The Contested Status of Political Elites: At the Crossroads [1 ed.] 0415792150, 9780415792158

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title page
Copyright page
Table of contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
1 Contested status: contemporary challenges to political elites and elite responses
Part I: Elite autonomy and security in modern democracies
2 Elite autonomy and post-industrial problems of employment
3 On the (lack of) autonomy of political elites as representatives
4 Economic elites – political elites: scenes from a symbiosis
5 European citizens and elites in times of economic crisis and citizen unrest
Part II: (Changing) elite structure
6 Degradable elites?: Modes and factors of parliamentaryturnover in Europe in the early twenty-first century
7 When political elites select political elites: insights into the accumulation of autonomous political capital
8 Careers of long-standing legislators and the making of the parliamentary elite: evidence from 25 Baltic parliaments
9 Recruitment of technocrats in Romanian cabinets
10 Farewell to the party elites?: Politically inexperienced ministers in Central and Eastern European cabinets
Part III: (Changing) elite attitudes and behavior
11 Irresponsible elites in opposition and government: the Hungarian case
12 Theorists of their own practice: democracy as seen by Weimar politicians
13 Immigration and its consequences for European integration: a multi-level analysis of European national representatives’ perceptions
Index

Citation preview

The Contested Status of Political Elites

Contemporary Western societies are witnessing ground-­breaking social, economic, and political changes at an accelerating pace. These changes are challenging the way democracy works and the role that political elites play in this system of government. Using a theoretical and empirical approach, this volume argues that political elites are urged to develop new strategies in order to achieve interest aggregation, to safeguard collective action, and to maintain elite autonomy and stability. The adaptive capacities of political elites are assessed through case studies, comparative and longitudinal analyses of their social structure, their recruitment patterns, and their attitudes. The book includes contributions from reputable scholars in the field of elite research and specialists on individual political systems across Europe and the US. It provides an analytical framework demonstrating that political elites are inevitable and potentially able to respond successfully to varying challenges. The book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political elites, democracy, comparative politics, political participation, and European Politics. Lars Vogel is a Post-­Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science, Leipzig University, Germany. Ronald Gebauer is Acting Professor of Methods of Empirical Social Research at the University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz, Germany. Axel Salheiser is Research Fellow at KomRex—Center for Research on Right-­ Wing Extremism, Civic Education and Social Integration at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.

Routledge Research on Social and Political Elites Series Editors: Keith Dowding and Patrick Dumont Australian National University, Australia

Who are the elites that run the world? This series of books analyses who the elites are, how they rise and fall, the networks in which they operate and the effects they have on our lives. Party Members and Activists Edited by Emilie van Haute and Anika Gauja Political Representation Roles, Representatives and the Represented Edited by Marc Bühlmann and Jan Fivaz Ministerial Survival during Political and Cabinet Change Foreign Affairs, Diplomacy and War Alejandro Quiroz Flores Government Formation and Minister Turnover in Presidential Cabinets Comparative Analysis in the Americas Edited by Marcelo Camerlo and Cecilia Martínez-Gallardo The Selection of Politicians in Times of Crisis Edited by Xavier Coller, Guillermo Cordero, and Antonio M. Jaime-­Castillo National Political Elites, European Integration and the Eurozone Crisis Edited by Nicolò Conti, Borbála Göncz and José Real-­Dato Semi-­presidentialism, Parliamentarism and Presidents Presidential Politics in Central Europe Miloš Brunclík and Michal Kubát The Contested Status of Political Elites At the Crossroads Edited by Lars Vogel, Ronald Gebauer and Axel Salheiser For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-on-Social-and-Political-Elites/book-series/RRSPE

The Contested Status of Political Elites At the Crossroads

Edited by Lars Vogel, Ronald Gebauer and Axel Salheiser

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Lars Vogel, Ronald Gebauer and Axel Salheiser; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Lars Vogel, Ronald Gebauer and Axel Salheiser to be identified as the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-415-79215-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-21191-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgments

  1 Contested status: contemporary challenges to political elites and elite responses

vii viii x xii

1

L ars V ogel , R onald G ebauer , and A xel S al h eiser

PART I

Elite autonomy and security in modern democracies

23

  2 Elite autonomy and post-­industrial problems of employment

25

J o h n Higley

  3 On the (lack of ) autonomy of political elites as representatives

33

J ean - ­P ascal  D aloz

  4 Economic elites – political elites: scenes from a symbiosis

44

Heinric h   B est

  5 European citizens and elites in times of economic crisis and citizen unrest U rsula Hoffmann - ­L ange and M indaugas K uklys

58

vi   Contents Part II

(Changing) elite structure

85

  6 Degradable elites? Modes and factors of parliamentary turnover in Europe in the early twenty-­first century

87

L uca V erzic h elli

  7 When political elites select political elites: insights into the accumulation of autonomous political capital

108

D aniel  G axie

  8 Careers of long-­standing legislators and the making of the parliamentary elite: evidence from 25 Baltic parliaments

124

M indaugas K uklys

  9 Recruitment of technocrats in Romanian cabinets

140

Laurenţiu Ştefan

10 Farewell to the party elites? Politically inexperienced ministers in Central and Eastern European cabinets

160

E lena S emenova

Part III

(Changing) elite attitudes and behavior

183

11 Irresponsible elites in opposition and government: the Hungarian case

185

G abriella I lonszki and G y ö rgy L engyel

12 Theorists of their own practice: democracy as seen by Weimar politicians

203

J ens B orc h ert

13 Immigration and its consequences for European integration: a multi-­level analysis of European national representatives’ perceptions

226

R onald G ebauer and L ars  V ogel



Index

242

Figures

  6.1 Parliamentary turnover in 17 countries (1979–2015)   9.1 Percentage of technocratic appointments in Romanian governments   9.2 Length of tenure for all ministers and experts per each cabinet (months) 13.1 Estimated country-­specific relationships of MPs’ left-­right self-­placement and their threat perceptions of immigration

94 146 155 235

Tables

  1.1

Typology of elites with autonomy and security as the two dimensions of elite status   3.1 An overview of major normative approaches of political representation   5.1 Elections, electoral volatility, and changes in government in 31 European democracies 2009–2016   5.2 Electoral volatility in 19 Western European democracies 1990 to July 2016   5.3 Kornhauser’s model of mass society   5.4 Newcomers in the German Bundestag   6.1 Possible determinants of legislative turnover   6.2 Legislative turnover in Europe: descriptive figures   6.3 Proposed hypotheses, variable and measurements   6.4 Factors affecting turnover in 164 elections in 17 countries (1979–2015)   6.5 Parliamentary turnover in the largest parliamentary group: recent cases of “critical elections” in Europe   7.1 Political ascent and social background (members of the Socialist, Green, and Left Liberal majority elected in 2012)   7.2 Political ascent and social background (members of the 2007–2012 Conservative and Center-­Right majority)   7.3 Political attributes and political ascent (members of the Socialist, Green, and Left Liberal majority elected in 2012)   7.4 Political ascent and social background (members of the 2007–2012 Conservative and Center-­Right majority)   8.1 Percentage of MPs serving at least three legislative terms after 1990   8.2 Political party and party family switching among legislators (average)   8.3 Heads of the Baltic parliaments from 1990 onwards   9.1 Number of times technocrats served in the cabinet   9.2 Appointments of expert and non-­partisan ministers in Romanian cabinets

5 34 65 66 75 78 89 93 96 98 100 113 116 119 120 125 133 135 145 147

Tables   ix   9.3

Ministerial portfolios held by expert and non-­partisan ministers   9.4 Ministerial tenures   9.5 Average length of ministerial tenures   9.6 Ministerial status   9.7 Experience as deputy ministers   9.8 Ministers with postgraduate degrees   9.9 Ministers with PhDs   9.10 Technocratic ministers successfully running for the national and European parliament 10.1 Institutional frameworks of the CEE countries 10.2 Political background of all first-­time ministers in democratic cabinets, 1991/1992/1993–2009 10.3 Selected socio-­demographic characteristics of first-­time OUTSIDER ministers, 1991/1992/1993–2009 10.4 First-­time OUTSIDER ministers in different types of portfolios, 1991/1992/1993–2009 (percent) 11.1 Regime type, elite configuration, leadership traits, and frames of irresponsibility 11.2 Irresponsibility of governing and oppositional elites before and after 2010 elections 13.1 Threat perception of immigration from non-­EU countries 13.2 Proposed hypotheses, variables, and measurements 13.3 Multi-­level models for threat perceptions of immigration from non-­EU countries

153 153 155 156 156 157 157 158 165 167 172 175 190 196 231 232 236

Contributors

Heinrich Best is Senior Professor of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Jens Borchert is Professor of Political Science, Frankfurt University, Germany. Jean-­Pascal Daloz is Research Professor CNRS/SAGE, University of Strasbourg, France, and Visiting Fellow, Centre for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, USA. Daniel Gaxie is Professor of Political Sociology and Methodology, European Center for Sociology and Political Science, Paris 1 University (PanthéonSorbonne), Paris, France. Ronald Gebauer is Acting Professor of Methods of Empirical Social Research, University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz. Germany. John Higley is Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Austin, Texas, USA. Ursula Hoffmann-­Lange is Professor of Political Science, Otto Friedrich University Bamberg, Germany. Gabriella Ilonszki is Professor of Political Science, Corvinus University Budapest, Hungary. Mindaugas Kuklys is Political Scientist, Flensburg, Germany. György Lengyel is Professor of Political Science, Corvinus University Budapest, Hungary. Axel Salheiser is Research Fellow at KomRex—Center for Research on Right-­ Wing Extremism, Civic Education and Social Integration, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Elena Semenova is Researcher at Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Contributors   xi Laurenţiu Ştefan is Senior Researcher at the Center for Public Policies at the West University of Timișoara, Romania.  Luca Verzichelli is Professor of Public Policy Analysis and Italian Politics, University of Siena, Italy. Lars Vogel is Post-­Doctoral Researcher, Department of Political Science, Leipzig University, Germany.

Acknowledgments

The starting point for this book goes back to a symposium entitled “Farewell to the elites?” This symposium was funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and took place in Jena, Germany, in Autumn 2014. It was held on the occasion of the retirement of Heinrich Best, to whom and to whose work on elites this volume is dedicated. Throughout his academic career, Heinrich Best has made major contributions to the comparative study of both political elites and elites from other sectors. He played a pivotal role in the establishment of collaborative international and national data-­collection projects and research networks such as Eurelite, IntUne, and the longitudinal Jena Parliamentarian Survey that prepared the ground and framed the context for ongoing data collection and research. Best has authored and edited several influential academic works on elites’ structural composition, recruitment patterns, attitudes, and their impact on democracy and society. His role in editing The Palgrave Handbook of Elites and the international journal Historical Social Research deserve special mention. With a background in history and the social sciences, Best always takes a long-­term perspective in considering the historically contingent interactions between social and political structures and the great—or less great—men and women of history. His engagement with elite studies is always embedded in a systematic analysis of the interplay between the guiding principles of modern societies and their political institutions. Thereby he analyzed not only modern representative democracies but other political systems as well, such as the proto-­ democracies of the nineteenth century or the communist regimes of the twentieth century. Investigating the ongoing challenge of integrating democratic openness and equality with the elitist principles of exclusiveness and inequality has always been linked to the premise that democratic elitism has proven itself to be, in Best’s own words, “successful as the dominant organizational principle of political order in complex societies.” However, in times of internal and external crises, global conflicts, and accelerated social and political change, the future success of democratic elitism is anything but guaranteed. This volume thus poses questions regarding elite change and stability and elite–population relations from the perspectives of sociology, political science, and historical social research. It gathers contributions from colleagues and friends of Best, who appreciate him as a competent and

Acknowledgments   xiii inspiring scholar, an ambitious scientific entrepreneur, and a thoughtful discussant. As Best has collaborated with and befriended so many academics from around the world throughout his career, this volume cannot include all who wished to participate. Yet, in different ways, all the contributions refer to the analytical concepts that Best has advanced on the change and stability of elites. Since producing and—more to the point—finishing such a volume is only possible with intensive and tireless collaboration, we would like to thank all our authors. We also thank everybody else who helped in the making of this book, especially the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Sophie Iddamalgoda, the anonymous reviewers from Routledge, Julia L. McMillan, Keith Dowding, Patrick Dumont, and Philipp Koch (Jena).

1 Contested status: contemporary challenges to political elites and elite responses Lars Vogel, Ronald Gebauer, and Axel Salheiser

The contested status of political elites The Davos annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is an illustrious gathering of some of the most influential leaders of the world’s most powerful states and biggest economies. In 2017 more than forty heads of state or government and several ministers were on the list of participants, among them Chinese President Xi Jinping, British Prime Minister Theresa May, South African President Jacob Zuma, German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde, and Director of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim (to mention just a few). It would have been intriguing to have known what these leaders were thinking when Richard Edelman presented to them the results of the Edelman Trust Barometer, a worldwide longitudinal survey covering the perceptions and evaluations of elites by citizens and comparing the political attitudes of these two groups for the last seventeen years.1 Edelman sharpened the results of contemporary academic discussion when he diagnosed an implosion of trust in elites and a growing gap between elites and the general population in how they evaluate the institutions and actors of democracy (Dalton 2004).2 On these grounds, Edelman has postulated that the rule of elites—small but powerful minorities exerting influence and formal authority—is coming to an end. In their place, the rule of the majority is on the rise, with elites remaining in positions of formal authority while influence is increasingly exerted by non-­elites. Although it seems reasonable to guess that the elites in Davos were neither amused nor convinced by Edelman’s diagnosis of their loss of influence, the origin of these extrapolations has been widely accepted. Contemporary Western societies are witnessing ground-­breaking social, economic, and political changes at an accelerating pace. These changes are challenging the way democracy works, and especially the role that dominant actors (i.e., political elites) play in this system of government. Most prominent among these challenges are the worldwide economic and financial crises that have taken place since 2008 (and their pervasive repercussions), global warming and related natural disasters, the simultaneous trends of globalization and regionalization, mass migration movements, terrorist attacks, military aggressions, and civil wars such as in Syria,

2   Lars Vogel et al. Libya, Ukraine, Nigeria, and Yemen. These challenges constitute serious pressures on national and transnational political regimes and their elites to provide and enforce solutions. At the same time, trust in the legitimacy and competence of these regimes and their elites is declining, as indicated by the withdrawal of significant portions of the population from traditional politics like elections and parties, coupled with the rise of populist—and often anti-­systemic or anti-­ elitist—parties, movements, and actors (Inglehart and Norris 2016). Therefore, the central question of this book is to investigate the degree to which democratic leadership of political elites in the early twenty-­first century has been changed, and to examine this trend—if one does indeed exist—capable of redirecting the trajectory of traditional twentieth century modes of elite rule and mass representation as described in classic and modern elite theory. May it even be appropriate to bid farewell to the elites? And if so, what are the causes, contexts, and consequences of this change? There are two potential answers to these questions, which may at first appear contradictory: (1) political elites are inevitable and there is no reason to expect that they are disappearing; (2) political elites must constantly adjust to social and political challenges in order to prevent their own abolishment. This paradox may be resolved by addressing three perspectives on a possible disappearance of the elites: First, this disappearance can be understood as the abolishment of powerful minorities who decide on political issues with significant societal consequences. In this view there is no longer any necessity for any kind of elite status. Second, in a narrower sense, this disappearance may instead refer to the decline of elite autonomy, with elites increasingly becoming the administrators rather than the framers of social change. Elite status is considered in this view as elites’ enhanced potential to autonomously influence and make decisions, which is now being contested (elite autonomy). The third perspective is that we are experiencing elite circulation: Elites are not disappearing; rather, the current elites are unable to cope with contemporary economic, social, and political challenges and are thus being replaced by emerging counter-­elites. The elite status that is contested in this third view comprises elites’ stable occupation of formal leading positions in organizations and institutions, which allows them to have regular impact on decisions (elite security). The 2018 Davos summit further underlined the necessity of taking a closer look at the developments of elites. Donald Trump, who briefly attended the summit, was elected—among other factors—for his explicitly anti-­elitist claim that, unlike the established US political elite, he speaks for ordinary citizens. Indeed, challenging long-­standing politics and polities in both the US and worldwide, his government is overwhelmingly recruited from established elites in other sectors, especially the business and military sectors. This staffing of a government administration largely by political outsiders indicates that populists attacking established elites and elite rule may primarily be a strategy of counter-­ elites for a hostile take-­over of elite positions of influence and authority.

Contested status   3

Democratic elitism and elite–society interactions Classic and modern elite theories—which constitute the unifying paradigm of this volume—start from the assumption that leadership by small minorities is inevitable, even in democracies. In this sense, classic elite theorists, along with advocates of democracy in the tradition of Rousseau and his concept of a leaderless and self-­ruled society, both consider elite rule and democracy as antagonistic organizational principles of societies. However, they disagree on the consequences: While classic elite theorists claim that any kind of democracy is decoration that simply camouflages elite rule, their self-­rule democratic opponents postulate that society has the potential to develop to a point that it can overcome elite rule through democratic measures. However, in modern elite theory, in what is often labeled democratic elitism, elite rule and democracy are reconciled, with democracy serving as a mechanism to select and—even more importantly—replace elites through democratic elections. This mechanism makes elites responsible and, thus—albeit to a varying degree—responsive to the interests and demands prevalent in society and its subgroups. Despite this consensus, the degree of elite autonomy vis-­à-vis society is a controversially debated issue (Körösényi 2010). A key point in this debate is the endogenous or exogenous character of populations’ real or perceived interests and preferences, since the fulfillment of these demands is the pivotal measure on which elites are evaluated by the population. If these preferences were completely exogenous, elites could and would frame, weight, mold, downplay, or even evoke them, which would give elites the power to influence the criteria by which they are measured. Thus, the exogenous or endogenous character of population attitudes determines the degree of elite autonomy. Despite these differences, democratic elitism gives theoretical grounds for a linkage between elites and societies, which allows the structure and development of political elites and societies to be understood as the outcome of mutual influence. While political elites do generate political support by claiming that they represent the grievances and interests of social groups (Saward 2010), they do not merely passively mirror pre-­existing social structures; instead, they transform latent social disparities and deprivations into political demands, and establish the organizations (usually political parties) needed to bring these demands into the political decision-­making process. It is only in this interactive and dynamic sense that the elite structure evolves out of the social structure (Best and Vogel 2014). Although elite structure therefore co-­varies with changes in social and political structures, their position and related resources allow elites to pursue countervailing or reinforcing strategies in response to social developments. The structure and attitudes of elites are therefore the outcome of repeated interactions between social and political developments; together, these interactions constitute not only challenges to elites, but they are also the result of elites’ responses designed to cope with these challenges.

4   Lars Vogel et al.

Social change as a chain of challenges and responses This chain of repeated interactions never starts from scratch, but emerges from a specific historical setting of elites and societies, and is always embedded in an existing institutional framework. Each of these constellations is the outcome of previous interactions, adding a historical dimension to the analysis of elite–­ society interactions: Social change is not an endogenous process of societies following predetermined trajectories, but rather the result of a long and complex chain of responses to substantial problems or demands, which may be caused externally or produced within the society itself. This perspective has its roots in the challenge response model introduced by British historical philosopher, Arnold Toynbee (1946) and highlights both the contingency and path dependency of social action. This theory is implicitly part of, for instance, the theory of Stein Rokkan, in which links between parties and social groups are tightened (or not) at “critical junctures” (Rokkan 1999, p. 34), with long-­lasting and pervasive effects on the party systems. Combining this challenge–response approach with democratic elitism adds to elitism that the outcome of elite–society interactions is both contingent and path-­dependent, suggesting that the degree of elite autonomy varies over time. It adds to the challenge–response approach that the enforcement of responses includes an asymmetry toward elite action. In this understanding, elites respond to any internal or external problems that seriously threaten the institutional and social setting in which these actors are important figures. These problems constitute a challenge if they come under scrutiny through the public perception, and thereby find their way to the agenda of political elites. In such times of crises (the critical junctures) elites enjoy a wide degree of freedom: The institutional setting has become ineffective in problem-­ solving, and society is seeking new ways to achieve social regulation and integration, including the forging of new alliances between elites and relevant subgroups of the population. However, this freedom and openness also brings insecurity and less predictable behavior. To reduce insecurity, influential actors therefore either seek to stabilize established institutions and alliances or to forge new ones. The outcome of these efforts then again reduces the freedom of actors by restricting certain behavior and promoting others. Thus, the choices made at critical junctures have long-­term and pervasive effects. This path-­dependence is limited by the fact that new challenges can always appear, being either induced by changes in external factors or triggered by the newly established institutional setting that was designed to overcome the previous challenges (Best, Gebauer, and Salheiser 2009, Best and Vogel 2014).

Contemporary challenges to elites’ autonomy and security In front of these background the initial question is reframed: We ask about the contemporary challenges to elite autonomy and to the security of their positions, how elites respond to these challenges, and what the outcomes of these responses are.

