontent have thus given legitimacy to the exigency of maintaining national unity which has, in turn, provided an auspicious momentum for the status-quo political parties, particularly the Liberal Party, to evade class cleavages and accentuate the imperatives of maintaining national unity and placating regional imbalances (Bickerton, 2007 ). Through adopting brokerage politics as a means of electoral mobilization which has continued to remain the dominant mode of party politics in Canada, the Liberal Party has historically been able to coerce both the right and left parties to mitigate their class appeals and hence adopt a classless image of Canada (Horowitz, 1968 ; Carty, 1988 ). Furthermore, leftist political forces have historically been outflanked by the ideological maneuverability of the Liberal Party which has adopted and implemented all those socially progressive policy measures advocated by the Canadian left (Finkel, 2013 ). Footnote 9 As Allen Mills has aptly pointed out, the CCF-NDP has historically faced formidable difficulty in distinguishing itself from the Liberal Party when the latter “is on its best behavior” (Mills, 1991 :259).

As has been argued throughout this paper, the rise of populism has historically been correlated with socio-economic downturns and ensuing perceived economic vulnerability. Populism resonates in an environment of intense socio-economic grievance which is receptive to divisive populist slogans. Under a climate of economic deprivation and social marginalization, socially and economically deprived individuals develop a predilection to search for the blame for their socio-economic misfortunes. Growing income inequality perceived economic vulnerability, the cultural backlash against immigrants, and the accompanying diminution of public trust in existing political institutions tend to provide fertile ground conducive to generating a magnetic field for populist appeals. The failure of mainstream political parties to surmount the social and economic implications of neoliberal policies has also intensified the populist surge.

Like other Western countries, signs of social and economic indignation, a relatively low level of cultural backlash against immigration policy, and political distrust can also be traced in Canadian society. Furthermore, there is a growing populist outlook among less educated and older Canadians whose political sympathies mainly lie with conservative political forces. While populist forces have been able to make political inroads at the sub-national level, they have not been successful at the national level. The failure of populist forces to make a significant electoral breakthrough at the national level lies in the interaction of institutional, cultural, and attitudinal variables that have the potential to hamper the success of populism at the national level. The absence of a historically ingrained strong sense of nationhood, the political maturity of multiculturalism, the eclipse of class from the terrain of national political discourse, and the decline in the appeal of anti-Americanism have made it a formidable task for both the radical right and left-populist forces to replicate the success of their international counterparts at the national level.

Due to the seismic shift in the ethnic makeup of Canadian society and the concentration of ethnic votes in certain metropolitan centers such as Toronto, Montreal, and British Columbia, no political party can ignore the reality of being attentive to new Canadians if it aims to knock on the doors of political power at the national level. This emerging reality of Canadian society explains why the Conservative Party of Canada unlike its predecessors has tacitly eschewed launching direct attacks on multiculturalism and immigration policy. The existence of a fractured nationalism as manifested in the fragmentation of national identity, has reduced the ability of populist parties to play the card of nationalism to rally Canadians against the threat of outsiders. Furthermore, the consolidation and institutionalization of multiculturalism has closed off an avenue for a significant backlash against immigration policy.

Due to the historical permeation of Canadian national discourse with the exigency of maintaining national unity and regional accommodation, and the perpetuation of a classless image of Canada by the Liberal Party, the latitude for class politics by right and left-wing political forces is constrained. Finally, the anti-American ingredient of Canadian political culture that in the past fueled Canadian nationalism as a mobilizing tool by radical political forces, is no longer an effective strategy that could be utilized by populist forces, particularly left-wing populism, to generate political support. Conditions such as the high level of US ownership of the leading sectors of the Canadian economy which in the early second part of the twentieth century facilitated the ability of radical leftist political forces to harness the anti-American element of Canadian political culture to mobilize Canadians to advance their political objectives have lost their appeal. The gradual continental economic integration, the decline in US ownership of Canadian industry, the ability of Canadian capital to expand its international scale of operation, and growing public support for international trade have all diminished the appeal of economic nationalism that was in the past utilized by radical leftist political forces as an anti-American mobilization tactic.

