Domination or possibility?
‘Power’ in ex-parliamentarians’ oral history interviews
Keywords:
power, executive power, spielraum, influence, authorityAbstract
Researchers of power have traditionally debated on the definitions of power to enable further empirical studies. This article, instead, asks how political actors – namely veteran MPs in their interviews – themselves speak about “power”, and as which kind of instrument of political action “power” functions. Do veteran MPs perceive power as domination, as the power of command, as an aspect of joint action, or as possibility or creation of political space of action (Spielraum)? The key result is the ambiguity of power: it can be both a tool of resistance and a tool of charac- terizing one’s own action in the parliament. The article combines methods of conceptual history and digital data mining in the qualitative analysis of a considerably big corpus of data.
