Framing political elites

Political thought has long grappled with the notion of elites, in an effort to explain the emergence of a ruling class in society (Pakulski, in Best and Higley 2018: 9). However, systematic studies on elite behaviour appeared only in the early twentieth century, largely thanks to the pioneering work of European liberal authors confronting the increasing bureaucratisation and segmentation of society (see, among others, Mosca 1939; Michels 1959; Pareto 1966; Schumpeter 1942; Weber 1978). These early elite theorists pointed out the existence of a homogenous, autonomous and self-perpetuating ruling class wielding power over the masses. In complex societies characterised by growing division of labour and social stratification, effective governance requires the existence of a segmented and skilled ruling class, according to an ‘iron law’ that perpetuates the power of the elites.

A new generation of scholars started to question the premises of classical theory after WWII, criticising the internal homogeneity and the limited size of elites postulated by classical elitism. Theorists as diverse as Charles Wright Mills (1956) and Robert Dahl (1961) shed new light on elite behaviour, highlighting that inter-elite interactions are far more complex, and that power is broadly distributed across society. In their studies of elites in the United States, Wright Mills and Dahl showed that power was a resource not held by a single, homogenous power elite, but by a composite set of competing elites who ally and wield varying influence over decision-making processes. In other words, elites do usually control only certain resources, and can be found at any level of society. These

“functional elites” are therefore far more pervasive than the “hegemonies” controlling all resources, which constitute instead a rare occurrence in modern political systems.

A question that has long puzzled elite theorists concerns the definition of what actually makes up an elite. Despite a long tradition in social sciences, there is little consensus on which groups constitute elites and how they exercise their power in wider society. Early

attempts to provide an empirical determination of elites focused upon their ability to influence the decision-making process and the allocation of resources across society thanks to their disproportionate power (Dekmejian 1971; Quandt 1969; Waterbury 1970;

Zonis 1971). These definitions, however, were often more concerned with issues of definition than issues of fact (Putnam 1976: 5), fighting “boundary wars” and seeking

“ultimate concepts” (Zartman 1974: 470). Nevertheless, these efforts at defining elites as a powerful class reveal that elite studies are a complex and contentious matter (Higley and Burton 2001: 182): elite boundaries are unclear and change according to the definition and the lens we adopt; their behaviour is elastic and its influence often hard to determine empirically; inter-elite relations are similarly complex, as are relations with the rest of society. This makes the task of determining the real impact of elites on society academically challenging, as elites are never the only factor that explains change but are always combined with other social processes (Lasch 1995).

In general terms, elites are defined by the relative power they exercise, or are accorded, in society (Salverda and Abbink 2013: 1). They include all influential individuals in a society who occupy a position of authority and seek to preserve this privileged status. In other words, a definition of political elites that embraces the complexity of domestic power structures should not only include the persons in highest offices, but a wider range of “governors, provincial chairmen, and mayors, as well as village chiefs, headmen, and leaders of party cells” (Paige 1977). In his seminal study on political elites in the Middle East, Volker Perthes (2004: 5) reaches a similar conclusion by introducing the concept of

‘politically relevant elites’ to identify “those people in a given country who wield political influence and power in that they make strategic decisions or participate in decision-making on a national level, contribute to defining political norms and values (including the definition of ‘national interests’), and directly influence political discourse on strategic issues”. This definition implies that power is distributed across several elite circles, wielding varying degree of influence on the political process. This is also the theoretical formulation underpinning this research project.

In the last few decades, the study of elites has developed to incorporate more empirical approaches. Empirical studies have largely focused on the social composition of elites, patterns of intra-elite conflict, how leaders distinguish themselves from the rest of the elite, how elites are recruited and vary over time (Blondel and Muller-Rommel, in Klingemann and Dalton 2007: 818-832). These new perspectives on elites have paid more

attention to identifying the individuals occupying top positions in decision-making institutions, thus making inferences on the social characteristics (such as age, education, gender, or social background) of elite circles. Additionally, they have benefitted enormously by the compilation of publicly available datasets and elite surveys, which allowed systematic comparative analyses of different political systems (Hoffmann-Lange, in Klingemann and Dalton 2007: 910-927).

As the interest in more empirically grounded elite studies grew, so did the demand for addressing the boundary problem: in other words, where should we look to study elites?

The boundary problem carries important theoretical and practical consequences, since studying either 30 or 300 elites assumes different understandings and research methods (Laumann, Marsden and Prensky 1989). In the absence of a uniformly applicable definition for elites, elite studies must be spatially and temporally situated, and assign public and reproducible criteria to the category of “political elites” (Zartman 1974: 469).

Another important dimension of elite studies is their geographical focus. Despite continuing interest in elite groups in social sciences, empirical research has focused largely on Western societies, where the abundance of data has allowed the compilation of large-n datasets. By contrast, there has been much less research on non-Western elites (Salverda and Abbink 2013: 2). This is partly explained by the fact that power in much of the developing world often resides outside the established formal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify influential power holders by merely looking at top government positions. This is especially true in Africa and the Middle East, where official public institutions have been traditionally kept weak in favour of more informal, private-like systems of governance (Bayart 1993; Bayart, Ellis and Hibou 1999; Owen 2012).

Nonetheless, the early processes of democratisation along with the growing institutionalisation of political practices in many African and Middle Eastern states starting from the 1990s has attracted growing academic attention in terms of elite behaviour and its wider impact on political stability (Goldsmith 2001).

The role of elites as agents and factors of change to explain domestic instability was further explored in several studies on political (Arriola 2009; Barkan 2009; Francois, Rainer and Trebbi 2015; Osei 2015; Posner and Young 2007) and military (Albrecht 2015; Barany 2011, 2013) institutions in Africa and the Middle East. This research has shed new light on the internal mechanisms of formal institutional structures in the

developing world. In line with Asseburg and Wimmen (2016), I seek to make sense of elite behaviour in states under stress, where inter-elite struggles over power and competition for influence can sometimes constitute an existential threat to the status of incumbents.

Indeed, by restricting access to the central decision-making institutions and presiding over the allocation of scarce resources, domestic elites are instrumental in shaping the political trajectory of a state. Elite groups always compete with one another, and with other groups outside the elite network, to control power and resources. However, whereas some elites agree on the rules of the game to ‘tame’ political competition (Sartori 1995), others resort to violent means in order to settle their divergences and preserve their position within networks of power. In this latter case, intra-elite conflict is likely to shape the political environment, and conflict patterns thus reflect the degree of integration or disintegration of ruling elites.

2.3. The ‘political marketplace’ framework. Political elites as business managers