Democratic Elitism: New Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology)

Democratic Elitism: New Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthro...

Author: Heinrich Best | John Higley (Editors)

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Democratic Elitism: New Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives

International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology Series Editor

David Sciulli, Texas A&M University Editorial Board

Vincenzo Cicchelli, Cerlis, Paris Descartes-CNRS Benjamin Gregg, University of Texas at Austin Carsten Q. Schneider, Central European University Budapest Helmut Staubmann, University of Innsbruck

VOLUME 111

Democratic Elitism: New Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives Edited by

Heinrich Best and John Higley

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover image: AP/Reporters This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Democratic elitism : new theoretical and comparative perspectives / edited by Heinrich Best and John Higley. p. cm. -- (International studies in sociology and social anthropology ; v. 111) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-17939-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Democracy. 2. Elite (Social sciences) I. Best, Heinrich. II. Higley, John. III. Title. III. Series. JC423.D381356 2010 305.5'2--dc22 2009041610

ISSN 0074-8684 ISBN 978 90 04 17939 4 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii Table of Contributors ................................................................................ ix Introduction: Democratic Elitism Reappraised ......................................1 Heinrich Best and John Higley PART I DEMOCRATIC ELITISM: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

“They Ain’t Making Elites Like They Used To”: The Never Ending Trouble with Democratic Elitism .......................... 25 Jens Borchert Beyond the Happy Consensus about Democratic Elitism .................. 43 András Körösényi Democratic Elitism – Conflict and Consensus .................................... 61 Fredrik Engelstad Elites’ Illusions about Democracy .......................................................... 79 John Higley PART II DEMOCRATIC ELITISM: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

Associated Rivals: Antagonism and Cooperation in the German Political Elite .............................................................................. 97 Heinrich Best Political versus Media Elites in Norway .............................................. 117 Trygve Gulbrandsen Elite Formation and Democratic Elitism in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Analysis ........................................... 129 Michael Edinger

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Hungary: Between Consolidated and Simulated Democracy .......... 153 György Lengyel and Gabriella Ilonszki The Assault on Democratic Elitism in Poland .................................... 173 Jacek Wasilewski Democracy by Elite Co-optation: Democratic Elitism in Multi-Ethnic States ................................................................................. 197 Anton Steen with Mindaugas Kuklys Epilogue: Democratic Elitism and Western Political Thought ......... 215 John Higley Index ........................................................................................................ 231

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book stems from an international conference organized jointly by the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on Political Elites (RC02) and the University of Jena’s Collaborative Research Centre on Social Developments after Structural Change: Discontinuity, Tradition, and Structural Formation (SFB 580). The conference took place during June 2007 in the Old Castle of Dornburg, near Jena in Germany. It assembled a score of scholars from eight countries to canvas Democratic Elitism’s achievements and limits as an explanation and description of contemporary representative democracies. Although Democratic Elitism may have become somewhat dated since it emerged during the first half of the 20th century, it still combines in an unmatched way two sets of political relations pivotal for these democracies: relations among competing elites and leaders, and relations between them and the general public. This book reassesses Democratic Elitism’s theoretical propositions, reconsiders their place in theories of democracy and Western political thought, and confronts the propositions with empirical evidence of how contemporary democracies are developing and functioning in Europe’s eastern and western countries. The book contains a selection of presentations at the Dornburg conference that have been thoroughly edited, peer reviewed, and updated. We wish to thank the German Science Foundataion (DFG) for funding the conference, and the University of Jena for providing it with a splendid venue. We also wish to thank Rainer Eising and Karl Schmitt (both University of Jena), Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Andreas Gruber (both University of Bamberg), Ekkart L. Zimmermann (University of Dresden), Jan Pakulski (University of Tasmania), Gwen Moore (State University of New York, Albany), and Jean-Pascal Daloz (Oxford University) for valuable comments and contributions that helped make the conference a success and that have numerous traces in this book. We thank two anonymous Brill reviewers for truly extensive and penetrating critiques of the book’s draft chapters. Finally, we thank Verona Christmas-Best most warmly for indispensable help in editing the book.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Heinrich Best is Professor of Sociology at the University of Jena, where he holds the Chair of Social Science Research Methods and Structural Analysis of Modern Societies. He is also Co-Director of the Collaborative Research Centre there. His recent publications include Parliamentary Representatives in Europe 1848–2000 (2000, with M. Cotta), Democratic Representation in Europe: Diversity, Change and Convergence (2007, with M. Cotta), and Elites and Social Change. The Socialist and Post-Socialist Experience (2008, with R. Gebauer). Jens Borchert is Professor of Political Science at the University of Frankfurt, where he holds the Chair in Political Sociology and State Theory. His recent publications include The Professionalization of Politics: On the Necessity of a Nuisance (2003, in German), and The Political Class in Advanced Democracies (2003, with J. Zeiss). Michael Edinger is Senior Researcher at the University of Jena, where he coordinates research on parliamentary elites in the Collaborative Research Centre. He is a member of the editorial board of Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen, the journal of German parliamentary affairs. His publications include Political Careers in Europe (2009, with S. Jahr), and “The Making of Representative Elites in East Germany” (2009). Fredrik Engelstad is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oslo and research director at the Institute for Social Research, Oslo. He is series editor of the yearbook Comparative Social Research, and a board member of the European Consortium for Sociological Research. His recent publications include Comparative Studies of Culture and Power (2003), Power and Democracy. Critical Interventions (2004, with Ø. Østerud), and Comparative Studies of Social and Political Elites (2007, with T. Gulbrandsen). Trygve Gulbrandsen is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Research, Oslo, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oslo.

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notes on contributors

His recent publications include Comparative Studies of Social and Political Elites (2007, with F. Engelstad), Private Business Between Market and Politics (2003, with F. Engelstad, E. Ekeberg, and J. Vatnaland, in Norwegian), and “Elite Integration and Institutional Trust” (2007). John Higley is Professor of Government and Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He chairs the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on Political Elites. His recent publications include Elites, Crises, and the Origins of Regimes (1998, with M. Dogan), Elites After States Socialism (2000, with G. Lengyel), Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy (2006, with M. Burton), and Nations of Immigrants: Australia and the United States Compared (2009, with J. Nieuwenhuysen). Gabriella Ilonszki is Professor of Political Science at Corvinus University in Budapest, where she conducts research on comparative, gender, and institutional aspects of political representation. Her most recent publication is Amateur and Professional Politicians: MPs in Hungary (2008, in Hungarian). Mindaugas Kuklys is a Dr. Phil. candidate in Sociology at the University of Jena and an associated member of the Collaborative Research Centre. His most recent publication is the monograph Gender and Ethnic Representation in the Baltic Legislatures: Latvia and Lithuania, 1990–2006 (2008). András Körösényi is Professor of Political Science at the Eötvös University of Budapest and President of the Hungarian Political Science Association. His English publications include Post-Communist Transition (1992), Government and Politics in Hungary (2000), and articles in Electoral Studies, Government and Opposition, and Political Quarterly. György Lengyel is Professor of Sociology at Corvinus University in Budapest, where in 2009 he received the Szent-Györgyi Prize for Distinguished Scholorship. His recent publications include Restructuring the Economic Elite after State Socialism (2007, with D. Lane and J. Tholen), The Social Composition of the Hungarian Economic Elite at the End of the 20th Century (2007, in Hungarian), and Hungarian Political and Economic Elites’ Images of the European Union (2008, in Hungarian).

notes on contributors

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Anton Steen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. His publications include Between Past and Future: Elites, Democracy and the State in Post-Communist Countries (1997), Elites and Democratic Development in Russia (2003, with V. Gel’man), Political Elites in the New Russia (2003), “Do Elite Beliefs Matter? Elites and Economic Reforms in the Baltic States and Russia” (2007), and “Elites and the Neo-Liberal State: Post-Social-Democratic and Post-Communist Elites” (2007, with Ø. Østerud, in Norwegian). Jacek Wasilewski is Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Warsaw School of Social Pyschology. His publications deal with political elites, democratization, and social stratification in Poland and include Political Leadership in Polish Counties (2009, in Polish).

INTRODUCTION: DEMOCRATIC ELITISM REAPPRAISED Heinrich Best and John Higley* Early in the twentieth century Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels and Max Weber highlighted the disjunction between political elites and democracy. Emphasizing the inescapability and autonomy of elites, they contended that efforts to achieve government by the people are futile; an elite-dominated “democracy” is the most that is possible (Burnham 1943; Femia 2001:67). In such a democracy there are elected parliaments and other elected offices, but voters do not really choose their representatives and key office holders. Rather, career politicians and assorted political interlopers impose themselves on voters. According to Mosca (1923/1939) and Michels (1915/1962), democracies can never be more than intra-elite competitions entailing the systematic manipulation of voters’ choices and interests (see Linz 2006). Regarding politics as driven always by “the principle of small numbers,” Weber hoped that a distinctive “leader democracy,” marked by a charismatic leader’s domination over parliamentary careerists, party machines, and state bureaucracies, might nonetheless emerge (1920/1978:41–71,1111–55,1414,1459–60). Pareto was less hopeful. There can be a “demagogic plutocracy,” in which an alliance of fox-like politicians and profit-seeking capitalists (“speculators”) rules through deception, demagogy and the bribing of diverse interests. But because such elite maneuvers involve allocating instead of creating wealth, a demagogic plutocracy gradually “kills the goose that lays the golden eggs” (1902/1966:142). When the goose is effectively dead – when the demagogic plutocracy is hollowed out economically – a leonine elite prepared to reverse economic decline and social decay by force displaces the vulpine elite. The demagogic plutocracy is transformed into a military plutocracy. Eventually, however, the leonine elite over-reaches * We thank Jan Pakulski for his contributions to an earlier version of this introductory chapter.

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in its “warlike activities” and is unseated by a new fox-like elite that creates another demagogic plutocracy, thus starting the “plutocratic cycle” over (Pareto 1921/1984:55–62; Femia 2006:100–123). Attempts to break the cycle are pointless. The four early theorists of elites depicted popular sovereignty and egalitarian socialism as rhetorical façades and political formulas that merely mask rule by elites. They regarded the surging communist and fascist movements of their time as vehicles on which illiberal and leonine elites would ride to power, with Weber warning that a “polar night of icy darkness and hardness” might well occur in post-World War I Germany (quoted by Antonio 1995:1370). Their premonitions were largely realized during the 1920s and 1930s, though as a consequence, theories about elites came to be seen as better at accounting for the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes than elucidating democracy (e.g. Lasswell and Lerner 1965). In ideological formulations and popular outlooks after World War II, the cohabitation of democracy and elites was viewed as awkward and uneasy (Mills 1956; Kornhauser 1959; Bottomore 1964; Porter 1965). It was widely believed that finding ways to restrict elite autonomy and prevent arbitrary elite action is essential if democracy is to have meaning. Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of competitive democracy, which is often labeled “democratic elitism” – a label Schumpeter himself never used – was the most important effort to reconcile democracy with the existence of elites. In his seminal book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter contended that democracy is a method or institutional arrangement “for arriving at political decisions in which individuals [political leaders and elites] acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (1942:269). Democracy, in other words, combines governance by leaders and elites with time-limited mandates to govern issued by the demos. But Schumpeter’s theory was ambiguous and somewhat contradictory. It assumed that leaders and elites are competitive but also restrained; it depended upon unspecified conditions that underlie peaceful competitions for votes; and it tried to merge two antagonistic principles, democracy and elitism. For these and other reasons we will discuss, democratic elitism is an overly simplistic rendition of how democracies, especially today’s democracies, work. Though a “competitive struggle for the people’s vote” occurs, political leaders and elites orchestrate this struggle. Indeed, democracies may be morphing into Weber’s leader democracy, with

introduction: democratic elitism reappraised

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strong plebiscitary thrusts that render “the people’s vote” little more than a rubber-stamping of self-selected leaders and self-reproducing elites. It must be asked if democratic elitism is still a relevant and useful theory of democracy.

Schumpeter’s Theory Like Pareto, Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) was an economist who ventured into political sociology as a sideline (Swedberg 1991; McCraw 2007). He knew Pareto’s pioneering work in economic theory, though it appears that Schumpeter became familiar with Pareto’s political sociology only late in life, after he had framed his competitive theory of democracy (see Schumpeter’s essay on Pareto, written in 1948 to celebrate the centenary of Pareto’s birth, but published posthumously in 1951). More important, Schumpeter possessed a close knowledge of Weber’s interdisciplinary “social economics,” and Weber’s discussion of leader democracy was a key inspiration. Schumpeter portrayed modern capitalist economies as propelled by mass consumption, but directed and driven by a few entrepreneurinnovators. It is the entrepreneur-innovators, not mass consumers, who are the source of capitalist dynamism. Democracy mirrors capitalism. It is propelled by mass consent, but this is mobilized and driven by political leaders and elites, who are the equivalents of entrepreneurinnovators. Leaders and elites are the vital actors in democracy; voters are political consumers who choose which leaders and elites will govern them: “The role of the people is to produce a government, or else an intermediate body which in turn will produce a national executive or government…Voters do not decide issues” (1942:269, 282). Leaders and elites are constrained indirectly and periodically by their competitions for electoral mandates and, one must add, their need to anticipate and influence voters’ future choices (Friedrich 1963). Schumpeter assumed these competitions to be free and fair, as well as circumspect and restrained, but he did not dwell on their features. He stressed, instead, the decision-making autonomy that leaders and elites must have once they win a mandate to govern: “The voters must understand that once they have elected an individual, political action is his business and not theirs” (1942:290). Schumpeter’s theory has received much attention. During the 1950s and early 1960s prominent theorists such as Robert Dahl and

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Charles Lindblom (1953), Anthony Downs (1957), Giovanni Sartori (1962), and Seymour Martin Lipset (1962) endorsed it. Starting in the mid-1960s, however, democratic elitism came under sustained attack by champions of a more direct democracy, with Jack Walker (1966), Henry Kariel (1966), Peter Bachrach (1967), and Carole Pateman (1970) among the most vocal critics. A main charge, still heard today (e.g. Diamond 2008:20–26), was that Schumpeter’s conception of democracy is too procedural or “thin.” It ignores democracy’s substantive or “thick” components, including rule of law, protections of minorities, civil liberties, due process, institutional checks against unbridled rule, a pluralistic civil society, civilian control of the military, and so on. Another charge has been that Schumpeter too blithely depicts voters as compliant and passive vessels while portraying political leaders and elites as creative and responsible actors. Moreover, in rendering democracy as simply a method by which voters assign governing power to leaders and elites, Schumpeter downgrades democracy from the status of an ultimate and universal value, as many people regard it, to that of a purely instrumental value (see chapter 12). There are other questions about Schumpeter’s theory. The readiness of leaders and elites to refrain from making their competitions into slugfests is more problematic than he assumed. Schumpeter said nothing about the origin of democratic game rules for competing with restraint in elections and policy disputes, how these rules become institutionalized, or how they are enforced and shored up when competitors violate them (Best 2007). He merely noted “a continuous range of variation within which the democratic method shades off into the autocratic one by imperceptible steps” (1942:271). Neither did Schumpeter discuss how persons are selected to compete in elections – whether selectors are judicious or corrupt; whether selection is relatively open, as in party primaries, or confined to cliques of party bosses; whether wealthy or unscrupulous outsiders with little political experience intrude; whether politicians shape electoral districts to guarantee re-election. Whether, in short, a galaxy of electoral tricks and unfair advantages make open and freely competitive elections a mirage. Furthermore, as noted above, Schumpeter stipulated that between elections office holders must be sufficiently free of mass pressures to formulate and implement policies effectively. But today, as Juan Linz has observed, this is problematic because of the complexity of issues, the multiplication of sub-national and supra-national elections that create permanent campaign mentalities among politicians, and the


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glare of 24-hour media in which officials’ policies and actions are subject to instant and often devastating attack (Linz 2006:108). In addition, Schumpeter seemed to take it for granted that election candidates’ presentations of their qualifications and accomplishments and their opponents’ alleged shortcomings are basically honest. His political competitions have no place for the agenda setting, professional image management, spin machines, dirty tricks, and outright lies that color so much of today’s politics. Schumpeter also ignored questions about the quality of political leaders and elites. In line with market theory, he apparently assumed that, through competition, the most qualified would usually win out, though he recognized that there could be “cases that are strikingly analogous to the economic phenomenon we label ‘unfair’ or ‘fraudulent’ competition or restraint of competition” (1942:271). But if, as in markets distorted by monopolies, some political competitors enjoy inherited privileges, grossly unequal funding, celebrity status, dynastic family names, or other big advantages, leaders and elites of high quality are hardly assured by competitive elections. What all of this boils down to is that neither Schumpeter nor subsequent defenders of democratic elitism pay enough attention to the actual behaviors of leaders and elites. Attention has been riveted on how adequately democratic elitism captures the relationship between governors and the governed in its simple insistence that competitive elections prevent the relationship from being one-way, i.e., leaders and elites largely unaccountable to passive and submissive voters. But why and how leaders and elites create and sustain competitive elections, what happens if their competitions become excessively stage-managed or belligerent – how, in short, leaders and elites really act – needs more examination. Before launching this book’s examination of such issues, let us clarify relevant concepts and phenomena.

Democracy, Political Elites, and Elitism As discussed here, democracy entails competitive and participatory elections, usually on the basis of universal suffrage, to select public office holders, and these elections are embedded in legal protections of civil and political liberties to ensure their integrity. We focus, in other words, on representative democracy because this is what Schumpeter clearly had in mind and it is what democratic elitism purports to

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encapsulate. There are, however, many at least minimally representative democracies in today’s world, many more than in the 1940s when Schumpeter wrote. The most recent Freedom House assessment of the nearly 200 political regimes in today’s world classifies 121 of them as “electoral democracies” (Puddington 2008). A score of these electoral democracies are microstates in which politics have a strong family- or clan-based cast. It is obvious, moreover, that in at least half of the 100 or so larger electoral democracies competitive elections and other democratic trappings are poorly institutionalized and subject to a host of disruptions and shortcomings: militaries prepared to veto election outcomes and policy decisions; widespread corruption and fraud; inchoate party systems; poorly functioning judiciaries; deep and destabilizing ethno-regional cleavages, and so on. During 2007, in fact, only 29 larger electoral democracies received the highest Freedom House scores for observing both political rights and civil liberties, and it is probably only in these well-institutionalized democracies that it makes sense to talk about democratic elitism. All but three of the 29 democracies are Anglo-American or European states, the three exceptions being Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Within Europe, moreover, none of its southeastern states, other than Slovenia, as yet displays the extensive political rights and civil liberties assumed by democratic elitism. Political elites consist of persons who are able, by virtue of their strategic positions in powerful organizations and movements, to affect political outcomes and the workings of political institutions regularly and seriously. They are persons at or near the top of the “pyramid of power” (Putnam 1976:14) or, put differently, persons with the “organized capacity to make real and continuing political trouble” (Higley and Burton 2006:7). This is a descriptive definition that applies to a number of functionally differentiated groups sometimes called “strategic elites” (Keller 1963): full-time politicians in cabinets, important legislators, party officials, and their immediate advisors; senior public servants; owners and CEOs of important business corporations and firms; leaders of large labor unions and other powerful pressure groups; top military officers; prominent lawyers, economists, journalists, and other leaders of professions; key religious leaders; as well as persons heading up major ethnic/racial or single-issue civic movements. This definition subsumes “established” figures and groups, as well as those who are often labeled “counter elites” because the latter, like the former, clearly


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have the power, though perhaps mainly through blocking actions, to affect political outcomes and the workings of political institutions regularly and seriously. It might be objected that defining political elites in this way is too sweeping – that it covers tens of thousands of persons in a country like the United States, for example. Yet when the definition has been applied rigorously at the national level, researchers have identified less than 8,000 political elite members in the U.S. (Dye 2002), roughly 4,000 in medium-sized countries like France (Dogan 2003), Germany (Hoffmann-Lange 1992), and Australia (Higley, Deacon, and Smart 1979), and about 2,000 in small countries like Denmark (Christiansen, Möller, and Togeby 2001) and Norway (Gulbrandsen et al. 2002). Researchers have found, moreover, that within these national political elites there are especially tight-knit groups whose memberships cut across functional boundaries, including what some term an “inner” or “central” circle to which several hundred persons holding the uppermost positions in the otherwise differentiated elite sectors belong (Kadushin 1968; Moore 1975; Useem 1984; Knoke 1990; Higley et al. 1991). Political elites vary in type among societies and within them over time (Aron 1950; Dahrendorf 1967; Putnam 1976). Most frequently, they are deeply divided into warring camps, with one camp holding the upper hand and ruthlessly harassing or suppressing other camps – a disunited political elite. Much less frequently, political elites are tightly united in a single party or religious movement, whose ideology or creed elite persons profess uniformly in their public utterances. Obviously, neither a deeply disunited nor a tightly united political elite is compatible with representative democracy. Only what might be termed a “consensually united” political elite is propitious for such a democracy (Higley and Burton 2006). The persons and groups making up a consensually united political elite interact through complex formal and informal networks that are most dense within functionally differentiated sectors, in which elite persons engage in the same kind of activity and share similar skills and information. But these sector-specific networks overlap and interlock to form web-works and inner or central circles through which sector elites are tied together and obtain access to key political decisionmakers. Members of the elite share a voluntary, mostly tacit consensus about norms and rules of political behavior, the hallmark of which is a commitment to keeping politics tamed (Sartori 1995). Terming this

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elite consensus “restrained partisanship,” Giuseppi Di Palma (1973) has dissected it as follows: – Elites recognize the right of oppositions to exist, to be heard, to bargain the content of decisions, to veto decisions, and to enjoy representation proportional to their size and influence; – Elites agree to disagree when decisions cannot or should not be reached; – Elites maintain significant autonomy in relation to their respective non-elite bases of support, i.e., they do not greatly intrude into each other’s sectors; – Elites emphasize technical and procedural feasibilities rather than ultimate rights and wrongs in problem solving; – Elites practice enough secrecy to have flexibility when bargaining, fashioning compromises, and seeking innovative solutions to problems. In a consensually united elite restrained partisanship is reinforced and perpetuated by the inclusive and integrated network of interactions in which most members participate. Through friendships and other personal ties; through frequent, intensive and wide-ranging organizational contacts; and also through common recreational and social activities in exclusive and privileged settings (e.g. Domhoff 2002:49–54), elite members know each other well, and this familiarity disposes them toward reciprocities when tackling common problems, conflicts, and disagreements. The elite’s operational code is do ut des – give to get (Sartori 1987:224, 229) – and over time it inclines persons and groups to view the totality of political outcomes as positive-sum and to uphold the political institutions that process their bargains (see chapter 4). Consensually united elites are relative rarities in the modern historical and contemporary world, and they appear to originate in only a few ways. One way is through a deliberate, sudden, and basic “settlement” of lethal and longstanding oppositions, as occurred between Tory and Whig elite camps in England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–89 (Barone 2007) or between Franquist and anti-Franquist elite camps in Spain during 1977–78 (Linz and Stepan 1996:87–115). A second way has been through a long experience of relatively benign colonial rule, during which settler or “native” elites have learned to practice cautious and restrained politics and eventually wage a unifying struggle for national independence – the origin of consensually united elites in the


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former British colonies of Australia, Canada, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, and, not least, the United States (Weiner 1987). A third way has been through a gradual convergence of opposing elite camps toward consensual unity when widespread prosperity has eroded the beliefs and postures of radically dissident elite camps, as appears to have happened in Italy and France during the 1960s and 1970s and in Japan during the 1970s and 1980s (Higley and Burton 2006:139–79). It is possible, in addition, that social mechanisms specified by William Sumner’s theory of “antagonistic cooperation” may spur the development of consensually united elites where conditions for the three historical origins of such elites do not exist (see chapter 6). “Elitism” is difficult to define. Its dictionary meanings are leadership or rule by an elite; the selectivity of an elite when choosing new members; and/or the consciousness of being or belonging to an elite. In popular parlance “elitism” and “elitist” are pejorative terms used to denigrate persons and groups who think they are better or profess to know more than others or who possess privileges regarded as unwarranted. An irony in contemporary politics – colorfully on display in the recent US presidential contest between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and sundry other contenders – is that persons in elite statuses regularly disparage each other for being “elitist” in one or more popular senses of the term. Democratic elitism is unclearly related to these several meanings. Nominally, it means only that elites play a major role in governance that does not prevent a substantial degree of democracy, though when used pejoratively democratic elitism implies that there should not be even this perversion of democracy. More stringently, democratic elitism means that a tolerance of arbitrary rights and powers vested in elites, however impossible it may be to justify these rights and powers ab initio, is necessary to prevent a profitless battle of all against all in a world devoid of universal values (Field and Higley 1980:3–4; Gray 2007:184–204). With regards to its other component, democratic elitism holds that elites protect democratic orders from unsophisticated and often intolerant publics through the stronger commitments of elites to democratic values, their more coherent belief systems, their greater tolerance of dissent, and their readiness to take unpopular actions in order to preserve democracy (Peffley and Rohrschneider 2007:65). Put differently, democratic elitism portrays elites as democracy’s guardians, without whose protections democracy would probably unravel (see chapter 3).

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heinrich best and john higley Democratic Elitism in Western Democracies

Democratic elitism’s record during the twentieth century was mixed. If we look at Europe during the years before and during World War I, we find a precarious democratic elitism in Britain and France that ultimately prevailed against authoritarian rule in Wilhelminian Germany. For Weber, who worried in his writings about Germany’s political capacity for waging war, figures like Britain’s David Lloyd George and France’s Georges Clemenceau exemplified the superiority of democratically elected leaders over bureaucrats like Theobald von BethmannHollweg, the ex-civil servant who was Germany’s wartime Chancellor. Political elites in France, and to some degree in Britain, included leaders of socialist parties and movements in the war effort and shared some amount of power with them. The fabric of France’s democratic elitism in those years was vividly described in Robert de Jouvenel’s République des Camarades (1914), with its image of politicians attacking each other fervently in the Palais Bourbon only to engage immediately afterwards in friendly conversations over good meals and fine wines. In Germany, however, even this limited elite power sharing was absent. In his famous 1919 lecture about “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber pleaded with his fellow Germans to recognize the need for autonomous political leaders and policy-makers whose competitions for office and whose actions the public would act, respectively, as referee and observer. Weber thought this the appropriate way to organize politics in a modern society, though he feared that mass democracy would too easily become leaderless and degenerate into a chaotic horse-trading of sectional interests. To counter this possibility, Weber outlined in his lecture and elsewhere his concept of a leader democracy, in which a charismatic and plebiscitary leader would be insulated from immediate public pressures but subjected to some control by his or her colleagues (1921/1968:1459). In the cataclysm that engulfed continental European democracies during the interwar period, however, Weber’s prescription was doomed. Always precarious because of antipathies among competing elites and surging fascist movements, democracy in France collapsed with the demise of the Third Republic in 1940. In Weimar Germany, Weber’s prescription never got off the ground. Political leaders and elite groups were captives of disparate and segmented socio-cultural movements that deprived them of the autonomy Weber deemed essential. By 1930,


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for example, almost half of the Reichstag’s members were employed by parties, organizations affiliated with parties (Vorfeldorganisastionen), or party newspapers (Best 1990). When the last governing coalition with majority support in the Reichstag broke down in 1930, direct presidential rule by emergency decree began, and the Nazis became the most successful recipients of votes in crucial elections that followed. Between about 1950 and 1990 consensually united elites – essential for the circumspect and restrained electoral competitions that democratic elitism assumes – solidified on the basis of elite settlements or gradual convergences in all West European countries. In most of these countries tripartite deals were negotiated by government, business, and labor union elites to create neo-corporatist elite condominiums (Schmitter and Lehmbruch 1979), and elites used state power as a regulatory-welfare tool for expanding social rights, a practice embraced, more tacitly than explicitly, by all main elite camps (Judt 2005:324– 389). As a description of politics during this period, democratic elitism became synonymous with representative democracy, though as a prescription of how democracy should be it remained a bone of contention (see chapter 2). Germany, or more precisely the West German Federal Republic, was again symptomatic. Partly in response to the destruction of democracy at the end of the Weimar Republic, but primarily in response to the Soviet threat during the Cold War, West German political elites formed a “cartel of angst” (Dahrendorf 1967:217–231) and operated an elaborate machinery of consensus politics in the neo-corporatist world of “Rhenish capitalism”. In few countries of postwar Europe was democratic elitism more apparent and successful than West Germany (Judt 2005:265–277). However, recent trends in the politics of European and other Western democracies cast shadows over democratic elitism’s continued relevance and success. Two broad trends strike us as especially pertinent. The dominance of political leaders A main feature of today’s democracies is the dominance of political leaders. Voters focus heavily on leaders’ likeability and personality traits that inspire trust. Leaders’ intellectual capacities, ideological and issue orientations, policy-making experience and skills are of more peripheral importance to voters. Leaders who inspire trust, project

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strength, and gain wide appeal define issues, overshadow party platforms and dominate elections that are preponderantly referendums on competing leaders’ images. As Ian McAllister puts it: There is little doubt that political leaders have become more politically important over the past half century, in parliamentary as well as in presidential systems. Leaders’ images are now as widespread as party symbols during election campaigns, and governments are routinely labeled after their leader, not the party… Parties, too, consider it advantageous to market political choices to voters through a personality. And for their part, voters prefer to hold an individual accountable for government performance, rather than an abstract institution or a political ideal (McAllister 2003:259).

Today, a likeable leader who has no skeletons in the closet and for whom an attractive media image can be fashioned is seen as the key to success. As McAllister notes, parties are vehicles for leaders, and governments are more and more synonymous with the prime ministers and presidents who head them. These changes are particularly striking in parliamentary democracies that long emphasized party government and collective cabinet decision-making and responsibility. Most recent electoral competitions – in Tony Blair’s Britain, Angela Merkel’s Germany, Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy, Luis Rodriquez Zapatero’s Spain, Stephen Harper’s Canada, John Howard’s (and now Kevin Rudd’s) Australia, Helen Clark’s New Zealand, Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s Denmark, – have emulated the strongly leader-centered contests of the United States and the semi-presidential systems of France and Poland. One cannot regard this increased focus on leaders as simply the “Americanization” of parliamentary democracies or the necessary response to terrorist threats to national security. America’s influence on parliamentary democracies has always been strong, but today’s preponderant focus on leaders is of relatively recent vintage. And while there is little doubt that terrorism reinforces the concentration on leaders, broader and deeper changes in democracies, both parliamentary and presidential, lie behind the change. At the most general level, economic globalization and international competition force a greater concentration of power at the apexes of political, business, and other key elite sectors. In the political sector power is now clearly concentrated in prime ministers and opposition leaders who are much more than primus inter pares in cabinets and shadow cabinets. As shown by Donald Savoie (2008), Canada and


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Britain now approximate “court governments” more than cabinet governments: effective power in both democracies rests with prime ministers and a small group of trusted courtiers. Cabinet ministers and their shadow counterparts operate as political conduits for prime ministers and opposition leaders, while public service department secretaries are scapegoats who take the blame for policy failures. An analogous trend is apparent in the business sector, where power is concentrated in the hands of chief executive officers. Until public anger about these executives’ risky actions surfaced late in 2008, they enjoyed bloated salaries and celebrity status akin to that of rock stars, brought in or sacked in order to reverse sagging share values and dividends. The enhanced role of paramount political leaders goes hand in hand with the waning of cleavage-based mass parties (Volksparteien). Jean Blondel (2005) observes that the structural bases of such parties have weakened greatly, and their ideological-programmatic competitions, which once addressed stable and loyal mass constituencies, especially class-based ones, have largely dissipated. Ideological blueprints for socialism, liberalism and conservatism have been abandoned as idioms for mobilizing support, and they no longer serve as frameworks for policy-making. Instead, political leaders stitch together policy packages, parts of which are often copied from packages that leaders in other countries have marketed successfully. These packages are more idiosyncratic than the programs of the earlier Volksparteien. Though they all assume a market economy, an electoral democracy, and a national identity, the packages contain mixes of ideologically incongruous elements. For example, a laissez-fare commitment to economic deregulation and tax cuts for business is packaged with a collectivist commitment to environmental protection, expanded health care programs, and measures to alleviate homeowners’ plights. Policy packages are constructed and presented by leaders and coteries of close advisors according to what incoming polling and focus group data indicate is most saleable. Leaders stage announcements of their packages for the media, who in turn portray the leaders as key agents of change. Parties thus become “leader parties” whose role is restricted to anointing leaders and financing campaigns in the expectation of receiving spoils if their leader wins. In some of Central and Eastern Europe’s new democracies leaders create their own political parties and use them as personal vehicles for gaining power (see chapters 8–10), much as Berlusconi has done in Italy. Leaders now bring parties to power rather than the other way around.

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This dominance of leaders can be viewed as a response to the growing complexity of political issues and attendant uncertainties about policy outcomes. Ideologically robust parties and programs were suited to times when policy choices were clearer and policy outcomes were more predictable. But such relative certainties, which accompanied the organized superpower politics of the Cold War period and voters’ innocence about environmental problems, globalization, and many other matters, has diminished greatly. In today’s atmosphere of complexity and uncertainty voters rely on leaders as guides and innovators who are ostensibly more capable of responding flexibly and rapidly to unforeseen dilemmas and events than the rigid party machines of yesteryear (Zolo 1992). Leaders who grapple with “issues whose complexities lie beyond the grasp of mass publics” (Zakaria 2003:241) offer broad visions that they try to articulate charismatically. Barack Obama’s artfully presented vision that change from old to new politics is a matter of inspired leadership and collective will (“Yes we can!”) is but one illustration. The leader-media symbiosis A public sphere suffused by mass media compels and facilitates much of this dominance by political leaders. The mass media, especially electronic media that create feelings of intimacy, are the natural allies of leaders seeking to project charisma. The media accentuate images of leaders as mass persuaders, tone-setters, figures with whom voters can identify, and providers of reassurance. This media role is obviously great, especially during election campaigns that are now prolonged and even “permanent” features of the political landscape. The media cater to voters’ short attention spans and susceptibility to hyperbole and spectacle. To suit the need for brevity, drama, and simplicity, campaigns are framed as “horse races” largely devoid of policy detail and nuance. Leaders’ personalities, especially their quirks, are the core idiom, and highlighting personal differences between leaders is the principal media effort (see chapter 7). Leader-media relations are symbiotic, instrumental, and driven by short-term political and commercial interests. Leaders and aspiring leaders carefully cultivate relations with the media and work hard to control their media images. Conscious of the impact that personalized media exposure has on voters, leaders comport themselves as, and are at the same time accused of being, celebrities. Indeed, growing numbers


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of leaders have themselves previously been familiar media figures with the advantages of “recognition” and experience in media performance. Leaders surround themselves with media-savvy advisors, PR experts, and spin-doctors. Their image-shaping machines include public opinion pollsters and strategists who elbow aside advisors on substantive issues and ignore the prosaic concerns of sub-national party and faction bosses (Paisley and Ward 2001). Use of this image-shaping expertise strengthens leaders’ positions vis-à-vis parliamentary and party colleagues, who, as background figures, see their political careers hinging on how leaders fare in voter approval ratings. Voter-media relations are also symbiotic. Brief, dramatic, and personality-focused media presentations suit voters well. Voters like to think of themselves as skilled in judging character, while few believe themselves capable of assessing complex policy issues and dilemmas. Forming an opinion about a leader as friendly, sympathetic, trustworthy and determined, or as aloof, calculating, cold and uncaring is easily accomplished with the assistance of a few minutes’ media exposure. Once formed, such voter judgments are relatively unshakeable unless some scandalous aspect of a leader’s personal behavior comes to light. Conclusion Joseph Schumpeter described how representative democracy works in modern national states. Governing power is centered in some representative body or office and transferred from one political faction to another through open, periodic electoral competitions to dominate that body or office. Acting as voters, citizens choose which competing persons and parties will represent them and, directly or indirectly, attain government executive office. Once chosen by voters, representatives and executives conduct the people’s business consonant with not jeopardizing their chances of re-election too greatly. Schumpeter made no claim that he described an ideal political arrangement. He simply took it for granted that in any large and complex polity his democratic method is all that is possible. Theorists of democracy have been more than a little reluctant to accept that this is so. Yet as a factual matter, among large and complex polities there is no known exception, and, gradually, more than a few contemporary theorists of democracy are at least implicitly recognizing this. To be sure, disputes about the extent of elite accountability to voters and of elite

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autonomy in decision-making continue. But much recent thinking about how today’s democracies work acknowledges that Schumpeter was close to the mark (see chapters 2 and 3). Yet democratic elitism needs to pay more attention to the leader-centered contours of today’s politics and the rough and tumble power competitions that now occur between elite factions. If it is to remain relevant and useful, democratic elitism must take account of these changing aspects of politics. This is what the present book seeks to accomplish. Let us preview its contents. Part I focuses on intersections between democratic elitism and today’s broad range of theories about democracy. Jens Borchert (chapter 2) begins by disentangling democratic elitism’s principal components – periodic elections, the inescapability of political elites, the need for elite autonomy – and asks if democratic elitism is now conventional wisdom, an obsolete doctrine, or still a distinct pole in the ongoing debate about democracy. Borchert shows that democratic elitism’s components pervade contemporary conceptions of democracy – even radically participatory conceptions – to an astonishing degree. He observes that, as a description of how representative democracy works, democratic elitism is now more or less universally accepted. Yet in our time, Borchert continues, democratic elitism is seriously distorted by a professionalized politics that makes leaders and elites less and less accountable to voters. He argues that the manifest discontent of many voters with democratic politics stems from their unwillingness to accept democratic elitism’s tenet about the necessity for elite autonomy, and he concludes that the balance sheet of how democratic elitism fares as a depiction of today’s democracies is mixed; it has triumphed in important respects, but it remains problematic in others. András Körösényi (chapter 3) has elsewhere argued vigorously for resurrecting Weber’s concept of leader democracy (Körösényi 2005). His chapter’s point of departure is the growing number of studies that assign elites and leaders a larger role than democratic elitism has customarily assumed. Körösényi does not regard democratic elitism as a coherent theory, because it papers over three quite distinct models of political representation and democratic control: Robert Dahl’s mandate model; the accountability model associated chiefly with John Plamenatz; and the authorization model set forth by Adam Przeworski and his colleagues. Körösényi compares and contrasts the three models and concludes that Przeworski’s authorization model, in which voters’ choices are conceptualized and presented by elites and leaders, best


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captures relations between them and voters in today’s democracies. While the authorization model is decidedly more pessimistic about controlling elites and leaders in a democracy, Körösényi views it as nonetheless compatible with a “skeptical” reading of Schumpeter. Fredrik Engelstad (chapter 4) begins by observing that discussions of democratic elitism have given relations among elites too little attention. He contrasts and critiques approaches that emphasize elite conflict with those that emphasize elite consensus, and he argues that both approaches exaggerate the space that elites have for independent action in today’s democracies. In reality, Engelstad contends, many relations among elites now unfold in the public sphere where elites are constrained by well-established institutions and public opinion. Although elites undoubtedly create democracies, over time the public spheres of democracies shape elite relations. Engelstad denies, moreover, that there is some single pattern of relations among elites in democracies; elite relations evolve in quite different ways according to national histories and cultures. Attributing to democratic elitism only one pattern of elite relations can therefore be misleading, because it overlooks the important particularities of each democracy. John Higley (chapter 5) concludes Part I by examining how ideologies, which elites utilize for political justification and mass mobilization, are misleading guides to what can be accomplished politically. After reviewing how socialism preoccupied and misled elites during the “short” 20th century, he argues that the ideology of democracy, in which Western elites today have unswerving faith, conceals a range of fundamental sociopolitical changes and distorts the implications of various major events. Higley’s thesis is that the fixation of elites on democracy’s illusions is leading – in some respects has already led – to disaster. Part II takes stock of how democratic elitism has operated in several European countries. Heinrich Best (chapter 6) discusses how Germany has exhibited democratic elitism’s workings in both a frail and a robust form. He reviews Max Weber’s conception of leader democracy, the precursor of democratic elitism. Best recalls the failed effort to practice this form of democratic politics in the Weimar Republic, and he reviews how democratic elitism took hold in West Germany following World War II. He argues, however, that democratic elitism needs to be reformulated and specified by adding elements of principal-agent theory and core concepts in William Sumner’s theory of antagonistic cooperation. Utilizing rich data on the attitudes and interactions of German federal and state MPs during 2003–2004, Best demonstrates how an

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expanded version of democratic elitism explains the phenomenon of “associated rivals” in today’s re-unified Germany. Trygve Gulbrandsen (chapter 7) addresses tensions between political and media elites in Norway’s democracy. He begins by surveying the large research literature that depicts relations between political and media elites as fraught. Gulbrandsen then draws on data from what is probably the most comprehensive survey study of national elites ever conducted – the Norwegian Elite Study in 2000–2001 – to analyze the mutual perceptions and interactions of top-level political and media leaders. He finds that relations between these two elite groups have somewhat contradictory implications for democratic elitism in Norway. On the one hand, the media elite checks tendencies toward excessive political elite secrecy. On the other hand, the relentless glare to which the media elite subjects the political elite, along with the media’s insatiable appetite for scandalous and commercially profitable leaks and exposés, make competitions between political leaders more continuous and risky than democratic elitism assumes. Michael Edinger (chapter 8) asks how democratic elitism has fared in a dozen Central and East European countries since they transited to democracy at the start of the 1990s. He employs extensive data on the social composition, recruitment, political behavior, and attitudes of parliamentary elites to measure the gap between them and voting publics. He then draws on public opinion data that show the extent of those publics’ discontent with parliamentary elites. Edinger finds that the aspects of parliamentary elites he studies are generally consistent with a gradual emergence of democratic elitism in the region, though there are important differences and setbacks among the dozen countries he compares and contrasts. György Lengyel and Gabriella Ilonszki (chapter 9) provide an incisive analysis of how and why Hungary’s democracy has become markedly more turbulent during the past several years. They show that a host of changes have debilitated democracy. They also provide a strong critique of democratic elitism by observing that, at least in new democracies like Hungary and its post-communist neighbors, democratic elitism does not take into account inequalities among competing elites, ignores important institutional details, and gives short shrift to the crucial roles played by idiosyncratic leaders. Lengyel and Ilonszki regard these lapses as a “negative synergy” that makes democratic elitism dubiously applicable to Hungary and other post-communist countries.


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Jacek Wasilewski (chapter 10) analyzes the dramatic assault on democratic elitism mounted by the Kaczynski brothers, Jaroslav and Lech, in Poland after 2001. He shows that the Kaczynskis and their allies threatened every tenet of democratic elitism when attacking the elites that negotiated Poland’s democratic transition. Though weakened after Poland’s 2007 parliamentary election, the Kaczynski challenge illustrates how a previously marginal elite faction can gain sudden political ascendancy and test democratic elitism severely. Nor is Wasilewski confident that the assault on Poland’s democratic elitism has by now been put to rest. Anton Steen, writing with Mindaugas Kuklys (chapter 11), observes that the elections that play so pivotal a role in democratic elitism can in fact enable dominant elites in multi-ethnic democracies to impede political participation by ethnic minorities. This is what happened in Estonia and Latvia during the years following independence from Soviet rule. In both countries, at lest until very recently, democratic elitism has been confined to elites seeking the support of the titular nation, with large Russian-speaking minorities pushed to the political sidelines. Steen and Kuklys puzzle, in short, about democratic elitism’s relevance to ethnically divided societies like Estonia and Latvia. In an epilogue, John Higley (chapter 12) portrays the discussion of democratic elitism as skewed by the utopian mode of much Western political thought. Many political thinkers have viewed democratic elitism as closing what they think should be an open-ended road to full democracy, which they treat as an ultimate or universal value. Higley examines why and how this has happened and argues that democracy has been conflated with classic liberal values. Á la Schumpeter, democracy should be seen as an instrumental value that in some, but by no means all, political and social circumstances promotes the ultimate liberal value of a society that consists of free and actively individualistic people. References Antonio, Robert J. 1995. “Max Weber.” Pp. 1369–72 in The Encyclopedia of Democracy, edited by Seymour Martin Lipset et al., Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press. Aron, Raymond. 1950. “Social Structure and the Ruling Class.” British Journal of Sociology 1 (March & June): 1-16, 126–43. Bachrach, Peter. 1967. The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique. Boston: Little Brown.

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Barone, Michael. 2007. Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. New York: Crown. Beetham, David. 1985. Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Best, Heinrich. 1990. “Elite Structure and Regime (Dis)continuity in Germany, 1867– 1933: The Case of Parliamentary Leadership Groups”. German History 8 (1): 1–27. ——. 2007. “New Challenges, New Elites? Changes in the Recruitment and Career Patterns of European Representative Elites”. Comparative Sociology 6 (1-2): 85–113. Blondel, Jean. 2005. “The links between Western European parties and their supporters. The role of personalization.” Occasional Paper 16, Centre for the Study of Political Change, Univ. of Siena. Bottomore, Thomas B. 1964. Elites and Society. New York: Basic Books. Burnham, James. 1943. The Machiavellians. Defenders of Freedom. New York: The John Day Company. Christiansen, Peter Monck, Birgit Möller, and Lise Togeby. 2001. Den danske elite. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Dahl, Robert A., and Charles E. Lindblom. 1953. Politics, Economics and Welfare. New York: Harper & Row. Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1967. Society and Democracy in Germany. New York: Doubleday. De Jouvenel, Robert. 1914. République des Camarades. Paris: Bernard Grasset. Diamond, Larry. 2008. The Spirit of Democracy. New York: Times Books. Di Palma, Giuseppe. 1973. The Study of Conflict in Western Societies: A Critique of the End of Ideology. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. Dogan, Mattei. 2003. “Is There a Ruling Class in France?” Pp. 17–90 in Elite Configurations at the Apex of Power, edited by Mattei Dogan. Amsterdam: Brill. Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper & Row. Dye, Thomas R. 2002. Who’s Running America? The Bush Restoration. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Femia, Joseph. 2001. Against the Masses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 2006. Pareto and Political Theory. London: Routledge. Field, G. Lowell, and John Higley. 1980. Elitism. London: Routledge. Friedrich, Carl J. 1963. Man and His Government: An Empirical Theory of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gray, John. 2007. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. Gulbrandsen, Trygve et al. 2002. Norske Makteliter. Oslo: Gyldendal. Higley, John, Desley Deacon, and Don Smart. 1979. Elites in Australia. London: Routledge. Higley, John, and Michael Burton. 2006. Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy. Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield. Higley, John, Ursula Hoffmann-Lange, Charles Kadushin, and Gwen Moore. 1991. “Elite Integration in Stable Democracies: A Reconsideration.” European Sociological Review 7(1): 35–53. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin. Kadushin, Charles. 1968. “Power, Influence, and Social Circles: A New Methodology for Studying Opinion Makers.” American Sociological Review 33: 685–99. Kariel, Henry. 1966. The Promise of Politics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Keller, Suzanne. 1963. Beyond the Ruling Class: Strategic Elites in Modern Society. New York: Random House. Knoke, David. 1990. Political Networks. New York: Cambridge University Press. Körösényi, András. 2005. “Political Representation in Leader Democracy.” Government and Opposition, 40(3): 358–78. Lasswell, Harold D., and Daniel Lerner, eds. 1965. World Revolutionary Elites: Studies in Coercive Ideological Movements. Boston: MIT Press.


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Linz, Juan. J. 2006. Robert Michels, Political Sociology, and the Future of Democracy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Linz, Juan. J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1962. “Introduction.” Pp. 15–39 in Robert Michels, Political Parties. New York: The Free Press. McAllister, Ian. 2003. “Prime Ministers, Opposition leaders and Government Popularity in Australia.” Australian Journal of Political Science 38(2): 259–77. McCraw, Thomas K. 2007. Prophet of Innovation. Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Michels, Robert. 1908. “Die oligarchischen Tendenzen in der Gesellschaft. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Demokratie”. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 27: 73–135. ——. 1915/1962. Political Parties. New York: The Free Press. Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Mosca, Gaetano. 1923/1939. The Ruling Class. New York: McGraw-Hill. Moore, Gwen. 1975. “The Structure of a National Elite Network.” American Sociological Review 44: 673–92. Paisley, Michael, and Ian Ward. 2001. “Parties, Governments and Pollsters.” Australian Journal of Political Science 36(3): 553–565. Pareto, Vilfredo. 1902/1966. Vilfredo Pareto: Sociological Writings. Translated by Derek Mirfin. Edited by Samuel E. Finer, New York: Praeger. ——. 1916/1935. The Mind and Society (Treatise on General Sociology). Translated by Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston. Edited by Arthur Livingston, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. ——. 1921/1984. The Transformation of Democracy. Translated by Renata Giola. Edited by Charles H. Powers, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Pateman, Carol. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Peffley, Mark, and Robert Rohrschneider. 2007. “Elite Beliefs and the Theory of Democratic Elitism.” Pp. 65–79 in The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior, edited by Russell Dalton and Hans Dieter Klingemann, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter, John. 1965. The Vertical Mosaic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Puddington, Arch. 2008. “The 2007 Freedom House Survey: Is the Tide Turning?” Journal of Democracy 19(2): 61–73. Putnam, Robert D. 1976. The Comparative Study of Political Elites. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Sartori, Giovanni. 1962. Democratic Theory. Detroit: Wayne State Press. ——. 1995. “How Far Can Free Government Travel?” Journal of Democracy 6(3): 101–111. Savoie, Donald J. 2008. Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom. Toronto: IPAC Series in Public Management & Government. Schmitter, Philippe C., and Gerhard Lehmbruch, eds. 1979. Trends toward Corporatist Intermediation. Beverly Hills CA: Sage Publications. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row. ——. 1951. Ten Great Economists. New York: Oxford University Press. Swedberg, Richard. 1991. Joseph A. Schumpeter: His Life and Work. Cambridge: Polity Press. Walker, Jack. 1966. “A Critique of the Elitist Theory of Democracy.” American Political Science Review 60: 285–95.

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Weiner, Myron F. 1987. “Empirical Democratic Theory.” Pp. 3–34 in Competitive Elections in Developing Countries, edited by Myron F. Weiner and Ergun Özbudun, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Useem, Michael. 1984. The Inner Circle. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max. 1920/1978. Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, Berkeley: University of California Press. Zolo, Danilo. 1992. Democracy and Complexity: A Realist Approach. University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

PART I DEMOCRATIC ELITISM: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

“THEY AIN’T MAKING ELITES LIKE THEY USED TO”*: THE NEVER ENDING TROUBLE WITH DEMOCRATIC ELITISM* Jens Borchert There is, unfortunately, no such thing as a unified theory of democratic elitism. Forty years ago Peter Bachrach (1967), a self-declared opponent of democratic elitism, identified a whole series of writers from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s as belonging to this notorious school of thought. Bachrach and critics after him drew a line of influence from Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto through Max Weber and Robert Michels to Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, Seymour Martin Lipset, Giovanni Sartori and many others. The criticism that Bachrach and others put forward focused on tenets allegedly embraced by all these authors: 1. The idea of popular sovereignty must be subordinated – “sacrificed” – to a purely representative system, in which citizen participation is largely restricted to the periodic act of voting. 2. The existence of a political elite is natural and unavoidable, even in democracy. 3. Elite autonomy in governing is a desirable feature of any functioning democracy because elites promise to be more “enlightened” and more likely to promote the common good than the uneducated and self-interested masses. Peter Bachrach and other critics charged that democratic elitism relegates citizen involvement to the sidelines, in both its empirical analyses and as a normative ideal of democracy. Most of the theorists labeled “democratic elitists” would deny at least the latter charge, however. They aim at a realist understanding of democracy. The first task is to analyze democracy as it is, not as it should be. In this view exposing and discarding myths about democracy is undoubtedly the most important contribution of democratic elitism. Different authors * This chapter’s title is adapted from a very insightful doctoral dissertation by André Marenco dos Santos (2000).

