Causal Theories of Power

There are key similarities between what is ordinarily considered an ascription of social power and that which is considered under the more general rubric of a “cause.” At one end of the historical scale, Thomas Hobbes asserted, “Power and Cause are the same thing.” At the other end, Herbert Simon asserted that we can substitute the locution “i has power over j” with “i's behavior causes j's behavior,” and William Riker argued that power and causality are really two sides of the same coin, so that we can delete the concept of power from the vocabulary of social science and political philosophy.

These claims are not surprising because in social contexts we generally use the terms power and [Page 93]cause to refer to circumstances related to the potential or actual “inducement of change” or of “making things happen” by some agent or group of agents against a set of known background conditions and regularities. That is, we are concerned with an asymmetric relation between two distinct events in the same time series, in which one ancestral event, an action on the part of some agent (or group of agents) has the efficacy to produce, or be part of the production, of another, the effect (which may or may not be the response of another agent or group of agents). If a chairperson of a committee has a casting vote and breaks a tie that leads to the acceptance of a new policy, we can say that the chair “induced a change” or “made things happen” and thus “exercised his or her power” or “was a causal factor” for the outcome. If there are good reasons to believe that the committee vote will be tied, we say that the chairperson has the power to force the outcome in which the policy is approved. Similarly, if j alters his or her course of action of getting into his or her car by instead handing the keys to i who is pointing a gun at j's head, we say that i had power over j because the latter did something he or she would not have otherwise done. We say i had power over j if he or she caused j to act in a particular manner; we can rewrite this as i “induced a change” (of j's behavior) or could be said to have “made things happen” (the change of j's behavior or j's performance or nonperformance of some specific action).