agency

agency, the property or capacity of actors to make things happen.

The concept of agency is central to political theory. Political activities are carried out by agents, whose agency inheres in their power to produce effects. In politics, agency is generally reserved for human actors, and, more controversially, it is sometimes attributed only to particular categories of persons. Although human agency and political agency are often equated, they are treated as distinct by some theorists. Niccolò Machiavelli and Max Weber, for example, contended that effective rulers require special capacities in the art of statecraft.

Although the term agency is mainly used in a straightforward way, its presuppositions are widely contested. Who counts as an agent, what kinds of ability are deemed necessary for agency (and whether such abilities are, for example, biased in terms of gender or ethnicity), and how effective agents are in determining political outcomes all remain sources of disagreement.

Theoretical approaches to agency

The most common theoretical approach to agency is one that views agents as individuals and politics as a realm constituted by individual agents. Their agency is ascribed to certain characteristics, among which rationality is typically preeminent. In rational-choice approaches, agents are perceived as decision makers with the rational capacity to make strategic choices. From that perspective, all citizens might be regarded as political agents (for example, as voters), although it is often more interesting to consider elite actors, whose decisions carry more weight.

Other approaches, in particular those inspired by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, focus on the moral agency that is involved in being held accountable for one’s acts and being capable of assuming responsibilities and duties as well as bearing rights. Exercising moral agency requires autonomy, freedom, and logical or reflective capacities to guide normative decision making.

Sometimes organizations are treated as rational agents, and in the field of international relations it is common for states to be treated as agents that make decisions about their national interests. Most exponents of individualist approaches would nonetheless maintain that individual decision makers within organizations or states are the ultimate sources of agency.

Criticisms

Despite their prevalence, these rather formal approaches to agency have prompted significant critical objections, among which three are especially salient. First, agency may be recognized as a historical and particularly modern phenomenon, which suggests that it may accordingly be lost as well as gained. Thinkers since Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill have worried about a decline of agentic capacity in modern democracies. Once one considers empirical individuals operating within concrete political conditions, moreover, it becomes evident that they do not all enjoy equal or identical capacities for agency. In the history of political thought, many categories of humans—notably children, women, workers, criminals, and members of particular racial, ethnic, or religious groups—have been regarded as deficient in such abilities and therefore as naturally passive or dependent and rightly excluded from exercising political power.

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Since the 18th century, however, agency has mainly been considered a product of education, socialization, and appropriate experience, a viewpoint that has provoked demands for the wider availability of such goods and opportunities as a route to realizing more inclusive conceptions of citizenship. The means of acquiring agency and the right to exercise it have accordingly become significant political issues in their own right.

Second, some critics dispute the assumption that political agency inheres primarily in individuals. Marxists, for example, argue that individual agency is a specifically bourgeois ideal and is limited by social structures and that historical agency is exercised by social classes, among which the working class is most important. Opponents of the Marxist view, however, assert that it relies on a dubious teleological conception of history and that its assumption of class agency is nonsensical because classes are mobilized only through the individuals who constitute them.

Third, questions about agency are often encountered theoretically in the context of the structure-agency debate. Advocates of structuralist approaches to politics and society argue that history is not made by individuals (or by classes exhibiting agency) but is a consequence of structural requirements. Individuals take up preexisting roles and mainly reproduce structures they neither choose nor question. Furthermore, their intentions, whatever they may be, have unforeseen consequences once their acts encounter other acts, which results in a largely anonymous outcome. The resulting structures may nonetheless exhibit an underlying logic or direction of their own.

The danger in the structuralist approach is that structures may themselves seem to evince agency insofar as they render individual practices congruent with their systemic imperatives. Thinkers critical of structuralism have argued that the relation between agents and structures is not one-sided but reciprocal, with each constituting and circumscribing the other, even if their separation might be necessary for analytical purposes.

Finally, it is important to distinguish between capacities for agency and opportunities for exercising it, because closed political regimes may afford little scope for agents to act.