Political Power

What Are The Types of Power in Politics?

Power has been classically viewed as informational or compliance-based. More recently, the three-process theory has been used to define types of power by the method of action.

Informational vs Compliance

Power is often either informational or compliance by nature. But what does this mean exactly?

Political Influence

Political influence is how political power is exerted across the world. That is, if someone can exert political influence, it suggests that they are politically powerful. One theory of how this influence is exerted is the Three-Process Theory:

Three-Process Theory

So, what is the three-process theory?

Authority

This is acceptance of the right to control based on group norms such as shared beliefs, attitudes or actions. Authority is legitimate if it is voluntary and not experienced as oppression of self or loss of power.

Persuasion

This is the capacity to persuade others that a judgment or opinion is correct, proper and valid. Any individual more influential than another will, over time, erode their authority.

Coercion

This is controlling others against their will, usually following unsuccessful attempts to exert influence or authority. Traditionally, clashes between coercion and authority have rapidly escalated into open conflict.

There are similarities between each process of power. The distinctions made by using the terms informational and compliance-based power are helpful here.

Military Power

Although we often associate political power with military power, they are not the same thing. An easy way to remember it is that military power can help political power, but political power isn't just military power.

Military Power Rankings

It is challenging to calculate a true military power ranking as size and power do not always correlate. Furthermore, there are limitations on relying on public data. Global FirePower ranked countries based on total available active military manpower using the information on airpower, manpower, land forces, naval forces, natural resources, and logistics such as ports and terminals outside the nation’s own borders.¹ Landlocked nations were penalised for lack of standing merchant marine force and lack of coastline coverage.

How is military power measured?

Traditionally, manpower, as in the number of troops or ships, was sufficient to determine the military power necessary for attack and defence from threats. This is now only referred to as a military size. Defence spending is a better indicator as complex and expensive military technology is increasingly important for new battles elsewhere. The United States currently spends the most on the military in the world.

What is Balance of Power Theory?

The idea suggests that nations are focused on preventing other states from amassing enough military power to dominate all others.

An increase in economic power is converted into military power (hard power) and the formation of counterbalancing alliances (soft power). We have seen alliances where regional powers (secondary and tertiary states) join more powerful superpowers rather than go against them.

Israel Military Power

Let's take about Israel! Case studies are great to use in your exams - be sure to use precise facts and figures to access those A*s.

Military Size

Israel is the regional military hegemony in the Middle East. According to Global FirePower, Israel has a military ranking of 20 out of 140.^1. This is the result of a large military size and impressive military technology with adequate financial backing. The country has compulsory military service for all citizens following their 18th birthday. Israel is a key global supplier of advanced weaponry, including drones, missiles, radar technology and other weapons systems.

Financial funding largely originates from the United States from such schemes, including the US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014 to regularly discuss regional defence sales with Israel and help maintain military superiority over its neighbours. This would seemingly go against the US Leahy Law, which prohibits the export of US defence articles to military units complicit in human rights abuse. However, no Israeli unit has been penalised under this law.

Israel and Palestine

The West Bank and Gaza Strip are considered to be territories under the sovereign state of Palestine. 86% of Palestinians are Muslim. This dominant religious belief is thought to be one of the causes of tensions with Israel's Jewish population, as both religions place a huge amount of importance on the region, particularly on Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is located on the West Bank, whereas the rest of the city is located in Israel. Tensions have been rising between the two nations, with Israel annexing parts of Palestine.

Israel exerts military power through heavy patrols of land, sea and air blockades around Gaza and through drone attacks on Gaza itself. This has resulted in the deaths of over 100 people. Further fighting between Gazan guerrilla paramilitaries and Israelis has resulted in thousands more deaths and demonstrations of military power. You can read more about the situation between Israel and Palestine in our explanation of Recent Conflicts.

Flags of Israel (above) & Palestine (below), Justass/ CC-BY-SA-3.0-migrated commones.wikimedia.org

How Do Superpowers Use Political and Military Power?

Superpowers use political and military power in many different ways. Stable geopolitics, such as in the form of harmonious relationships between countries, allows for the steady development of the economy. Political alliances and strong military presences are possible strategies to ensure stable geopolitics. Economic and political alliances include the European Union and the United Nations Security Council. This can work to reduce global economic inequalities by encouraging the development of low-income countries.

As well as simply to benefit other countries, superpowers have historically used political and military power to expand their influence in the geopolitical sphere. For instance, the Cold War (1947-1991) was a series of tensions between a capitalist superpower (USA) and a communist superpower (Soviet Union). Although the Cold War has come to an end, the clash between the political beliefs of both superpowers is still evident today. So much so that both the USA and Russia have been seen to offer economic and military support to nations in proxy wars. The Syrian conflict is an example of this. Arguably, these proxy wars are merely a continuation of the geopolitical clash between capitalism and communism. Therefore, superpowers have also used political and military power to further their own political and military ambitions and agendas.

Future events in the fields of the space race, nuclear arms, and cyberwars will determine the strongest political and military powers in the 21st century.

Space race

Have you heard of the space race? The rush for countries to be the first to go to space and explore it? When did this all start? Let's take a look.

History

The Cold War was a tense global conflict in a bipolar world based on the ideologies of capitalism and communism, as demonstrated by a series of competitive technologies. It is widely concluded that the launch of NASA’s first Apollo astronauts into space ended the war with the United States’ victory. In the end, both sides cooperated in setting up the International Space Station in 1998.

New Contenders

There has been a recent re-emergence of space programs developed by new superpowers such as China, India, and Russia. The former United States Vice President Mike Pence suggested that there could be a new space race as the nations aim to develop their prowess in military and national prestige. On the other hand, others have disregarded a brewing space race between nations and instead focus on space as unmarked territory for billionaires’ latest capitalist ventures. For NASA contracts, we have seen Elon Musk’s SpaceX compete with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Brandon’s Virgin Galactic in 2021.

Nuclear power

Our case study on Pakistan’s nuclear arms highlights that nations see the possession of nuclear arms as essential to prevent dominance achieved by their neighbouring countries. The issue that not all countries holding nuclear arms agree to adhere to (or even sign) treaties to limit nuclear arms production suggests that this type of weapon is a continuous threat to everyone. Since the Cold War, we have understood that any war involving 2 nuclear-armed countries may result in mass destruction of the world.

Cyberwars

War is now not only a physical conflict fought between and within countries. It may be a contest between state-sponsored hackers capable of leapfrogging borders. The first-ever web war took place in Estonia in 2007 when ethnic-Russian Estonian citizens hacked into official Estonian websites through DDoS (Distributed Denial of service). Many Estonians were unable to access their bank accounts as a result.

This shows that cyberwars are a clear mechanism to display political power because they have the capacity to have significant and long-lasting impacts on the politics, economics and social aspects of countries. Due to the globalised nature of the planet, this could have massive influence over the entire geopolitical sphere.

The first national cyberattack

Further, progress was made in the field of cyberwar in 2010, when Stuxnet was the first piece of known malware to damage physical equipment directly. It is thought to be the creation of the NSA and Israeli intelligence, designed to destroy centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear facilities.

NotPetya in 2017 took place in Ukraine, resulting in the infection of 10% of Ukraine’s computers and the paralysis of the country’s government agencies and infrastructure systems, resulting in millions of dollars in lost business and clean up costs. This is in the background of Russia’s attempt to take back Crimea. There is a question on whether we understand cyberwar's implications as Notpetya spread back to Russia, causing damage to the Russian state oil company Rosneft. Limitation treaties for nuclear arms may help, but US leaders (or any of the Five Eyes nations) do not want to impact its own NSA and cyber command services.