Centralization of power

(noun)

Centralization of power occurs in governments in which power or legal authority is exerted or coordinated by a de facto political executive to which federal states, local authorities, and smaller units are considered subject. In a national context, centralization occurs in the transfer of power to a typically sovereign nation state.

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Examples of Centralization of power in the following topics:

  • Study questions

    • Most approaches suggest that centrality confers power and influence.
    • How does Bonacich measure the power of an actor?
    • Which studies used the ideas of structural advantage, centrality, power and influence?
    • Can you think of a real-world example of an actor who might be powerful but not central?
    • Who might be central, but not powerful?

  • State Formation

    • Theories explaining the origins and formation of states all revolve around the ability to centralize power in a sustainable way.
    • Most agree that the earliest states emerged when agriculture and writing made it possible to centralize power in a durable way.
    • Thus, states have evolved from relatively simple but powerful central powers to complex and highly organized institutions.
    • In hydraulic civilizations, control over water concentrated power in central despotic states.
    • Discuss the formation of states and centralization of authority in modern history

  • Bonacich's approach

    • Fred is clearly more central, but is he more powerful?
    • Bonacich proposed that both centrality and power were a function of the connections of the actors in one's neighborhood.
    • Actor A's power and centrality are functions of her own connections, and also the connections of actor B.
    • We do this by selecting a positive weight of the "attenuation factor" or Beta parameter) in the dialog of Network>Centrality>Power, as shown in figure 10.6.
    • The Bonacich approach to degree based centrality and degree based power are fairly natural extensions of the idea of degree centrality based on adjacencies.

  • Introduction: The several faces of power

    • In this chapter we will look at some of the main approaches that social network analysis has developed to study power, and the closely related concept of centrality.
    • This logic underlies measures of centrality and power based on actor degree, which we will discuss below.
    • Network analysts are more likely to describe their approaches as descriptions of centrality than of power.
    • It is more correct to describe network approaches this way -- measures of centrality -- than as measures of power.
    • But, as we have suggested here, there are several reasons why central positions tend to be powerful positions.

  • Monarchy

    • A monarchy is a form of government in which supreme power is absolutely or nominally lodged with an individual, who is the head of state.
    • A monarchy is a form of government in which supreme power is absolutely or nominally lodged with an individual, who is the head of state, often for life or until abdication.
    • Monarchy now often takes the form of a constitutional monarchy, in which the monarch retains a unique legal and ceremonial role, but exercises limited or no political power pursuant to a constitution or tradition which allocates governing authority elsewhere.
    • For example, monarchies are often though of as highly centralized forms of absolute power.
    • But holding unlimited political power in the state is not the defining characteristic, as many constitutional monarchies such as the United Kingdom and Thailand are considered monarchies yet their monarchs have limited political power.

  • Introduction to degree centrality

    • So, a very simple, but often very effective measure of an actor's centrality and power potential is their degree.
    • With directed data, however, it can be important to distinguish centrality based on in-degree from centrality based on out-degree.
    • Simply counting the number of in-ties and out-ties of the nodes suggests that certain actors are more "central" here (e.g. 2, 5, 7).
    • It also appears that this network as a whole may have a group of central actors, rather than a single "star."
    • We can see "centrality" as an attribute of individual actors as a consequence of their position; we can also see how "centralized" the graph as a whole is -- how unequal is the distribution of centrality.

  • Introduction to betweenness centrality

    • Each one of these people could delay the request, or even prevent my request from getting through.
    • This gives the people who lie "between" me and the Chancellor power with respect to me.
    • To stretch the example just a bit more, suppose that I also have an appointment in the school of business, as well as one in the department of sociology.
    • Having more than one channel makes me less dependent, and, in a sense, more powerful.
    • For networks with binary relations, Freeman created some measures of the centrality of individual actors based on their betweenness, as well overall graph centralization.

  • Eigenvector of geodesic distances

    • The results are very similar to those for our earlier analysis of closeness centrality, with actors #7, #5, and #2 being most central, and actor #6 being most peripheral.
    • Last, we examine the overall centralization of the graph, and the distribution of centralities.
    • This suggests that, overall, there are not great inequalities in actor centrality or power, when measured in this way.
    • This is much less than the network centralization measure for the "raw" closeness measure (49.3), and suggests that some of the apparent differences in power using the raw closeness approach may be due more to local than to global inequalities.
    • Geodesic distances among actors are a reasonable measure of one aspect of centrality -- or positional advantage.

  • Flow centrality

    • The betweenness centrality measure we examined above characterizes actors as having positional advantage, or power, to the extent that they fall on the shortest (geodesic) pathway between other pairs of actors.
    • The idea is that actors who are "between" other actors, and on whom other actors must depend to conduct exchanges, will be able to translate this broker role into power.
    • The flow approach to centrality expands the notion of betweenness centrality.
    • By this more complete measure of betweenness centrality, actors #2 and #5 are clearly the most important mediators.
    • Despite this relatively high amount of variation, the degree of inequality, or concentration in the distribution of flow betweenness centralities among the actors is fairly low -- relative to that of a pure star network (the network centralization index is 25.6%).

  • Summary

    • Whole social structures may also be seen as displaying high levels or low levels of power as a result of variations in the patterns of ties among actors.
    • And, the degree of inequality or concentration of power in a population may be indexed.
    • Power arises from occupying advantageous positions in networks of relations.
    • We have reviewed three basic approaches to the "centrality" of individuals positions, and some elaborations on each of the three main ideas of degree, closeness, and betweenness.
    • The question of how structural position confers power remains a topic of active research and considerable debate.