Contested status   5 Table 1.1 Typology of elites with autonomy and security as the two dimensions of elite status Autonomy

Security

High

Low

High

Professional elites

Secure delegates

Low

Precarious trustees

No elites

Elite autonomy refers to the scope of action that incumbent political elites possess, as well as to the relevance of political criteria in the decision-­making process. Elite security refers to the potential of incumbent elites to maintain their status, as well as to the relevance of political criteria in elite recruitment and selection. Both dimensions can be restricted by the institutional and legal framework, by the demands and interference of elites’ various constituencies, or by elites from other societal sectors (e.g., economic, administrative, or media elites). Office holders who possess neither security nor autonomy cannot be considered political elites, as they are incapable of influencing political decisions regularly (due to their lack of security) or substantially (due to their lack of autonomy); this is in contrast to professional elites, who are capable of both types of influence (Higley and Burton 2006). The two other types—secure delegates and precarious trustees—rely on Burke’s famous distinction between different styles of representation (Eulau et al. 1959): While precarious trustees potentially enjoy wide autonomy in decision-­making, their security is, however, permanently at risk; as a result, they will constrain their actual decisional autonomy to better secure their positions. Secure delegates, on the other hand, enjoy secure positions, but these positions are not linked to particularly pronounced elite autonomy. Internal challenges The challenges that emerge may threaten either elite autonomy or elite security or both, and they may arise from internal or external forces. Internal challenges arise from the functioning of the institutional structure and the normative foundations of representative democracy. Classic elite theory and the paradigm of democratic elitism have both described elites as inevitable for democracies, due to problems of collective preference formation, interest aggregation, and decision-­making (Hoffmann-­Lange/Kuklys in this volume). Furthermore, it is argued that elites are better informed and equipped to make efficient political decisions compared to average citizens. Against this background, elite autonomy should be maximized to ensure that democracies work and provide good governance, with the role of citizens restricted to holding elites accountable through periodic elections. To ensure elites’ autonomy, these elite positions must be secure. These normative foundations are accompanied by institutional and/or organizational arrangements that produce an elite structure characterized by collective

6   Lars Vogel et al. stability, predictability of individual elite advancements, and a relative security of elite positions. Party systems are relatively stable, with parties either linked to social groups or designed to appeal to the median voter, who is not suspected of demanding radical reforms. Political elites are in control of parties, which are the main organizational channel for advancement to leadership positions. Political advancement is predictable, if aspirants staunchly offer their loyalty and competencies to their party, which rewards such commitment with political offices and mandates. The risk of being voted out of these positions (i.e., turn-­over) is relatively low, and is more likely to be due to an intra-­party defeat than to electoral volatility. The elite structure is further characterized by consensus and restrained competition. Elites share a consensus regarding the basic institutional framework and its formal and informal rules; this produces stability and, thus, predictability of the political competition. This consensus includes accepting the legitimacy of one’s political competitors. Accordingly, even electoral victories are not seen as a platform to fundamentally change the institutions and the rules of the game in a winner-­gets-it-­all manner. “Antagonistic” cooperation (Best 2009) and informal networks between otherwise competing elites are common; this consensus may even expand to include policy issues, if they are perceived to endanger the institutional framework and the consensual elite arrangement. Such de-­politicization and attenuation of political competition is pursued by either not offering policy alternatives on contesting policies, by holding them back from gaining saliency at the political agenda, or by excluding and delegitimizing any emerging counter-­elites who challenge this elite consensus. Since elites share an interest in securing their positions, elite consensus encompasses further the rules of the game concerning access to elite circles. Political professionalization describes this process and its mechanisms whereby access to political positions becomes restricted and dependent on the internal criteria defined by political insiders, rather than on external criteria defined outside the political sphere. Access restrictions allow insiders to stay in politics longer and prevent outsiders from entering politics. Political elites are especially well equipped to establish such insider–outsider differentials, as they are in the formal position to implement institutions that serve to restrict access, such as single-­ member district plurality electoral systems, thresholds, or the financing of established parties with public funding. This kind of elite structure marked Europe between WWII and the end of the socialist bloc as a response to the “consensus challenge,” i.e., the maintenance of representative democracy and capitalism in the face of the communist threat (Best 2007). However, during this era several indicators already pointed toward newly emerging challenges that gained momentum after the disappearance of the consensus challenge in 1989. These indicators comprise—notwithstanding national variation—decline in voter turnout and party membership, decreased trust and satisfaction with democracy, growing voter volatility, proliferation of alternative forms of political participation and protest, and the increasing importance of protest and anti-­system parties. These developments indicate a decline in elites’ autonomy and security in representative democracies, in which citizens

Contested status   7 are less and less accepting elites and their decisions, but are instead increasingly contesting, vetoing, and deselecting them. Declining support for elite autonomy and security among citizens can be traced back to both citizen preferences (on the demand side) and to elite structures and behaviors (on the supply side). The expansion of formal education that began in the 1960s has enlarged the cognitive capacities of average citizens, elevating the degree and expanding the forms of citizens’ participation in politics. Nevertheless, political participation remains largely occasional and elusive, and the number of political activists who devote significant time and other resources to politics has remained stable (Hoffmann-­Lange/Kuklys in this volume). Growing political sophistication does not primarily imply growing rates of intensive and regular political participation, but it does boost the internal efficacy of citizens (i.e., belief in their own political competency), making them quicker to critically evaluate elites and fueling a conviction that one’s own political positions should be considered in political decision-­making. This combination increases citizens’ readiness for occasional ex post protest against political decisions and undermines the idea that elites possess superior political knowledge and skills, an idea that has hitherto legitimized the delegation of political decisions to elites. This transformation of citizens’ political demands develops into a challenge when confronted with an elite structure including an expanded elite consensus that extends beyond fundamental politics and suppresses political competition in policy areas like, for instance, immigration, European integration (de Vries 2007), and neo-­liberal market organization with principles like austerity policies. An additional factor that tends to spur on the transformation of citizens’ political demands is political professionalization, which provides relative security for the majority of incumbent political elites. Given these conditions, citizens perceive there to be no real choice between competing policy proposals, and do not see a way to deselect established personnel and to elect alternatives. In this case, the most common form of political participation—voting—is stripped of efficacy, while alternative forms of participation like protests and demonstrations are not compensating for, since they do mainly satisfy punctual protest eruptions of a still small strata of the population. Enhanced political self-­efficacy among citizens who expect that their personal political positions will be considered in the political process, combined with a perceived lack of political choice, presumably fuels the impression among huge parts of the population that they have a lack of political voice in the established institutional framework of Western representative democracies. As a result, demands to curtail the scope of elite autonomy and security are on the rise (Inglehart and Catterberg 2002). The tension between the necessity of elite autonomy and elite control by citizens is at the heart of elite-­driven representative democracies (Best and Vogel 2018), but the diverging developments toward, on the one hand, expanded citizens’ demands for elite control by policy choice and personnel (de-)selection, and, on the other hand, expanding elite consensus and political professionalization have amplified this tension toward a “legitimacy challenge” to the acceptance of elite autonomy,

8   Lars Vogel et al. the legitimacy of elite decisions, and elite security—irrespective of the particular policy that is at stake. Important indications for this declining acceptance of elite autonomy are the rising influence of protest movements whose members have little in common beyond their opposition to government (i.e., elite) decisions. At the attitudinal level, citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and trust in institutions—in particular, in (political) elites—is on the decline. Elite security is especially endangered by the growing volatility of voters and by their simultaneous readiness to punish unsuccessful governments and reluctance to reward successful governments (Hoffmann-­Lange/Kuklys and Ilonszki/Lengyel in this volume). These developments are reflected in decreasing government stability and in an increasing turn-­over among political elites. The success of populist parties (which explicitly challenge the established political elites by accusing them of betraying the citizenry) is another indication of the declining acceptance of elite autonomy (Bustikova and Kitschelt 2009, Minkenberg 2006). Moreover, the emergence of these and other often erratic and instable “flash” parties make electoral outcomes less predictable, further increasing elite turn-­over and reducing elite security (Verzichelli in this volume). In general, political parties are losing their ability to provide secure political careers to their functionaries and members. This development is due, among other factors, to processes of de-­alignment—or not yet completed re-­alignment— leading to a decline in party identification, and to a subsequent decrease on parties’ impact on voting behavior (Drummond 2006). The primacy of parties in providing personnel, as well as ideological and interest linkages between society and polity, is thus decreasing, and political elites need to re-­calculate the relevance of such parties. This reconfiguration of the relationship between political elites and their parties has been grasped by concepts such as individualization and personalization, which encompass the idea that political elites strive for new relationships with voters and with the citizenry at large that are less mediated by traditional forms of party organizations. External challenges While the “legitimacy challenge” is an internal one, arising from the constitutive tensions of representative democracies, external challenges emerge either from outside of a representative democracy’s territorial boundaries, or from outside the political realm, such as social or technological developments. With regard to technological developments, digitalization has expanded and transformed opportunities for political communication and interaction (Coleman 2005, Kersey 2016, Ward and Gibson 2009). In principle, digitalization and, especially, internet and social media, provide political elites with the means for direct and unmediated interaction with voters and citizens. However, although social media are used by collective actors and organizations, the bulk of political digital communication is performed by a relatively small proportion of the citizenry, with this sub-­population tending to be biased toward the general

Contested status   9 population in terms of their socio-­structural composition. Accordingly, the interactive nature of digital communication urges political elites to invest their scarce time and attention, despite the fact that the benefits remain doubtful. However, political elites’ withdrawal from or resistance to digital communication can be perceived as lack of responsiveness by a broader audience that goes beyond the active participants. In this respect, digitalization is suited to enhance the autonomy of political elites vis-­à-vis their parties, but can also constrain the leeway in communication with voters and citizens. Beyond this long-­term trend of digitalization, the most pervasive effects on elites’ autonomy and security has had the global financial and economic crisis in 2008 that rapidly evolved into a sovereign debt crisis, and in Europe, into a crisis of the Eurozone prompting a political crisis of the entire European Union (EU) (Vogel and Rodríguez-Teruel 2016). After the economic recession was fought by massive public expenditures (which were funded by tax increases and by loans offered by the globalized financial market), the elite response to the resulting sovereign debt crisis—during which many countries became unable to secure loans on the private market—was overwhelmingly neo-­liberal. This included unpopular austerity policies and massive public expenditure cuts, which citizens perceived as a breach of trust in good governance. Many countries—particular those of Southern Europe—were still suffering from economic recession but were simultaneously constrained to impose austerity policies to get their debts re-­financed by supranational institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF ) or the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (TSCG) plainly known as European Fiscal Compact (EFCC). This resulted in persistent economic difficulties that fueled social unrest and increased the population’s political disaffection not only with their governments, but also with supranational institutions, in particular with the EU. Elites in these countries were especially constrained in their autonomy due to their reliance on supranational institutions at a time when citizens were protesting in the streets and in elections against the measures imposed by these institutions. Especially within the EU, asymmetries between countries were widening along the dividing line between creditor and debtor states. Since the responses that were made to the different crises were inextricably linked to European integration, populist parties fueled their rejection of European integration by promoting public resistance to austerity policies. The already ongoing change from a “permissive consensus” of elites and the population regarding European integration to a “constraining dissensus” (Hooghe and Marks 2008, Lindberg and Scheingold 1970) accelerated during these crises, indicating a further loss of elite autonomy. The growing social and economic inequalities that have been identified following the post-­2008 financial crises exist not only between member states of the EU, but also within nation states, as a result of globalization (Atkinson 2015, Piketty and Goldhammer 2014). As production industries staffed by workers requiring little formal education have diminished tremendously in Western democracies, the educational attainment required for even entry-­level jobs has  increased, fueling inequalities based on different levels of educational

10   Lars Vogel et al. attainment. Job security has also been eroding within even the most highly educated strata of societies, with new dividing lines emerging between insiders who have secured permanent employment in jobs that maintain their standard of living and outsiders either being unemployed or being employed in precarious or non-­satisfying jobs (Higley in this volume, Porta et al. 2015). These new dividing lines crisscross traditional cleavages and emerge in societies that are structured both by vertical inequalities with regard to resources, and by horizontal divisions based in lifestyles, identities, and values; increasingly, these identity-­based horizontal divisions are only loosely linked to the “classical” vertical inequalities. Additionally, the size of traditional organized societal groups, such as blue-­collar workers or Catholics, is declining (van der Brug, Franklin, and Toka 2008). These multiple dividing lines increase the social heterogeneity of societies and impede the potential of elites to identify and articulate common interests of social groups in order to mobilize, organize, and infuse their interests in the political arena, to draw political support from the groups that they claim to represent. Accordingly, the impact of these traditional interest-­based cleavages on party systems and electoral behavior is on the decline (Deegan-­Krause 2007), although it is not yet known whether the phenomenon is one of de- or re-­alignment. The multiplication and fragmentation of interests has been accompanied by an increase of organized lobbying groups with smaller membership bases and more specific (i.e., more homogeneous) interests than the traditional mass organizations like labor unions. The proliferation of these groups increases the number of veto-­players who are less open to compromise because they lack the internal heterogeneity and bigger size of the traditional associations, which have always forced them to achieve internal compromises to aggregate collective political positions (Hoffmann-­Lange/Kuklys in this volume). The emerging saliency of identity politics poses an additional challenge for political elites. Fragmentation of interests is presumably one of the causes for the growing political relevance of belongingness to collective entities around characteristics like gender, ethnicity, race, age, and, in particular, nationality. Collective identities are relatively stable and less prone to transformation, especially when they are linked to ascriptive criteria such as sex, skin color, or national origin and they are diffuse and able to absorb a wide range of partly contradictory interests. These characteristics allow elites to speak for collective groups despite their inner heterogeneity, which enlarges the potential for political elites to make claims of representation (Saward 2010). Identity politics, however, also challenge elites’ autonomy, since issues of descriptive and symbolic representation increase in saliency. In particular, elites’ autonomy in recruitment is affected, since an emphasis on criteria pertaining to belongingness potentially constrains the relevance of other political criteria (Best 2011). Moreover, although identity politics are inclusive—fostering integration in heterogeneous societies—their potential to demarcate and to exclude is equally relevant. In the process of European integration, an excluding national or sub-­ national identity impedes individuals’ identification as European and their

Contested status   11 positive attitudes toward European integration, while inclusive national identities foster them (Carey 2002, Hooghe and Marks 2008, Opp 2005). Although separatist movements like those in Catalonia, Scotland, or Wallonia are often based on social and economic inequalities, it is not until a regional identity distinct from that of the nation is established that the legitimacy of redistribution based on national solidarity (i.e., the flow of money from richer to poorer regions) can be challenged and undermined. Identity politics usually constitute a new political conflict line: The demarcation– universalistic conflict and the GAL-­TAN conflict (Green-­Alternative-Libertarian vs. Traditional-­Authoritarian-National) (Kriesi et al. 2006, Gebauer/Vogel in this volume) represent two influential concepts that can be used to grasp the dynamics of identity politics. These new conflict lines establish complex relationships to the traditional left–right conflict line that has been grounded in socio-­economic inequalities. Depending on the national context, these two lines either (1) are collapsed into one—in this case, elites on the right usually support national demarcation, while those on the left support universalism, (2) remain independent from each other, or (3) partly overlap (Prosser 2016, Real-­Dato, Göncz, and Lengyel 2012). The emergence of the demarcation–universalistic conflict line accompanied the politicization of European integration, which occurred as a shift from a “permissive consensus” to a “constraining dissensus” on European integration (Hooghe and Marks 2008, Lindberg and Scheingold 1970). This permissive consensus referred to the relationship between the elites and the masses, but also to the degree of elite polarization regarding European integration. Moreover, both aspects are intertwined: As long as established political elites shared a consensus, the populations that they represented overwhelmingly supported European integration, even if they were slightly less enthusiastic than their elites, or didn’t even care about this issue. Increasing elite polarization regarding European integration—induced most markedly by the increasing electoral shares held by populist anti-­EU parties—has been accompanied by decreasing support among the population, although the question of who is leading whom in this decline  cannot yet be answered (Gabel and Scheve 2007, Sanders and Toka 2013, Steenbergen, Edwards and de Vries 2007). Since political elites were not  able to maintain their consensus on European integration, they had to re-­ enter elite competition. This competition is occurring, in part, along the left– right-­dimension, where it focuses on the policies that the EU should pursue (Vogel 2016). However, competition also occurs along the conflict of maintenance or overcoming the nation states within the EU. This conflict is located at the demarcation–universalistic line and thus linked to the issues of immigration and integration (Gebauer/Vogel in this volume) that divide primarily established elites from their right-­wing populist opponents. Such situations constitute critical junctures, since the traditional patterns of elite competition and cooperation need to be refined, posing challenges to both elite autonomy and security. European integration has consequences for elite autonomy beyond its impact on national identities, because it has transformed national politics into a multi-­level

12   Lars Vogel et al. game and has increased the number of potential veto-­players. More generally, such processes like supranational integration, international cooperation, or even sub-­ national decentralization may either constrain or enlarge elites’ autonomy. They bring constraining effects, since more actors at more levels need to be considered and integrated. On the other hand, the higher the number of actors involved, the weaker the influence of each individual actor and elites then gain new possibilities to bargain and play off of the diversity of all of the interests involved (Dukelow 2015, Moravcsik 1994).

Potential responses by political elites Elite responses to these challenges are not deliberate collective actions of uniform groups, but rather the outcome of the interdependent actions of multiple actors, using diverging strategies and unequally distributed resources in multi-­ layered political systems. These interactions occur primarily within the established elites or between established elites and counter-­elites. The population and its subgroups are the audience of these interactions, who take action through elections or through other means of direct participation. One potential response by established elites to maintain the security of their positions and the autonomy of their decisions is to strengthen professionalization and elite cooperation. Even if established political elites perceive both strategies as fueling the withdrawal of citizens’ support for representative democracy and its actors, they might even more consider the further closure of the access to political positions and attenuating political competition as efficient insurances against an increasingly hostile and anti-­elitist environment. While political professionalization is currently most often linked to extended tenures in national parliaments (the core institutions of representative democracies), the patterns of professionalization may differentiate to more flexible careers that account for increased rates of turn-­over, by, for example, cultivating careers on and across different levels (Edinger and Jahr 2015). From this point of view, sub-­national decentralization and supranational integration both enlarge the number of positions that elites can occupy consecutively or simultaneously, thereby extending their stay in professional politics. Other strategies for achieving professionalization despite high turn-­over include all measures increasing resources that are related directly (e.g., remunerations, staff, infrastructure) and indirectly (e.g., pensions) to the occupation of elite positions to maximize one’s benefits while holding these positions for shorter lengths of time. Another de-­politicization strategy that may be deployed against challenges to elite autonomy and security is to delegate political decision-­making and influencing capacities (i.e., elite positions) to non-­majoritarian and non-­elected institutions like the IMF, the European Commission, the European or national central banks, the European Stability Mechanism, constitutional courts, or expert commissions. This kind of delegation is intended to establish new elite positions and allows political elites to reduce their accountability for unpopular decisions and to keep controversial political issues off the political competition.

Contested status   13 Populist parties throughout Europe deliberately attack established elites by arguing that these elites share a consensus on salient policy issues, by unanimously supporting neo-­liberal globalization, European integration, and immigration. This allegation, true or not, fits into the populist anti-­elitist and anti-­pluralist idea of homogeneous nations or classes that are being deceived by distant elites. An important distinction between populists is whether they are democratic or anti-­democratic challengers: While the former attack only established elites and use their populist stance as a means to become established themselves, the latter challenge the elites, institutions, and politics central to liberal democracy, which they claim to be insufficient to represent the interests and demands of citizens. Irrespective of this distinction, even if voters do not share these anti-­liberal ideas, they may perceive populism as an effective means to regain political influence by restoring choice between policy alternatives. However, the responses of established elites may differ according to their perception of the populist contenders. If they perceive populist parties and movements as challenging the democratic system as a whole—to which the established elites owe their own position—they may respond by strengthening or even enlarging the scope of their consensus. This strategy is intended to mark populists’ stances as marginal in the political discourse, with the goal of undermining their legitimacy and reducing the electoral support of populists, thereby bolstering the security of elites’ positions. While de-­legitimizing populist counter-­elites may be intended to protect democracy, its core purpose is to secure the political system, and with it the positions of established elites. Accordingly, narratives of de-­legitimization can also be based on other ideological foundations. Especially if they are based on matters of national identity and sovereignty, there is a tendency toward authoritarian backslash. Such a development goes beyond an elite consensus to impede political competition, instead striving for the abolishment of political competition and the institutions that enable it (Ilonszki/Lengyel in this volume). Such a strategy fundamentally alters the rules of the game, since political competition is no longer perceived as an ongoing alternation of governing and non-­governing elites, but as a way to completely and permanently exclude one’s competitors from ever even potentially occupying positions in the political elite (Borchert in this volume). Responses made to populists or to other counter-­elites that are perceived as legitimate political contenders may be similar, but it is also likely that established elites finally (have to) include them into the realm of legitimate political competition. This acceptance is especially likely if parts of the established elites see populist challengers as a possible means by which to weaken competing established elites, i.e., populists from the left or right can be used to weaken established left- or right-­wing parties (Meguid 2005). Alternatively, established elites may maintain their consensus and refuse to acknowledge their challengers, but their strategy of delegitimizing these populist counter-­elites may be unsuccessful. In this case a new political fundamental conflict line or even new cleavages may emerge between established elites and these newcomer populist elites.

14   Lars Vogel et al. In sum, the response made to newly emerging populist or other counter-­elites will depend on their political stances and on the electoral support that they have been able to garner. This will also depend on the strength of the consensus and cooperation between the established elites. Either way, if the emerging counter-­ elites are accepted as legitimate, elite consensus will shrink and political polarization will increase. Likewise, increased political professionalization is not the only possible response that elites can make to cope with threats to elite security. Another option is the deliberate opening up of access to elite positions to meet the— partly contradicting—demands for more open and more inclusive recruitment into elite positions. Open access might lead to increased turn-­over—since nomination would decreasingly ensure election—and inclusive recruitment might enhance descriptive representation. Such de-­professionalization would further cause non-­political criteria like age, gender, ethnic affiliation, or social background to gain importance in the processes of elite recruitment or, more generally, that elite recruitment would become more formalized overall. The strategy of increased descriptive and symbolic representation aims to halt the erosion of citizens’ trust in democracy and its established actors, and to cut off the rise in associated support for populist and anti-­democratic actors and movements in order to secure the status of established elites in the long term. Because formalization makes political recruitment more predictable, it limits elite autonomy while increasing elite security (Higley and Gaxie in this volume). These partially contradictory strategies make differentiated elite responses most likely that lead to further elite differentiation: While some elites may occupy positions—most likely visible ones—into which recruitment is open and inclusive and in which elite circulation is high and elite security low, an elite within the elite may still occupy positions to which access is restricted and elite circulation is low and who have reached a degree of professionalization that allows them to stay in politics significantly longer, giving them greater security. While the “law of increasing disproportion” (Putnam 1976) is still valid for the latter group, it is deliberately violated by the former group. From this perspective, the current analytical focus on average values of turn-­over and duration may be supplemented by a more nuanced view for differentiated subgroups of elites that shows, for instance, varying tenure due to different recruitment patterns into elite positions (Kuklys, Semenova, Ştefan, and Verzichelli in this volume). The deliberate formalization of inclusive recruitment processes may further serve citizens’ demands for symbolic representation and identity politics. Political elites emphasize their belongingness to subgroups of the society that they claim to represent, all while avoiding references to their specific interests. This strategy allows elites to avoid problems of interest representation in an environment characterized by increasingly heterogeneous interests. One potential result of these identity politics may thus be enhanced descriptive representation, i.e., an increase in congruence between the socio-­economic traits of the population and its political elites (Gaxie in this volume).

Contested status   15 Identity politics also allow elites to establish direct relationships with constituencies that are not or at least less mediated by their parties, and that are instead based on elite members’ origin from, belongingness to, and personal relationships into subgroups of the society. In this respect, identity politics are a response to the declining electoral value of party affiliation (i.e., parties come to provide less security for elite positions), that emphasizes the personal traits of political elites. This personalization can either be a strategy employed by the party organizations themselves to attracts voters (in which case there is no indication for a changing relationship between political elites and their parties), or it can reflect a dynamic whereby individual elite members gain more weight in their parties and parties are becoming less important in forming political elites’ stances and in protecting the security of their political careers (Karvonen 2010, Pakulski and Körösényi 2012). Multiple personal traits and assets may gain in importance (Best 2007). Group belongingness is one trait but political elites may also emphasize or feign their attitudinal or habitual proximity to “ordinary” citizens (Schmitter 2017). On the contrary, or as supplement, political elites may trumpet their real or purported eminence, such as outstanding qualifications and expertise, charisma, wealth, leadership, political acumen, or even physical strength to mention just a few. Since these two strategies of personalization may contradict each other (Daloz in this volume), this can trigger further elite differentiation. But beside these differences all political elites may downplay or completely refute their party affiliation, instead emphasizing their distance to parties. Such personalization would result in elites’ declining partyness evidenced, for instance, by political careers that are less structured by the traditional sequences of party positions, an increased importance of political leaders and candidates’ personal traits in swaying electoral outcomes (Verzichelli in this volume), or in a higher amount of party-­switchers. Personalization may also be applied to meet the demand for digital communication, with political elites supplying voters with personalized information to circumvent the public expectations for daily interactivity and immediate responsiveness of their elites. Qualifications and expertise in specific policy fields are among the highest profile personal traits (Semenova and Ştefan in this volume) and the recruitment of technocrats into elite positions is an established phenomenon. The implied emphasis on—often pretended—non-­political expertise has always been a means by which political elites seek to depoliticize conflictive policy issues and to avoid accountability for unpopular decisions. A rising share of non-­political elites in political positions does not necessarily imply the rise of technocratic elites but rather increased importance of those who select them (prime ministers, presidents, party leaders), because they are relieved from considering the party merits of candidates who have risen through established party channels. The political fate of these technocrats is indeed less dependent on a party organization, as they are instead highly dependent on the small group of core elites who selected them. This type of elite differentiation entails less security of the elite status of these technocrats, but greater security and decisional autonomy for those within the elite who recruit them.

