In view of a hundred-year-long discussion of political elites and the cascade of references to them today in academic and public discussion, it is astounding that investigations of political elites have not previously been incorporated and assessed in a handbook. The strong positive and negative value connotations that attach to political elites and the central roles these connotations have in the language of contemporary political combat are additional incentives to take stock of facts and theories about political elites. This handbook summarizes both common ground and contested issues in the literature on political elites.
When Robert Putnam published his Comparative Study of Political Elites 40 years ago (Putnam 1976), that literature was already large. Putnam surveyed some 600 books, articles, and documents that had appeared in English since Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels published pioneering works about political elites early in the twentieth century. In cogent chapters, Putnam distilled the extant literatureâs main topics and gave a good sense of its breadth: the inevitability of political elites, interactions between them and wider social structures, processes of political elite recruitment, sources of elite motives and beliefs, different structures of political elites, elite-mass linkages, and how political elites are gradually or suddenly transformed.
At the time of Putnamâs book, scholars studying political elites were embroiled in arguments with Marxists about which conceptual approach to politics, an elite-centered or a class-centered one, had greater explanatory value. Neo-Marxism was in vogue, and scholars who focused on elites during the 1970s remember the brickbats hurled regularly at them by neo-Marxists. The chasm between the two approaches seemed no less deep than when Mosca, Pareto, and Michels first posed the study of elites as an alternative and antidote to Marxism. During the 1970s, moreover, the chasm was a scholarly manifestation of the global conflict between liberal capitalism and state socialism. Amid oil shocks and economic stagflation; authoritarian rule in much of the world; upheavals in Iran, China, and Poland; as well as terrorist actions by ârevolutionaryâ groups such as the Brigate Rosse, Red Army Faction, and Weather Underground, the 1970s were a decade of tumult and uncertainty. It was by no means clear how the scholarly conflict between elite-centered and class-centered approaches would play out. Although Putnamâs benchmark book did much to move the study of political elites toward the scholarly mainstream, it remained a relatively specialized undertaking and, in neo-Marxist eyes, a blinkered one.
During the four decades since Putnamâs book appeared, world political configurations and scholarly discourse have been turned upside down, so that political elite studies, not class analyses, are now in vogue. This change has been associated with three global developments. One was the third wave of democratization, which began to flow almost exactly when Putnamâs book went to press. Although the third wave spawned a vast and conflicted research literature, political elites and their roles in democratic transitions and consolidations were at its center. Indeed, much of the debate about democratization boiled down to whether the third wave was driven mainly by elites or by mass yearnings for democracy (Huntington 1991; Higley and Gunther 1992; Diamond 1999; Collier 2000).
The inability of political elites in state socialist countries to reform their economic and political systems and avoid system collapse was a second, closely related development. Failures of state socialist elites to enact system-saving reforms and intricate elite negotiations to spawn fledgling democratic regimes did much to bring studies of political elites to the fore (Kotz and Weir 1997; Mawdsley and White 2000). The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and its protracted economic and political consequences have been the third main development. The extent to which actions and inactions by political and business elites caused the crisis and made recovery from it so halting have been key issues (e.g. Blinder 2013; Wolf 2014; Best and Higley 2014). The rise of nationalist-populist elites mobilizing crisis-rooted discontents among wide swaths of voters is another important issue.
As a consequence of these developments (and, of course, others), books and articles about political elites pour forth, and references to them are ubiquitous in scholarly and public discourse. Today, a Putnam-like survey of relevant literature would have to be several magnitudes larger than his was four decades ago. There is barely a political elite in the world that has not by now been the subject of at least one study, and political elites in most countries have been studied multiple times from numerous angles. Causal connections between political elites and a wide variety of social and political phenomena are now routinely asserted.
Directions in Political Elite Studies
On the axiomatic basis of the early elite theoristsâ postulate about the inevitability of political elites and the overwhelming body of historical and empirical evidence that supports the postulate, political elites must be viewed as a universal feature of all at least moderately developed societies. Following fundamental shakeups of political and social orders, political elites inevitably form anew, and in processes of renewal or transformation, they display an enormous variety of structural manifestations and adaptations to societal changes. The specific characteristics of political elites are related systematically to their performance and of societies over which they preside.
