Power can be exercised in one of two ways. The first is far easier to comprehend. It is called “manifest power”. Manifest power involves one person or group of people exercising control over a second person or group of people by giving some sort of sign or signal. This includes everything from coercion to simply asking for something to be done or even giving non-verbal cues, like a police officer flashing their lights.
If a police officer were to flash their lights, every driver in the United States would know that means the police officer wants them to pull over. By making the driver pull over, the police officer is exerting manifest power on the driver. As long as there is some form of observable communication between the two parties leading to an action on one party’s behalf, that is an example of manifest power. The second way power can be exercised is called “implicit power”, and it is a lot more difficult to analyze, or even identify.
In the case of implicit power, the group being controlled is not doing something simply because they were asked or threatened to do so but because they implicitly understand that the party in power wants that thing done and, for one reason or another, the party being controlled wants to do it. The thing that makes this form of exerting power so difficult to identify is that there is often no observable communication between the two parties, but rather an implicit understanding.
It is very hard to find examples of implicit power in official governments, but in the small, unofficial rules of personal relationships, families, and other forms of social interaction, there are plenty of examples. For example, a child may clean their room without being told explicitly because they know their room is messy and their parents prefer it to be clean. However, as was previously stated, it is hard to find examples of implicit power in politics, so most official political business falls under the ‘manifest power’ category.
Plenty of examples of manifest power can be found in the workings of the U. S. Congress. For example, their process for making foreign aid policy requires the use manifest power at just about every step. To begin the process, USAID submits a requested budget to Congress, complete with justification for all the funding they are requesting. Then, the budget is run through a series of authorization and appropriation committees. It starts out in the authorization stage, where the budget has to be approved by two committees.
The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs both get their opportunity to authorize or reject the various aspects of the budget. “Authorization” mainly focuses on creating the programs that need funding, USAID will not receive any actual funding until the “appropriation” stage. Once the programs receive authorization in both houses, the bill is then passed on to both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. These committees hen evaluate how much of the requested funding each authorized program will receive.
Some programs may receive all of their requested funding, some programs might get only partially funded, and others will receive none at all, effectively reversing the authorization committees’ decisions. This is an example of manifest power- by refusing to authorize or provide funding to a particular program, Congress is outright exerting power over USAID and its leaders. Along the way, but especially in the Appropriations committee, Senators and Representatives can add in lots of “earmarks” and other restrictions on how funding can be spent.
Specifically, earmarks necessitate that certain amount of funding or percentage of funding must be spent on a particular item or program. For example, a bill on providing funding for schools might have an earmark that 10% of the money must be spent on textbooks. That might be for a practical reason, like the fact that textbooks are expensive and important for learning, but can also serve more personal political functions. Imagine the congressperson responsible for that earmark represents a district with a lot of textbook manufacturers. That will allow the congressperson to get more support for the important education bill.
Earmarks are especially abundant in foreign aid spending because foreign aid is so unpopular among constituents. Many constituents may feel that spending money abroad is counterintuitive, but if the money is being spent in a domestic economy, they may be more willing to support funding for foreign aid. For example, there is a sort of standing earmark on all food aid that any agricultural products sent for food aid must be grown inside the United States. In many cases, it would simply be cheaper to buy up local surpluses in the country and then distribute them there (to avoid the massive shipping costs).
However, that would be very unpopular domestically as it would not benefit American farmers, so we continue to use the system of sending our own food as aid. This unspoken agreement could be interpreted as a rare example of implicit power in American politics, as politicians know that they will be unpopular, and possibly not be re-elected if they attempt to change the food aid system, although they were likely not ever explicitly told that. Question 2 All throughout the process of creating foreign aid, the influence of interest groups is clear and present.
An interest group is an organized group of people with one or more shared beliefs who use lobbying techniques to persuade the government to pass legislation that would be beneficial to their shared belief. There are many different kind of interest groups. Interests groups can be serve economic purposes. Economic interest groups include labor unions and, on the other side, corporations themselves or several businesses working together to promote their economic interests. There are several identity-based groups as well, whose members are drawn together by common racial heritage or religious beliefs.
Two prominent examples of identity interest groups include the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Many interest groups are based around a specific political issue, like the NRA, which promotes expanding rights to use firearms. Other governments can even be lobbying groups. At the federal level, state and local governments sometimes lobby for federal laws that would benefit them. Sometimes, foreign governments serve as interest groups as well, often in military and foreign aid legislation, because they want to benefit their own country.
Interest groups come in all types and all sizes, but they all use remarkably similar means to further their agendas. The most powerful and prevalent lobbying tool is money, usually in the form of campaign donations. By making donations to different candidates and their campaigns, lobbying groups are essentially extorting legislators by threatening to take away their donations if the legislator votes in a way that does not serve the lobbying group’s interests. There are, however, other, less threatening ways in which a special interest group can influence decision making.