16   Lars Vogel et al. The present volume sheds light on some of these challenges, responses, and outcomes of repeated interactions between these complex forces and elements. Building on theoretical considerations and extensive empirical evidence, this volume argues that a complete disappearance of political elites is utopian, given that even in highly egalitarian contexts (e.g., communist systems) small groups with internal differentiation, status security, decisional autonomy, and superior influence can always be identified (Best in this volume). Elites are inevitable because large collectivities have proven themselves to be unable to take autonomous collective action, to achieve interest aggregation and to come to decision without the establishment of institutions and organizations, which are easier to be established and maintained by smaller groups (Hoffmann-­Lange/Kuklys in this volume). From this perspective, normative and empirical conceptions should be elaborated to judge the ability of elites to cope with today’s complex and numerous social and political challenges. The adaptive capacities of both established elites and emerging counter-­elites are assessed in this volume through an analysis of their social structure, recruitment and career patterns, and attitudes. The results of the contributions to this volume indicate not only general trends, but also variations across both time and national context. Covering both democracies in Western and Eastern Europe enriches the analytical scope, as some of the developments identified in Western Europe are partly more advanced in post-­ communist countries. This phenomenon is especially evident for turn-­over rates (i.e., elite circulation), voter volatility, the personalization of politics, instability of the party systems, and populations’ support for populist parties and other aspiring counter-­elites, which all are more pronounced in Eastern Europe. In contrast, the average partyness of political elites, their degree of professionalization, the stability of governments, and satisfaction with democracy among the population is overall much lower in post-­communist countries compared to the average in Western Europe. Western Europe also appears to be trending toward the structural features that characterize the current democracies in Eastern Europe. However, the contributions to this volume caution that these developments do not usually follow linear trends, but are instead characterized by repeated changes in direction and even reversals. This non-­linear path underlines the necessity of a heuristic that models social and political change as an interplay between challenges and responses. Developments like an increase or decrease in the degree of professionalization can often be attributed to peculiarities of the political, economic, or social conditions in the particular democratic system under investigation. However, beyond these national variations, the trend of increasing turn-­over is remarkably significant and stable, indicating a decrease in average elite security. Within this overall trend, however, there are also indications that a deeper analysis of elite differentiation is needed. Some incumbents of formal elite positions cannot be considered elites, but rather as either precarious trustees or secure delegates (to use the typology proposed in this introduction), since they either lack security or autonomy. In contrast to these incumbents, a professional elite within the elite that takes into account internal elite asymmetries may be identified in future research.

Contested status   17

Contributions of this volume This volume is structured into three sections. The chapters in Part I address the challenged autonomy and security of elites in modern democracies and discuss the underlying processes of economic, social, and institutional change. As John Higley argues, the ongoing shrinkage of employment in post-­industrial societies, growing social insecurity, and deepening conflicts of distribution of social positions and resources have caused widespread discontent with elite decision-­ making, and have fueled distrust. Elites are urged to seek new modes of balancing the interests of organizational insiders and other societal stakeholders to encounter populist or authoritarian impulses, maintain their autonomy, and safeguard the principal arrangement of democratic elitism. Jean-­Pascal Daloz suggests some new directions for study in relation to the question of the legitimacy of political elites and the meanings of political representation. In his chapter, a comparative approach toward various normative, descriptive, and interpretative understandings of representation is introduced. Heinrich Best investigates the inevitability and interdependency of elites in modern societies, describing an ambiguous symbiosis between political and economic elites as observed throughout different stages of German history: From the 1848/1849 beginnings of German parliamentarianism to the process of European integration and the international financial crisis, to the East German state socialism that lasted until 1989. According to Best, competing interests, endemic conflicts between elites, and the antagonism between elites and non-­elites have been driving forces behind societal and political development. Ursula Hoffmann-­ Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys present empirical evidence on the change from elite-­directed to elite-­challenging political participation and its impact. They point out that, over the last few decades, established democracies have experienced a considerable decline in traditional forms of political participation such as voting, party identification, and party membership, while direct citizen involvement in political affairs has surged. This development has been accompanied by the rise of right-­wing populist movements and parties that take advantage of protest. The authors explore to what extent the return of traditional political concerns to the political agenda is capable of reinvigorating old political loyalties, or whether it will instead precipitate the ongoing erosion of traditional political ties. Moreover, the authors discuss implications for the security of elite position-­holding and the ability of elites to aggregate an increasingly diverse spectrum of interest groups, media, and ad-­hoc citizen initiatives. Part II focuses on elite structure, recruitment, and careers. Luca Verzichelli argues that increased turn-­over rates in European democracies during the first decade of the twenty-­first century could indicate a legitimacy challenge, and that various factors such as electoral shifts, intra-­partisan and institutional arrangements, and changing structures of opportunity must be studied to explain elite circulation. Verzichelli provides a new theoretical and empirical framework with which to explain parliamentary elite turn-­over and proposes an explorative empirical test for determinants of elite circulation. Daniel Gaxie compares data

18   Lars Vogel et al. on deputies to the French National Assembly elected in 2007 and 2012 to identify the political capital needed to be selected as a candidate and to be given access to different power positions within the parliament and government. A close look at the socio-­demographic characteristics of MPs, their political attributes, and the respective conditional probabilities allows the author to assess the degree of autonomy or heteronomy of politics. Mindaugas Kuklys applies Putnam’s (1976) “law of increasing disproportion” to the analysis of the backgrounds of long-­standing legislators and reviews the careers of the most experienced representatives in twenty-­five Baltic parliaments providing evidence for deepening elite differentiation: Although party switching has been an effective strategy for increasing tenure, and although there is a trend toward a more experienced parliamentary elite, tendencies of political de-­professionalization can be observed. Laurenţiu Ştefan describes how Romanian governing parties select non-­partisan experts as members of their cabinets and analyses the educational and professional backgrounds of those ministers. Although a party career is usually considered a precondition to becoming a minister, outsiders can still make their way to the very top of the political and administrative hierarchy under certain circumstances. Elena Semenova shows that ministerial recruitment in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries often contradicts the Western European practice of party dominance over cabinet positions, finding that approximately half of all ministers recruited to CEE cabinets between 1991 and 2011 had no political experience, and that most of them were non-­partisan. In Semenova’s chapter, the supply and demand reasons for the selection of outsider ministers, as well as the trajectories of their cabinets and post-­cabinet careers, are examined. Part III provides contributions on the attitudes and behavior of political elites. Gabriella Ilonszki and György Lengyel argue that irresponsible elite behavior— embodied in myopia, malicious hypocrisy, or pseudo-­transformative or toxic leadership—is a significant explanatory factor in the erosion of democracy. Their study on the development of regime types in Hungary between the democratic transition in the 1980s and 2018 reflects both governmental and oppositional action, and warns of the detrimental consequences of a shift from liberal democracy to authoritarian populism. Jens Borchert starts from the premise that politicians have a clear conception of what they are doing and what the rules under which they are playing are, although these theories of political practice may compete just as political ideologies do. Borchert then takes us back to the Weimar Republic for the autobiographical memories of three German politicians and a Collective Mindset Analysis (Deutungsmusteranalyse) of their understanding of democracy. As categories of analysis, the institutional and relational aspects of democracy (i.e., the understanding of the institutional order and of relationships to other actors) are emphasized. Ronald Gebauer and Lars Vogel address the attitudes and perceptions of members of eleven national parliaments in the EU on the issues of asylum and immigration. They assume that MPs’ perception of immigration as a threat or not as a threat is not only linked to their  political left–right orientation, but also to their Europeanness, i.e., their

Contested status   19 multifaceted perception and evaluation of European integration. The perception of immigration as a potential threat to European integration—with its implications for national and supranational decision-­making—is a striking example of the emergence of new conflict lines and their impact on the legitimacy, autonomy, and security of political elites.

Notes 1 The Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 is available at www.edelman.com/trust2017/. 2 It should be noted that authors such as Norris (2011) and Zmerli and Hooghe (2011) disagree with this diagnosis and stress the importance of national differences.

References Atkinson, AB 2015, Inequality: What Can Be Done?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass./London. Best, H 2007, “New Challenges, New Elites? Changes in the Recruitment and Career Patterns of European Representative Elites,” Comparative Sociology 6 (1–2), pp. 85–113. Best, H 2009, “Associated Rivals: Antagonism and Cooperation in the German Political Elite,” Comparative Sociology 8 (3), pp. 419–439. Best, H 2011, “The Elite-­Population Gap in the Formation of Political Identities. A Cross­Cultural Investigation,” Europe-­Asia Studies 63 (6), pp. 995–1009. Best, H, Gebauer, R, and Salheiser, A (eds.) 2009, Elites and Social Change. The Socialist and Post-­Socialist Experience, Reinhold Krämer Verlag, Hamburg. Best, H and Vogel, L 2014, “The Sociology of Legislators and Legislatures. Socialization, Recruitment, and Representation” in K Strøm, T Saalfeld, and S Martin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies, pp. 57–81, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Best, H and Vogel, L 2018, “Representative Elites” in H Best and J Higley (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Political Elites, pp. 339–362, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Bustikova, L and Kitschelt, H 2009, “The Radical Right in Post-­Communist Europe. Comparative Perspectives on Legacies and Party Competition,” Communist and Post-­ Communist Studies 42 (4), pp. 459–483. Carey, S 2002, “Undivided Loyalities. Is National Identity an Obstacle to European Integration?,” European Union Politics 3, pp. 387–413. Coleman, S 2005, “New Mediation and Direct Representation: Reconceptualizing Representation in the Digital Age,” New Media and Society 7 (2), pp. 177–198. Dalton, R 2004, Democratic Challenges. Democratic Choices. The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies, Oxford University Press, Oxford. de Vries, CE 2007, “Sleeping Giant: Fact or Fairytale?: How European Integration Affects National Elections,” European Union Politics 8 (3), pp. 363–385. Deegan-­Krause, K 2007, “New Dimensions of Political Cleavage” in RJ Dalton and HD Klingemann (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior, pp. 538–556, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Drummond, AJ 2006, “Electoral Volatility and Party Decline in Western Democracies: 1970–1995,” Political Studies 54 (3), pp. 628–647. Dukelow, F 2015, “ ‘Pushing against an Open Door’: Reinforcing the Neo-­Liberal Policy Paradigm in Ireland and the Impact of EU Intrusion,” Comparative European Politics 13 (1), pp. 93–111.

20   Lars Vogel et al. Edinger, M and Jahr, S 2015, “Political Careers in Europe Career Patterns in Multi-­Level Systems” in Studien zum Parlamentarismus 5, Nomos, Baden-­Baden. Eulau, H, Wahlke, JC, Buchanan, W, and Ferguson, LC 1959, “The Role of the Representative: Some Empirical Observations of the Theory of Edmund Burke,” American Political Science Review 53, pp. 742–756. Gabel, M and Scheve, K 2007, “Estimating the Effect of Elite Communications on Public Opinion Using Instrumental Variables,” American Journal of Political Science 51 (4), pp. 1013–1028. Higley, J and Burton, M 2006, Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracies, Rowman & Littlefield, Oxford. Hooghe, L and Marks, G 2008, “A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus,” British Journal of Political Science 39 (1), pp. 1–23. Inglehart, R and Catterberg, G 2002, “Trends in Political Action: The Developmental Trend and the Post-­Honeymoon Decline,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 43 (3–5), pp. 300–316. Inglehart, R and Norris, P 2016, “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-­Nots and Cultural Backlash” Paper, presented at “Rage against the Machine: Populist Politics in the U.S., Europe and Latin America” at the Annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, September 2, 2016. Karvonen, L 2010, The Personalisation of Politics a Study of Parliamentary Democracies, Ecpr Monographs, ECPR Press, Colchester. Kersey, T 2016, Constrained Elitism and Contemporary Democratic Theory, Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory, Routledge, New York/London. Körösényi, A 2010, “Beyond the Happy Consensus about Democratic Elitism” in H Best and J Higley (eds.), Democratic Elitism. New Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives, pp. 43–60, Brill, Leiden/Boston. Kriesi, H, Grande, E, Lachat, R, Dolezal, M, Bornschier, S, and Frey, T 2006, “Globalization and the Transformation of the National Political Space: Six European Countries Compared,” European Journal of Political Research 45 (6), pp. 921–956. Lindberg, LN and Scheingold, SA 1970, Europe’s Would-­Be Polity; Patterns of Change in the European Community, Prentice-­Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Meguid, BM 2005, “Competition between Unequals: The Role of Mainstream Party Strategy in Niche Party Success,” American Political Science Review 99 (3), pp. 347–359. Minkenberg, M 2006, “Repression and Reaction: Militant Democracy and the Radical Right in Germany and France,” Patterns of Prejudice 40 (1), pp. 25–44. Moravcsik, AM 1994, Why the European Community Strengthens the State Domestic Politics and International Cooperation, Center for European Studies Working Paper Series/Minda De Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Center for European Studies, Cambridge, Mass. Norris, P 2011, Democratic Deficit. Critical Citizens Revisited, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Opp, KD 2005, “Decline of the Nation State? How the European Union Creates National and Sub-­National Identifications,” Social Forces 84 (2), pp. 653–680. Pakulski, J and Körösényi, A 2012, Toward Leader Democracy, Key Issues in Modern Sociology, Anthem Press, London. Piketty, T and Goldhammer, A 2014, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Contested status   21 Porta, D, Hänninen, S, Siisiäinen, M, and Silvasti, T 2015, “The New Social Division Making and Unmaking Precariousness” in Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke/New York. Prosser, C 2016, “Dimensionality, Ideology and Party Positions Towards European Integration,” West European Politics 39 (4), pp. 731–754. Putnam, RD 1976, The Comparative Study of Political Elites, Prentice-­Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Real-­Dato, J, Göncz, B, and Lengyel, G 2012, “National Elites’ Preferences on the Europeanization of Policy Making” in H Best, G Lengyel, and L Verzichelli (eds.), The Europe of Elites. A Study into the Europeanness of Europe’s Political and Economic Elites, pp. 67–93, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Rokkan, S 1999, State Formation, Nation-­Building, and Mass Politics in Europe. The Theory of Stein Rokkan; Based on His Collected Works, edited by P Flora, S Kuhnle, and D Urwin, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Sanders, D, and Toka, G 2013, “Is Anyone Listening? Mass and Elite Opinion Cueing in the EU,” Electoral Studies 32 (1), pp. 13–25. Saward, M 2010, The Representative Claim, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Schmitter, PC 2017, “The Future of Democracy Is Not What It Used to Be,” Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 11, pp. 459–467. Steenbergen, MR, Edwards, EE, and de Vries, CE 2007, “Who’s Cueing Whom? Mass-­ Elite Linkages and the Future of European Integration,” European Union Politics 8 (1), pp. 13–35. Toynbee, AJ 1946, A Study of History. Abridgement of vol. 1–6 ed, Cumberlege, London. van der Brug, W, Franklin, M, and Toka, G 2008, “One Electorate or Many? Differences in Party Preference Formation between New and Established European Democracies,” Electoral Studies 27 (4), pp. 589–600. Vogel, L 2016, “Maintaining the Permissive Consensus in Times of Crises: The Europeanness of Germany’s Political Elites, 2007–2014” in L Vogel and J Rodríguez-Teruel (eds.), National Political Elites and the Crisis of European Integration, Country Studies 2007–2014, (Special Issue of Historical Social Research Vol. 41/4), pp. 61–85. Vogel, L and Rodríguez-Teruel, J 2016, “Staying on Course in Turbulent Times: National Political Elites and the Crisis of European Integration” in L Vogel and J RodríguezTeruel (eds.), National Political Elites and the Crisis of European Integration, Country Studies 2007–2014 (Special Issue of Historical Social Research Vol. 41/4). Ward, S and Gibson, R 2009, “European Political Organization and the Internet: Mobilization, Participation, and Change” in A Chadwick and PN Howard (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, pp. 25–39, Routledge, London/New York. Zmerli, S and Hooghe, M 2011, Political Trust. Why Context Matters, ECPR—Studies in European Political Science, ECPR Press, Colchester.

Part I

Elite autonomy and security in modern democracies

2 Elite autonomy and post-­industrial problems of employment John Higley

Introduction A preponderance of bureaucratic and service work is the most distinctive characteristic of post-­industrialism (Bell 1973, pp.  121–164; Field and Higley 1980, pp. 21–24). When Western countries first experienced post-­industrialism during the 1950s and 1960s, an unprecedented quantity of material goods was being turned out by 30–40 percent of their work forces, employed mainly in factories, mines, and construction sites at what by historical standards were short work weeks in reasonably clean and safe workplaces. Farmers and agricultural workers comprised another 10 percent, and they satisfied virtually all needs for foodstuffs. The goods that flowed from the manual work performed by about half of early post-­industrial work forces were more than sufficient to absorb the monies consumers could be induced to spend on them. While this created jobs for specialists in advertising, there was no pressing need for additional manual workers. Over the course of ensuing decades, the work force proportion employed in manufacturing, mining, and construction sank to between 10 and 20 percent, and that of farmers and agricultural workers to as little as 2 or 3 per cent. At present in the most advanced post-­industrial countries, material goods produced domestically come from the manual work of well under a quarter of their employed work forces. Approximately 75–80 percent of these work forces hold non-­manual bureaucratic and service jobs, the “products” of which, though important, are essentially intangible and not convincingly measurable (Piketty 2014, p.  91). Consequently, no one knows with any certainty whether more bureaucratic and service workers are needed. No one knows, for example, if more teachers or policemen, or accountants would actually produce more of whatever it is that teachers, policemen, and accountants produce. Much turns on the inclination of children to be taught, the disinclination of persons to obey laws, and the willingness of those in charge of private and public funds to report data for accountants to analyze. The questions that have to be asked when trying to assess needs for bureaucratic and service personnel are inherently without definite answers. Any answer depends on too many un-­specifiable matters.

26   John Higley What is clear is that in most bureaucratic and service work settings today, as also in most manufacturing, mining, construction, and agricultural settings, there is no clear and pressing need for more workers. Employed persons as proportions of working-­age populations diminish, formerly employed persons with real or imagined disabilities multiply, voluntary and involuntary early retirements increase, holidays become longer, and part-­time workers proliferate (Eberstadt 2016). In reaction, hostility toward immigrants and migrants entering Western countries to escape joblessness, poverty, violence, and other desperate conditions in non-­Western countries spreads. Discontents and conflicts that stem from the shrinkage of employment in advanced post-­industrial countries raise many questions. In particular, can elites find ways to contain and manage these discontents and conflicts? Do they have enough autonomy and latitudes of policy choice to do this? I have elsewhere tried to show how substantially autonomous elites overcame a host of ominous problems in the course of Western economic and political development (Higley 2016, pp.  41–70). In this chapter I focus on how post-­industrial employment problems endanger elite autonomy in contemporary Western countries.

Post-­industrial problems of employment Put off guard by the suddenness and extensiveness of post-­World War II prosperity, elites in Western countries failed to recognize that even during the dramatic economic expansions of the 1950s and 1960s modern technology and organization were rapidly reducing the roles of people in the production and distribution of goods and services. Consequently, during the 1970s populations in Western countries began to divide into two loose interest and attitude camps, the boundaries of which were not contiguous with those of the classes and strata based on the agricultural-­artisan, manual-­industrial, and bureaucratic-­service work force components so prominent during modern Western history. One camp, which I term insiders, consists of persons who are more or less satisfactorily employed in post-­industrial economies, plus their dependents. Specifically, the insider camp encompasses: (1) the bulk of bureaucratic and service workers, especially those holding relatively interesting and responsible jobs as middle- and upper-­level managers, professionals and their assistants, technology experts as well as specialists in an enormous variety of personal services; (2)  reasonably prosperous farmers and skilled artisans such as electricians, plumbers, and mechanics; (3) skilled manual workers holding decently paid jobs that are usually protected by strong trade unions; (4) persons in more or less honorific statuses such as better-­off retirees and persons who are directly dependent on the foregoing categories of workers as spouses, offspring in educational institutions, and elderly parents. The other camp, which I think of as outsiders, actually consists of two population segments with distinctly different social experiences that tend to prevent them from acting as a single and self-­conscious political force. One segment encompasses persons in conditions of poverty who are largely outside the work

Elite autonomy and problems of employment   27 forces and dominant cultures of Western countries. Most of these persons are without marketable work skills or, at least, without the attitudes necessary for regular employment in organizationally complex and technologically sophisticated work environments. Employers find it uneconomic to pay them a decent wage for the rudimentary kinds of work they may be able or willing to undertake. There is, in any case, no pressing need for their labor, because immigrants and migrants from non-­Western countries perform most such work, often in deplorable conditions for subsistence-­level wages. The other outsider segment encompasses many persons who have experienced what are essentially leisure-­class upbringings. During childhood and adolescence in post-­industrial conditions the offspring of relatively well-­off families engage in pleasurable activities provided by parents, schools, and a wide variety of sport, hobby, and other organizations. Although some manage to find part-­time employment for short periods, the incomes they earn are used mainly to purchase fashionable clothing, entertainments, electronic devices, sports equipment, and various other non-­essential items. Typically, their part-­time employment, if they find any, is not seriously time-­consuming, nor is it needed in any urgent way. Because the leisured circumstances of these young persons are generally comfortable and satisfying, comparatively few develop substantial personal ambition. They tend to face adult life with resignation, and many try to evade its responsibilities to the extent they can. Needless to say, persons with this outlook are nearly as unemployable as are persons with outlooks shaped in deprivation and poverty. Just as there is little pressing need for the kind of rudimentary work the latter might be able or willing to perform, there is little pressing need to employ inexperienced and unenthusiastic persons coming from leisured adolescent experiences in sometimes taxing, but often relatively boring, bureaucratic and service jobs. Although their backgrounds and social locations differ dramatically, people comprising the two outsider segments have in common an inability or reluctance to participate fully in post-­industrial work forces, labor markets, and occupational career structures. Taken as a single collectivity, outsiders are (1) unemployed people of working age; (2) people precariously employed in insecure jobs or “make-­work” jobs openly created to absorb them into the employed work force; (3) people who manage in one way or another, because of some obvious or at least plausible incapacity, to be supported in meager statuses by public authorities or private benefactors; and (4) the dependents and hangers-­on of all these people. The proportions of populations that outsiders comprise have increased in step with the length of time Western countries have spent in post-­industrial conditions. In countries that came somewhat late to post-­industrialism—Australia, Denmark, France, northern Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Spain, West Germany—outsiders became conspicuous during the 1970s and 1980s. However, they were visible a decade or two earlier in the first post-­industrial countries, especially the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, in all three of which racial features accentuated the distinctiveness of many outsiders.

28   John Higley To summarize, a deepening division of Western countries’ working-­age populations into insider and outsider camps during the past 50 years has been a principal consequence of the shrinkage of clearly needed work and the consequent spread of insecure employment and surplus labor as post-­industrialism has advanced. As was the case with work force components and the classes and strata based on them in earlier stages of Western history, relations between these two camps and between them and elites have been key loci of political and social conflicts for half a century. Having examined the fraught relations between insiders and outsiders in my recent book, I turn here to how employment problems among insiders impinge on the autonomy of elites.