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this research as no data were generated or analyzed.

Thomas Kurer ( 2020 ) has argued that the disadvantages of employment transformation for semiskilled workers and ensuing changes in the social hierarchy, not impoverishment, generate support for right-wing populist political parties. Kurer’s argument seems to be plausible. However, it should be noted that changes in social status are corollaries of economic transformation which cannot be analyzed independently from overall economic transformation and economic crisis that engender economic insecurity and economic deprivation.

As a well-known populist premier of Alberta from 1935 to 1943, William Eberhart introduced the direct democratic measure of recall but scrapped the principle when his own constituents decided to recall him (Wiseman, 1995 : p. 227).

Strategic voting refers to a voting situation where the voter is under the impression that their preferred party has no chance of winning the seat, and they therefore, vote for another party that has the chance of defeating the party that they dislike most.

The consolidation of multiculturalism as a bulwark against anti-immigration backlash does not mean that there are no conflictual non-economic variables such as religious and cultural values that can provide a demand for populist parties and populist political figures. The ongoing cross-Canada protests against the controversial sex education curriculum that are spearheaded by religious and conservative parents provide strong ammunition for populist forces. However, neither right-wing nor left-wing populist forces can harness this movement to advance their objectives. The majority of these religious and conservative parents are from visible minority groups who at the same time oppose the anti-immigration orientation of the right-wing populist party in Canada. On the other hand, the left-wing populist forces which have endorsed identity politics and have historically supported the rights of socially marginalized groups, cannot ally themselves with this movement which is depicted by many as an anti-LGBTQ crusade (Mason and Hamilton, 2023 ).

The Third Option which is associated with the policy proposals of Trudeau’s administration in the 1970s, referred to a range of choices that were available to Canada. Either maintaining its current relations or intensifying and deepening its relations with the US. However, in order to consolidate Canada’s independence and hence diminish Canada’s trade dependency on the US, Canada had to diversify its trade relations.

A left-leaned radical movement within the NDP in the 1960s and 1970s which identified American control of the Canadian economy as the impending threat to Canadian survival, the Waffle movement which was mainly led by university professors, embraced a socialist and nationalist policy platform aimed at turning Canada into an independent socialist country characterized by substituting US private ownership of Canadian industry with public ownership. The Waffle movement also called for the establishment of an independent Canadian labor movement and endorsed Quebec’s self-determination.

Kim Richard Nossal ( 2005 ) argues that the Canadian leftist nationalist movement has shifted its opposition away from the United States to the global capital, and remaining anti-Americanism in Canadian political culture is mainly directed toward a particular U.S. policy or personality.

Based on the most recent survey of Canadian attitudes, “Almost three-quarters of Canadians have a ‘very favorable’ view of international trade…” (Saunders, 2018 ).

Furthermore, income inequality in Canada is lower than income inequality in many OECD countries (OECD, 2023 ). This also reduces the ability of populist political forces particularly, the leftist populist forces to wage class politics.

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Karimi, S. Populism and the quest for political power: the pitfalls to populist electoral success in Canada. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 220 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02683-5

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Power and politics in different change discourses.

1. Introduction

2. research methodology—literature review, 3. concepts of power and politics, 4. using the metamodel of organizational change to examine the role of power and politics in change, 5. political interpretation of organizational change from the normative discourse, 5.1. exploration, 5.2. planning, 5.3. action, 5.4. integration, 6. political interpretation of organizational change from the interpretive discourse, 6.1. scanning phase, 6.2. interpretation phase, 6.3. learning phase, 6.4. incorporation phase, 7. political interpretation of organizational change from the critical discourse, 7.1. having a voice, 7.2. critical reflection, 7.3. emancipation, 7.4. democratic decision making, 8. political interpretation of organizational change from the dialogic discourse, 9. conclusions, author contributions, conflicts of interest.

