This document provides an overview of elite theory, beginning with its origins in the late 19th/early 20th century Italian School led by Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Roberto Michels. It examines how their work established the idea that societies are divided between a small, organized ruling minority and a disorganized majority. It then discusses how elite theory was applied in the US, notably by C. Wright Mills who argued America had an integrated power elite across political, economic, and military institutions. The document also summarizes debates between pluralist and elitist approaches to power structures.

1. See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346487306
Elite Theory
Chapter · November 2020
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-13895-0_67-1
CITATIONS
0
READS
66,006
1 author:
Claudia Mariotti
Università Degli Studi Roma Tre
15 PUBLICATIONS 29 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All content following this page was uploaded by Claudia Mariotti on 06 December 2020.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

2. E
Elite Theory
Claudia Mariotti
Università di Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
Keywords
Distribution of power · Power elite ·
Oligarchy · Aristocracy · Ruling class ·
Pluralism · Community power structure ·
Methods · Democracy
Definition
Elite theory envisions society as divided between
the mass of people and a ruling minority, where
the political power – the power to take and impose
decisions valid to the whole society – always
belongs to the latter.
The purpose of elite theorists is to find a scien-
tific explanation of the fact that – no matter when
or where – in every society, the majority of the
existent resources economical, intellectual, and
cultural – are concentrated in the hands of a small
group of individuals which use them to exercise
power over the rest of the population.
Initially developed by Italian scholars between
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century, the elite theory became crucial
in political science after World War II, tackling the
substantial question concerning “who governs”
even beyond formal or constitutional
appearances, and with a great impact on the
debates concerning democracy and its concrete
functioning (Dahl, 1956, 1971, 1989;
Schumpeter, 1942).
As throughout the years elite theory was devel-
oped through different approaches and with var-
ied (often diverging) results, today there is a wider
consent among scholars about the determining
impact of the different methods of inquiry chosen
by various researchers, raising questions that con-
tinue to instigate methodological discussions
among elite theorists and political scientists in
general.
Introduction
According to elite theory, it is evident that all the
forms of government are essentially oligarchies,
who use different values and principles to justify
the power struggle and to manipulate the consent
of the ruled. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, an increasing number of studies
approached this phenomenon, but the topic
became dominant only starting from the second
half of the twentieth century when a more empir-
ical declination of the disciplines of sociology and
political science was entrenched.
To better understand the polysemic term
“elite”, it is necessary to distinguish between two
different uses of the term. The first comes from the
Latin word eligere and is used to express a posi-
tive meaning. The spread of this connotation is
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
P. Harris et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups, Lobbying and Public Affairs ,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13895-0_67-1

3. due principally to the works of Vilfredo Pareto
who also used, as a synonym of elite, the term
“aristocrazia”, aristocracy, referred to the “best”.
This meaning was refused by Gaetano Mosca,
who found the definition of “ruling class” more
proper because elite implied a eulogy of the ruling
class that, in many cases, it doesn’t deserve. The
second use of the word is currently the most
common and refers, in a neutral way, to every
group who is positioned at the top of a social or
political hierarchy: following this meaning every
institution, organization, and association has elites
in their structure.
The Classics
The first period of development of elite theory can
be situated between the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. Even if elitism wasn’t a new
topic – back in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century, there were precursors such as Saint-
Simon, Comte, Tocqueville, and Taine who used
the concept of elite or managerial class to explain
the major historical and political transformations
of society – the Italian School of Gaetano Mosca,
Vilfredo Pareto, and Roberto Michels, also known
as “Machiavellian school,” started this new strand
of study, focusing not only on the assumption that
every society is characterized by an asymmetric
distribution of political power but investigating
who holds the power, how, on which basis, for
what reasons, with which justification, and how
the power can move from a small group to
another.
The concept of “political class” was first intro-
duced by Gaetano Mosca – Sicilian intellectual,
academic, deputy, and life senator of the Kingdom
of Italy – in his Teorica dei governi e governo
parlamentare (Theoretics of Governments and
Parliamentary Government) in 1884 and then it
was developed in 1896 in Elementi di Scienza
politica (The Ruling Class, 1939). Mosca’s
assumption was based on the observation of real-
ity, and in his view, the political class derives his
strength from the objective fact that it is orga-
nized. Mosca didn’t focus only on the division
present in every society between a small group
of people that govern, even using violence if nec-
essary, over the majority of the population, but he
explained the assumption through the concept of
organization. By organization, Mosca refers to
both the relationship based on common interests
who lead the members of an (organized) minority
to make a solid and homogeneous group against
the biggest but disorganized majority and as a
synonym of the political hierarchy, necessary to
the functioning and the surviving of the State.
The range of Mosca’s theory was so innovative
because he expressed his theory as a scientific
one, based on a methodic observation of facts,
not aprioristic or ideological, linking the results
of his research to a law valid for any political
organization. Through his works he affected the
whole doctrine of political science, claiming it
was supposed to address its efforts on the system-
atic interpretation of the dynamics of power and,
above all, studying the formation and organization
of the political classes. In this frame he formulated
a new theory of the forms of government, shaping
a new perimeter for political science.
Mosca’s theory’s echo in political science was
crucial even because in those same years an inter-
nationally well-known, esteemed scholar of social
science, economist, and Italian senator such as
Vilfredo Pareto studied the role of elites: in
Pareto’s view all individuals are different, and
they are located in different positions from the
top to the bottom in different – social, political,
intellectual, etc. – hierarchies. He focused on the
individuals at the top and called them the elite.
Pareto links the position of the people to their
distinguished abilities and exceptional virtues: in
his theory, the word “elite” or “aristocrazia” con-
veys exceptional qualities. Pareto observed that
the elite in the field of wealth and power was the
same, and he defined them the political elite. In his
Trattato di Sociologia generale, published in
1916 (The Mind and Society, 1935), Pareto’s
attention was focused on the circulation of the
elites, facing the fact that aristocracies don’t last.
Pareto underlines how different kinds of elites,
mostly the economic, political, and intellectual
elites merge, combine, and replace among
themselves.
2 Elite Theory