Insiders’ employment discontents In post-­industrial conditions there is a greater understanding of the necessity for power exercises by socially remote persons than was ever the case in industrial, not to mention pre-­industrial, conditions. This is because the daily work experiences of by far the largest proportion of employed persons—bureaucratic and service personnel—involve the more or less constant, instrumental manipulation of “social strangers” in extended and impersonal organizational and service contexts. Accordingly, insiders tend to perceive power, in the sense of manipulating the motivations and behaviors of other persons through offers and threats, as routinely necessary for bureaucratic functioning and most service transactions. This perception of power among insiders makes the dominant culture in post-­ industrial countries relatively sophisticated in how organizational imperatives are understood. There is at least tacit awareness that organizational leaders, managers, supervisors, and service providers necessarily manipulate the behaviors of others in order to make large bureaucratic organizations and extended service enterprises possible. In effect, impersonal organizations and institutions commanded by elites are viewed as essential for high levels of affluence and productivity. Copious and routine references to “elites” in the public discourses of all post-­industrial countries manifest this view. The widespread, if mostly tacit, recognition of the need for power exertions and elite decision-­making in impersonal and hierarchical work contexts does not necessarily lead, however, to an equally widespread acceptance of the autonomy and behavior of current elites or of particular elite persons. Insiders can tacitly acknowledge the need for organizational hierarchies and elites heading them but still suppose that major decisions might be better made—more humanely, more wisely—by persons other than those currently making them. In related fashion, insiders can view proposals to alter the ways in which elites obtain and exercise power as desirable and feasible: choosing them more democratically; making them more closely mirror the gender, ethnic, racial, and other salient compositions of the organizations and institutions over which they preside; shortening their tenures; requiring decision-­making to be more transparent; and so on. In addition, the recrudescence of populism inclines many insiders to entertain reforms that would require major decisions to be taken by all or most

Elite autonomy and problems of employment   29 organizational members. In universities, notably in Europe, such reforms have been implemented to a considerable extent. They allow, indeed encourage, formal inputs by non-­academic staff and students more or less equal to the inputs of academic staff in decisions that top administrators make. But because the hierarchical structures of universities are puny and peripheral to the primary tasks of teaching and research, these reforms and formalizations are mostly just time-­consuming and do not greatly affect how the primary academic tasks are performed. Where hierarchical structures are more essential for primary tasks, however, the encouragement of decision-­making by committees elected by all or most organizational members is a more consequential effort to restrict elite autonomy. In virtually all collective bargaining contexts between labor and management, rules and regulations are now adopted that formalize the hiring, firing, promotion, and task re-­assignment of employees. This is most pronounced in decisions that affect employees who have rights of seniority, but it extends to employees seeking those rights. Consider France’s famous (or infamous) Code du Travail and the bitter political conflicts spawned by efforts to reduce employee rights and give private employers and heads of public institutions more autonomy in personnel management. The French conflicts exemplify struggles that swirl around insiders’ relations with organizational elites. If unchecked, efforts by insiders to formalize organizational decision-­ making and subject it to pressures from all those affected by decisions will eventually cripple decision-­making and, thus, the primary basis of elite power. This is a prospect wholly peculiar to advanced post-­industrial conditions. In industrial and pre-­industrial conditions the elimination or severe truncation of elite decision-­making in organizational matters was literally impossible because most employees were too ignorant of organizational functioning to be  able to bring it about. Moreover, the line-­up of political forces in earlier work force conditions guaranteed that experiments in this direction never got much of a trial. The exceptions were leveling revolutions in mainly agricultural work force conditions that involved the full or partial destructions of elites and the organizations they headed. But as the French and Russian revolutions demonstrated, eliminating elites and organizations they command triggers drastic declines in economic productivity and general well being. A return to organizational hierarchies headed by new or restored elites with more decision-­making autonomy than their predecessors possessed occurs soon enough. It is not possible to be categorical about this scenario in post-­industrial conditions, however. As noted, the preponderance and work experiences of bureaucratic and service personnel create much greater sophistication about organizational functioning, and the trend toward formalizing elite decision-­ making, by now well advanced, has not yet resulted in disaster. The interesting question is how far post-­industrial countries can proceed in this direction. Are major further steps “impossible” in the non-­revolutionary sense that hierarchical organization would gradually become paralyzed and lead to economic

30   John Higley stagnation, retrogression, or the re-­assertion of elite autonomy through authoritarian means? An answer involves several issues in the theoretical understanding of elites.

Elite autonomy Most major organizational decisions, even when they are not explicitly personnel decisions, have important implications for the careers of organizational members. As regards such decisions, members are vitally interested parties, and they cannot be expected to show restraint or impartiality in processes leading to decisions that affect them. If anyone can be expected to judge more or less impartially in the interests of an organization (or a country), it is those whose own careers have already been successful enough so that further advancing their personal interests is not a pressing concern. Normally, such successful persons occupy paramount or “elite” positions in large organizations (and a country). It is conceivable that in old-­fashioned bureaucratic and hierarchical structures, where there were virtually no formalized inputs of the kinds organizations in post-­industrial conditions allow, decisions affecting the careers and lives of employees were made as prudently and responsibly as they can ever be made. The post-­industrial trend toward formalizing organizational decision-­making rests on the dubious assumption that decisions generally acceptable to all or most organizational members can be made. However, the rival interests of persons vitally affected by organizational decisions stand permanently in the way. Formalization makes these rivalries more public, and in doing so it exacerbates emotions and feelings that envelop them. Consequently, reforms aimed at formalizing choices between rival persons and interests in an organization (or a country) and making such choices transparent are likely to result in postponements, evasions, or lowest-­common-denominator compromises aimed at placating as many as possible. Furthermore, although making choices is usually necessary because of an organization’s limited resources, which choice to make is often an arbitrary matter except from the selfish standpoint of the person or persons it benefits. For elites to make such choices privately, even if they merely flip a coin, is possibly less harmful in the long run than pretending publicly that rational, defensible choices have been made impartially after a full airing of rival arguments and claims. These considerations imply that elites in post-­industrial conditions must find ways to preserve the essence of their decision-­making autonomy. They must do this not just to defend their own interests, but because if they allow themselves to become ensnared by procedural safeguards and formal requirements of transparency when making decisions, intra-­organizational (or societal) conflicts will be enflamed to the point where dysfunction sets in. Were this to happen widely, it would gravely impede material productivity and political orderliness.

Elite autonomy and problems of employment   31

Insiders’ distrust of elite autonomy The question is whether elites will be able to preserve their decision-­making autonomy. Specifically, is it possible to find ways in which the making of most day-­to-day decisions will continue to lie mainly in elite hands and yet be generally acceptable to organizational (or societal) members? In earlier times, bureaucratic and service personnel were inclined to trust elite decision-­making to serve their interests. This inclination rested most fundamentally on the self-­confidence that most bureaucratic and service personnel had in their own competence and indispensability. Typically, those who complained about decisions or sought to restrain elite autonomy were thought to reveal their personal insecurity or weakness, and it was usually quite inexpedient to be perceived in this way. In earlier times, too, bureaucratic and service positions and statuses were justified in terms of what could plausibly be viewed as “merit,” even if the formal organizational procedures connoted by the term were not always present. Those who performed bureaucratic and service work were mainly persons convinced of their own qualifications for the positions they held or to which they aspired, even in the face of serious competition from others. Although they feared that favoritism might sometimes lead to advancing the wrong person or persons, by and large they counted on their own qualifications to impress superiors with the need to employ them suitably according to organizational needs. In that posture, bureaucratic and service personnel had no serious distrust of elite autonomy per se. That posture was all the easier to hold because it was readily apparent that the number of persons qualified and available for responsible organizational and service positions was quite limited. Only a small proportion of the public had opportunities to acquire the verbal skills, personal demeanors, and rudimentary formal educations needed for such positions. Indeed, to be in white-­collar employment at all was in itself a substantial indicator of qualifications that elite decision-­makers could not easily disregard. Obviously, the situation is very different in advanced post-­industrial conditions. For most bureaucratic and service positions, especially those for which persons are initially employed, the qualifications needed consist of linguistic and social skills and a broad acquaintance with social structure. Most persons growing up in “cultivated leisure” acquire such skills and social knowledge. Moreover, post-­secondary education is readily available for much larger proportions of post-­industrial populations—half or more of young age cohorts—than was ever remotely the case in the past. Indeed, opportunities for higher education have increased more rapidly than have the available positions to which such education supposedly leads. The overall result is that many insiders are not confident that their qualifications for the bureaucratic and service jobs they hold or seek will impress and persuade remote elite decision-­makers to retain, promote, or even employ them. They are uncomfortably aware that a great many other persons have similar or virtually identical qualifications. This is the basic source of pressures to formalize decision-­making processes and reduce elite autonomy in post-­industrial work organizations and public

32   John Higley spheres. Insecure insiders are trying, quite rationally, to defend the positions they hold or seek on the basis of qualifications in which they have relatively little confidence. Consequently, they try to impose procedural safeguards against arbitrary, and from their standpoints, uninformed decisions that affect their careers, often gravely. They demand greater participation in the processes leading to these decisions, partly to present their credentials in the best possible light and partly to prevent decisions that might go against them. They demand the right to appeal decisions unfavorable to them. Given the large numbers of people competing for bureaucratic and service positions, the relative uniformity of their qualifications, and the remorseless insistence on “merit” in the sense of indicators that are inescapably vague, it is plausible to think that pressures to formalize decision processes and reduce elite autonomy will only increase. Yet, beyond some point this is likely to result in elite dysfunctions with accompanying organizational (and societal) setbacks.

Conclusion It is idle to believe that the discontents of insiders and their distrust of elite autonomy have some simple solution. If pressures from insiders for safeguards and openness in decision-­making are to be kept to a manageable level, greater respect for acquired rights and statuses will need to be paid. The price of maintaining autonomy is elites accepting the acquired rights of employees to retain responsible and visible positions. In organizations, these rights include having a say in decision processes and, probably more important, being able to count on receiving preference over candidates from outside an organization for advancement to a higher position. Only by emphasizing such “rights of possession” at the expense of ostensible “meritocracy” and “democracy” can the insecurities of insiders be abated and the essential autonomy of elites preserved.

References Bell, D 1973, The Coming of Post-­Industrial Society, Basic Books, New York. Eberstadt, N 2016, Men Without Work. America’s Invisible Crisis, Templeton, New York. Field, GL and Higley, J 1980, Elitism, Routledge, London. Higley, J 2016, The Endangered West. Myopic Elites and Fragile Social Orders in a Threatening World, Routledge, New York. Piketty, T 2014, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century, Belknap-­Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

3 On the (lack of ) autonomy of political elites as representatives Jean-­Pascal Daloz

Introduction Among all the major topics repeatedly addressed by political scientists, that of representation is probably one of the most sensitive. More often than not, it is likely to reveal the underlying ideological convictions of the authors engaging with it. Particularly when the theme of political elites is brought into line, approaches to representation quickly adopt a normative tone. As a matter of fact, the mainstream literature on political representation has been tied up with a set of moralizing considerations and belongs rather to the realm of philosophy than that of political science. Though it endlessly seems to reactivate the same old debates, this abstract and heavily value-­laden literature has found it quite easy to recycle itself. The study of representation also gives rise to concrete works of a more sociological nature, however. Unfortunately, even when empirical analyses are involved, we have to admit that discussions tend to centre on an obsessive concern with the issue of representativeness – hence the likelihood of yet more normative debates. Against such a background, it will be outlined here how research on political representation can be approached without ideological preconception. As an illustration, I will offer a few reflections on the question of the (lack of ) autonomy of elites as representatives. Throughout my comparative work on political representatives, my insistent aim has been to link three aspects of representation, namely socio-­cultural representations, the representation of interests and theatrical representations. In other words, my argument is that the nature of this type of relationship itself depends on the perception and understanding of representation by those concerned. It is also the outcome of the way in which representatives defend the interest of the represented, as well as of the legitimizing presentation of their role.1 After a first section, devoted to a theoretical overview of normative perspectives, I shall consider in the second section each of these facets of representation in turn.

34   Jean-Pascal Daloz

The primacy of normative political theory debates For a vast majority of authors writing on the question of political representation, what is at stake is not so much the analysis of its workings as the expression of their own normative views about what it should be – when they do not believe that the whole logic has to be repudiated altogether. These debates are usually anchored in a history of ideas that is more or less sensitive to contextual disparities.2 It goes without saying that such political theory debates go well beyond the issue of the place of elites in the process. Nevertheless, the latter certainly lies at the very heart of controversies. In Table 3.1, I summarize the positioning of the main contributors of the past on this topic, as well as some more recent influential ones. It can be argued that political representation has essentially been considered as either a problem or a solution. At one extreme, we find scholars who cannot help but look at it as a form of betrayal: here, representatives are always under suspicion of manipulating the whole process to their own advantage, especially when they belong to the higher spheres. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, who famously declared that ‘the instant a People gives itself representatives it ceases to be free; it ceases to be’ (1994 [1762]), was certainly one of the most fiercely anti-­representative authors ever. Strikingly enough, we still come across a similarly powerful denial of representation nowadays in some currents of postmodern thought,3 as well as in discourses advocating direct or deliberative democracy (henceforth perceived as a real possibility thanks to high-­tech developments).4 There are quite a few specialists who, though not radically opposed to the idea of political representation, remain sceptical nonetheless for reasons having to do with what they perceive as its inherent weaknesses. Among nineteenth-­ century authors, Benjamin Constant is a good example of someone who basically distrusted representatives and called for the people’s continuous vigilance. Contemporary thinking on political representation is not devoid of political theorists who likewise express some serious doubts. Bernard Manin (1996 [1995]) Table 3.1 An overview of major normative approaches of political representation

Classics

Radically opposed

Sceptics (distrustful opinions)

Pro for pragmatic reasons

Strongly in favour

Rousseau

Bentham Constant Elitist authors Schumpeter

American Federalists Sieyès Burke James Mill John Stuart Mill Tocqueville

Hobbes

Saward

Urbinati

Contemporary Some currents Manin authors of postmodern Phillips thought Young

Autonomy of political elites   35 thus considers that what is implied is a mechanism of selection which is inherently ‘aristocratic’. Anne Phillips stresses on her side, in an influential book arguing for a ‘politics of presence’ (1995), that it is only when people are consistently present in the process of working out alternatives that they have any chance of challenging dominant conventions, hence the importance of the inclusion of previously underrepresented voices (Young 2000) whose demands have often arisen out of the politics of new social movements reflecting inequalities other than social class. Contrary, yet still within the sceptical camp, we encounter the tradition of analysts who tended to reject the idea of political representation for conservative or anti-­democratic reasons. They were wary of narrow-­minded, ordinary peoples sending second-­rate men incapable of transcending, local or sectional interests as their representatives.5 They range from Bentham, the major figure of the Utilitarian movement, to elitist authors such as Pareto or Mosca, and to a lesser extent Michels or Schumpeter, who used to regard political representation as a somewhat hollow idea. On the other side of this normative literature stand those scholars who strongly defend the process of representation or at least advocate it for pragmatic reasons. Historically, we know that Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan made it the basis of a distinctively modern form of politics, guaranteeing stability and order perceived as the ultimate goals. Here, representation clearly appears as a way to solve a crisis: that of civil war. It is an instrument of power implying obedience to rulers whereas it was later conceived more as an instrument liable to limit arbitrary rule (one thinks for instance of the Lockean insistence on consent) or to solve other types of crises.6 For instance, regarding the crisis of absolutism, Sieyès could thus declare in the context of the French Revolution that ‘before the representative system, there was nothing but usurpation’ and that it was the political will of the nation that made representation legitimate. The most common argument in favour of political representation is of course related to the unfeasibility of direct democracy within modern states, which are too large to act collectively except through representatives. This does not necessarily imply an enthusiastic adhesion to this type of institutional mechanism but, for many authors, it is deemed to be the best choice on pragmatic grounds. Here, the issue of the relative autonomy of the representatives becomes once again central and it is necessary to distinguish between two different kinds of positions. On the one hand, we come across views that can be qualified as elitist. Edmund Burke notoriously defended the idea that representatives of high calibre were better placed than the people they represented to judge what was best for all. In his view, even if they were important in the prospect of getting re-­elected, narrow interests should not take priority over the representation of wider national ones. Likewise, the American Federalists considered representative democracy superior to direct democracy precisely because it allowed the people to delegate power to persons distinguished by their abilities and talents. In other words, for them, one of the main goals of political representation was precisely to select the best and the wisest candidates, most able to discern the common good of society.

36   Jean-Pascal Daloz On the other hand, we have authors such as James Mill who were conscious of the fact that the danger of all government was that those entrusted with power would abuse it in their own self-­interest, but conceded that political representation was the right modality, as long as people were able to check whether the representatives’ personal interest did not take priority over that of the community. Theorists of liberal democracy (notably John Stuart Mill) did not share the homogenising assumption of a ‘common good’ but, in so far as all sorts of opinions were represented, they also believed that political representation was a good system, provided that tyranny of the majority (most feared by Alexis de Tocqueville) was avoided. It is fascinating to see that such debates have never really abated. To some extent, we find disputes between contemporary analysts of representation that closely mirror controversies of the past, albeit sometimes with renewed arguments. This is for instance the case of Nadia Urbinati’s (2006) attempt to counter Bernard Manin’s (1997 [1995]) views regarding the allegedly non-­ democratic nature of representation. It is interesting to notice that even authors who bring theoretical innovations to the forefront of the discussion, and tend to reject conventional (e.g. electoral, institutional) forms, still strongly defend the very principle of representation seen as the best way to express claims (Saward, 2010). Far from me the notion that readings framed in normative terms should be considered negligible or unworthy of respect. Yet, in the eye of the analyst used to favouring an inductive empirical approach, they suffer from the usual defects of philosophical literature: they imply not only moralistic but highly abstract, dogmatic and generally universalistic forms of reasoning. They seem to assume that political representation should be a unitary phenomenon. Even for those who stick to the history of ideas, what is needed at the very least is an attempt to contextualize views on representation and understand that we are not facing a linear and cumulative evolution. It has of course proved possible to formulate an empirical reaction of this kind, as some American behaviouralists have done.7 This represents a significant step forward from a ‘scientific standpoint’, but it is still somewhat reductive in so far as their approaches often remain more descriptive than truly interpretive.8

Towards a renewed approach The perspective advocated here deviates from these traditions and argues that what is needed for the study of this important subject is not only a more neutral but also a deeper foundation. The intention is to generate a comparative scheme liable to capture the realities of a political process that can undoubtedly be observed in most polities, but whose diversity of guises has been underestimated.9 Casting a fresh look on the subject requires, first of all, that due attention be paid to the representations of representation, so to speak. Second, it aims at renewing traditional views on questions of delegation and representation of interest. And third, this undertaking gives full consideration to the theatrical side

Autonomy of political elites   37 of representation. Concentrating mainly on the issue of the degree of autonomy of elites as representatives, I shall begin by addressing the theme of perceptions. Discussions of the two other facets will follow. Representations of political representation Apart from a few important descriptive works,10 the question of actual perceptions of the relation of representation has been largely ignored. For authors driven by normative convictions and teleological visions, such a concrete angle was obviously deemed of negligible interest. Admittedly, this is no longer the case. When attention is paid to what makes sense to both the representatives and the represented, however, the bulk of present-­day works leans in favour of readings in terms of ‘constructions’ or ‘performative production’. In other words, they tend to focus essentially on the ‘constitutive’ dimensions of representation. Politicians (or political organizations and their spin doctors) are understood as playing a key role when it comes to making representations of their constituencies, of the group they claim to speak for, and of course of themselves. More often than not, the idea is that representatives construct to some degree the represented, or what needs to be represented, through images and verbal communication. For instance, Pierre Bourdieu (1984) goes as far as to say that it is the spokesperson who creates the group, rather than the other way round – a process that he calls ‘le coup de force symbolique de la représentation’ (that is, the symbolic takeover of representation, seen as a specific mode of domination).11 This may well be true. Indeed, we sometimes witness cases where it is the very claim of being a representative that shapes the nature of the grouping for which one purports to act.12 Yet, in many settings, there are severe constraints on representatives, who are expected to strictly reproduce the socio-­cultural representations and ideals of the community for which they stand. Only at this price are they empowered to act on behalf of the whole. It is important to realize that communities or identities (e.g. ethnical), as well as portrayals of ‘the others’, often pre-­exist their evocation or constitution in the political field. I consequently argue that we need to transcend the limitations of this type of one-­sided interpretation that systematically sees political elites as being in a position to influence perceptions. In my view, a serious analytical framework on the representations of representation must start by considering them as both makers and receivers of representations. To treat this topic thoroughly would require many pages and I will not attempt to do so in the course of this chapter. Suffice it to say, what is at stake here are fundamental interrogations about the perception of political realities, involving not only dominant social representations but also deeply engrained cultural representations (in the anthropological sense) that can possibly constrain the elites themselves. Some of these cultural representations will be related to roles and styles, others should be thought of in terms of mentalities and imaginaries, beliefs and ideologies, and so forth.

38   Jean-Pascal Daloz In my comparative work on political representation, I insist on the fact that it is crucial to take local meanings into account.13 The question as to whether or not political elites are in a position to instrumentalize cultural repertoires or to (re)make representations of socio-­political realities should remain an open one. The dangers of strictly adhering a priori to a systematic vision in terms of all-­ powerful representatives able to form and re-­form mental maps, as conveyed in some quarters of critical political sociology, are obvious. It is crucial to realize that elites are often both producers and prisoners of meaning. In any case, the current inflation of discourses – which some analysts see as characteristic of the postmodern era – certainly comes to undermine voluntarist efforts to define and impose one ‘legitimate’ vision. Representation of interests With the question of the representation of interests – or, seen from a bottom-­up perspective, that of delegation – we stand on more traditional ground. We are also definitely at the core of the issue of possible gaps between the representatives and the represented.14 However, approaches of this kind run the risk of reducing everything to questions of a purely juridical or technical nature. Suffice it to think of the persistent distinction between the ‘mandate model’ and ‘trusteeship’. Moreover, for the analyst, the danger equally lies in systematically equating the relation of representation either to an ideal model according to which the represented should by definition remain the ultimate arbiters, or, on the contrary, to an elitist – and supposedly more realistic – vision whereby, as a rule, the latter never have any real control over the actions of their political representatives.15 Beyond such overly general scenarios, what matters is to realize that the logics behind the representation of interest can be much more diverse than partial habits of thought might lead us to expect. Comparative research thus shows that political representation may be very institutionalized or durably informal,16 entail different types of links, involve various modes of accountability, or lead to numerous forms of responsiveness, for instance.17 Moreover, these aspects of political representation are affected by dynamic processes, which constitute a particularly crucial field of research. Relevant topics include the decline of political parties as key actors of representation, the rise of representative claims emanating from civil society, the balkanization of identities and interests, as well as the short-­termism of electoral politics in relation, for example, to the emerging need to take future generations into account.18 Regarding a potential decline of political elites, I think that it is difficult to draw firm conclusions in relation to the issue of the representation of interests. We are certainly not lacking writings that insist on an increasing mistrust of top politicians, on the so-­called ‘crisis of representation’ or everlasting ‘subordination to big money’. What is sure is that the traditional figure of the professional politician, which took over from that of the ‘notable’ at the end of the nineteenth

Autonomy of political elites   39 century in many countries and whose adherence to a party as well as effort to secure positions within representative institutions linked to territorial constituencies,19 is weakening. It is now challenged by new types or professional representatives and forms of representation (involving participatory and deliberative instruments as well as novel ways of communication). Despite the possibility of their adaptation to such a new context,20 the question arises as to whether this means the end of political elites per se, or whether we would be better served thinking in terms of transformation and dispersal. Whatever the case, even advocates of innovative forms of representation often acknowledge that the representation of interests by some individuals remains essential. Being represented has both advantages and disadvantages. It might transform the represented group into a monolithic bloc. On the other hand, however, by being closely identified with one or several spokespersons, the represented are likely to gain a public face. From a political science viewpoint, what is primordial is not to embark on endless, normative discussions regarding legitimacy and representativeness but to work instead on legitimation that is on the concrete ways through which political representatives possibly acquire legitimacy.21 It is relevant to study how the competition for the claim to speak on behalf of a group actually works, in relation to the question of perceptions mentioned earlier and from the theatrical angle we are going to consider in the following sub-­section. Theatrical representations To the extent that the literature also takes account of the performative (here in the sense of ‘staged’) side of representation at all, it is generally to point out symbolic aspects of domination. A number of social scientists, from various disciplines, have thus hastily interpreted most political rituals or modern communication strategies in terms of manipulation, their purpose being to generate deference and respect.22 There is undeniably some truth in this view. Yet, we cannot reduce these matters to the question of dramatic effects intended to constitute or reaffirm hierarchical relations.23 The theatrical metaphor with its rich terminology (persona, acting, roles, repertoires, performance, audiences, scene, backstage, etc.) certainly is very fruitful, and one that can be used analytically in very different ways. For instance, there is the question of the ‘dramatic’ persona to which social or political actors must conform more or less. Another is the study of the theatrical techniques enabling political actors to achieve the desired effects. There is also the issue of the processes of public identification with public actors. Nevertheless, we have to be conscious of the limits of this metaphor,24 or rather of the necessity to adapt it, when applied to the relationship of political representation. For example, audiences can prove to be more or less passive. At times, ordinary spectators would play at least a certain part in the great game of representation. Besides, it is essential to understand how, quite often, political

40   Jean-Pascal Daloz representatives concurrently hold several roles, are expected to perform on different stages and forced to address a wide array of audiences with assorted expectations. As a matter of fact, these audiences may prove receptive, or resistant, in varying degrees to certain styles of presentation.25 One outstanding question concerns the way in which political actors reconcile the opposing imperatives of eminence and proximity. Viewed from the standpoint of legitimation, a major contradiction arises between the requirement to represent a polity with dignity and the need for representatives not to appear cut off from those they represent. After all, in a democracy, those acting at the top are supposed to do so in the name of the latter. Seen from a symbolic angle, it is thus important to underline the articulation between an intra-­elite level (when representatives are expected to entertain distinguished guests decently or to attend meetings and receptions organized elsewhere) and the representation of the bulk of the population. Yet it is true that what makes the theatrical aspects of representation so fascinatingly rich is their high degree of ambiguity. When political actors for instance indulge in architectural follies, which are supposed to heighten the reputation of their respective region or country, or when they wear extremely elegant suits, are they contributing to project a flattering impression of the community they ‘represent’? Are they not also trying to enhance their own image? In my own comparative work on the ‘conspicuous modesty’ of Nordic elites, the necessity to project an image of substance for leaders in African countries, or the ambiguities of the French case (where theatrical representation may demand both proof of and transcendence of proximity), I try to show how an inductive examination of such theatrical dimensions of representation is fundamental and how political actors are constrained by cultural codes. It is important to highlight that the representatives operate within very contrasted systems of meaning. If showing off one’s wealth and resources matters a lot in a country such as Nigeria, in order to attract attention and supporters, this is properly unthinkable in Nordic countries. As for the French case, perhaps as a result of an enduring ‘Versailles’ culture having been partly counterbalanced by and egalitarian ethos inherited from the Revolutionary periods, success is frequently related to the ability to play on both registers.26 When we look at political representation under the concrete angles suggested above, we can hope to contribute to a somewhat more thorough understanding of the complexities involved.27

Notes   1 Such a tri-­dimensional perspective is fully developed in my latest book (Daloz 2017).   2 Even good syntheses (e.g. Brito Vieira and Runciman 2008) about both the practice and understanding of representation across centuries do not eschew teleological visions.   3 See Hall et al. (2014); Tormey (2015).   4 Cf., e.g. Karlsson and Åström (2016).

