Who Wants Power? Measuring Intrinsic Preferences for Power and Their Behavioral Signature

Francisco Gomez-Martinez and Holger Herz

No 12241, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: People seek positions of influence for material objectives, but it has been argued that people also seek power for its own sake. We propose a novel elicitation strategy that allows us to measure intrinsic preferences for power, where power is defined as influence over the outcomes of others, while fully controlling for all consequentialist sources of utility. We establish the existence of such preferences in general population samples in six countries, with substantial heterogeneity across individuals. Examining this heterogeneity, we show that our behavioral measure of intrinsic preferences for power is positively associated with favorable views of authoritarianism and higher social dominance orientation, and serves as a predictor of political attitudes. We also find significant correlations between intrinsic preferences for power and distributional preferences: Intrinsic preferences for power are predictive of a lower regard for equality. Our evidence thus suggests that the attitudes and preferences of individuals that are motivated by the exercise of power for its own sake differ in systematic ways from those that are not.

Keywords: power; preferences; authoritarianism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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