The Power Gap - quantifying the capability to do something
Last month the think-tank Demos released a report called The Power Gap, in an 'attempt to quantify the power capabilities people have in their every day lives'.
As part of this, they produced a Power Map (see below) highlighting the areas of Britain with the greatest concentrations of power. The author of the report Dan Leighton, explains how the map assigns a power score to every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales based on a wide range of indicators. These include levels of personal control, resilience and political participation which are they accorded based on constituency populations.
The map aims to depict where the most powerful and powerless citizens live; what factors make them score higher; disparities across and within regions; and which political parties represent the powerless and powerful. It adds a geographical picture to what is often said but rarely quantified or displayed at a national level.
The map is intended to be the start of conversation about the power in everyday life, and how it's distributed across the country. The Map illustrates the distribution of eight different indicators of citizens’ power and gathers these into one overall index. The eight power indicators include:
- education
- occupational status
- income
- employment
- freedom from crime
- health
- voter turnout
- marginality of parliamentary seat
One of the interesting factors noted in the report concerns the factors affecting boosting constituencies to the top of the power scale. These include education, occupational status and political power in the form of seat marginality and voter turnout.
Education, workplace power and political power are therefore important areas of focus in terms of moving towards more egalitarian power distribution. Those living in safe seats also tend to score poorly in the other categories, making them subject to a form of double damnation: not only do they lack personal control, they also lack meaningful opportunities to change the wider social and political landscape through a real choice at the ballot box.
The report looks agues that it is power and not income or mobility that is the critical inequality in Britain. It seeks to paint a more informed picture of who in Britain is in control of their own lives, and how equality is distributed throughout the country. Through showing the reality of power inequaluty they aim to 'concentrate minds and advance debate on the types of political, economic and social reform needed to close the gap between the powerful and the powerless'.
After all Politics' real purpose is to spread power to people. As the video below says:
When you understand power, you become powerful.
To download a free copy of the report see The Power Gap.
Demos Power Score map of Britain
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