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accepted the three tenets listed above in varying degrees. Let us examine each tenet in turn. 1. While all share an understanding of modern democracy as a system of representation, some see this system as inherently superior while others regard it as a second-best solution, yet the only one feasible in a large-scale polity. Thus, the connection between popular sovereignty and representation differs from one democratic elitist to another. For some, like Weber and Dahl, representation is an attempt to institutionalize popular sovereignty, but for others, like Mosca and Sartori, it serves as a shield against unruly citizen demands. Bernard Manin (1997) reminds us that for the longest time in history democracy and representative government were regarded as competing principles of government. Proponents of democratic elitism have attempted to reconcile these principles. Some of James Madison’s contributions to the Federalist Papers might well be seen as the first documents of democratic elitism. He thought popular sovereignty best preserved by (1) having frequent elections and (2) arranging for “ambition … to counteract ambition” so that public office-holders check and control each other (Hamilton et al. 1982:262, 267, 290). Direct participation by citizens in decision-making is thus replaced by periodic voting for office-holders who then do the decisionmaking. Joseph Schumpeter’s “alternative theory of democracy” (1942) carried Madison’s conception to its logical extreme: Democracy for him is nothing but a method for allocating power to office-holders by way of electoral competition for votes. As is usual with economists, Schumpeter thought that the (political) market would take care of everything else, and any fumbling with this market could only have disastrous consequences. Hence voting is not only the central mechanism of democracy, it should be the only avenue for public participation. Here Schumpeter’s economic line of thought added a new element to democratic elitism, although it fell to Sartori (1976/1987) to further develop and justify this version of democratic elitism normatively. 2. The idea that every society has by necessity a political elite is the oldest ingredient of democratic elitism. It can be traced back to Gaetano Mosca (1939 [1923]), who held that every society creates its own ruling class. For Mosca electoral competition is but one of several ways to recruit new elite members. The more common pattern, historically, was to simply co-opt the leaders of non-elite groupings. While Mosca’s explanation for the existence of elites had strong anthropological

the never ending trouble with democratic elitism

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overtones, Robert Michels (1970 [1911]) based his explanation more firmly on organizational sociology. The competition between organizations creates a strong impetus towards elite building within each organization. Only a durable, full-time leadership will be able to accumulate enough experience, organizational skills, power, and support to effectively challenge other similar organizations, whether they are political parties in the electoral arena or interest groups in the lobbying sphere. The “iron law of oligarchy” thus entails a paradox of democracy: The more open democratic competition between organizations becomes, the more internally hierarchical those organizations become. Subsequent versions of democratic elitism took Michels’ observation that organizational elites would form the constituent parts of an overall political elite within a society as a given (cf. Stammer 1965; Linz 2006). In this respect theories of party democracy, the party state, and pluralism are closely linked to democratic elitism. In such theories elitism is regarded as acceptable so long as there are various competing elite factions that represent different sectors of society. The logic of democratic elitism is applied to every political organization and then to society at large. 3. Democratic elitism’s quest for elite autonomy is tied to the meritocratic assumption that through some miraculous selection mechanism leadership positions will be filled by those persons who are particularly qualified for them – be they experts in various policy domains or simply the best and wisest members of society. Madison believed, for example, that elections tend to favor the candidates who are most qualified (Hamilton et al. 1982:290). But this requires a strong belief in the capability of voters to make the right choices. It also carries the tacit assumption that name recognition, wealth, rhetorical skills, and prior office experience tend to favor members of the social elite. While this assumption – that there are certain resources that tend to bias electoral competition in favor of some candidates at the expense of others – has proven to be entirely correct (cf. Best and Cotta 2000 for Europe; Phillips 2002 and Canon 1990 for the U.S.), the more basic assumption about meritocracy is still up for debate: Are leadership positions indeed filled by those who are particularly apt for them? If so, what is the mechanism that safeguards meritocratic rule? In fact, the ascendancy of particular leaders has time and again spurred much doubt about meritocracy. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe once observed that in his country there is no leading position that is held by

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the most competent person. While this certainly is a far cry from the reality in advanced democracies, it points to the theoretical possibility at least of an “adverse selection” system that favors precisely the wrong people (Strøm 2003:87). But if we assume that meritocracy operates, it is then only a small step to embracing elite autonomy from the public at large. If we have what is an arguably meritocratic mechanism for selecting leaders, then it follows that one should invest some trust in those who are thus selected and give them a chance to steer society as they see fit, independent of short-term swings in public moods and opinions. The democratic theorists who have carried the argument for elite autonomy farthest are Schumpeter (1942) and Sartori (1976/1987). In their view, elite autonomy is complementary to restricted citizen participation. It serves as the ultimate safeguard against ignorant citizens and their tendency to support demagogues and populist solutions. One important function of representative democratic institutions is, thus, to shield elites against citizens’ influence. The question of elite autonomy bulked large in one of the big debates of the mid-1970s and 1980s, which centered on the issue of “governability”. Some conservative critics – beside Sartori, they included Samuel Huntington and his colleagues in a report to the Trilateral Commission, Wilhelm Hennis and his collaborators in Germany, Anthony King and kindred analysts in Britain – argued that Western countries had become ungovernable because of democracy’s “excesses”. This was a reaction to political and academic movements in the early 1970s that had called for a thorough democratization of state and society – the call to “risk more democracy,” as German chancellor Willy Brandt proclaimed (without much consequence). Adherents of democratic elitism saw their favored model of an elite-centered representative government endangered, so they counter-attacked (for an insightful contemporary critique, see Offe 1979). The episode showed that for at least some students of politics democratic elitism is much more than a purely descriptive treatment of how democracy works. Today there is little talk about democratic elitism. Among publics it is hardly ever mentioned, and even in political science and political sociology the theory has receded to the status of a “modern classic”. As we all know, the status of being a classic is a mixed blessing. It may mean that an idea has so “sunk in” to conventional wisdom that it is no longer recognizable as a distinct idea. It may also mean, however, that the tides of history have washed over an idea so that it is seen as


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something pertaining to the distant past with little relevance to current problems. And, finally, it may mean that an idea is one of two poles in an ongoing competiton between which the pendulum of scholarly and public attention swings back and forth according to changing circumstances. What is the balance sheet for democratic elitism? It is this question that will inform the rest of this article. Let me first consider the possibility that democratic elitism has resolved the relationship between elites and democracy so convincingly that debate about it is effectively over; by virtue of its triumph, democratic elitism is no longer much discussed. As I intend to show, this judgment is made plausible by current theories of democracy that have incorporated the central tenets of democratic elitism as unacknowledged key assumptions.

Democratic Elitism Sunk In: Contemporary Theories of Democracy In Germany the rather limited electoral appeal of the small liberal party, the Free Democrats, is often explained by its ideological success. Liberalism, goes the argument, has pervaded the political thinking of the much larger Social Democrats and Christian Democrats to such an extent that a liberal party is no longer needed. Ralf Dahrendorf once made a similar argument about international social democracy: The 20th century was the social democratic century or golden age; if social democratic parties are now on the defensive this is, according to Dahrendorf, due simply to their huge earlier success in building the welfare state. I am not entirely convinced by an argument that interprets current failure as a measure of historical success. Such a “dialectical” reading all too often seems to be a consolation prize for the losers in a historical process, testifying primarily to the inventiveness of its proponent. Yet we cannot rule out, a priori, the possibility that democratic elitism has become conventional wisdom and is no longer debated precisely because it is universally accepted. The measure of this possibility would be the extent to which the three basic tenets of democratic elitism – a representative system with limited citizen involvement, the existence of political elites, and elite autonomy in governing – go unchallenged today. Evidence might be found, first, in the theories of democracy that dominate today’s debate and, second, in the beliefs of citizens. The sheer number of different theories and the separate debates about each – in short, the segmentation

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of theories of democracy – make it difficult to name a few approaches that are dominant today. But, utilizing a recent review of the field by Huburtus Buchstein (2004), we can point to some developments that have moved particular theories close to the forefront of debate. Buchstein distinguishes empirical, formal, and normative theories of democracy. Empirical theories try to measure the performance of democracy and uncover causal relationships between certain institutional features of democratic systems and their performance. Arend Lijphart’s two patterns of democracy, consensus and majoritarian, belong to the category of empirical theories, as do comparisons between presidential and parliamentary systems, parliamentary and plebiscitary decision-making, different electoral systems, and so on. All such theories are part of what Buchstein (2004:59) calls a “rationalization of the concept of democracy”. That is, assessments of democracy turn on the extent to which it leads to ostensibly more rational and thus “better” policies. The quality of democracy is defined largely in terms of its output. This perspective implies roles for elites and citizens that are strikingly proximate to democratic elitism. If output is the focus, participation almost automatically recedes in importance. Procedural inputs are subordinated to substantive outputs and outcomes. The representative character of democracy is taken for granted, as is the existence of political elites. These elites are now defined in a purely positional sense, however. The (largely unacknowledged) assumption is that institutional rationality trumps individual elite choice. Thus, it does not matter who the president or the representatives are and how they conceive of their roles because institutional design limits elite latitudes of action. Elites thus have autonomy from citizen demands, but they are quite constrained in their actions by institutions. Only when devising new institutions in periods of transition do elites have greater freedom of action and the ability to break with pre-existing institutional patterns. The structural conservatism of the “new institutionalism” is apparent. Formal theories of democracy are mostly derived from the rational choice paradigm. They reduce democratic politics to different “games real actors play” (Scharpf 1997). These theories also assume representative government; they calculate the rational behavior of actors within representative institutions. In this respect, formal theories are elitist from their outset: only when looking at the behavior of a limited number of actors (elites) in a clearly defined institutional setting can


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formal theories realize their full potential. Hence a focus on positionally defined elites is a necessary component of formal theories, as is the assumption of elite autonomy. The veto player approach devised by George Tsebelis (2002) is probably the most influential formal theory of democracy at present, and it rests on central premises of democratic elitism. It deals with representative government (the institutional setting), elites (the veto players), and autonomous elite preferences and strategies. The “win-set” is defined only in terms of the interplay between different elite factions; the wider citizenry plays no role at all. Here we clearly have an echo of how democratic elitism and rational choice were entwined in Schumpeter’s approach to politics. Normative theories of democracy have enjoyed the greatest growth during the past twenty years. Theories emphasizing inclusion and theories emphasizing deliberation have been most prominent. The former are based on observations of certain groups that are systematically disadvantaged in contemporary democracies. Their empirical point of reference is the (under) representation of these groups in parliaments and other key political institutions. Thus they call for more women or more members of ethnic minorities to gain elected office. But their underlying premises are representative government and the inescapability of political elites. Their only departure from the theory of democratic elitism concerns elite autonomy: a greater representation of disadvantaged groups in political institutions makes sense only if representatives will devise policies that respond to and serve interests of the constituencies that elect them, i.e., only if they do not govern with significant autonomy. Theories of deliberative democracy are often presented as the obvious counter-model to democratic elitism. Modeled on Habermas’ idea of a political discourse that would be devoid of relations of domination, deliberative democracy is portrayed as a radical or “thick” democracy with broad deliberation in the public sphere replacing an electoral majority’s tyranny. It is difficult to capture the relationship between deliberative democracy and democratic elitism because of the many forms of deliberative democracy that its different advocates urge. Some simply call for an internal deliberation within each individual, which basically amounts to the admonition to “think before you speak” (cf. Goodin 2003). Others want to amend or even replace the institutional fabric of democracy with new elements. In Habermas’ (1994) version, however, deliberative democracy is to be based on existing representative institutions. Making them more

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deliberative entails strengthening the roles of both minorities and experts. Minorities and those particularly affected by a certain decision would be guaranteed a hearing in the process. Yet this would be restricted to spokespersons meeting the high standard of “civil” deliberation. The other group that stands to gain from deliberation is policy experts. In short, the Habermasian prescription also seeks to “rationalize” democracy by focusing on its results in the sense that Buchstein discusses. Thus it is not surprising that some advocates of output legitimacy also harbor a preference for deliberation among experts, seeing, for example, EU “comitology”1 as a model for democratic deliberation (see, for example, Joerges and Neyer 1997a/ 1997b). Their argument is that certain policy issues might be resolved more rationally if removed from the realm of electoral politicking and handed over to expert bodies that would deliberate on them behind closed doors. This is because secrecy of deliberation presumably improves its quality (Elster 1995, also cf. Chambers 2004). Delegation of decision-making authority to agencies or commissions would, it is claimed, enhance the quality of both deliberation and policy-making. So while one branch of deliberative democracy builds on representative institutions, others, particularly those focusing on deliberation beyond the nation-state, seek to conceptually transcend them. Yet the latter theorists do not posit a more plebiscitary or more purely democratic alternative. They suggest institutional arrangements that remove decision-making even further from the people in order to govern more effectively for the people (cf. Saward 2000). This position contains a belief in the superior deliberative and problem-solving capacities of elites and in the necessity of their acting autonomously. In the words of Joshua Cohen: “Perhaps an ideal deliberative procedure is best institutionalized by ensuring well-conducted political debate among elites” (cited in Saward 2000:75). Paradoxically, then, the suspicion of popular pressures that Sartori voices throughout his writings is echoed in deliberative theories that doubt the “competence” of ordinary people to 1 “Comitology” is the official term for the web of committees consisting of national civil servants from the EU member states that assist the European Commission in implementing European legislation. While experts need not necessarily be part of an elite, in this case they certainly are. They form part of a bureaucratic elite that takes its cues in turn from the national political elites while also consulting interest group elites on the European level. Thus, the whole process is elite-driven and deliberately designed to maximize overall elite autonomy while providing ample opportunity for intra-elite consensus and compromise.


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make informed choices just as much as their elitist ancestors did (Sunstein 1991; cf. Offe 2003: 310–16). We might summarize all this by paraphrasing what E.E. Schattschneider (1960:34–5) observed about pluralism: “The flaw in the deliberative heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong elitist accent”. Overall, the underlying premises of democratic elitism inform today’s prevailing theories of democracy to an astonishing degree. Representative democracy is almost universally accepted as not just the only feasible but also as a superior type of government; elites are seen as an unproblematic feature of democracy; and elite autonomy is regarded as a necessary condition for rational policy-making. In these respects, democratic elitism is alive and well, having “sunk in” even to those current theories of democracy that started out with the declared goal of enhancing public participation. And what of the people? Democracy vs. Elitism: The Question of Political Professionalism While theories of democracy have made their peace with democratic elitism, somehow citizens have not. Study after study shows that citizens throughout Western democracies are deeply suspicious of their political leaders and feel shut out of politics (cf., inter alia, Kaase and Newton 1995; Pharr and Putnam 2000; Dalton 2007). These analyses make it plain that while there is little opposition to democracy as a system, there is strong and widespread discontent with its practice and its elite practitioners. This discontent is more pronounced as regards procedural questions than policy contents (cf. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2001). In the words of Hibbing and Theiss-Morse: “Public beliefs about an outof-touch government have more to do with processes than with policies; that is, with the way decisions are made rather than their specific content. …People want decision making to be a balance between elected officials and ordinary people, but they think they are getting a process dominated by officeholders” (149, 152). Citizens believe that the political process is deliberately sealed off against their influence. Pollsters regularly get high positive response rates when they offer statements like “People like me don’t have real influence in politics.” Obviously, this feeling of powerlessness and the discontent it helps produce are closely related. Thus, there is both an analysis of elitism in democratic politics and the normative expectation that democracy should be accessible and egalitarian. We will return to reasons for this duality later.

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We have seen that some theories of democracy are more outputoriented. They suppose that citizen disenchantment may be avoided by focusing on the results of the political process rather than on the process itself. Better policy outputs are difficult to achieve or claim with increasingly complex and interwoven social problems, external conditions limiting the range of action in the face of globalization, and intense public scrutinizing of politicians. Outputs, therefore, can hardly substitute for greater citizen participation. The logic works the other way around: People attribute unsatisfactory outputs to procedures they think are undemocratic. Then there is the question of political leaders. Pollsters and media consultants have been successfully arguing in favor of a more personalized style of politics as a remedy for the unattractiveness of institutions and policies alike (cf. Hart 1992; Mughan 2000; Swanson and Mancini 1996). Thus we find electoral campaigns, even in party democracies like Germany, where party emblems can hardly be seen and parties try to win elections by focusing public attention almost exclusively on their candidate for the foremost political office – for a chancelorship, prime ministership, or mayoralty. However paradoxically, this focus on top leaders’ personalities tends to further erode the trust in the political leaders overall. Media personalities are deconstructed or they decompose on their own much faster than new ones can be created, and it is not far-fetched to say that most parties are running out of presentable candidates. Overall, we have the ironic situation that political officeholders have become deeply unpopular with citizens at the same time that political theorists have made their peace with political elites. I want to argue that the professionalization of politics2 has changed the relationship between citizens and politicians on both sides. Historically,

2 “Professionalization” is a very complex term, since it not only may refer to both individuals and institutions and may be used both in a positive (preferring professionalism to the dilettantism of amateurs) and a neutral sense – it also connotes two different, though related processes. On the one hand, the Weberian notion simply refers to the process whereby an activity becomes an occupation. On the other hand, in the sociology of professions there is a long tradition of seeing some occupations – the professions (the law and medicine being the quintessential cases) – as set apart from others by a number of criteria. Cf. as classical examples Wilensky 1964 and Abbott 1988. I have argued elsewhere (Borchert 2003:148–67) that politics certainly has become a full–time occupation as Weber (1994) recognized early on, but that in the process it has also taken on some, yet not all, characteristics of a profession. Most important, access is increasingly regulated by practitioners, thereby creating an inherent tension with the democratic ideal.


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increasing professionalization was linked inextricably with increasing (representative) democratization (Borchert 2003/2008). As Max Weber (1994) observed back in 1919, either you pay politicians for their political work or you leave the political sphere to “plutocrats” – to those wealthy people who can afford it. Democratic politics has been professionalized in a slow but inexorable process from the days of the French and American Revolutions. This has had three important consequences: – The professionalized area of politics has been steadily expanding. Political professionalism has spread from national to regional to local politics; it has reached deep into state and society. – Accession to the professionalized area of politics has been governed mostly by rules of cooptation. It is professional politicians who largely decide about new recruits to the field. – At the same time, elected office-holders have been more and more successful in avoiding the exigencies of political accountability to the voters. From the point of view of professional politicians citizens are a constant danger. Once politicians become professionalized, their interest in retaining an office or moving on to a more attractive one takes on a new quality. It is no longer just about staying in public life; it is about staying in business. Politicians behave like members of any other profession (again cf. Wilensky 1964; Abbott 1988): they individually and collectively try to shield themselves from the influence of outsiders. Being their own regulators, professional politicians have generally and predictably been successful in this endeavor. Amidst dropping popularity rates, re-election rates are astoundingly high no matter what type of electoral system a country has. Obviously, political pros devise different ways of ensuring re-election in different systems: party control of promising slots in closed list PR systems; superior campaign finances for incumbents in the American plurality system. Despite differences in their details, these mechanisms have proven equally effective in protecting incumbents and reducing political accountability (cf. Somit et al. 1994). But independent of re-election rates, the subjective threat of sudden de-professionalization3 at the hands of vengeful voters remains. 3

In most cases being a member of the political “profession” is linked to holding public office. Thus, losing the office amounts to deprofessionalization, to being removed not only from one’s occupation but also from the social fabric and network it provides – unless one is rapidly able to win another office.

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Thus, even those politicians who should feel reasonably safe are often “running scared” (King 1997) because electoral safety cannot be taken for granted. Citizens understandably have a different view of the professionalization of politics. They see a “political field” (Bourdieu 2001) inhabited and vigilantly patrolled by political professionals who refuse to be controlled from outside it. At the same time, even two centuries of democratic elitism have not fully eroded a belief in the egalitarian nature of democracy among the public. Given their ignorance of recent developments in theories of democracy, many citizens deem “audience democracy” (Manin 1997) a violation of the democratic principle. As the reader may have guessed by now, I think these citizens have a point. What they react to, however, is a democratic elitism taking the particular form of a professionalized politics. Therefore, the public is often highly critical of particulars like legislative pay rises or the increasing number of career politicians, of people with little experience in other realms of society. What is directed against the “excesses of professionalism” is at its core also a criticism of democratic elitism. Beyond Democratic Elitism: Reconciling Democracy and Elites What are possible solutions for these tensions between democracy and elites? The easiest one, of course, is to avoid the perceived pathologies of professionalization by simply abolishing it. The phantom of the citizen politician who does it all by him or herself and has no need for professional politicians is still vivid enough to be re-invoked as the democratic ideal (cf. Barber 1984). The assembly of all citizens in Athens, similar traditions in some Swiss cantons, and the oft-cited New England town hall meeting are models for a democracy by amateurs – even if they can hardly be adapted to the exigencies of modern largescale democracy. Another idea is holding office for a limited time only as a civic duty. But even the country where this tradition is strongest – Switzerland – has long left behind the days when serving in legislative assemblies was seen as part of one’s “militia service”. Today, Swiss politicians are professionals financed in considerable measure by interest groups. In the states in which the American term limits movement has been successful, the result appears to be changes within professional career patterns rather


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than an elimination of professionalism.4 And even a national success of the term limits movement could most likely not be considered a success for democracy: The almost certain result would be a weakening of representative institutions and a strengthening of unelected actors like bureaucrats and lobbyists (Carey et al. 2000; Kurtz et al. 2007). Modern representative democracy needs and breeds professional politicians. In a time when representative government is the one element of democratic elitism that is universally accepted, they are here to stay. But what the public cannot accept is the existence of an elite that is seen as unresponsive and unaccountable, and a political arena that is regarded as inaccessible (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2001). Yet it is exactly the boundaries of that arena that democratic elitists depict positively as connoting “elite autonomy”. The dilemma for democratic theory is clear enough. On the one hand, if democratic theorists condone elite autonomy, they will also tend to condone the status quo or even call for increased elite leeway in decision-making, regardless of citizen discontent. If on the other hand citizens are discontented with what they perceive as too much elite leeway they will seek remedies. But as we have seen, some of the remedies would not actually eliminate the causes of citizen discontent and would have the potential for significant harm elsewhere. Maybe the attempt to offset some of the participatory deficiencies of modern democracy by heightening its plebiscitary elements is a more promising way. Nor would this be a new approach; the Austrian theorist Hans Kelsen (1981) proposed it in the late 1920s. In general, there is a need for theories of democracy that take the public criticism of self-contained elites and their lack of accountability seriously while not resorting to simplistic solutions. What would a theory look like that accepts modern democracy’s realities yet retains an emancipatory impetus – a principled sympathy for the common people and their political sovereignty? I think that, paradoxically enough, it would look very similar to one branch of democratic theory that is often subsumed under the label of democratic elitism. This position has been most clearly stated in Robert 4

Professional politicians shop for new opportunities to continue their careers. For example, some distinguished members of the highly professionalized, but term-limited California Assembly went on to become Mayor of San Francisco (Willie Brown) or Los Angeles (Villaraigosa) while others ran for Congress. Thus, new offices became reasonable options while pursuing a professional political career and new career patterns emerged. Cf. Carey et al. 2000.

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Dahl’s Polyarchy (1971) – a book that for some strange reason has come to be viewed by normative theorists as setting forth the “weak democracy” that they shun (Barber 1984). Even people sympathetic to Dahl’s conception have termed it “minimalist” (Abromeit 2002), which seems beside the point. As is well known, Dahl bases his conception of democracy on two and only two criteria: participation and contestation. Both norms go well beyond what Schumpeter or Sartori require of democratic systems – especially since they are conceived of as continua with a premium placed on greater participation and greater contestation. The only limit on the extension of participation and contestation Dahl proposes is if they become a threat to the persistence of democracy itself. In this regard one can readily conceive of situations of hypermobilization or cutthroat competition that hamper rather than promote democracy. Maintaining the participation rights of citizens serves as an effective check against too much elite autonomy. It is impermissible to delimit the participation of the citizenry in order to increase government efficiency or achieve a better policy output. On the contrary, the task is to find as many channels for effective citizen participation as possible. This is a call for democratic creativity with the overall goal not of juxtaposing but of reconciling democracy and representative government. In a way, the goal of maximum participation comes close to Dewey’s conception of democracy as a way of life that has a transformative effect on citizens, without systematically asking too much of them. Nor are extended participation rights conditional upon a certain level of political maturity not yet given. Democracy in Dahl’s conception does not require a whole new breed of citizens yet to be born. Just as important as participation rights is what Dahl calls public contestation. This criterion deals with political competition. As a reaction to the neo-liberal logic that currently prevails in economic thought, competition has had a bad press among social scientists. Some even identify competition as a central element of “acceleration” – of subsuming other spheres under the logic of capitalism – and they call for reducing competition throughout society (Rosa 2006). From this perspective the emergence of cartels among leading parties in advanced democracies and the effects this has had on the parties themselves (Katz and Mair 1995) would have to be re-evaluated as a positive contribution. More generally, Stefano Bartolini (1999/2000) has demonstrated neatly how intensively competitive democratic politics are actually embedded in collusive practices.


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Yet, in accordance with Dahl, maintaining meaningful competition is essential to the quality of democracy. As Ian Shapiro (2003:149) convincingly argues, “the problem … is not with competitive democracy, but with its absence”. Only by way of competition can the accountability and responsiveness of the political personnel be secured. If there is no competition, if competition is merely token, or if citizens are not the ones who decide the winners, democracy is in trouble. Late-nineteenth century trasformismo in Southern Europe (cf. Rueschemeyer et al. 1992:103, 119–20), in which two parties drawn from the same social strata formally competed for votes while having agreed beforehand on a power-sharing formula, is a good example of how the democratic principle can be hollowed out. In this case, the Schumpeterian competitive method is maintained yet the suspension of Dahlian contestation occurs. Back in the 1960s there were other writers beside Dahl who understood the importance of democratic competition very well. E.E. Schattschneider (1960) and Otto Kirchheimer (1964) both developed critical analyses of how modern democracy can decay through a loss of competition. Their writings seem more timely than ever. In the days of full-fledged political professionalization more citizen participation and more competition between politicians and their programs are essential. Nor is any of this a recipe for “weak democracy”. On the contrary. As regards democratic elitism, then, the result of our review is rather paradoxical: Democratic elitism has won over theorists but lost citizens. It has described the reality of modern democracies pretty well, but it has proved to be an apologetic and normatively unacceptable doctrine. Still it also provides, at least in some of its variants, the best theoretical route to reconciling the democratic wish with the practice of democracy.

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Manin, Bernard. 1997. The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marenco dos Santos, André. 2000. Não Se Fazem Mais Oligarquias Como Antigamente. Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Michels, Robert. (1911) 1970. Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. New edition, Stuttgart: Kröner. Mosca, Gaetano. (1923) 1939. The Ruling Class. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mughan, Anthony. 2000. Media and the Presidentialization of Parliamentary Elections. London: Palgrave. Offe, Claus. 1979. “Unregierbarkeit.” Zur Renaissance konservativer Krisentheorien”. Pp. 294–318 in Stichworte zur ‚Geistigen Situation der Zeit’. Vol. 1., edited by Jürgen Habermas, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2003. “Micro-aspects of Democratic Theory.” Pp. 297–320 in Herausforderungen der Demokratie. Frankfurt: Campus. Pharr, Susan J., and Robert D. Putnam. Eds. 2000. Disaffected Democracies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Phillips, Kevin. 2002. Wealth and Democracy. New York: Broadway Books. Rosa, H. 2006. “Wettbewerb als Interaktionsmodus.” Leviathan 34: 82–104. Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyn Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. 1992. Capitalist Development and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sartori, Giovanni. (1962) 1976. Democratic Theory. Reprint. Westport: Greenwood Press. ——. 1987. The Theory of Democracy Revisited. Chatham: Chatham House. Saward, Michael. 2000. “Less than Meets the Eye. Democratic Legitimacy and Deliberative Theory”. Pp. 66–77 in Democratic Innovation, edited by Michael Saward, London: Routledge. Scharpf, Fritz W. 1997. Games Real Actors Play. Boulder: Westview. Schattschneider, Elmer Eric. 1960. The Semi-Sovereign People. A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper. Shapiro, Ian. 2003. The State of Democratic Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Somit, Albert, Rudolf Wildenmann, Bernhard Boll, and Andrea Roemmele. Eds. 1994. The Victorious Incumbent. Aldershot: Dartmouth. Stammer, Otto. (1951) 1965. “Das Elitenproblem in der Demokratie.” Pp. 63–90 in Politische Soziologie und Demokratieforschung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Strøm, Kaare. 2003. “Parliamentary Democracy and Delegation.” Pp. 55–106 in Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies, edited by Kaare Strøm, Wolfgang.C. Müller, and Torbjørn Bergmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sunstein, Cass. 1991. “Preferences and Politics.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20: 3–34. Swanson, David, and Paolo Mancini. Eds. 1996. Politics, Media and Modern Democracy. New York: Praeger. Tsebelis, George. 2002. Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Weber, Max. (1919) 1994. “The Profession and Vocation of Politics.” Pp. 309–69 in Weber: Political Writings, edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilensky, Harold L. 1964. “The Professionalization of Everyone?” American Journal of Sociology 60: 137–58.

BEYOND THE HAPPY CONSENSUS ABOUT DEMOCRATIC ELITISM András Körösényi* The theory of democratic elitism can be regarded as a felicitous combination of Joseph Schumpeter’s “competitive theory of democracy” and Carl Friedrich’s “rule of anticipated reactions” (1963:199–215). It combines Schumpeter’s method of leadership selection through competitions for votes with Friedrich’s rule that leaders anticipate voters’ reactions to policies and adjust them accordingly, thereby providing a feedback mechanism between voters and governments. There has been a broad consensus in democratic theory and political science that this fusion of Schumpeter’s method and Friedrich’s rule is unproblematic and useful because it simultaneously ensures an efficient method of leadership selection and rule by the demos. In this happy consensus it is taken for granted that the fusion of Schumpeter and Friedrich makes leaders accountable to and representative of those who elect them. In these respects, democratic elitism is clearly distinguishable from more radical participatory concepts of democracy and from paternalistic or authoritarian rule. During most of the twentieth century’s second half, democratic elitism formed an important part of mainstream democratic political theory, though it was challenged sharply by “anti-elitists” such as Peter Bachrach (1967) and Carole Pateman (1970) and, less pointedly, by a renewal of the liberal theory of representative democracy in the works of Hanna Pitkin (1967) and John Plamenatz (1973). Replying pugnaciously to the anti-elitists while not quarrelling greatly with the liberal theorists, Giovanni Sartori (1987) defended democratic elitism and reinforced its place in the mainstream of democratic political theory. Yet near the twentieth century’s end, after political radicalism in

* I thank John Higley and an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. The Hungarian Scientific Research Fund supported my research (OTKA – T 049132).

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Western Europe had ebbed and communist regimes in Eastern Europe had fallen, new challenges to democratic elitism emerged in the guise of deliberative democracy, feminist theory, and identity politics. A further challenge to democratic elitism has emerged even more recently, this time not from normative theorists, but from more empirically minded scholars. This most recent challenge does not yet constitute a single discourse, and it exists in a scattered literature. Its exponents focus on agency rather than structure, assigning to political leaders a much larger role in the functioning of today’s democracies than democratic elitism supposes. They emphasize political leaders’ room for maneuver vis-à-vis institutional constraints such as democratic elections, and they question the accountability and responsiveness of elected leaders. For example, Danilo Zolo (1992) worries that growing social complexity is undermining the neo-classical paradigm of pluralist democracy, so that the distinction between democratic elitism and an untrammeled elitism is vanishing, and Emilio Santoro (1993) interprets Schumpeter’s theory in a way that supports Zolo’s concern. Bernard Manin (1997), after reviewing the history of democratic representation, describes today’s representative democracies as “audience democracies” in which personalities, rather than parties and party programs, play the pivotal role in electoral competitions. On the basis of extensive empirical research, James D. Fearon (1999) likewise concludes that democratic elections are now much more about selecting “good types” of candidates than judging office holders’ performances and the policy positions taken by leaders competing for votes. Adopting a rational choice approach and marshalling evidence, José María Maravall (1999) buttresses the claim that in electoral democracies incumbents are less accountable and responsive to voters’ wishes than democratic elitism teaches. Margaret Canovan (1999) portrays populist appeal and charismatic leadership not as pathological but, rather, as an inescapable feature of representative democracy. Yves Mény, Yves Surel and their co-authors (2002) investigate the sources of populism and highlight the trend toward a personalization of power in today’s democracies. Jean Blondel (2005) discusses how this increasing personalization of power skews the interplay of political parties in contemporary European democracies, while Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb (2005) sketch the “presidentialization” of these democracies. András Körösényi (2005) re-works the concept of “leader democracy” that Max Weber employed to capture the essence of plebiscitary democracy, while John Higley and Jan Pakulski (2007) speculate that

beyond the happy consensus

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“Ceasarist” leaders are becoming conspicuous in today’s democracies. Finally, Mark Philp (2007) breaks with much contemporary moral philosophy to stress the importance of agency and leadership in contemporary democracies. The works of all these scholars implicitly or explicitly challenge the happy consensus about the feasibility and explicative utility of democratic elitism. I have three aims in this chapter. First, I want to challenge the view that democratic elitism is a coherent theory. I will show that it papers over three distinct models of representation and democratic control: the mandate, accountability, and authorization models. Although they address the same institutional framework, the three models depict the distribution of control between political elites and voters in quite different ways. I will illustrate these differences by examining the arguments of each model’s most prominent exponent – Robert A. Dahl, John Plamenatz, and Adam Przeworski, respectively. Second, I want to uncover and analyze the sources of these divergent models. I will show that different assumptions about the rationality, knowledge, and competence of voters and leaders explain much of the differences between them. Third, I want to consider the authorization model’s proximity to the edge of democracy and, even, its possible movement across the line that separates democratic and authoritarian rule. Specifically, I will ask if the model’s authoritarian (or “Ceasarist”) leanings void Friedrich’s rule of anticipated reactions.

The Mandate Model The mandate model of representation has its intellectual origin in Rousseau’s concept of representation as pure delegation with an imperative mandate issued by voters. In contemporary political theory the model is most clearly presented in Robert A. Dahl’s works, especially his classic book about Polyarchy, where elections enforce a government’s responsiveness to the will of the people. Dahl holds that “the key characteristic of a democracy is the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, who are considered as political equals” (1971:1–2). Dahl and Charles Lindblom earlier acknowledged the possibility that leaders can play relatively autonomous roles in polyarchy and large-scale democracy (1953: 415–9). Later, in the normative theory of democracy that Dahl stated the autonomy of leaders is ignored. He assumes that voters have clear

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preferences about issues and that leaders’ preferences are not their own but are, instead, policy positions they adopt in electoral contests in response to voters’ perceived preferences (Dahl 1956/1989). In Dahl’s mandate model, voters’ choices of candidates amount to surrogate choices of policy options, and voters make these choices in two ways. First, they use a sampling technique to choose a candidate whose responsiveness to their policy preference(s) can be expected. When sampling candidates, voters concentrate on their personal characteristics. They mandate the candidate they select to represent and implement their policy preferences. But this seemingly rational behavior of voters, which is analogous to the descriptive concept of democratic representation (Pitkin 1967), is based on voters’ dubious belief that there is a direct link between candidates’ personalities and policy positions. The second method that Dahl thinks voters use when choosing their representatives manifests Friedrich’s rule of anticipated reactions. The fear among leaders that voters will switch their support to opponents makes leaders strongly responsive to voters. For Dahl, in short, political leadership does not amount to more than office-holders and candidates responding to voters’ preferences. Put differently, leadership is the re-presentation of voters’ issue preferences in various decision-making situations. Leaders are agents under strict control of principals (i.e., voters); they are delegates rather than autonomous actors. Dahl explicitly rejects Schumpeter’s argument that political competition guarantees a choice among leaders but not among policies (Dahl and Lindblom 1953:283). Dahl’s normative and theoretical reference point is the populist or mandate model of democracy. Let me turn to the mandate model’s underlying assumptions. Classical democratic doctrine in general and the mandate model in particular assume that citizens are well informed and competent in public policy matters. This assumption is necessary because only competent and autonomous citizens can create a preference order when considering policy alternatives. In effect, the assumption makes the mandate model applicable to party democracy, wherein the competition of office-seeking politicians supposedly provides valuable information to citizens that enhances their ability to judge policies. To subject the model to empirical research, Przeworski and his colleagues (1999) have created a set of measurable benchmarks. These stipulate that the mandate model is realized when the following conditions obtain: (1) citizens are well-informed, and electoral campaigns are informative as regards the policies candidates for office would follow if


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elected; (2) incumbent responsiveness prevails between elections in accordance with Friedrich’s rule; (3) the mandate given to winning candidates and policy platforms in elections is always in the public’s best interests; (4) after elections, voters retain the policy preferences they expressed at the time they voted; (5) the interests of politicians coincide with those of voters. It is not hard to see that these benchmarks are seldom if ever attained. Moreover, they lack both empirical validity and logical coherence. First, although candidates and parties try to inform citizens about their policy positions on some issues, they just as often misinform or deceive citizens about other ones and they frequently remain silent about particularly thorny issues. In elections for the European Parliament, for example, issues about further European integration are usually kept off campaign agendas, just as they are also kept off agendas in many national parliamentary election campaigns. Further, and as much work by rational choice and social choice theorists shows, parties routinely try to manipulate policy agendas according to their strategic interests (Riker 1982/1983; Shepsle-Bonchek 1997). Hence, the assumption that there are well-informed citizens at the time of elections is dubious at best. Second, although parties usually try to implement their electoral programs when in office, they are far from trustworthy in this respect. Although a party’s reputation for such trustworthiness can be an important electoral asset that its leaders try to preserve (thereby observing Friedrich’s rule), there are numerous rational considerations that may motivate them to break campaign promises. By invoking unexpected circumstances, empty treasuries, and the like, politicians often explain that disregarding their promises to voters is unavoidable and not at all their fault. Such explanations become more difficult when elected office holders take actions that fly directly in the face of what they earlier promised – when they do exactly what they said they would not do. But examples of such U-turns are legion and they indicate that Friedrich’s rule hardly operates always and everywhere (Stokes 1999/2001). Third, implementing policies promised to voters is not always in voters’ best interests. The wishes of an electoral majority may conflict with the common good, especially if short- versus long-term interests are considered. Thus, voters may be delighted by the benefits they receive from some welfare policy’s immediate implementation, but these may come at the cost of growing budget deficits and public

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indebtedness. It is quite possible that even an outright policy reversal may serve the public interest better than adhering to a policy that was promised and immediately implemented following an election. The U-turn of the Socialist-led coalition in France in 1983, when the Mitterrand government abandoned its policy of nationalizing core industries, is a good example. Fourth, the assumption that between elections voters retain the policy preferences they expressed when they voted is also dubious. It is obvious that public opinion about concrete issues often changes sharply between elections. Fifth and finally, the assumed coincidence of interests between politicians and voters has been disputed throughout the history of political analysis. Politicians’ self-interest is often in conflict with the public interest. We know from the results of contemporary empirical research and of rational choice theory that politicians are always able to shirk or seek “rents” (Manin et al. 1999).1 It is apparent, then, that the mandate model’s benchmarks are difficult, bordering on impossible, to meet in reality. As Manin and his colleagues conclude, “[O]n one hand, incumbents may adhere to their promises even if their implementation is not the best for citizens, and, on the other hand, they may deviate from the promises in the best interest of the public” (1999:16). Voters are, in reality, much less informed than the mandate model assumes. Even Anthony Downs’ well-known thesis of rational voter ignorance undermines the mandate model. Indeed, rational politicians do not necessarily have an interest in increasing citizens’ knowledge about policies, and may, in fact, have a distinct interest in misinforming them. This asymmetry in the information possessed by politicians and voters is reinforced by a “competence asymmetry” because there is little doubt that technical competence in governing separates politicians from voters. These asymmetries mean that political leaders and elites have substantial leeway for manipulating policy agendas and, accordingly, citizens’ policy preferences. The Accountability Model John Plamenatz charts a path between Dahl and Schumpeter. Leery of the unbounded mandate that Schumpeter assigns leaders once they are 1 When politicians want something whose pursuit is injurious to citizens, the rational choice terminology refers to this something as “rents” (Manin et al. 1999:40).


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elected, Plamenatz also criticizes the mandate model’s depiction of leaders as strictly responsive to voters and their policy preferences. Democracy, Plamenatz contends, is much more government by consent of the governed than it is government that expresses their will (1973:108). In a democracy leaders speak for the people, but this does not mean that leaders merely express people’s wishes. Rather, they express aims, beliefs, and feelings that voters may not be conscious of until a trusted leader articulates them (1973:87). It is this responsibility of leaders – to express and pursue more or less unconscious wants and desires of voters – that distinguishes Plamenatz’s accountability model from Dahl’s mandate model. Voters’ choices among leaders are not rational actions in a utilitarian sense; rather, they are reasonable efforts to make leaders responsible for their actions. Whereas Schumpeter thought that leaders manufacture “the people’s will,” Plamenatz holds that the selection of office-holders through competitive elections does not by itself provide responsible leadership. If leaders are to be accountable politically to the people, voters “…must understand the significance of what they are doing. (…) They must have some knowledge of how the candidates soliciting their votes differ from one another” (1973:189). When citizens vote, in other words, they must understand the significance of their choice. In this way, Plamenatz revitalizes the concept of accountable and responsible leadership, developed originally by Burke and J.S. Mill in their treatments of liberal representation and parliamentarism. In Plamenatz’s account, which fits well into the wider context of the accountability model of representation explored by Hanna Pitkin (1967:55–59), elections make leaders accountable for their actions. But this model’s details need to be unpacked. The accountability model is built on the concept of a free rather than a strictly bounded mandate of the kind that Dahl stipulates. Elected representatives are trustees who enjoy substantial autonomy for their actions. Elections are a method of leadership selection, as Schumpeter taught, but as Friedrich’s rule teaches voters have the opportunity to render ex post judgments on what leaders do. Thus Friedrich’s rule specifies a feedback role for democratic elections by which a set of leaders or a ruling elite is controlled by the people. More formally, although there is an asymmetry between principal and agent (because agents are the active and principals are the re-active party), electoral feedback produces some mutuality in the principal-agent relation (PA). Friedrich’s rule facilitates, in short, government that is accountable.

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The accountability model has turned out to be the dominant interpretation of the (feedback) mechanism of representative government. What are its assumptions? In contrast to the mandate model, it more realistically depicts the knowledge and competence of citizens and the contingent nature of the political and policy decision-making process. It assumes that citizens are too ignorant or disinterested to have ex ante preferences in most policy matters and that this undermines both the possibility and desirability of democracy in its classical form. However, the accountability model assumes that voters are able to give an ex post judgment of a government’s record and in this way hold their rulers to account. Thus Manin and his colleagues observe that, [E]ven if citizens are unable to control governments by obliging them to follow mandates, citizens may be able to do so if they can induce the incumbents to anticipate that they will have to render accounts for their past actions. Governments are ‘accountable’ if voters can discern whether governments are acting in their interest and sanction them appropriately” (Manin et al. 1999:40).

The accountability model assumes the following conditions: first, citizens set some standard of performance or re-election criteria for evaluating governments (e.g. clean streets, safety, an increase in real income); second, the government, wanting to be re-elected and anticipating citizens’ evaluations, does what it can to meet these criteria (Przeworski 1999; Manin et al 1999:41). But as Manin and his colleagues note, although voters can decide whether to re-elect incumbents on any basis they want and are in this respect sovereign, “Accountability is not sufficient to induce representation when voters have incomplete information” (1999:44). The conditions assumed by the accountability model can be further disaggregated as follows: (1) voters are informed about the political state of affairs in a weak sense; (2) this state of affairs is attributed to incumbent office holders; (3) Friedrich’s rule operates; (4) the re-election criteria that voters employ are always in their best interest. As regards citizens’ knowledge and competence, although they can be rather ignorant about policy details on the input side of policy making, they must be fairly well informed about the output side, especially about how policies have affected the economic situation and their own well being. But this weaker information requirement is sufficient for the voters’ retrospective judgment of a government’s record only where the economic or other state of affairs is directly attributable to incumbent office holders. This is, however, a completely unfounded


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assumption since the state of an economy or other complex of policies often depends largely on exogenous factors that are beyond a government’s control. It follows that voters must be well informed not only about the general welfare and their own well being, but also that they are able to distinguish between exogenous factors and a government’s contribution to the overall situation. Short of this technical competence, voters cannot judge a government’s record correctly.2 So, although the accountability model sets up less demanding conditions regarding citizen knowledge and competence than the mandate model, and although the Friedrich feedback rule seems applicable, these weaker conditions are still quite demanding in the real world of politics. Citizens’ uncertainty or inability to set apt criteria for evaluating government performance post hoc opens the way to various manipulations by leaders and elites (Riker 1982/1983; Manin et al. 1999; Maravall 1999). The Authorization Model In contrast to Dahl and Plamenatz, Adam Przeworski (1999) accepts Schumpeter’s argument that political competitions offer voters choices among leaders but not among policies. In Przeworski’s minimalist conception of democracy elections are mostly negative in the sense that they enable voters to get rid of those who govern without blood being shed. But due to politicians’ interests and voters’ lack of information, elections cannot ensure representative governments that act in the best interests of the people (1999:31–32). Przeworski asserts that Schumpeter’s account of democracy, as simply a method of leadership selection, is not only empirically accurate but has normative merits. First, it provides a peaceful method for resolving conflicts and changing leaders. The alternations in office-holding brought about by elections may well induce political moderation because today’s office holders know that they may be tomorrow’s opposition, and vice versa, so it is the common interest of incumbents and opponents to act with restraint (1999:45–46). Second, voting has the important consequence of authorizing “compulsion”. The principle of majority rule amounts to 2

E.g., if they set the re-election criteria “too low”, they may re-elect incumbents with a poor record; if they set the re-election criteria “too high”, they may pull the government down even if the government represented the public interest fairly well (Manin et al. 1999:40–44).

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authorizing coercive actions according to a counting of heads and sheer numbers so that conflicts are decided without resort to violence. In this respect, voting helps to legitimate democracy (1999:48–49). Przeworski’s minimalist conception of democracy is in accord with the wider authorization view of representation, explored by Pitkin (1967:38–54). Unlike the two other models discussed here, the authorization model provides a more skeptical account of elections. In this account, elections do not necessarily constitute a feedback mechanism (Przeworski 1999; Pitkin 1967). And in this reading of Schumpeter’s democratic elitism, the heteronomy and incompetence of ordinary citizens make holding elected representatives accountable for their actions difficult if not impossible. Accountability is at most a metaphor. Democratic control is limited to the selection of leaders, in the course of which citizens consent to leaders. Voters decide to consent to the leadership of particular persons (with particular images and traits) but they do not take autonomous initiatives or make autonomous choices. The possibility that incumbents might lose the next election does not, at least not reliably, make them accountable in the way that Friedrich’s rule holds. The contingent nature of political situations, the importance of exogenous factors, plus sheer social complexity eliminate or at least seriously limit feedback between political decision-makers and those affected by their decisions (A => P). The images, charisma, populist appeals, and achievements of incumbents and challengers do affect citizens’ electoral choices, but elections matter primarily because, as Przeworski’s minimalist concept of democracy holds, they facilitate political moderation and stability. The more realistic assumptions of the authorization model deserve highlighting. It presumes the following conditions: (1) voters are badly informed about policy matters and causes of the recent and current political state of affairs; (2) due to the complexity of the modern world, as well as the unpredictability of human agency, this state of affairs cannot be attributed directly to incumbents; (3) Friedrich’s rule is only a metaphor because voters usually reward the personal performance or image of office holders rather than their policy records; (4) the public interest is also a metaphor or a “thin” concept. The authorization model thus depicts a very different world than the worlds assumed by the mandate and accountability models. The mandate model’s world is rational and predictable; the accountability model’s world is also quite predictable or, at least, not capricious – it is only


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exogenous factors that make accountability imperfect. By contrast, the authorization model faces the challenge of an unpredictable and volatile political world. It embodies Weber’s semi-tragic view of political action: “[I]ntentions often have a perverse relation to outcomes in politics” (quoted by Philp 2007:81). Complexity and unpredictability under-determine causality in the world of politics so much that citizens’ well being and the political state of affairs cannot be attributed in any direct way to what incumbents have done. This does not mean that voters choose randomly among candidates for office; they simply choose differently from what the mandate and accountability models assume. Citizens are badly informed about policies and the causes of the political state of affairs; they are, in effect, disoriented by the political world’s complexity. Political leaders and elites make this world intelligible for them. In election campaigns and after elections, leaders and elites are authorized to do the following: (1) interpret political reality and make it comprehensible to ordinary citizens; (2) define the public interest; (3) carry out collective actions, including the coercion of citizens to obey them. Aware, at least subliminally, of this, voters reward the personal performance of leaders and elites rather than their adherence to a previous mandate or their general policy record. Personal performance is always judged situationally. The ex ante and ex post evaluative standards that are assumed, respectively, by the mandate and accountability models are absent. Voters’ choices occur in a frame of reference that is conceptualized and presented by leaders and elites. Leaders and elites are motivated to shape or manipulate this frame of reference. But their actions are neither a manipulation of something objectively given, nor a distortion of objective reality. They are the product of political actions that have different aims and that are usually incompatible. Thus the political situation that voters must contemplate is not only contingent as the result of exogenous factors; it is inherently contingent because it results from the endogenous structure of political actions by leaders and elites. It is a situation that requires subjective deliberation and the contemplation of political potentialities. It involves, at least in part, taking into account what political leaders would apparently like to see happen (Körösényi 2005:373–374). From this standpoint, the notion of a common good or a public interest is at most a metaphor. Voters must make electoral choices according to more or less ad hoc considerations. They will tend to associate the public interest with successful leaders in circumstances where success depends, in large measure, on fortune and

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virtue. There is a ceaseless political struggle to interpret and reinterpret the political situation and to thereby define and re-define the public interest. If both incumbents and voters are aware of the rather shaky connection between a government’s policy decisions and the political state of affairs in which voters find themselves when going to the ballot box, then Friedrich’s rule is also not more than a metaphor. Voters have no clear or definite clue about whether incumbents should be re-elected or thrown to the wolves. This makes manipulating and shaping voters’ preferences a rational political strategy for incumbents in order to increase their chances of reelection. Voters’ choices depend more on the impact of the strategic interplay of rival political leaders and parties, which is to say on agenda-setting, framing, and priming political issues than forming judgments according to independent yardsticks. Implications for Democratic Elitism We can see that there is a wide gap between complete elite control and complete realization of the people’s will, as the contrast between the authorization and the mandate models demonstrates. Citizens vote on candidates and leaders gain political ascendancy in all three models, yet the models produce views of democracy that are very different analytically and normatively. What implications may we draw for democratic elitism? First, democratic elitism is an umbrella concept in which political leaders and elites are elected to public offices, but the institutions of electoral democracy and Friedrich’s rule ensure that the will of the people nevertheless prevails. However, closer analysis reveals that this is an illusion. Under the surface of the happy consensus about democratic elitism there are, in fact, the three disparate models of democratic representation and governance that I have dissected and chart in the Appendix. Second, political leaders and the political elite have very different roles in the three models. In the mandate model elected leaders enjoy the trust of voters and form merely a functional elite. In the accountability model Friedrich’s feedback mechanism has a central role because voters evaluate the past actions of elected leaders who, to this extent, form a responsible elite. The authorization model focuses much less on what elected leaders have done and much more on their and their


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opponents’ charisma, popular appeal, and so on. Friedrich’s feedback mechanism prevails only as a metaphor, and there is an autonomous power elite. Third, in spite of the same institutional setup, i.e., contested and free elections, the relevance of Friedrich’s rule and the nature of representation are different in each model. In the mandate model Friedrich’s rule and representation enforce responsive public policy; in the accountability model they establish responsible government; but in the authorization model democratic control is limited to the selection of leaders. Fourth, the three models can be differentiated according to how they define the public interest. In the mandate model the public interest is identified in terms of policy inputs/outputs, in the accountability model in terms of its structural grounding, as in the working of the feedback mechanism, while in the authorization model the public interest is often just a metaphor. In the authorization model and especially in the accountability model, there is a room for statesmanship to identify and implement the best interest of the voters, while in the mandate model the voters define the public interest themselves. Fifth, the differences between these models turn largely on epistemological and anthropological assumptions about the capacities of voters, and there are large gaps between these assumptions. The extent to which voters are able to influence public policy and control incumbents depends on (1) voters’ competence and the extent to which they are well informed about policy matters, candidates’ promises and parties’ election manifestos, and the records of office holders seeking reelection; (2) the extent to which contingencies and exogenous factors are beyond government control; (3) the extent to which political leaders engage in agenda and issue manipulations; (4) the quality of electoral campaigns mounted by competing office seekers. The more realistic or pessimistic assumption about citizens’ political competence that we adopt, the farther from the mandate and the closer to the authorization model of representation we move. In conclusion, let me return to the authorization model for two reasons. First, it is rather neglected in the literature of democratic theory. Second, it is the most pessimistic model and it therefore constitutes the most difficult challenge for normative democratic theory. It is apparent that the relationship between the authorization model and democratic elitism is quite ambiguous. It can be argued, moreover, that the authorization model has a “Ceasarist” tilt (Baehr and Richter 2004). Three

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questions about the authorization model and its implications for democratic elitism need to be considered: (1) the relationship between leadership and manipulation; (2) the vanishing accountability of leaders; (3) the personalization of politics in democracies. Pitkin has observed that “[T]he line between leadership and manipulation is a tenuous one, and may be difficult to draw. But there undoubtedly is a difference, and this difference makes leadership compatible with representation while manipulation is not” (1967:233). Her dictum fits the accountability model well because it presumes, first, that there is an asymmetric but still two-way or mutual relationship between leaders and citizens, and second, that citizens do have objective or at least independent criteria for evaluating a government’s record. The model assumes, in other words, the independence of public opinion. By contrast, the authorization model abandons the latter assumption about public opinion so that the line between leadership and manipulation is not only vague, as Pitkin would have it, but vanishing. Manipulation does not mean that a single political authority “manufactures” citizens’ preferences, but rather that a competitive struggle among rival political leaders shapes citizens’ views and mobilizes them for competing ends. If electoral competitions and rivalries are not the domain of rationally comprehensible policy positions and programs, but are instead the domain of manipulation or of performance images and leaders’ personal dynamisms, then Friedrich’s rule does not obtain. Competitive elections do not provide a guarantee against elite domination, and they may simply conceal elite rule that is maintained through various means of heresthetics and manipulation (Riker 1983; Maravall 1999; Jacobs and Shapiro 2000). In contrast to an optimistic reading of Schumpeter’s competitive theory of democracy, David Miller (1983) and Emilio Santoro (1993:129–131) have shown that oligopolistic competition enhances neither the responsiveness nor the responsibility of leaders.3 Often involving staged presentations or other theatrics, the personal performances of leaders are evaluated by voters who constitute Manin’s “audience” in a democracy. But can leaders’ performances be regarded as a basis for holding them to account? Are leaders as actors on the 3 Santaro (1993:127) adds to the Friedrich rule a further criterion that democratic elections must satisfy if they are to have a positive effect, namely, that there should be no collusion among parties. But in reality, Santoro notes, collusion often happens: “parties can always agree not to compete on certain issues”.


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political stage really accountable? A theatre actor’s performance can be applauded or jeered off the stage. But we can term this “accountability” only in a very limited or metaphorical sense. What choice is left to citizens in this personalized view of democratic control, where accountability is limited and manipulation is an inherent part of leadership? Are there further considerations that make elections superior to lotteries or to elite guardianship and that go beyond the peace-inducing effects of Przeworski’s minimalist conception of democracy? I want to make two final points to support the argument that candidate selection in a personalized mode makes sense and provides citizens with meaningful choice. My first point is about citizen competence. Choices according to leaders’ personal characteristics are often regarded as irrational. But even Dahl and Lindblom admitted that “[T]o take personal characteristics heavily into account in voting is … not so irrational as it seems” (1953:71). At that stage in their thinking about democracy, Dahl and Lindblom accepted that voters are not informed sufficiently to satisfy the mandate model of representation. They tried to bridge the gap between the ignorance of voters and the knowledge necessary for issuing a mandate through the “sampling method” they suggested: Voters’ choices, based on candidates’ personal characteristics, serve as a substitute for issue voting in circumstances of incomplete information. We can generalize this sampling idea by stating that voters’ choices based on candidates’ personal characteristics and images are more congruent with the knowledge and competence of ordinary citizens, as is assumed by the authorization model, than issue voting or voting according to specific re-election criteria. Judging candidates’ images, personality traits and/or dynamisms is closer to ordinary citizens’ everyday practical knowledge than is the evaluation of complex policy actions and government records (cf. Schumpeter 1942:258–261). My other point pertains to the process of candidate selection. Offering empirical evidence, James Fearon notes that “[A] group of people might understand elections as means of selecting or conferring honor on the best or most distinguished person” (1999:57). Sartori (1987) and Manin (1997:149) emphasize the meritocratic aspect of elections. They argue that elections, in contrast to lotteries, are aristocratic means of leadership selection: they select the best candidates as their representatives vis-à-vis the average. As Manin puts it, “[V]oters, if they are to elect a candidate, must regard him as superior in the light of the quality … that they consider politically relevant” (1997:146).

