higley, john; burton, michael; field, g. in defense of elite theory.pdf

In Defense of Elite Theory: A Reply to CammackAuthor(s): John Higley, Michael G. Burton and G. Lowell FieldSource: American Sociological Review, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Jun., 1990), pp. 421-426Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095766 .Accessed: 19/02/2015 14:09

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IN DEFENSE OF ELITE THEORY: A REPLY TO CAMMACK

JOHN HIGLEY MICHAEL G. BURTON University of Texas at Austin Loyola College in Maryland

G. LOWELL FIELD University of Connecticut

Cammack's (1990) attack on "the new elite paradigm" provides a welcome opportu-

nity to engage his criticisms and clarify our version of elite theory. At bottom, we are trying to pin down the elite structures, outlooks, choices, and actions that may account for gross disparities among the political records of societies that in economic, class, cultural, and other respects appear remarkably similar. Look- ing first at European societies after the sixteenth century, we ask why the political records of Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, are from early dates marked by more gradual, peaceful change than other European societies, and why politics in most of the other societies become benign only after World War II. Sec- ond, we ask why the political records of Latin American societies are uniformly characterized by instability and violence during the nineteenth century, and why a handful of them establish stable, increasingly democratic regimes in this century, while others do not. Third, among the many developing countries that achieved independence after World War II, we ask why countries so similarly situated as India and Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, Senegal and Nigeria, Botswana and Ghana, have strikingly different political records. Fourth, we ask why the major revolutions and counterrevolutions of the modern period had such diverse political outcomes even though their causes and processes in most cases had a strong family resemblance. Finally, we ask why politics in the prosperous, glob- ally-dominant, post-industrial societies of north- western Europe, North America, and Australa- sia swing from a placid phase during the 1950s and early 1960s to a much more fragmented and turbulent phase during the late 1960s and 1970s, only to reach what today looks like immobility in the face of profound social and economic problems.

We believe that cogent and parsimonious answers to these questions can be found in a modified version of elite theory that ties the diverse patterns of regimes and their broader political context to continuities and transformations of national elites. We do not claim that elites alone run the political show, or that some simple, readily falsifiable explanation that holds for political change in all places and times can be derived from elite (or any other) theory. We argue only that elite theory illuminates the flow of modem political history and contemporary events better than competing theories, and that by synthesizing elements of elite and class theories, it may be possible to build a more powerful theory. In his attack, Cammack gives the impression that he is striking at the heart of our position. But his criticisms are based on a par- tial reading and caricature of our work. He ignores our attempted synthesis of elite and class theory, and he says nothing about the closeness or remoteness of our theoretical stance as a whole to modem political history. Instead, he concentrates on methodological issues in the nexus between elites and regimes, and his only notice of historical or contemporary political change comes in a few remarks about competing interpretations of English politics in the late seventeenth century.

Cammack first takes issue with our definition of elites, calling it too permissive because it ostensibly includes, in his words, "leaders of movements that may lack any permanent organizational structure," thereby making any "fully consensual elite . . . unstable by definition." This is incorrect. Starting with an ex- tended discussion of the subject 20 years ago (Field and Higley 1973), we have consistently followed Weber and Michels in conceiving of elites as rooted in bureaucratic organization. Movement leaders are elites only to the extent that the movements are bureaucratically struc-

American Sociological Review, 1990,Vol. 55 (June:421-426) 421


422 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

tured and thus powerful on a sustained basis. This alone enables such leaders to affect political outcomes regularly and substantially, as our definition of elites stipulates. We do not deny that unstructured and more or less spontaneous popular protests and uprisings occasionally have major political effects, but unless they take on bureaucratic trappings and articulate a distinct leadership component they usually dissipate or are promptly suppressed. Whether relations between movement leaders, in our sense, and other elites are consensual is therefore an empirical question.