4. Roberto Michels – Max Weber’s pupil, politi-
cal activist, and professor of economics and polit-
ical science – published his major works in the
frame of elite theory, with his Zur Soziologie des
Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie:
Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen
Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens published in 1910
(translated in Italian in 1912 and in English, Polit-
ical Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligar-
chical Tendencies of Modern Democracies, in
1915). This work addressed the study of political
mass parties, specifically the German SPD (Social
Democratic Party), which Michels supported at
that time, and he came to a very similar conclusion
than Mosca (but Mosca’s theory was referred to
the whole society): all the power is concentrated
in a small group of individuals that are organized
and rule over the majority. He named this group
“oligarchy” with a negative connotation, oppos-
ing the term aristocracy chosen from Pareto. In
Michels’ view, the rise of an oligarchy is inevita-
ble for what he calls “technical indispensability of
leadership for the survival of the organization”.
This is why he theorized the “iron law of oligar-
chy” for which “Who says organization, says oli-
garchy.” Michels, as Mosca does, underlines the
importance of organization but in different terms:
in Mosca’s idea, the organization is a tool that
leads to the creation of the political class; Michels,
instead, saw the organization as the cause that
inevitably transforms the leadership into an oli-
garchy, dividing the party into two parts, the oli-
garchy who follows its interest and the rest of the
members, the majority, who endure the
oligarchy’s decisions. Michels’ work represented
an empirical and historical confirmation to elite
theory, consolidating its success.
Elite Theory in the USA
Elite theory became crucial in Political Science
only when the works of Mosca, Pareto, and
Michels were translated – above all the works of
Pareto – and spread in the USA.
Around the same time, in 1936, Harold D.
Lasswell – a prominent American scholar, part
of the well-known School of Chicago – published
Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, identifying
as elite a small group of individuals which takes
most of the available values such as respect,
income, and safety, whereas these are denied to
others. In his further research with the philosopher
Abraham Kaplan, Lasswell insisted on the coher-
ence between elite theory and democratic theory.
A few years later, in 1941, James Burnham’s
book, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Hap-
pening in the World, raised a great interest in elite
theory. According to Burnham – who then wrote
The Machiavellians, where he pictured the clas-
sics of the elite theory as the only ones who
exposed the truth on power – the social revolution
of that time consisted in the passage from a dom-
inant class, composed of financiers and owners, to
another dominant class composed of professional
managers, with indispensable technical skills to
manage power. Burnham combined the analysis
of Mosca and Pareto to the Marxist approach,
concluding that it is the control and not the prop-
erty of the means of production that ensures
access to power.
The turning point in the research on political
elites in the USA came with the book of the
American sociologist Charles Wright Mills, The
Power Elite, in 1956. Mills shows through a com-
prehensive empirical, historical, and sociological
analysis that the power in the USA lied in the
hands of an integrated elite composed of top deci-
sion-holders in political, military, and economic
institutional hierarchies. Mills’ conclusions
represented quite a shock to a country such as
the USA, which was strongly convinced to repre-
sent the values of radical egalitarianism – as well
as many research studies confirmed until then.
David Riesman, for example, in 1950 theo-
rized the presence in the USA of multiple elites
and groups of power, who had veto power, the
power to stop decisions against their interests, but
who needed to create alliances and to compete
with other groups to implement decisions to their
advantage.
From Mills’ point of view, to claim the exis-
tence of a cohesive elite doesn’t mean to affirm
that there is a plot organized from a small group of
individuals against the majority of the people. His
theory relies on the institutionalization of power:
it is not about the existence of a political power, an
economic power, and a military power that are
Elite Theory 3

