Conceptualizing Politics

3.   Operating areas, instruments and modus operandi of 
political power
After defining political power, let us now look at the essential features with which 
it appears and works; then at its operating areas, instruments and modus operandi.
First, it is mostly institutionalised and legitimate. What institutions and what legiti-
macy are will be examined later, but let us hold that political power, even if origi-
nated by a revolution or coup or military defeat, has the tendency to last over time, 
to percolate into a stable framework of rules and authority and to resonate with 
the preferences and the models the population, or its majority, has in mind when 
thinking about the polity.

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12  What is politics?
Second, it includes on the side of those ruled some possible degree of voluntary 
compliance with the preferences of the power holders. This excludes that a regime 
mostly consisting of the use or threat of force can be sensibly regarded as a form of 
political power. Forced dependence on arbitrary rule should be called domination
17
 
rather than power; in the extreme case we have to do with state terrorism. In many 
European countries the Nazi occupation regime (1939 or later–1944 or 1945) was 
sheer domination by state terrorism and could not be said to be endowed with 
political power; so was Japanese rule in many of the occupied territories.
Compliance can be motivated by full or half-hearted convictions or else by an 
overall assessment that compliance is, for reasons of prudence, better than opposi-
tion or rebellion. Underlying it is some sharing of ideas and beliefs between the 
rulers and the ruled ones, or, in other words, a commonality of culture. Unlike 
in the famous, rather deterministic dictum by Karl Marx (1813–1883) and Frie-
drich Engels (1820–1995),
18
 this phenomenon is well-taken in Antonio Gramsci’s 
(1891–1937) notion of hegemony, seen as the ability of the ruling class or group 
to influence and reorient the ideas heeded by the people, who are thus inclined to 
consent to the existing regime.
Third, political power is universal, in the sense that its orders are valid against 
all and everybody (erga omnes in Roman law) within a given unity. This is another 
differentiation from force, which can have full sway only on those on whom it is 
actually applied or have to fear its imminent use.
The (legal, but also effective) universality of political power as far as exerted in 
the state is made possible by its pyramidal or top-down structure, which in the early 
modern European state was imposed after the ‘intermediate bodies’ (clergy, nobility, 
towns and guilds with special jurisdictions and feudal privileges) were deprived of 
any independence and brought under the central political authority.
* * *
Political power, in combination with influence, operates mainly in two areas:
• 
it makes substantive decisions, allocating goods and recognising identities, and
• 
it determines which issues will be taken to public debate and decision making, 
which will be left out or postponed: this is the agenda-setting power in democ-
racies scattered among government, media and other power centres such as 
trade unions and industrial associations.
Agenda-setting is no less important than decision-making power, sometimes even 
more so, as it can prevent crucial issues such as emerging faults in a country’s financial 
architecture or climate change from being addressed in the policy-making process. 
The openly political (in Parliament) agenda-setting process is obviously intertwined 
with the cultural background (values, worldviews) of a people and its elites. Ideas and 
beliefs matter in domestic as well as foreign policy more than it appears in the media.
The instruments of political power, as well as influence, are incentives and sanctions, 
or positive and negative incentives. Many things can be used as incentives in one 

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Politics and power  13
way or another: money for politicians or their constituencies or clans, political friend-
ship or enmity, positions to be attributed, allocation of prestige or infamy and more.
The modus operandi of political power, but far less of influence, are manifold, but 
the basic patterns are two:
• 
compellence or in extreme cases coercion: A makes B do things (or stop doing 
things) B would not otherwise do (or stop doing). This happens only margin-
ally by physical force; economic or psychological pressure are often enough, as 
well as persuasion. 
The same holds for
• 
deterrence (A makes B keep doing or omitting to do certain things B would 
otherwise stop or start doing). The best known case, nuclear deterrence, is just a