Three additional points about defining elites need mentioning. First, in our empirical investigations of national elites, none of which is mentioned by Cammack, we have, with various collaborators, applied the concept restric- tively, not permissively, in order to focus on the few thousand uppermost leaders of major organizations and movements in societies like the U.S., Australia, Norway, and West Germany (Higley, Field, and Groholt 1976; Higley, Dea- con, and Smart 1979; Higley and Moore 1981; Higley, Hoffmann-Lange, Kadushin, and Moore, unpublished). Second, problems in defining and identifying elites exist, but they are minor compared with the problems of defining and applying competing concepts like "ruling class," "power networks," or "the state." As Marcus (1983, p. 25) points out, elite theory has the great advantage of being the only mac- rotheory in political sociology that operates on a "small-group, personal level of conceptuali- zation," focusing on small numbers of people who can plausibly be viewed as sources of political continuity and change, who possess some important degree of internal organization, and who can often be described in considerable detail. Third, by adopting a Weberian-Michel- sian conception of elites, we draw attention to the organizational constraints on elite behavior. The need to maintain control of the organizations that give them power shapes their actions and outlooks in many ways, frequently overriding the substantive interests and vague ideological principles on which Cammack places so much emphasis, and often impeding their ability to enter into the settlements and other transformations from disunity that Cam- mack thinks should be routine if elites generally gain from such maneuvers.

Cammack next takes us to task for positing allegedly circular relationships between types of elites and patterns of regime stability/insta-

bility because our indicators of these patterns are not independent of the causally prior elite types (see Field and Higley 1985; Higley and Burton 1989). This objection is difficult to grasp. Cammack does not quarrel with our specification of regime instability as indicated by irregular seizures, attempted seizures, or widely expected seizures of government executive power by force. He adduces no cases for which this specification is inadequate, nor does he suggest any other specification. Instead, he asserts that in discussing three potentially prob- lematic cases out of a hundred or more - the French Third Republic, and Uruguay and Chile during the present century - we fail to sepa- rate elite and regime characteristics enough to avoid circularity. In fact, we use those cases to show how important it is to make such a sepa- ration. We recall that contemporary observers of the three regimes almost unanimously re- garded them as stable, whereas by one of our indicators they were clearly unstable: Expecta- tions of power seizures were widespread and were actually plotted on a number of occasions.

Our larger point is that to avoid mistaken assessments of such regimes, analysts should first apply our indicators of instability rigor- ously, and if they are still in doubt, they should look more closely than has been customary for evidence that elites that were clearly disunified prior to the regime and period in question - French elite struggles during the 1850s/1860s and earlier, the Uruguayan civil war of 1903-4, the Ibanez dictatorship in Chile prior to its overthrow in 1932 - had achieved unity. Analysts should (1) scrutinize a country's political record for one of the transformations to unity that we specify and that in theory would lay the basis for regime stability; and (2) look for the attitudes of elites toward basic rules of the game and the elite network configurations that we specify as characteristic of a unified national elite. Lacking evidence of these events and patterns, analysts should presume that the earlier manifest disunity of elites continues, and that the regime in question is basically unstable.

More generally, Cammack wants us to aban- don our distinction between disunified and consensually unified national elites because, in his view, elite structure and functioning is so elastic that it defies typological treatment and, therefore, any related specification of transformations in elite types. The unity of national elites ebbs and flows along a continuum, he tells us, with elite groups sometimes becoming


ELITE THEORY DEFENDED 423

"imperceptibly closer" only later to "drift apart." Thus, our distinction between disunified and consensually unified elites is excessively "po- larized" and "disproportionate" to the regime patterns we seek to explain. We have several responses to this criticism.

First, in alleging that we "polarize" elites into consensually unified and disunified types, Cammack forgets that we also distinguish a third elite, the ideologically unified type. If one wants to think in terms of a continuum, ideologically unified elites would cluster at one end, consensually unified elites would be arrayed along the middle, and disunified elites would cluster at the other end. In a recent paper, we invoked Sartori's (1976) discussion of typologies to point out that our distinctions constitute ideal or pure types that "represent the standards, parameters, or models against which ... concrete instances can be compared in terms of greater or lesser proximity" (p. 145). We wrote: "In reality, national elites appear to vary along a continuum while nevertheless clustering around three fundamentally distinct forms" (Field, Higley, and Burton 1989, pp. 13-14), and we referred to the clusters that a number of contemporary national elites form.

Second, it is easy to assert that the relative unity of national elites is a continuous variable, but since neither Cammack nor anyone else has produced a continuous measure of elite unity/ disunity, the assertion leads nowhere theoreti- cally; indeed, without typologies and the clas- sifications they engender there can be no theory. Third, our distinctions correspond closely to the typological work done by other students of elites (Burton and Higley 1987a). Finally, we (along with various collaborators) have conducted several empirical investigations of national elites that appear to be consensually unified, and much of this work is aimed at pro- viding the criteria and referents by which such elites can be identified. But, again, Cammack ignores these investigations.