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The implication of these two points is that even within the conditions on which the authorization model rests – where there is no expectation of accountability – voters’ choices based on personal characteristics of candidates make sense. I conclude, therefore, that the authorization model of representation, which is the most pessimistic of the three models I have dissected, is compatible with a skeptical reading of Schumpeter’s competitive theory of democracy. Although in this more realistic, albeit more skeptical rendition of democratic elitism political leadership that eschews manipulation while being substantially accountable to citizens is mostly a myth, it still lies well short of the classical elitists’ view that democracy is nothing more than an exercise in futility (Hirschman 1991; Femia 2001). Appendix The Mandate, Accountability, and Authorization Models Compared Mandate Model

Accountability Model

Authorization Model

P A (impact in both directions) Trustees Free mandate (and accountability)

Agent => Principal

Principal-Agent relation

Principal => Agent

Public Office-holders Type of the mandate

Delegates Bounded mandate

Democracy means

Self-rule of the Popular control people of rulers On policy-issues On incumbents’ On candidates (Input records (ex post (Selecting good mandate) judgment of output) type) Mandate Output accountability Evaluation of responsiveness theatrics or staging Functional elite Responsible elite Ruling elite Reasonable and Non-rational and Rational and fairly informed/ badly informed/ completely competent incompetent informed/ competent Rational and Reasonable and Capricious/ predictable predictable to irrational a certain extent

Voters’ choice

The meaning of the Friedrich’s rule Type of Elite Citizens

Assumptions about the world

Representatives Free mandate (accountability is a metaphor) Consent to rulers


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References Baehr, Peter, and Melvin Richter, Eds. 2004. Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blondel, Jean. 2005. “The Links Between Western European Parties and Their Supporters. The Role of Personalization”. Occasional Papers N. 16/2005. Center for Comparative Political Research: University of Siena, Italy. Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy.” Political Studies 47: 2–16. Dahl, Robert A. 1956. A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— . 1971. Polyarchy. Participation and Opposition. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. —— . 1989. Democracy and its Critics. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. Dahl, Robert A., and Charles E. Lindblom. 1953. Politics, Economics and Welfare. New Brunswick N.J.: Transaction Publishers. Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper. Fearon, James D. 1999. “Electoral Accountability and the Control of Politicians: Selecting Good Types versus Sanctioning Poor Performances.” Pp. 55–97 in Democracy, Accountability and Representation, edited by Adam Przeworski, Susan Stokes, and Bernard Manin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Femia, Joseph V. 2001. Against the Masses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friedrich, Carl J. 1963. Man and His Government: An Empirical Theory of Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Higley, John, and Jan Pakulski. 2007. “Elite and Leadership Change in Liberal Democracies.” Comparative Sociology 6(1-2): 6–26. Hirschman, Albert O. 1991. The Rhetoric of Reaction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jacobs, Lawrence R., and Robert Y. Shapiro. 2000. Politicians Don’t Pander. Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Körösényi, András. 2005. “Political Representation in Leader Democracy.” Government and Opposition 40(3): 358–378. Manin, Bernard. 1997. The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manin, Bernard, Adam Przeworski, and Susan Stokes. 1999. “Elections and Representation.” Pp. 29–54 in Democracy, Accountability and Representation, edited by Adam Przeworski, Susan Stokes, and Bernard Manin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maravall, José Maria. 1999. “Accountability and Manipulation.” Pp. 154–196 in Democracy, Accountability and Representation, edited by Adam Przeworski, Susan Stokes, and Bernard Manin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mény, Yves and Yves Surel. Eds. 2002. Democracies and the Populist Challenge. London: Palgrave. Miller, David. 1983. “The competitive model of democracy.” Pp. 133–155 in Democratic Theory and Practice, edited by Graeme Duncan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Philp, Mark. 2007. Political Conduct. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pitkin, Hanna. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Plamenatz, John. 1973. Democracy and Illusion. London: Longman.

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Poguntke, Thomas, and Paul Webb. Eds. 2005. The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Przeworski, Adam, Susan Stokes, and Bernard Manin. Eds. 1999. Democracy, Accountability and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Przeworski, Adam. 1999. “The Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense.” Pp. 23–55 in Democracy’s Value, edited by Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riker, William H. 1982. Liberalism Against Populism. New York: W. H. Freeman. —— . 1983. “Political Theory and the Art of Heresthetics.” Pp. 47–67 in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, edited by Ada W. Finifter, Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association. Santoro, Emilio. 1993. “Democratic Theory and Individual Autonomy. An Interpretation of Schumpeter’s Doctrine of Democracy.” European Journal of Political Research 23: 121–143. Sartori, Giovanni. 1987. The Theory of Democracy Revisited I: The Contemporary Debate. Chatham NJ: Chatham House Publishers. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row. Shepsle, Kenneth A., and Mark S. Bonchek. 1997. Analyzing Politics. Rationality, Behavior, and Institutions. New York: Norton. Stokes, Susan. 1999. “What Do Policy Switches Tell us about Democracy?” Pp. 131–153 in Democracy, Accountability and Representation, edited by Adam Przeworski, Susan Stokes, and Bernard Manin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— . 2001. Mandates and Democracy. Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zolo, Danilo 1992. Complexity and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

DEMOCRATIC ELITISM – CONFLICT AND CONSENSUS Fredrick Engelstad The most striking renewal of elite theory in the last decades has been the systematic linkage of elites to democracy. This linkage stands in sharp contrast to classical elite theory, which stressed the tensions, even the incompatibilities, between elites and democracy. The renewal of elite theory results partly from the changed conception of democracy introduced by Joseph Schumpeter. It also results from a better understanding of the relative autonomy of various institutional fields in modern societies – economy, law, science, politics, culture – and of the pivotal roles that large and hierarchical organizations in these fields play in democratic politics. Hence, it is now well recognized that democracy’s bottom-up character, stressing the political equality and participation of citizens, is accompanied by an array of elites at the tops of institutional hierarchies. This duality of citizens and elites is a source of constant and probably unsolvable tensions in modern democracies. Semantically, it warrants the oxymoron “democratic elitism,” which, despite its contradictory character, is essential for understanding how modern democracies function. Two separate debates have emerged around democratic elitism. One refers to the relationship between the electorate and elected political representatives. Here the political involvement of citizens is the main issue and the basic question is whether democracy is solely a method for allocating decision-making responsibility to elected representatives, or whether citizen participation between elections is desirable or even necessary for democracy (Schumpeter 1942; Bachrach 1967). The second debate concerns the interrelationships of political and other elites in democracies’ day-to-day decision-making processes. Here the distribution of decision-making power among multiple elites is the issue (Etzioni-Halévy 1993; Higley and Burton 2006), with citizens’ influence accorded secondary importance. Unlike the debate over Schumpeterian vs. participatory democracy, which has flourished for several decades, there is still too little debate

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about the interrelations of political and other elites in democracies. By contrasting two theoretical approaches to these interrelations, this chapter seeks to illuminate this important aspect of democratic elitism. One approach is charted by Eva Etzioni-Halévy in The Elite Connection (1993), in which democratic elitism is rooted in a theory of inter-elite conflict. The other approach is charted in a series of articles initiated by Gwen Moore’s analysis of elite integration in the United States (Moore 1979) and in comparative analyses of American, Australian, and West German elites (Higley and Moore 1981; Higley, HoffmanLange, Kadushin, and Moore 1991). This approach roots democratic elitism in a theory of elite consensus. Can these two approaches be combined in a single framework, and what theoretical modifications does this require? Elite Conflicts in Democracy Eva Etzoni-Halévy critiques the normative theory of democracy and applies the position that she develops to several contemporary democracies. Her critique connects directly to the classical liberal theory of democratic checks and balances, conceived by John Locke and formulated by Baron De Montesquieu, but transposed into a theory of institutional differentiation in modern societies. Etzioni-Halévy asks how the democratic norm of political equality can be reconciled with the growing inequalities in material resources and power created by the efficiency and complexity of large-scale organizations in diverse institutional fields. Her answer is simple and clear: If powerful political and other elites cannot be abolished, for democracy to work they must be balanced against each other. The core concepts in Etzioni-Halévy’s book are elite pluralism and elite autonomy. “Elite pluralism,” she writes, “has to do with the numbers of elites”; for democracy to work there must be a fairly extensive number of sector elites and sub-elites sharing power. On the other hand, “elite autonomy has to do with the distribution of resources between [elites]” that makes it impossible for one elite, such as the political elite, to dominate all other elites (Etzioni-Halévy 1993:97). She enumerates, in addition to freedom from physical coercion, three types of resources: material, administrative/organizational, and symbolic (ibid.:98). Democracy presupposes that elite autonomy is institutionalized in two respects: in the relationship between elites themselves, and in the relationship between elites and the state.

democratic elitism – conflict and consensus

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Etzioni-Halévy illustrates her theoretical approach with two empirical comparisons, between Germany and Great Britain in the first decades of the 20th century, and between Poland and Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1980s. Intuitively, it makes good sense that elites in Britain were more balanced and autonomous than elites in the Weimar Republic, and as a consequence democracy survived in Britain but not in Germany. Likewise, after 40 years of Communist rule in Poland there still remained rudiments on which to build post-communist elite balance and autonomy to a greater degree than was the case in Russia, hence democratization was more successful in Poland than in Russia. However, these twin comparisons are sketchy illustrations of a very complex matter. Etzioni-Halévy admits that in practice in any modern society it is unthinkable that elites could be completely autonomous from each other. Elite autonomy is never absolute; it is always relative. But she qualifies this by drawing a distinction between elite cooperation on the one hand end elite consensus and solidarity on the other, underscoring that, “It is in fact chiefly elite cooperation (rather than elite consensus on rules or elite solidarity) which is necessary for the proper functioning of any political system, hence also democracy” (Etzioni-Halévy 1993:109). She explicitly maintains that overlapping self-interest is a sufficient condition for elite cooperation, whereas a normative elite consensus is superfluous (ibid.:111). Consequently, a strong conflict theory underlies Etzioni-Halévy’s conception of elite interrelations in democracies. Elites do not have to “agree to disagree”; it is sufficient that they cooperate so long as they find it advantageous for their individual group interests. Here a serious contradiction in Etzioni-Halévy’s approach is apparent. Although she takes a strong normative approach to democracy, her analysis of how elites behave does not assume that they must have such a normative commitment. Undoubtedly in the histories of democratic societies one can find many examples of common arrangements being upheld by overlapping interests and nothing more. But in the absence of normative underpinnings, democracy would require that societies routinely reach a high number of “saddle points” in cooperative games, which would together constitute a stable equilibrium. The complexity of modern societies is generally at odds with such constellations, however. Etzioni-Halévy acknowledges this implicitly when she points out that relative elite autonomy has to be “institutionalized” (ibid.:101). The difficulty is that institutions are always normative arrangements. They

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may be rooted in habits and expectations, but these require a common normative character to be relatively stable. To paraphrase Robert Michels, institutionalization says underlying common norms, and in the case of elite conflicts, this means agreement about rules of the democratic game, or, in other words, an agreement to disagree in ways that support rather than harm democracy. This contradiction in Etzioni-Halévy’s approach extends to the question of elite autonomy. In my view, her conception of autonomy as amounting to independent control of resources is too narrow on both philosophical and empirical grounds. In the liberal tradition, autonomy is not equivalent to self-interest or self-sufficiency. At the individual level autonomy means “making a law for oneself ”. But the individual who is autonomous in this sense necessarily assumes that the law in question is equally important for all others who are subject to it. Put differently, it is difficult to conceive of autonomy without also conceiving some sort of commonality and reciprocity. The same applies to social groups and organizations. When elites cooperate with other elites in a democracy, they must mutually recognize each other in order to pursue their own distinctive goals. If this mutual recognition breaks down, democracy is likely to break down as well. The history of the Weimar Republic is among other things a history of little or no mutual elite recognition and a consequent political stalemate that contributed to the Republic’s demise (Hoffman-Lange 1998). If mutual recognition between sector elites is institutionalized, on what basis does this take place? One general basis is the professionalization of elites. In modern societies a majority of top positions are linked to large bureaucratic organizations run by experts with credentials that satisfy various public certification systems (cf. Weber 1920/1978). This makes it possible for each elite group to acknowledge its mutual dependence on the expertise of other elite groups. Moreover, elite autonomy presupposes institutions for resolving conflicts, first and foremost an independent and impartial legal system. The United States displays the most salient example of a legal system as a conflict solving mechanism. Alternatively, conflicts may be managed through institutionalized negotiations between major social groups, as occurs in the neo-corporatist systems of Northern Europe. Finally, the institutionalization of elite autonomy and cooperation rests on what may broadly be termed a culture of liberal values. The liberal value of political equality pertains not only to individual rights but has a wider significance in justifying what are deemed legitimate


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actions, motives, and arguments in politics. An agreement among elites to disagree cannot be reduced, in other words, to a purely instrumental motivation. Even a system of institutionalized conflict resolution will break down if courts, for instance, are used solely in a strategic manner to crush opponents. As a cultural phenomenon, agreeing to disagree is rooted in the fact that common values cannot be enforced; they must be reciprocally accepted. Elite Consensus and Elite Networks The Moore-Higley approach to elites in democracies wrestles with many of the same questions as Etzioni-Halévy, but this approach takes a completely different path by emphasizing the necessity for underlying elite consensus if democracy is to work. The point of departure is not a normative conception of democracy, but, instead, empirical analyses comparing influence and social networks between members of different sector elites in three modern societies: the United States, Australia and West Germany. These studies form the basis for a discussion of related, but competing, theories of elites and power structures in modern democracies. John Higley and Moore (1981) argue in favor of their model of a consensual elite by contrasting it to the pluralist model inspired by Robert Dahl (1961), the power elite model of C. Wright Mills (1956), and the ruling class model of G. William Domhoff (1983). Empirical indications of elite interaction in the U.S. and Australia, as measured by elite inclusiveness and the structure of elite circles, seem to favor the consensual elite model (Higley and Moore 1981:584–5). A subsequent article expands these research findings by including an analysis of similar data from West Germany (Higley et al. 1991), while at the same time the idea of a consensually united elite is interpreted in the light of Giovanni Sartori’s Theory of Democracy Revisited (1987). Elites are identified on the basis of the high-ranking positions they hold in a wide array of institutional fields: business, trade unions, government administration, politics, major interest groups, etc. The material used in the analyses of informal elite networks consists of survey questionnaire responses by several hundred elite persons in each country about policy issues on which they have recently been active and the persons with whom they have principally interacted on those issues. This permits a mapping of elite interactions on specific and important issues on each country’s political agenda at the time of the research.

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Analyses of contact patterns, along with actors’ influence on specific policy issues, make it possible to identify cohesive parts of the network and the relative centrality of network members (Higley et al 1991:40). A number of issue-centered elite networks are uncovered in each country. In each a large “central circle” consisting of several hundred elite persons loosely connected to each other – reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s metaphor of family resemblances – emerges in the data. (See also Laumann and Knoke 1987 for similar findings on the relationship between organizations in the U.S.). Within the central circles smaller circles of especially powerful actors are also detected. The network patterns in the United States, Australia and West Germany show striking similarities (Higley et al. 1991:40–43). In order to situate and interpret their findings in the light of democratic theory, the researchers highlight the structural similarity of the elite networks with the pattern that Giovanni Sartori (1987:227–237) posits as a chief feature of democratic decision-making, to wit, an interconnected chain of “committees” of equal and interdependent members. A committee as conceived by Sartori is an arena for deliberation and decision-making. Concrete examples may be parliamentary committees, corporate boards of directors, public ad hoc commissions, or peak negotiating committees in a neo-corporatist polity as found in Scandinavia. Common to Sartori’s committees and elite networks is that both imply personal encounters between elite members. On the basis of Sartori’s theory of democracy Higley, Moore and their coauthors infer that any stable democracy depends heavily on the existence of multiple informal elite circles that overlap each other. Referring to Sartori (1987:228) they characterize these networks as, “The ‘real stuff ’ of politics – the places in which issues are examined, discussed, drafted, and for the most part decided” (Higley et al 1991:37). Accordingly, they postulate that, “In stable democracies a relatively tight and at the same time comprehensive integration of national elites permits their members access to decision-making and fosters a common perception of mutual interdependence” (ibid.). In one respect, what we encounter here is a sharp picture of elite consensus in terms of “elite integration” and the “common perception of mutual interdependence”. But at the same time, and paralleling Etzioni-Halévy, the normative aspect of these concepts is underplayed because elite consensus is assumed to be the consequence of how elites’ differing self-interests intersect (ibid.:36). Consensus is thus mostly regarded as an epiphenomenon: elites cooperate and “integrate” when


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they believe it is to their benefit. There is no need to deny that elites often engage in interactions when they perceive that they will gain from doing so, and this is also largely true as regards establishing democratic systems of governance themselves, as described most comprehensively by Higley and Burton (2006). But these observations are insufficient to serve as a basis for a broader understanding of modern democracies. Let me first try to assess the conceptual issue. Sartori develops his idea of democracy as a “committee” process in order to complement Schumpeter’s original competitive theory of democracy. Schumpeter concentrated on the processes leading up to the selection of decisionmakers, with the implication that once they are selected by voters the democratic process is essentially closed during the period that follows. In Schumpeter’s theory, elected representatives have great discretion, indeed a duty, to make decisions with little reference to public desires, although they must of course anticipate how the decisions they make will affect voters at the next round of elections. Extending Schumpeter’s theory, Sartori focuses on decision-making processes between elections, pointing out that they require a broader consensus than Schumpeter assumed but never explicitly stated. Sartori posits that this broader consensus is attained through a network of committees, because such bodies have a strong tendency toward unanimity and are at the same time the places where decisions really are made. It should be recalled that a precursor of Sartori’s committee conception was Stein Rokkan’s portrayal of a neo-corporatist system, in which modern democracy is characterized by parallel channels of decision-making and interest negotiation: an electoral channel comprising parties and political institutions; and a corporatist channel where interest groups and economic actors are dominating forces. Stein Rokkan’s well-known phrase, “Votes count, but resources decide” (Rokkan 1966) places greatest power in the corporatist channel. However, this conception of democracy through committee processes among elites is problematic in at least two respects. Even though it is true that unanimity is more common in small-scale committees than large assemblies, it is easy to overlook the amount of conflict that actually occurs. As Sartori depicts them, committees have the flavor of gentlemen clubs that function in a collegial atmosphere. But in modern democratic realities, the deliberations in decision-making often involve the articulation of rival and sharply conflicting interests. Most members of such powerful bodies represent quite different

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constituencies to which they are individually accountable, and this means that often deep cleavages in the citizenry are mirrored in committees. More important, the relationship between elite committees and social interest groups leads to the concept of a public sphere in which information is exchanged and deliberated in the media and a host of other public outlets (Habermas 1989). To the degree that committee members represent broad interest groups, negotiations among them are seldom kept inside the walls of the committee room. Premises for decisions may of course be laid down there, but matters of national significance are mainly decided in broader political arenas and only after quite extensive ventilation in the public sphere. When elites have to make their views known in public statements through the media or in more specialized channels of communication, as well as in the internal debates of interest groups themselves, the electorate looms much larger as a factor in elites’ day-to-day decision-making than is assumed in the theories of both Schumpeter and Sartori. Underlining the electorate’s importance does not deny that elite interaction is a desirable, even essential, element in modern democratic processes. Backstage deliberations are unavoidable, and the confidence that elites have in each other is to a large degree dependent on their encounters with each other in closed settings. Nevertheless, beyond tightly knit organizations, in which backroom deals among uppermost leaders are the rule, some of the main channels of elite communication are located in the public sphere if for no other reason than that persons holding top positions are subject to severe time restrictions. It is often not possible to meet with each other on an individual basis sufficient to work out complex political issues. In modern societies elites, to a large extent, communicate via media, and their opinions are shaped and personal evaluations are made on the basis of reports and statements that other elite persons make in the press, public debates, and official documents (cf. Schudson 1995). These public communications may be truthful or manipulative – probably they are a mix of both – but their key feature is that they occur beyond the confines of committees. This implies that processes of the public sphere frame informal elite encounters, rather than the other way around. However, Higley et al. (1991:36) focus attention in the opposite direction when they maintain that informal relations give all important elites in modern democracy “mutual access to central decisionmaking arenas,” a claim that is clearly an exaggeration. Elite interaction


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through personal networks is more like the oil for the democratic machine than it is the machine itself. This point is illustrated by a description of network structure that Higley et al. provide and that is particularly interesting. Table 1 simplifies one of the tables in their 1991 article, leaving out five of eight elite groups (hence, the columns do not add to 100). Table 1 gives the percentages of the three remaining groups in the original elite samples, along with the percentages of each sector elite among the 100 most centrally located persons in each of the three national elite networks. The distribution of politicians and business leaders in the original positional samples is quite similar in the United States, Australia and West Germany. It varies between 22 percent (politicians in Australia) and 33 percent (politicians in the US) of the total elite sample. The distribution of the business elite in all three countries lies between these numbers. But when we look at the power core, defined as the 100 most central elite persons in each country, the picture is strikingly different. A large majority in the US power core consists of politicians, this proportion being virtually double what is found in West Germany, and almost the triple what is found in Australia. One obvious interpretation is that the United States is a country that is really run by politicians. But we all know that the opposite is more likely true, namely, if there is a country where business holds a strong power position it is certainly the United States. Thus, a more plausible interpretation of the table is that these revealed networks reflect certain aspects of elite interaction, but not the general power structure itself. The dense interaction between politics, business, and labor in neo-corporatist West Germany leads to a more even distribution of these groups in the observed power core. In contrast, the more pluralist Table 1. Sector elites: Sample structure by position method, and power core (percentages). USA Sector

Sample

Politics 33 Business 24 Labor 9 Unions

Australia

West Germany

Top 100 Sample Top 100 Sample

Top 100

71 9 4

38 27 10

Source: Higley et al, 1991:42, Table 2.

22 24 14

25 37 4

28 29 5

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United States business and politics operate more independently of each other, with American business to a large degree exercising its power without engaging all that much in political circles (Vogel 1978).

Elite Conflict, Consensus, and Integration This brief overview of the Etzioni-Halévy and Moore-Higley approaches to democracy highlights two opposing conceptions of elite relationships. One pointing to a power balance among relatively autonomous sector elites as the precondition for democracy, and the other pointing to informal contacts through extensive elite networks as the crucial precondition. Both approaches are valuable starting points, but neither is well developed theoretically. Having already commented critically on Etzioni-Halévy’s conception of elite autonomy, let me comment on the concept of elite consensus and, as Higley and Burton (2006) now term them, “consensually united elites”. What is the specific point of reference? The notion of “elite consensus” often carries connotations of elite manipulation, political machines, and backroom politics, but obviously this is not what is meant. Consensually united elites do not usually display consensus on specific issues; rather, their consensus is about rules of the democratic game. The question, then, is how to conceptualize the combination of elite conflicts over specific issues and elite consensus about basic game rules. The theoretical gist of the Moore-Higley approach is restated by Higley and Burton (2006), who define consensually united elites according to two elements: value consensus and structural integration. I believe that my earlier discussion of common elite adherence to democratic norms is very much in line with the conception of value consensus. This value implies a combination of issue-specific conflicts together with consensus about rules of the political game in democracies. The contrasts that Higley and Burton draw are with disunited elites that operate authoritarian regimes or façade democracies and with ideologically united elites that sustain totalitarian regimes (ibid.:14). Disunited elites are unable to reach value consensus, and ideologically united elites stifle the expression of any view that does not accord with the single ideological goal that they profess to be pursuing. Within this framework, however, the concept of structural integration, which Higley and Burton depict as the second dimension of consensually united elites, becomes somewhat confusing. Reaching


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back to the earlier Moore-Higley approach, Higley and Burton characterize structural integration as consisting of “…overlapping and interlocked communication and influence networks [which] encompass and tie together all influential factions and sector elites…” (ibid.:10). But here the conflict side of the agreement to disagree drifts out of sight. Networks based on issue cooperation do not constitute rules of the game but are instead reflections of the decision-making process, i.e. the game itself, which has strong competitive elements. The problem is not that elite conflict is denied – this is obviously not the case (see Higley et al. 1991:46) – but that it is not the object of theoretical discussion. If elite consensus in the sense envisaged here should have as its foremost concern the constitutive preconditions for such decision-making processes, issue-based elite networks are perhaps better regarded as constellations of conflicts, whether manifest or latent, between sector elites and often between subgroups of sector elites. David Knoke makes a similar point. He objects to the Moore-Higley approach because in his view elite consensus is made to overshadow the conflicts that regularly occur within each arena where decisions are made. Knoke recommends studying directly the conflicts that unfold in specific fields of debate and decision-making, such as energy production or labor relations (Knoke 1990; Laumann and Knoke 1987). This criticism is to some degree unfair because the Moore-Higley approach has a different focus. Nevertheless, I believe that the existence of conflicts in different arenas deserves greater attention. Knoke’s (1990:165) analysis of struggles over labor legislation well illustrates the interplay of inter-elite and intra-elite conflict. Labor legislation ignites conflicts between the business elite and the trade union elite and it simultaneously ignites much conflict within the political elite, mainly along the left-right cleavage line. By returning to the concept of elite integration this relatively obvious point can be further developed. As noted, the concept occupies a relatively peripheral place in Etzioni-Halévy’s theory and is limited mainly to the relationship between various elites and their followers. She points out that elites in top positions are dependent on a large group of subordinate sub-elites and, further down the hierarchy, on large groups of ordinary followers. Her point is that there are different hierarchical layers reflecting different levels of activity and power. These layers constitute obstacles to the vertical integration of sectors by the elites that sit atop them (Etzioni-Halévy 1993:95). Equally salient, however, is the horizontal integration of each sector elite. Within

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any given sector, elites are also confronted by the challenge that agreeing to disagree poses. Elite persons in a given sector almost invariably have interests that elites in other sectors also have over resources and over priorities in their specific arenas. At the same time, there may be fierce competitive relationships within each sector elite. It is here that a central aspect of the Schumpeterian problem is situated: democracy is competition between factions of sector elites. In politics, conflicts are fought out between political parties, between interest groups that jockey for influence in each sector, in the economy between corporations competing for the same markets, and in the cultural sphere between numerous religious denominations, artistic styles, and voluntary associations. In short, complex constellations of elite consensus and conflict are virtually always present in modern democracies. A major requirement of democratic stability is that elites agree to disagree on at least two levels simultaneously. Primarily such agreements are in the face of strong interest conflicts over the constitutive rules of society and how to preserve an always precarious cooperation in the most central societal sectors.

Elites and Democratic Stability Common to the Etzioni-Halévy and Moore-Higley approaches is the question of democratic stability and how it is affected by political and other elites. I believe that the foregoing discussion points toward a broader theory of democratic stability, at the same time taking the contributions that both approaches make to understanding political stability, as well as their weak points, into consideration. In their recent study of how liberal democracies emerged historically, Higley and Burton (2006) give a broad description of initial conditions for liberal democracy as a set of converging elite interests. The converging interests facilitate basic elite “settlements” and, thereby, overarching constitutional agreements (for earlier formulations see O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Burton and Higley 1987). Such settlements are both fragile and rare, and when viewed in historical perspective the emergence of liberal democracy has clearly been the exception rather than the rule. In most places and times democracy has not and probably could not be established, so that most countries have long been dominated by disunited elites. Alternatively, a liberal democracy


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may wither, with its elites becoming disunited or even ideologically united. But the question arises, how and why has liberal democracy been sustained in at least some countries and in a few of them for two or more centuries? Mechanisms at work in the birth of democracy are hardly sufficient to ensure its persistence. Although vehement elite conflicts may initially be “settled” and the foundation for liberal democracy thereby laid, similar elite conflicts are certain to recur. Specific elite groups will often see it in their interest to break out of an initial settlement if adhering to it prevents them from achieving a dominant position. The complex multilevel conflicts sketched above likewise attest to the fragility of elite settlements. Higley and Burton (2006) point, however, to two stabilizing factors. One is the relatively strong elite adherence to a set of liberal values; the other is a tacit acknowledgement by elites of their mutual dependency. These factors are shown to have been at work in the creation of liberal democracies, and they are presumed to be significant at later stages as well. But they are not sufficient to avoid a breakdown of democracy over the long run. Institutionalization is necessary if stable liberal democracies are to persist over long periods, as several of them have done. However, the role of legal and political institutions is quite unclear in both of the theoretical approaches under discussion. It is reluctantly admitted by Etzioni-Halévy, and is denied, or at least ignored, by Moore-Higley and colleagues. At a very minimum, relevant processes of institutionalization include (1) a legal system that contributes to conflict regulation, if not resolution; (2) a set of constitutive rules that establishes an order of importance among different institutional arenas so that, for example, parliamentary institutions take priority over military ones; (3) stable rules for changing procedures, such as rules for amending constitutions. Without institutionalization of these parts of the governing system, viable elite compromises are virtually impossible. A necessary and complementary element of democracy is the public sphere in the Habermasian sense. In Etzioni-Halévy’s approach the public sphere is superfluous because elite communication is to a large extent irrelevant; it is the balance between elites that is crucial. In the Moore-Higley approach, informal elite networks overshadow the public sphere. I have suggested that the Moore-Higley approach needs to recognize that even if informal inter-elite contact is necessary, the most important channels for communication between elites lie in the public sphere. In the context of democratic elitism, the public sphere is crucial

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because it transcends the limitations of isolated elite decision-making and channels information flows between elites and between them and citizens. A final, dynamic aspect of democracy’s emergence must also be noted. Elites shape democracy at its outset, but in due course democracy shapes elites. Over time, democratic institutions and practices increasingly shape the understandings and behaviors of elites. Democracy limits the space for independent elite action, as well as elites’ policy preferences and their conceptions of how politics will unfold in the future. Varieties of Elite Dynamics Even if a relatively large set of factors must be present for democracy to persist, once it is established it evolves quite differently among societies, depending on their historical situations and national cultures. This is also true of elite constellations among societies whose cultures and basic value systems are quite similar. A few simple observations illustrate the salience of institutionalization and the variations that occur among democracies. In the United States the constitution and the Supreme Court have an importance for political processes that is relatively unique among modern democracies. This entails a constitutional conservatism that greatly limits the possibilities for regulating business politically. The American constitution’s original aim was to create and maintain a weak national state that would at most serve as a referee in conflicts between different business and also different regional interests (Dobbin 1994). A general acceptance of this constitutional order has been the strongest stabilizing element in American democracy, and it has also been the prime shaper of relationships and power distributions among American elites. In France, by contrast, political stability has had a completely different basis. A political system that for 80 years displayed much outward instability in the form of consistently short-lived governments has actually been quite stable. The core of this stability has been a centralized and strong state controlled by a coherent and self-perpetuating political class throughout the 20th century. An equally important source of stability in France has been an exceptionally powerful administrative apparatus. These two elements are fused by the distinctive French educational system, in which the École Nationale d’Administration sits at the summit and serves as the main route into elite positions in


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administration, politics, and, at least in part, business (Dobbin 1994; Dogan 2003). A third institutional pattern that serves as a basis for democratic stability is found in the neo-corporatist Scandinavian countries. There stability stems mainly from a set of sector specific “secondary elite compromises” that have been institutionalized over more than a century, in the wake of the original elite compromises of the 19th century (Engelstad et al. 1999). One of many forms these secondary compromises take is the relationship between capital and labor, in which there is a large constellation of interlocking agreements that regulate wage negotiations as well as industrial relations on the shop floor. Similar compromises are found in such diverse fields as foreign policy, religion, language policy, and gender equality (Gulbrandsen et al. 2002). These three examples demonstrate that elites are shaped by their own distinctive histories that make their withdrawal from democratic practices prohibitively costly in most circumstances. What elites can do, and for the most part actually do, is to effect changes from within well-established democratic orders. This in no way precludes elite conflicts; on the contrary, elite competitions and conflicts continuously take new forms. Thus, one salient source of elite conflict in the 21st century is the process of globalization, which decisively changes the latitude for elite actions, albeit in very different ways among today’s democracies. As an example, the governing capacities of the state visà-vis business interests are significantly diminished by increased capital mobility across national borders, but the relationship between economic and political elites is probably most affected in small countries with open economies. Globalization also affects democracy at the supra-national level, as is seen most clearly in the changing shape of the European Union and its relations to member states (Cotta 2007). Although it is impossible to predict how these processes will play out, it is certain that they will create new patterns of elite consensus and conflict. A Postscript About Theory There is a widespread tendency to criticize contemporary social science theories for being insufficiently broad because they do not capture every important social phenomenon. Very often this criticism is beside the point because it implies simply that a host of variables must be added to any specific theory if it is to capture the social complexities.

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But adding new variables is in itself no theoretical contribution, even if doing so may seem warranted by empirical analyses. It is appropriate to ask if this chapter’s discussion amounts to recommending the addition of variables to democratic elitism and elite theory. The answer may be both yes and no. It makes sense to highlight specific but questionable assumptions held by the two theoretical approaches I have discussed. Etzioni-Halévy is concerned with elite autonomy and power struggles between elites in pre-democratic and democratic societies. The Moore-Higley model investigates the structure of informal elite contacts in modern democracies. There is hardly anything to be gained by adding more variables to each optic. It is obvious that elites cannot avoid extensive contacts with each other, and it is equally obvious that they do much more than merely engage each other. But to say this is by no means to invalidate the two approaches. At the same time, both approaches have larger theoretical ambitions. Both take democratic elitism as their frame of reference, and this requires that salient aspects of democracy be born in mind. I have highlighted two aspects: (1) Being enmeshed in democracies, elites are bound by specific institutional requirements that not only shape their outlooks and preferences, but also shape their actions decisively; (2) The public sphere is the most important, though by no means the only, channel of information flows between elites. These elements of democracy are absent, or are at least poorly developed, in many contemporary societies, but they are preconditions for sustaining democracy. Therefore, they are also indispensable for a more robust theory of democratic elitism. Not only do the elements regulate and shape relationships between elites, they also decisively shape the relationship between elites and citizens. They depict citizens as potentially more active participants in democracy’s workings than democratic elitism has recognized. As regards elite theory itself, adding the importance of institutionalized agreements and deliberations in the public sphere helps to reduce elite theory’s long and unfortunate conspiratorial tone. References Bachrach, Peter. 1967. The Theory of Democratic Elitism. Boston: Little, Brown. Burton, Michael and John Higley. 1987. “Elite Settlements.” American Sociological Review 52: 295–307. Cotta, Maurizio. 2007. “Domestic Elites in the Transformation of the ‘European Polity’: The Case of Italy.” Comparative Social Research 23:137–170.


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Dahl, Robert A. 1961. Who Governs? New Haven: Yale University Press. Dobbin, Frank. 1994. Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain and France in the Railway Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dogan, Mattei. 2003. “Is There a Ruling Class in France?” Pp. 17–90 in Elite Configurations at the Apex of Power, edited by Mattei Dogan, Leiden: Brill. Domhoff, G. William. 1983. Who Rules America Now? Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall. Engelstad, Fredrik, Trygve Gulbrandsen, and Øyvind Østerud. 1999. “Elite Compromises in a Stable Democracy: The Case of Norway.” Paper presented to the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta. Etzioni-Halévy, Eva. 1993. The Elite Connection. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gulbrandsen, Trygve, Fredrik Engelstad, Trond Beldo Klausen, Hege Skjeie, Mari Teigen, and Øyvind Østerud. 2002. Norske makteliter. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Higley, John and Gwen Moore. 1981. “Elite Integration in the United States and Australia.” American Political Science Review 75:581–597. Higley, John, Ursula Hoffmann-Lange, Charles Kadushin, and Gwen Moore. 1991.“Elite Integration in Stable Democracies: A Reconsideration.” European Sociological Review 7:35–53. Higley, John and Michael Burton. 2006. Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Knoke, David. 1990. Political Networks. The Structural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore, Gwen. 1979. “The Structure of a National Elite Network.” American Sociological Review 44:673–692. O’Donnell, Guillermo and Philippe Schmitter. 1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rokkan, Stein. 1966. “Norway: Numerical Democracy and Corporate Pluralism.” Pp. 70–115 in Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, edited by Robert A. Dahl, New Haven: Yale University Press. Sartori, Giovanni. 1987. The Theory of Democracy Revisited. Chatham: Chatham House. Schudson, Michael. 1995. The Power of News. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper. Vogel, David. 1978. “Why Businessmen Distrust Their State: The Political Consciousness of Business Executives.” British Journal of Political Science 8:45–78. Weber, Max. 1920/1978. Economy and Society. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.

ELITES’ ILLUSIONS ABOUT DEMOCRACY John Higley An important question about democratic elitism is how elites think about democracy. This chapter explores one facet of the question, which is the influence of democratic ideology on their thinking. Ideologies are general doctrines that encompass broad social and political matters. They present abstract, sweeping choices about social behavior and structure that societies are supposedly able to adopt as wholes. Reduced to its basic elements, an ideology contains a distinctive belief about human nature and motivation, instrumental reasoning about how, in light of this belief, society should be structured, and consequent approval or disapproval of an existing society. To illustrate, historical liberalism posited that human beings are to a large degree self-interested creatures. It reasoned instrumentally that society should therefore be structured to allow considerable scope for selfish ambitions, and it disapproved of any society that ranked persons according to allegedly innate characteristics or otherwise sharply curtailed individual ambition. Historical socialism posited that, although human beings can be tempted by selfish aims, they are capable of much altruism and benevolence. It reasoned instrumentally that status and wealth hierarchies should therefore be abolished in order to eradicate or at least greatly reduce self-interested behavior, and it disapproved of any society that rewarded such behavior or otherwise discouraged personal altruism and benevolence. Classical elite theory taught that ideologies are most explicitly developed and used by elites to mobilize non-elite support, and in this respect they are primarily elite devices. However, classical elite theory did not hold that elites effectively propagate whatever doctrines strike their fancy. To be effective as mobilizing devices, the ideologies that elites develop and employ must be relevant to the circumstances of non-elite populations. As Pareto put it, ideologies must be “derived” from sentiments or “residues” prevalent among non-elites. Thus the abstract and sweeping choices that ideologies pose, their instrumental reasoning, and the approvals or disapprovals

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for which they call must seem plausible to large numbers of people. In this respect, non-elites limit the ideological innovations and maneuvers of elites. It is a major paradox, however, that the need for ideologies to resonate with non-elite sentiments makes them quite misleading as regards fundamental social changes that are taking place. Most social change occurs because new structural incentives motivate smaller or larger number of individuals to act in novel but roughly parallel ways. Almost always, such innovations in individual behavior are discrete and more or less unacknowledged. They cumulate in changed patterns of collective behavior and sentiment imperceptibly and only over fairly long periods of time. These new patterns are usually not seen by those involved as requiring justification or condemnation, encouragement or restraint. Most of the time, it is only the possibilities and choices that discrete, largely unrecognized changes in non-elite behavior appear to pose that are thought to call for approval or disapproval. Ideologies focus on these apparent possibilities and choices. In early modern Europe, for example, occupational mobility and a range of material improvements made various secular goals increasingly realizable for sizable numbers of people. As a result, the behavior of many persons gradually became more shrewdly acquisitive and sturdily individualistic. But the religious possibilities and choices this spreading behavior seemed to pose were the main foci of ideological debate and mobilization by elites. Europe was suffused with conflicts and wars over essentially illusory questions of “right” religious belief and organization. From late in the 19th century, similarly, Europe’s industrialization and resulting world dominance generated new patterns of behavior associated with a great expansion of non-manual bureaucratic and service occupations and with improved wage and working conditions for many manual industrial workers. Gradually, the new patterns of behavior that these changes called forth undercut the size and coherence of industrial working classes. The real issues posed by the changes centered on the organization and persistence of the European world dominance that propelled the changes. But during most of the ensuing 20th century ideological debate and mobilization by elites focused on an illusory question, namely, the means by which the industrial working class would take power and usher in a socialist society. Europe was again suffused by violent struggles, this time for and against the “specter” of revolutionary socialism and a dictatorship by the proletariat.

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The focus of ideologies on the apparent, rather than real, possibilities and choices posed by gradual social change means that they offer alternatives that are always more or less imaginary and infeasible. This is because the courses of action that ideologies urge could not possibly be pursued successfully without first controlling the more fundamental, but largely unrecognized, changes in individual and collective behavior that precede and give ideologies a spurious plausibility. Thus, a principal effect of ideologies is to prevent elites and others who disseminate them from concentrating on the real issues of their time. This ideological concealment of social and political realities has been a continuing feature of European and other Western elites’ thinking during modern history. I want to examine how the ideology of democracy, in which Western elites today have unquestioned faith, conceals a range of fundamental social changes and distorts the implications of various major events. Like the ideologies that preoccupied elites in earlier periods, the ideology of democracy presents a vision and poses choices that are illusory. The fixation of elites on these illusions is leading – in some respects has already led – to disaster.

Social Change During the Short 20th Century, 1914–1991 As backdrop for discussing elites’ illusions about democracy, it is useful to encapsulate fundamental social changes during the “short twentieth century” – the appellation is Eric Hobsbawm’s (1994) – and how for reasons of ideology elites basically misunderstood them. By about 1900 capitalist practices in global trade created what Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) later termed the “world system” – a substantially integrated world-economy unaccompanied by a single world state. Wallerstein argued that the absence of a world state or single empire has been necessary to the success of the world-economy and to the great prosperity that its core European and North American countries have enjoyed. In previous historical periods, the spread of a dominant economic system had always been a concomitant of political empire. Eventually, however, the taxes and tribute exacted in order to maintain an empire’s political and bureaucratic apparatuses stifled economic rationality by overwhelming the mercantile and trading wealth that developed in it (see also Landes 1998). In Wallerstein’s view, the modern world system’s peculiar feature, which has been the secret of its

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strength, is “the political side of the economic organization called capitalism. Capitalism has been able to flourish precisely because the world-economy has had within its bounds not one but a multiplicity of political systems” (1974:348). Wallerstein is probably right that the consolidation of political power in a single entity would have been counterproductive economically before 1900. Yet events during the short 20th century strongly suggested that the world system could not be maintained indefinitely without greater political organization. Because of its sea power and initial lead in industrial and trading activities, Britain emerged as the predominant world power after the Napoleonic Wars. It did this in spite of its comparatively small home population and territory. After the British decisively defeated the French in 1815, they found themselves in a significantly more modernized condition than other European countries, where, except in the small Low Countries, the release of capitalist incentives was still very recent. This enabled the British to build an industrial plant at home and a wide-ranging commerce abroad very rapidly. By 1880, Britain was thoroughly dominant in world trade, and it enjoyed great prosperity as a result. About that time, however, it became apparent to careful analysts and observers that, because of the extent and resources of their home populations and territories, and because of their rapidly developing heavy industries, two other countries, Germany and the United States, could potentially displace British dominance. Although the United States had yet to develop large world ambitions, and although Germany was not quite ready to challenge the leader, sober reflection during the 19th century’s closing decades pointed to the conclusion that Britain could not long maintain its position as the world’s most powerful and prosperous state (Adams 1982). In this context and in retrospect, World Wars I and II are best viewed as takeover bids for control of the world system by an illiberal German state and its erstwhile allies. The German Imperial and Nazi regimes successively sought to replace Britain as the world’s predominant power. The Germans also sought to reduce the roles of France, the Low Countries, and the United States in the world system. Regarding Germany’s takeover bids as threatening their liberal political systems, Britain and other Western countries fought tenaciously to defend themselves and their colonies. The irony was that the liberal practices that the British, French, Dutch, Belgians, and Americans strove to defend soon ensured loss of their colonies. This happened because, by


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the end of World War II, the development of colonial leadership cadres had proceeded far enough to make most colonies ungovernable under Western liberal practices (Plamenatz 1960). By the mid-1960’s, therefore, the British, Dutch, Belgian, and French empires, as well as the quite limited American empire, were gone, mainly through prudential and largely peaceful withdrawals, albeit with the glaring exceptions of France’s withdrawal from Indochina and Algeria. By the mid-1970’s, overseas territories held by the less liberal Portuguese had also been abandoned. During the 45 years that followed World War II, the world system’s organization was complicated by another illiberal state’s bid for dominance: the Soviet Union. Occupying a somewhat isolated place in the system, the Soviet Union was the end product of those Western socialist forces that sought to cut corners by dropping the political presumptions of liberalism in the revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Out of a combination of defensive and offensive considerations, the Soviets maintained a posture of implacable hostility toward the European and other Western powers, contesting their domination of the world system where and when circumstances permitted. The Soviet aspiration to world system dominance was accompanied by increasing dissatisfactions and resentments in the West’s former colonies. When acceding to colonial independence, European and American elites prevailingly believed that ongoing processes of commercial exchange, technical assistance, Western example, and various forms of aid would eventually establish a rough equality between the West and what came to be called “the Third World”. However, indications that this was not going to happen anytime soon multiplied, as did indications that Third World countries would not accept their peripheral statuses in the world system indefinitely. Their demands for restitution increased, and their recognition of the world system’s unequal and exploitative organization made an eventual confrontation with the West likely. Moreover, during the short 20th century’s last decade or two (the 1970s and 1980s) it was increasingly evident that even in the absence of sustained economic development the swelling populations of impoverished Third World countries were consuming and devastating natural resources at rates that, together with the proportionally much greater consumption of natural resources by Western countries, most especially the United States, pointed toward environmental disaster.

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Liberalism, and especially its “left liberal” offshoot, stood for the equal rights of people when facing constituted authorities and laws. During the 19th century, however, many who sympathized with the growing industrial working class judged that its members’ wage-earning relation to private employers precluded an equality of rights. For most of the century this trend in social and political thought was associated with utopian ideas about creating small and socially harmonious communities that would consist of wholly equal and self-governing citizens. But late in the 19th century these utopian ideas emerged as a separate doctrine and movement wearing the label “socialism” and holding that nothing like equality for the working class would ever be possible under capitalism. During the 1890s, socialists began to appear in European and other Western parliaments. Between then and the end of World War I, socialist delegations expanded so that they became the major dissenting force in Western politics. What vision and choices did socialism pose? It was always difficult to give a simple answer. Socialism addressed the strong feeling among many persons, especially industrial workers, that domination of the economy by profit-seeking capitalists was morally wrong and positively harmful. Believing that this domination deprived the working class of profits that were rightfully its own, socialist elite factions advocated the abolition of private property in the means of production. Although seldom explicit on the point, these elites seemed to assume that people would thereafter work as a consequence of mainly altruistic motives and would not require substantial economic incentives that tied their well being to the amount or quality of their work. To the extent that this conception of human motivation formed part of its core, socialism was deeply illusory. Karl Marx reasoned instrumentally about how a transition from capitalism to socialism would occur. His scheme rested on the industrial proletariat’s self-interest. At the time Marx lived, it was widely assumed that this class would soon become numerically dominant in European and other Western countries where capitalism was well developed and would at the same time be wholly alienated from their capitalist orders. In the hands of Marx and other socialist theoreticians, this assumption took care of the political question: once in power as a majority, the proletariat would have no reason not to be democratic.


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The assumption led socialists to believe that anyone who was hostile to proletarian aims and who yet professed a commitment to democracy was either foolish or insincere. In general, however, Marxist doctrine counseled against attempting to define the goals socialists were seeking. It essentially held that if the transition to a socialist order was accomplished the future state of society would take care of itself. This tended to satisfy those who felt that capitalism was morally reprehensible and that socialism, however it might be constructed in detail, could only be an improvement. Early in the 20th century more practical-minded socialists began to conclude that the presumed self-interest of a still unrealized proletarian majority would not assure socialist success. As attractive professional and white-collar jobs multiplied, most persons performing them or having good chances of obtaining them refused to see themselves as so badly off that they could only be advantaged by a transition to the poorly specified order that socialism promised. This spreading doubt and skepticism could have led socialists to reconsider their aims and to specify a practical socialism that might actually attract majority support. But because socialists were strongly influenced by the Marxian concern with how the transition from capitalism to socialism would occur, and because they were also strongly convinced of socialism’s moral superiority, the result was quite different. Instead of revising and more concretely specifying their aims, many socialist leaders turned to considering how the socialist revolution that Marx had predicted could be brought about. The answers they came up with raised a real question about their adherence to ideas of democracy and self-governance that socialists had previously espoused. The fixation on how socialism might triumph forced a worldwide split in the socialist movement at the time of the Russian Revolution. Following the lead of Russian Bolsheviks, socialists who came to be called communists contended that the bourgeoisie had so many advantages in a capitalist society that it would forever confuse and dupe large parts of the proletariat. To attain socialism, therefore, it was necessary for clear-thinking proletarian elites to seize power by force where and when circumstances permitted. The choice posed was, in short, violent revolution. But the bulk of socialist elites and leaders, commanding “social democratic” parties and trade unions, insisted on adhering to representative government and other liberal standards and refused to participate in power seizures where a majority of citizens and voters

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did not appear ready to accept socialist rule. The depth of this quarrel continued to obscure the question of just what a socialist order would look like. Together with the shift to ever more numerous non-manual bureaucratic and service jobs, it ensured that neither communists nor social democrats would obtain clear and obvious majority support in the prosperous Western countries. The question of what socialism offered, apart from violent revolution, was never realistically faced by the elites in question. One could only look at socialist practice for clues. Where, as in Russia, radical communist movements seized power they kept the working class on short rations and filled necessary bureaucratic positions with persons considered to be strictly loyal to Marxist-Leninist precepts. Because such party bureaucrats and managers usually lacked any direct interest in profits and losses, the market ceased to regulate production and distribution with any closeness. Decisions about production and distribution had to be made through centrally designed plans that were authoritative and enforced. But in the absence of market data these plans were arbitrary and inflexible. Over time it became apparent that substituting centralized economic planning for decentralized and private economic calculations was decidedly awkward, and by the 1980s the consequences for supplying goods and services and for preventing environmental despoliation were obviously calamitous. During the short 20th century, in sum, the principal ideology, socialism, posed a choice of economic systems that was never adequately addressed as a real issue. Instead of specifying the economic alternative they urged, socialist elites concentrated on the evils of capitalism and how these would lead “inevitably” to socialism. This heavy emphasis on modern capitalism’s evils probably made capitalism seem more distinctive historically than it really was. It diverted attention from the extent to which the release of acquisitive and entrepreneurial behavior throughout the entire modern historical period led to enormous productivity increases and, eventually, to an integrated world system in economic matters. How this system would further evolve and who would control or guide its evolution was what was at stake in all major events of the short 20th century: the German takeover bids in World Wars I and II, the subsequent efforts of major European countries and the United States to stabilize the system through decolonization, and the Soviet effort to mount a new takeover bid. But this world system struggle was largely ignored in the ideological furor that arose over socialism.


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Social Change after the Short 20th Century, 1991–2008 The Soviet Union’s collapse between 1989–1991 left the United States as the principal locus of power in the world system. During the 1990s, when two other power loci, the European Union and Japan, suffered from weak internal organization and anemic economic performances, the United States consolidated its prime position. This was evident in the multinational force the United States assembled to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and sustain the advantageous supply of petroleum, its creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, its extension of NATO to Eastern Europe and NATO’S American-led deployment in the Balkans. The role of the United States as the lifeblood export market for East and Southeast Asian countries during their economic “meltdowns” in the late 1990s was another indication of its prime position. Throughout the 1990s, the world system’s organization and management looked primarily like an American undertaking. However, the mammoth trade and budget deficits that the United States was running, the gradual economic rejuvenation of EU countries and Japan, as well as the dramatic economic growth rates of China and India, all suggested that, after a shakeout period, the system would have to be reorganized and this would entail more a process of bargaining than centralized direction by the United States. “Globalization” is now at the core of world system reorganization. It takes several familiar forms: increasing mobility of capital combined with more integrated financial markets (financial globalization); increasing linkages between investment, production, and trade (production globalization); increasing circulation of goods and services (consumption globalization). Accelerating interconnectedness and interdependence among national economies are the result. Accompanying this is significant political reorganization. Interactions between political and business elites located in diverse countries no longer occur along bi-polar lines. Instead, fluid alliances driven as much by economic and cultural affinities or oppositions as by political and military considerations form and re-form. A key question is whether these changes are occurring in ways that ensure system primacy for the United States and the European Union. Important parts of the answer can be found by considering what is happening among political elites and between them and non-elite populations. Virtually all students of globalization agree that it is changing the capacities of political elites to control their national economies and,

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perhaps, their national politics and cultures. These changing elite capacities constitute a double-edged sword. On one edge, the movement of many decision loci from national to international levels weakens citizen oversight and makes normal domestic pressure group politics less determinative of what gets decided. In other words, globalization makes elites more inaccessible and their decisions more obscure. Continuous and intensive assessments and deliberations essential for decisions at the world system level bring elites into close contact across national boundaries. Summit and ministerial meetings, regional associations, NGO conferences, and other conclaves of elites to consider actions on specific system problems proliferate, so that what Samuel Huntington dubbed a “Davos Culture” among interconnected elites has emerged (Huntington 1996:57). Some scholars studying these phenomena discern transnational elites that are not much constrained by domestic electorates (e.g. Middlemas 1995; Young 1998; Rothkopf 2008). In these respects, globalization is making political elites more autonomous and powerful. The sword’s other edge, however, is the growing incapacity of political elites to control domestic electorates and non-elite populations. The complexity and interconnectedness of decisions reached in supranational forums produce policies that fly in the face of what many voters desire. The decisions generate bitterness and suspicion toward elites, who become targets of strong populist movements. One effect is that the holding of elite positions at the national level is again incurring some of the insecurities and risks that were the historical norm. A second effect is collaboration among elites across national borders to manipulate public opinion by withholding information, portraying the consequences of decisions as more benign than elites know them to be, and asserting that international competitions and agreements allow no alternative (see Cotta 2007). Changed relations between elites and nonelites are the consequence, and their concrete manifestations are several: (1) the collapse of established parties and party systems throughout much of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia; (2) a pronounced shift toward plebiscitary political mobilizations in these regions; (3) everywhere a gradual marginalization of elected parliaments and legislatures by strengthened chief executives, unaccountable and secretive central banks, dispute settlement tribunals, and powerful watchdog agencies such as the IMF and World Bank; (4) the spread of organized criminal activities that are international in scope and that domestic criminal justice systems are incapable of


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containing; (5) the ever growing flight of people from countries and regimes that are sensed to be failing or, at least, incapable of providing the minimum of protections and provisions necessary to hold their populations in place. Main concomitants of globalization and world system reorganization – simultaneously more and less powerful elites and leaders, weakening political and social orders in many countries, the rise of plebiscitary politics, criminalization of much national and international activity, population flight, environmental disasters – point ominously toward what Robert Kaplan (2000) has called “the coming anarchy”.

