A validation node is just that, a validation node. It allows the person running it to see what is going on in the network and whether or not the current blockchain is following the rules which are set out in his version of the client.
A validation node has no voting power whatsoever, it may at best refuse to relay blocks/txns it finds invalid. Ultimately the people who decide what rules the network is based on are the miners alone. This is why decentralisation of miners should not be taken lightly. If the hard fork makes p2pool unviable for many miners, it's not a good sign.
It's a bit more complex than that. Miners can't directly force anyone to accept the blocks they mine - if they break the rules the blocks aren't Bitcoin.
But if block sizes grow to the point where running a validation node is expensive the reality is the group of people who have full copies of the set of all unspent transactions, the UTXO set, essentially control Bitcoin. If there are 50,000 copies of the UTXO set it's almost inconceivable that anyone could monopolize control over it; if there are 1000 copies it's conceivable, if there are 100 copies it's downright likely. (a situation pretty much like the central banking system)
It's especially nasty because once you're at that point the remaining validating nodes and mining pools have an easy time getting together and deciding to change the rules of Bitcoin, and even though they are forcing a hard-fork, what choice will you have but to install a new client and accept it? Without the UTXO set data you can't transact your Bitcoins. All this clever cryptography stuff we've come up with for
proving inflation and what not is rendered useless if the central mining pools and validating nodes decide to turn the features off.
An interesting parallel I think is actually search engine data. You need a truly enormous investment in hardware to store the indexes required to run an internet search engine. Sure you
could try to start your own, but without a full index, what's the point? What do you know, Google, Bing and Yahoo are pretty much the only players in that game.