Meaning
The stock of goodwill, credibility and influence an office-holder or party builds up, conceived as spendable currency: it can be earned in an election victory, banked, invested in a risky reform, squandered on a lost cause, or simply run out of. Pundits apply it to a leader's honeymoon popularity; Wiktionary defines it as the ability of a person to influence political decisions. Uncountable: say 'much political capital', not 'a political capital'. Collocates almost obligatorily with spend, earn, burn and run out of. Keep distinct from 'the bully pulpit', the platform an office confers, and from mere approval ratings, which are only one input. Regional use: Global English; strongest currency in US political journalism.
Origin
Often assumed to be a modern cable-news coinage, the noun phrase is far older: the OED's earliest evidence dates from 1818, in the writing of the Anglo-Irish novelist Sydney Morgan, Lady Morgan. The currency metaphor was formalized in scholarship by Edward C. Banfield in Political Influence (1961), which described a 'stock of influence' built by 'buying' a bit here and there and, like money, needing to be spent and saved wisely (Wikipedia). Pierre Bourdieu's capital theories of the 1980s are regularly credited with the popular version - a folklore worth correcting, since Banfield's money metaphor predates him. By the 2010s the phrase was pundit shorthand, attacked in pieces like the National Journal's 2013 'There's No Such Thing as Political Capital', and Wiktionary's citations run from the Guardian in 2023 to The Atlantic in 2025.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- burn political capital
- earn political capital
- spend political capital
Usage Examples
- The prime minister burned through her political capital in the first hundred days, forcing the tax bill through on a single-vote margin.
- A bailout this expensive will cost the governor whatever political capital the flood response earned her.
- Fresh from a landslide, he arrived with more political capital than any leader in a generation - and no plan for spending it.