Political elites are defined in this handbook as individuals and small, relatively cohesive, and stable groups with disproportionate power to affect national and supranational political outcomes on a continuing basis. They consist of several thousand persons in all but the tiniest of modern societies. Political elite members hold top positions in large or otherwise pivotal organizations, institutions, and social movements, and they participate in or directly influence political decision-making. Political elites include the familiar âpower eliteâ triumvirate of top business, government executive, and military leaders (Mills 1956) along with persons and groups holding strategic positions in political parties and parliaments, major interest organizations and professional associations, important media enterprises and trade unions, and religious and other hierarchically structured institutions powerful enough to affect political decisions.
This definition of political elites, or one very close to it, is now standard in the literature, although scholars use different methods to identify âproximate decision makers,â as Putnam termed them (1976, p. 11). Some scholars and observers have much larger aggregations of influential persons and groups in mind when they refer to elites (e.g. Collier 2000, pp. 17â19; Murray 2012, pp. 17â20), but in most studies, political elites at national and supranational decision-making levels are treated as numbering only a few thousand persons. For example, a series of systematic studies of the US political elite since Putnamâs book appeared have identified about 6000 individuals holding roughly 7000 top positions in institutions and organizations that together control more than half of Americaâs total resources (Dye 1976â2014; see also Lindsay 2014). To give another example, the polycentric political elite presiding over the European Union and Euro Zone is estimated to consist of 600â650 persons, many of whom simultaneously hold top decision-making positions in their home countries (Cotta 2014).
Analyzing the backgrounds and demographic profiles of political elite membersâtheir family and class origins, ages and genders, educations and careers as well as their religious, ethnic, regional, and other affiliationsâlong constituted the dominant approach to studying political elites. This was in no small part because public biographical and other documentary sources were readily available for analysis. During the past 40 years, however, scholars have availed themselves of computers, statistical techniques, and many advances in communications to undertake survey studies of political elite attitudes, interpersonal networks, and participation in decision-making. These surveys have largely displaced the earlier analysis of elite membersâ biographies. Research on political elites has become much more multidimensional and focused on what elites do than on where they come from (Higley 2016). Consider, for example, the several comparative surveys of political elites in European countries that have been conducted in recent years (Best et al. 2012).
Recent studies cast doubt on the accuracy and utility of earlier models of political elite structure and behavior, which derived mainly from analyses of elite biographies. The debate between adherents of pluralist, power elite, and ruling class models generated much heat during the 1960s and 1970s, but that debate has cooled, because the rich data stemming from survey studies show that elite structures and behaviors are more complex and multifaceted than earlier models depicted. However, there is as yet no clear replacement for earlier models. Contemporary theorists of political elites do not agree about elite structures and behavioral dynamics and how they vary from one country to another or from one historical period to another in a particular society.
This is to say that theorizing has not kept pace with the collection of more diversified and rich empirical data about political elites. There is no general and accepted theory that drives studies today, and its absence is a main challenge. There is, for example, no widely accepted typology of political elites that would inform a theory positing causal relations between changes in elite types and changes in political regimes or in institutional effectiveness. These and other unresolved issues are refrains in this handbook.
The Handbookâs Structure
In early 2015, the Research Committee on Political Elites of the International Political Science Association invited several dozen specialists on political elites to contribute chapters summarizing and assessing recent conceptual and empirical advances in their areas of expertise. Organized in six sections, the handbookâs 40 chapters contributed by these scholars illustrate the fieldâs diversity and richness, its achievements, and its shortcomings. Chapters build on studies of political elites that have accumulated, showing how they illuminate a wide range of political phenomena. The handbook has been co-edited by a half dozen prominent analysts of political elites who have played leading roles in the Research Committee. It would be wrong, however, to regard the handbook as summarizing studies conducted or sponsored by the Committee. The volume contains a much wider array of scholarship about political elites that will, we hope, stand as a lasting contribution to this important area of social science.
The handbook opens with a section devoted to old and new theories concerning political elites, with its chapters highlighting both continuity and innovation. The handbookâs second section describes and discusses methodological techniques and instruments devised for identifying and studying political elites. Its third section canvasses patterns of traditional political elites and those today in the worldâs major regions: sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the West, with special chapters on Chinese and post-Soviet Russian political elites. The fourth section discusses attributes of political elites in the main sectors and institutional settings of modern societiesâthe executive, parliament, the economy, media, for exampleâand how these fundamentally differentiated elite groups relate to each other. The penultimate fifth section explores characteristics and resources of political elites vis-Ă -vis mass populations, while the sixth and final section dissects challenges that political elites confront today. Each section begins w...