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Maes, G.; Van Hootegem, G. Power and Politics in Different Change Discourses. Adm. Sci. 2022 , 12 , 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci12020064

Maes G, Van Hootegem G. Power and Politics in Different Change Discourses. Administrative Sciences . 2022; 12(2):64. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci12020064

Maes, Guido, and Geert Van Hootegem. 2022. "Power and Politics in Different Change Discourses" Administrative Sciences 12, no. 2: 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci12020064

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Power, Politics, and Ethics in Research

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Politics are used for the purpose of constructing and maintaining control over the research process and its products; because research produces knowledge and knowledge can be a means for obtaining the power. Ethics and politics are normally considered domains that do not mix, rather there remain conflicts. The conflict between scientific research ethics and politics is not different. There are many ways of exercising the power and politics on research and researcher; hence the role of ethics comes. Other than this, ethics is also important at personal level (personal ethics). This chapter helps to understand the nature of power and politics and the critical role of ethics in scientific research, especially remote sensing research.

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Bhatta, B. (2013). Power, Politics, and Ethics in Research. In: Research Methods in Remote Sensing. SpringerBriefs in Earth Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6594-8_6

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All the Autocrat's Men

World Politics contributors Edward Goldring and Peter Ward on the inner workings of North Korea’s political elites

In the July 2024 issue ( Volume 76, Issue 3 ) of  World Politics , Edward Goldring, lecturer in political science at the University of Melbourne, and Peter Ward, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute, argue that incumbents in autocracies prepare for succession by building a power base of elites outside their inner circle, for their preferred successor. Doing so helps the successor to stabilize the regime. They test their theory “on the prominent but puzzling case of North Korea, when Kim Jong Il was preparing for succession to Kim Jong Un,” they write in their article. “Prior to Kim Jong Il’s death, experts were skeptical about Kim Jong Un’s ability to survive, let alone consolidate power… Unlike when Kim Jong Il came to power after years of preparation, Kim Jong Un was relatively young with limited exposure to North Korean elite politics. So how did Kim Jong Il create the conditions for North Korea to pull off a second peaceful succession?”

In the first in our  Storied Teller series — designed to extend  World Politics’ content to a non-academic audience — the journal’s executive editor Emily Babson speaks with Goldring and Ward about their article and why it’s important to include North Korea in research on comparative authoritarianism. 

Can you talk about why succession is so important to the case of North Korea, and to other autocracies?

Ward: North Korea is itself a brittle sociopolitical and economic system. Since 1994, it’s acquired nuclear weapons capability. Thus, succession as a potential cause of political instability is an issue with far-reaching ramifications for the region and the world.

Goldring: Succession has been described as the thorny problem for autocrats to resolve; research shows that in autocracies in Africa, regimes have often collapsed after the first leader died. Increasingly, though, in recent years, we’ve seen regimes, including in Asia, navigate succession. There’s been a big focus in research recently on democratic backsliding, but if we want to understand why so many people are living under autocracy — given that over 70% of the world’s population lives under autocracy — understanding succession is absolutely crucial to understanding why this is the case.

You highlight the role that elite support plays in empowering the successor, so he or she can govern and maintain power. Why is helping the successor to govern so important? 

Goldring: We contend that the management of elites prior to succession is about empowering the successor who hasn't yet come to power, so that when he does, he can govern properly. Victor Shih's work, Coalitions of the Weak , posits that dictators don't care what happens after they die, an insight he's gleaned from studying Mao in China. Our evidence from North Korea, however, suggests that dictators do care what happens after they die. We argue that this is because often they want to protect their kin and their allies who have played key parts in their lives while they were alive. It’s also about legacy and policies. Getting in place the right person is crucial. Having in place a successor who they have empowered, who they can also count on to help them stay out of prison, or keep them out of The Hague, if they’re still alive after leaving office is also really important. 

