Book Review of Who Rules America?

According to Domhoff, power is based on who has the money and resources. Wealth and income play an important role in determining who has the power. The individuals that occupy prestigious positions and take part in making decisions hold a great amount of power. Groups that are strongly represented are said to have a great amount of power since their viewpoints can be put into effect, whereas groups that have little to no representation have little to no power since their ideas are not heard. The upper class is over-represented in many institutions which gives them a great deal of power to determine what will happen in certain situations. The lower class and women are often under-represented thus giving them little influence in making decisions.

Power is built by the winner take all political system that gives the power to those who win those positions, there is no proportional representation in the United States, thus the individuals who win the positions are the ones that can make the decisions and downplay the decisions they disagree with. Lobbyists play an important role in this part of politics, they often try to convince legislators to vote certain ways. These lobbyists generally work for large corporations and attempt to sway the Congress people minds on a specific bill in order to help the corporation.

The political parties select individuals to be candidates based upon that individual’s devotion to the power. If the individual does not go with the party’s plans, then the person is not going to be a candidate for a political position. The individuals in power want to maintain this power, so they want to shape the opinions of the public. They do this by having ads and commercials that focus on the audience that they are wanting to influence. These corporations focus the majority of their time on the middle class, since there are so many individuals in that social class, so it is most beneficial to sway this group’s opinions in favor of certain acts and legislation.

Domhoff believes that the best way for the social change to occur within the political since to decentralize the power and make it so that average individuals can share in that power is to use a clean money system in the elections. This rids politicians of their ties to corporations since the state provides a specific amount of money to each candidate running for the political position. Each individual running for office would have the same amount of money to run their campaign. This would prevent large corporations from being able to buy elections then demand the politician to repay them by voting specific ways. With the clean money system it allows average individuals to run for office so this would allow for more ideas to get into the political atmosphere.

The first article titled “Lines of Power in Exchange Networks” by Jeffrey W. Lucas and others states that power is defined by social networks, the amount of resources that the individuals have and how the resources are connected to their network’s resources, and how these resources can exclude others from being able to gain these resources. Strong power refers to the networking and how individuals in the network have differing amounts of resources and do not exclude each other, but may exclude other individuals. The resources can be shared between the individuals, but access is denied to other individuals. However, in a weak power system the amount of resources are similar from individual to individual, so there is either a large amount of exchange between the network or there is no exchange whatsoever.

The second article titled “Power and resistance” by J.M. Barbalet suggests that power is when one individual has the ability to do their own wishes even though there is a possibility of resistance. This means that an individual has the resources to be able to fight against a resistance if there were one to rise up. However, the resistance in itself is a check on the individual that holds the power to make sure that they do not step too far out of line, otherwise the resistance would turn into a form of conflict or rebellion.