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Story Posted: 18 January 2010

Roehampton’s Dr Pathik Pathak has called into the question the results of The Power Gap report by Demos, a London-based thinktank.

Led by James Purnell MP, the Open Left project is an initiative that aims to provide a forum for rethinking political values and ideas, and aims to rediscover the Left’s idealism, pluralism and appetite for radical ideas’. The Power Gap report itself explores what it means for people to be powerful. Using eight indicators, this report assembled data across Britain to create an index of every constituency in the nation.

Dr Pathak explained that the term “power” in this context is conceptualised as “power to” (capability) rather than “power over” (domination). He argues that on one hand, the Power Gap report exemplifies all that is best about Demos's work as an accessible analytic tool to slice through political bluster.

“But on the other hand,” he said, “the report is symptomatic of the shortcomings of thinktank research, driven as it is by political alignment. Consider the glaring contradiction of this report. It was grandly announced as a counterpoint to measures of elite power that painted a granular picture of power from the grassroots up.

“Yet the indicators for everyday power weren't chosen by consulting citizens, either individually or collectively. Instead, they were selected internally by the Demos team. As a consequence, the power index is computed using indicators which, at the very best, are a little arbitrary and, at the very worst, are slightly self-serving.”

Chief among Dr Pathak’s concerns is that the report’s most revealing findings have been dismissed too easily. In particular, the report found that people living in areas declared to be disempowered believed themselves to be very powerful. Dr Pathak thinks this should have led the report’s authors to question whether the indicators used were wrong in the first place. 

He suggests this is particularly the case when the report discusses social agency. Instead of using indicators such as the marginality of constituency seats and voter turnout as indicators of social agency, the report should have factored in “the variables of kinship circles, organisational life and friendship groups” to “paint a richer picture of everyday social agency."

Dr Pathak’s full analysis of the report is featured in the Guardian.