Elites and the Ideology of Democracy The ideological furor over socialism during the short 20th century diverted the attention of elites from how the world system was actually evolving. Today, unswerving adherence to the ideology of democracy diverts elites from considering with sufficient realism the world system’s ominous flux. As an ideology, democracy amalgamates tenets of liberalism and socialism, though it does so awkwardly. It embraces liberalism’s assumption that people are primarily self-interested, but also socialism’s assumption that they are, nonetheless, inclined toward considerable altruism when bargaining and dealing with others, including social strangers. The ideology of democracy purports to unite these contradictory assumptions about human nature by reasoning instrumentally that when people are treated fairly, listened to, and allowed unfettered opportunities to express their opinions and interests they will effectively be both free and equal. It supposes that even persons whose occupational roles and other circumstances are seriously degrading, punishing, frightening, or just boring will feel themselves to be free and equal citizens by participating in democratic processes. Democracy is thus regarded as an ultimate and universal value that must be pursued in all circumstances (e.g., Diamond 2008). That democracy might instead be only an instrumental value that in appropriate circumstances may help elevate people but in other circumstances may lead to deadly conflict is regarded as heretical (see chapter 12). Like earlier ideologies, democracy is a device used by elites to justify and mobilize support for their rule or aspirations to rule; it is at base a political formula, as Mosca and Pareto recognized. Still, democracy is

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not a mere artifice of elites. It is a construct that is plausible to the many well-off Westerners who happen to live under stable regimes in which one or another degree of representative politics is practiced. These persons’ favored circumstances enable them to derive significant satisfactions from participating in their own, if primarily local and not high stakes, governance. But democracy has little plausibility for more downtrodden Westerners. They have no interest in or wherewithal for part-time excursions into the limited and negotiated politics that provide satisfactions to the more educated and privileged. Modest turnout rates in Western countries’ elections manifest this lack of interest. As for the several billion people who live under illiberal regimes in crushing personal circumstances outside the historic West, Japan, and the Asian “Tigers”, democracy is largely irrelevant. Democracy has a tenacious hold on the thinking of Western political elites. Politicians regularly invoke the Lincolnian myth of government of, by, and for the people (Mueller 1999:139; Sartori 1987:34–5). Even if elites know this to be a myth, just about all profess to believe that “genuine” or “real” democracy is within reach in an age of Internet communications among citizens and between citizens and elites. Exercises in direct democracy – referendums, citizen initiatives, “deliberative” gatherings, recall elections – are excitedly promoted and proliferate. That elites are under a democratic gun is widely believed and applauded, not least by elites themselves if their public pronouncements are taken at face value. The proposition, implicit in democratic elitism, that peaceful democratic competitions are impossible without elites who keep explosive issues off the public agenda and otherwise manage conflicts is ignored or, if heard, reviled. Elites, scholars, and public intellectuals profess to believe, furthermore, that democracy is readily exportable. The 1990s opened with Francis Fukuyama announcing that history would soon “end” in liberal democracy’s definitive triumph, and with Samuel Huntington’s thesis about democratization’s ever increasing waves (Fukuyama 1989; Huntington 1991). Types and sub-types of democracy multiplied in scholarly work, with a score identifiable by the mid-1990s (Collier and Levitsky 1997). How newly created democracies could become “consolidated” in their political, civil, and economic arenas, state apparatuses, and rule of law became a main topic (e.g., Linz and Stepan 1996). At decade’s end, inventories of democracy’s ostensible progress purported to find that anywhere from 65 to more than 100 countries had become democratic in some meaningful sense (e.g., Dahl 1999).


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Buoyed by all this talk and by democracy’s third wave the precariousness of vaguely democratic politics in many countries is seen as a temporary problem. Resonant of earlier ideologies, democracy is touted as a solution to most world problems and, therefore, a moral imperative. As icing on the ideological cake, democracy’s spread is also portrayed as globalization’s inevitable consequence. How Western political elites interpreted the Soviet Union’s weakening and collapse, the independence and rapid democratizations of its former satellite states in Eastern Europe, and the trajectory of the suddenly distinct Russian regime is additional evidence of the hold that democracy has on elite thinking. Pondering these unexpected developments, European and American elites could have interpreted them in two ways. One was to regard the Soviet collapse and East European democratizations as the fortuitous outcomes of internal economic difficulties, sub-national ethnic mobilizations by increasingly distinct Soviet elite factions, and failed policy gambits by Mikhail Gorbachev and his associates. Alternatively, the collapse and its ramifications could be seen as the most dramatic and consequential instance of worldwide democratization, greatly abetted by the fortitudes of the Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl governments in “standing up” to the Soviets, declaring the U.S.S.R. an “evil empire,” and initiating an arms race the Soviets had no chance of winning. The second interpretation was seized upon and became the mantra of Western elites. American elites, in particular, viewed the Soviet collapse and East European democratizations as auguring a long and benevolent U.S. hegemony that would be the world’s key sociopolitical dynamic. If the Soviet Union and its satellites could collapse and democratize so quickly and bloodlessly, American elites further reasoned, then the same thing could happen in undemocratic regimes across the world. As Francis Fukuyama has recently encapsulated this American elite fixation: “Regime change was now conceived not as a matter of slow and painstaking construction of liberal democratic institutions, but simply as the negative task of getting rid of the old regime” (2006:63). American elites, whether neo-conservative or liberal, came to regard democracy as the default condition to which societies revert once they are liberated from dictators. The Soviet collapse and East European regime changes thus tightened the hold that democracy has had on the thinking of Western elites. Dressed subsequently with the rubric of “combating terrorism,” an unqualified belief among elites, most especially those in the United

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States and Britain, that democracy is the basic and eminently attainable condition of humankind contributed to the toppling of dictatorial and theocratic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively. It has propelled the condemnation, and even the undermining, of illiberal regimes around the world. But the extent to which this democracy crusade is akin to seeking the Holy Grail is becoming clear (see Gray 2007). In ways wholly unforeseen by American, British, and other Western elites, the crusade has altered and hastened the world system’s reorganization by pushing the system’s key player, the United States, toward the sidelines to lick severe military, economic, and political wounds. Conclusion Much depends on the capacity of elites to recognize and respond to fundamental social changes. The ideologies in which elites have trafficked during the modern historical period have kept them off guard in this respect. Elites have been preoccupied with sociopolitical possibilities that seemed plausible but were illusory because they ran counter to what underlying social changes would actually permit. Wars and other disasters have, at least in part, been the consequence. The illusory character of Western elite thinking is evident today in the preoccupation with spreading democracy to the world’s every nook and cranny. But this is a mission impossible because no amount of aid, example, persuasion, or military force can create the elite accommodations in most non-Western countries that would be the essential first step toward stable democracy (Higley and Burton 2006). If they contemplated today’s world more realistically, Western elites might realize that they have long been hostage to deceptive ideologies that were always echoes of the West’s good fortune. These ideologies derived from the West’s military invincibility and the running together of clever artisanship, technology, and resources. Ideological fixations of elites have led, in our time, to the fantasy that economic and political development propelled by the West will solve most of the world’s problems. If the speciousness of this hope becomes more evident to Western elites, they will revert to the customary need in world history to defend the material and cultural acquisitions of their own peoples against the incursions of others. Specifically, they will realize that aspirations to reshape the world democratically are foolish because their power to


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transform other societies is slight and the costs of attempting such transformations are great. Just as Western countries are no longer capable of imperial rule, so they are no longer sufficiently entrenched in global leadership to play the role of world benefactors. To be sure, Western societies still have substantial technological advantages over non-Western ones. But through bad luck or continued elite illusions a time could arrive when Western elites and countries would have no alternative but to pay immense blackmail to a set of militant but culturally traditionalist non-Western elites and countries frustrated in their efforts at development other than in the acquisition of lethal weaponry. While an abandonment of democracy’s illusions may occur among Western elites as international and domestic circumstances become still graver, it is conceivable that it will occur too late to save much of Western civilization. There is thus a compelling need for the elites to change how they think about possibilities for democracy. Democratic elitism is a cogent formulation of what is possible, providing that the underlying conditions and circumstances on which it depends are present, and it is crucial that elites recognize and embrace democratic elitism more squarely. References Adams, Richard N. 1982. Paradoxical Harvest: Energy and Explanation in British History, 1870–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press. Collier, David, and Steven Levitsky. 1997. “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research.” World Politics 49(1): 430–51. Cotta, Maurizio. 2007. “Domestic Elites in the Transformation of the ‘European Polity’: The Case of Italy.” pp. 137–70 in Comparative Studies of Social and Political Elites, edited by Fredrik Engelstad and Trygve Gulbrandsen, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Dahl, Robert A. 1998. On Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Diamond, Larry. 2008. The Spirit of Democracy. The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World. New York: Times Books. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer): 3–18. ——. 2006. America at the Crossroads. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gray, John. 2007. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Higley, John, and Michael Burton. 2006. Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991. New York: Pantheon. Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press. ——. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Shuster.

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Kaplan, Robert D. 2000. The Coming Anarchy. New York: Random House. Landes, David S. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: Norton. Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Middlemas, Keith. 1995. Orchestrating Europe: The Informal Politics of the European Union, 1973–95. London: Fontana. Mueller, John. 1999. Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Plamenatz, John. 1960. On Alien Rule and Self-Government. London: Longman. Rothkopf, David. 2008. Superclass. The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Sartori, Giovanni. 1987. Democratic Theory Revisited: The Contemporary Debate. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House Publishers. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Young, Hugo. 1998. This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press.

PART II DEMOCRATIC ELITISM: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

ASSOCIATED RIVALS: ANTAGONISM AND COOPERATION IN THE GERMAN POLITICAL ELITE Heinrich Best Few of Max Weber’s theoretical propositions were as topical and as intended to influence the course of political and social developments in late Wilhelminian Germany as was his concept of leader democracy, which later evolved into the theory of democratic elitism (Mommsen 1959; Mommsen 1984; Mommsen 1988; Beetham 1985:95–118, 215–249). Germany’s leadership, like the leaderships of other European powers in Weber’s time, was confronted by two main challenges: pacifying a highly unequal class society under the growing pressures of mass mobilization, and securing a leading position in the struggle for supremacy in Europe and beyond. Home of what was by far the largest and strongest socialist party in pre-WWI Europe, a latecomer to great power status, and wedged in a precarious geopolitical position between mighty competitors, Germany and its leaders faced challenges that were especially acute. The Wilhelminian regime’s response was to curb the influence of the democratically elected Reichstag by averting, in particular, its influence in the filling of government posts so that this prerogative would remain exclusively with the Kaiser and the Chancellor. The stipulation in Bismarck’s Imperial constitution that forbade Reichstag membership and the simultaneous holding of a government post was only changed in a last-minute attempt at reform a few weeks before the constitution became obsolete with the November Revolution of 1918 (Wehler 1995; Best et al. 2000). The erratic course of Wilhelm II’s personal rule (Persönliches Regiment) and its counter-productive consequences for Germany’s external status and internal stability were subject to harsh contemporary criticism. Despite this criticism, there was always some open and much tacit support for monarchical rule – even among prominent liberals like Otto Hintze (1911; Best 1989). Concentrating state power in the hands of a strong monarch and separating that power from the

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influence of volatile parliamentary majorities seemed, to many, the way to integrate a badly divided polity and strengthen Germany’s projection of power externally. It was exactly this assessment that Max Weber’s concept of leader democracy questioned. Weber maintained that democratic voting generated elected politicians with strong mass-mobilizing capacities and that electoral competition for power would produce leaders of much greater quality than simply appointing bureaucrats to high government positions, as was the Whihelminian practice. A strong political leadership emerging from the arena of mass democracy would also be a better basis for expanding Germany’s power internationally than the hybrid Whilhelminian blend of idiosyncratic monarchical rule and bureaucratic administration (Weber 1921). Thus Weber’s plea for a leader democracy was instrumental, not normative or “sentimental” in nature. For Weber, the crucial test of any regime is war, and leader democracy seemed to him the appropriate form for organizing a polity in an age of mass armies and industrialized warfare. In Weber’s treatment, a leader democracy’s superiority over monarchical-bureaucratic rule rested on the supposition that a competitive struggle for power produces superior leaders: “Those who are fit for political leadership are those who have been selected in the political struggle, since all politics is in its essence a struggle. The much criticized ‘work of the demagogue’ provides this fitness better than holding an administrative position” (Weber 1921:210). But in the struggle for power the role of the masses must be limited to responding to initiatives from above: “It is not a question of the politically passive ‘mass’ throwing up a leader by itself, but rather of the political leader recruiting a following and winning the mass by demagogic appeal” (ibid.:219). The quality of political leaders is the crucial criterion for a polity’s survival and success: “Every type of social order, without exception, must if one wishes to evaluate it, be assessed according to which type of man it enables to rise to a position of superiority through the operation of various objective and subjective factors” (Weber 1918:479, emphasis in original). World War I tested competing concepts of political leadership severely and to his horror, though not his surprise, Weber’s skepticism about the Wilhelminian regime’s leadership capacities was born out. In an increasingly desperate attempt to help alter the course of the war and change the command of an obviously sinking ship, Weber toured wartime Germany to give lectures that today belong to political

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sociology’s core syllabus (Mommsen 1984). But Weber could not avert the Reich’s downfall. His appeals to Wilhelm II to abdicate before he was forced from power by military defeat or revolutionary upheaval were fruitless and revealed the inherent weakness of a regime that had to collapse before elite change and power sharing with the moderate wing of Social Democracy became possible. In her biography of Weber, his wife, Marianne, recounts a conversation Weber had with General Ludendorff, one of the supreme commanders of the Imperial army and the Reich’s de facto dictator during the war’s last years. In that conversation Weber tried to give Ludendorff a short course in his understanding of democracy and he tried to make a leader democracy palatable to this arch authoritarian (and future Nazi figurehead): Weber: “Do you think that I regard the mess (Schweinerei) that we now have as democracy?” Ludendorff: “What is your idea of democracy, then?” Weber: “In a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, ‘Now shut your mouth and obey me.’ The people and the parties are then no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.” Ludendorff: “I should like such a democracy!” Weber: “Later, the people can sit in judgement - if the leader has made mistakes, to the gallows with him!” (Weber, Marianne 1926:665)

This conversation took place during the period of armistice and revolution when Weber was preparing to participate in the Versailles Peace Conference. It was a time when he was actively involved in politics and succeeded in influencing the political order of the nascent Weimar Republic. Weber’s concept of leader democracy had echoes in the Weimar constitution, particularly in the design of the presidency, which took the form of a leader chosen by popular vote and given farreaching powers to rule by emergency decree (Struve 1973:145–148). Weber’s influence could also be seen in the restructured Reichstag, which was designed as a seedbed for government position-holders to be selected from among competing party politicians (Mommsen 1959:396–400/1988:9–11). Weber died in June 1920 and did not see what happened to the first German Republic that, thirteen years later, was quite easily and under the auspices of formal legality transformed into the constitutional shell of one of the most murderous regimes the world has ever seen, a regime

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that defied the principles of “Occidental Rationality” and “German Culture” so cherished by Weber.1 The Weimar constitution was not formally abolished until 1945 when Germany came under foreign military occupation. One of the few amendments to the constitution made during Nazi rule was to re-name the office of “President” that of “Führer” (Leader) when in 1934 Hitler followed Ludendorff ’s former colleague and rival in supreme command of the Imperial Army, Paul von Hindenburg, as Head of State. Lessons from Weimar The history of Germany between 1919–1945 provides a stunning example of leader democracy going wrong, and there is an element of bitter irony in the fact that one of the few instances in which Weber’s theoretical work had a practical impact ended in catastrophe. The question here is whether this failure in political practice invalidated Weber’s theoretical propositions. Obviously, Joseph Schumpeter thought this was not so because his “realistic theory of democracy,” first published in 1942, included central features of Weber’s concept of leader democracy and was marked by the same crusading zeal to demolish illusions about popular sovereignty, even though Schumpeter referred not once to Weber’s political writings. The decisive point, in any event, is that for Schumpeter democratic elitism was not just a variant of democracy but the modal form of (representative) democracy in modern societies (1959:250–302). It would be historically inaccurate to attribute the Weimar disaster to the ineptitude of Weber and other founding fathers when designing the Republic’s constitution. It is useful, nonetheless, to scrutinize the constitution’s underlying theoretical propositions for flaws and omissions that might explain why the risks of certain institutional and political practices adopted after the November Revolution of 1918 1 In this respect Max Weber was luckier than Alexis de Tocqueville who had to witness the office of President in the 1848 Constitution of the Second French Republic, which he himself had decisively designed as a member of the Constitutional Commission, being perverted and transformed into a vehicle for personal rule by Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (Jardin 1988:420). The end of the ill-fated Second French Republic should have provided a warning for the founding fathers of the Weimar Republic, demonstrating how easily a democratically “chosen leader” could destroy the institutions of representative democracy and replace them with an authoritarian regime.


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were ignored. Such scrutiny extends to the concepts of leader democracy and democratic elitism because the Weimar Republic’s demise was triggered and brought about by fallacies and machinations among various segments of its political elite. In this context it is important to remember that, notwithstanding his electoral successes, Hitler was never the democratically chosen leader that Weber praised when talking with Ludendorff. Hindenburg defeated Hitler in the last free presidential election in 1932 and the NSDAP never came close to winning an absolute majority of votes or Reichstag seats in a free national election. As is well known, Hitler’s ascendance to executive power in 1933 was the result of a backdoor intrigue by a circle of conservative politicians close to the presidency (Turner 1992). The performance of democratic elites before that intrigue had hardly been stellar, however. The last parliamentary government of the Weimar Republic, which had the backing of a strong majority in the Reichstag based on a broad party coalition, had already fallen apart in 1930 due to the coalition parties’ inability to agree about how the economic burdens resulting from the Great Depression were to be distributed. Many party politicians abandoned the struggle for political power and tried instead to protect the socio-political milieus in which their careers were rooted (Best 1990). For three years, from 1930 until 1933, the national government amounted to presidential cabinets that exercised the president’s emergency powers as prescribed in the Weimar constitution. One important exercise of those powers was the extremely unpopular deflationary policies of Chancellor Brüning, which shattered the trust of large parts of the population in the ability of Weimar democracy to abate the social problems stemming from the economic crisis. The failure of leader democracy in the Weimar Republic was due, in no small part, to ignoring the prerequisites of democratic elite formation. This was especially so as regards the importance of structural and normative integration among political elites as the basis for effective political leadership, the fidelity of elites to institutions of representative democracy, and the need for elite bonds of trust with non-elites. In Weber’s Darwinian-Hobbesian world of constant power struggles, merciless selections of leaders, and ruthless manipulations of mass publics by clever demagogues, little or no attention was paid to the integration and commitments of elites. Questions about why leaders should respect the institutional rules of democracy after acquiring the reins of state power, how the plurality of interests present in complex societies could be articulated

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and mediated democratically, and how a democratic regime can adapt to social and political change went to a large extent unanswered. To be sure, some of the answers could be found in other parts of Weber’s works. Also, one should not forget that most of his political writings were designed for non-scientific audiences, blending explanatory, descriptive, and prescriptive elements in a way that violated his own methodological criteria for social science (Weber 1921:126). It is necessary, at any rate, to complement the core propositions of leader democracy and democratic elitism by depicting democratic competitions for power as a relatively autonomous field of action among political elites and how rules governing peaceful political competitions come into being and play out.

Two Theoretical Propositions I propose that a theory of antagonistic cooperation explains why and how political elites cooperate and limit their conflicts in power competitions. I also propose that principal-agent theory helps to explain the emergence of bonds of trust between electors, selectors, and the elected in representative democracies. The early American sociologist William G. Sumner coined the term “antagonistic cooperation” to denote how adversaries may sometimes enter into limited but durable partnerships in order to pursue common interests and maintain a mutually beneficial social order (Sumner 1913). But such partnerships are not based solely on common interests; to be effective and stable, interactions between conflicting actors must also rest on a set of common social institutions (Kliemt 1986; Marin 1990). Antagonistic cooperation cannot be equated with complete social integration because the conflicting actors do not abandon their antagonistic positions in social and political controversies. Over the longer run sociation (Vergesellschaftung) via antagonistic cooperation may produce close relations that display strong normative and emotive ties (Vergemeinschaftung). Sumner envisaged the realm of antagonistic cooperation as widening in modern societies with the increasing plurality of values and interests and the decreasing importance of traditional authorities and hierarchies. This would occur because antagonistic cooperation – for example, between employer associations and trade unions in order to secure jobs – is usually beneficial for the society at large (Bakke 1946).


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It is plausible to apply Sumner’s concept of antagonistic cooperation to competing elite groups, especially when it comes to establishing and maintaining a political order that provides a safe arena and fair game rules for power competitions (Bourricaud 1961). The cooperation between representatives of conflicting social groups in consociational democracies serves as one example. At the time of Max Weber’s political writings the union sacré forged in 1914 between the main political forces in France’s Third Republic (1875–1940) was also an example. The union sacré provided France with coherent political leadership during World War I and was an instance of antagonistic cooperation between competing elite factions (Dogan 2003:76–77). The union sacré differed from its German counterpart, the Kaiser’s Burgfrieden (truce), which tried to enforce a temporary stop to political conflict by Imperial arbitration. The union rested upon comprehensive and long established networks of social interaction between members of the Third Republic’s political elite factions, whereas in pre-1914 Germany such elite networks were much less comprehensive and much more sharply segmented along ideological and social class lines (Mayeur 1984; Best 1990; Best and Gaxie 2000). While the concept of antagonistic cooperation helps to explain why and under what conditions conflicting elite groups will provide effective leadership and adhere to rules for political competition and power transfers, principal-agency theory may be used to grasp problems that are inherent in relations between political elites and ordinary citizens (Grossman and Hart 1983; Strøm 2003). When applied to electoral politics, principal-agent theory depicts electorates as principals that commission agents, i.e., political elites, to act on their behalves. Both the principals and the agents pursue different interests and the agents – the elites – enjoy fairly wide latitudes of action and better information than the principals – the electorates. This asymmetry, which agents/ elites are disposed to use opportunistically, underlies theories such as Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy (1908) and it was the basis of Weber’s and Schumpeter’s deep skepticism – to put it mildly – about concepts like “popular sovereignty” and “will of the people” (Beetham 1985:111). Principals dispose of several strategies to overcome problems emerging from principal-agent asymmetry. One strategy is a thorough selection of agents and the provision of incentives for them to act with moderation upon attaining elected office. Political careers involving the repeated “signalling” and “screening” of candidates’ characteristics

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and qualifications in sequential recruitment processes can be viewed as a pivotal instrument of representative democracies that reveal important information about agents/elites to voters (Lupia 2006:44– 51). The exigencies of office holding and the risk of being voted out at the next election constitute strong incentives for agents/elites to act in favor of the interests of principals/electorates. These considerations do not contradict the basic assumptions of leader democracy and democratic elitism; rather, they are inherent in the idea of continuous leadership competitions. The thrust of these theoretical considerations coincides with the thrust of leader democracy and democratic elitism in Germany following the horrors of Nazi rule and World War II. With some exceptions that will be noted, the course of German politics subsequently exemplified antagonistic cooperation between the factions of West Germany’s political elite and reached a kind of climax when the principals/citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) selected new agents/ elites in a re-unified Germany after 1989. Antagonistic Elite Cooperation in Re-unified Germany The record of the German Federal Republic is one of democratic elitism’s success stories. Partly in response to the experience of democracy’s self-destruction in the Weimar Republic, but primarily in response to the communist threat during the Cold War, West German elites formed a “cartel of angst” (Dahrendorf 1965:297) that operated an elaborate machinery of consensus production in the corporatist world of “Rhenish capitalism” and that was firmly embedded in the Western Alliance. Excluded from this elite cartel were politicians from extremist parties, especially the Communist Party, which was formally banned in West Germany by the Federal Constitutional Court. Hegemonic communist party rule was, however, firmly established under Soviet control in East Germany. Democratic elitism in West Germany and authoritarian elitism in East Germany co-existed until the Soviet empire’s meltdown and the GDR’s fall in late 1989 (Hoffmann-Lange 1989; Best et al. 2000). Post-communist democratization was inextricably tied to Germany’s re-unification and it entailed a complete transplanting of West Germany’s political institutions in the east. Formally speaking, re-unification involved incorporation (Beitritt) of the GDR into the FRG. This


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process also involved the extension of the West German party system to the east, partly by absorbing the GDR’s former bloc parties into their West German counterparts. The only party that retained an exclusive eastern German identity was the GDR’s former communist party, which changed its name from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) (Oswald 2002). During the entirety of its existence,2 the PDS has enjoyed positive electoral outcomes in eastern Germany, but it has regularly failed to clear the five percent threshold in elections to state parliaments in western Germany. In the 2002 national elections this PDS failure also largely extended to the federal Bundestag. Only two MPs, who had been directly elected in East Berlin electoral districts, represented the PDS between 2002 and 2005 in the Bundestag. The political configuration of eastern Germany in the context of a national uniformity of political institutions is the backdrop for examining democratic elitism in re-unified Germany. I begin by noting that the fall of communism ended the threat to a market economy and representative democracy. It is worth asking how the Cold War’s ending has affected democratic elitism in re-unified Germany. How has the German political elite coped with the sudden and essentially unwanted acquisition of a post-communist addendum to the country’s party system (Oswald 2002)? And how have the representatives of a party that only recently abandoned Marxist-Leninist principles of proletarian dictatorship and hegemonic party rule coped with becoming part of the competitive system of associated rivals in Germany’s representative democracy? Answers to these questions can be found in the “German Parliamentarians Study,” which was a telephone survey of about 1400 sitting and past MPs at European (MEPs), national (Bundestag) and state (Länder) levels conducted between September 2003 and January 2004. (The data for MEPs and about 400 Bundestag and state MPs and MEPs who had left office before 2003 are not discussed here.) The questionnaire used in the survey covered a wide range of subjects including MPs’ policy and political system preferences, their representative role perceptions, participation in intra- and extra-parliamentary networks,

2 In 2007 the PDS merged with the predominantly West German Wahlalternative Arbeit und Soziale Gerechtigkeit (WASG) and changed its name to DIE LINKE (The Left).

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coalition preferences, and their “political class-consciousness”. As a comprehensive set of attitudinal and behavioral data about normative and behavioral patterns of elite conflict and cooperation in the framework of representative institutions, the survey facilitates an assessment of democratic elitism as it is perceived and is operated by political elites “from within”(Best et al. 2004). Parliamentary parties, which are the dominant collective actors in German politics and which seek to regulate conflict and co-operation between MPs at the parliamentary level, are the main units of analysis. My conception of democratic elitism contains an attitudinal and a behavioral dimension. Democratic elites should share a sense of togetherness that extends beyond their own party and embraces at least some (but not necessarily all) of their associated rivals in other parties. At the same time, voters should be the ultimate point of reference for the elites, in effect constituting the “principal” for elite “agents,” but excluding other possible principals such as parties (otherwise democratic elitism would be not democratic). Elites should also support strong political leadership and reject the plebiscitary aspects of direct democracy (otherwise democratic elitism would not be elitist). Elites should be closely linked in networks of informal contacts that extend beyond their own parties and even party families – though this is not a necessary, but merely a helpful, precondition for antagonistic cooperation. Finally, elites should be willing to associate with their political rivals in other parties by forming coalitions and joining forces in competitions for government office. This willingness to associate with rivals in coalitions should also extend beyond party families. At the same time, nevertheless, continuous disagreement and conflict between elites over personnel and policy issues should be expected as a key element of democratic elitism. An overall review of evidence provided by the 2003–04 survey largely confirms and uncovers a pattern consistent with my conception of democratic elitism. However, a close look at the data reveals that this overall pattern is quite differentiated as regards intra- and interparty differences in the extent to which party elites accept the norms and practices of democratic elitism. Take, for example, responses to a survey item about “political class consciousness” that asked parliamentary elites about their sense of togetherness with MPs in parties other than their own. Although a large majority of MPs (65%) expressed this sense, a significant minority overall (35%) and a majority of MPs in the PDS (52%) said they did not have such a sense of togetherness.


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Figure 1. "Do you have a feeling of togetherness with colleagues in other parliamentary party groups or don´t you have such a feeling?" (percentage of MPs who "don´t have") 100

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PostCommunists

"no feeling of togetherness"

In terms of MPs’ self-perceptions, a “union sacré” in re-unified Germany is obviously not a totality. In particular, a majority of MPs in the PDS felt alienated from their colleagues in other parties during 2003–04. Survey items about the political system tapped into a still larger inter-party disjunction. Asked if they agreed with the (elitist) statement that strong leadership should restrain the pursuit of specific group interests, respondents were split in half, with large majorities of CDU and SPD MPs agreeing, but large majorities of PDS and Green MPs disagreeing. Obviously, in the smaller special issue and special interest parties – the Greens’ focus on environmental issues. The PDS’s representation of east German constituents – the desirability of strong and independent political leadership is undercut by the felt need of these two parties’ MPs to respond to particular constituencies and to defend and promote the core issues that give them their basic identities. By contrast, MPs belonging to the catchall CDU and SPD tend to present themselves to the electorate as the providers of strong leadership. With but one exception to date, all prime ministers at state level and all chancellors at federal level have come from one or the other of the catch-all parties. A similar pattern of inter-party differences, albeit in different overall magnitude, emerged as regards the extent to which MPs agreed with the statement that “referenda are a necessary complement of representative democracy”. A large majority (75.3%) of all MPs agreed with

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heinrich best Figure 2. "Democracy is only possible if a strong political leadership contains group interests." (percentage of MPs who "rather agree" or "strongly agree")

100 80 60 40 61

53

51

50

20

33 19

0 Christian Democrats

Social Democrats

Liberals

PostCommunists

Greens

all MPs

"rather agree" and "strongly agree"

the statement, as did a majority of MPs in each parliament, whether federal or state, and so did a majority of MPs in each party. Three quarters of the political elite were, in short, willing to give voters a direct say in deciding political matters via referenda. This sits uneasily with democratic elitism, which locates competence and jurisdiction for political decision-making squarely among leaders once they are elected to office. Not only because of the self-interest of political elites in securing autonomy in decision-making, but also in view of the ever-present memory of the Weimar Republic, in which referenda were misused to undermine democracy, this overwhelming readiness of elites to support referenda was unexpected. But two circumstances may explain this elite view. First, the new constitutions of the reconstituted states in the territory of the former GDR introduced referenda across the whole of eastern Germany. Indeed, most of those state constitutions were ratified by referendums, so that the self-empowerment of eastern German voters in the re-unification process continues in state constitutional orders that grant them direct participation in political decision-making. Second, there has been a general discussion in Germany about referenda as a means of rejuvenating elite responsiveness in what many perceive to be an increasingly “elitist” and unresponsive political order. For both reasons, endorsing the desirability of referenda has become a matter of political correctness that makes it difficult for even skeptical MPs to reject in any outright way.


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The effects of these two circumstances can be seen more clearly by distinguishing between those who agreed “fully” with the statement about referenda and those who “rather agreed” with it. It was only among MPs in the eastern German states that a majority “fully” agreed with the statement, while nationally there were huge differences between the parties, with more than 80% of MPs belonging to the PDS and the Greens, but only 23% of MPs belonging to the CDU agreeing “fully” about the desirability of referenda. Moreover, the readiness of elites to endorse referenda probably does not signify a basic rejection of democratic elitism because during the past seven years the debate about introducing referenda at the federal level has waned. Additionally, even in states where referenda have been introduced political decision making by elected elites proceeds without major interventions by voters. Another area of broad consensus among MPs concerned the model of representation that they attached to their roles. Only 10% saw themselves as representatives of parties, while 90% of MPs perceived citizens and voters in one or another way as their principals, with more than 50% of MPs regarding themselves as representatives of the whole country. However, this overall pattern, which conforms to my conception of democratic elitism, was quite differentiated among the parties. MPs belonging to the Greens and the PDS held more particularistic conceptions of representation, regarding themselves much more frequently as either representing their parties or representing their own Figure 3. "Referenda and plebiscites are a necessary complement of representative democracy" (percentages of MPs who "strongly agree") 100

80

60 89

40 53 20

82 47

44

23 0 Christian Democrats

Social Democrats

Liberals

PostCommunists "strongly agree"

Greens

all MPs

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heinrich best Figure 4. "Do you perceive yourself primarily as a representative of your party, your own voters, your constituency or the whole country?" (percentages)

100

80 53

50

49

9

5

52

72

60

40 33

21

29

25

27 10

20

0

48

11 10 4 Christian Democrats

10 Social Democrats own party

8 10 Liberals own voters

16 PostCommunists constituency

26

13 10

Greens

all MPs

whole country

voters than did MPs belonging to the other parties. Here again there was a difference between newcomers to the party system – the Greens and PDS – and the parties that built the West German party system following World War II – the CDU, SPD, and FDP. MPs affiliated with the latter three parties manifest traits of democratic elitism much more clearly than those of the former two parties. Democratic elitism’s structural dimension can be discerned in data about informal contacts between representatives of the several parties and – in the case of the CDU/CSU – a party family. Strong structural integration, i.e. the existence of dense and extended networks of communication and cooperation across party lines are a constituent element of democratic elitism. It appears that Germany’s political elite is highly integrated, with only 13% of respondents reporting no informal contacts with members of other parliamentary parties. MPs belonging to the founding parties of the Federal Republic reported frequent contacts with MPs in other parties, but MPs affiliated with the Greens and PDS reported less frequent contacts. Nevertheless, only 5% of the MPs who reported no informal contacts at all with members of other parliamentary parties belonged to the two newcomer parties, whose MPs constituted about 15% of the survey sample. In the case of MPs belonging to the PDS, this finding contradicts the earlier observation that a majority of PDS MPs – that is, significantly more than in any other party – reported having nothing in common with representatives of other parties.


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Obviously, the structural and attitudinal dimensions of elite integration are but loosely coupled. This is confirmed by a cross-tabulation of reported participation in party-transcending networks and reported senses of party-transcending togetherness. Although there is a significant but weak relation between the two variables (cv = .164; p = .000), a large majority of MPs who declared that they had nothing in common with MPs in other parties nonetheless maintained informal contacts with them (80% of 320 MPs). There is a smaller but still significant sub-group among these MPs who even reported frequent or very frequent contacts (25% of 320). It seems that – using the terminology of Mosca and Marx – the German political class “by itself ” and the political class “for itself ” are separate phenomena. I will discuss in my conclusions whether and in which ways this contradictory pattern helps explain democratic elitism’s workings in Germany. Data from the 2003–04 survey also provide information about the party affiliations of MPs who were chosen as partners in informal contacts. The resulting matrix of between-party interactions is based on information from parliaments where both parties involved in interactions were represented. The overall interaction patterns show that all parties were directly connected in one comprehensive network of informal communication. This was true even of parties separated by wide ideological gaps like the CDU and the PDS. However, the density of interactions varied between clusters of parties, with fewer MPs belonging to the CDU and FDP reporting informal Figure 5. "Do you have informal contacts to MPs in other parliamentay party groups?" (percentages of MPs who said "no, never") 100 80 60 40 20 17

13

15

4

2

13

Christian Democrats

Social Democrats

Liberals

PostCommunists

Greens

all MPs

0

"no, never"

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Table 1. Informal Contacts with MPs of the Row-Party by MPs of the Column Party Contacts with MPs of …

CDU

SPD

FDP

PDS

B90/Grüne

CDU SPD FDP PDS B90/Grüne

68,2 80,5 34,6 59,8

66,7 50,9 81,6 72,1

78,8 69,2 42,9 68,3

63,1 93,1 53,7 86,2

75,0 84,1 45,5 81,8 -

contacts with MPs belonging to the PDS, and with fewer MPs belonging to the SPD, PDS, and Greens reporting contacts with MPs belonging to the FDP. Notwithstanding these differences, the picture of an integrated political elite that ostracizes no set of party MPs can be seen clearly. With regard to the choice or rejection of potential coalition partners, a somewhat different picture emerges. There was a total or near total rejection of the PDS as a coalition partner by MPs belonging to the CDU and FDP. This rejection was not fully reciprocated because a minority of PDS MPs said that they would be amenable to forming a coalition with one or both centre-right parties. The data also suggest that sheer opportunity shaped the readiness of MPs to contemplate coalitions with parties distant ideologically from their own party. With few exceptions the rejection rate was significantly lower if a party was represented in the respondent’s parliament and therefore available as a potential coalition partner in the competition for power. This was the case whether the parties in question had actually formed a coalition previously or not. There were especially dramatic differences between the hypothetical and the real choices in the cases of SPD and Green MPs as regards coalitions with the PDS: MPs rejecting such coalitions decreased from 76% (SPD) and 89% (Greens) to 27% if the PDS was represented in a respondent’s parliament. But such opportunity-based rapprochements did not (yet?) operate in the case of CDU and FDP dispositions toward the PDS. If it is assumed that choosing another party as a partner for forming a coalition is a normative process then probably, and as a rule and after some grace period, norms follow opportunities.


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Table 2. Rejection of Coalitions with Row-Parties in Percent of MPs of Column-Party Coalition with …

CDU

SPD1

FDP

PDS

B 90/ Greens

all

CDU SPD FDP2

–

44,7 – 46,4 41,3 76,1 27,4 10,1 3,0

0,0 19,6 –

89,2 5,4 87,8 79,6 –

48,8 0,0 – 72,1 88,9 27,3 –

51,5 26,3 39,1 32,3 87,5 69,9 32,4 23,2

PDS B 90/Grüne2

38,2 8,5 2,8 98,2 100,0 54,0 42,8

100,0 95,2 90,9 52,5

14,9 3,4

1.

Reading aid: 44,7% of interviewed SPD-MPs rejected a coalition with CDU. The first number refers to parliaments in which the potential coalition-partner is not represented, the second to parliaments in which the potential coalition partner is represented.

2.

Conclusions My examination of democratic elitism in Germany from within the political elite has revealed what seems to be a complex and somewhat contradictory pattern of reinforcing and countervailing tendencies. While the elite’s collective self-interest leads its members to seek and guard an autonomous field of action within the polity, rivalries and concerns for democratic legitimacy and public support for the polity’s institutional order lead elite members to prize political responsiveness to voters. Both dispositions within the political elite are presumably based on rational choices and are not necessarily dependent on preexisting networks and shared norms. This conclusion is supported by noticing that the normative or attitudinal and the structural or network features of democratic elitism are only weakly correlated. The norms and structure of the German political elite appear to be the result of democratic elitism’s workings over time, rather than a precondition for it. The basic calculations that elites in conditions of democratic elitism make are relatively easy to fathom. Authoritarian or totalitarian systems are eminently risky for elites, as the Nazi and Bolshevik episodes showed so clearly. It is definitely preferable for a departing

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elite member to be sent into retirement than to the GULAG or an execution squad. Political professionalism and institutional arrangements like cartel parties stabilize political careers for elites and make their careers much less risky. Democratic elections are certainly an “inconvenience” for those in power, but in addition to being an opportunity for those seeking power elections enable both power holders and power seekers to mobilize support and renew their ranks. The historical record also shows that elites’ lack of responsiveness to voters can change the political mass market by bringing in new competitors and thereby increase overall competitiveness. This was the case with the German Greens in the 1980s and it has been repeated with the new DIE LINKE (Left Party), which has become a national political player. I propose, therefore, a reconsideration of democratic elitism that incorporates Sumner’s idea of partial cooperation in a context of otherwise strong competition – “antagonistic cooperation”. In democratic elitism cooperation is restricted to win-win situations, and it is especially likely when a return on investment can be obtained relatively easily (as in forming a coalition). A trusting cooperation emerges when all party elites become convinced that cooperating on a long-term basis while also accepting short-term risks is worthwhile. This permits cooperation even in situations where some actors cannot fully assess their own advantages or disadvantages accurately in advance. As in the Prisoners' Dilemma, neither social ties nor shared norms are necessary to enter into and continue antagonistic cooperation. The greatest dangers for antagonistic cooperation arise in end-game situations entailing a dramatic change in pay-offs and the breakdown of mutual trust. But because such end-game situations probably occur only after a catastrophic accumulation of crises, such as took place in the early 1930s in Germany, the prospects for democratic elitism continuing in contemporary Germany are far from bleak. References Beetham, David. 1985. Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bakke, E. Wright. 1946. Mutual Survival: the Goal of Unions and Management. New Haven: Yale Labor and Management Center. Best, Heinrich. 1989. “Mandat ohne Macht. Strukturprobleme des deutschen Parlamentarismus 1867–1933”. Pp. 175–222 in Politik und Milieu. Wahl- und Elitenforschung im historischen und interkulturellen Vergleich, edited by Heinrich Best, St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae.


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——. 1990. “Elite Structure and Regime (Dis)Continuity in Germany 1867–1933: The Case of Parliamentary Leadership Groups.” German History 8(1):1–27. Best, Heinrich, and Daniel Gaxie. 2000. “Detours to Modernity: Long Term Trends of Parliamentary Recruitment in Republican France 1848–1999.” Pp. 88–137 in Parliamentary Representatives in Europe 1848–2000, edited by Heinrich Best and Maurizio Cotta, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Best, Heinrich, Christopher Hausmann, and Karl Schmitt. 2000. “Challenges, Failures and Final Success: The Winding Path of German Parliamentary Leadership Groups towards a Structurally Integrated Elite 1848–1999.” Pp. 138–195 in Parliamentary Representatives in Europe 1848–2000, edited by Heinrich Best and Maurizio Cotta, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Best, Heinrich, Michael Edinger, Stefan Jahr, and Karl Schmitt. 2004. Deutsche Abgeordnetenbefragung 2003/04. Gesamtergebnis. Jena: SFB 580. Bourricaud, François. 1961. Esquisse d’une théorie d’autorité. Paris: Plon. Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1965. Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland. München: Piper. Dogan, Mattei. 2003. “Is there a Ruling Class in France?”. Pp. 17–90 in Elite Configurations at the Apex of Power, edited by Mattei Dogan, Leiden and Boston: Brill. Grossman, Sanford J., and Oliver D. Hart. 1983. “An Analysis of the Principal Agent Problem.” Econometrica 51(1):7–46. Hintze, Otto. 1911. “Das monarchische Prinzip und die konstitutionelle Verfassung.” Preussisches Jahrbuch 144: 381–412. Hoffmann-Lange, Ursula. 1989. “Eliten in der Bundesrepublik: Kartell der Angst, Machtelite oder verantwortliche Repräsentanten?” Pp. 238–262 in Politik und Milieu. Wahl und Elitenforschung im historischen und interkulturellen Vergleich, edited by Heinrich Best, St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae. Jardin, André. 1988. Tocqueville. A Biography, London: Peter Halban. Kliemt, Hartmut. 1986. Antagonistische Kooperation – Elementare spieltheoretische Modelle der Ordnungsentstehung. Freiburg u. München: Karl Alber. Lupia, Arthur. 2006. “Delegation and its Perils”. Pp. 3–32 in Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies, edited by Kaare Strøm, Wolfgang C. Müller and Torbjørn Bergmann, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marin, Bernd. (ed.) 1990. Generalized Political Exchange. Antagonistic Cooperation and Integrated Policy Circuits. Frankfurt/Main and Boulder/Colorado: Campus and Westview. Mayeur, Jan-Marie. 1984. La vie politique sous la Troisième République 1878–1940. Paris: èditions du Seuil. Michels, Robert. 1908. “Die oligarchischen Tendenzen in der Gesellschaft. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Demokratie.” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 27:73–135. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1959. Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, 1890–1920. Tübingen: Mohr. ——. 1984. “Einleitung.” Pp. 1–20 in Max Weber. Zur Politik im Weltkrieg. Schriften und Reden 1914–1918, edited by Wolfgang Mommsen with Gangolf Hübinger (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I 15), Tübingen: Mohr. ——. 1988. “Einleitung.” Pp. 1–46 in Max Weber. Zur Neuordnung Deutschlands. Schriften und Reden 1918–1920, edited by Wolfgang Mommsen with Wolfgang Schwentker (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I 16). Tübingen: Mohr. Mommsen, Wolfgang J., and Wolfgang Schluchter. 1992. “Einleitung.” Pp. 1–46 in Max Weber. Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919 – Politik als Beruf 1919, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter with Birgit Morgenbrod (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I 17). Tübingen: Mohr. Oswald, Franz. 2002. The Party That Came out of the Cold War: The Party of Democratic Socialism in United Germany. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger.

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Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1942) 1959. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Allen & Unwin. Strøm, Kaare. 2006. “Parliamentary Democracy and Delegation.” Pp. 55–106 in Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies, edited by Kaare Strøm, Wolfgang C. Müller and Torbjørn Bergmann, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Struve, Walter. 1973. Elites against Democracy. Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political thought in Germany 1890–1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sumner, William G. 1913. Folkways. A study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores and Morals. Boston: Ginn. Turner, Henry A. 1992. “Alliance of Elites as a Cause of Weimar’s Collapse and Hitler’s Triumph?” Pp. 205–214 in Die deutsche Staatskrise 1930–1933. Handlungsspielräume und Alternativen, edited by Heinrich August Winkler, München: Oldenbourg. Weber, Marianne. 1926. Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild. Tübingen: Mohr. Weber, Max. 1918. “Der Sinn der‚ Wertfreiheit’ der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaft.” Logos 7:451–502. ——.1921. “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland.” Gesammelte politische Schriften. München: Drei Masken Verlag. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 1995. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte III (Von der‚ Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849–1914). München: Beck.

POLITICAL VERSUS MEDIA ELITES IN NORWAY Trygve Gulbrandsen A political earthquake of considerable magnitude occurred in Norway in early 2007, and it illustrated how relations between political and mass media elites today complicate democratic elitism. The woman who led the Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), Gerd Liv Valla, and whom Norwegian media routinely characterized as the most powerful person in the country, suddenly resigned her top position. In addition to her leadership of LO, Valla was a national executive committee member of the Labor Party, the largest party and mainstay of the “red-green” coalition government at the time. When she resigned her LO position, Valla was in line to head the Labor Party’s candidate selection machinery, a pivotal location that would give her much influence over the choice of candidates for top party positions. But in an open letter to the principal tabloid newspaper, Verdens Gang (World Affairs) in late 2006, another woman, who held a mid-level position in LO’s bureaucracy, accused Valla of having harassed her to the point where the woman had to take sick leave. Verdens Gang and other media seized on this accusation as the basis for an intensive campaign to drive Valla from her leadership of LO. Like bees around a hive, the media swarmed around Valla, digging up allegations of other high-handed behavior by her and publishing a barrage of comments critical of her. Under withering assault, Valla concluded that she had no alternative but to resign and effectively leave Norwegian politics. This was not the first time that Norway’s mass media waged a campaign ending in the resignation of a top political leader. A Labor Party prime minister and a cabinet minister had earlier been driven to resign after intensive and negative media assaults. Consequently, it is not surprising that many Norwegian political leaders, like their counterparts in other western democracies, regard the media warily, and media leaders and practitioners reciprocate this wariness. I want to examine this tense relationship and its implications for democratic elitism, utilizing some rich data from a major study of Norwegian elites that my colleagues and I conducted during 2000 and 2001 (Gulbrandsen et al. 2002).

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trygve gulbrandsen Mass Media and Politics: An Overview

The political role mass media play in contemporary democracies is a subject of much debate. The media are most often viewed, and certainly like to regard themselves, as constituting a ‘fourth estate’ that acts as a watchdog for citizens and voters in political affairs (Sparrow 1999). They are also seen, and see themselves, as constituting a main part of the ‘public square’ in which democratic debate and discourse takes place (Skjeie 2001). Similarly, the media are portrayed as a key two-way transmission belt for communications between political elites and citizens (Ostbye 1997). Other and more sceptical observers portray the media as agents of elites that help them manage policy agendas and mobilize mass support (Mills 1956; Domhoff 1967). Or again, political and media elites are depicted as linked symbiotically in a mutually advantageous giving and taking of information (Gans 1979). Mass media are also pictured as elite battlegrounds on which governments, opposing parties, and an array of interest groups fight each other in efforts to gain the upper hand (Schudson 1995). Alternatively, the media are also sometimes seen as communication channels for negotiations that regularly take place among competing elites (Davis 2003). A trend in studies of the mass media’s political role has been to emphasize their independent influence on political outcomes. The media are shown to set much of the political agenda (Iyengar and Kinder 1987). By selectively choosing to play up some issues but not other ones, by simplifying the issues they select for readers and viewers and allocating greater space or airtime to them, the media act as gatekeepers and interpreters of political themes and information. Scholars devote much attention to how media define and give meaning to issues and connect them to the wider political environment – what is frequently called ‘framing’ (Gamson 1992). Some scholars go further and argue that nowadays the media drive the political debate, pure and simple. Given the circulation and ratings pressures on media organizations, journalists and television presenters exploit immediate conflicts and dramas that will gain market share while ignoring larger social, economic, or political complexities and settings (Bennett 1996; Sparrow 1999). It is also claimed that the media play a dual role, constructing and promoting frames of their own while simultaneously serving as conduits for the frames of others (Callaghan and Sewell 2001).

political versus media elites in norway

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These diverse conceptions of the media’s role in democratic politics all assume that political elites relate actively to the media. Political leaders try to influence the media’s framing of issues and priorities through well-timed public statements, granting exclusive interviews, leaking confidential information to selected media representatives, cultivating personal relationships with important editors and journalists, and trying in general to block or offset negative media coverage of leaders’ actions and intentions (Davis 2003). Conceptions of the media as watchdogs, agenda gatekeepers, and framers and drivers of the political debate imply that the media disrupt political elite undertakings and interfere with elite priorities. As watchdogs, the media regularly seek to expose instances of elite misconduct. As gatekeepers, they undercut political elite stratagems. As drivers and framers of debate, the media overshadow the political elite and short-circuit its public and private discourse. Mass Media and Politicians in Norway Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of democratic elitism supposes that political leaders, once they are elected to govern, have sufficient autonomy and decisional latitude to govern in largely unfettered ways between elections. But in Norway today, government office-holders and all other top political leaders are subjected to close and constant surveillance by the mass media, whose operatives appear to see themselves as charged with the task of “keeping the bastards honest”. This was not always the case in Norway. Before the 1970s most major newspapers were affiliated with political parties and they functioned as passive channels for disseminating party stands on issues of the day. Newspapers not affiliated with parties generally tended to play down or even avoid politics. The main radio station and only television station were operated by the state and, perforce, strove to report political developments as neutrally and, many said, as insipidly as possible. At least as regards close and critical media surveillance, the period before the 1970s were halcyon years for the autonomy of political office holders regarded by Schumpeter as essential for democratic politics. But during the 1970s and 1980s the earlier and clear ties that newspapers had to political parties attenuated. Parties that had operated nationwide syndicates of local newspapers through central party press offices in Oslo saw many of their local papers dwindle and disappear as

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Norwegians turned to television (Östbye 1997). The newspapers that remained viable abandoned or watered down their party profiles and linkages in order to attract readers from across the party spectrum. Because advertising was their primary source of income, and because advertising agencies demanded documented circulation numbers before purchasing space for ads, increasing a newspaper’s circulation became a matter of financial life or death, and strong partisan profiles hindering this had to be jettisoned. Newspapers thus became more independent entities that placed issues on the political agenda and voiced demands that should, in their view, be dealt with by governments. At the same time, the state-operated radio and television stations asserted greater independence and became venues for the expression of clashing and sometimes quite heated political views. Moreover, several commercial radio and television stations were licensed and they, too, contributed to the growing media din. Added to this was a spreading penchant among journalists to undertake “investigative reporting” and to regard any fixed party affiliation of the print or electronic media for which they worked as stifling their investigative freedom. In sum, changes in mass media finances together with an investigative ethos set the stage for collisions between media and political elites of the kind illustrated by the Valla episode. There are other strands that complicate the relationship between media and political elites in Norway, as elsewhere. One is the relatively high degree of circulation between media and political elite personnel. Press and broadcasting visibility has become an important aspect of political elite recruitment, while cabinet members and parliamentarians not infrequently move from their elected offices to visible roles as media pundits. Another strand is the mass media’s intensive pursuit of new readers and viewers in order to remain commercially viable. This motivates the media to enflame imbroglios like the Valla case, delve into the private lives and shenanigans of politicians and other public figures (not least Norway’s royal family), and portray complex policy dilemmas in simplistic and sensational ways. Meanwhile, the lion’s share of print space and air time is given over to infotainment – articles and programs about life styles, food, personal health, entertainment, travel, and the like. With this background in mind, let me turn to actual patterns in the mutual relations and perceptions of Norwegian political and media elites.


