In every society a small organised minority rules the unorganised majority, whatever the formal constitution says.
Gaetano Mosca argued it in Elements of Political Science (1896), translated as The Ruling Class in 1939: in monarchies, aristocracies and democracies alike, power is exercised by an organised minority, and its organisation is its advantage over the majority. With Pareto and Michels he founded elite theory.
In practice
- A party whose members elect their leaders by ballot finds that the same few families have held the leadership for thirty years.
- A residents' association of five hundred members is in practice run by the eight who come to every meeting.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is organisation: a minority can coordinate where a majority cannot. Another is time and expertise, which few people can devote to ruling.
- In its favour
- Consistent with Michels's iron law and with research on the persistence of political elites across changes of regime.
- Against it
- Pluralists such as Dahl, in Who Governs? (1961), argued that power in democracies is dispersed among competing elites who answer to voters. The claim can be hard to falsify, since any concentration of influence counts as confirmation.
- Standing
- Debated between elite theorists and pluralists. Compare the circulation of elites and Michels's iron law of oligarchy.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works