Autonomy of political elites   41   5 Elites can equally be seen as the ‘natural’ representatives of the people, as was the case with those European aristocrats endowed with a privilege to represent (Bush 1983, ch. 4).   6 For an interpretation of political representation as a way to adjust to challenges, see Ankersmit (2002, ch. 4).   7 A volume edited by Eulau and Wahlke (1978) provides the clearest introduction to this literature. It contains many classical articles which, taken together, give a good overall picture of the evolution of perspectives within this school of thought.   8 The vitality of the behaviouralist tradition in the field of legislative studies is obvious, as can be seen from the collective volume published on members of 37 statewide and sub-­state parliaments in Europe and Israel (Deschouwer and Depauw 2014).   9 See Daloz (2016). 10 I have notably in mind the two remarkable studies by Fenno (2003 [1978] and 1996) from a top-­down perspective. For a short, recent synthesis from a bottom-­up perspective, also on the USA, see Lauermann (2014). There is also a new emerging stream on how MPs and people perceive the tasks of representation and on how these two perspectives are linked (e.g. von Schoultz and Wass 2016). 11 See also Gaxie (1996). 12 The representation of non-­anthropocentric interests (nature, the planet, endangered species) constitutes a good illustration of this. It may lead to new visions or even counter-­representations challenging traditional views. The issue for ‘green’ politicians, theorists or activists is to be able to impose these new competing representations as legitimate (cf. Dryzek 2000). 13 See my chapter (10) on political representation in Chabal and Daloz (2006) and Daloz (2013, pp. 51–66). 14 Cf. the seminal essay by Pitkin (1967); Shapiro et al. (2009). 15 See Esaiasson and Homberg (1996). One may also consider, however, that we are rather dealing with a continuum here (cf., e.g. Best and Vogel 2018). 16 For a detailed analysis on the workings of political representation in a particularly informal environment, I refer the reader to my work on Nigeria (Daloz 2002). 17 See, e.g. Kitschelt (2000) and Mansbridge (2003). 18 See, e.g. Pecaut and Sorj (1991); Saward (2010) and his bibliography. 19 As famously analysed in Weber’s and Schumpeter’s seminal works. See also the synthesis by Heinrich Best and Maurizio Cotta (2000). 20 Which may involve, for instance, a great ability to anticipate and act in response to shifts in the public mood or to elaborate more flexible programmes. 21 The distinction between the philosophical question of legitimacy and the more ‘scientific’ one of legitimation is now standard (see, e.g. Barker 2001, ch. 1). 22 A large part of this literature in history, anthropology and semiology concerns autocratic systems (see, e.g. Marin, 2002). However, a number of sociologists and political scientists have tended to resort to the same type of interpretation, emphasizing the necessity for elites to inculcate submissiveness, when it comes to interpreting democratic contemporary settings. Cf. various references in Daloz (2017, ch. 5). 23 In this respect, see above all Geertz (1980). 24 As a side note, the question is to which type of theatre such a metaphor refers. Even within the so-­called ‘Western’ world, there has been a continuous evolution in what we identify as drama. Further complications arise when we take into consideration non-­Western examples, such as the multiform rituals of so-­called ‘primitive’ societies or, for example, the highly stylized forms of Japanese drama. 25 On the question of reception (by ordinary people, by other elites), see for instance Koering (2013). 26 I will not go over this previously published work here (see, e.g. Daloz 2002, 2007, 2008).

42   Jean-Pascal Daloz 27 Needless to say, it is important to realize that these facets are related in a number of ways. It is interesting to note how, in many volumes (see, e.g. Agulhon, Becker and Cohen 2006, or Scholz and Schröer 2007, on the French case), authors consider only one or two facets of the phenomenon (cf. however Rosanvallon 1998 as a counter-­ example). Some political scientists go as far as warning about the possible pitfalls linked to shifts in meaning (see several chapters in D’Arcy 1985). As has been emphasized throughout my own comparative studies on political representation, I argue that a combined approach can yield rich findings.

References Agulhon, M, Becker, A and Cohen, E 2006, La République en représentations – Autour de l’œuvre de Maurice Agulhon, Publication de la Sorbonne, Paris. Ankersmit, FR 2002, Political Representation, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Barker, R 2001, Legitimating Identities: The Self-­Presentations of Rulers and Subjects, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Best, H and Cotta, M 2000, Parliamentary Representatives in Europe 1848–2000: Legislative Recruitment and Careers in Eleven European Countries, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Best, H and Vogel, L 2018, ‘Representative Elites’, in H Best and J Higley (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Political Elites, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Bourdieu, P 1984, ‘La Délégation et le Fétichisme Politique’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, vol. 52/53, pp. 49–55. Brito Vieira, M and Runciman, D 2008, Representation, Polity Press, Cambridge. Bush, ML 1983, Noble Privilege, Holmes and Meier, New York. Chabal, P and Daloz, JP 2006, Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Daloz, JP 2002, Élites et Représentations Politiques: la Culture de l’Échange Inégal au Nigeria, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, Pessac. Daloz, JP 2007, ‘Political Elites and Conspicuous Modesty: Norway, Sweden, Finland in Comparative Perspective’, Comparative Social Research, vol. 26, pp. 173–212. Daloz, JP 2008, ‘Between Majesty and Proximity: The Enduring Ambiguities of Political Representation in France’, French Politics, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 302–320. Daloz, JP 2013, Rethinking Social Distinction, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke/New York. Daloz, JP 2016, ‘Political Representation: From Classical Research Traditions to Comparative Perspectives’, in WR Thompson (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Daloz, JP 2017, La Représentation Politique, Armand Colin, Paris. D’Arcy, F (ed.) 1985, La Representation, Economica, Paris. Deschouwer, K and Depauw, S (eds) 2014, Representing the People: A Survey Among Members of Statewide and Sub-­State Parliaments, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Dryzek, JS 2000, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Esaiasson, P and Holmberg, S (eds) 1996, Representation from Above: Members of Parliament and Representative Democracy in Sweden, Dartmouth, Aldershot. Eulau, H and Wahlke, JC (eds) 1978, The Politics of Representation: Continuities in Theories and Research, Sage, Beverly Hills. Fenno, RF 1996 [1978], Senators on the Campaign Trail: The Politics of Representation, University of Oklahoma, Norman.

Autonomy of political elites   43 Fenno, RF 2003, Home Style: House Members in their Districts, Longman, New York. Gaxie, D 1996, La Démocratie Représentative, Montchrestien, Paris. Geertz, C 1980, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-­Century Bali, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Hall, P, Jacoby, W, Levy, J and Meunier, S (eds) 2014, The Politics of Representation in the Global Age: Identification, Mobilization and Adjudication, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York. Karlsson, M and Åström, J 2016, ‘The Political Blog Space: A New Arena for Political Representation’, New Media & Society, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 465–483. Kitschelt, H 2000, ‘Linkages between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Polities’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 33, no. 6–7, pp. 845–879. Koering, J 2013, Le Prince en Représentation: Histoire des Décors du Palais ducal de Mantoue au XVIè siècle, Actes Sud, Arles. Lauermann, RM 2014, Constituent Perceptions of Political Representation: How Citizens Evaluate their Representatives, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Manin, B 1996 [1995], The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mansbridge, J 2003, ‘Rethinking Representation’, American Political Science Review, vol. 97, no. 4, pp. 515–528. Marin, L 2002, On Representation. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Pecaut, D and Sorj, B (eds) 1991, Métamorphoses de la Représentation Politique au Brésil et en Europe, Editions du CNRS, Paris. Phillips, A 1995, The Politics of Presence: The Political Representation of Gender, Ethnicity and Race, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Pitkin, HF 1967, The Concept of Representation, University of California Press, Berkeley. Rosanvallon, P 1998, Le Peuple Introuvable: Histoire de la Représentation Démocratique en France, Gallimard, Paris. Rousseau, JJ 1994 [1762], The Social Contract, Oxford University Press, New York. Saward, M 2010, The Representative Claim, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Scholz, N and Schröer, C (eds) 2007, Représentation et Pouvoir: La Politique Symbolique en France (1789–1830), Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes. Shapiro, I, Stokes, SC, Wood, EJ and Kirshner AS 2009, Political Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tormey, S 2015, The End of Representative Politics, Polity Press, Cambridge. Urbinati, N 2006, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Von Schoultz, A and Wass, H 2016, ‘Beating Issue Agreement: Congruence in the Representational Preferences of Candidates and Voters’, Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 136–158. Young, IM 2000, Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

4 Economic elites – political elites: scenes from a symbiosis Heinrich Best

Introduction In this chapter I address a topic that has (at least in part) determined my academic work from the outset or, more precisely, since working on my doctoral thesis: the relationship between economic and political elites, which I characterise as symbiotic in the title of this chapter. Its subtitle, ‘Scenes from a symbiosis’, is borrowed from Ingmar Bergmann, who produced a television series in the 1970s called Scenes from a Marriage, a short version of which also made it to the cinemas. (At the time, Sweden’s filmmakers were apparently more focused on profound romantic dramas than gruesome murder mysteries.) I modified the original title because marriages are dissoluble and based – at least in theory – on love. That is what Ingmar Bergmann’s story is really about. In this chapter I will show that it would be rather inappropriate, however, to characterise the relationship between economic and political elites in this way: their symbiosis is irresolvable and determined purely instrumentally by the conditions of state resource mobilisation and private capital accumulation (Best 2018). The socio-­economic process underlying this symbiosis is the co-­evolution of modern capitalism and the modern state, or – in the words of Max Weber – rational capitalism and the rational state. My primary classical reference in this regard is Max Weber’s General Economic History (Weber 1927). It deals with the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ and its origins in Protestant ethics only secondarily, far more concerned with the institutional preconditions for the development of a capitalism that relies on the long-­term predictability of risk in order to be able to plan – or, as Weber puts it, be conducted in a rational manner. These preconditions include, for instance, state institutions providing a reliable guarantee of ownership, organised markets for goods and financial products, taxation bound to the approval of those taxed (‘no taxation without representation’), efficient infrastructure, as well as standardised measures and weights. The modern state is rewarded for its ‘good governance’ with higher tax revenues and access to technological innovation, on the latter of which both social progress and the further elaboration of state power are founded. This constellation provides the modern state with an advantage in inter-­state power struggles, just as it gives modern capitalism an advantage in the competition between economic systems.

Economic elites – political elites   45 Weber’s Economic History provided numerous cues for neo-­institutional economic theory, including, for example, the work of economic historian and Nobel Prize winner Douglas North (North 1990, North 2005), but also the macro-­ historical works of sociologist Randall Collins (Collins 1999). The co-­evolution of the modern state and modern capitalism is also a central element of modernisation theories and their offshoots, such as Francis Fukuyama’s well-­known ‘End of History’ claim (Fukuyama 1989/1992).1 Although I assume that the symbiosis of economic and political elites is intrinsically linked with the co-­evolution of modern capitalism and the modern state, it manifests itself not as ‘pre-­established harmony’, but rather as a conflict-­ ridden long-­term relationship – taking us back to Ingmar Bergmann’s romantic dramas. Essentially, there is in my view a ‘dissociative symbiosis’ between economic and political elites, in which neither can do without the other and yet each follow their own action logics, partly in conflictive opposition to one another. Power rivalries between political elites, for instance, can interfere heavily with the interests of economic elites – see: Russia sanctions; profit maximisation by economic elites can undermine the stability of entire political orders – see: financial market crisis. In the following, I intend to reconstruct these interlinkages in three scenes which are all based on my own research (sometimes in collaboration with others), namely on the Revolution of 1848/49, on the attitudes of national elites towards the process of European integration, and on processes of elite differentiation in a communist society.

Scene 1 The first of these scenes concerns the territories of the German Confederation in the revolutionary years of 1848/49. It is depicted in greater detail in my doctoral thesis on interest-­driven politics and national integration (Best 1980a) as well as in some segments of my post-­doctoral thesis on the structure and transformation of leading parliamentarian groups in the Constitutional Assemblies in Germany and France in 1848/49 (Best 1990). The backdrop in the spring of 1848 is a politically and economically fragmented Germany on the verge of industrial take-­off and lagging far behind Great Britain in terms of development. The vast majority of the population lives in individual small states or principalities without constitutions, representative bodies nor rights to civic participation, albeit with some elements of the rule of law and relatively sophisticated state bureaucracies. The task of nation-­forming elites in the Constitutional Assembly of the Frankfurt Parliament was to establish an economically, socially and politically integrated state structure – one state, one society, one market – on the territory of the German Confederation, which at the time was little more than a loose alliance under international law. Condensed into a single historic moment, this amounted to a programme for the realisation of the co-­evolution of the modern state and modern capitalism. This programme, however, ended up caught between the millstones of bitter conflict among the elites in which ideational, economic and power conflicts would unfold with paralysing impact.

46   Heinrich Best This is also valid – as the literature had almost entirely overlooked – for the formation of a common economic area, accompanied by a conflict between the interests and ideologies of the trade policy of the Customs Union and a united Germany to come. As the young Marx remarks in the introduction to his Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right (1843), the German public was emphatically redirected over the course of this development from a mere ‘critical quarrel with their refection in philosophy’ to ‘a practical quarrel with modern political conditions’.  [T]he relationship of industry and the world of wealth in general to the political world is one of the main problems of the modern age. In which form does this problem begin to preoccupy the Germans? In the form of protective tariffs, of a system of prohibitions of national economy. German chauvinism has made the passage from men to matter, and one fine morning our cotton barons and iron heroes woke to find themselves transformed into patriots.  (Marx 1975, pp. 248–249) Under the banner of ‘protecting national labour’, above all the demand for restrictive foreign-­trade policies had a strong national-­integrative and mass-­ mobilising effect, while simultaneously producing fierce conflicts between economic sectors, economic regions and levels of production. The political and social impact of the conflict between protectionists and free-­trade advocates – characterised by an indissoluble blend of interests and economic doctrines – were thus highly contradictory. It placed the diversity and broad range of socio-­economic and regional interests within the action space of pre-­March Germany in the public spotlight. In the years 1848/49, then, it literally made it onto the agenda of the ‘embryonic institutions’ of the provisional federal state established in Frankfurt (Best 1980b). The protectionist movement in particular was closely tied to the goal of German unity and the emergence of a national representation with established rights to participation and free public speech. In his ‘National System’ of political economy, Friedrich List had explicitly included participatory rights and representative bodies as productive forces. Economic-­nationalist and social-­ protectionist emphases characteristic of the German protectionism debate were a result of influences from German idealism and political romanticism. As it were, German idealism was characterised by the notion of unequal states engaged in tension and conflict as well as the state’s obligation to provide social welfare. Indeed, the ‘protection of national labour’ represented an economic-­nationalist ideologeme with a rather weak foundation in terms of the real distributional effects of protective tariffs. The slogan of ‘protecting national labour’ above all served the aggregation and mobilisation of interests. Generally, trade policy – and the same is true, on the other side, for free trade – constituted the most important rallying point for the emerging interest organisations of German economic elites in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Economic elites – political elites   47 During their foundational phase, these were faced – and the following is to be understood as a sequence – with the tasks of defining, accommodating, aggregating, articulating, mobilising and implementing economic interests that could not be realised through para-­state associations or organisations. In coping with these problems, certain interest-­based political networks evolved accompanied by free interest organisations, media capable of influencing the public, and economic ideologies with considerable public impact – all of which challenge the widespread notion, reiterated by Hans-­Ulrich Wehler in his classic Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Wehler 1987/1995), of a silent, weak and fragmented German bourgeoisie well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The March Revolution of 1848, the convening of the Frankfurt Parliament and the establishment of a provisional central power in the Reich, then, fundamentally changed the conditions of interest-­driven economic policy in Germany. The goal of creating a German nation-­state with a single, unified market appeared to be within reach. While German economic unity was an objective uniting protectionists and free-­trade advocates, the future trade policy of a united Germany triggered a fundamental conflict waged with great militancy by both sides. The demand for a tariff system oriented towards domestic labour costs and spanning the entire territory of the German Confederation became the programmatic core of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Verein zum Schutz der vaterländischen Arbeit (ADV – Pan-­German League for the Protection of National Labour). Friedrich List’s concept of the industrial educational tariff was thus abandoned in favour of a line that turned the ADV into the focal point of a cross-­group protectionist coalition in the broader sense. A formal resolution passed by the first general assembly confirmed this new principle of agitation: ‘The weight of the masses’ from now on was to back up the demands and legitimise requests for protective tariffs not ‘only as the concern of one class of the population, but [as] a thoroughly national one affecting the whole people’. An economic-­nationalist programme served as the basis for a level of interest-­driven mass mobilisation unprecedented in the history of German associations. Its most comprehensive legacy consists of about 4,000 trade policy petitions with roughly 400,000 signatures presented to the National Assembly and its national economic committee between May 1848 and March 1849. These documents constitute about 10 per cent of all petitions submitted to the National Assembly, and thus a central topos of the petition movement during the years of revolution (Best 1980b). The dispute over state intervention versus freedom of trade, which the tariff conflict can essentially be boiled down to, thus already had a mass impact at this point. Likewise, the position of interventionism, the hopes for a state that secured employment and income, was already the far more popular variant. Proponents of protectionist demands accounted for 93 per cent of the trade policy mass movement, whereas submissions by free-­trade advocates managed to accrue only 20,000 signatures (Best 1984). The trade policy petition movement was basically the result of elite-­controlled organisational efforts at the national and regional level: about 90 per cent of all petitions were collective petitions employing

48   Heinrich Best pre-­formulated texts, of which in turn 90 per cent had been distributed by the ADV. The success of protectionist mass mobilisation rested on a coalition policy that went far beyond the core interests, whose success was carried largely by supporters standing to gain no advantageous improvements, or even facing downright negative consequences as a result of such tariffs. These developments suggest that economic interest groups deployed the full arsenal of lobbyism and mobilisation of public pressure as early as 1848/49, during the birth years of the European mass democracies. Organised, interest-­ based lobbying faced for the first time ever a central and – or so it seemed at first – authoritative addressee in the form of the Frankfurt Parliament, its national economic committee and the Reich Ministry of Trade. At the same time, however, antagonising mass mobilisation deepened the divergence of interests among German economic elites. A protectionist-­industrial camp and a free-­ trade-mercantile camp stood in resolute opposition to one another by September 1848 at the latest. The tariff conflict of the 1840s therefore goes to show to what extent conflicts within and between elite sectors can disrupt processes of economic and political integration. Here, two dissociations can be observed: first, the dissociation between economic and political elites, with the latter failing to achieve the political and thus economic integration of Germany mainly due to the power rivalry of the Prussian-­Austrian dualism; second, a dissociation among economic elites between the interests of trade and industry, respectively, turning on Germany’s position in the system of the international division of labour and the state’s role in the regulation of markets. Both issues were resolved – with the critical involvement of a certain Herr von Bismarck who had earned his political spurs in 1848 – in favour of the ‘Lesser German’-Prussian and protectionist-­corporatist variant. The imperial effervescence of Prussian Germany and its simultaneous rise to become the leading economic power rested on the successfully established symbiosis between economic and political elites (Best et al. 2000). This marked the birth of corporate Germany (‘Deutschland AG’ – literally: ‘Germany, Inc.’). Incidentally, I am unable to detect that ‘treason of the bourgeoisie’ in the events of 1848/49 with regard to the aims of the 1848 Revolution which Friedrich Engels, and after him Marxist historiography as a whole, blamed, in an oddly unmaterialistic interpretation, for the revolution’s failed completion. Rather, the emerging industrial faction was surprisingly accommodating of the evolving mass market of a democratic public – certainly not as ‘flawless democrats’, but as talented manipulators and propagandists.

