ABSTRACT
Power is largely exercised through the political system. For that reason, when Max Weber identified power as one of three key dimensions of stratification, he referred to it as "party". In many cases, power is legitimate power, that is, people agree that the person exercising power has the right to do so. Often, legitimate power is attached to a position that a person holds. Besides authority, there are many other sources of power. Some are generally regarded as legitimate, others as not legitimate, and some may be either legitimate or illegitimate. In a democratic system, for example, people exercise power by voting. To determine who has power, we must have some way of measuring power. This is not easy to do, because power is an abstract concept, or construct, that cannot be measured directly. Max Weber argued that the state is the institution that holds a legitimate monopoly over physical violence in a given territory.
