Elite theory

Constitutions describe who should rule. Elite theory claims to describe who does: in every society, an organised minority governs and the majority is governed. Democracy, aristocracy and monarchy differ in how elites are recruited, how they justify themselves and how they compete, but not in the basic fact of minority rule.

The theory began as a realist critique of both liberal democracy and socialism around 1900. It has since developed into an empirical research programme on who holds power, how elites circulate, and whether democratic competition among elites can deliver accountability.

Mosca: the ruling class

Gaetano Mosca argued in Elementi di scienza politica (1896; English as The Ruling Class, 1939) that in all societies there are two classes, a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The ruling minority prevails because it is organised, while the majority is not. Every ruling class justifies itself by a political formula, a principle such as divine right or popular sovereignty, that makes its rule seem legitimate. Mosca later accepted that representative government could moderate minority rule through what he called "juridical defence".

Pareto: circulation of elites

Vilfredo Pareto, in his Trattato di sociologia generale (1916), distinguished a governing elite from a non-governing elite and the mass. He argued that elites decay and are replaced, so that "history is a graveyard of aristocracies". Drawing on Machiavelli, he contrasted elites of "foxes", who rule by cunning and combination, with elites of "lions", who rule by force and conviction; a governing elite that blocks the rise of talented outsiders invites revolution.

Michels: oligarchy in organisations

Robert Michels, studying the German Social Democratic Party, formulated the iron law of oligarchy: large organisations, even those committed to democracy, inevitably come to be controlled by a small leadership.

Competitive elitism

Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), redefined democracy as an institutional arrangement in which leaders acquire power through a competitive struggle for the people's vote. Democracy is not rule by the people but rule by competing elites chosen by the people.

The power elite

C. Wright Mills argued in The Power Elite (1956) that in the mid-twentieth-century United States, the leaders of large corporations, the military and the federal executive formed an interlocking elite that made the key decisions, while Congress, parties and voters dealt with the "middle levels" of power.

Pluralism and its critics

Robert Dahl challenged the ruling-elite model, arguing that it could only be tested by examining key decisions where the supposed elite's preferences ran against those of others. His study of New Haven, Who Governs? (1961), found different leaders prevailing on different issues, a pattern he called pluralism. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz replied that power has "two faces": besides winning decisions, elites can keep issues off the agenda altogether (non-decision-making), which Dahl's method could not detect.

• Elite settlements: John Higley and Michael Burton argued that stable liberal democracies often begin with settlements in which warring elites agree to compete peacefully, such as England in 1688–1689 or Sweden in 1809.
• Policy responsiveness: Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analysed 1,779 US policy issues and found that economic elites and business-oriented interest groups had substantial independent impact on policy while average citizens had little or none.
• Elite recruitment studies document the over-representation of graduates of a few universities or schools in cabinets, courts and boardrooms in countries such as France, the United Kingdom and Japan.
• Party organisations: research on parties and unions continues to test Michels's law, with mixed results.
• Revolutions and regime change: Pareto's circulation thesis has been applied to the replacement of aristocracies by bourgeois and then party elites.

• Unfalsifiability: if every society is by definition ruled by a minority, the theory risks explaining everything and nothing; much depends on how "rule" is measured.
• Pluralist evidence: Dahl and others found fragmented, issue-specific influence rather than a single cohesive elite.
• Measurement disputes: Peter Enns argued that because the preferences of affluent and average citizens usually coincide, average citizens often get what they want even if their independent influence is hard to detect statistically, a phenomenon he called coincidental representation.
• Normative ambiguity: Mosca and Pareto were used by anti-democratic movements, including Italian fascism; Schumpeter's competitive elitism has been criticised for shrinking democracy to the choice of leaders.
• Underestimating mass agency: social movements, strikes, referendums and electoral upsets show that non-elites can impose outcomes.

Elite theory's core empirical claim, that organised minorities exercise disproportionate power in all large societies, is widely accepted in some form. What remains contested is how cohesive elites are, how much they compete, and how far democratic institutions constrain them. For governance design, the theory points to mechanisms that check or rotate elites: sortition, term limits, recall, transparency of lobbying and campaign finance, and open recruitment, as well as to the risk that new institutions simply create new elites.

• Robert A. Dahl, "A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model" (1958)
• Bachrach and Baratz, "Two Faces of Power" (1962)
• Gilens and Page, "Testing Theories of American Politics" (2014)
• Peter K. Enns, "Relative Policy Support and Coincidental Representation" (2015)
• Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (McGraw-Hill, 1939)
• C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956)
• Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Harper & Brothers, 1942)