Measuring Political Inequality- a Difficult Task

In previous posts I have proposed changes to our political system and supported them on the basis that they would tend to diffuse political power.  In order to further support claims of this sort, it is necessary to have some measure of the concentration of political power.

The kind of power I am interested in comes with discretion.  If an individual cannot chose how the power is exercised then they don't really hold that power.  For example, if a president has the power to alter the budget in some way, if by doing so he would render himself so unpopular that he would likely lose in the next election, this limits his power.  As I pointed out, by making it more expensive for people in a district to replace their legislators, the incumbent legislators increase their power.

Some political scientists have likely looked into how much power a senator has and compared this to the power of a president or a member of the House, but if we are to come up with a serious measurement here, we will have to come up with some way of comparing the power of someone who holds some type of elected office, and someone who merely holds the power to vote in the next election.

We can compare the power of state and local government with that of the federal government by comparing the size of the budgets of each, but I suspect that few on the left would accept a comparison of money left in the private sector with that spent by government as an indication of how widely distributed political power was.  This is because most people want the government to do things.  Hence government that is smaller than that desired by most of the people could only be implemented under a situation in which political power was distributed unequally.

Similarly we might think that abolishing the legislature altogether and relying on direct democracy would be a diffusion of political power, but there are some who might oppose such a change.  This would require people to  spend too much time thinking in detail about how we ought to be governed.  They are left with a choice between putting in this costly effort, making government more simple than they actually want and leaving legislation to an unelected minority consisting of those who are willing to put in the effort.

We can't naively assume that direct democracy evenly distributes power.  Rich people are able to devote more resources into collecting signatures for ballot measures.  No system of government will be completely fair, and we will want to develop a method of measuring the concentration of political power that doesn't have perverse features that make a system that is rightly seen as less fair as being better in this sense.