Structural power and political science in the post-crisis era

Abstract

This essay highlights productive ways in which scholars have reanimated the concept of structural power to explain puzzles in international and comparative politics. Past comparative scholarship stressed the dependence of the state on holders of capital, but it struggled to reconcile this supposed dependence with the frequent losses of business in political battles. International relation (IR) scholars were attentive to the power of large states, but mainstream IR neglected the ways in which the structure of global capitalism makes large companies international political players in their own right. To promote a unified conversation between international and comparative political economy, structural power is best conceptualized as a set of mutual dependencies between business and the state. A new generation of structural power research is more attentive to how the structure of capitalism creates opportunities for some companies (but not others) vis-à-vis the state, and the ways in which that structure creates leverage for some states (but not others) to play off companies against each other. Future research is likely to put agents -both states and large firms -in the foreground as political actors, rather than showing how the structure of capitalism advantages all business actors in the same way against non-business actors.

Renationalizing finance for development: policy space and public economic control in Bolivia

“…According to an extensive business politics literature, the ability of governments to impose their policies against business preferences depends on the extent of the mutually reinforcing structural and instrumental power of business elites vis-a-vis the state (Culpepper, 2015;Fairfield, 2015). In contrast to instrumental power which includes deliberate action to influence policy-making and depends on factors such as personal relationships with/access to policymakers, and degree of concentration and cohesion within sectors, which reduce collective action problems in lobbying (Fairfield, 2015, p. 2), structural power results from the economic position of a firm or sector.…”

“…Mass mobilization by non-elite groups 4 is an overlooked factor in the structural power literature, and can help account for variation in business power. According to the literature, non-elite groups such as labor unions or social movements can only act as a countervailing force against business instrumental power through providing attractive potential for electoral mobilization, lobbying by labor groups, or strike action, but because they do not own capital, they cannot challenge business' structural power (Culpepper, 2015;Fairfield, 2015). Yet the Bolivian case shows that non-elite groups can be important in counteracting not only instrumental, but also structural power.…”

Ideational power and pathways to legitimation in the euro crisis

“…It is also worth noting that although we develop our arguments from the starting point of an agency oriented approach to understanding relations of power, there is little doubt that structural forms of power too play an immensely important role in understanding processes of legitimation (see also Carstensen and Schmidt 2018). Notably, a particularly vibrant research agenda has formed around the argument that the structural power of finance has impacted heavily on crisis management and post-crisis reform trajectories (Culpepper andReincke 2014, Culpepper 2015), a structural power crucially shored up by the dominance of ideas that serve to legitimize the financialized economies of the West (Woll 2014). In focusing on ideational power, and the different guises under which it may be employed to build legitimacy, our framework provides a view of the ways in which agents use their structural power in concrete struggles over legitimacy, or indeed how structural power may be significantly challenged as new conceptions of legitimacy come to the fore.…”

How Do Ideas Shape National Preferences? The Financial Transaction Tax in Ireland

“…Overt clashes of preferences are only one dimension of influence, and the structural power of the financial sector has attracted much attention since the crisis (Woll 2016, 2014a, Grossman and Woll 2014, Woll 2014b, Culpepper 2015, Culpepper and Reinke 2014, Culpepper 2016, Moschella 2017, Epstein 2017. The structural significance of finance as a gatekeeper to investment accords it a privileged position in policy formation.…”

“…However, the causes and consequences of potential exit options are interpreted within a particular ideational framework. Culpepper defines structural power as 'the ways in which large companies and capital holders -in practice very often the same thing -gain influence over politics without necessarily trying to, because of the way they are built into the process of economic growth' (Culpepper 2015). In this framework, the availability of exit options (disinvestment) and the dependence of the policymakers on capital holders are the main components of structural power (Culpepper and Reinke 2014).…”