The Power of Positive Sanctions

POLITICAL science has made valuable contributions to the progressive clarification of the concept of power since World War II. In view of the attention political scientists have traditionally lavished on the concept of power, it seems fitting that they should help clarify it. Thanks to the efforts of such men as Harold Lasswell and Robert Dahl, many political scientists today are keenly aware of the need to define power in relational terms, to distinguish power relations from power resources, to specify scope, weight, domain, and so on.' There is, however, one distinction that is rarely considered by political scientists-that between positive and negative sanctions. The purpose of this paper is to clarify this distinction and show how and why it matters. It is not that political scientists have said wrong things about the role of positive sanctions in power relations; it is just that they have said little.2 Most of their discussions of power have focused on severe negative sanctions. Can one influence more flies with honey than with vinegar? Can one influence more Vietnamese with economic aid than with napalm? The literature of political science not only gives few clues to the answers, it often implies that such questions are not even worth asking. Dahl recognizes but understates the problem: "The existence of both negative and positive coercion is sometimes a source of confusion in political analysis, since writers often either confound the two or ignore positive coercion."' Although it is not the purpose of this paper to survey the literature,