The phrase "retention of power" is correct and usable in written English.
You could use this phrase in any context when referring to keeping a certain level of power or control. For example, "The Prime Minister's successful re-election campaign ensured the retention of power for the ruling party".
Machiavelli, sometime state secretary of the Florentine republic, explored techniques for the seizure and retention of power in ways that seemed to exalt "reasons of state" above morality.
Such lawmakers will do just about anything to stay in the right wing's good graces, which they perceive as essential to their retention of power.
Rizal's public execution, on Dec. 30, 1896, so enraged and united Filipinos as to make permanent retention of power by Spain clearly impossible.
As Wotan sacrifices an eye for the sake of knowledge, and is diminished further as the cycle proceeds, so those in public life pay a heavy price for the acquisition and retention of power.
As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 2003 case, "The first instinct of power is the retention of power". And as long as politicians can retain that power with impunity, they will, even when they know it's harmful.
Politicians always reposition themselves for reasons pure and impure, but never has such a chunk of the government and its apparat performed so many spectacular volte-faces for no other discernible reason than the acquisition and retention of power.
He sees us as a means to his ends, a means for the achievement and retention of personal power, no more than that.
The practice of lynching — there were more than a hundred and fifty lynchings in South Carolina between 1877 and 1950 — facilitated the disenfranchisement of blacks and the retention of political power in white hands.
The drug spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers, Andy Hayman, said, "The retention of police power of arrest will enable the police to have greater flexibility in dealing with incidents on the street".
However, under steam reforming conditions with CH4/H2O mixtures the behaviour of the Au-doped Ni-GDC anodes were far superior, exhibiting retention of good power density and dramatically improved resistance to deactivation by carbon deposition.
Technology and the population are critical variables in the development and retention of national power.