Today it is nearly axiomatic in political sociology that a key feature of stable democracies is substantial consensus and accommodation among elites on rules of the political game and the worth of political institutions. In Sartori's (1987) recent formulation, stable democracy requires that elites perceive politics as "bar- gaining" rather than "war" and that they see outcomes as positive- not zero-sum (pp. 224- 6). What divides the field is how this elite condition comes about and how it is sustained. Is it

produced by a democratic political culture, by the workings of democratic institutions, or by class hegemony resulting from a "re-ordering of class forces," as Cammack phrases it? Our answer is "none of the above." We contend that stable regimes that operate according to principles of representative politics, which may evolve into "democracies" in the modem sense if other conditions are favorable, originate in consensual, and thus voluntary, unifications of the most powerful elite factions around rules of the game and new or existing institutions. Of- ten such unifications occur in the process of gaining national independence. But in a number of crucial cases, they involve sudden or otherwise clear-cut elite transformations from endemic, long-standing disunity to consensual unity. Much of our recent work is aimed at specifying two kinds of transformations: elite settlements and elite convergences (or "two- step" transformations).

Cammack tries hard to explode the idea of elite settlements, claiming that if they occur at all they play a small role in larger class struggles. Mainly, he caricatures our analysis. Thus, we do not say that settlements include all elites; they are "comprehensive" in the sense that they occur among major factions that previously were at each other's throats, but they may well exclude or destroy factions that stand in the way (e.g., English and Swedish royalists in the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries respectively, allies of the deposed Colombian and Venezuelan dictators in the late 1950s). Nor do we say that the settlements in England, Sweden, and Colombia involved only political elites, and that the settlement in Venezuela involved only political and business elites. In highly condensed treatments of the four cases, we concentrate on the most visible actors, al- though, depending on the country, military, church, trade union, media, and other elites were parties to the settlements. Similarly, we do not claim that elite autonomy from mass pressures is the sole or main cause of elite settlements. Instead we emphasize legacies of costly but inconclusive conflicts, new crises which threaten the renewal of those conflicts, and exceptional negotiating circumstances that seem necessary in fashioning settlements. However, we do not presume to "explain" elite settlements, which Cammack repeatedly says we fail to do. Settlements are highly contingent events that depend on such factors as the skills and choices of elite persons who happen to be in



place, and they cannot be fully "explained" in the usual social scientific sense. Finally, we do not say that elites are without substantive interests. Together with organizational constraints on elite behavior, the existence of strong and irreconcilable interests among elites accounts for the persistence of elite disunity in many countries over long periods. Nevertheless, in extraordinary circumstances, elites sometimes find ways to compromise conflicting interests while maintaining organizational support, and the settlement concept captures these turning points in the politics of certain countries.

England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 is the only empirical case to which Cammack refers in his attack on the settlement concept, and a brief restatement of how we view elite change in that event is warranted. Long before and after 1688-89, a limited suffrage confined political influence in England to the upper, largely landed, class. But before 1688-89, that class was deeply divided between "Tory" sup- porters of royal power and the established Anglican Church, and "Whig" advocates of what amounted to republicanism and greater religious tolerance. There was no systematic difference in the economic interests of the two factions. During the voluntary and deliberate Tory-Whig conspiracy that deposed James II and made England into a "crowned republic" in 1688-89, Tory leaders dropped their insis- tence that kings could not be resisted (much less deposed), while Whig leaders accepted the privileged status of the Anglican Church over other Protestant sects. Together, these repudia- tions insulated each faction against attempts by the other to take a principled position and seek exclusive dominance in civil conflicts. Neither faction needed to fear that the other would push any political advantage to intolerable lengths. After 1688-89, in short, the major elite factions were consensually unified, and they dominated subsequent English politics in long stretches without seeking to go much beyond the limited representation of landed wealth. Thus, all subsequent dissident movements were deprived of major elite support. A prudent and restrained politics very different from the divisive, vio- lent politics of earlier periods of English history became the norm, and peaceful transfers of government executive power via elections, which eventually became democratic, took place periodically.