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Data and Findings A Leadership Study involving face-to-face interviews with 1,710 leaders of twelve main sectors of Norwegian society was conducted during 2000 and 2001 (Gulbrandsen et al. 2002). The original sample numbered 1,969 holders of high positions in these sectors, so the response rate of 87 percent was exceptionally robust, perhaps even unprecedented for a survey of national elites. Of the 1,710 leaders who were interviewed, 138 were serving members of parliament (84 percent response rate) and 116 were owners, managers, editors, and prominent journalists in the media elite (87 percent response rate). Let me first consider how much trust the political leaders who were interviewed have for the media. First, each parliamentarian was handed a list of 13 institutional sectors, of which the media were one, and asked to indicate his or her degree of trust in each sector on a zero to ten scale, where zero was no trust and ten was high trust. Second, each parliamentarian was asked to agree/disagree with the following propositions: (1) “Mass media have too much influence on the political agenda;” (2) “The way media criticize power and politics creates an unfortunate distance between decision-makers and the public.” A majority of the parliamentarians are skeptical about the media. Nearly nine of every ten believe that the media have too much influence on the political agenda, and nearly three of every five think that the media create distance between political leaders like themselves and ordinary citizens. These political elite members also have relatively low trust in the media, on average a 4.2 level of trust on the 10-point scale they were asked to utilize. The same list of institutional sectors and propositions about media influence were put to the media elite members interviewed. In addition, their opinions about the following question were sought: “Is increased ability on the part of the sources to control the news a significant or a small threat to the editorial independence of Norwegian mass media?” Media leaders were further asked to agree/disagree with these two propositions: (1) “A few media have power to determine the agenda for the current debate on social affairs”; (2) “Generally, the power of media is extensive, and in individual cases it is frequently quite central.” Not surprisingly, media elite members assess the media much less negatively than they assess other institutions. Only a third think that the media have too much influence on the political agenda, and only half of that proportion fear that the media’s coverage of politics widens

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the gap between political leaders and citizens. It goes almost without saying that media leaders have considerable trust in the media as an institution, giving it on average a 6.3 level of trust on the 10-point scale. At the same time, half of the media elite consider that their independence is threatened by the increasing power of politicians to control the news, while nearly all media elite members deny that the media are able to set the agenda for Norway’s political debate. Nevertheless, four of every five media leaders admit that the media have significant influence on public opinion, both in general and with regard to specific issues. To measure the extent of their media activities the parliamentarians were asked how many times during the preceding year they had (1) been interviewed; (2) published articles in Norwegian or foreign media; (3) provided a journalist with confidential information with a stipulation that the journalist could not use the information publicly. It turns out that the correlations between these three media activities are weak, which probably means that the three activities constitute distinct media strategies used by some political leaders but not by others. It is clear, nevertheless, that Norway’s parliamentarians engage actively with the media. During the year before they were interviewed, each was on average interviewed 73 times and published 18 articles in the media. Moreover, the average parliamentarian provided confidential information to one or another media representative at least four times during that year. Not surprisingly, engagement with the media varies directly with parliamentary rank, with party leaders and parliamentary committee chairs reporting significantly more engagement than backbenchers. Probably many political leaders in Norway and other democracies experience the media as a cross they must bear. Some Norwegian cabinet members have disclosed to a researcher that the aggressive and critical mass media make them feel insecure and vulnerable (Skjeie 2001). In order to probe parliamentarians’ concrete experiences with mass media they were asked to agree/disagree with the following propositions: (1) “Leaks to the mass media represent a substantial problem in my field of activity;” (2) “My agenda frequently has to be changed as the result of news in the media.” In addition, they were asked if the media usually report interviews they give or pieces of information they provide accurately. When it comes to regarding the media as a cross that must be born, more than three of every five parliamentarians say that they must


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frequently change their agendas because of media coverage, and more than two of every five think that leaks to the media are a considerable problem in their political undertakings. But nearly all say that the media usually report their statements and information accurately. In short, members of the Norwegian political elite prevailingly think that they are treated fairly enough by the media but that the media’s stories and investigations often disturb their work. It is notable that there are far more politicians who hold skeptical attitudes towards the mass media than there are politicians who themselves have had negative experiences with the media, a disjunction between attitudes and actual experiences that is even more pronounced among the other elites studied. This may mean that a negative image of the mass media has been generalized among elites in ways that are unrelated or only loosely related to their own concrete media experiences.

Politicians’ Reactions to Mass Media The study we conducted reveals a further puzzle. Although a majority of Norway’s political leaders hold negative views of the mass media, a sizable minority has high trust in the media and is not noticeably skeptical about how the media function. In various personal communications to researchers and in public statements several politicians express much understanding and approval of the role played by mass media in Norway’s democracy. For instance, one recent study of internal party elections reports a leading parliamentarian as saying “I dislike it that politicians are always whining about the media. We are dependent upon the media’s attention” (Karlsen and Narud 2004). During a debate with a former member of parliament, Thorbjørn Jagland, the parliament’s president, recently declared, “I have frequently felt inclined to stop buying newspapers. But I have understood that the mass media have a function that is different from the parliament and cabinet.” What explains variations in politicians’ reactions to mass media? One obvious possibility is that the negative attitudes of some politicians arise from harsh treatments they have received by the media. We might hypothesize, for example, that politicians who experience leaks as an ongoing problem, who have their agendas upset, and/or who frequently experience incorrect media reporting hold quite

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negative views of the media. Another aspect of this may be that the relative power and seniority of the politicians on whom journalists, talk-show hosts, and others in the media rely for stories and programs influences what they write or say. Information provided by paramount political leaders, chief executives of major corporations, and similarly powerful leaders of major mass organizations may usually be conveyed more accurately and less sensationally than information obtained from less weighty leaders (Bennett 1990). Accordingly, the most powerful and senior leaders have greater success in using the media to frame and structure the issues on which they are engaged (Callaghan and Sewell 2001). In addition, top leaders can more deliberately and easily draw leading journalists, editors, and the like into tight and exclusive circles of civil servants, advisers, and other important actors clustered around top leaders. The most powerful leaders, in short, have a capability to capture or co-opt significant parts of the media. We may therefore hypothesize that the uppermost political leaders, who usually have long careers in politics, hold more positive views of the mass media than lower-ranking leaders with lesser amounts of power and usually shorter political careers. It is also interesting to speculate that political leaders are more thick-skinned than most people outside politics. There is evidence, for example, that leaders are less easily rattled by encounters with extremists of one or another sort than are ordinary citizens (Sullivan et al. 1993). Presumably, those who succeed in climbing the greasy pole of politics have psychological and social properties amounting to high levels of self-confidence. As well, during their climb up the pole politicians are frequently exposed to wide ideological polarities and this induces in them a penchant for seeking compromises to a greater extent than occurs among ordinary citizens. Finally, political success is probably also conducive to a strong sense of personal efficacy and control. Accordingly, we might hypothesize that the longer a politician has been active in politics, or the longer he or she has been a member of parliament, the less suspicious that leader’s view of the media will be. Voting studies show that a citizen’s ideological orientation affects his or her trust in political institutions. A leftist orientation appears to stimulate greater trust than a conservative orientation stimulates. Studies of institutional trust among elites uncover a similar pattern (Gulbrandsen 2005). It may not, therefore, be too much of a stretch to hypothesize that the left- or right-wing orientations of politicians


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influence their degree of trust in the mass media as an institution. This is made all the more plausible by the well-documented tendency among mass media operatives to favor centrist or left-of-center political parties (Hovden 2008; Weaver and Wu 1998). Aware of this media political bias, leaders of conservative parties can be hypothesized to more often hold skeptical, even openly hostile, views of the media. In Norway over a long period, for example, leaders of the strongly right-wing and populist Progress Party have complained bitterly about a leftist bias in the media. To investigate the validity of these several hypotheses I made a detailed analysis of correlations among political leaders’ views of the media and how their views may also be affected by control variables like age, education, and gender. But in this analysis only two statistically significant relationships were found. First, parliamentarians who regard leaks to the media as a considerable problem in their fields of work hold more negative views of the mass media than those who see leaks as not especially bothersome. Second, male parliamentarians are less concerned about negative aspects of the media than female parliamentarians. But statistically speaking, the relative power and seniority, length of time in politics, and left or right party affiliation do not effect how political leaders evaluate the mass media.

Conclusions The Swedish political scientist Olof Petersson (1994) contends that the ideology held by modern media practitioners, which he terms “journalism,” regards today’s democracies as divided into three categories: rulers, journalists, and ordinary citizens. In their ideological view, journalists stand between rulers and citizens and are always the allies of citizens, protecting them against the deceptions and other manipulations of rulers. Media elites accordingly believe that citizens take the news coverage they provide seriously and develop suspicions of politicians and politics that are certainly warranted. The concrete Norwegian case is not so clear-cut, however. The study that my colleagues and I conducted shows that only one aspect of the relationship between political leaders and media leaders is enflamed in any serious degree. This is the problem of leaks. Political leaders who complain about leaks – and 43 percent of those whom we interviewed did so – hold a noticeably negative

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view of the media. Why do leaks disturb politicians? The answer is relevant to the workings of democratic elitism in Norway and elsewhere. It is obvious that leaks distract attention from political leaders’ planned undertakings. Leaks often give rise to heated public discussion, fanned by the media outlets that report them, and this tends to make compromises and deals between political leaders more difficult. Not infrequently, information that is leaked concerns disagreements between politicians within the same party. The dramaturgy favoured by the mass media makes such disagreements particularly appealing, and journalists and editors are for this reason all the more susceptible to being used by one or another actor who is seeking to undermine others in an intra-party conflict. While political leaders regularly seek opportunities to confront their opponents in public, they are a good deal less happy about “dirty laundry” becoming public. Increasingly, leaks are attempts by political subordinates or other informed insiders to call public attention to political misconduct or to some kind of moral lapse. The news media are a vital conduit for this whistle blowing. But in Norway there have been relatively few cases of misconduct, at least of serious magnitude, in the country’s politics. What Norwegian political leaders most fear is not the exposure of genuine misconduct, but public accusations and allegations that have little factual validity. The media’s passion for drama and sensation means that factually dubious accusations and allegations are very likely to receive substantial coverage, with eventual corrections or retractions being lost in the mists of back pages and almost never stated on radio or television. In this situation, politicians are compelled to devote much time and effort to accusations and allegations that put their honor and public standing in question. It is obvious that leaks to the media are instruments in political power competitions, and they appear to be increasing, more or less exponentially, in Norway and other democracies. Competitors who prefer to operate out of public view employ leaks. Their aim is to sabotage political initiatives or destroy a foe’s reputation or credibility. Defending against this skulduggery in a time when mass media are aggressive and ready to expedite a political “kill” for commercial or ideological reasons is, to put it mildly, difficult. In the case of Ms. Valla, as well as the other high-level resignations mentioned at the outset, media commentators employed, whether accurately or not, leaks that proved lethal to the leaders in question and that came from foes of Valla and the others.


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The mass media thus affect the workings of democratic elitism in contrary ways. Certainly the media check tendencies toward excessively secret elitism. But at the same time they make political competitions much more continuous than the periodic electoral contests that Schumpeter placed at the centre of his “democratic method”. Worse, the insatiable appetite of mass media for scandal and leaked revelations about political leaders’ personal misadventures, greatly enflames democratic politics, making them a good deal more costly and risky than Schumpeter recognized. Political elites inevitably react to real or perceived onslaughts by media elites. One reaction is a tolerance or at least a resigned acceptance of what the mass media do. But more commonly politicians seek to defend themselves and their power from the media. They hire communications specialists and advisers and create effective spin machines. Governments centralize and formalize relations with the media, regulating and limiting media contacts with all but the highest position holders. Inquiries by the media are referred to the communications directors and public information divisions that each ministry or government agency creates. Political leaders systematically favor sympathetic media outlets and shun unsympathetic ones. This tussle between watchdog media and political elites seems increasingly to favor the latter because they have it in their ultimate power to stifle the media and, thus, much public discussion. On balance, the changing dynamics of political and media elite relations indicate a democratic elitism that is increasingly elitist in its working. References Bennett, W. Lance. 1990. “Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States.” Journal of Communications 40:103–125. Callaghan, Karen, and Frauke Schnell. 2001. “Assessing the Democratic Debate: How the News Media Frame Elite Policy Discourse.” Political Communication 18: 183–212. Davis, Aeron. 2003. “Whither Mass Media and Power? Evidence of a Critical Elite Theory Alternative.” Media, Culture and Society 25:669–690. Domhoff, G.William. 1967. Who Rules America? Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Gamson, William A. 1992. Talking Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gans, Herbert J. 1979. Deciding What’s News. New York: Pantheon Books. Gulbrandsen, Trygve, Fredrik Engelstad, Trond Beldo Klausen, Hege Skjeie, Mari Teigen, and Øyvind Østerud. 2002. Norske makteliter. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk. Gulbrandsen, Trygve. 2005. “Norway: Trust Among Elites in a Corporatist Democracy.” Comparative Sociology 4(1-2):107–127. Hovden, Jan Fredrik. 2008. Profane and Sacred. A Study of the Norwegian Journalistic Field. Ph.d. Thesis. Bergen: University of Bergen.

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Iyengar, Shanto, and Donald R. Kinder. 1987. News That Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karlsen, Rune, and Hanne Marthe Narud. 2004. “Organisering av valgkampen – ‘tradisjonell’ eller ‘moderne’?” Pp. 33–58 in In valgkampens hete, edited by Bernt Aardal, Anne Krogstad, and Hanne Marthe Narud, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Mills, C. Wright. (1956). The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petersson, Olof.1994. “Journalistene som klasse. Journalismen som ideologi.” Pp. 25–36 in Media og samfunnsstyring, edited by Terje Steen Edvardsen, Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Schudson, Michael. 1993. “How News Becomes News.” Forbes Media Critic 2:76–87. Skjeie, Hege. 2001. “Det kritiske kjendiseri.” Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift 18:229–45. Sparrow, Bartholomew H. 1999. Uncertain Guardians. The News Media as a Political Institution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sullivan, John L., Pat Walsh, Michal Shamir, David G. Barnum, and James L. Gibson. 1993. “Why Politicians Are More Tolerant: Selective Recruitment and Socialization Among Political Elites in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States”. British Journal of Political Science 23:51–76. Weaver, David H., and Wei Wu (eds.). 1998. The Global Journalist: Newspeople around the World. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Østbye, Helge. 1997. “Media in Politics: Channels, Arenas, Actors, Themes.” Pp. 215– 228 in Challenges to Political Parties. The Case of Norway, edited by Kaare Strøm and Lars Svåsand, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

ELITE FORMATION AND DEMOCRATIC ELITISM IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS Michael Edinger Renditions of democratic elitism from Max Weber to Joseph Schumpeter and from Robert Dahl to Giovanni Sartori differ, but there is enough common ground to employ them under the same label. The core tenets of democratic elitism are (1) political elites and leaders win governing power through open, if somewhat constrained, electoral competitions; (2) entry to these competitions is relatively open in a functioning electoral market; (3) elites and leaders who prevail in the competitions have the capacity to manage a society’s pressing problems; (4) elites and leaders are held responsible for their actions through subsequent elections; (5) elites and leaders share fundamental norms that make democracy the “only game in town”. When the relation between elites and the public is considered, however, two additional tenets of democratic elitism obtain. First, elites in democracies are ready to defend democracy in the face of less tolerant publics (Peffley and Rohrschneider 2007). Second, consensually unified elites are crucial, and nowhere more so than in societies transiting to democracy (Higley and Lengyel 2000). Since the third wave of democratization crested at the end of the 1990s (Huntington 1991; Diamond 2008), the basic tenets of democratic elitism have spread around the globe, making them – in substance if not by label – common components in the discourse about democracy. In many parts of the world, however, the behavior of political leaders does not comply with these tenets, and this leads to a variety of semi-authoritarian regimes and façade democracies (Collier and Levitsky 1997). In this chapter democratic elitism is used as an analytical concept to comprehend the complex reality of modern democracy and the role of political elites. I investigate the extent to which the tenets of democratic elitism have entered political life across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) two decades after the end of state socialism.

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On its face, the CEE region is fertile soil for democratic elitism. Unlike many other parts of the world, quests for democracy and liberty in CEE countries date back to the mid-19th century, even if the quests seldom culminated in actual democratic practices. By the end of state socialism, moreover, CEE countries were located at relatively high levels of economic development and education conducive to establishing democracy. As well, the prospect of joining the European Union provided a strong incentive for elites to adhere to tenets of democratic elitism (Pridham 2005; Grabbe 2006). To what extent has democracy been crafted in CEE countries during the past two decades? To answer this, I examine members of CEE national parliaments. Members of parliaments (MPs) may not be the most important component of political elites, but they represent that part of elites directly legitimized by the people and meant to represent popular interests. I first assess the social composition of MPs to determine similarities and dissimilarities across party lines. I then examine the extent of MPs’ political professionalization and the diversity of their careers across the CEE countries. This is followed by a discussion of public perceptions of MPs, trends in general elections, and aspects of MPs’ political behavior. This distinction identifies some of the barriers to democratic elitism in CEE countries. The chapter concludes with the implications of my analysis for democratic elitism as an explanatory concept. Hypotheses 1. The composition of CEE parliaments displayed rather elitist or non-representative features soon after regime change at the start of the 1990s so that the introduction of an electoral market was accompanied by social closure that marginalized important groups of citizens. 2. Parliamentary parties and party families, such as the post-communist Socialist parties and the Conservatives/Christian Democratic parties, have differed not only in their policy preferences but also in their social compositions. These differences, in concert with policy disputes, have limited the scope for political compromises that are essential for effective coalition governments in CEE countries. 3. The political professionalization of MPs, while it aggravates the social divide between the electorate and the elected, is neither

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uniform nor linear. This poses serious problems for democratic elitism because it means that elite decision-making suffers from a lack of personnel continuity. 4. Where anti-elite sentiments are widespread among CEE citizenries, even a moderate degree of MP professionalization is questioned, and this erodes democratic elitism’s legitimacy. In a word, the voting public dislikes democratic elitism. This dislike is compounded where MPs do not comply with basic democratic norms – where they pervert democratic elitism. The first hypothesis about social closure is firmly rooted in elite theory (Putnam 1976). In their social make-ups political elites seldom mirror the social characteristics of the populations over which they preside. Patterns of elite social closure, along with the exclusion of some groups from parliamentary recruitment channels, have been observed in parliaments across Western Europe (Best and Cotta 2000). The second hypothesis about similarities and dissimilarities between party families, as well as the third and fourth hypotheses about MPs’ careers and behavior address challenges to democratic elitism resulting from the specific courses, paces, and legacies of post-communist transformations in CEE countries. On the elite side of democratic elitism, MPs’ different social and political backgrounds and, inter alia, the weakness of political parties, threaten elite unity and a proper selection of parliamentary leaders – the second and third hypotheses. On the democracy side of democratic elitism, CEE publics’ high economic and political expectations, as well as the manipulative strategies and dubiously legal actions of some MPs, undermine the linkage between elites and citizens that is crucial for an elite-driven democracy that has legitimacy – the fourth hypothesis. The data for my analysis derive mainly from a research network focused on “European Political Elites in Comparison: On the Road to Convergence.” This network has compiled basic information on the social profiles, occupational backgrounds, political careers and actions of MPs in twelve national CEE parliaments (Best and Edinger 2005). The data cover MPs in the three Baltic republics, the four Viségrád countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), along with MPs in Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, and the Russian Federation. In addition, findings of public opinion polls, as well as documents about elections and cabinets, are taken into account.

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michael edinger Parliamentary Elites: Homogeneity, Inclusion, Careers

The social composition of parliaments has received much attention in elite studies and legislative research (Best 2007, Norris 1997, Norris and Lovenduski 1995, Matthews 1985). It is important for two reasons. First, it allows differences between parliamentary elites in postcommunist countries and the population at large to be estimated. While a gap is hardly problematic from the perspective of democratic elitism – elites are leaders who routinely display distinctive social characteristics – it may create legitimacy problems, something that is particularly relevant for parliamentary elites whose political futures depend on public support. Second, the social profiles of MPs differ between parties and, more importantly, between party families. Large social profile differences may contribute to substantial disharmony among MPs that extends beyond party competitions in elections. On the other hand, significant homogeneity in MPs’ social profiles, regardless of the parties to which they belong, may contribute to an esprit de corps and facilitate compromise, especially in crisis circumstances such as the transition to democracy. Let us, therefore, examine main aspects of CEE parliamentarians’ social profiles. Education High levels of education, formal and informal, have long been a distinctive feature of political elites. In almost all Western countries MPs have customarily come from the best-educated segments of society. Although more mixed levels of education among MPs emerged during the first half of the 20th century due to the electoral successes of communist and socialist parties, since World War II a steady increase in the educational levels of West European MPs has been evident (Gaxie and Godmer 2007). Consequently, the high education attainments of MPs are a main aspect of the social distance between them and voters. Among MPs in post-communist CEE countries a gross overrepresentation of the highly educated is easily seen. On average across the dozen countries, nine of every ten MPs are university graduates, so that a university education appears to be virtually a pre-requisite for entering CEE parliaments. More important, differences between parliamentary parties and party families are small, especially between the


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most significant party families1 – the Social Democrat successors to the communist parties of state socialism (Bozóki and Ishiyama 2002), the Christian Democrats-Conservatives, and the Liberals. MPs belonging to all of these party families display a quite uniform composition as regards university education. Comparatively lower levels of education can be observed for MPs belonging to (ultra) nationalist and ethnic minority parties. But overall, MPs are remarkably homogeneous as regards level of education. Their university degrees and academic titles manifest the importance of cultural capital in post-communist politics. Exclusion of the lesser educated from CEE parliamentary elites may not pose a problem for democratic elitism so long as it is not formalized. Indeed, MPs with high levels of education might contribute to the emergence of consensually united elites because their political attitudes tend to be more structured and in this respect conducive to compromises. Indeed, MPs in many post-communist countries may have even more in common than their academic degrees suggest. Although precise figures are not available, there is little doubt that a large proportion graduated from a relatively small number of elite schools and universities that provided them with access to elite networks even before entering parliament. Occupation If CEE parliamentary elites are rather homogeneous in their education, do they also have similar occupational backgrounds? And which professions have become the main recruiting pools for MPs in postcommunist Europe? Answers to these questions are relevant for two reasons: First, it may be that certain professional backgrounds are more suited to democratic behaviors; second, similar professional backgrounds may make common understandings and negotiated compromises easier to reach. After the first free democratic elections at the start of the 1990s the occupational group most prevalent among MPs was former teachers and professors. Over time,2 however, the proportionate size of this group has fallen continuously, so that after the most recent CEE 1 This party family classification follows the scheme developed by Gallagher, Laver and Mair (2006) for Western Europe. 2 To facilitate comparative analysis, post-communist elections (PCEs) are numbered from 1 (first democratic election after regime change) to 5 (fifth election).

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elections former teachers and professors constituted only the fourth largest occupational grouping, being outnumbered by MPs who had been higher civil servants, businessmen, and full-time politicians. At present the dominant occupational sectors from which MPs are recruited are higher administration and business, as well as politics itself. In 2008 two out of every three MPs in the CEE parliaments had previously followed careers in at least one of these sectors (Figure 8.1). From the perspective of democratic elitism, these trends in parliamentary recruitment comply with initial expectations. The three major occupational sectors from which representatives are recruited all entail competencies and qualifications that are prime ingredients for political leadership. Thus, the majority of MPs gained experience in leading positions and/or became familiar with political processes, bargaining techniques, and conflict management before entering parliament. They brought with them significant amounts of economic, administrative and/or political expertise. This previous occupational experience should enhance their ability to grapple with challenging political tasks. 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1st PCE Education

2nd PCE Politics

3rd PCE

4th PCE

Higher Administration

Business

5th PCE Others*

Figure 8.1. MPs’ Employment Sectors before Entering Parliament by Post-Communist Elections (PCE). * including MPs with no occupation before entering parliaments and missing information.

In most CEE countries the first democratic election (PCE 1) took place between 1990 and 1992, PCE 2 occurred in the mid-1990s, PCE 3 by the turn of the century, and PCEs 4 and 5 in the 21st century’s first decade.


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For many of the occupational background sectors, differences between the most important party families across CEE countries are modest, though large disparities between countries can sometimes be observed. Since the mid-1990s in Slovenia, for example, the majority of MPs have had backgrounds in higher administration. By contrast, businessmen have heavily populated the Russian Duma, and among its members there are only a few former high-level civil servants. For most party families in CEE countries, business, teaching, and higher administration are among the top three sectors of parliamentary recruitment, and only some of the smaller party families deviate from this pattern. In communist parties almost a quarter of representatives are from the political sector, whereas in agrarian parties the farming (primary) sector is, not surprisingly, an important occupational area for parliamentary recruitment. By contrast, and somewhat ironically, (ultra) nationalist and ethnic minority parties alike tend to recruit their MPs rather extensively from the engineering and liberal professions. The larger party families also have some distinctive features. Thus, the Conservatives and Christian Democrats have disproportionately large numbers of higher civil servants among their ranks but comparatively few MPs from business backgrounds. For Liberal parties the pattern is the opposite: many more former businessmen than civil servants and quite small numbers of MPs with experience in politics-related occupations. Parties of the Left also recruit many MPs from business, but they have substantial numbers of former party officials and employees of lobbying organizations in their parliamentary delegations. Overall, there is little doubt that parties and party families have specific recruitment logics and preferences. Differences between the occupational profiles of party and party family MPs are not pronounced, however, though there are enough differences to suggest that an esprit de corps based on common occupational backgrounds cannot be crafted readily. The occupational sectors from which MPs come are diverse, and rarely does more than a third of a parliament come from some single sector. Still, MPs in all CEE countries in 2005 had backgrounds noticeably closer to politics than MPs in the early 1990s. Ethnicity After the late 1980s and the collapse of state socialism, ethnicity and inter-ethnic relations quickly became a political issue in the CEE countries with sizeable ethnic minority populations. This has since been

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one of the most politically salient cleavages in those countries. Having members of ethnic minorities and, particularly, of a dominant ethnic minority in parliament is a matter of inclusion. Parliamentary representation guarantees minorities that their interests are heard, even if only in debates. Denying minorities representation in parliament and other elite positions makes it more likely that minorities will use direct extra-parliamentary means to express demands. In this respect, the inclusion of MPs representing ethnic minorities is relevant to democratic elitism. Consistent with the concept of consociational democracy (Lijphart 2004), parliamentary representation of ethnic and other culturally distinct minorities is important for a democracy’s workings. Most of the CEE countries under discussion contain sizeable minority populations. Only Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary do not. The minority populations vary from just over 10 percent in Romania to more than 40 percent in Latvia.3 These minorities display one or both of two principal features: (1) the numerical preponderance of just one ethnic group (e.g. Turks in Bulgaria; Russian-speakers in Estonia and Latvia; Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania); (2) the proximity of an ethnic homeland, i.e., a co-ethnic state.4 The representation of ethnic minorities in CEE parliaments has varied since the collapse of state socialism (Edinger and Kuklys 2007). The largest number of MPs belonging to ethnic minorities is found in Russia where, on average, they make up more than one fifth of the Duma. Non-Russians in the Duma come from many different ethnic groups, reflecting the country’s multi-ethnic composition. Yet, Russia is a special case and since 1990 there has been only one other country, Romania, where the proportion of ethnic minority MPs was at least proportionate to the size of minorities in the population.5 In most CEE parliaments ethnic minorities are under-represented. In the Central European countries of Slovakia and Croatia, as in Bulgaria, ethnic under-representation is not pronounced. But it is conspicuous in Estonia and Latvia, both of which have large Russian-speaking minorities. 3 Slovenia is excluded because reliable data are neither available for the ethnic minority share of the population nor for its representation in parliament. 4 The obvious exception is the Russian Federation with its large population of different and mostly small minorities that have no clear ethnic homeland. 5 This is partly due to Article 62 II of the Romanian constitution under which one seat in parliament is reserved for each officially recognized ethnic minority which otherwise would not be represented in parliament.


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The Russian minorities in Estonia and Latvia were well represented following parliamentary elections in 1990, before the countries became formally independent. However, in the first elections after independence, the Russian-speaking minorities’ shares of parliamentary seats diminished markedly, in Estonia almost to the point of a mono-ethnic parliament. In the subsequent 1995 elections, seats won by ethnic minorities further decreased in Latvia, though they increased in Estonia, leaving both national parliaments with roughly the same proportion of ethnic minority MPs (8 and 7 percent, respectively). In recent elections the proportion of ethnic minorities in Latvia has increased steadily so that after the 2006 election one of every five MPs had a non-Latvian origin. In Estonia the proportion has been stable at a comparatively low level. The under-representation of ethnic minorities in the Latvian and Estonian parliaments reflects the simultaneous democratization and fervent nationalism that unfolded in both countries during the early 1990s (see chapter 11). This contrasted quite sharply with developments in other CEE countries with sizable ethnic minorities. In neighboring Lithuania, where there are small Russian- and Polish-speaking minorities, the proportion of minority MPs is closer to the proportions of the minorities in the population. Essentially equivalent proportions of MPs represent fairly large Russian-speaking minorities in two other post-Soviet countries, Moldova and Ukraine (not included in this study). In CEE countries where there is only a small disproportion between the size of ethnic minorities and ethnic MP delegations, ethnic parties are the most important bodies through which minorities gain access to elite political positions. Examples are the Hungarian Coalition and its predecessors in Slovakia; the Movement of Rights and Freedoms of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria; the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania. MPs from these parties and party coalitions account for between 60% and 90% of all MPs who do not belong to the core national populations. Where ethnic parties are absent some left-wing parties provide limited access to parliament for non-members of the core national population. In Latvia, for example, increased representation of the Russian-speaking minority in the Saeima after 2000 resulted largely from the electoral successes of the major left-wing parties, more than half of whose MPs have been non-Latvians. The Russian Duma once again stands out as an exception: despite the absence of ethnic parties

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(prohibited by law in the late 1990s) there are substantial proportions of MPs from ethnic minorities in almost all its major parliamentary parties. If elite integration across ethnic lines is an important element of democratic elitism in ethnically heterogeneous CEE societies, the ethnic composition of national parliaments does not give much cause for concern except in Estonia and Latvia. Estonia and Latvia have national leaders who opted to partly exclude Russian-speaking minorities from access to high political positions or have denied the minorities suffrage. Primarily in Estonia, though also in Latvia, exclusionary practices have led to a massive under-representation of ethnic minorities in parliament and have re-enforced inter-ethnic tensions by stirring up feelings of political marginalization among Russian-speakers. Against this background in Estonia, riots by young Russian-speakers during the spring of 2007 – triggered by the removal of a memorial for Red Army soldiers from Tallinn’s city center – were hardly accidental. Stone throwing and arson substituted for the parliamentary voice that the Russian-speaking minority has so far lacked. If an under-representation of ethnic minorities is an impediment to democracy, access to elite positions only through ethnic parties may also be problematic. MPs elected on an ethnic basis may see themselves as counter-elites rather than part of established political elites. Yet there is little evidence that ethnic tensions increase where ethnic minorities are represented only through ethnic parties. Indeed, the opposite seems more nearly true: marginalized in the early years of democratic transitions, ethnic parties have gradually become accepted coalition and negotiating partners. Today they are a normal part of the parliamentary game in Bulgaria, Romania, and even Slovakia. Political Professionalization Parliamentary politics have specific functions, logics, and rules. The requirements, challenges, and expectations that MPs face differ significantly from those that business or administrative elites confront. Unlike professions such as medicine or law, access to parliamentary politics is unregulated (Borchert 2003). Still, becoming an MP does not happen by chance: research has shown that West European MPs have usually accumulated much political experience before they enter parliamentary politics (Best and Cotta 2000). Due to the pivotal role of political


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parties in the process of selecting MPs, experience in politics is usually gained through service and functions within a party. Political experience is also often gained in sub-national politics or by holding higher executive positions. In the early 1990s transition years, parliaments in CEE countries contained large numbers of newcomers who had quite limited political experience. This parliamentary elite circulation was wholly expectable because basic regime changes had just occurred. Subsequently, however, it became important to have politically experienced MPs, which is a way of saying that the emergence of professional politicians is an important aspect of democratic elitism. Politically experienced MPs help to aggregate interests, find compromises within and across parties, organize parliamentary majorities, and provide steady political orientations for voters. Three kinds of political experience are exhibited in the CEE countries: performing party functions, holding local political offices, and appointments to government cabinets. It is not hard to discern a general trend in CEE parliaments toward the increasing importance of prior political experience. Immediately after the initial democratic elections in the early 1990s over 60% of MPs had had no previous political experience. This proportion diminished dramatically and steadily after subsequent elections, so that after the fourth democratic election roughly two of every three MPs had previously served in at least one of the three political roles listed above. It is noteworthy, however, that even today few MPs had been appointed to cabinet positions before they entered parliament. About 10 percent of MPs have had earlier cabinet experience, but it is unclear if former ministers have been recruited to parliaments because of their cabinet experience. In any event, prior experience in party offices or local political offices is far more frequent. More than a third of MPs held such offices before entering parliament. Yet there has been some change in the kind of prior political experience MPs have had. Holding party offices was relatively common among the first generation of MPs, but this has not increased in frequency in any marked way since. Prior experience in local politics has ballooned, however, and it now clearly is the most important form of political capital for MPs. There are, nonetheless, significant variations in the political experience of MPs across CEE countries. Croatia and Poland have high proportions of experienced MPs, whereas this is much less true of Bulgaria

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and Slovenia.6 The relative importance of party versus local political offices differs considerably among the countries. In Hungary and Lithuania experience in local offices seems to be a priority for MPs; for many of whom it is more important than performing important party functions. By contrast, MPs in Croatia, Poland, and Romania display strong patterns of prior party service, with experience in local politics much less evident. The extent and kind of prior political experience varies somewhat between MPs belonging to the main party families. The experience of Socialist/Social Democrat and Conservative/Christian Democrat MPs is frequently rooted in local politics and on average they have less experience in cabinets. As regards prior party offices and functions, MPs belonging to both party families display much the same pattern. Larger differences exist when the major political camps (the Left, Liberals, and the Right), rather than party families, are compared. MPs affiliated with the political right have often held leading positions in their party before entering parliament, but very few of them have had prior local political experience. The trend toward professionalization in almost all CEE countries and party families means that many MPs have obtained similar political training. If we also take into account their extremely high levels of education and the increased numbers of MPs recruited from party offices and leading positions in public administration or business, the overall development of parliamentary elites seems to comply with the theory of democratic elitism: put simply, parliamentary elites have become more “elite” and should be better able to pave the way for democratic consolidation. But this conclusion ignores less savory aspects of MP elites in CEE. The requirements of democratic consolidation are ambiguous and complex, and the profusion of MPs who are career politicians can have unintended consequences. Barriers to democratic consolidation are double-barreled: on the one hand, they manifest the still limited scope of democratization; on the other hand, barriers are the product of the very patterns sketched above. In other words, in CEE countries democratic consolidation is retarded partly because voting publics dislike democratic elitism and think it is working poorly. I will first address the public’s reservations about democratic elitism. 6 The deviant case is the Russian Federation, where the proportion was stable during the first three Dumas but declined after 2003.


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Public Dislike of Democratic Elitism The discontents of electorates have palpable effects on parliamentary elites. Let us look briefly at three rough indicators of CEE publics’ dislike of democratic elitism: trust in political elites and institutions, electoral turnout, and anti-government voting. Trust in Elites and Institutions There is much evidence that political elites in CEE countries are largely mistrusted and little supported by public. Data from a “Political Culture in Central and Eastern Europe” public opinion survey in 2000 revealed that large parts of CEE electorates regarded political elites as corrupt, unresponsive to public needs, and untrustworthy. At the same time, most respondents to the survey held positive attitudes about democracy’s desirability, while – with the notable exception of Russians – only relatively small minorities favored some alternative to it (Pickel and Jacobs 2006). Despite public support for democracy, CEE political elites clearly lack the public’s trust, as do key CEE political institutions. There have been low levels of trust in governments, national parliaments, and parties ever since the start of democratic transitions, though with some significant differences between CEE countries and over time (Klingemann, Fuchs and Zielonka 2006). In EU member or membership candidate countries, for example, trust in national parliaments declined between 2001 and 2007 from an already low 25 percent to less than 20 percent on average.7 This lack of trust results only partly from dissatisfaction with the economic performance of post-communist governments and it is certainly not peculiar to CEE countries, though it seems more pronounced in them than in most Western democracies. The discrepancy between relatively strong support for democracy and much dissatisfaction with democratic performance suggests that what people dislike about democratic elitism is unrelated to free elections and parliaments as such. Rather, it is due to the “elitist” character and poor performances of parliamentary elites. As a result, voters’ frustrations hang like the proverbial Sword of Damocles over the heads of CEE political elites. Governing elites are especially prone to

7 These data are compiled from the Candidate Countries Eurobarometer (20012004) and from the Standard Eurobaromenter (2005-2007).

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rapid losses of (electoral) support, as happened to Estonia’s Pro Patria Union in 1995, Lithuania’s Homeland Union, Romania’s Democratic Convention in 2000, and Bulgaria’s Union of Democratic Forces in 2001. Electoral Turnout Free competitive elections marked the beginning of a new political era across CEE. After decades of pseudo-elections under state socialist regimes the founding elections were cheered with great enthusiasm (Millard 2004: 73-4). Accordingly, turnouts for the first free elections were mostly high, exceeding 82% in half of the CEE countries under discussion. Even in the second free elections people went to the polls in large numbers. Yet from the third elections onwards turnout decreased significantly. In the most recent round of CEE parliamentary elections the median turnout has been more than 20 percentage points below that of 15 years earlier. The only countries with somewhat stable turnout rates are those that had low rates from the start, notably Poland and Russia. Despite the fact that citizens give many reasons for not voting, and even though no linear decline in CEE turnouts can be observed, the ever decreasing participation in general elections reflects dissatisfaction with political institutions, political actors (not least parliamentary elites), and economic situations (Kostadinova 2003: 743).8 Not making use of the right to vote results from a perception of MPs’ unresponsiveness and from dissatisfaction with the policies that emanate from parliaments. Low voter turnouts do not necessarily affect parliamentary elites directly, but they point to a lack of democratic legitimacy. Anti-government Voting Especially where they are deeply dissatisfied, voters may simply punish office-holders by ousting them. This is, of course, the benefit of democracy. Yet using the vote solely as a means of punishment can be a risky practice. First, people who do this may vote for undemocratic

8

A recent multivariate analysis identifies the sequence of elections as the most important determinant of voter turnout in Central and Eastern Europe (Kostadinova and Power 2007). The most plausible explanation of decreasing turnout is the massive disappointment of electorates with political and economic performance after the highly mobilized initial elections.


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parties – although no such trend has as yet been discerned across the CEE countries (Thieme 2007). Second and more important, frequently and continuously felling governments inhibit consistent policy-making. Many CEE governments have had scant opportunity to complete, adjust, or revise policies for more than one electoral period (Blondel and Müller-Rommel 2001). With the exceptions of Croatia in the 1990s under the Tudjman government and Slovenia with its rather consociational political practices, CEE elections have been pendulums swinging from governing to opposition parties and then almost immediately back again. In countries like Poland and Bulgaria no government has secured re-election. Frequently, the electoral pendulum’s swings have been so extreme as to decimate what had previously been the largest parliamentary parties, as happened to Democratic Forum in Hungary in 1994 and to AWS in Poland in 2001. Conversely, completely new parties have regularly entered the political arena and immediately formed one of the largest parliamentary delegations, as did SMER in Slovakia in 2002 and the Labour Party in Lithuania in 2004. Anti-government voting has made unpopular but necessary reforms increasingly difficult to adopt or implement because they engender voters’ immediate wraths. Little trust in political office-holders and institutions, declining turnouts in elections, and anti-government voting pose serious obstacles for CEE democracies. They have a critical impact on the parliamentary elites and challenge democratic elitism. Elite’s Mismanagement of Democratic Elitism Obstacles to democratic elitism do not come solely from voters and their dislike of elites. Obstacles also stem from questionable selections of candidates by parties, high rates of parliamentary turnover, and elite malpractices. Parliamentary Turnover Turnover rates are important for understanding elite circulation (Putnam 1976: 65-8) just as they are a key part of democratic theory (Matland and Studlar 2004, 87-92). For parliaments and MPs in societies transiting to democracy, limited and decreasing rates of parliamentary turnover are important indicators of increasing MP professionalization, whereas high turnover rates and concomitant low

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proportions of career MPs raise at least three problems. First, if most MPs have only a short time in office they can hardly build networks, stabilize connections to their constituents, or become policy specialists. Second, sharply limited tenures in parliaments heighten MPs’ disadvantages when dealing with government bureaucrats who usually have considerable policy expertise. Third, the constant renewal of parliaments makes decision-making more conflict-laden because, following the latest election, most new MPs are unfamiliar with informal rules intended to facilitate the smooth working of parliaments. This suggests that the level of parliamentary turnover is quite relevant to democratic elitism. Especially under conditions of large changes in social, economic, and political orders, as in the transition from state socialism, it is unlikely that representative democracy will function properly if the political elite is undergoing continuous and rapid circulation. In order to perform well and serve as responsible and responsive political leaders, a critical proportion of elected representatives should have a political career perspective extending beyond the usual four years of a parliamentary term. High turnover rates among political elites are typical of regime change (Best, Hausmann and Schmitt 2000, 184-5); replacing the former political elite symbolizes breaking with the past. The almost complete turnover of parliamentary elites in CEE countries after the initial elections was in this respect no surprise. Even after the second elections relatively high turnover rates were expectable because many sitting MPs had entered parliaments with no intention of becoming professional politicians. Yet after subsequent elections the rates of parliamentary turnover continued to be well above 50% (Figure 8.2).9 The standard deviation across the CEE countries almost doubled after the fourth post-communist elections, which indicated growing variation in rates of parliamentary turnover between CEE countries. The Czech Republic and Hungary stand out in this respect, with an average turnover of less than 50% after the second post-communist elections. In Hungary more than 70% of MPs in the outgoing fourth post-communist parliament were re-elected in 2006. By contrast, Lithuania, Romania, and Croatia showed an average turnover of more than 60% in each post-communist election. Yet the mean averages 9 Turnover is measured as the proportion of newcomers to parliament. During the 1980s in two-dozen mostly West European parliaments the average turnover was about 30 percent (Matland and Studlar 2004: 92-93).


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Figure 8.2. Turnover (Parliamentary Newcomers) by Post-Communist Elections (PCE). conceal different developments in their parliaments. In Romania, for example, though turnover was still at 58% in 2004, it has decreased consistently with each election, whereas in Lithuania turnover rates display a more erratic pattern. The high turnover rates in CEE parliaments could be attributed to the voting behavior (impact of electorates) or to nomination processes in parties (impact of selectorates). If party nomination processes are decisive, the high turnover rates in CEE parliaments are more the result of dysfunctional recruitment processes than anti-government protests. In order to determine the relative impacts of electorates versus selectorates on turnover rates, electoral volatility is calculated on the basis of parties’ seats in parliaments.10 Analysis shows that, at least for some parliaments, election results have less effect on turnover than party re-nomination processes have.

10 Technically, parliamentary volatility is the sum of all differences between PPGs’ percentages of parliamentary seats in a given term compared to their shares in the previous term, divided by two. It can reach values between 0 (all parties got exactly the same share of seats as in the previous parliament) and 100 (only new parties are represented in parliament). The measure is not exact because MPs can enter parliament on a different party list than in the previous term.

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When comparing countries with the highest turnover rates, it is evident that the sources of parliamentary turnover differ greatly. In Lithuania, electoral swings have been so extensive that turnover can be almost completely explained by voting behavior (Figure 8.3). In Romania, on the other hand, parliamentary volatility was crucial for turnover only in the fourth parliament and even then it accounted for less than two thirds of the turnover. In the Croatian parliament, the high turnovers after the 1995, 2000, and 2003 elections were mostly (in 1995 almost exclusively) due to incumbents either not getting or not seeking re-nomination. In short, the recruitment and selection processes of parties affect parliamentary turnover markedly. The extent and causes of turnover raise doubts about the functioning of parliamentary elite recruitment in some CEE countries, and this observation is somewhat mirrored by examining the duration of cabinets in CEE countries. Changes of government during parliamentary terms have been quite frequent. In some CEE countries, such as the Baltic republics, Poland, and Romania, frequent mid-term changes of government, as well as turnover within cabinets, have occurred (Taras 2007: 134). This has resulted in cabinets with short life spans, as in Romania where 40% of ministers between 1990 and 2008 served in cabinet for less than one year (Ştefan 2009). 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 3rd PCE 4th PCE 5th PCE 3rd PCE 4th PCE 5th PCE 3rd PCE 4th PCE 5th PCE Lithuania

Romania turnover

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Figure 8.3. Turnover and Parliamentary Volatility in Parliaments with High Turnover by Post-Communist Elections (PCE) (percentages).


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Brief incumbencies may indicate that parties continuously de-select a large proportion of their own MPs and/or that parliaments are so unattractive to ambitious politicians that most MPs leave in order to seek other offices. Using a seat in parliament as the starting point of a political career aimed at holding a high government post could be considered as functional because it contributes to a closer linkage between governments and parliaments. On the other hand, if a parliamentary mandate is used mostly as a springboard to an attractive business position (as the backgrounds of a substantial number of MPs in countries like Lithuania, Romania, and Russia seem to suggest), such career patterns are evidence of dysfunctional recruitment processes. Overall, the patterns of turnover leave little doubt that parliamentary elite recruitment is malfunctioning in some CEE countries. Yet deficiencies in the selection of political leaders and a rapid circulation of MPs and cabinet ministers are not the only elite-centered problems that CEE countries face. Defects in elite behavior are also crucial. Elite malpractices The benefits of well-qualified parliamentary elites, efficient recruitment mechanisms, and limited turnovers are easily lost when MPs disregard or openly act against fundamental democratic norms. The most common features of such non-democratic or even anti-democratic conduct in otherwise democratic CEE countries are excessively belligerent elite competitions and the misuse of powers. Belligerent elite competitions took place frequently in the early phase of democratization, as in Bulgaria where in the mid-1990s opposition forces organized mass demonstrations to oust a democratically elected government. In Hungary a decade later belligerent competition between the two political camps and their leaders resulted in mass protests and even violence (see chapter 9). Such competitions are a form of irresponsible elite conduct. But worse are elites’ violations of basic democratic norms and using non- or semi-constitutional means to increase and retain power by systemically disadvantaging current or prospective competitors. The former Slovak Prime Minister, Valdimír Mečiar, behaved irresponsibly during the second half of the 1990s when he ignored rulings of the Constitutional Court and changed the electoral system in his favor – as did the Croatian President, Franjo Tudjman. A similar spate of irresponsible behavior took place with the ascendancy of the Kaczynski brothers in Poland after 2005 (see chapter 10).

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michael edinger Conclusion

At first glance, the development of parliamentary elites in CEE countries after state socialism corresponds in large measure to the basic tenets of democratic elitism. MPs have increasingly approximated a distinct elite in their social compositions, occupational backgrounds, and steadily more professional political careers. This seems not to have harmed the quality of democracy – at least if Freedom House rankings of political rights and civil liberties in the CEE countries are taken as a measure.11 If a still more robust measure of democracy that combines several indices is applied, all of the countries, save Russia, can be classified as liberal democracies, though with some reservations about Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania (Berg-Schlosser 2007: 269-70). My findings confirm my first hypothesis that democratization was accompanied initially by exclusions of entire social groups from parliamentary elites. But in contrast to my second hypothesis, differences between party families as regards the social and political profiles of their MPs have generally been small. Consequently, conflicts between parties and party camps have not been rooted in or reinforced by differences in MPs’ social and career backgrounds. An increasing proportion of MPs display experience in party functions, local offices, or cabinet positions prior to entering parliament. However, the emergence of more careerist politicians is hampered by high rates of parliamentary turnover so that professionalization is quite incomplete in most CEE countries – my third hypothesis. The limited trust of CEE voting publics in elites, their low turnouts at elections, and their anti-government voting patterns challenge core tenets of democratic elitism. But it is not only the voting public that limits development toward an elite-managed democracy; the elites themselves also bear responsibility. Both artificially exacerbated intra-elite conflicts and some political leaders’ outsized appetites for power have led to a disregard of institutional norms and a weak commitment to democracy, as specified in my fourth hypothesis. On close inspection, therefore, the CEE transition countries are not as favorable arenas for democratic elitism as the democratic euphoria that sometimes accompanied the collapse of state socialism seemed to suggest. 11

For details see Freedom in the World Country Ratings, available from www .freedomhouse.org. The most notable exception is Russia, which by almost all indicators has become less democratic during Vladimir Putin’s precidency.


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What are my findings’ implications for democratic elitism? Democratic elitism is certainly relevant to CEE countries. Yet in the CEE context its major strength – its focus on the leadership roles of democratically legitimized elites - is also its weakness. Concentrating almost exclusively on elites well captures the initial situation in post-communist CEE, when largely autonomous intra-elite negotiations were crucial for founding new regimes. Yet in the subsequent phase of CEE transitions, elites have no longer been able to act in such autonomous ways. Voters have limited the autonomy of parliamentary elites, in particular, by punishing them regularly for policy decisions or the lack thereof. Under this pressure, political parties have reacted by deselecting many members of their parliamentary delegations, often after only a single term, in order to protect their top leaders from politically lethal election swings. Convincing as its emphasis on the centrality of elites is, democratic elitism needs to treat this interdependence between parliamentary elites and voters more effectively. Issues of elite representation and responsiveness need to be better incorporated into the core of democratic elitism, and democratic elitism also needs to better recognize the importance of political cultures. Finally, though it may be true that in most CEE countries political elites have generally been more tolerant and democratic in their attitudes than masses of voters, the commitment of elites to democratic values and practices should not be overestimated. Even when they employ a democratic rhetoric and do not openly ignore democratic principles, elites can readily succumb to excessively self-serving and irresponsible behavior. This does not negate democratic elitism’s value for understanding modern democracies, but it teaches us that democratic elitism must constantly be revised, refined, and re-adjusted to fit the changing and complex workings of 21st century democracies. References Berg-Schlosser, Dirk. 2007. “The Quality of Post-Communist Democracy”, pp. 264–75 in Developments in Central and East European Politics, edited by Stephen White, Judy Batt, and Paul G. Lewis, 4th ed., Durham: Duke University Press. Best, Heinrich. 2007. “New Challenges, New Elites? Changes in the Recruitment and Career Patterns of European Representative Elites.” Comparative Sociology 6: 85–113. Best, Heinrich, and Maurizio Cotta, eds. 2000. Parliamentary Representatives in Europe 1848–2000. Legislative Recruitment and Careers in Eleven European Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Best, Heinrich, and Michael Edinger. 2005. “Converging Representative Elites in Europe? An Introduction to the EurElite Project” Czech Sociological Review 41(3): 499–510. Best, Heinrich, Christopher Hausmann, and Karl Schmitt. 2000. “Challenges, Failures and Final Success: The Winding Path of German Parliamentary Leadership Groups towards a Structurally Integrated Elite 1848–1998.” pp.138–95 in Parliamentary Representatives in Europe 1848–2000. Legislative Recruitment and Careers in Eleven European Countries, edited by Heinrich Best and Maurizio Cotta, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blondel, Jean, and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel. 2001. Cabinets in Eastern Europe, Houndmills/New York: Palgrave. Borchert, Jens. 2003. Die Professionalisierung der Politik. Zur Notwendigkeit eines Ärgernisses, Frankfurt/M: Campus. Bozóki, András, and John T. Ishiyama, eds. 2002. The Communist Successor Parties of Central and Eastern Europe, Armonk NY: Sharpe. Collier, David, and Steven Levitsky. 1997. “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research.” World Politics 49: 430–51. Diamond, Larry J. 2008. The Spirit of Democracy. The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World. New York: Times Books. Edinger, Michael, and Mindaugas Kuklys. 2007. „Ethnische Minderheiten im Parlament. Repräsentation im osteuropäischen Vergleich.“ Osteuropa 57(11): 163–75. Gallagher, Michael, Michael Laver, and Peter Mair. 2006. Representative Government in Modern Europe, 4th ed., Boston Mass. etc.: McGraw-Hill. Gaxie, Daniel, and Laurent Godmer. 2007. “Cultural Capital and Political Selection: Educational Backgrounds of Parliamentarians” pp. 106–35 in Democratic Representation in Europe: Diversity, Change, and Convergence, edited by Maurizio Cotta and Heinrich Best, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grabbe, Heather. 2006. The EU’s Transformative Power. Europeanization Through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Higley, John, and Michael Burton. 2006. Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Higley, John, and György Lengyel. 2000. “Introduction: Elite Configurations after State Socialism” pp. 1–21 in Elites after State Socialism, edited by John Higley and György Lengyel, Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, Dieter Fuchs, and Jan Zielonka, eds. 2006. Democracy and Political Culture in Eastern Europe, London and New York: Routledge. Kostadinova, Tatiana. 2003. “Voter Turnout Dynamics in Post-Communist Europe.” European Journal of Political Research 42: 741–59. Kostadinova, Tatiana, and Timothy J. Power. 2007. “Does Democratization Depress Participation? Voter Turnout in the Latin American and Eastern European Transitional Democracies.” Political Research Quarterly 60: 363–77. Lijphart, Arend. 2004. “Constitutional Design for Divided Societies.” Journal of Democracy 15(2): 96–109. Matland, Richard E. and Donley T. Studlar. 2004. “Determinants of Legislative Turnover: A Cross-National Analysis.” British Journal of Political Science 34(1): 87–108. Matthews, Donald R. 1985. “Legislative Recruitment and Legislative Careers.” pp. 17–55 in Handbook of Legislative Research, edited by Gerhard Loewenberg et al., Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Millard, Frances. 2004. Elections, Parties, and Representation in Post-Communist Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Norris, Pippa, ed. 1997. Passages to Power: Legislative Recruitment in Advanced Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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Norris, Pippa, and Joni Lovenduski. 1995. Political Recruitment. Gender, Race, and Class in the British Parliament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peffley, Mark, and Robert Rohrschneider. 2007. “Elite Beliefs and the Theory of Democratic Elitism.” pp. 65–79 in The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior, edited by Robert J. Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pickel, Gert, and Jörg Jacobs. 2006. “Der soziokulturelle Unterbau der Demokratien Osteuropas“, pp. 31–52 in Osteuropas Bevölkerung auf dem Weg in die Demokratie, edited by Gerd Pickel et al., Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Pridham, Geoffrey. 2005. Designing Democracy. EU Enlargement and Regime Change in Post-Communist Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Putnam, Robert D. 1976. The Comparative Study of Political Elites. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall. Ştefan, Laurenţiu. 2009. Pathways to Cabinet: Selecting Ministers in Post-communist Romania. Jena: Jena University Press. Taras, Ray. 2007. “Executive Leadership.” pp. 127–44 in Developments in Central and East European Politics, edited by Stephen White, Judy Batt, and Paul G. Lewis, 4th ed., Durham: Duke University Press. Thieme, Tom. 2007. Hammer, Sichel, Hakenkreuz. Parteipolitischer Extremismus in Osteuropa. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

HUNGARY: BETWEEN CONSOLIDATED AND SIMULATED DEMOCRACY György Lengyel and Gabriella Ilonszki* TV broadcasting studios besieged, hate speech in the streets, political leaders calling each other liars – this was the situation during 2006 in Hungary. Most local and foreign political observers had, for many years, regarded Hungary as the foremost example of a smooth transition from state socialism to democracy, the most consolidated democracy in East Central Europe, and the most successful locus for foreign investment in the region. But in 2006 this highly positive view of Hungary went up in smoke as political elite consensus and citizen morale attenuated greatly. Why did this happen? Why did Hungary’s democracy suddenly exhibit marked frailties? In this chapter we argue that the answer lies primarily in changed behaviors of political elites. The changes highlight democratic elitism’s shortcomings in Hungary, with disturbing parallels in adjacent East Central European countries. Early in the 20th century a Hungarian sociologist, Lajos Leopold, argued that capitalism in Hungary had a “simulated” character because rent-seeking capitalists were tied firmly to the state and thus dependent on state subsidies (Leopold (1918)1988). Borrowing Leopold’s term, we ask if the post-transition Hungarian political system is a simulated democracy. Behind its scenery of democratic institutions, elite adherence to the norms and rules essential for robust democracy remain ragged and unsettled. Political elites mouth fidelities to democratic norms and rules but deviate from them in actions. To the extent that this elite behavior is also occurring in Hungary’s Czech, Polish, and Slovak neighbors, the concept of simulated democracy may constitute a useful addition to the sub-types of democracy that are distinguished in comparative political analysis (Carothers 2002). Political scientists have written extensively about requirements for democratic consolidation. As is well known, Juan Linz and Alfred * The authors thank Jan Pakulski, John Higley, András Körösényi, Imre Orthmayr, Károly Szabó and Zoltán Szántó for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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Stepan (1996:6) stipulated that consolidated democracy involves the common elite view that democracy is “the only game in town”. In addition, elite integrity and openness are regarded as essential to the workings of political institutions in a consolidated democracy (Welzel 2002; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). In a simulated democracy significant groups of elites and segments of society just imitate the acceptance of democratic norms and game rules. We argue that the particularities of elite behavior, most importantly the breaching of democracy’s norms, justify introducing this subtype. In a simulated democracy, however, elite behaviors that breach norms do not destroy democratic institutions. Such institutions are not mere façades and they continue to operate – an independent judiciary and the equality of individuals and minority groups before the law, competitive elections, pluralistic media, civilian control of the military and state security agencies, etc. (Diamond 2008:21-25). But elite behavior makes institutional working relatively ineffective and precarious. A simulated democracy is still a democracy but it has characteristics and qualities that fall well short of consolidated democracy. To these considerations can be added the proposition put forth by John Higley and his colleagues that the lack of an underlying and mostly tacit elite consensus about democratic game rules can be fatal for democratic stability (Higley and Pakulski 2002; Higley and Burton 2006). If important elite groups begin to doubt that other groups accept democracy as the common denominator and come to suspect that these others are pursuing narrow partisan interests regardless of the harm done to democratic game rules, then one cannot speak of consolidated democracy. Elite groups that once shared an accommodation become disillusioned when several of them cater to populist interlopers and adopt populist stratagems. In short, the elite competitions described by democratic elitism become less restrained and more zerosum. This appears to have happened in Hungary during the past several years. We will review these Hungarian developments, consider why they have occurred, and ask if they are part of a wider pattern among elites in East Central Europe.

