Editorial to special issue on rational choice and political power

The literature on power is something of a wormhole between the worlds of political philosophy and political science. It ranges over empirical strategies for measuring power through to the debate surrounding its normative implications. Empirical political scientists engage with Marx’s moral imperatives and normative philosophers pick holes in survey methodology. There are few literatures that are so splendidly cross-disciplinary in nature – and few books that captures it better than Keith Dowding’s Rational Choice and Political Power. The contributions to this special issue, designed to engage with the book’s recently published second edition, all reflect this. From Greg Whitfield’s article on the normative project of public reason, through Pamela Pansardi’s reflections on conceptual analysis, to Jim Johnson’s critique of Dowding’s use of formal modelling for empirical explanation, the issue sports a wide range of perspectives that stand testament to the book’s breadth. While diverse, they all touch on the major challenge Dowding tackles for traversing both the empirical and normative domains: distinguishing what is the case from what one wants it to be. It is easy, for example, to say a political party is powerful when you want the party to be held to account and powerless when you do not. Along these lines, Dowding (2019, p. 173) suggests in the new Postscript that ‘the original idea for RCPP came from my critique of Steven Lukes’s three dimensions of power. I thought the collective action problem could explain everything which he thought required adding dimensions of power’. Workers may not push for legislation in their interest because they are crippled by collective action problems, the critique goes, not because a power elite is controlling them. Marx’s prophecy of a Communist revolution assumes that once the proletariat wakes up to their real interest individual workers will revolt and smash the means of production. But where violence takes effort and in the short term runs the risk of incarceration, it is presuming a lot to think large groups can coordinate in the face of free-riding incentives. While we might rightly want to hold capitalists responsible for their privilege, their power is underlain by the collective action problem faced by the many. Steven Lukes responds in the issue with his article ‘Power and Rational Choice’. He agrees that we do not need to impute the power of outsiders to explain a group’s lack of power, calling it the ‘paranoid fallacy’, and questions ‘just how far [he and Dowding] do part ways’ (Lukes, 2021). There are cases though that do appear to stir rival judgements between the two. One of the more contentious is in what sense sexual or racial bias constitutes an exercise of power. When an individual unconsciously gains from this kind of bias, such as when a male mechanic is judged more authoritative than a female engineer purely because they are male, Dowding would describe the judgement as the male mechanic’s luck that he might then use as a source of power. Lukes argues this would overlook the mechanisms that sustain and reproduce the power structure. When JOURNAL OF POLITICAL POWER 2021, VOL. 14, NO. 2, 277–280 https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2021.1900468