Walter Korpi — The Iceberg of Power below the Surface: A Preface to Power Resources Theory

32 published claims from this book.

• Actors pursue both optimal outcomes and structural change to their advantage.
• Aspiration adaptation, not resistance, is the weaker party’s rational response to large power gaps
• Coalition and party power resources shaped welfare state development.
• Coalitions of worker, farmer, and salaried parties shape welfare states through democratic politics
• Cross-border capital mobility shifts power toward economic-resource holders over labour and voters.
• Exercising power incurs mobilization, liquidity, and application costs across three distinct stages
• Financial deregulation strengthened capital while leaving labour and voters behind.
• Inequality trends result from shifting collective action capacity, not fixed laws.
• Institutions arise from vertical power asymmetries, not only horizontal coordination dilemmas
• Institutions encode the prevailing power distribution while lowering its costs.
• Institutions should be read vertically as tools of differently empowered actors.
• Large power asymmetries suppress visible conflict by lowering the weaker party’s aspirations
• Large power gaps suppress visible resistance and lower aspirations.
• Low industrial conflict can indicate strong, not weak, working-class power.
• Low strike levels can indicate strong rather than weak labour power
• Manifest conflict reveals only part of how power shapes outcomes
• Power holders routinize outcomes into institutions to cut mobilization and application costs
• Power operates through indirect, non-conflictual channels hidden below manifest conflict
• Power resources work indirectly through the alternative strategies they enable.
• Power-motivated leaders pursue dramatic confrontational foreign policy
• Power-resource distribution varies over time and across countries, unlike rival theories.
• Power-resource shifts between interest groups drove welfare-state citizenship expansion
• Racial inequalities originate in violence and persist through closure strategies tied to class.
• Racial inequality stems from violence and closure strategies, not markets alone
• Rationally adjusting aspirations downward can suppress grievance despite large power gaps
• Restricting power to visible conflict captures only power’s tip.
• Soft power is derivative of hard power and follows it in both directions
• The distribution of power resources shifts over time and between countries
• The power resources approach long neglected gender in distribution analysis.
• Twentieth-century power equalization resulted from collective action and policy inventions
• Universal suffrage functions as the primary power resource for market-disadvantaged wage earners
• Unstable power structures intensify intergroup conflict more than settled ones do.