Power Comparability
“A (actor) has power over B (respondent) to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” (Dahl, 1957, p.202-03)
Dahl (1957) suggested that there are at least five factors that to be included in the comparison of two individuals: 1) basis of their power, 2) means of employing the basis, 3) scope of their power, in type of response evoked, 4) number of comparable respondents, and 5) change in probabilities, or amount of power. (Dahl, 1957, p. 205-206) The first two are the differences in properties of the actors exercising power, and the last three are the differences in the responses of the respondents. Thus he formulated these and we use the power relations of a school board, a school head and parents as an example:
M1: Amount of power of School Board = (the probability that Parents will agree to increase tuition fees if School Board increases places for scholarships) - (the probability that Parents will agree to increase tuition fees if School Board does nothing)
M2: Amount of power of School Head = (the probability that Parents will agree to increase tuition fees if School Head increases places for scholarships) - (the probability that Parents will agree to increase tuition fees if School Head does nothing)
If M1 > M2, theoretically this ranks the amount of power the actors, i.e. school board and school head posse and the actor with the highest probability of securing the response is the more powerful (Dahl, 1957, p.208). However, Dahl saw his formula not practical unless researchers “consider carefully the goals and substance of a particular piece of research in view of the theoretical constructs one has in mind” and “define the meaning of comparability”. He suggested that the concept of power has to be defined by operational criteria according to different research settings which “power would appear to be many different concepts.” (Dahl, 1957, p. 214)
An example is the EDB’s research on the local demand for international school places (Policy 21 Limited, 2012). A part of the research aims to understand local demand for international schools. The report defined local students as “those who are Hong Kong permanent residents and do not have any foreign passport” (Policy 21 Limited, 2012, p.27). However, the grouping had indeed ignored the fact that many Hong Kong permanent residents have an overseas passport and have been living in Hong Kong since they were born. Grouping these students as international students, ignoring them from the research to understand the local demand is indeed wrongly estimating, or even ignoring the group’s influence to the sector.
Ragin (1987)’s concept on comparative analysis gave a more detailed explanation. He distinguished two meanings of unit of analysis — observational and explanatory. Using the above example, the actors (i.e. the school board, the school head and parents) are observational as they are “the units used in data collection and analysis” (Manzon, 2014, p.98), and their votes in school decisions and degree of participation in school activities are explanatory units that can be “used to account for the pattern of results obtained” (Manzon, 2014, p.98).
Considering various units of analysis of control in education, can we specific some world standards that insure power comparability? No. The concept of power is still undefined, the weight on each standard involves value and cultural judgements which make cross-national comparison questionable, and the amount of power is not stagnated over time.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development attempted to rank nation-states by the levels of decision-making for public lower secondary education (OCED, 2008) and the United Nations Development Programme (1995) tried to show the measurement of power in three domains. However these rankings did not recognise the difference in significance between the measurements. Bray (2003) pointed out the problem when he discussed the complexities to measure control involved in centralisation and decentralisation. He provided an example — the power to determine the structure of school systems might be more important than the power to hire school cleaners.