Signs and Sources of Crisis There are several possible explanations why politics in Hungary and neighboring post-socialist countries have become more turbulent. One is that after achieving long-awaited membership of the European

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Union in 2004, a degree of political upheaval was unavoidable because EU membership requires that a number of politically painful reforms be brought to completion. So further adjustments to EU membership have sparked political turbulence. Another explanation is that the apparently successful consolidation of democracy in Hungary did not move beyond a stabilization of formal political rules. From the perspective of democratic elitism, however, reasons for recent difficulties may lie elsewhere. A first question is whether Hungary’s transition to democracy, which was orchestrated almost entirely through elite negotiations and agreements at the famous roundtables in 1989, actually led to a weak democratic order. Because capitalism can, in principle, coexist with democratic or non-democratic regimes (Kornai 2007), the roundtable elites assumed that the transition to capitalism would not pose problems for whatever political order emerged. Consequently, they concentrated on configuring democratic institutions to provide liberties that had been absent under state socialism. Parliamentary democracy, competitive elections, civil liberties, as well as the institution of private property, a free market, and various foreign policy priorities were all agreed at the roundtables. Political safety for the elites participating in the roundtables and stable institutions that would provide this safety were a major, if mostly unspoken, goal. This elite search for safety and stability was manifested in various constitutional provisions, such as requiring a “constructive” parliamentary vote of no confidence before a government could be toppled. The aim was to elevate prime ministerial power and protect it from assaults by irresponsible political forces. But at the same time, important measures to safeguard fringe political groups were put in place, and a requirement that major legislation received a two thirds majority in parliament sought to ensure elite compromise and cooperation in the policy arena. In these respects Hungary’s transition to democracy involved a basic “elite settlement” (Higley and Burton 2006: 84–86). By the middle of the 1990s, however, the elite consensus underpinning this settlement started to erode in important ways. Already in 1994 the postcommunist Socialist Party (MSZP – the Hungarian Socialist Party) returned to power by promising to restore social guarantees that had been prevalent during the last years of state socialism. In 1998 a populist party (MIÉP - the Party of Hungarian Justice and Life) entered parliament with a radical right wing program. During the parliamentary cycle between 1998 and 2002 the senior government coalition

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party (Fidesz – the Alliance of Young Democrats) sought to challenge the government-parliament relationship that had been a significant part of the roundtable compromises. Fidesz strengthened executive power, pushed through a two-year budget, and blocked the formation of oversight committees in parliament. Two large parties – the Socialists on one side and Fidesz on the other – dominated the political scene. Conflicts between elite groups sharpened and a bloc politics took shape. Government and opposition coalitions consisted of two opposing blocs that refused to support each other’s legislative initiatives. The two-thirds majority requirement that had been introduced to protect minorities became an obstacle to reform. Opposition parties supported referendums that attacked provisions in state budgets. Before the 2008 financial crisis, for example, referendums supported by opposition parties blocked structural reforms of health care and education. Worse, election campaigns increasingly involved semi-violent street demonstrations. Tensions between parliamentary and “street politics” exist in many political systems, of course (von Ahm 2007), and there is no direct connection between irresponsible referendums and mass demonstrations. But where democratic consolidation is still a work in progress and trust in political leaders and newly established institutions has yet to solidify, responding to street politics can be a major political challenge that opens the way to a simulated democracy. It must be asked, therefore, if the 1989 roundtables in Hungary achieved deep and lasting elite consensus or just temporary compromises between elite camps that still regarded each other warily and with much suspicion. In the years that followed, competing elites increasingly behaved as though they did not respect the understandings reached at the roundtables and as if they had not even participated in them. New elites and leaders displaced many of the original roundtable participants, and they articulated issues in increasingly combative ways. These changes became manifest in a transformation of political institutions (Ilonszki 2004). Transformation towards Majoritarian Democracy Participants in the 1989 roundtables envisaged a consensual form of democracy, but a more clearly majoritarian democracy soon began to emerge. Although a similar turn towards majoritarian democracy unfolded in Southern European countries after their democratic


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transitions (Bruneau et al. 2001), the majoritarian turn in Hungary went hand in hand with circumstances ready made for political trouble. One involved party system change and the organizational characteristics of parties. A multi-party system morphed into a two-party-plus system as the number of effective parties decreased from 6.7 in the early and mid-1990s to just 2.7 in the 2006 elections. In 2006, 85 percent of the vote went to just the two big parties, the Socialists and Fidesz. This is roughly the same total vote share that the Labour and Conservative parties in the United Kingdom achieved during the heyday of Britain’s majoritarian democracy. Disparities in the resources that the main parties possessed also undermined a consensual form of democracy. As the direct successor of the former state socialist MSZMP (Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party), the Socialist Party enjoyed strong competitive advantages in terms of organization, financial underpinnings, mass membership, political experience and skills, and well-oiled elite networks. Attempting to overcome these Socialist advantages, new parties quickly became highly centralized and leader-oriented. This was true of the once miniscule Fidesz, which started as an opposition movement of young liberal intellectuals at the end of the 1980s and had only a handful of MPs after the 1990 and 1994 elections. But in the face of Socialist dominance and looking for its own position in the new political space Fidesz turned itself into a conservative people’s party and became the Socialists’ main competitor in the 1998 elections. In the situation of unequal resources, the Fidesz and other party elites resorted to simplistic and plebiscitary slogans and symbolic actions, along with base accusations against each other and against the better-resourced Socialists. Nor did the Socialists abjure populist slogans and promises. Political campaigns were increasingly conducted on issues like who is a “true Hungarian” and featured implausible promises to usher in rapid economic growth and well being for everyone. Symbolic postures rather than representative and accountable policy actions became prominent (Karácsony 2006). Second, sharply unbalanced coalition governments accentuated the turn toward majoritarianism. In 1994 the Socialists formed a strongly asymmetric coalition with the Liberals. As the largest party in the governing coalition after the 1998 elections, Fidesz held a strong upper hand against over its junior coalition partners. Fidesz refused to allow its partners to play an active role in initiating legislation, and it even tried to absorb them. One of the smaller partners ceased to exist, while the other was significantly weaker by the end of the four-year coalition.

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Unbalanced coalitions created new divisions among parties and elevated the importance of leaders within parties and government. Another reason for the turn toward majoritarian democracy was the citizenry itself. A low level of confidence and trust in politicians prevailed among citizens, with the majority of voters saying repeatedly that they did not trust politicians. A disenchanted and partially inert electorate was more receptive to parties’ symbolic messages than to their policy programs and the performance records when governing. According to European Social Survey findings, the policy preferences of Hungarian voters have had the lowest impact on voting behavior among all European countries (Tóka 2006). Party cleavage lines have at the same time been firmly drawn, if not entirely frozen: electoral volatility dwindled to 9.0 by 2006, compared with 25.8 in 1994 and 31.7 in 1998 (Karácsony 2006a:73). Electoral volatility in Hungary is now of the same magnitude as in the long-established Swedish electoral arena (Mainwaring and Zoco 2007). Increasingly raw and personalized party competitions, instead of competitions centered on alternative policies, now dominate. In part, to be sure, this has been due to Hungary’s exceptionally rapid political institutionalization compared with countries like Sweden. There was less time in Hungary for competing packages of policies to be formulated and disseminated. In any event, bloc politics and a resulting “us against them” style of politics is ensconced.

Political Elites, Business, and Money Despite their strongly adversarial and hostile postures, the main party and associated elites nevertheless have a common interest in defending the existing configuration of political institutions. This is because they mutually enjoy the advantages it provides. A still quite weak civil society and a weak mezzo-sphere of trade unions and employers’ organizations aid and abet ways in which the most important elite groups profit from the institutional order. For example, the main party elites have not seen any necessity to alter the electoral system significantly. As a mixed-member system it advantages the large parties and is strongly majoritarian in its real workings. It is therefore not surprising that one of the few modifications made to the electoral system, in 1993, was to increase the threshold that small and competing parties would have to surmount to gain entrance to parliament. In 1994 the dominant party elites changed the law to their mutual advantage by making cumulative


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mandates legally possible. As a result, the proportion of MPs who also hold elected local positions has increased substantially. The multiple positions that many political elite members hold inhibits transparency and elite circulation and blurs lines of representation and accountability. Initially, cumulative mandates mostly served the interests of the Socialists, who lost the first democratic elections in 1990 at the national level, but maintained much of their local influence. Since then the rival Fidesz has also managed to build its local support base. After the 2006 elections some three out of five MPs had formerly held local positions, and one out of five still held such positions. This has two consequences: a more direct enhancement of party finances from uncontrolled local sources, and greater indirect benefits flowing from tight connections with business interests at both local and national levels. Via kick back contributions, businesses obtain advantages from parties with government policies influenced by business interests in an uncontrolled way. As a result the borderlines between public and private and between legitimate party financing and corruption evaporate. Uncontrolled local sources of party finance are a democratic concern because they help entrench ascendant elites, as reflected by MP turnover rates of less than 30 per cent (Ilonszki 2008). Experts estimate that party campaign expenditures now exceed by more than ten times the sums legally allowed, and there is little doubt that campaign finance is the locus for illegal money transactions and corruption. Playing fast and loose with campaign finance, the main party elites do not and cannot ask why a great many business entrepreneurs report minimal profits in their tax returns, why so many business transactions take place without recorded bills of sale and receipts, or why many officially unemployed workers actually display considerable affluence (Báger-Korbuly 2006; Semjén-Szántó-Tóth 2001; Krekó-P. Kiss 2007). Even in Hungary’s school system cheating on examinations is widespread and mostly unpunished (Sándor 2005). As regards connections between politics and business, the two recent Socialist prime ministers were businessmen-turned-politicians with state socialist roots. A significant number of MPs also have strong business interests and sizable incomes. MPs with business interests are of course not peculiar to Hungary; during the 1990s some 11.5 percent of all MPs in European parliaments were found to have such interests, with 15 percent of Hungarian MPs having them in 2005. The significant point is, however, that the proportion of business-connected MPs in the Hungarian parliament has risen from nearly zero during less

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than two decades. Still, there is evidence that this proportion of MPs is as high as 20 percent in neighboring post-socialist democracies (Ilonszki and Edinger 2007), and in post-socialist Russia a politicalbusiness oligarchy is on flagrant display. With these comparisons noted, it nevertheless seems safe to say that such an oligarchy is clearly forming in Hungary (Kets de Vries et al. 2004, Hoffman 2002, Lengyel 2007) even if the country’s billionaires are not yet very numerous or very rich by international standards or by comparison with the wealth of the multinational corporations that now dominate Hungary’s economy.

Sportsmen, Businessmen, and Statesmen If we recognize the diversity of political elites and distinguish between elites and their foremost leaders, it is clear that the personal characteristics of leaders are becoming ever more prominent aspects of democratic politics in East Central Europe as elsewhere (Higley and Pakulski 2007). The personalities and styles of leaders have long been studied in social science (e.g., Bryman 1996, Seligman 1950, Jung-Avolio 2000), not to mention the innumerable works of historians dating back to Thomas Carlyle ((1841) 1923) and beyond. The extent to which politics are increasingly personalized in what looks more and more like a Weberian leader democracy is now an important research topic in Hungarian political science (Csizmadia 2006; Körösényi 2005). It might be useful to follow Higley and Pakulski (2007) and return to Pareto’s (and Machiavelli’s) distinction between elites who behave like lions and those who approximate foxes. But we think it equally profitable to enumerate key characteristics of Hungary’s recent and current political leaders, such as Viktor Orbán, the Fidesz leader, and Ferenc Gyurcsány, the Socialist prime minister until 2009. Orbán is known as a devoted football player, while Gyurcsány reached his pre-eminent political position through a highly successful business career. Their different backgrounds spark a few reflections about the roles of sportsmen, businessmen, and statesmen. At first glance, similarities are more obvious than differences in that all three types of figures have a strong will to win, they are powerfully inner-directed, success-oriented, and strongly motivated to achieve dominance. An ability to react quickly to changing circumstances and improvise effective reactions are additional characteristics common to sportsmen, businessmen, and statesmen who become political leaders.


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But there are important differences between the three types, too. For example, a sportsman tends to be more of a team player and a businessman more of an individualist. A sportsman trains hard and tries to reach peak form just when he or she needs it most, while a businessman’s most important talent is alertness and responsiveness to ever changing market conditions (Kirzner 1973). These traits of sportsmen and businessmen are not merely conventional images dug up from the past; they are political tools. Think, for example, of the political opposition leader who keeps preparing to match his strength against his adversary, firing up his followers with slogans like that of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza, Italy! and its Hungarian counterpart Hajrá, Magyarország!. Or consider the billionaire businessman turned minister for economic affairs who is inclined to conceive of his country as an economic enterprise. Compared to the sportsman or businessman, a statesman’s main traits include the ability to recognize dominant social trends and needs, synthesize and integrate many disparate interests, and signal consistent thinking and behavior while at the same time concealing this consistency through words and deeds that mollify those who wish to go in other policy directions. Thus a statesman is firm and unwavering in values and goals but also able to make convincing gestures to common causes and compromises between diverging interests. In these respects, neither the sportsman nor the businessman is a statesman. It must also be said that there are negative sides to sportsmen and businessmen as political leaders. Just as football hooliganism increases in inverse proportion to a sporting team’s performance, so street politics and populism may gain ground in political rivalries between sportsmen who become political leaders. Or again, when a government’s budget conditions deteriorate, the temptation for a businessman-turned-politician to manipulate the budget grows in a way not very different from that of a tax-evading entrepreneur. When the negative aspects of these two types of leaders come to the fore, political competitions depart from rules of fair play. In short, different types of political leaders have impacts on political modalities by reinforcing or modifying political practices and norms. The observations of a Hungarian political scientist, István Bibó ((1942) 2004) are relevant. During the calamities of World War II Bibó asserted that the social sensitivities of elites should not be manifested through acts of charity but, rather, by providing examples of proper political behavior. His message remains pertinent today and it is worth

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pursuing a bit further as regards recent developments in Hungary and East Central Europe.

Transactional and Transforming Leadership Three decades ago James Macgregor Burns developed an interesting theory about political leaders (Burns 1978). Its main component was a distinction between two types of political leaders. One type is the leader able to negotiate and take into account the wills of constituencies, what Burns called a transactional leader. The other type is a transformational leader who is adept at mobilizing followers and is reminiscent of Schumpeter’s depiction of the entrepreneur-innovator as a path-breaker. Burns’s transformational leader triumphs not only in revolutionary situations but also in periods of reform, and such triumphs are due to the leader’s ideological, moral, and intellectual tenacity, and even his or her heroism, all of which offer symbolic solutions to seemingly intractable societal problems. As a concept, transformational leadership is close to Weber’s concept of charismatic leadership, to which Weber assigned the features of courage, selflessness, and commitment. By contrast, transactional leadership is associated with pragmatism, bargaining abilities, attentiveness to sudden opportunities, as well as finding reciprocal solutions and persuading others of their worth (Burns 1987:169ff ). Reformers need transformational abilities, but they need other abilities, too. For example, transformational leaders have to face public distrust that is usually quite intense during periods of reform. And they have to provide moral example by eschewing improper means for reaching their desired ends. They have to deal with a great many details, not just a few sweeping alternatives, and they have to march in step with ongoing trends while at the same time being devoted to effecting significant changes. Burns’s distinction between transformational and transactional leaders has been developed further in several empirical studies (Bryman 1996). These have found that transformational leaders generate senses of inspiration, individual attention, and intellectual stimulation among followers. Transactional leaders are found, in contrast, to rely on providing followers with contingent rewards and exceptional management skills. The studies show the two types of leaders to be quite distinct empirically, although they are not entirely mutually exclusive and there


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may be situations in which a leader displays both sets of characteristics. All in all, the distinction between transforming and transactional leaders is provocative and possibly illuminating when applied to concrete political circumstances such as those in Hungary and East Central Europe during the last several years. In recent Hungarian political discussion, for example, a distinction between leadership personification and personalization has been drawn (Kiss 2003). Personification occurs when a leader embodies the values and interests of the constituency to which he or she appeals for support, and personalization occurs when a leader’s personality utterly dominates his or her party. It is worth speculating that part of the recent turbulence in Hungarian politics results from top leaders displaying excessive personalization and insufficient personification, or, in Burns’s terms, top leaders who approximate the transformational rather than the transactional type. To apply this scheme more concretely to recent Hungarian politics, transformational leaders have been predominant. A transformation discourse became embedded in Hungary’s politics from the late 1960s until 1989 – the period of ‘goulash communism’. Students and young intellectuals were socialized into this discourse, which cut across the boundary between state socialist supporters and dissidents. As secretary of the Communist Youth Organization (KISZ) during the late 1980s, Ferenc Gyurcsány was pushed in a transformational direction. It is telling that two key figures in the government Gyurcsány has headed since 2006 were products of the same milieu. Reading Gyurcsány’s speeches it is clear that they are superheated efforts to provide transformational leadership. His speeches are in principle timely during a period of transformation, in which Hungary’s redistributive systems of health care, pensions, unemployment benefits, education, and the state budget itself require fundamental changes, as is the case in many other European countries (Bozóki 2007). But Gyurcsány’s transforming passion can be criticized on grounds that it is not adequately transactional, with his speeches and other public statements occasionally utilizing even a revolutionary rhetoric. During their years as prime ministers both Orbán and Gyurcsány appeared unable to combine transformational and transactional politics. Ideally, basic policy changes should be consonant with people’s hopes and should turn those hopes into concrete outcomes. But a firm belief that basic changes are essential even if they go against the will of the majority of voters seems to be an integral part of Hungary’s political leaders today. Thus one cabinet minister opined, “Don’t ask the frogs if

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you want to drain the swamp”. But such transformational zeal overlooks why and how the “swamp” needs draining. When combined with a disregard for popular hopes and expectations, transformational leadership is not a promising recipe for democratic politics.

Vicious Elite Circles The Hungarian political elite, which has enjoyed the advantages but also suffered the consequences of the original roundtable agreements in 1989, exhibits several behavior patterns that also help to explain why and how a spreading populism has created difficulties for democratic consolidation. First, competing party elites have slipped into a spiral of promises about outsized government spending that are driven by calculations of immediate political advantage. Experts regard budget overspending as a core problem for Hungary’s economy (Ehrke 2006). Comparatively speaking, the economy has not been in bad shape, but it has two monetary features that are highly problematic: the state’s total indebtedness and its annual budget deficits (Bartha 2006, Martin 2006). Gross government debt – due to indebtedness inherited from state socialism and to bloated spending since the democratic transition – is 67.5 % of GDP, a proportion that is not staggering but still one of the largest in Europe in recent years. Annual budget deficits have been running at around 9% of GDP (Kopint-Tárki 2007), one of the largest in the European Union, but not unprecedented because budget deficits have been still greater in Italy, Greece, and Sweden (OECD 2005, 2006, 2007). More important is the fact that Hungary’s total state indebtedness and annual budget deficit are integral consequences of spiraling political promises. During election campaigns parties compete by promising voters still more emoluments if elected. This is, of course, not a strategy peculiar to Hungary, but it is nevertheless a serious problem, especially because the promises made by the parties are interwoven with widespread patterns of tax avoidance and other corrupt practices. When elections approach, a false elite responsiveness to the public increases, as does voter gullibility. This pattern has been apparent in all recent elections, an indicator of which is that immediately before elections popular expectations about economic prospects have become more positive as voters listen to party promises. But once elections have passed and realities start to bear down, popular economic expectations sink rapidly.


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A related phenomenon is the politicization of everyday life and policy issues. By now there are magazines for dog-keepers, bird-watchers, fishing anglers and many other hobbies that voice right-wing or leftwing political views. It has been found that instead of discussing their monthly rents and other housing issues, tenants and owners of condominiums use political labels to denounce each other in meetings. Political identities intrude into the work realm, undermining impartiality. It is increasingly evident, for example, that leading lawyers and jurists, as well as journalists and other media practitioners, are not selected according to standards of competence but, rather, through bargains between the parties. Politics creeps into institutions that are regarded as of crucial importance for constitutional order. Both the Electoral Commission and the Constitutional Court have been heavily criticized for partisan decisions and political involvements. In these and many other domains, party rivalries divide the society, creeping into circles of families, friends, and neighbors. Congenial and reasonably sober discussions of public issues become more and more the exception. This is not Ronald Inglehart’s “cognitive mobilization” in a post-materialistic discourse; Hungary’s political leaders ignite and exploit a highly emotional discourse, alleging that rivals are traitors with dark records or would-be dictators who promise only the most baleful futures. Neither are such heated rivalries peculiar to Hungary, but in magnitude and extensiveness the Hungarian pattern appears to have few equals in Europe, with the possible exception of Poland during the era of Kaczynski twins’ dominance between 2005–2007. The Hungarian political elite is to be condemned less because of its rough-and-tumble competitions and more because leaders and factions try systematically to pit social groups against each other in service to their respective political dogmas. They question rivals’ national loyalties and honesty. A frail elite sense of safety and weak credibility reinforce each other. Political fear and alienation are induced in the public by staged partisan events and by the refusal of leaders to participate in cross-party public forums. Politicians counter their opponents’ street politics by emulating them. A “mediaization of politics” by the political elite is also apparent. Its essence is well described in the words of a former Free Democrat Party leader Gábor Kuncze: “Politics is now a stage on which each actor plays to his or her own audience.” The mass media have become mediators of these political performances and for the public the media sometimes

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seem to be at least as important as the politicians the media purport to cover. Media personalities present themselves as tough debaters, debunkers, and as impresarios of political debates staged as entertainment. Even the more ideologically balanced media outlets are unable to resist voicing artificially inflated political extremes, scandals, and sensations. The result is the well-known tabloid presentation of politics, in which political competitions are depicted as battles between heroes and villains (Kiss 2003; Mazzoleni and Schulz 2002). The tabloid depiction of politics is more about symbolic gestures and less about practical issues requiring discussion. A clear example was the demolition of a security cordon around the Parliament building by opposition politicians on the day that the prime minister announced a set of “reform roundtables” would soon be convened. Covering that day’s events, the media were full of opposition objections about the legal and moral aspects of the security cordon, with the prime minister’s announcement of new roundtables and the important reform issues they would address being ignored or only briefly mentioned. On this as on other recent occasions, political symbolism and ostensible political heroism trumped policy questions and political pragmatism. Periods of liminality and transition call forth tricksters and prophets, and Hungarians are witnessing both (Hankiss 2007). One can also observe a new kind of political double talk in which intra-elite communications are increasingly separated from elite-mass communications. Obviously, there can be and are specific features of communications among elites that center on complex facts and arguments about which the public knows and cares little. What is worrisome is when elites in communicating with each other say that something is “black” and then say to the public that it is “white”. This elite practice was on clear display in Prime Minister Gyurcsány’s now famous leaked discussion with a closed circle of top Socialist Party leaders, in which he stated that they had consistently and knowingly lied to the public about economic conditions. Still another worrisome aspect of recent elite behavior is questioning opponents’ legitimacy, to wit, “We refuse to be on speaking terms with liars!” Such intractability is obviously incompatible with the maintenance of elite consensus. Not to speak with political rivals and claim they are without integrity has far-reaching consequences for democratic elitism, a bedrock condition of which is accepting the legitimacy of other players in the political game. Combined with the tabloid treatment of politics, such intransigence leads quickly to political decay.


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MPs on opposing sides in parliament increasingly say that they do not question the other side’s legitimacy while at the same time assailing the legitimacy of the opposing side’s top leader. But in the atmosphere of personalized politics the legitimacy of a leader and the party he or she leads are one and the same thing in the public’s mind and as portrayed by the tabloid media. In March 2007, for example, the deputy leader of Fidesz declared that “Since Gyurcsány’s secret speech, we know that the Socialist Party lies even in the questions it asks” (Magyar Nemzet 2007). Thus the limits to elite consensus may be violated by gestures that wittingly or unwittingly fuel populist emotions. Statements of the opposition such as “Let the liars pay!” echo populist sentiments of “Let the rich pay!” and are incompatible with a democracy’s need for restrained and moderate political competitions. Hungarian (and neighboring) political elites are behaving as though they do not belong to an elite that has a distinctive and shared code of behavior. Statesman-like behavior is conspicuous by its absence, and this is hardly propitious for democratic consolidation. To say the least, it is unusual in a consolidating democracy that an uppermost leader like Gyurcsány should address party colleagues with a hyperbolic and shocking speech that exaggerates problems and is diametrically opposed to what he and his colleagues said publicly about those problems during the culmination of an immediately preceding election campaign. Nor does casting doubt on his rival’s mental health, as Viktor Orbán did in a leaked talk, enhance Hungary’s political culture. Chicanery is of course a staple of politics everywhere, and perhaps recent chicaneries in Hungarian politics will not prove fatal for the country’s democracy. But they hinder its consolidation and may be viewed as signposts on a road to simulated democracy. To extend this metaphor, political elites in Hungary have clearly reached a political crossroads. At the end of 2008 the need to discuss long-term strategic issues and engage in self-critical reflections was pressing. Amid a severe financial crisis the hostile elite camps began to communicate with each other and even began to agree about the danger of external economic pressures on Hungary. It remains to be seen, however, if these changes would move the political and associated elites toward consensus and restrained actions. The dominant elements of elite discourse in late 2008 continued to be essentially negative reactions to the economic crisis. There is, however, one dimension of Hungarian elite attitudes that has not been mentioned. This is the fact that there are no major

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elite differences as regards European integration, which Hungarian elites more or less uniformly view as desirable. Moreover, comparative research on the extent to which elites and mass publics in Hungary identify with “Europe” reveals that the gap between elites and the public is among the smallest in Europe (Lengyel 2008). This basic agreement among elites and citizens about Hungary’s place in Europe may contribute to restoring a broader elite consensus and greater amount of public trust. Lessons for Democratic Elitism Encouraging populist tendencies, indulging in a personalization and tabloid presentation of politics, politicizing everyday life and policy issues, questioning opponents’ legitimacy, sending one message to the public and another to elite colleagues, misusing public finances, evading taxes, and other forms of norm-breaching behavior – these are troublesome aspects of democratic elitism in Hungary and other East Central European countries. They are flagrant in Hungary where they reflect a malfunctioning of institutions and a waning sense of elite security and mutual trust. The situation carries some important lessons for democratic elitism. First, democratic elitism does not allow enough consideration of inequalities between competing elites and it instead tends to portray them as having more or less equal power and influence. A more realistic weighting and depiction of elite inequalities is necessary if the outcomes of competitions between party elites, business, governmental administrative, media, and other elite groups are to be captured accurately. Especially in new democracies, of which Hungary is one clear example, the role and influence of the business elite in politics must not be underestimated. Successful businessmen become top-level politicians, and successful politicians accumulate business largess. This a reason why politicians who have recently reached top positions differ in their behaviors from predecessors who learned political practices and progressed very gradually in politics by emulating those of the previous elite generation. Second, democratic elitism too readily neglects the richness of institutional variations. As a rule, modern liberal democracies are built on the basic institutions of representation, in which parties play the central parliamentary and electoral roles. But how parties are organized and how the governments they form are made accountable varies substantially


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from one country to another and from one time to another. Similarly, elite settlements may be quite varied in so far as what appears to be a settlement may turn out to be only a compromise of limited duration. Third, it is important that democratic elitism pay attention to the details of institutional functioning and elite actions. In particular, there is a risk that overall encapsulations of elites – such as a “consensually united elite” – are too broad to capture the diversity of elite behavior and the extent to which it accords with basic political game rules. By paying greater attention to details of institutions and elites, analyses of democratic transition and consolidation may be made more accurate. Finally, democratic elitism does not distinguish sufficiently between the political elite as a group and the always idiosyncratic but crucial personalities of political leaders. Distinguishing between elites and leaders is a necessity in the era of personalized politics. The actions of leaders are always tied to the structures and behavioral modalities of elites, but this is by no means the whole story of what happens politically. Moreover, not only do leaders as individuals require more attention, statesman-like qualities and different types of leaders need to be considered, especially the presence or absence of the transactional type of leader. In contemporary Hungarian politics and probably in the politics of most other post-socialist democracies, these shortcomings in democratic elitism constitute a kind of “negative synergy”. Nearly two decades since Hungary and other post-socialist countries democratized, changing and somewhat ominous patterns of elite behavior are hindering democratic consolidation. References Ahm, Thomas von. 2007. “Demokrácia, vagy utca?” (“Democracy or street?”) Politikatudományi Szemle, 1:113-128. Bartha, Attila. 2006. “Megint a purgatóriumban” (“In Purgatory Again”), Beszélő 11(7). Báger, Gusztáv-Andrea Korbuly. 2006. Anticorruption Strategies within the Competences of the Supreme Audit Institutions in the European Union: Hungary. Budapest: R &D Institute of the State Audit Office. Bibó, István. (1942) 2004. “The Elite and Social Sensitivity.” Review of Sociology 10.(2):103–114. Bozóki, András. 2007. “Hogyan reformáljunk?” (“How to do Reforms?”) 2000 3:3–12. Bruneau, Thomas, Nikiforos Diamanduoro, Richard Gunther, Arend Lijphart, Leonardo Morlino, and Risa A. Brooks. 2001. “Democracy, Southern European Style.” pp. 16–82 in Parties, Politics and Democracy in the New Southern Europe, edited by Nikiforos Diamandouros and Richard Gunther, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bryman, Alan. 1996. “Leadership in Organizations.” pp. 276–292 in Handbook of Organization Studies, edited by Stuart.R.Clegg, Sage: London. Burns, James MacGregor. 1987. Leadership. New York: Harper and Row.

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Carlyle, Thomas. (1841) 1923. Hősökről (On Heroes) Budapest: Athenaeum Rt. Carothers, Thomas. 2002. “The End of the Transition Paradigm.” Journal of Democracy 13(1):5–21. Csizmadia Ervin. 2006. “Politikai vezetők és politikai környezet” (“Political Leaders and Political Environment”). Politikatudományi Szemle I–II: 2–3; 4. Diamond, Larry. 2008. The Spirit of Democracy. New York: Times Books. Ehrke, Michael. 2006. “Magyarországi nyugtalanságok – A közép-európai csatlakozási válság szimptómája?” (“Hungarian Disorders – Symptoms of Central-European Accesion Crisis?”). www.fesbp.hu.hu Downloaded on 02.17 2007 Hankiss, Elemér. 2007. “Határhelyzet és átmenet” (“Liminality and Transition”). 2000 (2):3–15. Higley, John. 2007. “Elite and Leadership Change in Liberal Democracies.” pp. 13–22 in Érték és Valóság. Budapest: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Higley, John, and Jan Pakulski. 2002. “Az erő az úr: a szeptember 11-e utáni világ politikai elitje” (“Force to the Fore: The Political Elite of the World After 11 September”). Századvég 4:39–59. Hoffman, David. 2002. The Oligarchs. Wealth and Power in the New Russia. New York: Perseus. Ilonszki, Gabriella. 2004. “Ist die Kontinuitat der Elite von Bedeutung?” pp. 227–242 in Alte Eliten in jungen Demokratien?, edited by Hans-Joachim Veen, Koln Wiemar Wien: Böhlau Verlag. —— . 2008, “Rules, Norms and Stability Undermined.” pp. 129–142 in Public Finance and Post-Communist Party Development, edited by Steven D. Roper and Janis Ikstens, London: Ashgate, 129–142. Ilonszki, Gabriella, and Michael Edinger. 2007. “MPs in Post-Communist and PostSoviet Nations: A Parliamentary Elite in the Making.” Journal of Legislative Studies 13(1): 142–163. Inglehart, Ronald, and Christian Welzel. 2005. Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jung, Dong I., and Bruce J. Avolio. 2000. “Opening the Black Box: An Experimental Investigation of the Mediating Effects of Trust and Value Congruence on Transformational and Transactional Leadership.” Journal of Organizational Behaviour 21:949–964. Karácsony, Gergely. Ed. 2006. Parlamenti választás 2006 (Parliamentary elections 2006). Budapest: DKMKKA. —— 2006.a. “Árkok és légvárak” (“Ditches and Castles in the Air”). pp. 59–104 in Parlamenti választás 2006, edited by Gergely Karácsony, Budapest: DKMKKA. Kets de Vries, Manfred F.R. 2004. The New Russian Business Leaders. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Kiss, Balázs. 2003. ‘Kampány és tabloidizáció. A perszonalizáció jelentősége” (“Campaign and Tabloidization. The Importance of Personalization”). pp. 9–40 in Kampánykommunikáció. edited by Erika Sárközy and Dóra Schleicher, Budapest: Akadémiai K. Kirzner, Izrael. 1973. Competition and Entrepreneurship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kopint-Tárki. 2007. Economic Trends in Eastern Europe 1 (May). Budapest: Tárki. Kornai, János. 2007. “Mit jelent a ‘rendszerváltás’? Kísérlet a fogalom tisztázására” (“What Does ‘Systemic Change’ Mean? An Essay on the Clarification of the Concept”). Közgazdasági Szemle 54(4):303–325. Körösényi, András. 2005. Vezér és demokrácia. Politikaelméleti tanulmányok (Leaders and Democracy. Studies in Political Theory). Budapest: L’Harmattan. Krekó, Judit, and P. Kiss Gábor. 2007. Adóelkerülés és a magyar adórendszer (Tax Evasion and the Hungarian Tax System). Budapest: MNB.


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Lengyel, György. 2007. A magyar gazdasági elit társadalmi összetétele a huszadik század végén (The Social Composition of the Hungarian Economic Elite at the End of the 20th Century). Budapest: Akadémiai K. —— . Ed. 2008. A magyar politikai és gazdaság elit EU-képe (The EU Image of the Hungarian Political and Economic Elite). Budapest: Új Mandátum K. Leopold, Lajos. (1918) 1988. “Színlelt kapitalizmus” (“Simulated Capitalism”). Medvetánc 2(3):321–351. Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Magyar Nemzett. 2007. “Kiss Péter is Orbánnal foglalkozik” (“Péter Kiss Deals with Orbán, Too”). 23 March:2. Mainwaring, Scott, and Zoco Edurne. 2007. ”Political Sequences and the Stabilization of Interparty Competition. Electoral Volatility in Old and New Democracies.” Party Politics 13:2–20. MPA Magyar Parlamenti Adatbázis (Hungarian Parliamentary Database). 2007:06–06. Martin, József Péter. 2006. “Ördögi körök” (“Vicious Circles”). Beszélő 11(9). Mazzoleni, Gianpietro, and Winfried Schulz. 2002. “A politika ‘mediatizációja’: kihívás a demokrácia ellen?” Politikatudományi Szemle 1–2:135–155. O’Donnell, Guillermo, and Philippe C. Schmitter. 1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. OECD 2005. Economic Surveys. Hungary. Paris: OECD. OECD 2006. Factbook. Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics. Paris: OECD. OECD 2007. Economic Policy Reforms. Going for Growth. Paris: OECD. Offe, Claus. 1996. “Political Economy: Sociological Perspectives.” pp. 675–690 in A New Handbook of Political Science. edited by Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sándor, Mónika. 2005. “Competition in Classroom: Primary School Teachers’ View in Hungary, Slovenia and the UK.” pp. 111–117 in Teaching Citizenship, edited by Alan Ross, London: Metropolitan University. Seligman, Lester G. 1950. “The Study of Political Leadership.” American Political Science Review 44:904–915. Semjén, András, Zoltán Szántó, and I. János Tóth. 2001. Adócsalás és adóigazgatás. Mikroökonómiai modellek és empirikus elemzések a rejtett gazdaságról (Tax Evasion and Tax Administration. Microeconomic Models and Empirical Analyses of the Hidden Economy). Budapest: Aula. Tóka, Gabor. 2006. “Vezérek csodálói” (“Admirers of Leaders”)/ pp. 17–58 in Parlamenti választás 2006, edited by Gergely Karácsony, Budapest: DKMKKA. Welzel, Christian. 2002. “Effective Democracy, Mass Culture and the Quality of Elites: The Human Development Perspective.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 43:317–349.

THE ASSAULT ON DEMOCRATIC ELITISM IN POLAND Jacek Wasilewski Democratic elitism appears to have withstood a severe test in Poland during this century’s first decade. To comprehend the test one has to go back to the democratic transition year of 1989. Sitting at the famous Round Table between February and April 1989, leaders of the major elite camps that supported and opposed Poland’s state socialist regime negotiated a transition to democracy. The Round Table negotiations between elites in Warsaw pioneered a method of regime change that elites in neighboring Soviet Bloc countries, notably Hungary, quickly emulated. The Polish negotiations amounted to a basic settlement among elites that had been deeply disunited under the authoritarian state socialist regime (Linz and Stepan 1996:255–292; Higley and Burton 2006:86–88). Entailing a relatively comprehensive set of understandings and political trade-offs, this settlement paved the way for rapid democratization under a more united political elite that displayed considerable internal accommodation and much consensus about democratic game rules during the years that followed. From the outset, however, a few leaders and small elite groups who played no role in Poland’s elite-driven and essentially surreptitious transition to democracy criticized it sharply. But until 2005, all governing and main opposition elites respected, albeit often only tacitly, the deal that was struck at the 1989 Round Table.1 The Kaczynski twins, Lech and Jaroslaw,2 whose Law and Justice Party (PiS) emerged as the clear winner of the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2005, were the first Polish leaders – Lech

1 The short-lived coalition government led by Jan Olszewski, from December 1991 to June 1992, which had among its members the Center Alliance party led by Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, tried unsuccessfully to discredit the Round Table pact. 2 The twins were democratic opposition activists in the late 1970s, Solidarity leaders/ strategists in the 1980s, and close collaborators of Lech Walesa during his presidential campaign (1990) and the first year of his presidency. Lech was Walesa’s national security adviser and Jaroslaw was chief of staff in the President’s Chancellery. In 1991 they broke with Walesa, opposing his reconciliation stance towards post-communists and other left-oriented groupings. Becoming fierce critics of Walesa, Lech Kaczynski served

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Kaczynski as president, and brother Jaroslaw as prime minister – to challenge openly the 1989 elite settlement. They portrayed the Round Table negotiations as the source of much that they regarded as wrong with Poland’s politics and institutions. Presenting themselves as visionaries who were not listened to during the transition era (Wasilewski 2001), the Kaczynski brothers and their supporters promised to void or reverse the political, economic, and symbolic choices made seventeen years earlier. Their program was to return Poland to the seminal years of 1989–1990 while ignoring many of the structural and societal developments that had occurred since. Before the Kaczynskis’ political victory in 2005 the consensual unity of Polish elites had, of course, never been complete, but there were numerous indications that it was strengthening steadily (Wasilewski 1998; Mach and Wesołowski 2000; Higley and Lengyel 2000). The major and politically ascendant elite groups adhered to the formal and informal rules of democratic elitism and liberal democratic politics. Populist leaders and elites critical of the dominant liberal and reconciliatory stream, among them the Kaczynskis, were located at the margins of Polish politics. But after the Law and Justice party’s parliamentary and presidential victories in 2005, relations between competing elites soured greatly, to the point that further consolidation of Poland’s democracy came to a halt. Elite consensus about basic democratic game rules and the goals of fundamental foreign and domestic policies eroded badly.3 Under the dominance of the Kaczynski twins and the coalition government in which PiS was the principal force, there were numerous signs that Poland’s consensually united elite was degenerating into a disunited elite, with democratic elitism ceasing to be the modus operandi of Polish politics.4 How can one explain this unexpected

as president of the Supreme Chamber of Control (1992–95), minister of justice (2000– 2001), and mayor of Warsaw (2003–2005). Jaroslaw Kaczynski, until his premiership in 2006, held no formal offices in government and devoted himself exclusively to party work, as founder and president of Center Alliance (1990–97), and later as founder and president of Law and Justice (after 2001). 3 Possibly the best summary of recent and crucial policy disagreements is provided by Adam Michnik (2007) in his collection of 2005–2007 essays W poszukiwaniu utraconego sensu (In search of a lost sense). 4 Higley and Burton define a disunited elite as follows: “Structural integration and value consensus are minimal in the sense that communication and influence networks do not cross partisan lines and elite sector boundaries in any comprehensive way. Partisan factions and elites in different sectors manifestly distrust each other and engage in unrestrained, often violent struggles for dominance that have a zero-sum or politics as war character” (2006:14).

the assault on democratic elitism in poland

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and profound change in Polish politics, and does it signal the end of democratic elitism in Poland? The Kaczynskis’ Threat to Democratic Elitism The Law and Justice party won the 2005 elections under a revolutionary banner. It correctly diagnosed the legacy of the 2001–2005 government headed by the post-communist Socialist Left Alliance (SLD). PiS accusations of widespread corruption in the political establishment, ties to suspicious businesses, and distance from ordinary people were well founded. The SLD establishment was involved in a series of bribery scandals that blackened its image and dramatically reduced its popular support, from 41% of voters in the 2001 election to single digits in 2004.5 The first in a series of scandals, recounted by Aleks Szczerbiak, was “the so-called ‘Rywin affair’ at the end of 2002. This centered on allegations that individuals linked to the Democratic Left Alliance, including the media mogul and film producer Lew Rywin, demanded payment from the newspaper publisher Agora in return for favorable changes to the government’s media regulation law. The televised public hearings of the special parliamentary commission set up in January 2003 to investigate the allegations revealed close links between Rywin and senior media figures associated with the Democratic Left Alliance and drew in numerous government officials, including Miller himself.” (Szczerbiak 2007:205). Breaking radically with the moderate and “cohabitation” politics of previous governments, as PiS promised to do in its 2001 electoral manifesto (Slodkowska 2002:89–126), did not attract voters. But in 2005, PiS proposed an even more radical break with existing politics and this time its promise was well received, garnering 27% of votes in the parliamentary elections, a proportion large enough to form a minority government.6 5 Analyses of the 2001–2005 SLD government and the major scandals that toppled it are provided by Millard (2006), Szczerbiak (2007), and Jasiewicz (2008a). See also Pakulski and Wasilewski (2006), Kucharczyk and Wysocka (2008). 6 After the 2005 election a minority PiS government led by Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz was formed. To overcome that government’s weakness, in April 2006 Jaroslaw Kaczynski signed a coalition agreement with two minor and populist parties, Self-Defense and League of Polish Families. As a consequence, the Marcinkiewicz cabinet was reshuffled, and leaders of both junior partners received deputy prime minister and ministerial posts in Agriculture and Education, while their party colleagues obtained three other ministerial portfolios. In July 2006 Jaroslaw Kaczynski realized that he could no

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The 2005 election showed that a significant proportion of voters shared the Law and Justice diagnosis. They liked its anti-corruption drive and promised overhaul of the legal system, as well as its uncompromising hostility toward persons who had played roles, however minor, in the state socialist regime. Moreover, large numbers of these voters shared the Kaczynskis’ social conservatism on issues such as homosexuality, abortion, women’s rights, and morals, together with the belief in an anachronistic 19th century national sovereignty. PiS leaders succeeded in mobilizing much of the discontent among people and groups who saw themselves as losers in post-communist Poland: the occupationally insecure and poorly educated; inhabitants of rural areas and provincial towns; elderly people with strong attachments to traditional Catholicism and nationalist values. The Kaczynskis played skillfully on the mass public’s fears, national resentments, anti-elitist sentiments, and hatred of communism. They trafficked in a plebiscitary and warlike political discourse that depicted Poland as divided into two mutually hostile camps. One consisted of morally upright, patriotic, honest leaders and voters; the other was made up of corrupt, greedy, libertine, and cosmopolitan figures belonging to a “network” (uklad) that was ostensibly forged during state socialism and the transition years and that dominated the country secretly. PiS claimed to embody and represent the former camp, and it accused virtually all other elites and political parties of belonging to the latter. Its main campaign slogan, Polska Solidarna vs. Polska Liberalna (Poland of social solidarity vs. liberal Poland), deliberately resurrected the “us versus them” cleavage of the 1980s when Poland was ruled under martial law.7

longer remain on the sidelines and he took the prime ministership. An observer in the Institute of Political Affairs in Warsaw described the PiS-led coalition as follows: “The three parties which formed the coalition sought legitimacy for their project from the fact that none of them previously formed a part of the government coalition. As such they could not be held responsible for the weaknesses of the process of democratic and market reforms initiated after the fall of communism and concluded with Poland’s entry into the EU in May 2004. This claim of political ‘virginity,’ coupled with the denunciation of the political, but also the economic and intellectual elites, gave the new ruling coalition a populist orientation, which remained its trademark until the early elections in October 2007 ended its hold on power” (Kucharczyk 2007:7–8). 7 Particularly insulting for former oppositionists and Solidarity leaders who had broken with the Kaczynskis during the 1980s and 1990s was a speech by Jaroslaw Kaczynski at a pro-government rally at the Gdansk Shipyard (the cradle of Solidarity) in October 2006, in which he compared the entire opposition, including Civic Platform, which is composed of former Freedom Union democrats and most other liberal-minded fighters against communist rule, to ZOMO, the communist regime’s paramilitary riot police.


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The Law and Justice party’s diagnosis of Poland’s transition from state socialism contained the following claims.8 First, Poland’s democratic transition was engineered in a secret project or plot by a tiny group of communist reformers and their left-oriented opponents, the latter consisting mainly of Solidarity leaders and advisers, among them top figures of post-1989 politics: president Walesa, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first non-communist prime minister, Bronislaw Geremek, the main architect of Round Table accords from the Solidarity side and minister of foreign affairs 1997–2000, as well as many other leading actors in Poland’s democratization. Second, the post-communist regime – the Third Republic – is the creation of post-communists and their allies, and from its very beginning it has been a mechanism for holdover elites from state socialism and their secret partners from the democratic opposition to secure their political and economic interests with the support of international capital and foreign agencies that act in concert with some of Poland’s secret services. Third, the worlds of politics, business, media, and civil society in the Third Republic have been penetrated thoroughly by former political police informers and military intelligence officers whose primary loyalty is to foreign patrons, many of whom are located in Moscow. Fourth, throughout its brief history the Third Republic has actually been ruled by a mysterious and corrupt “network” of former communists, elected representatives, government administrators, domestic and foreign business leaders, media operatives, ex-informers and police 8 My reconstruction of Law and Justice views and aims draws on two official party documents: a 55-page declaration, Polska katolicka w chrzescijanskiej Europie (Catholic Poland in Christian Europe), issued in April 2005; a September 2005 electoral manifesto titled IV Rzeczpospolita – Sprawiedliwosc dla wszystkich (The Fourth Republic – Justice for All). A preamble to the latter document announces a radical shift in Polish politics involving a profound rebuilding of the state, a crucial reorientation of social and economic policies, a restoration of their moral dimension. Both documents are available at www.pis.org.pl/dokumenty/php I also draw on press reports and interviews with Jaroslaw Kaczynski in the newspapers Rzeczpospolita (March 8, 2007; September 13, 2007; October 26, 2007), Dziennik (July 29, 2006; October 10, 2006), and Gazeta Wyborcza (February 5, 2006). I rely further on the parliamentary speech by Jaroslaw Kaczynski on February 17, 2006 and the expose he presented to parliament on July 19, 2006. Finally, I take material from two reports of the Institute of Public Affairs, an independent think-tank in Warsaw: Democracy in Poland 2005–2007 and Populist Politics and Liberal Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as a stenographic record of the academic panel Przyszlosc polskiej sceny politycznej (The future of the Polish political scene) held at the Institute of Public Affairs on December 12, 2006. All three documents are available at www.isp.org.pl

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collaborators, along with an array of experts, ideologists, and people in the professions. Close interpersonal relations, common secret interests, cronyism, and nepotism tie this powerful network together (IV Rzeczpospolita – Sprawiedliwosc dla wszystkich, 2005: 7–10). It originated in the transition from state socialism, and among its most important members have been former presidents Walesa and Aleksander Kwasniewski, all former prime ministers except Jan Olszewski, all ministers of foreign affairs, and very nearly all other prominent figures in Polish public life during the 1990s and the ensuing decade.9 Fifth, the “network” is still very powerful, perhaps even more powerful than ever. Recent evidence, during 2007, of its power was its success in inserting several traitors into the core leadership of Law and Justice, among them Janusz Kaczmarek, who after serving as deputy minister of justice and the country’s chief prosecutor became minister of the interior, together with the former commander-in-chief of the police force and the president of the largest insurance company controlled by the state.10 Sixth and last, in the international arena the Third Republic has adopted a submissive posture towards its partners, especially Russia and Germany, and it has joined the European Union on disadvantageous terms. These PiS claims, though vastly exaggerated and insulting to many heroes of the struggle against communism, nevertheless had some substance because politicized capitalist practices and mysterious ties across the business-politics boundary were undeniable. To remedy this state of affairs, the PiS party program proposed to make the following fundamental changes. First, abolish the post-communist 9 The Economist in its internet edition of February 17, 2007 gives the following description of the uklad: “In their [the Kaczynski brothers] eyes, a sinister combination of crooked businessmen, corrupt officials and lawless spooks has consolidated economic and administrative power, usurping what should have been an anti-communist revolution. This putative coalition of post-communist interest groups and clans is commonly called, in Polish, the uklad, a word which can be translated both as ‘deal’ and ‘establishment.’ ” I agree with the balanced judgment of Krzysztof Jasiewicz: “Without denying that the members of the old nomenklatura had the means, legal and illegal, formal and informal, to enrich themselves in the process of privatization and economic liberalization, and that some former dissidents could not resist the temptation to better their lot and used old and new connections to this end, it is still doubtful that there is in fact a single powerful network running Poland behind the scenes” (2008:13). 10 All of these individuals were fired by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and detained for questioning after being accused of hindering an investigation of corruption.