5. distinct, it is about the existence of a political
economy connected with political institutions
and with military decisions. The key is not in the
individuals who compose the elites – in Mills’
vision the composition of an elite can’t be defined
by the qualities or success of its members – but it
refers to the position they occupy in the political-
economic and military institutions within the
structure of interconnected power. Mills also
claims that elites’ circulation exists and it is
intense but confined among the three elites thanks
to their social homogeneity and their common
interests.
The Structure of Power at the Local Level
In the 1950s, the interest of the scientific commu-
nity in the USA was addressed to empirically
control the findings of elite theory. The local
level of the distribution of power was considered
more accessible for empirical research, and, as
consequence, an increasing number of this kind
of research was developed.
For a long time – until the middle of the 1970s
– these studies represented the core of political
science research.
Among the multitude of studies on the struc-
ture of power at the local level in those years, two
stand out: Floyd Hunter’s analysis on Atlanta,
Georgia (Hunter, 1953) and Robert Dahl’s inves-
tigation on New Haven, Connecticut (Dahl,
1961).
Hunter demonstrated the existence of a mono-
lithic elite who managed all the power; he
underlined the predominance of the economic
elite on the political-administrative one and a
great level of cohesion between the members of
the elite – along with an almost total lack of
responsibility for their actions.
Dahl’s view, on the opposite, claimed that
Mills’ (at the national level) and Hunter’s (at
local level) findings were both wrong. Dahl
claimed the existence of multiple, very different
elites, in constant competition with each other,
which are strongly affected by various forms of
citizens’ political participation. Dahl stated that
inequalities existed in New Haven, but they were
in a dispersed form, and this is the reason why no
group could ever reach all the resources to
dominate in the political arena on all different
issues. Dahl’s theory differs from Hunter’s theory
on the topic of responsibility as well. According to
Dahl, politicians are aware of citizens’ desires and
needs, and – if it is not inconvenient for them –
they’ll try to be as responsive as possible to obtain
electoral consent.
Different Approaches in Elite Theory
From the 1950s, two different approaches were
established in elite theory: elitism and pluralism.
The former pictures the power elite as unique and
cohesive and the power as cumulative, meaning
that someone (the elite) has power insofar as
someone else (the mass) has not. The latter defines
power as relational: it changes depending on the
context and the contenders. In this pluralist view,
the power elite consists of the capacity to reach a
specific interest in the presence of opposition. The
opposition is represented by the presence of sev-
eral interest groups in the political arena, which
are mutable: their structure, composition, and
goals change very often, making it very difficult
to stabilize a solid, enduring hierarchy of power.
In those years the elitist vision was represented
above all by authors such as Mills and Hunter,
while the pluralist vision was firstly based on
Bentley’s group theory and then taken up and
enriched by Truman in his The Governmental
Process (1951). Later, it was Robert A. Dahl to
systematize the pluralistic approach (A Preface to
Democratic Theory, 1956; Who Governs?, 1961;
Polyarchy, 1971; Dilemmas of Pluralist Democ-
racy, 1982; Democracy and Its Critics, 1989) with
a more pluralist-elitist vision. In Dahl’s idea, inter-
est groups are conceived as multiple centers of
power, multiple elites, which hold a lot of power,
more than a common citizen, but which are in
constant competition with each other so that no
one can be dominant on all issues. The potential
power of an elite is balanced and controlled by the
power of another elite: the dispersed power trans-
forms the domination in a complex system of
mutual checks and balances. Very different, muta-
ble, and permeable elites can never become a
monolithic power elite.
In the 1960s, thanks to the works of Peter M.
Bachrach e Morton Baratz, ‘The two faces of
4 Elite Theory

