The idea that the only thing missing is ‘political will’ in a project is a cliché that is representative of our time. We think it’s back in A Financial times article about regulating social media (“The coming battle between social media and the state“, January 21, 2025):
But there are two problems with regulating social media platforms. … The second is that imposing effective regulations on unwilling platforms will require unshakable government action and political will.
The first meaning of political will is clear from the vocabulary: ‘determined’ and ‘unshakable’ ” government action ‘. Strict laws and rules must be imposed to check those who do not want to be checked. If they do not submit, their properties are confiscated and they receive a fine, prison sentence or worse. Ultimately, political will, state violence, threatened or actually. We can call this The rough definition of political will.
A second view of political will is covered and more procedural: it is what some politicians or rulers want strong enough to convince their colleagues to accept or not to accept it as laws or regulations (or extra-statutory actions). For this understanding of the expression it does not matter whether the most important motivations of state -agents are self -interest, as the Or to punish. Individuals. In this sense, political will is simply what the rulers can agree on:The proceeds of the horse trade of the rulers.
An attempt to define the political will was made by Lori Ann Post (a sociologist), Amber NW Raile (an expert in ‘social influence’) and Eric D. Raile (a political scientist), ‘Defining Political Will’, Policy and politics 38-4 (2010), p. 652-676. They quote another researcher who notices that political will is “the most slippery concept in the policy lexicon”, and it seems that they have not gone much further than that, or at least no further than the definition of horse trade.
Many people seem to be explicitly or implicitly distinguishes and elevate a third meaning of the expression, on which the emphasis is the will of the peopleAs Jean-Jacques Rousseau would call it (The social contract1762). Except in a crowd, the will of the people, if there is such a thing, will not be realized automatically for a large number of reasons explained by the economy and that can be summarized under the name of the problem of collective action (see Mancur Olson, The logic of collective action1966): Everyone wants something, but would ride if he was not forced to contribute to his own good. In reality, the will of the people do not exist because there are no homogeneous people-individuals are not identical-and numerical majorities are incoherent (condorcet paradox and the like); It is a unicorn (see William Riker, Liberalism against populism1982). The will of the people means nothing but the imposition of the preferences and values of a certain group by state violence, or that are attributed to a certain group, to the rest of ‘the people’ and the ‘enemies of the people’, both Domestic as foreign. Develop these ideas in my “The impossibility of populism” The independent review26-1 [Summer 2021]page 15-25).
Liberal social contract theories are attempts to reconcile democracy with the fact that ‘the people’ does not exist as a separate being, organic or collective. The most advanced and economically realistic of such contract theories is, I believe, that of James Buchanan and his fellow theorists. In a nutshell they claim all that individuals reach agreement on a virtual contract in which minimum rules are laid down to control social life and to limit violence and state violence in the common interest of everyone. ‘The people’ in the single and collective form is not only unnecessary, but also illusory. The supposed will of the people are replaced by the consent of each individual in the ‘Constitutional Stage’. The political will, when If there is still room for this concept, this could be the (suspect) maneuvering of state -agents (politicians and bureaucrats) to help individuals forcing the unanimous rules they agree, or, ominous, to make some individuals at Good to be at the expense of others. It is safer to avoid the expression.
Note that ‘people’ in its plural and usually indefinite form – for example ‘the weather was beautiful and the people were golfing’ – is not controversial, but these individuals have no political will in the sense in which the expression is usually used.
Another definition of political will would be The capacity of the state to meet what I wantThat is related to the state concept of Princess-Mathilde. The concept refers to one side of a conflict about resources, and we are not far from the first definition above.
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The people and his will