Ward: The dictator’s successor needs to appear plausible. If the dictator’s successor doesn’t look like they will be able to take power after the dictator is gone, then this will further weaken the dictator in a crucial time for the regime. Had Kim Jong Un not appeared to be a plausible replacement for his father, then this may have harmed the regime or hurt Kim Jong Un. 

Can you speak to your methodology? What data did you collect, and why? And how did you collect it?

Goldring: I often get asked, “How do you study North Korea?” My answer is, “It depends on what question you’re interested in.” If someone were interested in studying the relationship between nuclear tests and and stock markets in South Korea, for example, those data are all publicly available and you could study that easily. Through reading North Korea-focused literature, we spotted a common theme: everyone pinpointed Kim Jong-Il’s stroke in August 2008 as the moment when he realized his own mortality and began planning for succession. It gave us what social scientists call a “plausibly exogenous shock,” where we can study a before and after. Since our contention is that elite management matters, we needed data about what elite management looked like in North Korea. That’s when we concluded that leadership event data would be a good way to study this. Whenever Kim Jong-Il went to an event, he had X number of officials, studiously writing in their notebooks, with him. All the information for those events came from North Korea state propaganda. We were interested in the signals that the regime was trying to send regarding the importance of different elites, even to each other, within the regime, and we complemented this by collecting biographical information on all these elites from publicly available South Korea-based sources, such as the Ministry of Unification.

In a counterfactual universe, Kim Jong Il hasn’t had a stroke. How might have this affected his succession planning, if at all?

Ward: Our information indicates that Kim Jong-Il was not immediately thinking about appointing a successor before his stroke and was still telling officials that he planned to lead the country potentially for decades going forward. He had toyed with the idea of anointing one of his other children as successor, at least according to high ranking defector statements to outside journalists. I would suggest had Kim Jong-Il not had a stroke, it's very likely that we would not have seen the kinds of elite management techniques that he did decide to use in 2008, because our data very clearly demonstrate that there were sudden and dramatic shifts in the way he managed elites. 

Why is it important to include North Korea in research on comparative authoritarianism?

Ward: North Korea is a unique system, which makes it an appealing case to study. But the deeper you get into it, the more limiting this is methodologically. It’s helpful to use theories that are used outside of the North Korean context to make more sense of the North Korea case. If we were only to use the conceptual language that the North Korean state itself uses, this would also severely limit our capacity to understand what’s going on inside that country. The flipside of this is that North Korea is not quite as atypical as the North Korean leadership likes to present itself. North Korea has a vast security sector with substantial coup-proofing issues, for instance; as a result, lots of latencies are built into its military organizational structure. Its police state uses methods that are common to the way secret police work in any dictatorship. And, as we show in our article, this is also true for elite dynamics. There are things that could be learned from the North Korean case, which are applicable more broadly.

To read Goldring and Ward’s full article, “Elite Management before Autocratic Leader Succession: Evidence from North Korea,” please visit Project Muse .

Integrating Leadership, Power and Politics and Its Impact on Organization

IMPACT: International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Literature (IMPACT: IJRHAL), Vol. 6, Issue 4, Apr 2018, 1-6

6 Pages Posted: 27 Jul 2018

Saloni Arora

University of Delhi - Jesus and Mary College

Rableen Kaur Rao

Department of Commerce,Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi; Shaheed Rajguru College of Applied Sciences For Women, University of Delhi

Date Written: April 30, 2018

Organizations consist of resources in terms of both human and material. The human resources in an organization plan and organize the structure to convert the material resources into consumable products. In order to convert the resource, choices have to be made. The role of leadership helps to use his skill, knowledge, capabilities and some kind of politics to make decisions and also uses his power to ensure that his decisions are accepted. Thus, the impact of a leader using his power and politics in an organization is important to get a competitive advantage. Indeed, the survival is a political act in an organization.

Keywords: Leadership, Power, Politics, Organizational Performance

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Saloni Arora (Contact Author)

University of delhi - jesus and mary college ( email ).

Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110021 India

Department of Commerce,Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi ( email )

Delhi, 110007 India

Shaheed Rajguru College of Applied Sciences For Women, University of Delhi ( email )

University of Delhi New Delhi India

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Political Polarization and Finance

We review an empirical literature that studies how political polarization affects financial decisions. We first discuss the degree of partisan segregation in finance and corporate America, the mechanisms through which partisanship may influence financial decisions, and available data sources to infer individuals' partisan leanings. We then describe and discuss the empirical evidence. Our review suggests an economically large and often growing partisan gap in the financial decisions of households, corporate executives, and financial intermediaries. Partisan alignment between individuals explains team and financial relationship formation, with initial evidence suggesting that high levels of partisan homogeneity may be associated with economic costs. We conclude by proposing several promising directions for future research.

No funding was received for this project. We are grateful to William Cassidy, Maarten Meeuwis, and William Mullins for sharing their comments. We also thank Terry Cheng and Anushri Jain for excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Senior Projects Spring 2024

Ancient china’s political legacies: how national identity and historical narratives construct images of global power.

Kelany Michel De La Cruz Reyes , Bard College Follow

Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Asian Studies

Project Advisor 1

Robert Culp

Abstract/Artist's Statement

To understand the role of a nation-state within the international system, it is important to understand how that nation-state identifies itself and the role they wish to perform as an active actor in the global community. The People’s Republic of China, as a growing global power, is often criticized for how it approaches international relations and how it deals with foreign policies. Oftentimes, it is feared or seen as a threat because its domestic policies do not align with the values and ideals of powerful nations– these states are often identified as Western powers. Nevertheless, modern China continues to strive to establish itself as a global leader. As part of its approach to receiving affirmation from the international community, the People’s Republic of China is looking back at its history and creating historical narratives that emphasize its attributes as a righteous and valuable member of the international community. China is defining itself in new ways, yet still uses rhetoric related to its late imperial times, which it led with a hegemonic approach. In contemporary times, it is not clear if it seeks hegemony or its new shared idea of a democratized international relations system. As a result, this research paper seeks to examine how China is using its historical narrative and self-conception to present itself as a leader in the global community. (This paper analyzes how the Tianxia and Tribute Systems influence modern Chinese political thinking.)

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De La Cruz Reyes, Kelany Michel, "Ancient China’s Political Legacies: How National Identity and Historical Narratives Construct Images of Global Power" (2024). Senior Projects Spring 2024 . 65. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2024/65

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Feature   Aug 6, 2024

Political Violence in America: Causes, Consequences, and Countermeasures

In the wake of this most recent incident, the Ash Center convened a panel of experts to discuss Americans’ attitudes toward political violence and explore strategies for counteracting and de-escalating future violent acts to prevent them from becoming an accepted social norm.

Democratic Reform

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has stoked Americans’ fears of rising political violence across the country. It is no longer an aberration; in recent years, it has impacted people at every level of the political process, from the President to Congress to poll workers. While the vast majority of the population, across the political spectrum, reject political violence entirely, “a number of different polls have come out in recent years, in recent months, suggesting growing anxiety about political violence in general, with some polls reporting modest increases in the proportion of respondents who would tolerate or even condone political violence against members of the opposing party,” shares host Erica Chenoweth, academic dean for faculty engagement and Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School. “Since the COVID-19 pandemic, America has witnessed an era of political violence unparalleled since at least the 1960s,” they added, quoting political scientist Robert Pape.

The following excerpts, edited for clarity and length, are taken from the remarks of the speakers:

The threat of political violence is just as detrimental to the American psyche as the violent events themselves.

“Threats are, right now in my view, doing most of the damage for a country of 330 million people thereabouts. The actual incident of physical political violence is relatively small depending on how we define the term.”