6. power’ (1962) and ‘Power and poverty’ (1970),
elite theory was enriched by a new perspective,
known as neo-elitism. While the elitists tried to
answer the question “who has the power?” and the
pluralists “who governs?”, this new field of study
focused on another question: “who benefits from
the power?”. In their view, the power needs to be
studied, revealing the invisible dimension of it:
the individuals who benefit from the power even if
they are not a visible part of the decisional process
(pluralism) or if they are not positioned at the top
of the institutional hierarchies with formal roles
(elitism).
It is worth mentioning that in the same years,
another group of political scientists, mostly Euro-
pean, decided to combine the frame of elite theory
with a neo-Marxist approach – preferring the term
“state” to “political system” and “social classes”
to “interest groups” (Miliband, 1969; Poulantzas,
1968).
The Role of the Method in Elite Theory
In a journal article published in 1966, Substance
and Artifact: The Current Status of Research on
Community Power Structure, the sociologist John
Walton showed a shocking correlation in multiple
pieces of research between the method used and
the structure of power detected. After reviewing
33 different research programs, regarding 55 com-
munity power structures, he found that “the repu-
tational method tends to identify pyramidal power
structures, while the decision-making approach
discovers factional and coalitional power struc-
tures” (1966, 434).
The reputational method – more often chosen
by elitists, such as Hunter – is essentially based on
interviews, submitted to a group of influential
people, asking them to identify the group of
power in the city; this information is then dou-
bled-checked in different forms. On the other
hand, the decisional method – used by Dahl, for
example – is based on the study of the decisional
process on several different issues in a specific
community to individuate who affects the final
decisions the most and in what terms (issue anal-
ysis approach). To those methods, the neo-elitists
added another one, known as “mobilization of
bias” and “contextual approach”. They underline
the importance of non-decisions and agenda-set-
ting: the power to prevent that some unfavorable
decisions could be taken or just even discussed.
As Walton exposed, the role of the method
could be the real key to understand the different
findings in elite theory, but this revelation didn’t
challenge the importance of elite theory studies;
on the contrary, it revealed how more research
needed to be done, using different combined
methods.
As Stoppino (1971) pointed out, all the
methods can be criticized, but it’s important to
realize that, as a matter of fact, the different
approaches are not incompatible and that the inte-
gration of these different methods could be the
best way to study the distribution of power both at
the national and local level.
Conclusion
The decline of the studies on local power at the
end of the 1960s and the freeze of the debate
between pluralists and elitists opened the way to
a new crucial approach in political science, based
on the centrality of public policy, known as “pol-
icy approach” (Lindblom, 1968; Ranney, 1968).
According to this approach, it is more relevant to
focus on what a government decides to do or not
to do – the policies – instead of focusing on who is
part of the decisional elite.
The analysis of the structure of power thus
changes from a vertical level to a horizontal one.
Cross-References
▶ Dahl
▶ Group Theory
▶ Pluralism
▶ Power
▶ Public Policy (Studies)
▶ Truman
Elite Theory 5

7. References
Bachrach, P. M., & Baratz, M. (1962). The two faces of
power. The American Political Science Review, 56(4),
947–952.
Bachrach, P. M., & Baratz, M. (1970). Power and poverty.
Theory and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burnham, J. (1941). The managerial revolution: What is
happening in the world. New York: Day.
Dahl, R. (1961). Who governs? Democracy and power in
an American City. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Dahl, R. A. (1956). A preface to democratic theory (2006th
ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dahl, R. A. (1971). Polyarchy: Participation and opposi-
tion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Dahl, R. A. (1982). Dilemmas of pluralist democracy :
Autonomy vs. control. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Dahl, R. A. (1989). Democracy and its critics. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Hunter, F. (1953). Community power structure. A study of
decision makers. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of
North Carolina Press.
Lasswell, H. D. (1936). Politics: Who gets what, when,
how. New York: Whittlesey House.
Lindblom, C. E. (1968). The policy-making process.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Michels, R. (1910). Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der
modernen Demokratie. Untersichungen über die
oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens. Leipzig,
Germany: Klinkhardt.
Miliband, R. (1969). The state in capitalist society. New
York: Basic Books.
Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Mosca, G. (1884). Sulla teorica dei governi e sul governo
parlamentare. Studi storici e sociali. Torino, Italy:
Loescher.
Mosca, G. (1896). Elementi di Scienza Politica. Torino,
Italy: Fratelli Bocca Editori.
Pareto, V. (1916). Trattato di sociologia generale. Firenze,
Italy: Barbera.
Poulantzas, N. (1968). Pouvoir politique et classes
sociales. Paris, France: Éditions Maspero.
Ranney, A. (1968). Political science and public policy.
Chicago: Markham Pub.Co.
Riesman, D. (1950). The lonely crowd: A study of the
changing American character. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Schumpeter, J. A. (1942). Capitalism, socialism and
democracy. New York: Harper & Row.
Stoppino, M. (1971). I metodi di ricerca del potere nella
comunità locale II. Il Politico, 36(3), 455–502.
Truman, D. B. (1951). The governmental process. Political
interests and public opinion. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf.
Walton, J. (1966). Substance and artifact: The current
status of research on community power structure.
American Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 430–438.
6 Elite Theory
View publication stats