Like other scholars to whom we referred in our discussion of this case (see Burton and

Higley 1987b), Cammack believes that 1688- 89 was merely the political coda to what had been a class-conflict symphony, i.e., the Eng- lish Civil Wars and upheavals of 1640-60. This fairly orthodox Marxist interpretation has drawn devastating criticism (see Goldstone 1983 for a compelling summary). Our thesis of elite settlement is in step with a growing body of historical scholarship that stresses the watershed character of the events of 1688-89 (e.g., Jones 1972; Schwoerer 1981; Speck 1988). Full ap- preciation of our thesis is possible, however, only when it is placed in comparative context, where it offers a much more plausible interpretation than Marxism for why it took so long for most European societies to achieve the kind of peaceful conflict management that has characterized English politics since 1689, and why many societies in the world still have not achieved it.

But let us also dispel the idea that our aim is to refute class analysis. In some of our work (e.g., Field and Higley 1980, esp. pp. 21-32; Field, Higley, and Burton 1989), we hold that the interdependence of elites and mass publics can best be captured by combining elite and class theory. In slogan form, our position might be rendered as "Classes push, elites effect" (cf. Dahrendorf, 1988, pp. 53-4). The difficulty is that classes presumably "push" in rather uniform ways among similar societies, yet political outcomes are radically different. It is thus necessary to consider how elites "effect" such different outcomes, and therein lies the signifi- cance of the elite transformations we examine.

In our investigation of elite convergences ("two-step" transformations), we do not reverse our method, as Cammack charges. Analyses of both settlements and convergences are triggered by observations that previously unstable regimes achieved stability at some fairly specific point (e.g., England after 1689, Sweden after 1809, Italy and France during the 1970s). Ac- cording to our theory, such stabilization of regimes (which also operate according to principles of representative politics) means that elites achieved substantial consensus and unity prior to, or perhaps coterminous with, stabilization. In concrete cases, the research questions are: Is there evidence of such consensual unification and, if so, how did it occur? Elite settlement is one possibility. Another is elite convergence, in which some of the powerful but previously warring factions in a disunified elite form a winning electoral coalition and,


ELITE THEORY DEFENDED 425

through repeated electoral victories, eventually leave dissident elites no alternative but to com- pete for government executive power under the same rules of the game and other tacit under- standings as the winning coalition. This seems to capture the process by which French, Italian, and other national elites became consensually unified in recent decades, and it is, for example, the process through which South Korean elites are apparently moving at present. Though we think that our thesis of elite convergence needs further investigation, Cammack takes no issue with its accuracy in the cases we have exam- ined.

Cammack is right that we have not as yet spelled out, let alone documented, the complex ways in which elite consensus and unity, whether created through settlements, convergences, struggles for national independence, or other ways, are sustained over time. He is right to observe that new elites emerge and old elites are pushed aside, and that there is, in his words, "a continual process of negotiation among changing elite groups" with consensus and unity waxing and waning. But he is wrong to assert that the rules of the game change in any funda- mental way. The basic rules of the game, sum- marized as "restrained partisanship," do not change. Cammack also goes astray in imputing to us the contention that elite consensual unity is an all-or-nothing condition, so that either an entire national elite agrees publicly on every- thing important or it is disunified. Our basic distinction between ideologically unified elites (which are what Cammack actually seems to have in mind) and the consensually unified type avoids just this confusion. The hallmark of the former is uniform public utterances on major policy questions in conformance with a single ideology. Lacking ideological unity, members of a consensually unified elite regularly and publicly disagree on such questions, though they just as regularly pull their punches short of the point where violence and regime instability would begin. Finally, while much needs to be done to specify why and how consensually unified elites persist in various circumstances, we cannot identify a single case in the modern historical record in which a consensually unified elite, once created, failed to make the ad- justments necessary to its continuance. Cam- mack seems equally unable to find such a case, while the history of the last 300 years in his own country, Britain, testifies forcefully not only to the lasting effects of elite settlements

and the permanence of this kind of elite, but to the importance of elites for comprehending the broad sequences of politics in the modem world.

JOHN HIGLEY is Professor of Sociology and Government and Director of The Edward A. Clark Center for Australian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. MICHAEL G. BURTON is Professor of Sociology at Loyola College in Maryland. G. LOWELL FIELD is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at The University of Connecticut. The authors are writing a book tentatively titled A New Elite Framework for Political Analysis.

REFERENCES

Burton, Michael G. and John Higley. 1987a. "Invi- tation to Elite Theory." Pp. 133-43 in Power Elites and Organizations, edited by G. William Dom- hoff and Thomas R. Dye. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Burton, Michael G. and John Higley. 1987b. "Elite Settlements." American Sociological Review 52:295-307.

Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1988. The Modern Social Con- flict. New York: Wiedenfeld & Nicholson.