Scene 2 Scene change: 160 years after the failure of the European revolutions of 1848/49, we now find ourselves in the year 2009, the annus horribilis of the financial market crisis as it begins to expand into the Eurozone crisis (Best and Higley 2014). Once again, the central question is that of power and market organisation, the territorial reach and interplay of political and economic power. The

Economic elites – political elites   49 co-­evolution of modern capitalism and the modern state is out of step, the symbiosis between political and economic elites is out of balance. That said, symbiosis may by all means be compatible with asymmetry, for the political elites’ task is to posit common social goals and binding norms, whereas economic elites are responsible for mobilising economic resources. By this time, however, globalisation and deregulation have shifted the relationship of control between economic and political elites in favour of the former. The territorially bound nation-­state is unable to impose rules on a global economy and can only imperfectly and incompletely demand the resources needed for its own operation and the social re-­distributional efforts required for its system integration. Following the end of the communist economic and social orders in the Eastern part of Eurasia, transnational capital truly went on a rampage: no longer dependent on the liberal democracies’ protection, it would no longer be subordinated to the logic of a system-­integrative ‘consensus challenge’ with its welfare state-­mediated management of social conflict (Best 2008). At the same time, throughout the course of globalisation it could seek out, in a largely unrestricted manner, those milieus and localities that provided the lightest tax burdens and regulation density. These could by all means include authoritarian regimes and effectively tax-­free and veritably lawless micro-­territories, all of which now competed with the West’s established constitutional states. Did this, then, mark the end of the co-­evolution of the modern state and modern capitalism, the symbiosis of economic and political elites? Were we witnessing the ‘withering away of the state’, this time under the banner of global capitalism? As it were, economic and political developments over the past 25 years have provided answers to these questions: as early as the mid-­1990s, the volatility of economic development processes began to surge noticeably. The various crashes – namely, the Asian crisis, the internet bubble and the financial crisis – together with their corresponding boom periods manifest as dramatic roller coaster rides on stock indices worldwide. The financial market crisis assumes a special position in this list, for it was not a ‘normal’ crisis of the business cycle or structural adjustment, but a systemic crisis resulting from the deregulation and dissolution of the boundaries of global financial markets. However, it became above all a sovereign debt crisis after the cash flows between states and the private economic sector began to shift direction: not from ‘the economy’ to the state, but from the state to ‘the economy’ – mainly the financial economy – or even more precisely: from (more or less) solvent nation-­states to the global financial industry. The memento this major intervention invoked was the mega-­ crash of the world economy in the 1930s. There is reason to believe that a global financial market collapse was indeed a realistic worst-­case scenario. Thomas Piketty’s ‘world formula’ of p>r (Piketty 2014) is valid only against the backdrop of government bailout action, whereas a financial market collapse would have annihilated decades worth of accumulated profits. The price states – and thus their citizens – had to pay for the bailout packages was a crisis of state finances. On the other hand, however, the relationship of control between state and economy swung back in favour of the state. The lawlessness of

50   Heinrich Best financial markets is meanwhile recognised as infringement of the rules and sanctioned accordingly. The crisis of state finances is particularly pronounced within the European Union’s monetary union, namely in the form of the Eurozone crisis. Its specificity was a dissociation of political and economic integration, or more specifically: the fact that the common currency was not accompanied by common political institutions regulating financial needs and transfers among member countries. This configuration opened up an entirely new crisis scenario and delayed European political elites’ response to the challenge of the financial market crisis. The international IntUne research project investigated the reasons why and ways in which European elites succeeded in devising an at least partially adequate response within the framework of the multi-­level European system of governance, over the course of which we conducted field surveys among elites and other population groups in two separate waves during the pivotal pre-­crisis and crisis years of 2007 and 2009 (Best et al. 2012a). The responses provide a unique impression of interest constellations, value concepts and prospects for political action associated with the European integration process by both elites and masses during this critical period. Some might recall that the survival of the European currency and even of the European Union itself had been at stake by 2010. By and large, our studies have shown that the normative and structural foundations of an expansion of the European financial system’s institutional base were also fragile at the elite level. The notion that the process of European integration is based on a European elite consensus orienting them towards the common goal of European unity was not confirmed by our surveys. Instead, we found combinations of contradictory attitudes varying from one country to the next, linking elites to the European integration process while simultaneously distancing them from it – in other words, ‘Europe à la carte’ (Best et al. 2012a). A broad elite consensus shared by all countries in the survey existed only with regard to the notion that one’s own country had largely benefited from integration, affirmed by more than 90 per cent of political and almost 100 per cent of economic elites surveyed, as well as by three-­quarters of respondents from the general population. At the same time, we observed a strong mutual orientation among political and economic elites towards the approval or rejection of an expansion of the institutions representing the European multi-­level governance system. The general population is tied to these mutual orientations ‘in a semicircle of responsivity’ only via the political elites. According to these findings, the dynamic of European integration is strongly determined by the symbiotic relation between political and economic elites at the national level. The primary site and level of reference of this symbiosis continues to be the nation-­state, which incidentally also appeared as the main actor in the management of the financial crisis. Correspondingly, the findings of our study reveal that, at the outset of the financial crisis, a majority of European political elites viewed cooperation between national governments as the ideal path out of the looming disaster (Best

Economic elites – political elites   51 2014). This strategy was then pursued in the context of the European Union and the European Monetary Union, as the institutions of the European multi-­level governance system, complete with the European Central Bank, were not endowed with sufficient competencies to intervene in member countries’ national budgets and thereby allocate the distribution of financial market risks between weak and strong members. The outcome of this shift of crisis management competence, however, was not a general gain in sovereignty for member states, but rather the formation of a hierarchical structure within the EU and the Eurozone in which the powerful national economies could dictate their finance-­political preferences to weaker economies. This new order of European affairs was formally codified in the stability mechanism, in which the principle of ‘one country, one vote’ as practiced within the European Central Bank was abandoned in favour of a weighting according to a country’s national product. Germany and France nearly command a majority in this body, while Germany effectively possesses veto power. This stratification process was tied to a weakening of European Union institutions. At the height of the Eurozone crisis, decisions concerning the common currency’s future were reached not in Brussels or Strasbourg, but in Berlin and Karlsruhe – the seat of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court. Our data indicate that Europe’s political elites anticipated the implications of an allocation of finance-­political competencies at the level of inter-­state cooperation long before the outbreak of the crisis in early 2009. Elites in the economically powerful core European states were particularly supportive of this option, while elites in the economically weaker countries on the European periphery tended to place their hopes in the European Union. Generally speaking, European political elites’ preferences regarding strategies for solving the financial market crisis were critically determined by the economic situation in their respective countries and the latter’s standing within the institutional structure of the European Union, rather than by ideologies or individual social situations. Only their ‘European orientations’ had a significant impact in this respect. The fact that individual elite dispositions bear only minor significance with respect to their finance-­political preferences likely facilitated a pragmatic rather than ideological course of crisis management. These action orientations expanded possibilities for compromise building. Another, and likely more important, circumstance expanding the potential space for institutional solutions to the Eurozone crisis was the compatibility of inter-­state, with multilateral (especially European) strategies of crisis management: the second-­most preferred mode of resolving the financial crisis among European political elites was intervention by the European Union itself. This also applies to respondents who indicated a coordinated action by national governments as their first choice. Indeed, the European Union and the Monetary Union in particular proved to be an apt framework for processes of inter-­state coordination, which in turn led to a new architecture of the institutions of the Monetary Union, the Financial Union. Combined with an application of European Central Bank competencies bordering on illegality, this development

52   Heinrich Best prevented the economic dominance of Germany within Europe from turning into outright hegemony. The renewed strengthening of the European Commission is another sign that the institutional checks and balances of the European institutional edifice stand in the way of any direct translation of economic power into political dominance on the part of a single country. On the other hand, the institutional expansion of the Financial Union and the development of hierarchical structures within the European multi-­level governance system have resulted in a stabilisation of the common currency and an effective regulation of financial markets, and thus contributed to a strengthening of political over economic elites.

Scene 3 Another (and final) scene change: we find ourselves in the GDR in 1989 – a country in which elites do not exist and which is gradually moving towards a ‘classless society’, at least according to the ruling party. Whether or not this was true is, of course, a controversial matter. Uncontroversial, however, is the notion that the GDR was not a capitalist society. The last remnants of ‘private ownership of the means of production’ were eliminated in the early 1970s, and all remaining private-­capitalist activities confined to residual small enterprises in gastronomy, retail, and small-­scale crafts. Accordingly, the co-­evolution of ‘modern capitalism’ and the ‘modern state’ was said to have reached its conclusion here, while the end of capitalism was accompanied by a new system of political control of economic processes compatible with collective-­economic structures. This, essentially, was the aspiration of the Marxist-­Leninist theory of state and society, which incidentally represents the original variant of the ‘End of History’ theorem (Best 2012). Furthermore, the abolition of capitalism was alleged to have been accompanied by the end of a symbiotic or dissociative relation between economic and political elites. In all societies of the Soviet type, it was supposedly replaced by a unitary system of social leadership which – again, following the Soviet model – was institutionalised in a unified ‘cadre nomenklatura system’. This system was to realise the pretensions of a ‘planned society’ complete with ‘socialist’ cadre recruitment, meaning determined exclusively by political loyalty and professional competence. The corps of cadres was to be constantly renewed through the masses, above all the working class. This model reflected the ‘programme for the abolition of social differentiation’ that the German sociologist Rainer Lepsius once described as the essence of the ‘socialist experiment’. This programme is deeply rooted in the code of Marxist doctrine and was classically formulated by Marx himself in The German Ideology (Marx 1932). Here, he suggests a link between the division of labour and private property – or, in other words, between functional and stratificatory differentiation. In his eyes, the end of private ownership (of the means of production) in a ‘communist’ society would simultaneously put an end to the division of labour. The diagnoses of social development in the GDR commissioned by the SED, for instance in the

Economic elites – political elites   53 form of the ‘party conference studies’ (Parteitagsstudien), thus identified, alongside the ‘approximation of classes and strata’, the levelling out of ‘functional’ differentiation, say, between the city and the countryside. First and foremost, however, this self-­understanding intended for the difference between the state and the economy to be taken up in a comprehensive system of social planning and control. Was this really the case? Did the elimination of capitalism simultaneously implement the socialist programme of a de-­hierarchised and sectorally de-­ differentiated society? In our study of the GDR Council of Ministers’ central cadre files (Best et al. 2012b), we found answers to this question drawing on a rather unique source of information: the entries on the political and social affiliations of family members, and particularly the inclusion of several hundred thousand persons without cadre status, which render the central cadre files one of the most valuable sources on the social reality of Soviet-­style socialist societies. They reveal ‘illegitimate’ elements of inherited privileges, social closure and the power-­mediated reproduction of social status within the logic of the stratificatory differentiation of a socialist society. The crucial finding here is not the fact that socialism exhibited steep hierarchies and out-­of-touch power circles – it was Marx, and Lenin in particular, who first provided justification for an elaborate system of control and the party’s ‘leading role’ (Best 2012). Standing in plain contradiction to the project and programme of socialism, however, was the evident discrimination of people from working-­class backgrounds and women in general in the recruitment of functional elites. Likewise, ‘cultural capital’ (operationalised via educational degrees) and ‘political capital’ (operationalised via access to the party’s power resources) were increasingly inherited with each passing generation, and constituted the medium of intergenerational status reproduction. The emerging processes of social closure among the leading functionaries in the GDR differed markedly between functional areas. Correspondingly, central state administrative bodies exhibited tendencies towards the formation of a ‘party aristocracy’ complete with political background requirements and endogamy rules. The antithesis could be found in the leading staff of the manufacturing industry: here, SED membership on the part of parents or spouses was not favourable to a career in the economy, while with each generation a growing share of ‘managers’ came – in the language of the class schematic dominant in the GDR – from a ‘bourgeois’ background. At the same time, the share of those from working-­class backgrounds dwindled to a minority (Best 2010a). At this point, I would like to confine myself to emphasising one aspect: in the GDR, that is to say, in a non-­capitalist society, there was an ongoing process of formation of a hierarchical structure, reproduced over the course of multiple generations (Best 2010a, Best 2012). In this process, ‘political capital’ replaced economic capital as differentiator, leading to the paradoxical conversion, at least compared to capitalist social orders, that the GDR’s economic executive functionaries (with the exception of the highest level of combine directors) were negatively privileged in terms of political capital (Best 2005, Salheiser 2009). The abolition

54   Heinrich Best of capitalism thus did not fulfil the promise of a de-­differentiated society. Instead, collective ownership of the means of production was accompanied by a full-­fledged and intergenerationally reproduced stratification and horizontal differentiation according to distinct functional areas. But why was this the case? Our findings suggest that family background and clientelism – in other words, paternalism and cronyism – constituted the underlying social mechanism. These can only take effect in a system of patronage and clientelism, of which we could find indirect evidence in the cadre files. For example, foreign trade as well as tourism and the hospitality industry – which all entailed privileged access to foreign travel, foreign currencies, and thus highly coveted goods and services – were the only economic sectors located near the centre of power where political capital was concentrated and central state organs were also situated (Best et al. 2012b). These facts suggest that political capital can be regarded as a derivative of social capital, which in turn found its institutional expression in the cadre nomenklatura system – the central pillar of party rule. Not ownership rights, but rather discretionary authority and the power of control deduced from political power formed the fundamental criteria of differentiation in this system. The rule of the functionaries appears as a variant of the rule of the managers, predicted by James Burnham in the early 1940s as the result of a ‘managerial revolution’ occurring across political regimes and systems of ownership (Burnham 1941). This diagnosis contained elements of his analyses of Stalinism, which he developed at an earlier stage in close exchange with Leo Trotsky. Yet  why, then – and here I take a step back from the GDR and look at (post-)socialist societies in general – this (re-)conversion of political into economic capital on the part of socialist elites themselves, particularly the socialist economic elites, during the re-­establishment of capitalism? The reason is that the disposition over and passing on of political capital is far more precarious than that of economic capital. At times, affiliation to political clientele groups can entail deadly risks, as recently experienced by the family members and relatives in the patronage network of Kim Jong-­un’s uncle, who were killed along with their patron. The elites of the People’s Republic of China, recruited mainly from functionary families, are still influenced by the experience of the Cultural Revolution. By comparison, ‘modern capitalism’ in the Weberian sense, combined with elements of the rule of law, created almost paradisiacal conditions for the elites of the (post-)communist transitional societies (Best 2010b, Best et al. 2012c), who could now begin consolidating their new-­found prosperity through worldwide diversification, introduce their children to the codes of global capitalism by sending them to American business schools, and initiate them into their networks. It is obvious – and could hardly be expected otherwise – that these processes, which essentially represent distributional struggles among elites, will play out with severe tensions. The conflicts between oligarchic cliques and factions within the  state apparatus over control of Russia’s natural resources and political influence are but one example of the processes of disassociation currently taking place. By and large, however, the history of post-­communist system

Economic elites – political elites   55 transition is characterised by a symbiosis and, at least during the phase of primitive accumulation, partial fusion between economic and political elites, exhibiting traits of a community of looters.

Conclusion These developments, and the rescission of socialist collective property in particular, cannot be interpreted and explained through codified theories of capitalism nor the class paradigm. Instead, an elite paradigm is required, as I have illustrated in the above discussion of the symbiosis between political and economic elites. This paradigm may be melted down to seven aspects: 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

Elites are inevitable. This is the case because controlling and coordinating functions usually correspond to a Pareto distribution and follow the 80/20 rule. Elites are important, due to their specific controlling and/or coordinating functions. Elite systems are differentiated; their structure corresponds to the patterns of functional differentiation across a given society. Elites are connected: social integration and intense internal communication are required in order to meet their social coordinating function. Here, the law of small numbers applies. The occupation of elite positions and fulfilling of elite roles by a given collective of people is precarious. This is a result of rivalries around elite positions as well as endemic conflicts between distinct elite groups, yet above all of the antagonism between elites and non-­elites. We may conclude from this: elite systems must be adaptive and, at least to a certain extent, responsive, in order to survive and reproduce themselves. History is the history of elite conflicts.

The note on which I wish to close is by no means one of resignation, particularly in light of points 3, 5 and 6. Needless to say that nobody can promise an elite-­ less society nor an ‘End of History’, but instead a society in which elites are forced, through institutional provisions and public pressure, to act in a responsible way and to be competent and sufficiently open-­minded. Empirical elite research may by all means contribute to this goal.

Note 1 The last reference on this list prompts the question as to why the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern and Eastern Central Europe and the capitalist transformation of similar regimes in East Asia failed to usher in the ‘End of History’ or the definitive triumph of liberal democracy, which remains unfulfilled to this day. Francis Fukuyama devoted two thick volumes to answering this question, The Origins of Political Order (Fukuyama 2011) and, more recently, Political Order and Political Decay (Fukuyama

56   Heinrich Best 2014). Though Fukuyama’s arguments cannot be summarised in a single sentence here, his diagnosis of the crisis of the American political system places a large degree of blame on the conduct, or rather the failure of elites.

References Best, H 1980a, Interessenpolitik und nationale Integration 1848/49. Handelspolitische Konflikte im frühindustriellen Deutschland, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen. Best, H 1980b, ‘Analysis of Context and Content of Historical Documents. The Case of Petitions to the Frankfurt National Assembly 1848/49’, in JM Clubb and EK Scheuch (eds), Historical Social Research. The Use of Historical and Process-­produced Data, pp. 244–267, Klett-­Cotta, Stuttgart. Best, H 1984, ‘Struktur und Wandel kollektiven politischen Handelns: Die handelspol­ itische Petitionsbewegung 1848/49’, in H Volkmann and J Bergmann (eds), Sozialer Protest. Studien zu traditioneller Resistenz und kollektiver Gewalt in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur Reichsgründung, pp. 164–197, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen. Best, H 1990, Die Männer von Bildung und Besitz. Struktur und Handeln parlamentarischer Führungsgruppen in Deutschland und Frankreich 1848/49, Droste, Düsseldorf. Best, H 2005, ‘Cadres into Managers: Structural Changes of East German Economic Elites before and after Reunification’, in G Lengyel (ed.), Cohesion and Division of Economic Elites in Central and Eastern Europe, pp.  9–24, Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest. Reprinted in Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 6–24. Best, H 2008, ‘New Challenges, New Elites? Changes in the Recruitment and Career Patterns of European Representative Elites’, in M Sasaki (ed.), Elites: New Comparative Perspectives, pp. 77–103, Brill, Leiden and Boston. Best, H 2010a, ‘Did Family Matter? The Formation and Reproduction of Functional Elites in a Socialist Society’, in H Best, R Gebauer and A Salheiser (eds), Elites and Social Change, pp. 13–24, Kraemer Publishers, Hamburg. Best, H 2010b, ‘Transitions, Transformations and the Role of Elites’, in H Best, K Bluhm, M Fritsch and RK Silbereisen (eds), Transitions – Transformations: Trajectories of Social, Economic and Political Change after Communism, Special Issue of Historical Social Research, 35, 2010, pp. 9–13. Best, H 2012, ‘Marx or Mosca? An Inquiry into the Foundations of Ideocratic Regimes’, Elite Foundations of Social Theory and Politics. Special Issue of Historical Social Research, 37/2012, pp. 73–89. Best, H 2014, ‘Is ‘Europe’ the Lesser Evil? Limits of Elite Crisis Resolution in a Limitless Crisis’, in H Best and J Higley (eds), Political Elites in the Transatlantic Crisis, pp. 36–58, Palgrave Macmillan, London/New York. Best, H 2018, ‘Elite Sectors: Differentiation and Integration’, in H Best and J Higley (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Political Elites, pp.  331–338, Palgrave Macmillan, London/New York. Best, H and Higley, J (eds) 2014, Political Elites in the Transatlantic Crisis, Palgrave Macmillan, London/New York. Best, H, Lengyel, G and Verzichelli, L (eds) 2012a, The Europe of Elites: A Study into the Europeanness of Europe’s Political and Economic Elites, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Best, H, Gebauer, R, Remy, D and Salheiser, A 2012b, ‘Die DDR-­Gesellschaft als Ungleichheitsordnung: Soziale Differenzierung und illegitime Statuszuweisung’, in

Economic elites – political elites   57 H  Best and E Holtmann (eds), Aufbruch der entsicherten Gesellschaft. Deutschland nach der Wiedervereinigung, pp. 63–84, Campus, Frankfurt a. M. Best, H, Gebauer, R and Salheiser, A (eds) 2012c, Political and Functional Elites in Post­Socialist Transformation: Central and East Europe since 1989/90, Historical Social Research, Special Issue, vol. 37, no. 2. Best, H, Hausmann, C and Schmitt, K 2000, ‘Challenges, Failures and Final Success: The Winding Path of German Parliamentary Leadership Groups towards a Structurally Integrated Elite 1848–1998’, in H Best and M Cotta (eds), Parliamentary Representatives in Europe 1848–2000. Legislative Recruitment and Careers in Eleven European Countries, pp. 138–195, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Burnham, J 1941, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, John Day Co., New York. Collins, R 1999, Macro-­History. Essays in Sociology of the Long Run, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Fukuyama, F 1989, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, Summer 1989. Fukuyama, F 1992, The End of History and the Last Man, The Free Press, New York. Fukuyama, F 2011, The Origins of Political Order, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Fukuyama, F 2014, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Marx, K 1932, The German Ideology, Marx-­Engels Institute, Moscow. Marx, K 1975, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in K Marx and F Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3: March 1843–Aug 1844, International Publishers, New York. North, D 1990, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. North, D 2005, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Piketty, T 2014, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Salheiser, A 2009, Parteitreu, plangemäß, professionell? Rekrutierungsmuster und Karriereverläufe von DDR-­Industriekadern, VS Verlag, Wiesbaden. Weber, M 1927, General Economic History, The Free Press, Glencoe, IL. Wehler, HU 1987, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Band 2: Von der Reformära bis zur industriellen und politischen ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ 1815–1845/49, Beck, München. Wehler, HU 1995, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Band 3: Von der ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849–1914, Beck, München.

5 European citizens and elites in times of economic crisis and citizen unrest Ursula Hoffmann-­Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys

Introduction Since the mid-­1960s, established democracies have experienced a considerable decline in institutionalized forms of political participation such as voting, party identification, and party membership; this has been accompanied by a parallel surge of citizen protest against the decisions of governmental institutions of all levels: local, regional, national, and transnational. In his theory of value change, Ronald Inglehart (1997, pp.  168–171, p.  311) has characterized this ongoing process as a change from elite-­directed to elite-­challenging political participation, which he considers to be the result of a cognitive mobilization that has enabled citizens to act as political subjects, rather than as objects of elite decision-­making. This rationale implies that today’s citizens are more critical of elites and demand more opportunities for direct democratic involvement. Another concurrent trend has been changes in the political party systems of the established democracies. Since around 1970, the traditional socio-­economic cleavage began to lose its grip on the electorate. Identification with the established parties has declined, voter volatility has increased, and party systems have become more fluid (Drummond 2006). The last decade has seen some of the most turbulent political developments in European democracies. The global economic recession forced governments to respond to the economic downturn and its associated fiscal problems, frequently by imposing austerity policies and economic hardships on their citizens by increasing taxes and reducing welfare payments. At the same time, the ongoing globalization has contributed to moving industrial production to low-­cost countries, while post-­industrial economies have specialized in the development of ever more sophisticated products, information technologies, and global distribution logistics. Finally, international political tensions have increased. Moreover, persistent poverty and civil wars in other parts of the world have contributed to an unprecedented mass migration of people seeking both physical security and economic opportunity in European countries. Inglehart has argued that value change also depends on the persistence of relatively secure socio-­economic conditions. Even though most of the European democracies show signs of recovery, the economic recession, the rapid changes

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   59 in living conditions, and the massive influx of migrants all contribute to feelings of insecurity among citizens, and have facilitated the rise of right-­wing populist movements and parties whose political demands are very different from the New Politics envisioned by Ronald Inglehart. Instead of post-­materialist concerns, these movements (e.g., the Front National in France, the Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats, and the Alternative für Deutschland) all articulate traditional materialist demands, such as higher government expenditures for infrastructure and welfare, the creation of new jobs, and security. These movements are also preoccupied with cultural identity and traditional values, e.g., by mobilizing against issues such as gay marriage and mass immigration of people from different cultural backgrounds. One would be hard pressed to label the latter as materialist demands (Papadopoulos 2013, p.  28). These new right-­wing populist movements and political parties frequently use the same action repertoires as the post-­materialist protesters. This raises two different questions: The first is whether the return of traditional economic and cultural issues to the political agenda will reinvigorate old political loyalties, or whether it will rather precipitate the ongoing erosion of traditional political ties and provide opportunities for new political entrepreneurs. The second is more fundamental and asks if the advent of monitory democracy implies that elites have come under unprecedented public pressure by the media and vocal protest groups. Will established representative democracies thereby come closer to realizing the ideal of a democracy not only for, but by the citizens? Or will it contribute to an erosion of representative democratic institutions, impair the ability of elites to aggregate an increasingly heterogeneous spectrum of political demands, and give rise to erratic political decisions and anarchy? Empirical political sociology, elite theory, and theories of pluralist society have all pointed out the less benign implications of more direct involvement of citizens in policy decision-­making. Empirical political sociology has shown that regular political involvement of citizens is normally limited to a relatively small stratum of active citizens. Elite theory has argued that a considerable degree of elite autonomy is necessary for pursuing coherent and sustainable policies. Theories of pluralist society, finally, have claimed that intermediary associations provide indispensable linkages between citizens and elites. Therefore, a rising degree of direct citizen involvement in political affairs implies more public pressure especially on elected political elites. Their power basis will become less stable and their careers more vulnerable to electoral defeat. This will force them to pursue short-­term strategies in order to secure their mandate. At the same time, it will make democratic politics more volatile and erratic in the future.

