Power is not just seen as an ability or attribute of a person, but arising from the kinds of relations and processes between the members. In a democratic nation, the power of politicians is in large part controlled and determined by the people that they represent. Power may therefore be conceived as permeating all kinds of social interactions and relationships. The fact that power is one of the most disputed concepts in the political and social sciences should not lead us to believe that it is 'an essentially contested concept', something so value-laden as to be beyond general consensus. The political scientist Keith Dowding helpfully distinguishes 'outcome power' from 'social power'.
Social power is therefore a subset of the more general concept of outcome power.
So far, however, such agreement has proven elusive. Three fallacies which frequently accompany the discussion of political power appear to block the prospects of intelligent investigation. The first is the 'blame fallacy'. It asserts that the fact that an agent, call her x, is powerless to bring about an outcome, call it o, implies that there is another agent, call him y, who is exercising power to prevent x achieving o. However, even if y has this potential power it does not follow that y is to blame.