Field, G. Lowell and John Higley. 1973. Elites and Non-Elites: The Possibilities and their Side Ef- fects. Andover, MA: Warner Modular Publica- tions.

. 1980. Elitism. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

. 1985. "National Elites and Political Sta- bility." Pp. 1-44 in Research in Politics and Soci- ety: Studies of the- Structure of National Elite Groups, Vol. 1, edited by Gwen Moore. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Field, G. Lowell, John Higley, and Michael G. Burton. 1989. "A New Elite Framework for Po- litical Sociology." Paper presented to the Roundtable on "The New Elite Paradigm: Oppos- ing Views," American Sociological Association annual meetings, San Francisco.

Goldstone, Jack A. 1983. "Capitalist Origins of the English Revolution: Chasing a Chimera." Theory and Society 12:123-42.

Higley, John and Michael G. Burton. 1989. "The Elite Variable in Democratic Transitions and Breakdowns." American Sociological Review 54:17-32.

Higley, John, Desley Deacon, and Don Smart. 1979. Elites In Australia. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Higley, John, G. Lowell Field, and Knut Groholt. 1976. Elite Structure and Ideology: A Theory with Applications to Norway. New York: Columbia



University Press. Higley, John, Ursula Hoffmann-Lange, Charles

Kadushin, and Gwen Moore. Unpublished. "Elite Integration in Stable Democracies: A Reconsid- eration."

Higley, John and Gwen Moore. 1981. "Elite Integra- tion in the United States and Australia." American Political Science Review 75:581-97.

Jones, J.R. 1972. The Revolution of 1688 in Eng- land. New York: W.W. Norton.

Marcus, George E. 1983. "'Elite' as a Concept, Theory, and Research Tradition." Pp. 3-27 in Elites: Ethnographic Issues, edited by George E.

Marcus. Albuquerque: University of New Mex- ico Press.

Sartori, Giovanni. 1976. Parties and Party Systems. New York: Cambridge University Press.

. 1987. The Theory of Democracy Revis- ited: The Contemporary Debate, Vol. 1. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House.

Schwoerer, Lois G. 1981. The Declaration of Rights, 1689. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Speck, W.A. 1988. Reluctant Revolutionaries: Eng- lishmen and the Revolution of 1688. New York: Oxford University Press.

MANUSCRIPTS FOR THE ASA ROSE SOCIOLOGY SERIES

Manuscripts (100 to 300 typed pages) are solicited for publica- tion in the ASA Arnold and Caroline Rose Monograph Series. The Series welcomes a variety of types of sociological work- qualitative or quantitative empirical studies, and theoretical or methodological treatises. An author should submit three copies of a manuscript for consideration to the Series Editor, Professor Teresa A. Sullivan, University of Texas, Population Research Cen- ter, 1800 Main, Austin, TX 78712.


Article Contentsp.421p.422p.423p.424p.425p.426

Issue Table of ContentsAmerican Sociological Review, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Jun., 1990), pp. 313-468+I-XVIIIFront Matter"Prolegomena to a Theory of Social Institutions"An Historical Prologue [pp.313-319]Prolegomena to a Theory of Social Institutions [pp.319-333]Commentary: Social Institutions and Social Theory [pp.333-339]Commentary: Structure, Value, Action [pp.339-345]

Collaring the Crime, not the Criminal: Reconsidering the Concept of White-Collar Crime [pp.346-365]Collective Sanctions and Compliance Norms: A Formal Theory of Group-Mediated Social Control [pp.366-384]Incorporating Comparison within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alternative Comparative Method [pp.385-397]Class Formation without Class Struggle: An Elite Conflict Theory of the Transition to Capitalism [pp.398-414]A Critical Assessment of the New Elite Paradigm [pp.415-420]In Defense of Elite Theory: A Reply to Cammack [pp.421-426]Structure, Action, and Outcomes: The Dynamics of Power in Social Exchange [pp.427-447]Communication Dilemmas in Social Networks: An Experimental Study [pp.448-459]Comments and RepliesThe Logocentrism of the Classics [pp.460-462]Reply: Cumulation and Anticumulation in Sociology [pp.462-463]Revising Socialization Theory [pp.463-466]Reply: An Interpretive Approach to Childhood Socialization [pp.466-468]

Back Matter [pp.I-XVIII]

higley, john; burton, michael; field, g. in defense of elite theory.pdf

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