— Hardy Merriman , President, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict; Author of “Harnessing Our Power to End Political Violence (HOPE)”

“Turnout tends to be lower when people fear that the elections might be violent, when they fear it wouldn’t be safe for them to go out and vote … Even if they don’t think they would actually be hurt, they are deterred from voting if there’s a violent atmosphere surrounding the election.”

— Sarah Birch , Professor of Political Science at King’s College London and author of Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order

“The First Amendment protects lots of scary things that you can say and do to legitimately affect the political behavior of officials, businesses, citizens … of all kinds of folks. So, the threats have skyrocketed.”

How we talk about political violence plays a vital role in shaping public sentiment around safety.

“To quell anxieties, it’s important that we also communicate that many communities won’t be at increased risk because we know from other studies that political violence tends to be quite localized.”

“It’s so important not to minimize what’s going on, but also to keep a healthy perspective relative to the fact that people overwhelmingly reject political violence and that, in general in our country, people have been able to vote safely, especially relative to many other places in the world.”

— Erica Chenoweth

“Political violence is an act of desperation. It’s the loser’s gambit. It’s what you do when you’re not winning the argument, the national conversation. I think that rather than cover violence as this sort of breathless, very frightening thing, we want to reframe and think of it more as this was a desperate act.”

— Lilliana Mason , Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Co-author of “Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for American Democracy”

“I think it’s important to begin to reframe this problem, not just as a threat maker and a person who is targeted but also build a narrative that incitement is a key part of this. And the inciters don’t get off the hook … they get to profit the most from their work, and then can simultaneously distance themselves from the actual threat.”

Liliana Mason explains that combating political violence requires strong leadership.

“Most of our data has shown that it’s very easy for leaders to reduce approval of violence. It’s quite simple, all they have to do is say, ‘Don’t do that.’

… We have the power to change Americans’ attitudes about political violence if our leaders are willing to do the responsible thing and provide leadership that keeps our democracy functioning peacefully … Leadership is extraordinarily important. We want responsible leaders who provide an example of how to be a member of a democracy for people who support them or not. But the problem with that is that we can’t control our leaders.”

Condemning political violence is a group effort.

“At the very least, we need to agree that violence isn’t the way that we’re going to get things done. No matter how much you may politically disagree with your neighbor, chances are they agree that violence is not acceptable too, and it is not how they want to get things done in this country”

“A community that will tolerate violence will get violence. A community that does not tolerate violence is much less likely to have violence. And I think it is down to every single citizen to condemn violence and to talk in such a way that makes it unacceptable.”

“Our strength is in finding each other. Our strength is in our [allies], of which there are many, and we all have skills and networks to which we can contribute … There’s enormous power to tap into, and it depends on our unity, it depends on our strategy, it depends on our ability to make political violence backfire,”

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Aug 14, 2024

Jail-Based Voting in Denver: A Case Study

In this latest report on providing access to registration and voting for the hundreds of thousands of Americans being held in jails without having been convicted, Tova Wang looks at how Denver – and the State of Colorado – have become a model for the nation.

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Jun 26, 2024

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How do states fill vacancies in the U.S. Senate? It depends on the state

This year, as in every even-numbered year, about a third of U.S. Senate seats are up for election. Given the 51-49 split in the Senate between Democrats and Republicans (including the four independents who caucus with Democrats), each of those races has the potential to tip the chamber’s balance of power. But elections aren’t the only way that can happen.

We compiled information on state procedures for filling U.S. Senate vacancies from each state’s online code of state law. Data on senators’ ages, party affiliation and length of service comes from the  Biographical Directory of the United States Congress .

All ages are calculated as of July 31, 2024. In the comparison of senators’ and governors’ party affiliations, the four independent senators are counted as Democrats, since they all caucus with the Senate Democrats.

Should a sitting senator resign, die or otherwise leave office during their term, governors in 45 states have the power to appoint a temporary replacement. In most of those states, governors have free rein to appoint whomever they wish, with the appointee serving until a successor is elected to fill out the rest of the term.

