As in the Old World, so in the New. Power paralleled polygyny, once. Good hunters on the Kalahari got two or three, not just one, wife. To put it plainly, the point of politics is sex. There are, in short, positive and negative sanctions.
Negative sanctions appear to have been necessary, often.
I don't want to bore you with the grisly history of human politics, but I'll offer a few examples. At Sumer, about which we know relatively little, we know at least that kings derived power from Enlil, who symbolized compulsion by force. In India and China, punishment by torture was highly refined, and systematically biased to exempt the rich. We live by another law now. Once every state was a polygynous despotism.