They can produce advertising to influence the public in their voting or their contact with their representatives. They can speak to legislators directly to attempt to influence their votes on a more personal level. These interactions can be formal or informal, relying on personal connections with the legislators. All of these methods, however, require a certain amount of resources that most individuals would not have access to alone, which is why it is necessary to form interest groups to pool resources and utilize them effectively. Many worry that interest groups are becoming too influential.
It is nearly impossible to be elected to any federal office without huge amounts of donations, and although individual donations can be helpful, interest groups have way more money than any one individual, giving them a disproportionate amount of influence over a particular elected official. A quick Google search may prove many of these fears correct. For example, most Republican officials are receiving funding from Gas and Oil corporations (and other pro-fossil fuel economic interest groups), which correlates with the Republican voting record.
On the flip side, many Democrats receive funding from alternative energy corporations. These correlations can raise serious issues about how lobbying from special interest groups threatens the purity of our democracy. Question 3 Although most aid scholars agree that aid in started in the 1940s in response to World War II and the Cold War, there were several antecedents to aid that allowed that aid system to take shape. Ever since the 19th century, humanitarian relief has been an expected social norm whenever a country is hit with some devastating issue like a natural disaster or a disease epidemic.
In addition, wartime aid between allied countries through financial support and technical assistance had been in place before that time as well. Aid as we know it today, however, came about in the late 1940s with the creation of 2 key aid programs: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. The Truman doctrine involved giving aid to countries at risk of falling to the communist threat of the USSR such as Greece and Turkey in order to keep them as allies heading into the Cold War.
The Marshall Plan gave aid to Europe in order to help with recovery after World War II. This marks the beginnings of aid, so no real aid “fashion” had taken shape yet. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, however, although aid from the Marshall Plan continued to flow into countries near and around the USSR, aid was largely apolitical and focused on purely economic and technological issues. This change in fashion was brought on by growing concerns over the East-West tensions of the cold war, and aid-givers were worried that overtly political steps might ake the conflict escalate into a full-blown war.
While this approach was fairly effective from a purely diplomatic point of view, it failed to address growing concerns over global poverty. In the ‘70s, the focus of aid really narrowed itself down to poverty reduction, specifically the “Basic Human Needs” approach. Poverty-reduction aid was given a more prominent position due to the de-escalation of the Cold War (which reduced the need for diplomatic aid) and the occurrence of several economic crises and famines around the world.
During this period, aid was focused on ensuring that everyone in less developed countries had access to basic human needs such as food, water, sanitation, health care, and basic infrastructure and safety precautions. This time also marked a significant increase in the amount of aid distributed due to the rise of Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) aid. All of this aid coming in did help to address some Basic Human Needs issues, it failed to address the overarching, institutional issues that led to such troubling poverty rates in the first place, so something had to change.
Development came even more to the forefront during the ‘80s due to Ronald Reagan and the rise of “Reaganomics”. The theory of Reaganomics spread into aid with the theory of “market-led model”, or the idea that if government policies were altered to increase output, the free market would then fix the country’s economy and put them on the track to development. This technique was referred to as structural adjustment. Thus, this era of aid was very focused on institutions compared to the previous strategy of simply providing basic human needs.
As the world became more globalized, however, people in donor and recipient countries became more in tune with the issues facing the world as a whole, not just small-scale institutional issues. So in the ‘90s, aid was largely focused on “global issues”. For example, HIV/AIDS and Global Warming both became large issues in the ‘90s that world leaders could attempt to solve through the use of global issues focused aid. Of course, many of these issues were also linked to development, so development continued to be a goal of the global aid community as an integral part of addressing global issues.
The emphasis on development in aid is evidenced by the creation of the “Millennium Development Goals” put in place during the ‘90s. The collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the decade also created a large number of new countries that now required additional foreign aid, and now had the potential to become democratic, which significantly increased the role of politics in aid. Political concerns were also addressed in the Millennium Development Goals. However, the Millennium Development goals fell out of being in December 2015, and the UN was swift to create a new set of goals entitled the “Sustainable Development Goals”.
In many ways, the era of aid we are currently in could be considered the age of ‘Sustainable Development’. Most recently, aid has become increasingly focused on finding sustainable solutions to the Global Issues introduced to us in the ‘90s, especially in terms of the energy crisis. The Sustainable Development Goals focus on sustainability of the environment as well as other issues like healthcare and the economy all over the world. Rather than providing quick, temporary fixes, the aid community is now committed to finding solutions that will last.