The rise of non-­institutionalized political participation in Western democracies The last decades have seen a considerable increase of protest against decisions taken by national governments, public agencies, and private enterprises. Global

60   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys protest movements have mushroomed especially over the past decade, with the Occupy movement confirming that political action groups that first emerge in one country may easily spread to other countries, quickly developing into a loosely knit global protest network. However, not all of these organizations belong to what is usually labeled New Social Movements, as established organizations—especially labor unions and economic pressure groups—have also intensified their mobilization efforts. The politically quiet post-­war period came to an end already in the late 1960s with the sudden and unexpected outburst of political protest among students in the affluent Western democracies. The Political Action Study, a five-­nation survey conducted in 1974, confirmed the emergence of new modes of political activism and a mobilization of citizens outside of the traditional intermediary associations. A majority of the respondents in four of these five countries considered lawful direct political actions such as demonstrations and petitions as a legitimate way to articulate their disapproval with government policies. At that time, however, only a relatively small number of about 10 percent indicated that they had actually participated in such activities (Barnes and Kaase 1979, pp. 548–549). The potential for engaging in direct political action showed a negative association with age and was positively associated with higher education. Although the authors had only cross-­sectional data, they saw their results as indicating a fundamental shift in patterns of political participation that would change the politics of established democracies in the future. At the same time, the data also showed that the protest potential they had found was not directed against the democratic institutions per se, but rather signified an expansion of the repertoire of citizen participation in politics (Barnes and Kaase 1979, p.  27). Moreover, protest activities and traditional means of political participation such as voting and membership in traditional intermediary associations were closely interrelated at the individual level, rather than being alternative acts of political participation. In their conclusions, the authors discussed the likely political impact of these new patterns of participation:  Undoubtedly, elite positions in the future will become less and less permanent, hierarchical, and encompassing; contrary to C. W. Mills’ expectation, the existing elite structure will become increasingly diverse and pluralistic. We hold this to be desirable for a democratic society. Furthermore, we are not frightened by the claim that decision-­making will become more and more difficult because of broadened participation by citizens. This may well be true, but the old efficiency argument does not suffice in democratic politics; it has to be qualified and balanced by bringing in the consensus or legitimacy dimension as well. In fact, it appears entirely conceivable that citizens will be willing to engage in prolonged decision-­making and to accept political outcomes not to their liking if their own involvement satisfied their self-­ realization needs and persuades them of the legitimacy of that outcome.  (Barnes and Kaase 1979, p. 531)

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   61 In the more than 40 years that have passed since the Political Action survey, the share of citizens in post-­industrial democracies who participate in direct political action has increased at a breathtaking pace (Dalton 2006, p. 68). This was first confirmed by a longitudinal comparative analysis of survey data on citizen attitudes toward the state and changes in patterns of political participation from the mid-­1970s until the mid-­1990s. “The observed increase in non-­ institutionalized participation in practically all countries is the most unambiguous finding in this volume” (Fuchs and Klingemann 1995b, p. 431). A 2015 representative youth survey in Germany confirmed that non-­institutionalized forms of political participation have continued to rise with the spread of the digital media. The percentage of young Germans aged 14 to 29 claiming that they had already participated in demonstrations has since risen to 43 percent, with 35 percent participating in online protest initiatives and 75 percent signing petitions (Gille et al. 2017). Ample empirical evidence confirms that institutionalized and non-­ institutionalized forms of citizen participation are complementary, and that active citizens tend to use the entire range of available options to feed their political preferences into the political system by voting, working within political parties, but also by trying to influence policy decisions through all kinds of direct action. Increased readiness to engage in political protest against government policies does not imply, however, that citizens “withdraw their support from the democratic system state as a whole, or, at least, from core structural elements” (Fuchs and Klingemann 1995b, p. 434). Support for democracy and democratic procedures has even increased over the last decades. As many observers have rightfully pointed out, this increase in political activism can be attributed primarily to educational expansion. However, while Inglehart and others have claimed that rising educational levels, in conjunction with the spread of mass media (especially the internet), have promoted a massive process of cognitive mobilization and an increase in political sophistication (Inglehart and Welzel 2005, p. 28; Dalton 2006, p. 25), politics remains a sphere to which most people devote little time. A deeper understanding of the complexities of politics and regular political involvement continue to be the preserve of a relatively small segment of the population. Moreover, political interest has not risen as much as could be expected given this increase in educational levels. Nie et al.’s (1996) study of the relationship between education and democratic citizenship tries to unravel this seeming paradox. The authors distinguish two analytically distinct aspects of democratic citizenship: democratic enlightenment and political engagement. Democratic enlightenment relates to knowledge of the principles of democracy, and to a commitment to democratic values and tolerance. “Political engagement, on the other hand, signifies the capability of citizens to pursue their preferences in politics and is characterized by attributes such as participation in difficult political activities and knowledge of leaders” (Nie et al. 1996, p. 37). Both aspects of democratic citizenship are related to formal education, but  they follow a different logic. Political engagement depends not only on

62   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys education, but also on one’s perceived ability to influence political processes. Unlike education, regular political activity and influence are scarce status goods. Political engagement therefore follows what the authors call the relative education model. Rising educational levels increase the competition for political influence among those with higher education, causing the political clout associated with higher education to decrease. As a result, the percentage of respondents who report engaging in time-­consuming political activities such as campaign work and who regularly follow politics has been more or less stable between 1972 and 1992 (Nie et al. 1996, p. 127). Democratic enlightenment, in contrast, is a personal attribute that follows the absolute education model. Support for democratic values has, accordingly, increased with the rise in average educational levels (Nie et al. 1996, p. 122). Nie et al.’s study provides a pertinent explanation for some of the paradoxes in the development of citizen value orientations and political participation patterns in modern democracies. The absolute education model explains why rising educational levels have contributed to a spread of pro-­democratic values, declining trust in politicians, and an increased readiness to contribute money and to take to the streets for “good” political causes. Most of these activities, however, are intermittent and limited to influencing specific issues. The relative education model instead explains why the number of activists who are prepared to devote a fair amount of time to politics has not risen comparably. This conclusion is supported by the fact that both established and new organizations increasingly have problems both recruiting and retaining members: While demonstrations may draw large crowds, the organizational work is left to a relatively stable core of activists. The declining reliance on traditional mass organizations has, in turn, led to a decline in membership, which has especially affected political parties and labor unions (Putnam 2000), although this decline has been more than compensated for by the proliferation of advocacy groups and initiatives promoting social and political causes, ranging from loosely structured local groups to national and even global ones. An increasing non-­profit sector, the rise of watchdog groups, but also new political party types can serve as examples (Huntington 1974, p.  176; Fuchs and Klingemann 1995a and 1995b; Keane 2011). The sheer number of these organizations does not support Putnam’s concerns that the decline of traditional mass organizations has eroded social capital in post-­ industrial democracies. At the same time, however, these new groups and initiatives are organizationally less institutionalized and ephemeral:  From the citizen’s perspective, they allow efficient interest representation under time constraints; from the perspective of the political system, they are a collective political actor which is capable of adapting more quickly than formal organizations to the changing constellation of problems. (Fuchs and Klingemann 1995a, p. 19)

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   63

Elections in 31 European democracies since 2009: acceleration of a long-­term increase in electoral volatility during the economic recession The combined impact of these ongoing political developments and the recent economic recession on electoral behavior in the European democracies can be gauged by looking at the basic economic indicators and the elections of the last decade. For this purpose, we have collected data for the 28 EU member countries and three other long-­standing European democracies (Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland). Although the data cover only a relatively short period and use relatively simple measures, they illustrate the degree to which traditional political parties and governments are being confronted by unstable electorates. We can distinguish three groups of countries based on per capita gross domestic product (GDP): With the exception of the Czech Republic and Slovenia, the post-­communist democracies have a per capita national income below $20,000; the per capita GDP of the Southern European countries ranges between $22,000 (Greece and Portugal) and $34,000 (Italy), while the established democracies in Northern and Western Europe all enjoy per capita GDPs above $40,000. A look at changes in GDP growth for 2009 shows that only 1 of the 31 countries, Poland, had a small positive economic growth in 2009, while the other 30 countries suffered considerable economic setback, with an average dip in their growth rate of –5.5 percent. The three Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were hardest hit by the recession in 2009, but they quickly recovered, while the recovery took much longer in four of the six Southern European countries. By 2015, the average GDP growth in the 31 countries had improved to +2.9 percent. Even Greece—which suffered an exceptionally deep and prolonged crisis—showed a modest economic growth of 0.4 percent. However, GDP in a number of these countries has not fully recovered from the crisis, some of which continue to report double-­digit unemployment, and some suffer from a sovereign debt rate of more than 100 percent. Greece is worst off with a GDP standing at 89 percent of its 2007 level, a 23.9 percent unemployment rate, and a sovereign debt of 181.7 percent. Based on these economic indicators, the economic crisis appears far from over yet, and especially the poorer countries have been suffering from a decline in standards of living. The decision to distinguish three country groups was based on the GDP data as well as on their different historical trajectories. This is especially obvious for the post-­communist countries that democratized only in 1989/90.1 The Southern European countries are set apart by the their somewhat peripheral location on the Mediterranean.2 Moreover, five of these six countries (excluding Malta) have been deeply affected by the economic crisis. The decision to treat them as a separate group is also supported by the fact that the crisis played an important role in most of the elections held in these countries since 2009 (again, with the exception of Malta). The decline in party identification and increasing voter volatility have both made contemporary democratic party systems less stable. In addition, increasing

64   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys public pressure for lowering electoral thresholds, increasing the proportionality of electoral systems, and the introduction of public funding in ever more European democracies, has resulted in lower entrance barriers for new parties, and has facilitated an increasing fragmentation of their party systems. This process has not proceeded in a uniform and linear fashion, and has been particularly pronounced for younger and smaller parties (Drummond 2006; Dassoneville and Hooghe 2011). Table 5.1 shows a fairly high level of electoral instability in recent years. From 2009 to 2016, a total of 68 legislative elections were held in the 31 countries. Excluding the 2 countries with fixed legislative terms (Norway and Switzerland), one-­third of these elections (23 out of 64) were held ahead of schedule after a break-­up of the government. Looking at the incidence of early elections, it can be seen that they were less frequent in the 11 post-­communist democracies than in the other 2 country groups. Only eight of these countries (30.8 percent) have held early elections since 2009. Since the party systems of these still relatively young democracies are less entrenched, party splits, electoral coalitions among parties, and the formation of new parties are all more common. This allows that new elections can be avoided by a regrouping of the parties in parliament. Early elections, which used to be considered indicators of political instability, were instead much more frequent in the Southern European democracies, where 9 out of 15 elections (60 percent) were called before the regular end of the legislative term. But they also have been quite common in the established democracies, especially in those with highly proportional electoral systems. It seems that early elections are no longer considered by politicians to be dangerous, but rather as a way out of a political impasse. Increasingly, parties justify their wish to hold early elections by arguing that the political situation calls for a new electoral mandate. At first glance, it seems surprising that the economic crisis and the governments’ economic and fiscal policies were a central issue only in about half of the electoral campaigns. This is probably due to the fact that, especially in the elections held since 2013, many of the countries had already recovered economically, with other issues arising as more central.3 The data indicate, however, that the economic crisis continued to play an important role, especially in the electoral campaigns of the Southern European democracies, which have been strongly affected by high sovereign debt and the Euro crisis. High electoral volatility was assumed if at least one party in an election suffered a loss or scored a gain of at least 10 percent. The figures show a linear increase from 44.4 percent in the group of Western and Northern European countries, to 53.3 percent in the Southern European group, to 73.1 percent in the post-­communist group. Data compiled by Emanuele (2015, with an update for 2016 and the first half of 2017) on the long-­term development of voter volatility in 19 Western and Southern European democracies (excluding Cyprus) are provided in Table 5.2. They confirm an overall increase of electoral volatility by 5.5 percent from the

73.1 –12.4 50.0 37 142.3 44 169.2

53.3 –11.0 33.3 14 93.3 22 146.7

95 139.7

86.8

59

41.2

57.4 –10.0

68 35.3 45.6

All 31 democracies

Notes 1 Includes all elections and changes in government from January 2009 to December 2016. 2 Norway and Switzerland excluded from calculation because of constitutionally fixed legislative terms. 3 Elections in which the national government’s handling of the economic crisis/Euro crisis/sovereign debt was a central focus of the electoral campaign. 4 Any gain or loss of more 10% for at least one party in the election was counted as high volatility. 5 Because some countries have no or very low electoral thresholds, a first-time representation with at least five parliamentary seats was considered sufficient. In parliaments with less than 100 seats (Cyprus, Iceland, Luxemburg, and Malta), a first-time representation with at least three seats was counted. These parties are not necessarily new in the sense that they were founded only recently. It was only required that they ran successfully for the first time, e.g. the Sweden Democrats in 2010. New parties that resulted from a regrouping of older parties were included unless they had simply changed their name, merged or formed electoral coalitions. 6 Any change in party composition, majority/minority status of a government or change in head of government (President or Prime Minister). Caretaker governments that did not involve a change in coalition partners, majority status or PM were disregarded.

Sources: www.parties-and-elections.eu; Wikipedia; articles on individual elections in Electoral Studies.

26 30.8 30.8

11 post-Communist EU member countries

15 60.0 93.3

14 Western and Northern 6 Southern European European democracies democracies

Number of elections held 27 % early elections2 25.9 % economic policy/recession central issue of the 33.3 electoral campaign3 % elections with high electoral volatility4 44.4 Mean combined gains/losses for the parties in –7.7 government (%) % elections with combined losses for parties in 37.0 government of more than 10% Number of new parties gaining first-time 8 parliamentary representation5 % of new parties gaining first-time parliamentary 29.6 representation in an election Number of changes in government6 29 % changes in government 107.4

Country group

Table 5.1 Elections, electoral volatility, and changes in government in 31 European democracies 2009–20161

66   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys Table 5.2 Electoral volatility in 19 Western European democracies 1990 to July 20161 Country

Mean 1990–2008

Mean 2009–July 2017

% change

Austria Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Iceland Ireland Italy Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Portugal Spain Sweden Switzerland UK Mean

12.6 11.7 10.6 10.6 19.8 8.2 6.2 10.6 9.5 17.9 7.8 2.8 21.4 17.1 11.2 8.4 14.6 7.6 7.3 11.4

15.7 12.8 15.2 11.5 32.2 15.2 21.2 26.3 27.2 36.7 7.2 3.8 20.9 10.7 12.2 19.3 9.8 6.4 15.8 16.8

3.1 1.1 4.6 0.9 12.4 7.1 15.0 15.7 17.6 18.8 –0.6 1.0 –0.5 –6.4 1.0 10.8 –4.9 –1.3 8.5 5.5

Source: Emanuele (2015), updated on August 3, 2017. Note 1 Cyprus not included in dataset.

period before (1990–2008) and after the onset of the economic recession (2009 to mid-­2017). However, they also indicate that the bulk of this increase stems from a subset of five countries in which volatility went up by more than 10 percent after 2008: Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. These were also the countries that suffered the most from the economic recession, if we take into account unemployment rate and sovereign debt rather than limiting the analysis to GDP growth.4 A study by Drummond (2006) complements these data by going even further back. He compared two successive periods (1945–1970 and 1970–1995). While the first period was characterized by a fairly high electoral stability, electoral volatility increased during the second period. This increase was mainly due to the ascendancy of parties that formed during the interwar period and New Politics parties formed since the 1970s. Lane and Ersson (2007), finally, who included post-­communist countries in their study, also found increasing volatility in the older democracies and at the same time considerably higher levels of volatility in the post-­communist countries. A comparable development can be seen in the magnitude of electoral losses for the parties in government (Table 5.1). The average loss during the period 2009 to 2016 amounts to –10.0 percent for all 31 countries, ranging from –7.7 percent to –12.4 percent for the three groups. Parties in government lost more than 10 percent in two fifth of all elections (41.2 percent). The percentage is not much lower (37.0 percent) in the Northern and Western European democracies.

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   67 This finding confirms that voters have become more mobile, and do not hesitate to change their voting decision from one election to the next. Losses of more than 25 percent for the parties in government occurred in Bulgaria 2009 (–28.8 percent), in the Greek election of June 2012 (–48.1 percent), Iceland 2013 (–27.7 percent), Ireland 2011 (–29.7 percent), Italy 2013 (–27.5 percent), Lithuania 2016 (–27.6 percent), and Slovenia in both 2011 and 2014 (–34.3 percent and –34.6 percent). While slightly below that threshold, it should be noted that in France the three leftist coalition parties under leadership of the Socialist Party experienced a combined loss of 24.4 percent in 2017. Conversely, the electoral returns for governmental parties increased in only 10 of the 68 elections. This shows that voters have become more prone to punishing governments for poor performance rather than rewarding them for good performance. The electoral success of new parties is another indicator of an increasingly mobile electorate. In the 68 elections under study, 59 new parties were able to gain first-­time parliamentary representation. Some of them even managed to achieve a substantial share of the total vote, e.g., 2009 the Citizens for European Development (GERB) in Bulgaria which immediately became the strongest party with 39.7 percent of the total vote, just as 2013 the Cinque Stelle movement in Italy with 25.5 percent. Emmanuel Macron’s new party La République en Marche was even able to get 28.2 percent of the total vote in the first round of the 2017 elections for the French National Assembly, and 43.1 percent in the second round, which was enough for winning a majority of seats (308 of 577, i.e., 53.4 percent).5 As was mentioned before, new parties have been particularly successful in the post-­communist democracies, on average more than one per election. In the Southern European democracies, new parties were successful in 14 of 15 elections. The party systems of the established democracies have been more stable in this respect, but even here eight new parties appeared on the scene from 2009 to 2016, including the PVV (Wilders), the True Fins, and the Sweden Democrats. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), founded in 2013, has already successfully competed in 14 of the 16 German state elections held since, and received 12.6 percent of the total vote in the 2017 Bundestag election. La Republique en Marche’s appearance in the 2017 French election was certainly the most spectacular in this group of countries. The overall volatility in this election was 40.7 percent, which has been the second-­highest in one of the established European democracies, only surpassed by the Greek election of May 2012 with 48.5 percent. Studies of electoral volatility have emphasized the necessity of distinguishing between volatility deriving from an exchange among established parties (alteration volatility) and volatility stemming from the entrance of new parties (regeneration volatility). Chiaramonte and Emanuele (2015) tried to untangle these two types of volatility, finding that both have increased in Western Europe, with the rate of increase accelerating during the economic recession. As high-­volatility elections with successful new parties are on the rise, the authors conclude “that symptoms of an ongoing process of de-­institutionalization are spreading across

68   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys many countries in Western Europe” (2015, p. 9). Likewise, Powell and Tucker (2013) have shown that electoral volatility in the post-­communist countries is primarily due to the participation of new parties in elections, rather than to voters switching between existing parties. Changes in government were noted in Table 5.1 if one of the following conditions applied: A change in the majority or minority status of a government, a change in the governing party coalition, or a change in the head of government. Since 2009, a total of 95 changes in government have taken place in the 31 countries under study. Only Switzerland with its customary four-­party coalition has not experienced any change in the 8 years from 2009 to 2016. Six countries have experienced 1, another 6 experienced 2, 7 countries 3, while the remaining 11 countries saw between 4 and 7 changes, with Greece and Romania at the top. Changes in government have been more frequent in the post-­communist countries, where—with the exception of Lithuania and Poland—nine countries have gone through at least three changes in government. These countries collectively account for 46.3 percent of the total of 95 changes, while they make up less than one-­third of the 31 countries. Changes in government between elections have also been rather frequent in the Southern European democracies. Many studies indicate that the increasing electoral volatility has been accompanied by a parallel decline in both political trust and satisfaction with democracy (e.g., Dalton 2006). Evaluations of politics have been negatively affected by the current economic crisis, too. Based on data from the European Social Survey for the years 2004 and 2010, a study by Polavieja (2012) revealed that both political trust and satisfaction with democracy have significantly declined after 2004, especially in the countries hardest hit by the crisis, primarily Greece, Spain, Slovenia, and Ireland (2012, pp.  18–19, p.  35). Likewise, a report by the Pew Research Center (May 2013) showed a sharp drop in respondents’ evaluation of the state of the national economy and of the ability of political leaders to deal with the economic crisis, especially in the three Southern European countries of Greece, Spain, and Italy, but also in France and Great Britain (2013, pp. 3–5). Do these indicators of political dissatisfaction with government performance also threaten the viability of democratic institutions? The post-­communist democracies are particularly interesting in this respect, since they constitute the poorest group of countries in Europe, and all but one were severely affected by the economic recession. One would therefore expect democracy in these countries to be more vulnerable. But despite their high level of governmental instability, electoral or parliamentary defeats of governments have not resulted in constitutional crises so far. The present danger is not so much that governing parties are not willing to accept electoral defeat—they have always done this— although the governments of Hungary and Poland have made attempts to curb opposition rights. Compared to the instability of many Central and Southern European democracies that had formed after World War I, democracy in the post-­communist democracies has remained remarkably resilient. While the economic and fiscal problems of the Southern European democracies are certainly grave, with very high unemployment rates, high sovereign

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   69 debt and electoral gains of an openly fascist party in Greece, democracy in these countries does not seem to be in danger either. Governmental instability in Italy, for example, was much higher during the first 40 years after World War II, when the life expectancy of Italian governments was counted in days rather than months (Cotta and Verzichelli 2007a, pp.  110–118). Trust in politicians has always been rather low in Italy as well. While it is obvious that governmental instability impairs the ability of governments to govern effectively, it is doubtful that it indicates a severe crisis of democracy. On the contrary: If necessary, the major established parties have eventually acted responsibly and have joined broad-­based coalition governments even with their main political adversaries, most notably in Greece and Italy. Today’s European democracies seem to be more stable and at the same time more flexible in absorbing relatively high levels of electoral and governmental instability. The increase in voter volatility has resulted in major party system changes, even in long-­standing democracies such as Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and France, without producing much concern about the overall stability of democracy among citizens and elites. Even in the UK with its first-­past-the-­post electoral system, the combined share of Conservatives and Labour has been decreasing since the 1970s and single-­party parliamentary majorities may become less customary in the future. This was the case in 2010 as well as in 2017. The party systems in the post-­communist democracies are even more fluid. This raises the questions as to whether these developments will have an impact on the effectiveness of governments and on the quality of these democracies.