This has already happened twice during the current Congress. In January 2023, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska resigned to become president of the University of Florida. Nebraska’s GOP governor, Jim Pillen, appointed the state’s former governor , Pete Ricketts, to replace Sasse. (Ricketts is running in a special election this year to complete the rest of Sasse’s term, which ends in January 2027.)

And in September 2023, longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, died at age 90. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler to fill the vacancy. (Butler is not running for the remainder of Feinstein’s term or for the new term that begins in January 2025.)

A third senatorial appointment likely will come soon. Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who has been convicted of multiple federal corruption charges , has said he will resign his seat effective Aug. 20. Gov. Phil Murphy, a fellow Democrat, is expected to quickly appoint a successor to Menendez.

There may be another appointment, too. Should the Republican presidential ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance win in November, GOP Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine would appoint someone to fill Vance’s Senate seat.

The possibility of appointed senators tipping the partisan balance – or at least giving an electoral advantage to one party or the other – is brought into sharper relief when one considers that this is the oldest Senate of any in U.S. history . The  mean  age of current U.S. senators, as of July 31, is 65.2. Almost a third of senators (31) are in their 70s, five are in their 80s, and one (Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley) will turn 91 in September.

One senator in the 80-plus club, Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin (age 80), is retiring at the end of his term this year. Two octogenarian independents – Bernie Sanders of Vermont (82) and Angus King of Maine (80) – are running for reelection. Iowa’s Grassley won his eighth term in 2022. The terms of the other two oldest senators – Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell (82) and Idaho’s Jim Risch (81) – don’t expire until 2027.

Senate replacement procedures vary by state

The current system for filling vacant Senate seats dates to the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913. Along with letting people elect their senators directly – state legislatures had chosen them up to that point – the amendment gave states the option of letting their governors appoint temporary replacements.

The only states  not  to do so are Kentucky, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. In those states, vacancies can only be filled by special election. Kentucky is the latest to join this group, after its majority-Republican legislature took the appointment power away from Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear earlier this year.

Among the 45 states that do give their governors authority to name replacement senators, 11 limit their field of choice in some way. Six states – Hawaii, Maryland, Montana, North Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming – make the governor choose from a list of three nominees submitted by the previous senator’s party. Utah requires the same kind of list, but from the state legislature. Arizona, Nevada and Oklahoma simply require the governor to choose someone from the previous senator’s party.

Connecticut has the most restrictive rules: The governor can fill a Senate vacancy only if there’s a year or less remaining in the term, and their choice must be approved by a two-thirds vote in each house of the state legislature.

One reason for such limitations is to prevent a governor from appointing someone of their own party to a Senate seat formerly held by the other party. In 2013, for instance, New Jersey’s then-Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, appointed state Attorney General and fellow Republican Jeffrey Chiesa to the seat that had been held by the late Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat. Chiesa served for just under five months, until Democrat Cory Booker won the special election for the rest of Lautenberg’s term.

Currently, 13 of 50 governors belong to a different party than at least one of their state’s senators. But only seven of those 13 would be able to do what Christie did in New Jersey. The others either can’t appoint temporary senators at all or are required to choose someone of the same party as the former senator.

The 17th Amendment also gives states considerable leeway in deciding how long temporary senators can serve until a special election. In 31 states, special Senate elections are held concurrently with regular general elections. In some cases, those special elections coincide with the next scheduled general election, but in other cases – especially if the vacancy occurs late in the election cycle – they coincide with the general election  after  the next one.

Six states have specific timetables for holding special Senate elections, usually a certain number of days following the start of the vacancy. Nine states either set a separate date for the special election or hold it concurrently with the next general election, depending on when the vacancy occurs. And four states have few or no rules on when a special election must be held, effectively leaving the decision up to the governor.

Note: This is an update of a post first published May 3, 2022.

• State & Local Government

Drew DeSilver is a senior writer at Pew Research Center .

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A Review on the Concept of Leadership, Power and Politics

• December 2020
• International Journal on Leadership 8(1):29-34

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