Toward a Revised View of Measuring National Power

The finding that single-variable measures of power turn out to be just as effective as more complex indexes for purposes of rank ordering countries—even when they focus on entirely different variables altogether—suggests that exercises in rank ordering may not indicate very much about what makes countries “really” powerful. Such exercises point to how countries compare against one another by some gross measures, but they are not grounded in a clear understanding of what makes certain nations powerful or why some nations can be said to have more power than others. Further, in focusing on rank ordering to the neglect of almost all else, the traditional approaches to measuring power offered an “extensive” rather than “intensive” picture that depicts the global distribution of capabilities but does not enable a close and detailed scrutiny of any specific target country. Finally, most traditional indexes fail to incorporate qualitative factors that describe state capacity, presumably the most important variable that recent research suggests must be incorporated in any adequate assessment of individual national capabilities.