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Third Republic by purging the former communist collaborators in the “network” through extensive screening procedures under a lustration law (see IV Rzeczpospolita – Sprawiedliwosc dla wszystkich 2005, chapter “Cleaning of the State”:16–19) and launching a process to “reclaim” the country’s political, judicial, economic, media, and social institutions for the good of Poland.11 Second, establish a Fourth Republic that, in contrast to the Third Republic of 1989–2005, would rest on moral principles and real social solidarity achieved through an extensive welfare program anathema to “liberalism”. The putative Fourth Republic was invoked by the PiS to symbolize a reckoning with the past and a moral revolution (Millard 2006:1029). Third, in foreign policy PiS would defend the national interest in a tough way, using without hesitation its right to veto EU decisions and policies it regarded as contrary to Poland’s interests. Under PiS governance the Fourth Republic would, in short, break cleanly and sharply with previous institutions and policies. However, altering institutional arrangements on such a large scale would require major amendments to the constitution, for the passage of which the PiS government had nowhere near enough votes in parliament. Still, within the existing constitutional framework the party intended to make several basic institutional changes, and it immediately set about “re-claiming” (odzyskane) institutions by appointing Kaczynski loyalists to key positions, even though some of the appointees were clearly unqualified for the positions.12 11 The report of the Institute of Public Affairs described this PiS “moral revolution” as follows: “The ideology of the end of post-communism served as a justification for controversial policies of the new government, such as capturing the public media and the media regulatory agency, firing experienced managers in state-owned companies to make room for political cronies, dissolving the civil service and revoking the regulations limiting political appointments in public administration and engaging in a number of other practices which it strongly condemned when they were used by previous governments. Law and Justice justified its capture of democratic institutions and procedures by pointing out that since all the people who contributed to building the Third Republic belong by definition to the uklad, the party could not be too careful and must choose its most trusted and loyal people to chair and serve in key public institutions. The same theory was used to pre-empt all criticism: they argued that media who expose incompetence and corruption of Law and Justice protégés, were simply defending the uklad. This makes the ideology of 'the end of post-communism' irrefutable in the Popperian sense, thus precluding any possibility of rational discussion” (Kucharczyk and Wysocka 2008:85). 12 “We reclaimed public television,” declared Jaroslaw Kaczynski, after changing the bill on public media that enabled him as prime minister to appoint his candidates to the National Broadcasting Council and to the Polish TV Board. He said the same

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jacek wasilewski The Critical 2005 Election

The parliamentary elections in September 2005, with a turnout of only 40.6%, as well as the following presidential election a month later, with a turnout of 51%, were fought principally by six parties whose main features and policy preferences can be encapsulated as follows: Democratic Left Alliance (SLD): post-communists now belonging to the social democratic family of parties, pro-EU, moderate in terms of welfare measures and economic policies, and consisting on the one hand of former state socialist apparatchiks, and on the other of persons with “new left” attachments. Polish Peasant Party (PSL): independent small farmers descended from the United Peasant Party during state socialism. Law and Justice (PiS): strong anti-communists and anti-postcommunists, shrilly nationalist, populist, and skeptical about the EU and Western values, led single-handedly by Jaroslaw Kaczynski.13 Self-Defense (SO): extreme populists and proponents of radical welfarism, many of whom held low-ranking government and other posts during state socialism; anti-EU, and led in a markedly authoritarian way by Andrzej Lepper.14 after appointing a new Minister of Foreign Affairs and purging the majority of experienced diplomats. Possibly the mostly criticized of the Kaczynskis’ nominations was that of Wojciech Jasinski as minister of the state treasury. During the 1970s Jasinski had been a communist party member and head of the interior department in a provincial town, an office that by definition required close collaboration with the secret political police. A classmate of Jaroslaw Kaczynski during law studies, Jasinski in the 1990s joined the Kaczynskis’ party, the Center Alliance, and served as vice-minister of justice under Lech Kaczynski in 2000–01. 13 A clear sign of Kaczynski’s iron rule of PiS was his suspension of three top PiS leaders (two of them party vice-presidents) in Spring 2007 for advocating more open party discussion. Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s dominance was also signified by the number of times “president of the party” appeared in party statutes: 53 times (at least twice on every page). By contrast, Civic Platform’s statute mentioned “president of the party” 13 times (about once every three pages), PSL’s statute mentioned it 15 times (once every two pages), and League of Polish Families did so 14 times (a little more than once per page). Self-Defense had a vague 3 page-long document that could hardly be considered a party statute, in which “president of the party” was mentioned three times. 14 Political Data Yearbook 2007 described SO as follows: “Self-Defense (Samoobrona) has been completely dominated by its charismatic and demagogic leader, Andrzej Lepper, who founded the party in the early 1990s as a radical union of farmers, which subsequently also registered as a political party. […] Its support for state interventionism and opposition to market mechanisms place it on the far left; in addition, there are strong authoritarian and xenophobic strains in its pronouncements and actions” (European Journal of Political Research 2007:1068–69).


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League of Polish Families (LPR): far right, xenophobic and antiWestern Catholic fundamentalists descended distantly from the preWorld War II National Democracy Party that had anti-Semitic and fascist overtones. LPR is led by a young leader, Roman Giertych, who comes from a family with a tradition of nationalistic politics.15 Civic Platform (PO): moderately liberal, pro-EU, and constituting an amalgamation of center-right political tendencies. Donald Tusk, the leader of PO, has been Poland’s prime minister since the October 2007 parliamentary election.16 As can be seen in Table 10.1, the outcome of the 2005 parliamentary election was a dramatic shift in the distribution of seats and power in the lower house of parliament, the Sejm. This shift gave the Kaczynski brothers and their PiS the upper hand. PiS received 27% of the popular vote, won 155 of the 460 Sejm seats, and also won 49 of 100 Senate seats. A month later Lech Kaczynski won the presidential election, defeating Civic Platform’s Donald Tusk in the runoff election by 54% to 46% of votes. In the parliamentary election the next largest party and the principal competitor of PiS was Civic Platform (PO), which received 24.1% of votes and won 133 seats in the Sejm, plus 34 seats in the Senate. The incumbent post-communist Democratic Left Alliance suffered a massive loss, receiving only 11% of the votes and winning only 55 Sejm seats, compared with the 216 seats it held after 2001; moreover, the Alliance did not win a single Senate seat. Changing Political Game Rules Power wielding by the Kaczynski brothers and their coalition partners after the 2005 elections was in most respects the reverse of what had prevailed during the previous fifteen years in Polish politics. It challenged many of the formal and virtually all the informal rules and practices of democratic elitism. The Kaczynski brothers openly declared a new political mission, namely, ridding Poland of the Third Republic’s alleged pathologies (see the chapter in IV Rzeczpospolita…on 15 His grandfather Jedrzej Giertych and his father Maciej Giertych were both politicians and leaders of Polish nationalists. Maciej Giertych was LPR’s candidate in the 2005 presidential election. 16 Both PiS and PO are post-Solidarity political parties formed in 2001. PiS attracted more conservative and radical anti-communist leaders and members of Solidarity, while PO attracted centrists and liberals.

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Table 10.1. elections

Party composition of the Sejm after 2001, 2005, and 2007

Term

Democratic Left Alliance (SLD)

Polish Peasant Party (PSL)

Civic Plat- Selfform (PO) Defense (SO)

Law and Justice (PiS)

League Total of Polish seats* Families (LPR)

200105

216 (47%)

42 (9%)

65 (14%)

53 (12%)

44 (10%)

38 (8%)

460 100%

133 (29%)

56 (12%)

155 (34%)

34 (7%)

460 100%

governing coalition 200507

55 (12%)

25 (5%)

governing coalition (since April 2006) 200711

53 (11%)

31 (7%)

209 (45%)

–

166 (36%)

–

460 100%

governing coalition * Two seats in 2001 and 2005, and one in 2007, were held by the German Minority electoral committee.

“Strengthening the State”). While it would be an exaggeration to say that the Kaczynskis set about destroying Poland’s liberal democracy, restrained partisanship, politics-as-bargaining, and other hallmarks of democratic elitism attenuated rapidly and sharply. The following political practices replaced those of democratic elitism: Elite politics as warfare: After 2005 a “clear and present danger” was said to be stalking Poland, to wit: In both domestic and foreign affairs “we Poles” are surrounded by a hostile world that threatens our sovereignty and development. Depending on the situation “we Poles” were defined as PiS members, the PiS-headed government, Catholics, patriots, or the Polish nation itself. “We” are victims; “they” are aggressors.17 Domestically, the principal “they” were the post-communists, who were depicted as an insidious force, but “they” included former Solidarity and democratic opposition leaders such as Walesa, Mazowiewcki, Michnik, and Geremek. Externally, the number one “they” were either the Russians or the Germans, Poland’s historic enemies. All critics of PiS, foreign and domestic, whatever their persuasion, were a collective enemy so that those not with PiS were deemed to be against it and its mission. 17

“Unprecedented aggression” was a favorite phrase of Jaroslaw Kaczynski.


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Elite ideological zeal and parochialism: Political actions and outcomes were claimed to be products of non-negotiable ideological beliefs. Fierce conservatism, ultra-nationalism, and parochial discourse pervaded politics and attracted the most traditionalist segments of society, among them Catholic fundamentalists and opponents of the EU. On the one hand, this rhetoric appeared chosen deliberately and employed strategically by the PiS leaders; on the other hand, it reflected their lack of international experience and familiarity with contemporary Western countries. Elite distrust: No one could be trusted because the “network” was everywhere. Personal loyalty to the twin brothers was the major criterion for recruitment to top elite positions. Thus, virtually all powerful positions within the presidential and prime ministerial chancelleries came to be held by persons who were close associates of Lech Kaczynski during the years during which he had been president of the Supreme Chamber of Control, minister of justice, and mayor of Warsaw. These top office-holders were augmented by a narrow coterie of Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s personal friends and close co-workers in his old Center Alliance party. Elite control of civil society: Civil society organizations and autonomous professional associations of lawyers, doctors, journalists, and academics could not be trusted because most of them emerged or reemerged during the negotiated democratic transition in 1989. This meant that they were probably components of the “network” and might well be controlled or steered by ex-communist functionaries and agents, and possibly also by foreign interests. All of these entities were to be regarded with suspicion and their autonomy was to be limited and placed under state control. In general, civic participation in politics and public life was undesirable unless conducted in the framework of state-controlled organizations led by trusted patriots. Severed elite communication links and propaganda wars: Communications between elite sectors, even between the government coalition’s own segments, decreased sharply. Leaders of the coalition parties Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Andrzej Lepper, and Roman Giertych – met infrequently and usually only in situations of political crisis. There appeared to be no communication channels at all between PiS and the two major opposition parties, PO and SLD. Instead, leaders of the three biggest parties communicated indirectly with each other, using the public media and press briefings to transmit views to their counterparts. There was no overt or even tacit cooperation and restraint between the half

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dozen party elites; each sought to outmaneuver the others. In this situation politics became volatile and unpredictable. Propaganda wars, accusations, and counter-accusations were constant and dominant political motifs. Elite autocracy: All three parties in the governing coalition had strong leaders. Even high-ranking activists had little say in party undertakings. There was, in short, an extreme personalization of power in the three coalition parties. Technical and procedural rules did not count; what was decisive was the party leader’s will. Instances of bending or flouting legal rules in order to adapt them to each leader’s will, along with hasty changes in legal and institutional structures aimed at securing the governing coalition’s immediate interests, occurred frequently. For example, a law passed in December 2005 terminated the tenures of the National Broadcasting Council’s members and reduced the Council’s size from nine to five. All five members who were then appointed were the governing coalition’s candidates, which left the opposition parties without a single representative on the Council. Similarly, the law governing elections was amended less than three months before local elections were held in 2006, despite vehement protests from the entire opposition, whose members left parliament’s lower house, the Sejm, when the final vote on the law took place. As a further and especially ominous example, a lustration law, which even many PiS supporters considered faulty and unconstitutional, was pushed through the Sejm, signed by President Kaczynski, and it took effect on March 15, 2007. According to this law, nearly 700,000 citizens and foreigners, including journalists, academics, lawyers, schoolmasters, and executives of public and private companies, plus all politicians and public officials, were required within a month to submit declarations that reported any contacts they had with the state socialist security services between 1944 and 1990. Eventually, however, the Constitution Tribunal ruled the law unconstitutional and suspended the screening process. Zero-sum elite competitions: Extraordinary and ad hoc parliamentary committees, composed exclusively of the government coalition’s deputies, took on the status of standing committees. For example, a special committee to deal with draft bills put forth by the government seriously diminished the role of the Sejm’s standing Legislative Committee. Meanwhile, “re-claiming” virtually all governmental and public agencies and businesses in which the state had some ownership meant taking them over in practice. Thus, PiS loyalists were appointed as presidents and chief executive officers of the public radio


185

and TV stations, the National Bank, the largest commercial bank and the largest insurance company, the principal petroleum corporation, and numerous other entities. The only two important public institutions not “re-claimed” were the Supreme Chamber of Control and the Constitutional Tribunal. “Re-claiming” the Constitutional Tribunal was difficult because its justices held nine-year appointments, though the Kaczynski brothers were able to fill four vacancies that occurred between 2005–2007. Elite Circulation Developments in Poland under the Kaczynski-led government amounted to a dramatic retrogression from liberal to illiberal democratic politics. How can this be explained? One of its most important causes was a deep and wide elite circulation that had two aspects. The first was the sudden opening up of political space resulting from the self-destruction of the Democratic Left Alliance and its postcommunist allies while in government between 2001–2005 (Pakulski and Wasilewski 2006). The SLD’s unprecedented 2001 parliamentary victory – previously no party had won more than 40% of the popular vote – together with its 2002 local and regional election victories produced an arrogance and sense of impunity among SLD cadres. But a series of corruption scandals, covered extensively by watchdog media, toppled the SLD-PSL coalition government led by Leszek Miller in May 2004, one day after Poland formally entered the EU (Millard 2006; Jasiewicz 2008a). Occurring a year and a half before the parliamentary elections scheduled for September 2005, the SLD-PSL government’s collapse made a dramatic change in the political opportunity structure, creating an unexpected political vacuum that could be filled by others. The PiS, which had been the most radical and uncompromising critic of the SLD,18 eagerly stepped into the newly opened space. This change in the political opportunity structure was the first cause of the 2005 power shift in Poland. There was, however, an equally important second cause. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s the people who constituted the political elite were those who had been personally involved in the 1989 Round Table settlement and 18 In 2004 PiS had demanded that the SLD be outlawed on the ground that it was a criminal organization.

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democratic transition, and who had before 1989 been opponents of state socialism or reformers within the Polish United Workers’ Party. It is not too much to say that between 1990–2005 Poland was ruled by the “Round Table generation” whose members held nearly all of the national elite positions. During those fifteen years, however, a new generation of elites was beginning to emerge. Its members consisted of persons too young to have played leading roles in the democratic transition, but who, by the late 1990s, began to find their political aspirations and careers blocked or at least slowed by the hold that the Round Table generation had on power. The sudden opening of elite posts brought about by the SLD’s self-destruction and the SLD-PSL government’s downfall in 2004 energized young, ambitious, and impatient aspirants in the opposition parties and intensified their pressures on more senior colleagues. In their pursuits of elite status these young aspirants often used radicalism as a weapon, and the strongly anti-SLD youngsters in the PiS were the most radical. It was not surprising, therefore, to observe subsequently that the most enthusiastic supporters of the effort to lustrate upwards of 700,000 Poles were young politicians, even though they personally had had little or no experience of state socialism.19 Providing data about deputies in the Sejm after 2001, Tables 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4 display the extent of this elite circulation. Newcomers to the 2005–07 Sejm, who could be regarded as representing a new political elite generation, did not differ from “old” deputies or newcomers in the 2001–05 Sejm – who had in large proportion been SLD deputies – so far as gender, living in their constituencies, and levels of education were concerned. But the 2005–07 Sejm newcomers differed significantly from earlier newcomers in terms of age: in 2005 they were on average three years younger than 2001 Sejm newcomers had been when elected, and more than three quarters of the newcomers in 2005 had been 25 years of age or less in 1980, the year Solidarity was born. Consequently, the 2005 newcomers could have had little or no political involvements and experiences during the last years of communism. Indeed, more than 80% of them were completely inactive politically during those years, compared with just 55% of the newcomers in 2001.

19 For example, the PiS representative who defended the lustration law before the Constitutional Tribunal was Arkadiusz Mularczyk, a lawyer and MP, born in 1971.


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Table 10.2. Selected characteristics of Sejm members and newcomers during the 2001–2005 and 2005–2007 terms Term

% of % female mean age % 25 years % of veterand % of age and newbelow 40* less in 1989 comers ans** and in 1980 (below)

% living in a constituency

% with university education

2001–05

20

48,2 14%

13 46

55

20

84

81

2005–07

20

46,6 22%

32 68

60

12

85

85

Newcom- 22 ers 2001– 05

47,2 17%

15 52

100

–

86

90

Newcom- 21 ers 2005– 07

44,1 31%

42 76

100

–

88

86

* At the time of election ** Served in three consecutive terms

Table 10.3. Political backgrounds of Sejm members and newcomers in 2001 and 2005 Communist period

Democratic period*

No activ- ComOpposition ity** munist politics***

No activ- Local Leading party ity politics positions or government office

2001–05

42

45

13

16

42

73

2005–07

70

17

13

14

60

66

Newcomers 55 2001–05

35

10

19

55

64


7

10

15

68

64

Term

* Data refer to activity before a deputy’s first election to the Sejm, ** Includes cases with no information about political involvement before 1989. *** Includes positions in local and regional administration, nomenclatura positions, and membership in the Polish United Workers’ Party.

21

26

19

28

2005–07



10

11

14

16

16

13

16

11

* Mostly middle-ranking managers and officials and semi-professionals.

25

8

20

10

15

17

8

13

7

Other occupational background*

26

Farmers, bluecollars, craftsmen and merchants

2001–05

Higher/medium local/ regional selfgovernment officials

Teachers, journalists, and other intelligentsia

Term

Managers Higher/ & business- medium men party & state bureaucrats

Occupational backgrounds of Sejm members and newcomers in 2001 and 2005

Table 10.4.

267

255

451

444

Total N=100%

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The 2005 newcomers also differed from their predecessors as regards political activity after 1989: nearly 70% had backgrounds in local politics, and 16% at the time they were elected to the Sejm in 2005 held higher or mid-level offices in local and regional governments. As far as occupational backgrounds are concerned (see Table 10.4), a large proportion of the 2005 newcomers were teachers, journalists, or other members of the mostly humanities-centered intelligentsia. This suggests a prevalence of ideologues over technocrats among the new Sejm deputies in 2005. Tables 10.5 and 10.6 record the 2005 newcomers’ party affiliations, ignoring newcomers from the SLD and Peasant Party because of their tiny numbers. Newcomers affiliated with Law and Justice and with Civic Platform had more frequently been opponents of state socialism, while those affiliated with Self-Defense had more frequently been involved in the politics of the state socialist regime. Bear in mind, however, that a majority of newcomers affiliated with all parties in 2005 were too young before 1989 to take part in politics. With regard to post-1989 politics, both Law and Justice and Civic Platform newcomers Table 10.5. Political backgrounds of the 2005 Sejm newcomers by party Party

Communist period No activity

Law and Justice (PiS)

Communist politics

Democratic period Opposition

No activity

Local politics

Leading party positions or government office

84

2

15

10

70

66

League of Polish Families (LPR)

90

10

–

10

62

76

SelfDefense (SO)

83

17

–

31

53

47

Civic Platform (PO)

85

5

14

18

70

59

38

37

9

32

League of Polish Families

SelfDefense

Civic Platform

29

31

–

14

Teachers, Managers & journalists, businessand other men intelligentsia

3

6

26

9

Higher/ medium party & state bureaucrats

19

3

5

17

Higher/ medium local/ regional selfgovernment officials

4

34

11

4

14

17

21

19

79

35

19

112

Farmers, Other Total N= blue-collars, occupational 100% craftsmen and background merchants

Occupational backgrounds of the 2005 Sejm newcomers by party

Law and Justice

Party

Table 10.6.

190 jacek wasilewski


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were heavily involved in local politics, while Self-Defense newcomers appear to have been genuinely new to politics, and those affiliated with the League of Polish Families were members of the party’s cadre. There were also interesting differences between the newcomers’ occupational backgrounds. No members of the intelligentsia were among Self-Defense newcomers, who hailed overwhelmingly from farming, blue-collar, and independent craft and merchant backgrounds or from small businesses (classified as “managers and businessmen” in Table 10.6). By contrast, the League of Polish Families, Law and Justice, and Civic Platform drew their newcomers predominantly from the intelligentsia, along with some persons from lower service occupations in the cases of PiS and LPR, and from management and business in the case of PO. To summarize, after 2003 and early 2004, when the first wave of scandals thinned SLD elite and sub-elite echelons, a quite sudden, deep, and wide elite circulation got underway. Employing a typology developed by Higley and Lengyel (2000), this circulation can be located conceptually between a “replacement” circulation, which often involves violence, though it has not so far done so in Poland, and a “quasireplacement” circulation, which is normally gradual and non-violent. The self-destruction of SLD opened political space that was filled by zealous “revolutionaries” who were out to eradicate perceived evils. These evils ranged from children’s TV cartoons and the sexual preferences of citizens, through immoral readings assigned in secondary schools, to foreign policies and the constitutional foundations of the political system itself. To a large extent this elite circulation swept away the Round Table generation and brought to power younger right-wing and populist radicals, who under the leadership of the older twin lions, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, ignored principles of democratic elitism in the exercise of power. This major change in Polish politics was mostly an elite undertaking and it manifested the ideological commitments and specific political cultures of ascending party and government leaders. It is worth remembering that there were no serious economic, social, or other troubles that might have impelled such a profound political change. For some years the Polish economy had been strong and growing steadily.20 20 Annual GDP growth in 2004 reached 5.3% in 2005, 3.6% in 2006, 6.1%, and in 2007, 6.7%. The rate of inflation meanwhile decreased from somewhat above 4% in 2004 to below 2% in 2007.

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Poland had become a member of the EU after gaining a number of concessions favorable to the country before the dismissal of Prime Minister Miller in May 2004. The minority SLD government that followed under Prime Minister Marek Belka was performing reasonably well and receiving relatively favorable assessments by the media and nonpartisan observers in the public. Investigative parliamentary commissions were dealing with corruption scandals and the cronyism of SLD power holders. Yet the public mood was very much against the post-communists’ abuses of power and very much for radical measures to stamp out corruption. This is why Law and Justice won the 2005 election. No one expected, however, that a “moral revolution” led by the Kaczynski twins would ensue and produce political turmoil, just as no one anticipated the eventual collapse of their coalition government and holding of early parliamentary elections in the fall of 2007. Conclusions The political developments I have examined show how sharp changes in the compositions and behaviors of political elites can threaten democratic elitism. During the autumn months of 2007, however, several important events in Poland indicated a return to democratic elitism’s principles and practices. In September 2007 the governing PiS–Self-Defense–LPR coalition unraveled. The immediate reason was Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s dismissal of Andrzej Lepper, the leader of Self-Defense, as Deputy Prime Minister on grounds of Lepper’s suspected corruption. The accusations made against Lepper were probably false and may have been a provocation by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA).21 In any event, the Sejm was dissolved and early elections took place on October 21, 2007. In those elections Self-Defense and the League of Polish Families lost badly, receiving, respectively, 1.5 and 1.3 percent of votes, well below the 5 percent threshold for gaining seats in the Sejm. Only four parties won

21 A CBA agent impersonating a businessman was supposed to have passed a bribe for Lepper through one of Lepper’s party colleagues. The alleged bribe was not transferred to Lepper, but it emerged that the Minister for Justice had secretly been recording Lepper’s conversations with other ministers in the PiS-led coalition government and that the intelligence agencies were also monitoring the conversations. The affair illustrated PiS leaders’ extreme lack of trust, not only in their political opponents but also in their own coalition partners.


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seats (the smallest number of parties since 1989): Civic Platform with 41.5% of votes that translated into 209 seats; Law and Justice with 32.1% of votes and 166 seats; the Left and Democrats22 with 13.1% of votes and 53 seats; and the Polish Peasant Party with 8.9% of votes and 31 seats. High voter turnout was the election’s decisive feature. The leaders of Law and Justice had turned the election into a kind of plebiscite, appealing to voters to support their avowed aim of establishing a Fourth Republic and portraying all other parties as supporters of postcommunists and “the network”. The election did indeed approximate a plebiscite, although it proved to be a plebiscite for or against PiS. In a plebiscitary way the election produced a broad political mobilization, with nearly 54 percent of eligible voters (16.5 million) casting ballots (Jasiewicz 2008:11–12). In the 2005 election, by contrast, only 40.6% (12.3 million) of eligible voters had bothered to go to the polls. The voter mobilization in 2007 was greatest in the large cities: in Warsaw, for example, 74% of eligible voters cast votes; 67% did so in Poznan; 62% voted in Lodz and Krakow. The bulk of these urban dwellers voted for Civic Platform. Thanks to the high turnout – by Polish standards – Civic Platform triumphed, receiving almost 4 million more votes than in 2005. But Law and Justice, in spite of its defeat, still received 2 million more votes than in 2005.23 SLD did not recover from its 2005 electoral disaster. Running together with three other parties under the Left and Democrats banner, SLD received roughly the same support that it had two years before. The Peasant Party, which in pre-election polls had been precariously near the 5 per cent threshold in 2005, achieved a somewhat better result in 2007. In November 2007 a new PO-PSL coalition government was formed with Donald Tusk, the Civic Platform leader, as prime minister. Controlling only 240 seats in the Sejm (52.1%) the coalition government was from its outset in a difficult position because PiS held 166 22 The Left and Democrats (LiD) was a new coalition of four left and center-left parties, two of them with a communist background and two with a Solidarity background. The leading role in this coalition was played by SLD. 23 In 2005 2.85 million voted for PO, in 2007 6.7 million did so. For PiS the respective figures were 3.18 and 5.18 million. Jasiewicz (2008:11) observes about this increase in PiS voters that, “As the exit polls indicate, PiS succeeded in mobilizing its 2005 electorate (keeping the loyalty of three out of every four voters) and attracted many of those who in 2005 had supported LPR (one out of every two) or Self-Defense (one out of every four). Even more important, PiS drew to the polls almost 2 million new voters. The message sent by PiS – anti-communism, Euro-skepticism, law and order, in short, populism – still resonates well with substantial segments of Polish society.”

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seats and declared that it would be a merciless opponent. Moreover, the PO-PSL government did not have enough votes to override presidential vetoes by Lech Kaczynski, which requires 60% of Sejm votes. To override presidential vetoes the new government needed the support of SLD, which gave the latter greater political importance than its modest parliamentary delegation implied. How did the Sejm’s composition change as a consequence of the 2007 election? The new Sejm manifested an incremental continuation more than a radical change. In contrast to 2005, when the SLD’s self-destruction created a political vacuum filled by “young wolves” belonging to PiS and LPR, in 2007 the elimination of the two small populist parties – Self-Defense and the League of Polish Families – did not create a comparable vacuum. The number of newcomers in 2007 compared to that of 2005 fell from 60% to 34% of all deputies. Thus the Sejm elected in 2007 contained a greater number of experienced and on average somewhat older (47.8 years) members. Nevertheless, the Round Table generation’s departure from elite positions continued. Emblematic of this was the decision of the SLD leader and former president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, to leave the political arena. The Kaczynski brothers’ attempt to undermine and reverse the elite settlement reached in 1989 appeared to have failed. Participants in or descendants of the negotiated transition in 1989 – Civic Platform, SLD, the Peasant Party,24 – have consistently respected the Round Table agreement, and they carried the day in 2007. Put differently, politics as bargaining instead of politics as war appeared to be restored. Does this mean that the two-year rule of the Kaczynskis and PiS was merely ephemeral? Possibly not. In its attempted negation of the 1989 settlement the Kaczynski interlude was important because it was an omen of what might recur. For one thing, the losers in 2007 did not accept their defeat and portrayed it as further evidence of “the network’s” power and omnipresence. Their response was to close ranks behind the strong leadership of Jaroslaw Kaczynski and cast a host of aspirations against Donald Tusk’s government even before it took office.25 During the two

24 The League of Polish Families and Self-Defense did not participate in the 1989 elite settlement, being latecomers to Poland’s politics. 25 Jaroslaw Kaczynski exiled three leaders of his party who were fomenting an internal PiS discussion about the reasons for its election defeat, and two days before Tusk’s government was sworn in Kaczynski called it a threat to Polish democracy.


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years of Law and Justice rule, moreover, the Kaczynski brothers successfully expanded sentiment for a less liberal democracy.26 They succeeded in polarizing Polish society while also keeping its balance point well toward the right-wing side of the political spectrum. Some aspects of the Kaczynskis’ putative Fourth Republic – the fight against crime and corruption; lustration; a tough policy towards Brussels, Germany, and Russia; a cult of Catholic values and hostility toward outsiders – have adherents located beyond the ranks of Law and Justice voters. Many Poles did not like the methods that PiS used to pursue its goals, but they did not question the goals themselves. Civic Platform and the coalition government it led after 2007 had little alternative but to take this fact of political life into account. Its space for maneuver was defined and limited by what had gone before. Accordingly, it would be difficult for PO to oppose PiS policies in any full way. Many Kaczynski and PiS themes would have to be paid respect, albeit more calmly and without the rhetoric of political warfare. The Round Table settlement and practice of democratic elitism that it inaugurated were tested severely, but both appear to have survived the test. Nevertheless, the consensually united elite that was apparent in Poland between 1990 and 2005 was weakened because a significant part of it refused to observe norms and practices of restrained political competition. Should Poland’s economy turn sour, as began to occur at the end of 2008, all bets about the country’s political future could be off. Still, a pessimistic forecast is not justified. The political turbulence of 2005– 2007 showed that an anti-modern proclivity to reject the spirit of liberal democracy is probably without majority support in Poland. References IV Rzeczpospolita – Sprawiedliwosc dla wszystkich (The Fourth Republic – Justice for All). 2005. Election program of the Law and Justice Party. (www.pis.org.pl/ dokument/php) Higley, John, and Gyorgy Lengyel, eds. 2000. Elites after State Socialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Higley, John, and Michael Burton. 2006. Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Jasiewicz, Krzysztof. 2008. “The New Populism in Poland. The Usual Suspects?” Problems of Post-Communism 55:7–25. 26 Although Civic Platform expanded its circle of supporters to a significant extent, it must be remembered that many voters voted against PiS rather than for Civic Platform.

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—— . 2008a. “The (not always sweet) Uses of Opportunism: Post-communist Political Parties in Poland.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 41:421–442. Kucharczyk, Jacek. 2007. “Introduction: Democracy in Poland 2005–2007.” pp. 7–13 in Democracy in Poland 2005–2007, edited by Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, Jacek Kucharczyk, and Jaroslaw Zbieranek, Warsaw: Institute of Public Affairs. (www.isp .org.pl/files) Kucharczyk, Jacek, and Olga Wysocka. 2008. “Poland.” pp. 71–100 in Populist Politics and Liberal Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Grigorij Meseznikow, Olga Gyarfasova, and Daniel Smilov, Bratislava: Institute for Public Affairs. (www .isp.org.pl/files) Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mach, Bogdan, and Wlodzimierz Wesołowski. 2000. “Poland: The Political Elite’s Transformational Correctness.” pp. 87–102 in Elites after State Socialism, edited by John Higley and Gyorgy Lengyel, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Michnik, Adam. 2007. W poszukiwaniu utraconego sensu (In search of a lost sense). Warsaw: Fundacja Zeszytow Literackich. Millard, Frances. 2006. “Poland’s Politics and the Travails of Transition after 2001: The 2005 Elections.” Europe-Asia Studies 58:1007–1031. Pakulski, Jan, and Jacek Wasilewski. 2006. “Cyrkulacja elit politycznych: Od lisów do lwów” (Political elite circulation: from foxes to lions”). Studia Socjologiczne, 181:81–102. Polska katolicka w chrzescijanskiej Europie (Catholic Poland in Christian Europe). 2005. Law and Justice Party document.(www.pis.org.pl/dokument/php) Slodkowska, Inka, ed. 2002. Wybory 2001: Partie I ich programy (Elections 2001: parties and their programs). Warsaw: Institute of Political Studies. Szczerbiak, Aleks. 2007. “ ‘Social Poland’ Defeats ‘Liberal Poland’? The September– October 2005 Polish Parliamentary and Presidential Elections.” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 23:203–232. Wasilewski, Jacek. 1998. “Elite Circulation and Consolidation of Democracy in Poland.” pp. 163–187 in Postcommunist Elites and Democracy in Eastern Europe, edited by John Higley, Jan Pakulski, and Wlodzimierz Wesolowski, London Macmillan. —— . 2001. “Three Elites of the Central East European Democratization.” pp. 133–142 in Transformative Paths in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Radoslaw Markowski and Edmund Wnuk-Lipiñski, Warsaw: Institute of Political Studies.

DEMOCRACY BY ELITE CO-OPTATION: DEMOCRATIC ELITISM IN MULTI-ETHNIC STATES Anton Steen with Mindaugas Kuklys How do elites in new democracies with scant traditions of political pluralism address the challenge of integrating ethnic minorities that some perceive as endangering political stability? Answering this question requires investigating the extent to which elites are prepared to allow leaders of ethnic minorities roles in politics and government administration. In this chapter we argue that where elections are the major form of interest aggregation, democratic elitism enables elites to control political participation by ethnic minorities. More specifically, democratic elitism facilitates the cooptation of minority leaders better than other, more participatory forms of democracy. At the same time, it enables elites to appeal effectively for the support of a culturally dominant majority of voters without altogether excluding culturally subordinate minorities. This is what happens in so-called “ethnic democracies” where democracy legitimates the domination of indigenous majorities over ethnically distinct minorities. The initial priority in newly independent countries with large ethnic minorities, such as Estonia and Latvia, is to re-create a national identity. During both countries’ early years of independence the segregation or even repatriation of large Russianspeaking minorities were main goals. Failing repatriation, restrictive citizenship laws were adopted in order to bolster Estonian and Latvian national identities. However, international human rights pressures and efforts to enter the European Union and NATO soon required political elites to accept less restrictive allocations of citizenship. Somewhat later, treatment of the Russian-speaking minorities emphasized assimilation policies and the cooptation of minority leaders. In these respects democratic elitism and electoral democracy have been main mechanisms for domination by elites representing the indigenous majority, though the form of this domination changed significantly during the nearly two decades since the countries’ independence in 1991.

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According to Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996), as well as Graham Smith and his colleagues (1998), the Estonian and Latvian elites’ way of structuring their citizen polities and political systems has been crucially important for regulating access to power. In effect, the two national elites have practiced a strategy of “divide and rule” by helping to create insiders and outsiders within the minority populations – a strategy that has weakened the social bases for collective actions by the minorities (Smith 1998:113). As Will Kymlicka (2001) has put it, the “securitization” of ethnic relations in post-Soviet countries with few liberal traditions has involved national political leaders mobilizing support from the majority indigenous population while portraying ethnic minorities as disloyal and warranting exclusion from government positions. One may argue that when an ethnic challenge is “securitized,” a Schumpeterian version of democracy with strong top-down elements of nationalist control prevails over Robert Dahl’s participative democracy and universal political rights (Dahl 1971). National elites coalesce in closed networks based on their common ethnic identity, and they eschew the creation of parallel state institutions that would be anchored in the diverse ethnic or religious communities making up their society (cf. Lijphart 1977). We hypothesize, however, that instead of brusquely excluding minorities, thus raising human rights issues and international opprobrium, and instead of granting minorities full citizenship, thus aggravating majority fears, a middle or “third way” is open to elites. This consists of socializing and co-opting leaders of minority communities into power positions, in effect opening the practices and processes of democratic elitism to selected minority leaders. We will test this hypothesis with evidence about elite attitudes and strategies drawn from surveys of elites in Estonia, Latvia, and also Lithuania during 2000, 2003, and 2006–2007, and from statistics about the changing political representation of minority communities in these countries. Our survey data on elite attitudes and strategies derive from personal interviews with roughly 300 holders of top political and administrative positions in each of the three countries. Elite respondents included parliamentary deputies, administrative officials, directors of major private companies and state enterprises, high-ranking judges, and prominent leaders of NGOs, cultural institutions, and local governments1. We also employ data from public records and secondary 1

For a full description of the data and methods, see Steen (1997).

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sources about the recruitment of minority representatives to national assemblies and cabinets. Demographic Background Even before the Soviet period, immigrant communities were quite visible in Estonia and Latvia. A Russian-speaking minority community was but one, albeit the largest, of these minority communities. In Estonia, a long-term shift in the demographic composition of the population was evident. In 1934, for example, the titular national Estonian community constituted 88% of the population; by 1989 this proportion had decreased to 62%, though it increased to 65% by 1999. A parallel demographic transformation took place in Latvia. In 1935, 77% of the population constituted the indigenous Latvian community, but this proportion had decreased to 52% by the end of the Soviet period in 1989. Thereafter, the proportion of indigenous Latvians gradually increased, so that by 1993 it reached 54% and in 1999 it stood at 56%. In Lithuania, by contrast, the indigenous population remained remarkably stable, being the same in 2001 as in 1923, namely, 83%. After World War II immigrants from the Russian Socialist Republic quickly became the principal minority communities in Estonia and Latvia. Immigrants from other Russian-speaking socialist republics, such as Ukraine and Belarus, joined them. But in Lithuania in the last two Soviet decades, Russian-speaking residents never exceeded 9% of the population, while a Polish minority accounted for another 7%. Of the 652,000 Russian-speaking residents of Latvia in 2006 (29% of the total population), 57% were citizens. In Estonia in 2006, ethnic Russians comprised 26% of the population, and approximately 35% of them were citizens, while 27% of them continued to hold Russian citizenship, and 35% were effectively “stateless” with undefined citizenship. In Lithuania in 2008, Russians constituted 5% of the population and Poles made up 6%. Elites and the Nationality Issue Contrary to many expectations and the desire of nationalists in the Baltic countries to repatriate their Russian residents after 1991, most Russians stayed. They have since stuck to their Russian cultural mores and maintained their Russian language while seeking the minority rights emphasized by the EU and international human

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rights organizations. In Estonia and Latvia a considerable part of these Russian residents are marginalized politically. Observers of Estonian and Latvian politics have portrayed this marginalization as instigated by elites representing the national majority communities (Steen 1997; Smith et al. 1998; Kelley 2004). However, the marginalization may also be self-inflicted. Some members of the Russian minorities have not become Estonian or Latvian citizens because of advantages they perceive in retaining Russian passports and, perhaps, in avoiding local military service. Whatever the reasons for this political marginalization may be, it challenges elites to find ways in which to safeguard national identities while also building a more or less full measure of representative democracy. Minority politics became intrinsic to the nation-building process in these two countries (Galbreath 2005). The political marginalization of Russian minorities became a hot issue in the mid-1990s when Estonia and Latvia commenced negotiations for membership in the EU and NATO (Kelley 2004; Steen 2006). The conflicting logics of an exclusionary nation-state and an inclusive democracy, which Linz and Stepan regarded as besetting many Central and East European countries during the 1990s, constituted acute dilemmas in Estonia and Latvia. Until the mid-1990s most Estonian and Latvian political elites rejected the idea of an inclusive democracy that ensured minority political rights. Due to the fragmented party systems in both countries, elites feared that even small Russophone parties would play pivotal roles in parliaments and, thus, in forming governments. The main question dominant elites confronted was how to socialize leaders of the Russian communities into the politics of the newly independent national states. Put differently, the question was how to chart a course between Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl.

The Schumpeter Option Schumpeter’s competitive theory of democracy diverges considerably from Dahl’s more normative conception of a democracy that is open to all social and ethnic groups. In Schumpeter’s theory the “common good” is realized when voters produce a government, i.e., “when they decide who the leading man shall be” (1996:273). Voters rule only indirectly through their elected representatives.


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This has important implications for minority rights. If “the will of the people” is the basis of legitimate democratic rule, decisions by simple majority inevitably distort that will (1996:272). According to Schumpeter, the people comprise a “mosaic” that a simple majority fails to mirror. But because he believed that proportional representation leads to a fragmentation of societal interests and produces inefficient government, Schumpeter rejected minority representation for practical reasons. Moreover, proportional representation does not concur with the logic of Schumpeter’s democratic method: a competitive struggle for the people’s vote simply means that government will be effected by those elites and leaders who win more support than competing elites and leaders. The democratic method of competitions for votes leads inexorably to majority rule and the best way to ensure stable government is to establish a two-party system. But who should be given the right to vote? Who should be included in the polity? According to Schumpeter, when societies discriminate against people on the basis of religion, sex, or race, it is important to understand the reasons why. We may disapprove of such discrimination, but societies that engage in it are not necessarily undemocratic: Should “we not leave it to every populus to define itself?” Schumpeter asked (1996:245). His democratic method seems to imply that a victorious elite faction has a latent mandate from a majority of voters to exclude minorities from participation. The strength or weakness of minority rights is simply the consequence of a competitive struggle for votes. A democracy can decide to be “undemocratic” so long as the democratic method itself is adhered to. The basic prerequisite for a stable democracy is a readiness among elites to share basic norms and rules of political competition, while also being socially and functionally differentiated. John Higley and Michael Burton (2006) argue that such “unity in diversity” commits elites to robust democratic behaviors and pluralist political practices, which imply formalizing minority political rights. Their model captures how democratization unfolded in many Western countries where consensually united elites managed to form. Such elites are the “foundation” of liberal democracy, and they arise either through distinctive, crisis-triggered elite settlements or incremental elite convergences for which changing mass political attitudes are important propellants. This Schumpeter-inspired conception of democracy as initiated, sustained, and shaped by elites illuminates processes of democratic consolidation in multi-ethnic Central and East European countries.

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anton steen with mindaugas kuklys The Dahl Option

Robert Dahl’s theory of polyarchy can be regarded as a normative but also empirically based confrontation with democratic elitism because it emphasizes how and why liberal democracies are established and broadened by popular political participation. Dahl’s polyarchy incorporates elite competitions for votes, but it is mainly concerned with the participation of citizens and voters. Classical liberal freedoms, encapsulated as public contestation and broad participation, are seen as the basic components of a democracy. Dahl’s democracy includes, inter alia, opportunities to oppose a government and form political organizations, the free expression of political views, plural sources of information, and secret ballots (Dahl 1971:20). Whereas Schumpeter’s democratic elitism implies that including minority groups is not a defining characteristic of democracy, Dahl holds that such inclusion is a sine qua non of democracy. Political conflicts should be settled “by a demos consisting of citizens whose interests are involved in a significant way” (Dahl 1982:86). It follows that the inclusion of minority groups in the political process through universal suffrage, together with the right of public contestation, is the very basis of liberal democracy. According to Dahl, this type of democracy, which exists in Western countries today, is the result of historical processes that included the gradual extension of voting rights and ever more pluralist competitions. Historically, one of two paths – the one emphasizing political competition, the other political inclusion – was followed. But establishing a viable system of mutual security between conflicting social groups was always difficult, and the greater the variety of groups, the more difficult it was to create mutual security for all. Thus Dahl held that “tolerance and mutual security are more likely to develop among a small elite sharing similar perspectives than among a large and heterogeneous collection of leaders representing social strata with varying goals, interests and outlooks” (1971:37). In Dahl’s view the gradual socialization of a restricted group of elites created the best conditions for tolerance and mutual security before universal suffrage was introduced. It facilitated a peaceful transformation from “closed hegemony” to “competitive oligarchy,” which subsequently led to universal participation and culminated in a polyarchy. Dahl observed that, in short, “the rules, the practices, and the culture of competitive politics developed first among a small elite” (1971:36). It is not difficult to find many West European examples of how the leaders of rising working classes gradually accepted the norms and rules of


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parliamentary government so that such leaders eventually became acceptable participants in governments. In many Central and East European countries after 1989–1991, however, international pressures to create liberal democracies compelled the immediate introduction of universal participation, whether or not elites had been socialized into the norms and rules of peaceful competitions. In particular, countries containing minority communities that had immigrated during the Soviet period faced pressures to provide those communities with full political rights more or less immediately.

Multiculturalism in Estonia and Latvia Will Kymlicka has enlivened the discussion of minority rights and democracy by specifying conditions in which such rights should be and actually are institutionalized in liberal democracies. He portrays the increasing focus on minority rights and multicultural policies in the West as a universal phenomenon that has three causes. First, demographic trends in multicultural societies are becoming clearer, and this is important where the assimilation of minority communities has not yet succeeded. Second, there is a spreading consciousness among minority communities of ideas of equality, human rights laws, and democratic principles. Third, the spread of liberal democracy “limits the ability of elites to crush dissenting movements” (Kymlicka 2002:8). In a liberal democracy minority groups are able to mobilize and utilize multiple access points of political influence, and if they are prevented from doing this they can pursue their claims judicially or by recourse to international bodies. Polices of multiculturalism are a main route to ethnic integration in many liberal democracies. These policies enable groups to organize and mobilize along ethnic, religious, and/or linguistic lines. The result is a “multi-nation state” (Kymlicka 1995), of which there are many examples: Australia, Canada, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, and so on. In other democracies, however, multiculturalism is a problem for central authorities that regard cultural diversity as an obstacle to the overall, often implicit, aim of creating culturally cohesive states. Liberal democratic rights and inclusiveness make such states more just and accommodating, but they do not necessarily lead to robust relations among divergent ethnic groups. Inter-group relations may, in fact, become more limited, with majority and minority communities more

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separated. Kymlicka observes that such segmented or “parallel” states are nevertheless viable because they are embedded in a liberal democratic tradition and its accompanying institutions. Where this situation exists, liberal democracies jettison the idea of a common identity and a fully unitary state, and they embrace ideas of cultural pluralism and mutual tolerance as a kind of super-identity. But how the demands of minority communities for inclusion are met varies according to whether such communities consist of indigenous peoples, recent settlers, or immigrants. This variation affects integration policies in important ways. An inherent aspect of Russian minorities in the Baltic States is that they see themselves as immigrants who, during the Soviet period, moved legally to the Baltic territories from other parts of the Soviet Union in order to enter the local work forces. Yet the indigenous Baltic populations continue to regard the Russian communities as residues of an occupying Soviet force who arrived illegally (Kymlicka 2001). Voluntary repatriation to Russia appealed to very few members of the Russian minorities, while policies that marginalized them politically quickly came under attack by international institutions. Accordingly, after 1997–98, by which time it was not hard to see the negative effects of exclusionary policies, the Estonian and Latvian governments pursued a new ethnic policy. They sought to develop comprehensive programs aimed at integrating Russian-speakers into their societies. As Vello Pettai (2001) remarks, this was mainly a shift in the ethnopolitical discourse of the two countries’ elites, whereby “illegal immigrants” who arrived during the Soviet period came to be regarded as “long-term residents,” but still as immigrants. The unwillingness of elites to define the Russians as legitimate and permanent minorities continued to rule out a multi-national state. Overcoming restrictive naturalization barriers was the only way members of these minorities could join the political community. By contrast, in Lithuania, with its relatively small ethnic minorities, elites chose to grant universal citizenship from the start. To complicate matters, minority ethnic communities in Central and East European countries are often parts of diasporas tied by ethnicity, language or religion to original homelands (Brubaker 1996). If the homeland is a neighboring country, fear of its forceful intervention or political manipulation on behalf of its cultural kin may lead the local indigenous population to perceive the ethnic minority in question as


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disloyal to the national state. Such diasporic minorities, which Will Kymlicka dubs “hard cases,” raise quite difficult questions about democracy and the accommodation of ethnic minorities. How dominant national elites deal with these hard cases is influenced deeply by their felt need to “securitize” ethnic relations (Waever 1995) so that the political rights granted to the diasporic minorities do not jeopardize, at least in the eyes of the elites, national security. Kymlicka (2001:78) and David Laitin (1998) are rather pessimistic about the ability of elites to effect such securitization, especially in Estonia. They observe that even if the minority Russians learn the national language and profess loyalty to the state, the legacy of distrust and fear of Russia, as well as the propensity of many Balts to define group membership in terms of blood relations, is likely to exclude the Russian minorities from the political community no matter how much cultural assimilation they achieve. Democratic Responses Figure 11.1 illustrates how the two approaches to democracy, Schumpeter’s and Dahl’s, interact with Kymlicka’s, and Linz and Stepan’s main forms of ethnic policies, exclusion and inclusion, and how quite different democratic responses to this interaction in multi-ethnic states are generated. Cells (1) and (2) in the figure depict a democracy in which political participation is restricted to the indigenous national community. Thus the titular nation members can secure over-representation and superior

Exclusion

Democratic approach

Ethnic policy Inclusion

(2)

(3)

*Ethno-elitist democracy

*Ethno-liberal democracy

(1)

(4)

*Ethnic democracy

*Liberal democracy

Elitist

Participative

Figure 11.1. Democracy in multi-ethnic conditions.

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position for itself – in national and local government, education, the courts, and public administration (Smith 1998).2 A policy of ethnic exclusion is related to another dimension of democracy: its elitist (Schumpeterian) or participative (Dahlian) form. In the participative shape, the indigenous national community is the subject of the political process. It is encouraged by elites to form political parties and interest organizations, use information and media to express opinions, create political oppositions, and influence government decision-making between elections. Dahl’s criteria for polyarchy are met, but not by the entire population. In the elitist form, which we label “ethno-elitist democracy” in Figure 11.1, the right to vote flows from membership in the indigenous national community, defined by its ethnic boundaries, but that community is regarded as the object of elite competitions for support in elections. According to Smith (1998:98) post-communist nationalist leaders follow a certain logic that “is served if nationalizing elites secure political power positions by mobilizing their constituents along ethnic lines...” Cell (3) in Figure 11.1 captures an “ethno-liberal democracy,” in which a national elite makes concessions for the inclusion of minorities but manages to control the effects by requiring that leaders selected to represent minority communities first satisfy strict citizenship conditions, such as language tests and oaths of loyalty. Democratic elitism operates, with elites now recruited from different ethnic groups. The co-opting of minority leaders makes it possible to please the international community and also bolster national security. In cell (4) in Figure 11.1 a bottom-up pluralism plus inclusiveness are the main features. This encapsulates the liberal democratic ideal, in which a common political identity binds diverse cultural and ethnic communities, all of which enjoy open access to government elections and decision-making. This is the situation favored by the EU and international human rights organizations and by normative theorists like Dahl. The arrows in Figure 11.1 indicate an evolution from ethnic democracies, which in the Baltic States at the end of the Soviet period featured mass protests by segments of the indigenous national communities demanding regime change and the institution of electoral democracy. Following independence, this popular participation receded as elites within the indigenous national communities competed for support of

2

For a discussion of the “ethnic democracy thesis”, see Smith (1996).


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these communities’ voters. An ethnic elitism held sway. However, starting with mid-1990s negotiations to gain EU and NATO membership, pressure on the Baltic states to liberalize citizenship laws forced some concessions to minority community representation. In the ensuing ethno-liberal democracy, established elites accepted leaders of ethnic minorities who had undergone the political naturalization process and who professed loyalty to the national state. But as suggested by the dashed arrow in Figure 11.1, it is doubtful that elites in Estonia and Latvia will move further toward a comprehensive liberal democracy. Research Findings3 Our hypothesis is that in the Baltic States only democratic elitism, not a participative democracy, provides sufficient guarantees and control for elites to accommodate ethnic groups when the cultural assimilation and loyalty of those groups remains uncertain. We will examine elite attitudes about the Russian minority communities and the extent to which elites are prepared to include leaders of those communities in politics. Toward cultural pluralism? In Estonia and Latvia nationalists argue that because of the close connection between culture and the nation-state, and after decades of what amounted in their eyes to “cultural genocide” under Soviet rule, they have a right to protect their cultural heritages as Estonians and Latvians (Smith et al. 1998). Many have feared that a “Russification process” will gradually extinguish these cultural heritages. This fear drove Baltic independence movements at the end of the 1980s, and today some nationalists still claim that Russian culture is a threat to Baltic national identities and languages. However, after pursuing policies to protect these identities and languages do Baltic elites also hold this view? In all three Baltic countries, an overwhelming majority of elites clearly do not see Russian culture as any longer a threat. In 2000 and 2003, 10% or less thought it a threat, and in 2007 the proportion of elites doing so was still small, even if slightly greater than earlier in the decade. When more than 90% of Baltic elites do not regard Russian 3 Due to lack of space, tables presenting research findings are not shown but can be obtained by contacting the authors.

