Power, Order and the Politics of Social Policy in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

If there is one topic on which political science ought to be able to stake out a distinct claim to fame against other social sciences, it is power. From Machiavelli in the Renaissance Florence of the Medici to Bismarck and Pope Leo XIII in late nineteenth-century Prussia and Rome, rulers and their counsellors have been studied by political scientists in how they have used their state power to establish and consolidate political order. In the post-war decades, early post-behavioural theories by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) and Steven Lukes (1974) represented seminal breakthroughs. They emphasized the hidden faces of power, suggesting how the asymmetric distribution of political and economic rights can structure relations of dominance in society above and beyond any observable decisions taken by ruling elites. Even in the absence of manifest conflict — what Lukes called the first face of power — powerholders often have the ability to stack the deck of cards of social life in ways such as to avoid the making of decisions (the second face of power), for instance through institutional design and agenda setting. Moreover, powerholders can shape the definitions of subordinate actors’ identities and interests, thereby forcing them to pre-emptively adapt to newly stacked decks of cards (the third face).

There is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new order of things; for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old order as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new.

(Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VI)

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research in Vienna for providing me with an excellent research environment during the writing of this chapter, and to Alfio Cerami, Sean Hanley and Jana Vobecka for helpful comments and suggestions.