Alienation and "Little Acts of Rebellion'": Understandings of Politics, Power, and Contesting Heteronormativity

Abstract

Political science is the study of power, yet work on how members of the public conceptualize power is limited. This dissertation explores how people think about power and how their perceptions relate to their political engagement. I conducted 33 interviews, resulting in nearly 50 hours of discussion on how people define "politics", participate, conceptualize power, and assess how much power they have. Those I spoke with had a broad definition of politics that can be summarized as belief in how things should be and efforts to shape the way things are. Interviewees engage in the standard forms of participation described in the literature, but the primary method of engagement was through actions in their everyday life, such as efforts to persuade friends and family. At the most abstract level, interviewees defined power as the ability to get what one wants; however, their understanding of power was far more complex and nuanced. Fifteen themes emerged in how interviewees discussed power. Four different dimensions of power underlaid these themes: collective power to shape large-scale politics, individual agency as political power, social manifestations, and a sense of hope(lessness). From the 15 themes that emerged in my discussions, I created a set of 40 test questions for a new measure of how survey respondents assess how much power they have. I fielded these questions on a convenience sample of 400 people recruited from CloudResearch. I performed factor analysis to identify dimensions in the data and select a subset of questions. The survey data reflected the interview analysis, and four dimensions emerged: aggregate power, individual power, ability to pursue self-actualization, and hope. The result was four Perceptions of Power (PoP) scales with a total of 23 questions. I then tested how the scales correlate with a range of different types of participation. In general, the aggregate scale correlates with intent to participate in larger-scale and collective forms of participation and less so with more local and individual-level forms. The individual scale has a significant and positive correlation with most participation items, although the correlations are stronger with more local and less collective forms of participation.