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culture as a danger, the nationalist fear to the contrary can presumably not any longer prevail. There are only negligible differences between the three sets of Baltic elites on this score, and all indications are that their downplaying of the Russian cultural “threat” is stable. This elite confidence about the robustness of Baltic national identities suggests that language legislation has been an important aspect of successful nation building. As Priit Järve (2002) has observed, Baltic language laws have combined “ethnic containment,” in which minority ethnic communities are systematically disadvantaged, with the management of linguistic diversity. International pressure soon made linguistic pluralism in schools and government administration an urgent issue. In 2004 Latvia responded with a policy of bilingualism that actually worsened the situation for Russian secondary schools, since until then all subjects were taught in Russian. The decision of the Latvian government was that 60% of the subjects in these schools were to be taught in Latvian and 40% in Russian. This policy was seen by the Russian population as both discriminatory and an effort at forced assimilation, and it met with protests. Toward political integration? Successful political integration is a two-way street. Minority communities must declare loyalty to the fundamental values and institutions of the state, while the indigenous national community must be willing to include them by adopting liberal citizenship laws and recruiting minority leaders to elite positions. Between 2000–2007 sizable proportions of Estonian and Lithuanian elites, varying from 46% to 63%, perceived their Russian minority communities as loyal. In Latvia, however, this elite perception varied only from 21% to 27%, with about two thirds of the elites pronouncing themselves skeptical about minority loyalty. This pattern of elite attitudes is consistent with studies that have found a generally lower level of inter-community trust in Latvia, along with a relatively low level of public trust in many Latvian political institutions (Steen 1996). The larger proportion of Russian-speakers living in Latvia may contribute to the skepticism of Latvian elites, which remained widespread even after Latvia joined the EU and NATO in 2004. However, the somewhat larger size of the Russian minority in Latvia does not alone account for why elites there are less trusting of the Russians than is the case with Estonian elites. For a relatively high proportion of Lithuanian leaders also express little trust in their much


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smaller Russian minority community. This suggests that experiences under Soviet rule may be as important as the sheer size of Russian minorities. Toward citizenship rights? The crucial test of an inclusive democracy is allowing participation in national elections on the basis of universal suffrage. A large majority of Lithuanian elites (almost 90%) agree with the statement “all permanent residents of this country must have full citizenship rights,” which of course includes the suffrage. This pattern is consistent with one tenet of the “fear thesis,” to wit, that where an ethnic minority community is small in size, as both the Russian and Polish communities are in Lithuania, the indigenous national majority will always dominate election outcomes. Conversely, where minority communities are quite large, as they are in Estonia and Latvia, elites express substantial disagreement about offering those communities automatic citizenship and, thus, the suffrage. In 2007, 57% of Estonian elites would not grant citizenship to all permanent residents, and as many as 70% of Latvian leaders would not do so. Between 2000–2007 elites in both countries pronounced themselves somewhat more willing to grant citizenship and voting rights to the Russian minorities, but overall the attitudes of Estonian and Latvian elites on this issue are a major obstacle to liberalizing citizenship and voting rights. Toward co-opting minority leaders? Where leaders of ethnic minorities have passed citizenship tests and learned to speak the national language elites should be willing to have such leaders attain important political and other positions. Between 2000–2007 about 70% of Estonian elites favored allowing naturalized Russians to hold important political positions. The corresponding proportions of elites in Latvia and Lithuania were 90% and 80%, respectively. The same pattern of elite views pertained to allowing naturalized Russians to hold leadership positions in the countries’ state administrations, with Latvian elites again being the most favourably disposed. The greater support among Latvian elites for allowing naturalized Russians to hold important posts (between 53% and 58% favored this “very much” whereas only between 12% and 19% of Estonian elites were similarly disposed) is somewhat surprising because of the two countries’ different majority–minority ratios. Apparently, Latvian elites regard

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command of their national language as especially crucial. This is consistent with Fredrika Björklund’s finding of a specific Latvian variant of ethnic politics that underscores the “powerful Latvian affirmation of the mother tongue definition of national belonging”(2006:113). Toward representation in parliaments and cabinets? To what extent are these rather liberal elite attitudes reflected by the presence of minority leaders in political and administrative bodies? Here we focus on ethnic Russians only. Rather large proportions of Russian parliamentary representatives during the first years of Baltic independence derived from elections that took place at the very end of Soviet rule in 1990. After independence and the first free elections, which took place in 1992–1993, the proportion of Russians in Baltic parliaments dropped dramatically. This was especially true in Estonia where the proportion fell from 20% to zero. A nearly comparable reduction from 22% to 6% occurred in Latvia and it illustrated how important the ethnic issue was in that newly independent state. In Lithuania, the decrease was merely from 3% to 1%. As outcomes of subsequent parliamentary elections, the proportions of Russian representatives in the Estonian parliament have varied between 4% and 7%, and in Lithuania between 1% and 5%. In Latvia the proportion of representatives with a Russian background increased substantially from 6% in 1993 to 16% in 2006. As regards the ethnic backgrounds of cabinet ministers, no one with a Russian or Slavic background held a cabinet position in Estonia during the entire 1992– 2008 period, though there was one such cabinet minister in Latvia and three in Lithuania. Information about ethnic representation in central state administration has been less available. For Latvia, data is only available for entire ministries. According to a survey in 2001, persons with Russian and other Slavic backgrounds constituted about 7% of total employees (Pabriks 2002). This was a striking change compared to the Soviet period when according to the 1989 census, 69% of the state administration was non-Latvian (Pabriks 2002:24). For Estonia information has been available only for the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Justice, in which just 1% of employees had a russophone background in 2007. In Lithuania the proportion in the Ministry of Welfare was 6%. These patterns of ethnic minority representation are consistent with the orientations of elites in the three countries. However, there is some


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discrepancy between the comparative openness of elites to recruiting Russians and what has actually happened. Estonian elites have been the most skeptical about Russian minority communities and the most restrictive in recruiting leaders from those communities. Latvian elites have been more disposed toward the inclusion of minority representatives in leadership positions and have also displayed a more liberal approach to making its political bodies more accessible. In Lithuania, elite attitudes and practices concerning minority recruitment are more reserved than one might deduce from the country’s liberal citizenship policy. Conclusion Baltic elites have had to face the dilemma of meeting liberal requirements for political access by their Russian minority communities while at the same time preserving the indigenous national community’s control of the state. The overarching question is whether ethnic minorities in the Baltic countries are or will become loyal to the state. Because of experiences under Soviet rule and Russia’s close proximity, this question is of pressing importance in the Baltic countries’ politics. Our main research finding is that the attitudes and perceptions of dominant Baltic elites changed once ethnic Russian minorities overcame barriers to citizenship. Much larger proportions of the three national elites began quite rapidly to accept Russians and their political leaders as trustworthy political actors. Why? Our data suggest that a restrictive naturalization process involving rigorous language tests and loyalty declarations did much initially to reassure indigenous elites. Such tough measures led elites to believe that a reliable allegiance and devotion to the state was emerging among the ethnic minority communities. Citizenship laws appear to have acted as mechanisms for screening minority communities’ political proclivities and certifying their trustworthiness as political participants. The liberal inclination to open politics to naturalized ethnic minorities does not contradict elite resistance to granting automatic citizenship. It has been rational for Baltic elites to keep suspect Russians outside the political–administrative system while at the same time setting requirements for citizenship sufficiently strict to instil confidence that those who meet the requirements are sufficiently naturalized to be trustworthy political actors. To be sure, attaining this modus vivendi

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resulted in no small part from the desire of Baltic elites to gain admissions to the EU and NATO by conforming more closely to EU strictures about citizen rights. It remains to be seen if the Baltic countries will develop Robert Dahl’s “culture of competitive politics” (1971:37). As noted, this unfolds among a secluded and small elite that only gradually includes other elites before universal political rights are realized. Where this happens, political trust and peaceful movement toward a more participatory democracy eventually takes place. It is probably the most that can be hoped for in the Baltic states, especially in Estonia and Latvia. Political pluralism with strong Russian political parties - not to mention parallel state institutions along ethnic lines, as in Arend Lijphart’s (1977) model of consociational democracy - will most likely not occur in these states. The ethno-liberal model of democracy (Figure 11.1), which combines elite mobilization along ethnic cleavage lines with the rhetoric of inclusive democracy, rests on the Schumpeterian view of democracy as a political method for deciding who rules. This model works because for the foreseeable future the Baltic elites must strike a fine balance between national security concerns and ethnic inclusion. The co-optation of minority leaders into the majority political culture is one step on the long road leading from an elitist ethno-liberal democracy to an inclusive and participatory liberal democracy. References Björklund, Fredrika. 2006. “The East European ‘Ethnic Nation’ – Myth or Reality?” European Journal of Political Research 45(1):93–121. Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed. Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dahl, Robert A. 1971. Polyarchy. Participation and Opposition. New Haven: Yale University Press. —— . 1982. Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy. Autonomy vs. Control. New Haven: Yale University Press. Galbreath, David J. 2005. Nation – Building and Minority Politics in Post – Socialist States. Interests, Influences and Identities in Estonia and Latvia. Stuttgart: Ibidem – Verlag. Higley, John, and Michael Burton. 2006. Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Järve, Priit. 2002. “Two Waves of Language Laws in the Baltic States: Changes of Rationale?” Journal of Baltic Studies 33(1):78–110. Kelley, Judith Green. 2004. Ethnic Politics in Europe. The Power of Norms and Incentives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


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—— . 2001. “Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe.” pp. 13–106 in Can Liberalism Be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe, edited by Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— . 2002. “Multiculturalism and Minority Rights: West and East.” Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 4:1–25. Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lijphart, Arend. 1977. Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration. New Haven: Yale University Press. Laitin, David D. 1998. Identity in Formation. The Russian – Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pabriks, Artis. 2002. “Occupational Representation and Ethnic Discrimination in Latvia.” Research Report of the Soros Foundation Latvia. Riga: Nordik. Pettai, Vello. 2001. “Definitions and Discourse: Applying Kymlicka’s Models to Estonia and Latvia.” pp. 259–269 in Can Liberalism Be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe, edited by Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1942) 1996. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: George Allen & Unwin. Smith, Graham. 1996. “The Ethnic Democracy Thesis and the Citizenship Question in Estonia and Latvia.” Nationalities Papers 24(2):199–216. Smith, Graham, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr, and Edward Allworth. 1998. Nation – Building in the Post – Soviet Borderlands. The Politics of National Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steen, Anton. 1996. Confidence in Institutions in Post-Communist Societies: The Case of the Baltic States. Scandinavian Political Studies 19(3):205–225. —— . 1997. Between Past and Future. Elites, Democracy and the State in Post – Communist Countries. A Comparison of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Aldershot: Ashgate. —— . 2006. “Accessioning Liberal Compliance? Baltic Elites and Ethnic Politics under New International Conditions.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 13(2/3):187–207. Waever, Ole. 1995. “Securitization and Desecuritization.” pp. 46–86 in On Security, edited by Ronnie D. Lipschutz, New York: Columbia University Press.

EPILOGUE: DEMOCRATIC ELITISM AND WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT John Higley* Most influential schools of Western political thought since World War II have had a utopian flavor. Assuming that political possibilities are essentially open-ended, they have been reluctant to rule out any desirable political goal as impossible. A case in point is the strong resistance to Joseph Schumpeter’s conception of democracy as simply a method of representative government and his implication that democracy can never be more than this. During the past half-century Schumpeter’s thesis has stuck in the craws of many who believe that a much more open, participatory, and elite-less democracy is possible (Sartori 1987:156-63; see also chapter 1). The utopian flavor of recent Western political thought can be traced, in part, to the superpower status and influence of the United States since World War II and to American history’s singularly fortunate, but intellectually misleading, contours. For at least a century prior to World War II, American interests and values were unthreatened by foreign powers, and this enabled the United States to cultivate its own affairs and refrain from a sustained engagement with the larger world. In that fortunate setting and echoing their settler ancestors’ aspirations to create a “new world,” Americans came to regard politics as an unrestricted means for achieving their ideals, most especially a broad democratic equality. As Tocqueville highlighted, democracy has been the American touchstone, and Americans have believed that the road to it is open-ended. But the “exceptional” history and recent superpower influence of the United States do not alone explain the utopian flavor of recent Western political thought. One must also take into account the West’s success in perfecting the organizational and technological aspects of a civilization * Parts of this Epilogue restate and update arguments that G. Lowell Field and I advanced three decades ago in Elitism (1980). Lowell Field passed away in 1997 at the age of 86. He was a highly original and far-sighted scholar whose thinking about politics influenced me deeply.

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that proved vastly more productive than any other. After about 1700, the running together of clever artisanship, scientific reasoning, and readily available land and other natural resources fostered the agreeable notion that increases in economic productivity would eventually meet Western needs on a substantially equal basis. Most deep social conflicts would then dissolve. Once Turkish forces were defeated at Vienna in 1683, moreover, the West’s clear military superiority over the rest of the world allowed Westerners to presume that they would never be faced with cultural degradation, enslavement, or extermination at the hands of non-Western peoples. A principled optimism about political possibilities flowed from these circumstances. Expectations about the long-term equalizing effects of material progress supported the idea that radically different conceptions of social justice would eventually be joined in a synthesis acceptable to all. The sense of being safe from conquests by nonWestern peoples fostered a belief that, in the meantime, domestic conflicts in the pursuit of social justice could be fully explored, exploited, and fought out without risking the loss of Western civilization. Put differently, since the Enlightenment and French Revolution, Westerners have prevailingly cast political possibilities in secular utopian guises (Gray 2007). This was very different from how politics were viewed during the period that antedated the West’s economic and military triumphs. As portrayed by the two principal political thinkers of that earlier time, Machiavelli and Hobbes, politics are always a dangerous and difficult means for limiting – through deceit, bribery, force, and other stratagems – the potentially chaotic pursuit of self-interest in a world devoid of universally shared values. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the West’s increasing optimism about political possibilities gradually undercut this essentially harsh and hopeless position. The somewhat greater optimism of Locke was followed by the unbridled utopianism of Rousseau and the early socialists and, finally, by the whole panoply of progressive liberal, socialist, and democratic thought. After World War II the “historic West” – the countries of Western Europe plus those of British settlement in North America and the Antipodes – formed a political bloc largely under American leadership. During the next four decades this Western bloc was challenged only by the radical Soviet and Chinese regimes, whose economic ineffectiveness was, however, increasingly apparent. By the early 1990s

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China was embracing capitalism, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, and the republics that comprised it, as well as the East European states controlled by it, had abandoned their rival doctrinal allegiance and sought, in effect, to join the historic West. These watershed changes made it seem that Francis Fukuyama’s forecast of an end to major international divisions might be correct (Fukuyama 1992). Early in the twenty-first century, however, there are many indications that the circumstances underpinning Western political optimism were fortuitous and transient. Although the assumption about openended political possibilities lingers, the circumstances that made it seem plausible have basically ended. A major reality today is that various non-Western states and sects, led by fervently anti-Western elites, possess or will soon possess weapons of mass destruction capable of devastating Western populations, either by direct attack or as a side effect of wars between non-Western states. In their domestic affairs, Western countries confront a serious weakening of their occupational orders that will, in a deep economic downturn like that which began in 2008, exacerbate distributional conflicts greatly. They also confront ominous environmental problems and resource shortages that threaten the material progress by which such distributional conflicts might be contained. As the wheel of fate turns, Western countries may continue to enjoy important advantages over the rest of the world for several more generations. But there is no solid ground for assuming this. Despite much domestic dissension, they may be able to defend themselves against non-Western threats to their security, but there is no self-evident basis for thinking this will be so. It may happen that increases in Western economic productivity will continue to be large enough to buy off serious domestic discontents and sustain a modest degree of democratic politics through relatively painless redistributions out of an economic surplus. There is, however, no reason to take this for granted. If the way people think about politics mainly reflects their circumstances, these basic uncertainties in the situations of Western countries will in time give rise to a conception of political possibilities less optimistic than that which has flourished during recent centuries and especially since World War II. Yet the problems confronting the West are pressing, and the need to adopt a more realistic conception of political possibilities is urgent. Juxtaposing democratic elitism with recent Western political thought is one step in this direction.

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A hundred years ago, personal safety and respectful treatment in most of life’s contingencies were assured to members of upper- and middleclass families in Western Europe, the countries settled by Englishspeaking peoples, and the larger cities of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Even in African, Asian, and Middle Eastern colonial territories ruled by Europeans, this was generally true for most upper- and middle-class persons without European ancestors, although the privileges of European rulers were embarrassing and humiliating to such “native” families. Between the well behaved, well dressed, and well spoken in all these locales, Western liberal conceptions of personal dignity and impartial justice were generally professed and broadly observed. Around 1900, of course, such treatment did not extend in any large measure to members of lower-class families, ethnic or racial minorities, and women who acted outside traditional female roles. Especially in countries not directly influenced by British political practices, and especially when they asserted rights that dominant classes and strata did not think they had, persons in lower statuses were not reliably respected. There is no reason to suppose, however, that they were less respected or less safe from abuses than such persons had been throughout all earlier history. On the contrary, the widespread profession of liberal values among those who were well off resulted in the relatively respectful treatment of the less well off in many legal and occupational situations. On the whole, much larger proportions of populations were accorded respect by authorities and institutions than ever before in complex societies. This meant, in turn, that larger proportions of nonelites than ever before lived lives of substantial self-respect. In 1900, governments in Western Europe and the countries settled by English-speaking people derived much of their legitimacy from relatively contested and participatory elections of representative parliaments and assemblies. To be sure, monarchs in Denmark, Italy, the Low Countries, and Sweden still claimed significant degrees of independent power, and monarchs in Austria-Hungary, Germany, Portugal, and Spain clearly wielded such power. Although the suffrage was not yet universal, it was advancing toward the enfranchisement of all adult citizens. The liberal idea of political choices by, at least, moderately large electorates in real party competitions was the prevailing standard of political authority, and in most Western countries there was no expectation that military coups were likely to veto choices made by

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voters. Although this liberal political standard did not extend much beyond Western Europe and the English-speaking countries, political activists in other parts of the globe tended to accept representative government as their preferred political model. In part, of course, this reflected Western colonial power. But whatever the cause, liberal political principles were dominant intellectually, and liberal practices were beginning to spread widely at the twentieth century’s start. The period around 1900 could well be seen, in retrospect, as the high water mark in liberalism’s advance. Serious interruptions of liberal practices occurred subsequently in many West European countries. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Spain all experienced the suppression of liberal practices for substantial periods before, during, or after World War II. For long periods during the 20th century, moreover, the Soviet Union and its satellite countries professed communist principles that in practice disregarded the personal rights involved in liberalism, and they eschewed meaningful electoral contests and choices. Today, unlike 1900, no Western liberal country exerts much political influence and power outside the historic West except, insofar as raw power goes, the United States, and developments during the first decade of the twenty-first century indicate that US power, not to mention US influence, is attenuating. Outside the West, except for Japan, Israel, and a few scattered ex-British colonies such as India and Ghana, adherence to liberal principles and practices is precarious at best. It is certainly no longer the case that members of upper- and middle-class families are assured of safety and respectful treatment in the cities of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia. In the face of criminal and political kidnapping on a scale unknown since the Middle Ages, the safety, personal liberty, and self-respect of educated, wealthy, and politically prominent persons and families are now frequently at risk. As they were historically before the appearance of liberal and semi-liberal states, politics in much of the world are again a dangerous but unavoidable activity that tends to degrade all but the most fortunate of those who engage in it. When they travel outside the West today, and even when they are at home, Westerners are no longer exempt from terrorist actions and the taking of hostages. Especially when outside the West, well-off Westerners cannot count on personal safety and respectful treatment. Enmeshed in elaborate security arrangements, they face the real, if statistically still remote, possibility of being killed, maimed, or held hostage in the

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interest of some often obscure political sect’s public relations, moneymaking efforts, or vendetta. The machine-gunning of a score of Westerners in Mumbai’s most expensive hotels during December 2008 is but one illustration. As reflected by the relatively illiberal surveillance, profiling, and other security measures Western governments are instituting, this new vulnerability of Westerners tends to weaken liberal attitudes and practices. Historic liberal protections of individual rights such as habeas corpus are loosened, while a “Dark Side,” as a US vice-president has termed it, involving the harsh interrogation, torture, and assassination of suspected subversives is increasingly seen by Western governments as a necessary evil. The basic political reason why liberal practices have failed to spread much beyond the comparatively few countries that enjoyed them a hundred years ago has been the failure of consensually united elites to form in most countries of the world. As pointed out in this volume’s introductory chapter, an elite that is consensually united must emerge before any stable pattern of government conducive to substantial political freedom and meaningful political choice becomes possible. Around 1900 such elites existed in no more than ten Western countries. Although they exist in about forty countries today, most of these elites are located in Europe and the English-speaking countries (Higley and Burton 2006). Western political thought has generally failed to recognize the elite basis of democracy. Instead, it has naïvely urged democratic suffrage, free and fair elections, respect for personal liberties, and democratic constitutions on all countries of the world, most of which have deeply disunited elites that are engaged in dog-eat-dog political struggles. Much too blithely, in other words, Western thought has assumed that simply by adopting such measures countries will move from unstable and illiberal regimes to stable and liberal democracies. In particular, assiduous “democracy promotion” efforts have tended to persuade policymakers in the United States and other Western countries that instituting competitive elections where they do not now occur is a relatively sure route to democracy (Carothers 2002/2004). This failure to recognize the elite basis of any stable and liberal democratic political system – a failure that has much to do with how democratic elitism has been construed – is a manifestation of the utopian assumption that political possibilities are open-ended. The failure also reflects a conflation of liberal and democratic values that need to be kept separate and distinct. Although democracy obviously belongs among the values of any liberal political system, it is not, contrary to

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most Western political thought, a reliable instrument for promoting liberal practices.

Politics and Elites The conflation of liberal and democratic values is rooted in the reluctance of Western political thought to entertain distasteful assumptions about the basis, nature and function of politics. One of these distasteful assumptions is that politics arise out of rationally irreconcilable conflicts of interest among people (Gray 2007). Such conflicts are irreconcilable in the sense that the parties to them cannot be shown or persuaded that they are mistaken about their interests. Not all conflicts have this character, of course, but many do, and it is these that are the principal basis of politics. Where conflicts of interest are not rationally reconcilable, politics are the alternative to civil warfare. As history readily shows, politics are hardly a reliable alternative, yet they are frequently and widely accepted. This is because the many people in any society who lack substantial self-confidence, ambition, and assertiveness are usually prepared to tolerate politics in order to reduce the amount of violence and disorder that would otherwise occur. They are prepared to put up with political actions that are unsatisfactory to them in order to achieve a semblance of peace. Behind any smoothly functioning political system, in other words, are expediential and tacit conclusions reached by individuals and groups that trying to claim all they think they deserve is unprofitable, and that conforming to the political organization and distribution of privilege that happen to exist offers a better return than they might obtain by openly challenging the established order. Because many of the conflicts that give rise to politics are not rationally reconcilable, political actions seldom fully “solve” social problems in any objective moral sense. “Social justice” is rarely attained through politics (or through any other activity) because in assuming that differences of interest are ultimately mistaken, social justice is a largely empty concept. As Bertrand de Jouvenal (1963) once observed, political actions result only in “settlements” that contain, discourage, or repress the expression of interests that are not, and for the most part could not be, fully satisfied. Although political settlements sometimes involve fairly even-handed compromises between entrenched and opposed groups, they necessarily sacrifice at least some interests that

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happen not to be well represented at the points and places where settlements are reached. This is because elites who are in positions to shape settlements normally expect to gain something for themselves and their friends from the settlements they orchestrate. In most political settlements, some interests are sacrificed merely by the efforts of elites to ensure that they, at least, are not disadvantaged. Because there are no strictly objective moral solutions to many conflicts of interest, and because the elites who make their weight felt when shaping political settlements regularly produce more advantages for themselves and their allies, elites are commonly judged to be callous, deceitful and immoral. From perspectives that would be appropriate when judging many non-political activities, they are. But as a moral judgment about most or all elites, this common view is erroneous because politics are a necessary activity that never allows fully open and trusting behavior. Political actions that are naively open and trusting are normally ineffective, while actions that do not seek to coerce some persons in ways that are advantageous to others are by definition not political. Given this nature of politics per se, appropriate moral judgments of elites are complex, controversial, and subtle. They are concerned with effectiveness, with humaneness, and with culturally shaped notions of fairness. Basically, they are concerned with the moral obligation of elites to avoid practices that unnecessarily reduce the satisfactions of some persons or unnecessarily degrade some persons’ attitudes and behavior. Inevitably, these moral standards are culture-bound to a degree. As pointed out in chapter 5, Western liberals have customarily approved of elite practices that create or preserve a certain type of selfreliant citizen. Western socialists, on the other hand, have regularly called for practices that would foster a more altruistic kind of citizen. Liberals and socialists have tended to disagree, in other words, about what constitute unnecessarily harsh and degrading elite actions. The function of politics is to make possible the existence of all larger territorial organizations of people. These range from city-states to modern national states to empires to such weakly organized supranational entities as the European Union or the United Nations. But when politics successfully perform this function by suppressing overt conflict and producing a reliability of expectations in social life, they tend to conceal their own nature from the persons who benefit most from them. Secure and influential, such persons lose sight of the basis, nature, and function of politics, and they come to mistake their own situations

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and sensibilities for those of people in general. They find it more or less impossible to believe that the political institutions and processes that so effectively protect and nurture them are regarded as more or less iniquitous by less fortunate people in their own and other societies. In this way, successful politics undermine themselves. The most favored strata come to contain growing numbers of sentimental and unrealistic persons who are unwilling to recognize that their fortunate circumstances emanate in large measure from how elites in their societies have practiced politics. These are individuals who like to talk about such things as social justice, politics without coercion, conflict resolution, participatory democracy and other constructs that can only be mainly imaginary. They seek to impose respect for such constructs on the elites who need their support. But if elites start to believe and profess such naïveté seriously, their own effectiveness is crippled. In the eyes of less advantaged people at home and abroad, such professions are patently insincere, and the elites who voice them are contemptible. Only a ruthless tradition of intellectual honesty or a protected private tradition of objectivity among elites and their immediate supporters can resist this tendency of successful politics to be self-undermining. The politics of Western liberal countries in about 1900 were perhaps the most successful politics ever practiced. Yet, the intellectual life of none of these countries was able to prevent the naïve moral claims that this success inspired from coming to pervade the thought and utterances of elites and many otherwise sophisticated citizens.

Liberal and Democratic Values As developed originally by fairly well off bourgeois strata during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in English-speaking countries and northwestern Europe, liberalism emphasized freedom from arbitrary political and legal restraints and from political interferences in legitimately private activities. Combining beliefs in religious tolerance, freedom of speech for those who discussed issues responsibly, and the social utility and inherent fairness of freedom for economic entrepreneurs, liberalism did not originally have any clear egalitarian thrust. During the nineteenth century the countries in which this doctrine was widely accepted achieved political and economic domination over much of the world. Consequently, large parts of their populations

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experienced great increases in prosperity, leisure, and self-confidence. With this, many adherents of liberalism in these countries found that political order and social peace were compatible with, and even facilitated by, wider and wider extensions of the suffrage. They discovered, in other words, that steady increases in national power and prosperity and the multiplication of attractive and reasonably influential job opportunities permitted the formal democratization of their governments without opening the way to participation by any great number of illiberal and deeply discontented persons. Thus the English-speaking countries, the Low Countries, and the Scandinavian countries, in particular, enjoyed obvious success in democratizing their governments and in extending liberal practices. Most other West European countries moved in the same direction, although more severe conflicts among their elites made success less complete. In this way, the attainment of stable liberal democracies gradually came to be seen as a plausible, even a natural progression, and liberals became increasingly committed to egalitarian values in terms of individual rights, including the right of suffrage. During the twentieth century this process led to the assumption that all of the principal features of modern liberal democracies are equal components of ultimate liberal values. These features include: (1) constitutional government, as distinguished from powerful monarchies and from the military and other dictatorships that occur sporadically in unstable political systems; (2) political, administrative and judicial practices that strongly respect personal dignity by requiring that governments follow established laws, that they put themselves at a substantial disadvantage in proving persons to be wrong-doers, and that they refrain from governing at all in certain more or less understood matters, such as religion and other forms of belief; (3) democracy, in the sense, at least, of universal suffrage exercised in real electoral contests that determine leading government personnel. Thus the liberal became a staunch democrat, and the general pattern of government in the liberal societies of the West came to be labeled “liberal democratic”. However, while this evolution of liberal values into those of liberal democracy was natural enough in the historical economic and political contexts of Western countries, in most other countries the twin commitments to liberal and democratic values are frequently, perhaps even always, in conflict. This is because opening effective political participation to all organized factions in free and fair electoral contests leads quickly to political claims that are unacceptable

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to many entrenched interests. Such interests are commonly numerous enough and well enough placed to carry out coups or electoral frauds that sweep away the threats to their ways of life and privileges that come from the operation of democratic suffrage. Thus attempts to achieve liberal democracy merely by instituting universal suffrage and holding elections are likely to be unsuccessful. This was amply illustrated by the military coups that terminated repeated attempts to establish democratic regimes in Latin America during the 150 years following independence from Spanish and Portuguese rule. Since the end of colonial rule in Africa, the Middle East, and most of South and Southeast Asia the general pattern of political struggles has been the same. Linking the egalitarian goal of democracy with liberal goals such as personal freedom and orderly government has thus involved considerable confusion. It has diverted attention from the elite structures and practices that are everywhere a precondition for liberal political practices, and in doing so it has been harmful to the liberal cause. A more sophisticated understanding would see democracy as an instrumental value that in certain elite conditions may promote or help realize ultimate liberal values. It is clear that constitutional government and at least some version of governmental practice respectful of personal dignity are empirically necessary to a liberal regime. But democracy in the sense of an extended or universal suffrage is not strictly necessary for such a regime, and in many ordinary political circumstances may be inimical to it. To suppose, then, that a liberal should ultimately prefer democratic government for its own sake is, in fact, a somewhat naïve and provincial position. It is a position that is speciously plausible to well-off persons who happen to live under stable liberal democratic regimes and whose favored circumstances enable them to derive personal satisfactions from democratic participation in their own government. But it has little plausibility for those who live under illiberal regimes or even for less well-off and less self-confident persons in liberal democracies. In general, such persons have no interest in diligent part-time excursions into the kind of limited and negotiated politics that offer satisfactions to educated and relatively privileged citizens. Similarly, in contemplating liberal safeguards against violations of personal dignity, less well-off and less self-confident persons often conclude that these safeguards do less to protect their own dignity, which they may feel they have little of anyway, than they prevent

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effective control of interests that they fear or for which they have no serious sympathy. In order for liberal doctrine to regain the allegiance of elites and larger political classes it is necessary to highlight an ultimate liberal value that can be widely shared. At the same time, this value must be distinguished carefully from instrumental values that may or may not contribute empirically to its realization. A social milieu of “free people” constitutes the ultimate liberal value. This is a milieu in which people deal with each other as equals and in which no one claims for him or herself, nor expects to accord others, systematically greater deference or higher privilege. The historical contexts that the expression “free people” calls to mind are the Switzerland of William Tell, the Holland of William the Silent, the America of George Washington. However, to evoke these contexts is to make it clear that liberals value equality only insofar as it is linked to an active and individualistic freedom. Liberals care nothing for, and even abhor, the kind of equality that might prevail in a community of unassertive persons wholly submissive to custom or prevailing opinion. The ultimate liberal goal is thus a social milieu in which persons are free and equal in active roles. Institutionalized politics and government practices that prevent violations of personal dignity contribute instrumentally toward achieving this milieu. Unstable politics involving coups and court intrigues, as well as government practices that readily degrade people, contribute instrumentally toward preventing or destroying it. As for democracy, or universal suffrage, its effectiveness as an instrumental device – in Schumpeter’s term a “method” – for achieving a liberal milieu varies with circumstances.

Elitism Distinguishing between the ultimate liberal goal and instrumental liberal values places democracy and other egalitarian measures on a different footing from that which has been presumed in most Western political thought. It re-emphasizes Schumpeter’s conception of democracy as simply a political method that depends for its workings on the propitious and underlying circumstances that have been elaborated in this volume. If liberals ultimately prefer to associate actively with free persons on a basis of equality, then obviously an entire society of free

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persons that is governed democratically and is otherwise egalitarian is the liberal ideal. Liberals would greatly prefer this to an oligarchic society in which only a small number of privileged people interact on a free and equal basis. Yet, the historical contingencies that have produced societies that have at once been liberal and egalitarian have been extremely rare. They have mostly been tiny collectivities located in agrarian and isolated parts of Western countries that were advantaged over the rest of the world by early technological progress. Any liberal reasonably familiar with history would not believe that this ideal of a wholly free and equal society is attainable in most circumstances. A society that is considerably more stratified, but which nevertheless has an upper layer of actively free and equal persons – by no means a common historical situation – is the most that a liberal can normally hope to attain or preserve. These considerations point toward elitism. Although the liberal’s ideal is individualistic participation in a society of equal persons, is the liberal honestly an egalitarian? An egalitarian is presumably a person committed to the equalization of people as an intrinsic good. When this egalitarian preference is held unconditionally, it is likely to prove incompatible with the liberal’s preference for a society of free persons within which one can interact as an active equal. It is simply a matter of historical fact that liberals have sometimes enjoyed limited approximations of their ideal that would most probably have been upset or destroyed by thoroughly egalitarian measures. In eighteenth-century England, for instance, a considerable number of well-off persons enjoyed an approximation of a liberal society in their own interactions, though most of the population was poor, uneducated, disfranchised, and subject to abusive treatment by authorities when speaking or acting in ways that threatened the well-off. It can hardly be supposed that in that time and place the liberal practices that existed would have survived if some force had decreed formal equality for all and then actually implemented this decree by equivalents of today’s affirmative action measures and confidence-building exercises in community action organizations for the deprived. Similarly, there can be little doubt that liberal practices in Western countries today would be destroyed if someone established a genuine world government with a full range of taxation and police powers and with arrangements designed to ensure that non-Western countries exercise proportionate shares of influence in the world government’s policy-making.

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The implication is that a prudent person of liberal persuasion must be willing to accept his or her goal in the form of half a loaf when the alternative appears to be no bread at all. In other words, the liberal cannot honestly claim to be a committed egalitarian in the way that some persons are or believe themselves to be. The liberal is willing to live in a society where liberal practice extends only to that part of the population to which his or her associates belong if further equalization can only be attained by upsetting this liberal social milieu. Likewise, the liberal is willing to live in a liberal democracy that enjoys considerable advantages in technology and access to world resources over other countries if (1) international equalization is not attainable without drastically curtailing living standards in the advantaged country so that its liberal practices would probably be destroyed, and if (2) because of the population ratios involved there is little prospect that international equalization would create liberal practices in countries whose living standards would only be minutely increased thereby. The liberal is necessarily elitist, however much this may clash with what he or she would prefer as an ideal if ideals could be made real. The liberal has had, or expects to have, enough good fortune to want and value the equal interaction of free and actively individualistic persons. He or she is more self-confident, more self-reliant, and less fearful of powerful persons and interests than the average person historically or today. The liberal is not, however, committed to inequality. He or she is not among those who prefer a society of unequal and mostly un-free persons in principle. From the liberal’s standpoint, therefore, the more socially or geographically extended that a milieu of free and equal people is, the better. But there is no simple, straightforward way to create or extend a society of free and equal persons by political or legal means. It is obvious that, as socialists have argued, one cannot make unequal persons equal merely by declaring them equally qualified to vote and participate in formal politics, as in a democracy. It is also obvious that one cannot make unequal persons equal merely by enforcing a variety of rules, principles, and standards designed to prevent people from taking advantage of inequalities, as state socialism tried but failed to do. The liberal does not seek social advantages as an ultimate goal but, instead, accepts advantages when they afford free and equal interaction with other persons and when there are no practical possibilities for widening the circle of liberal persons greatly. The failure to distinguish the ultimate liberal goal from instrumental democratic considerations has caused liberals to misunderstand the

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real relation of democracy to liberal aims. By treating democratic government as an indistinguishable part of a cluster of goals, liberals have committed the error of thinking that formal equality in political statuses, democracy, is a reliable means for promoting liberal practices. Considered on its own merits, this proposition that universal suffrage, frequent voting, and other democratic measures reliably, that is, regardless of circumstances, promote the interaction of free and actively equal persons should be patently incredible to anyone with much political experience or knowledge. It is more nearly the other way around. Especially among elites, liberal practices such as avoiding the use of political means to pursue drastic social changes are essential to the year-in, year-out acceptance by different factions of a Schumpeterian competition for votes that determines who will hold office and who will define policies. This live and let live disposition among elites, which means a tacit agreement not to exacerbate potentially explosive conflicts and to respect each other’s vital interests, is the sine qua non for any practical and durable degree of liberal democratic politics – for democratic elitism.

Conclusion Has the liberal’s conflation of ultimate and instrumental values lasted too long to be reparable? Possibly it has. Since at least World War II almost everyone who might be considered a liberal has characterized the ultimate liberal goal in democratic terms. The unanimity and fervor with which persons who regard themselves as liberals have urged extensive democratizations of their own societies and of illiberal nonWestern ones indicate a near total confusion of cause and effect in their understanding of political possibilities. This confusion has greatly weakened the self-recognition of liberals to the point where it is uncertain whether liberal-minded elite and sub-elite Westerners are any longer capable of identifying and taking initiatives that might deal constructively with the world’s problems. They are blind to the fact that in their own societies the spread of democratic suffrage in ways that did not fundamentally undermine liberal practices depended on the prior existence of consensually united elites and probably also on substantial world economic and military domination by the West. Consequently, they cannot comprehend that the absence of these conditions in most non-Western countries may necessitate less than democratic means of governing them.

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I have tried to show – in a roundabout way that will have tried the reader’s patience – how democratic elitism can be put on a firmer intellectual and comparative historical footing than Western political thought has allowed. As a liberal, Joseph Schumpeter correctly saw that democracy is a method, or an instrumental value, that can serve the ultimate liberal goal of a free people. Addressing English-speaking readers in the early 1940s, whom he plausibly assumed to be of liberal persuasion, Schumpeter did not highlight the comparative-historical distinctiveness, indeed the rarity, of the democracy he described. Nor, perhaps conscious of his United States location and Americans’ democratic proclivities, did he think it useful to highlight the strict limits to democracy implicit in his theory. However, numerous, mainly American critics of his theory did this soon enough, depicting democratic elitism as an unwanted, even outrageous closure of the open-ended road to ideal democracy that they regarded their society and, they wanted to believe, all societies as traveling. Critics of democratic elitism must come to terms with the more or less ineluctable aspects of elites and politics that I have explored. If and when they do, their conception of democracy will not differ significantly from that which Schumpeter offered. References Carothers, Thomas. 2002. “The End of the Transition Paradigm.” Journal of Democracy 13(1):5–21. ——. 2004. Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment. De Jouvenal, Bertrand. 1963. The Pure Theory of Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Field, G. Lowell, and John Higley. 1980. Elitism. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press. Gray, John. 2007. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. Sartori, Giovanni. 1987. The Theory of Democracy Revisited: The Contemporary Debate. Chatham N.J.: Chatham House Books.

INDEX Accountability, model of, 15, 16, 35, 37, 39, 44, 45, 48–58, 159 Agenda gatekeepers, 119 America/American, 6, 12, 35, 36, 62, 70, 74, 81–83, 87, 91, 92, 102, 215, 216, 218, 226, 230; see also US Americanization, 12 Antagonistic cooperation, theory of, 9, 17, 102–104, 106, 114 Argentina/Argentinean, 6 Australia/Australian, 7, 9, 12, 62, 65, 66, 69, 203 Authorization, model of, 16, 17, 45, 51–58 Autocracy, 184 AWS, Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność (Polish Political Party), 143 Bachrach, Peter, 4, 25, 43, 61 Baltic, parliaments, 210 states, xi, 204, 206, 207, 212 Berlusconi, Silvio, 12, 13, 161 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 10 Bismarck, Fürst Otto von, 97 Blair, Tony, 12 Blondel, Jean, 13, 44, 143 Bonaparte, Louis Napoléon, 100 Britain/British, 9, 10, 12, 13, 28, 63, 82, 83, 92, 157, 216, 218, 219 Brüning, Heinrich, 101 Buchstein, Hubertus, 30, 32 Bulgaria/Bulgarian, 131, 136–139, 142, 143, 147, 148 Bundestag, 105 Canada/Canadian, 9, 12, 87, 203 Career/careerization, 1, 36, 37, 103, 114, 124, 130–132, 134, 140, 144, 147, 148, 160 CDU, Christlich Demokratische Union (German political party), 107, 109–112 CEE, Central and Eastern Europe, 129–149, 177

Charismatic leadership, 44, 162 Chile/Chilean, 6 Christian Democrats, 29, 107–111, 133, 135 Citizenship rights, 209 Civic Platform (Polish political party), 176, 180–182, 189–191, 193–195 Civil society, 4, 158, 177, 183 Clark, Helen, 12 Clemenceau, Georges, 10 Clinton, Hillary, 9 Communism, 105, 163, 176, 178, 179, 186, 193 Competition, 1–5, 10–13, 15, 16, 18, 26, 27, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 51, 56, 72, 75, 88, 90, 98, 102–104, 106, 112, 114, 126, 127, 129, 132, 147, 154, 158, 161, 165–168, 184, 195, 201–203, 206, 218, 229 Conservatism, 13, 30, 74, 176, 183 Conservatives, 130, 133, 135 Croatia/Croatian, 131, 136, 139, 140, 143, 144, 146–148 Dahl, Robert, 3, 16, 25, 26, 38, 39, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 57, 65, 90, 129, 198, 200, 202, 205, 206, 212 Delegates, 46, 58 Democracy, vii, 1–5, 7, 9–11, 13, 15–19, 25–31, 33, 36–39, 43–46, 49–52, 54, 56–58, 61–68, 70, 72–76, 79, 81, 85, 89–93, 97–102, 104–109, 123, 129–132, 136, 138, 141–144, 148, 153–158, 160, 167, 173, 174, 181, 182, 194, 195, 197, 198, 200–203, 205–207, 209, 212, 215, 218, 220, 223–226, 228–230 committee process, theory of 67, 68 consociational, 136, 212 consolidation of, 155 deliberative, 31, 32, 44 electoral, 6, 13, 44, 54, 197, 206 empirical theories of, 30 ethnic, 205, 206 ethno-elitist, 205, 206 ethno-liberal, 205–207, 212

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formal theories of, 30, 31 leader, 1–3, 10, 16, 17, 44, 97–102, 104, 160 minimalist conception of, 38, 52, 57 normative theories of, 30, 31 output-orientation of, 34 participatory, 61, 212, 223 party, 27, 46 rationalization of, 30, 32 representative, 5, 7, 11, 15, 16, 33, 37, 43, 44, 100, 101, 105, 107, 109, 144, 200 simulated, 153, 154, 156, 167 Democratic, elitism, vii, 1–6, 9–11, 16–19, 25–31, 33, 36, 37, 39, 43–45, 52, 54–56, 58, 61, 62, 73, 76, 79, 90, 93, 97, 100–102, 104–106, 108–111, 113, 114, 117, 119, 126, 127, 129–134, 136, 138–141, 143, 144, 148, 149, 153–155, 166, 168, 169, 173–175, 181, 182, 191, 192, 195, 197, 198, 202, 206, 207, 215, 217, 220, 229, 230 theory, 37, 43, 55, 66, 143 values, 9, 149, 220, 221, 223, 224 Democratic Convention (alliance of Romanian political parties), 142 Democratic Forum (Hungarian political party), 143 Democratic Left Alliance see SLD Democratic Union of Hungarians (Romanian political party), 137 Democratization, 28, 35, 63, 90, 91, 104, 129, 137, 140, 147, 148, 173, 177, 201, 224, 229 Denmark/Danish, 7, 12, 218, 219 Diasporic minorities, 205 Downs, Anthony, 4, 48 Electoral turnout, 141, 142 Elite, accountability, 15 autonomy, 2, 16, 25, 27–29, 31–33, 37, 38, 62, 63, 64, 70, 76 circulation, 139, 143, 159, 185, 186, 191 compromises, 73, 75, 155 consensually united, 7–9, 11, 17, 32, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70–72, 75, 104, 133, 153–156, 166–169, 174, 195, 201, 220, 229 consensus, 8, 17, 32, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70–72, 75, 153–156, 166–168, 174

control, 54, 183 cooperation, 63, 104 cooptation, 35, 197 distrust, 174, 183 disunited, 7, 70, 72, 73, 173, 174, 220 functional, 54, 58 ideological zeal, 183 integration, 62, 66, 71, 111, 138 networks, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 103, 133, 157 parochialism, 183 pluralism, 62 political, 1, 5–7, 10, 11, 16, 18, 25–27, 29–32, 34, 45, 54, 62, 71, 75, 87, 88, 90, 91, 101–106, 108, 110, 112, 113, 118–121, 123, 127, 129–132, 138, 141, 144, 149, 153, 158–160, 164, 165, 167, 169, 173, 185, 186, 192, 197, 200 professionalization, 64 resources, 27, 62, 64, 67, 157 responsible, 54, 58, 147 responsiveness, 108, 164 ruling, 49, 58 settlement, 8, 11, 72, 73, 155, 169, 173, 174, 194, 201 turnover, 143–147, 159 unity/unified, 131 Entrepreneurs, 159, 223 Estonia/Estonian, 19, 136, 137, 138, 142, 197–200, 203–205, 207–212 Ethnic, minorities, 19, 31, 136–138, 197, 198, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211 parties, 137, 138 policy, 204, 205 Etzioni-Halévy, Eva, 61–66, 70–73, 76 European Union (EU), 32, 75, 87, 130, 141, 155, 164, 176, 178–181, 183, 185, 192, 197, 199, 200, 206–208, 212, 222 Everyday life, 165, 168 Executive power, 101, 156 Fascist, 2, 10, 181 FDP, Freie Demokratische Partei (German political party), 110–113 Framing, 54, 118, 119 France/French, 7, 9, 10, 12, 35, 48, 74, 82, 83, 103, 216, 219 French Republic, second, 100 third, 10, 103

index FRG, Federal Republic of Germany, 104; see also Germany Friedrich’s law/rule, 43, 45–47, 49–52, 54–56, 58 GDR, German Democratic Republic, 104, 105, 108; see also Germany Geremek, Bronislaw, 177, 182 Germany, 2, 7, 10–12, 17, 18, 28, 29, 34, 63, 82, 97, 98, 100, 103–105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 178, 195, 218, 219 East, 104, 105, 108; see also GDR West, 11, 17, 65, 66, 69, 104, 105; see also FRG Government/cabinet, 1, 3, 6, 11–13, 15, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 37, 38, 43, 45, 48–51, 54–57, 65, 74, 85, 90, 91, 97–99, 101, 106, 117–120, 122, 123, 127, 130, 131, 139–148, 155–159, 161, 163, 164, 168, 173–177, 179, 180, 182–195, 197–204, 206, 208, 210, 215, 218–220, 224–227, 229 Green Party, 107–114, 117 Habermas, Jürgen, 31, 32, 68, 73 Harper, Stephen, 12 Hindenburg, Paul von, 100, 101 Hintze, Otto, 97 Hitler, Adolf, 100, 101 Homeland, 136, 204 Homeland Union (Lithuanian political party), 142 Howard, John, 12 Hungarian Coalition (Slovakia), 137 Hungary/Hungarian, 18, 136, 137, 140, 143, 144, 147, 153–169, 173, 218 Iron law of oligarchy, 27, 103 Italy/Italian, 9, 12, 13, 161, 164, 218, 219 Japan/Japanese, 9, 87, 90, 219 Jouvenel, Robert de, 10 Kaczynski, Jaroslaw, 19, 147, 165, 173–183, 185, 191, 192, 194, 195 Kaczynski, Lech, 19, 147, 165, 173–176, 178–185, 191, 192, 194, 195 Kariel, Henry, 4 Kwasniewski, Aleksander, 178, 194 Kymlicka, Will, 198, 203–205 Labour Party (Lithuanian political party), 143

233

Latvia/Latvian, 19, 136–138, 197–200, 203, 204, 207–212 Leader, vii, 1–6, 9–18, 26, 27, 33, 34, 43–49, 51–57, 68, 69, 82, 85, 89, 97–101, 108, 117, 119, 121–127, 129, 131, 132, 138, 144, 147–149, 153, 156–158, 160–163, 165–167, 169, 173–177, 180–184, 191–194, 197, 198, 200–203, 206–212 democracy, see Democracy parties, 13 Leadership, 14, 27, 44, 46, 49, 52, 56–58, 83, 93, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104, 106–108, 117, 121, 134, 149, 162–164, 178, 191, 194, 209, 211, 216 selection, 13, 28, 43, 49, 51, 52, 55, 57, 101, 103 Left, the, 135, 140, 193 Legislators, 6; see also MPs Legitimacy, 32, 113, 131, 132, 142, 166–168, 176, 218 Liberalism, 13, 29, 79, 83, 84, 89, 179, 219, 223, 224 Liberals, 97, 107–111, 133, 140, 157, 181, 222, 224, 226–229 Lindblom, Charles, 4, 45, 46, 57 Linz, Juan J., 1, 4, 5, 8, 27, 90, 153, 173, 198, 200, 205 Lipset, Martin Seymour, 4, 25 Lithuania/Lithuanian, 137, 140, 142–147, 198, 199, 204, 208–211 Lloyd George, David, 10 LPR, League of Polish Families (Polish political party), 175, 180–182, 189–194 Ludendorff, Erich, 99– 101 Lustration/lustration law, 179, 184, 186, 195 Madison, James, 26, 27 Majoritarianism, 157 Mandate (model), 2, 3, 16, 45–55, 57, 58, 147, 159, 201 Manin, Bernard, 26, 36, 44, 48, 50, 51, 56, 57 Marx, Karl, 84–86, 105, 111 Mass media, 14, 117–127, 165 and politics, 118 elites, 117 experiences with, 122 leaks to, 122 Mass parties 13 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 177 McCain, John, 9

234

index

Mečiar, Valdimír, 147 Meritocracy, 27, 28 Merkel, Angela, 12 Michels, Robert, 1, 25, 27, 64, 103 Michnik, Adam, 174, 182 Ministers, cabinet, 13, 147, 210 prime, 12, 13, 34, 107, 159, 163, 176, 178 Minority rights, 199, 201, 203 Moldova, 137 Moore, Gwen, vii, 7, 62, 65, 66, 70–73, 76 Moral revolution, 179, 192 Mosca, Gaetano, 1, 25, 26, 89, 111 Movement of Rights and Freedom (Bulgarian political party), 137 MPs, 17, 105–113, 130–140, 142–145, 147, 148, 157, 159, 160, 167, 186; see also Representatives; Legislators Multiculturalism, 203 Nazi, 11, 82, 99, 100, 104, 113; see also NSDAP Newcomers, 110, 139, 144, 145, 186–191, 194 Norm-breaching behaviour, 131, 147, 153–154, 168, 195 Norway/Norwegian, 7, 18, 117, 119–123, 125, 126, 219 November Revolution, 97, 100 NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German political party), 101; see also Nazi Obama, Barack, 9, 14 Pareto, Vilfredo, 1–3, 25, 79, 89, 160 Parliamentary party groups (PPGs), 107, 145 Party family, 106, 110, 130–133, 135, 140, 148 Pateman, Carole, 4, 43 PDS, Party of Democratic Socialism (German political party), 105–107, 109–113 PiS, Law and Justice (Polish political party), 173–186, 189–195 Pitkin, Hanna, 43, 46, 49, 52, 56 Plamenatz, John, 16, 43, 45, 48, 49, 51, 83 Plebiscite (plebiscitary election), 109, 193 Poland/Polish, 12, 19, 63, 131, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 146, 147,

153, 165, 173–182, 185–187, 189–195, 199, 209 Political, accountability, 35 elite, see Elite integration, 208 opportunity structure, 185 professionalism, 33, 35, 114 Politician, 1, 4, 6, 10, 34–37, 39, 46–48, 51, 69, 90, 98, 99, 101, 104, 119, 120, 122–127, 134, 139, 140, 144, 147, 148, 158, 159, 161, 165, 166, 168, 181, 184, 186 Politics, personalization of, 56 Polyarchy, 38, 45, 202, 206 Popular sovereignty, 2, 25, 26, 100, 103 Populism, 44, 161, 164, 193 President/presidency, 12, 30, 99–101, 123, 147, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184, 194, 220 Presidential, 9, 12, 30, 101, 173, 174, 181, 183, 194 Presidentialization, 44 Principal-Agent Theory, 17, 102, 103 Prisoners’ Dilemma, 114 Pro Patria (Estonian political party), 142 Professionalization, 34–36, 39, 130, 131, 138, 140, 143, 148 Propaganda wars, 183, 184 Przeworski, Adam, 16, 45, 46, 50, 51, 52, 57 PSL, Polish Peasant Party, 180, 182, 185, 186, 193, 194 Public service, 13 Public sphere, 14, 17, 31, 68, 73, 76 Rasmussen, Anders Fogh, 12 Rational choice, 30, 31, 44, 47, 48, 113 Recruitment, 18, 104, 120, 131, 134, 135, 145–147, 183, 199, 211 Re-election criteria, 50, 51, 57 Reichstag, 11, 97, 99, 101 Representation, 8, 16, 26, 31, 44–46, 49, 50, 52, 54–58, 107, 109, 136–138, 149, 159, 168, 198, 201, 205, 207, 210 Representatives, 1, 15, 30, 31, 46, 49, 52, 57, 58, 61, 67, 103, 105, 109, 110, 119, 134, 135, 144, 177, 199, 200, 210, 211; see also MPs; legislators Responsiveness, 39, 44–47, 56, 58, 108, 113, 114, 149, 161, 164

index

235

Revolution, 8, 35, 80, 83, 85, 86, 97–100, 162, 163, 175, 178, 179, 191, 192, 216 moral, 179, 192 Right, far, 181 the, 140 Romania/Romanian, 131, 136–138, 140, 142, 144–148 Round Table, 173, 174, 177, 185, 186, 191, 194, 195 Rudd, Kevin, 12 Russia/Russian, 19, 63, 85, 86, 91, 131, 136–138, 140–142, 147, 148, 160, 178, 182, 195, 199, 200, 204, 205, 207–212 Russian Duma, 135, 137 Russian-speaking minorities, 197 Russification, 207–208

Sumner, Wiliam G., 102

Sartori, Giovanni, 4, 7, 8, 25, 26, 28, 32, 38, 43, 57, 65–68, 90, 129, 215 Savoie, Donald, 12 Schattschneider, Elmer Eric, 33, 39 Schumpeter, Joseph, 2–6, 15–17, 19, 25, 26, 28, 31, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 56–58, 61, 67, 68, 72, 100, 103, 119, 127, 129, 162, 198, 200–202, 205, 206, 212, 215, 226, 229, 230 Securitization (ethnic relations), 198, 205 Securitize, 198, 205 SED, Socialist Unity Party (German political party), 105 Selection/de-selection, 4, 27, 28, 43, 49, 51, 52, 55, 57, 67, 101, 103, 117, 131, 143, 146, 147 Simulated capitalism, 153 SLD, Democratic Left Alliance (Polish political party), 175, 180–183, 185, 186, 189, 191–194 Slovenia/Slovenian, 6, 131, 135, 136, 140, 143 SMER, Social Democratic Party (Slovak political party), 143 SO, Self-Defense (Polish political party), 175, 180, 182, 189–194 Socialists/Social Democrats, 29, 84–86, 107–111, 156, 157, 159, 216, 222, 228 Socialization, 202 SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German political party), 107, 110, 112, 113 Spin machines, 5, 127 Stepan, Alfred, 8, 90, 154, 173, 198, 200

Uklad, 176–179, 183 Ukraine/Ukrainian, 137, 199 Union of Democratic Forces (Bulgarian political party), 142 Union Sacré (alliance of French political parties), 103, 107 Uruguay/Uruguayan, 6 US/United States, 7, 9, 12, 62, 64–66, 69, 70, 74, 82, 83, 86, 87, 92, 215, 219, 220, 230; see also America

Tabloidization of politics, 165–166 Tax evasion, 159,161,164,168 Term limits, 36, 37 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 100, 215 Transactional leadership, 162 Transformation, post-communist, 131 Transforming leadership, 162 Trust, 11, 13, 15, 28, 34, 47, 49, 54, 99, 101, 102, 114, 121–125, 141, 143, 148, 156, 158, 168, 179, 183, 192, 208, 211, 212, 222 Trustees, 49, 58 Tsebelis, George, 31 Tudjman, Franjo, 143, 147 Turnover, 143–147, 148, 159

Versailles Peace Conference, 99 Veto player approach, 31 Volksparteien, 13 Voters, 1, 3–5, 11, 12, 14–17, 27, 35, 43–58, 67, 85, 88, 104, 106, 108–110, 113, 114, 118, 132, 139, 141–143, 149, 158, 163, 164, 175, 176, 193, 195, 197, 200–202, 207, 219 Walesa, Lech, 173, 177, 178, 182 Walker, Jack, 4 Watchdogs, 119 Weber, Marianne, 99 Weber, Max, 1–3, 10, 16, 17, 25, 26, 34, 35, 44, 53, 64, 97–103, 129, 160, 162 Weimar Republic, 10, 11, 17, 63, 64, 99–101, 104, 108 Wilhelm II, 97, 99 World War I, 2, 10, 84, 98, 103 World War II, 2, 17, 83, 104, 110, 132, 161, 181, 199, 215–217, 219, 229 Zapatero, Luis Rodriquez, 12

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