Participatory democracy and monitory democracy as new models of democracy? The spread of protest activities was long considered to be a typical phenomenon of affluent Western democracies. However, popular uprising against political oppression in the Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, the Arab Spring of 2011, as well as more recent mass protests in Venezuela, Turkey, Thailand, and Russia all confirm that political protest has become a global phenomenon. The most popular explanation for this development is Ronald Inglehart’s theory of value change. Even those who doubt the validity of this theory do not dispute the correctness of Inglehart’s observation that a secular shift from elite-­directed to elite-­challenging modes of political participation has taken place (1997, p.  169; see also Inglehart 2005), a shift which has been corroborated by a wealth of empirical data. More recently, Inglehart and Welzel (2005) have developed the theory of value change into a full-­blown theory of the relationship between modernization, human development, and democracy, with a decidedly bottom-­up perspective of democracy. This perspective not only denies the relevance of elites for processes of democratization and for the consolidation of democracy (ibid., p. 2), but also neglects some problematic consequences of the decreasing willingness of

70   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys citizens to accept government decisions for interest aggregation. It also confounds elite-­challenging and elite-­directing behavior, and does not adequately conceptualize the crucial distinction between the two. Political protest challenges elites and is primarily directed against policy proposals of public authorities, rather than aimed at developing alternative solutions. While democracy grants citizens the right to articulate political demands, effective governance also depends on the ability of democratically elected governments to take and implement binding policy decisions that citizens accept as legitimate. Such decision-­ making involves the balancing of contradictory demands, and requires compromises that will necessarily disappoint those whose preferences have not prevailed. Many social scientists, and especially political activists, claim that the increase in cognitive mobilization has opened up opportunities for improving the quality of existing democracies by developing representative liberal democracy into a participatory democracy. This would involve the introduction of direct democratic instruments such as referenda, advisory citizen committees, and direct elections for important political offices (i.e., presidents and heads of government). The Swiss model is frequently invoked in this argument, albeit without acknowledging the central role of elites, political parties, and interest groups in the Swiss direct democratic process (Kriesi 2005). Keane’s (2009, 2011) model of monitory democracy shares many features with the model of participatory democracy, although he emphasizes a different aspect of political life. He expects that the advent of the digital age will promote the spread of watchdog groups monitoring the actions of governments and other public agencies (2011, p. 212). At the same time, he argues that elections, political parties, and legislatures will neither disappear nor necessarily decline in importance, but that they will lose their pivotal position in policy-­making. “The new power-­scrutinising innovations tend to enfranchise many more citizens’ voices, sometimes by means of unelected representatives skilled at using what Americans sometimes call ‘bully pulpits.’ ” These new mechanisms will “break the grip of the majority rule principle—the worship of numbers—associated with representative democracy” (Keane 2011, p. 214). Maloney (2015) criticized Keane’s overly optimistic view of advocacy groups claiming to represent grass-­root interests. He argued that advocacy groups frequently represent supply-­side rather than demand-­side interests, and increase the inequality of political resources by providing additional influence channels for already resource-­rich groups. The term astroturf participation denotes such attempts by paid lobbyists to conduct public relations campaigns on behalf of paying clients. While the advocates of participatory democracy assume that increased citizen involvement in politics will improve the quality of democracy, they tend to neglect fundamental insights of elite theory, political sociology, and theories of interest intermediation. These cast doubt on the validity of the expectation that the increase of political activism will also increase the political influence of ordinary citizens.

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   71 Already in the 1970s and 1980s, after the post-­war period of rapid economic growth had come to a halt, and a period of economic turbulences set in, with high inflation, soaring budget deficits, a dramatic increase in sovereign debt levels, and rising unemployment, a series of publications invoked the specter of government overload and the ungovernability of modern democracies (e.g., Huntington 1974; Crozier et al. 1975; King 1975). Most of these authors diagnosed the problems of governability as stemming from increased citizens demands that confronted governments with increasingly untractable problems. Already then, Huntington (1974) asked how benign post-­industrialism would be, and predicted that changing citizen attitudes toward politics would make it more difficult for governments to carry through their policy priorities and to solve pressing political problems. Theoretical and empirical insights of various strands of sociology and political science may be helpful in assessing a number of implications of high levels of direct citizen involvement in politics, in particular with respect to five different aspects: • • • • •

the role of citizens in elite theory; the rationality of elections; the inequality of political participation; problems of interest aggregation and political deadlocks; leadership selection and the security of elite positions.

The role of citizens in elite theory The classics of elite theory, Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels, were preoccupied with claiming the universality of (political) power and elites. Despite their reputation of being fervent opponents of democracy, their major objective was to demonstrate that a conception of democracy as direct rule by the people was fundamentally flawed. Therefore, they analyzed elite motivations, the strategies used by elites to preserve their power (basis), and the rise and decline of historical elites. Non-­elites, in their view, were objects rather than subjects of history. While they acknowledged that elites had to take into account mass preferences, they expected that they did so by manipulating them to their own advantage. They also assumed that studying the characteristics of ruling classes and elites was sufficient for understanding politics. This implied the assumption that the failure of politics to solving political problems and to cope with social change was primarily due “to the incompetence and inadequacy of the ruling classes” (Mosca 1939, p. 430). Pareto and Mosca were not interested in non-­elites, whom they considered to be more or less politically irrelevant. Even in a parliamentary democracy, Mosca claimed that the parliamentary deputy is not chosen by the voters, but “has himself elected by the voters” (Mosca 1939, p. 154, italics by Mosca). He went on to state that the theoretical freedom of choice of the voters “necessarily becomes null, not to say ludicrous” (ibid.). He tones down his argument on the

72   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys next page, though, by acknowledging that voters have a “limited right to exercise an option among a number of candidates.” This obliged candidates to make “every effort to flatter, wheedle and obtain the good will of the voters” and “to take account of mass sentiments” (Mosca 1939, pp. 155–156). Michels (1970, first published in 1911) and Schumpeter (1994, first published in 1943), analyzed the division of labor between politicians and ordinary citizens in representative democracies. Based on his analysis of the pre-­World War I German Social Democratic Party (SPD), Michels identified three causes for the emergence of a stable political leadership in political parties: The necessity of creating and upholding an effective party organization, the diverging motivations of the party leadership and the rank-­and-file members as well as the knowledge gap between the two. Since this was true even for a political party whose main objective was to fight for democracy, Michels claimed the existence of a iron law of oligarchy that is universally valid for large organizations. In a similar vein, Schumpeter argued that most voters lack sufficient knowledge about political affairs, and that the political interests of the voters remain latent until they are articulated by political leaders:  Such volitions do not as a rule assert themselves directly. Even if strong and definite, they remain latent, often for decades, until they are called to life by some political leader who turns them into political factors. This he does, or else his agents do it for him, by organizing these volitions, by working them up and by including eventually appropriate items in his competitive offering.  (Schumpeter 1994, pp. 270–271) Schumpeter developed a new theory of democracy that relies entirely on competitive elections and institutional constraints for enforcing the political accountability of elected leaders. It implies a top-­down model of interest representation: In contrast to the mandate theory, which is based on the expectation that representatives act as agents, who are supposed to implement the demands of the citizens (i.e., principals), Schumpeter claimed that political leaders play an active role in developing alternative programs and presenting them to the voters. In this model, the role of the citizens is limited to electing and ousting governments. Although Giovanni Sartori (1987) agrees with the assumption that policies are seldom initiated by the voters, he has taken a more differentiated position and claimed that the assumption that new policies are always initiated by elites too simplistic. He argued that the process of policy formation can work in both ways (1987, p. 94). Bottom-­up initiatives developed and promoted by groups of active citizens can and do regularly occur. However, they need to be fed into the regular channels of policy formation, and will only be implemented if they are taken up and converted into formal legislation by the political leadership.

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   73

The limited rationality of elections as instruments for producing elite accountability, and the inequality of political participation Public opinion research has regularly confirmed that the majority of citizens are only marginally involved in public affairs, while only a relatively small segment of the citizenry has in-­depth knowledge about politics. In his classic study on “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” Converse (1964) claimed that the political beliefs of most citizens showed only low levels of ideological constraint and were not stable over time. Even though Converse’s study was criticized on methodological grounds, as well as for not adequately acknowledging the usefulness of political heuristics for citizens with low levels of political sophistication, the existence of a hierarchy of political involvement remains undisputed. In their book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (2016), Achen and Bartels made the most systematic attempt to date to disprove traditional assumptions about the function of elections as instruments for informing governments about the policy preferences of citizens. They claim that elections are not a suitable instrument for producing responsive governments. Their analysis cast doubts on the rationality of voter decisions, as well as on the impact of elections on the actions of legislators and governments. They found that the policy preferences of citizens were only modestly predictive of election outcomes, and even less so of policy decisions taken by legislatures (Achen and Bartels 2016, p.  46). This finding confirms Converse’s analysis and is not really surprising given the myriads policies that legislatures routinely have to deal with. The authors further claim that not even the less demanding assumption that retrospective voting is a suitable instrument for ensuring government accountability is true, since even such retrospective judgments are mostly myopic and based on the state of affairs at election time rather than reflecting an assessment of the entire electoral term (Achen and Bartels 2016, p. 211). While the examples used by of Achen and Bartels are selective and one-­sided, they confirm the inadequacy of conceptualizing elections as instruments of informing elites about the policy preferences of the voters, as well as the central role of elites in policy formation and decision-­making. Other authors have found more elite-­mass congruence in political issue attitudes (e.g., Burstein 2003 and Shapiro 2011). The differentiated analyses of Putnam (1976) and Zaller (1992) have shown, however, that public opinion formation is more complex than both one-­ directional theories assume. Rather than wrongly assuming that the rise of citizen initiatives and political action groups promoting New Politics issues will increase the political power of ordinary citizens, one has to keep in mind that the iron law of oligarchy also applies to these groups. Like traditional associations and political parties, their supporters tend to follow the policies chosen by their leadership. Most of these leaders are political entrepreneurs intent on making a living, sometimes even a

74   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys profit, from the money generated by donations to their organization. Moreover, many of these organizations (e.g., Greenpeace) do not even practice democratic procedures in selecting their leadership. The fact that they prefer to call themselves public interest groups and pretend that they are different from particularistic interest associations must not fool us into believing that they are substantially different from their traditional counterparts. Increasing the opportunities for direct citizen involvement in policy decision-­ making, rather than making democracies more democratic, increases political inequality. Based on empirical studies of political participation, Nie et al. (1996) have shown the validity of the standard model of political participation, which holds that the inequality of political participation increases with the difficulty of the participatory act. Citizens with higher socio-­economic status are therefore more likely to engage in forms of political participation that require higher levels  of political sophistication and that are more time-­consuming. Non-­ institutionalized forms of direct political action (e.g., demonstrations) as well as direct democratic forms of political participation (e.g., referenda) are disproportionately used by citizens with better political resources (Kaase 1981). The problem of political inequality further increases with even more demanding forms of political participation, such as initiating petitions, e-­democracy, or involvement in citizen initiatives. The institutionalization of more direct democratic participation rights might therefore contribute to increasing rather than reducing political inequality, as the following statement by Schäfer and Schoen shows: “Broadening democratic participation rights is not a wholesale cure, but rather a medicine with grave side-­effects” (2013, p.  115, translation by the authors; see also Merkel 2011).

Problems of interest intermediation and aggregation Around the time when elite theory started to emphasize the inevitability of elite rule, cultural critics started to raise concerns about the impact of modernization on societal integration and politics. They warned that it would lead to an erosion of traditional social bonds of family, kinship, and religion, would uproot individuals and result in an atomization of society. This was not only considered as detrimental for citizens’ sense of identity, but also expected to pose problems for the social order. The concomitant loss of social control on the side of traditional elites would open up chances for mass mobilization by extremist movements. The dangers associated with the advent of mass society became a topic analyzed by many writers, among them Ferdinand Tönnies (1887), Gustave Le Bon (2002, first published 1895), and José Ortega di Gasset (1964, first published 1930) come to mind.6 Later, theories of pluralism, communitarianism, and civil society (inter alia Aron 1950, Stammer 1951, Lipset et al. 1956, Lipset 1960, Dahl 1971, Putnam 1993 and 2000) took up these ideas. While they accord citizens a more active political role than the classic elitists, they assume that political influence needs to be mediated by voluntary associations. The idea of the crucial function of

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   75 Table 5.3 Kornhauser’s model of mass society Accessibility of elites

Low High

Availability of non-elites Low

High

Communal society Pluralist society

Totalitarian society Mass society

Source: adapted from Kornhauser 1960, p. 40.

intermediary associations for democracy can be traced all the way back to Tocqueville. Kornhauser’s book on The Politics of Mass Society (1960) is a good example of this type of theorizing, and explicitly dealt with elite–mass relations. These relations involve bilateral channels of communication. The bottom-­up channel secures the accessibility of elites for mass demands, the top-­down channel the availability of non-­elites for elite guidance. Combining the two yields a table with four societal types (Table 5.3). Kornhauser argued that pluralist society is characterized by a high degree of elite responsiveness to citizen demands, as well as by a high degree of elite autonomy from public pressures. Citizen demands are transmitted into the political decision-­making arena through a dense web of intermediary associations via institutionalized channels of interest articulation. Elites have the task of aggregating these group demands. Mass society, in contrast, is characterized by a lack of intermediary associations. Elites are confronted with direct political pressures to accede to mass demands, and in turn use mass manipulation to placate the citizenry while they pursue their own agenda. This implies that mass society is vulnerable to fall prey to totalitarian movements that promise to establish direct links between elites and citizens, but that in reality try to establish a tight control over society. The fundamental flaw of the model of participatory democracy based on direct interaction between citizens and political elites is its complete disregard for problems of interest aggregation. Protest movements as well as organized pressure groups do not have to take into account the externalities that an implementation of their political demands will produce. Therefore, Dahl (1982) identified the problem of interest aggregation as a fundamental dilemma of pluralist democracy. He argued that pressure groups stabilize social and political inequalities. By publicly advocating particularistic interests, they contribute to deforming civic consciousness. They distort the public agenda because they convert their superior resources into influencing the political agenda. And finally they use their veto power to alienate final control (Dahl 1982, p. 47). While traditional voluntary mass organizations used to have a heterogeneous membership that requires them to aggregate the interests of their members before feeding their policy demands into the policy formation process, small groups targeting more specific interests do not have to do this. The proliferation of specialized pressure groups then decreases the transparency of the policy-­making

76   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys process, as the demands of small groups usually receive little media attention. In their study of interest group networks in the US, Heinz et al. (1993, ch. 12) argued that the increasing fragmentation of the associational landscape has increased the uncertainty of political outcomes and increasingly forces private organizations as well as public office holders to focus on realizing their short-­ term interests and to disregard any negative externalities that their deals may produce (Heinz et al. 1993, p. 412). Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) pointed out that the same logic applies to mass mobilization against specific government projects. He argues that it is relatively easy to mobilize against specific policies, because this does not require a consensus to be forged on alternative courses of action. Moreover, since small advocacy groups are better able to mobilize support for their causes, the spread of such groups makes working for political parties as the main vehicles of interest aggregation less attractive. These considerations cast doubt on the claim made by Fuchs and Klingemann (1995b, p.  437) that more direct citizen participation will increase the political influence of ordinary voters and the responsiveness of elites. The final decision-­ making power will continue to rest with the political parties and their leaders, who have to decide on political priorities. It is also questionable if an excessive fragmentation of the demands on political decision-­makers will increase public control. Finally, it should also be noted that not all of these new organizations pursue democratic objectives. The use of the web for propagating all kinds of fundamentalist and extremist agendas shows that freedom of organization is open to everyone and can be used for all kinds of causes, not only for beneficial and democratic ones. Already in 1974, Huntington argued that the continued expansion of citizen participation could make post-­industrial society extraordinarily difficult to govern (1974, p. 177). He cited a study that showed that American cities whose populations had above-­average levels of higher education were characterized by lower levels of innovation. “One reason suggested for this seemingly anomalous situation is that widespread education tends to produce too much interest and participation which leads in turn to political stalemate” (ibid.). In a similar vein, Sartori argued that less power for the political leadership does not necessarily imply more power for the governed (1987, p. 122). In The End of Power, Moisés Naím, once himself minister of development of Venezuela, comes to similar conclusions regarding what he calls “the decay of power” (Naím 2013, Ch. 1): “In the twenty-­first century, power is easier to get, harder to use—and easier to lose. From boardrooms and combat zones to cyberspaces, battles for power are as intense as ever, but they are yielding diminishing returns” (Naím 2013, p. 2). He mentions increasing constraints “in the form of citizen activism, global markets, and media scrutiny.” The author explains this development as being the result of three revolutions: “The More, Mobility and Mentality Revolution” (Naím 2013, ch. 4). The “more revolution” involves the proliferation of micropowers, the increase in the number of political actors across the globe due to the larger number of independent states. The “mobility

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   77 revolution” has made people more difficult to control, and immigration has changed the economy and culture of nations. The “mentality revolution,” finally, was facilitated by the spread of a global middle class in the developing and its shrinking in the richer countries. “And both growing and shrinking middle classes fuel political turmoil. The embattled middle classes take to the streets and fight to protect their living standards while the expanding middle classes protest to get more and better services” (Naím 2013, p.  64). While the author sees undeniable positive consequences of the decay of power (e.g., an increase in civil liberties and more options for voters), he also emphasizes the downsides of these developments, such as an increase in crime, the rise of extremist politics, and a proliferation of improvised groups as well as reduced transparency of the policy formation process which may lead to political paralysis or vetocracy (Naím 2013, p. 223).

Leadership selection and the security of elite positions From the previous considerations it is obvious that the increase in voter volatility and the sometimes dramatic changes in the national party systems could not have happened without having an impact on the careers and outlook of elites, in particular political elites. First, they have reduced the stability of elite careers. Naím concluded “today’s power players often pay a steeper and more immediate price for their mistakes than did their predecessors” (2013, p. 2). Political parties have lost much of their former ability to promise would-­be candidates and office-­holders (re-)nomination or (re-)election in exchange for their dedicated party work. The insecurity associated with this development not only affects the parliamentarians themselves, but also their staff: After the 2013 German Bundestag election in which the Liberals (FDP) failed to surmount the 5 percent threshold, about 500 staff members lost their jobs along with the 93 ousted FDP deputies (Kempkens and Weiland 2013). More than one-­third of the members of the Bundestag elected in 2013 (34.2 percent) were newcomers. Based on their analysis of the re-­election rates of state parliamentarians in Germany, Best and Jahr (2006) concluded that politics should be considered precarious employment since the hazard rate for losing the mandate after the first term is rather high: 26 percent in the west German and even 62 percent in the east German state parliaments (Best and Jahr 2006, p. 74). The authors characterized the political profession as insecure, episodic, and underspecified in regard to the definition of the professional field, the required qualifications and the career prospects (Best and Jahr 2006, p.  79). They also expect that political incumbents will do anything in order to increase their income and to decrease the risks of losing office. Such prevalence of short-­term considerations is exactly the opposite of what is expected from parliamentarians, who are supposed to be responsible for the well-­being of their country. The data of the EURELITE project provide some insights into the long-­term development of parliamentary turnover in the European countries since the mid-­ nineteenth century. They show a considerable effect of the two World Wars as

78   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys well as of regime change on parliamentary turnover. It should not come as a surprise that the first elections after democratic transitions usually produced a very high turnover rate compared to the previous election or the last democratic election before the authoritarian or totalitarian regime took power (Cotta and Verzichelli 2007b, pp. 467–469; Best 2007, pp. 101, 109). More interesting in the present context is the increase in parliamentary turnover since the 1980s. The average tenure of parliamentarians decreased from 2.7 terms in the 1980s to 2.3 in the 1990s, but then slightly rebounded to 2.4 in the first half of the 2000s (Best 2007, p. 109; Cotta and Verzichelli 2007b, p. 473; Verzichelli 2014). The data indicate that this trend is neither pronounced nor uniform. A study by Matland and Studlar (2004) comparing parliamentary turnover for 25 advanced industrial democracies during the period from 1979 to 1994 reveals notable differences across countries: The United States had the lowest average turnover rate (15.2 percent),7 followed by Australia (20.0 percent) and West Germany (22.3 percent), while France (43.3 percent), Spain (44.0 percent), Portugal (45.2 percent), and Canada (46.9 percent) were located at the other end of the spectrum (2004, p. 93). The very low turnover in the US House of Representatives is probably due to its short terms of 2 years, the American two-­party system, and the electoral system of plurality voting in small electoral districts. The post-­communist democracies show an opposite pattern. They started out with very high turnover rates of nearly 70 percent, which have meanwhile somewhat receded (Edinger 2010, p. 145). Turnover rates in these post-­communist democracies can be expected to remain high, however, so long as their party systems continue to be highly volatile. Turnover in the established parliamentary democracies falls between these extremes, and has gone up in recent years: In Canada, turnover started to increase after 1980, and hit a peak of 66.1 percent in 1993 (Docherty 1997, p. 52). In Germany, an increase in turnover is visible, but not very pronounced: Excluding the first two Bundestag elections, the average turnover for the elections from 1961 to 1987 was 25.1 percent, and from 1990 to 2013 it rose to 29.5 percent (Table 5.4).8 Table 5.4 Newcomers in the German Bundestag (percent) Election year

% newcomers

Election year

% newcomers

1949 1953 1957 1961 1964 1969 1972 1976 1980

100.0 48.1 30.6 25.1 25.5 30.1 28.0 22.6 24.9

1983 1987 1990 1994 1998 2002 2005 2009 2013

17.7 21.2 35.5 30.2 24.8 28.7 23.0 32.9 34.2

Source: www.bundestag.de, own calculations.

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   79 Careers in other elite sectors have become less predictable as well. Candidates for senior positions are generally expected to be flexible. Frequent rotation in positions at all hierarchical levels is considered desirable. In the business sector, board positions and especially the positions of CEOs in major corporations have also become less secure in recent years. A study of the top managers in the 50 largest German corporations showed that while the average age at which the CEOs reached their position has remained rather stable and decreased only slightly from 53 to 51 years since 1960, average tenure has decreased from 11 to 8 years (Freye 2009, pp.  63–65). Naím (2013, p.  163) cites a number of studies that confirm a global trend toward higher turnover rates in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In the US, the tenure of the average CEO has halved from about 10 years in the 1990s to about 5.5 years in recent years. The same trend also applies to corporations. “Sojourns at the top of corporate league tables have noticeably shortened” (Naím 2013, p.  164). These changes confirm a general trend that is likely to continue into the future. Unfortunately, studies trying to determine the consequences of the increasing insecurities of elite careers are lacking. It can be expected that elites will adapt to the new situation as they always have done. They will certainly try to minimize negative consequences for their personal life. This may for instance be one of the reasons for the enormous increase in salaries and bonuses for top managers. It will probably also reduce the loyalty of elite position-­holders to their organization and their dedication to the obligations of their office. These will be important questions for future elite research.

Conclusion The first part of our analysis has shown a clear trend toward increasing voter volatility and fragmentation of the European party systems, which has been aggravated by the recent economic recession. Rather than stabilizing or even reinvigorating loyalties to traditional parties that historically represented the two sides of the class conflict, the economic crisis has further accelerated the erosion of traditional cleavages. These developments, in combination with the rising protest potential, have made politics more erratic and less predictable. While some social scientists have interpreted these developments as a higher stage of democratization, we have noted some less sanguine implications associated with the destabilization of electorates and the proliferation of a vast and heterogeneous sector of civil society organizations, ranging from large traditional associations, to small and highly effective small pressure groups all the way to loosely structured Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) and ad-­hoc initiatives. Without strengthening the institutions for interest aggregation, in particular the legislative arena, this trend will continue to impair opportunities for a fair aggregation of interests and will work to the benefit of those who are best able to use their political clout for pursuing their particularistic interests.

80   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys

Notes 1 Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia. 2 Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain, Cyprus. 3 It should be noted that this indicator is based on the subjective assessments of experts, and is therefore less valid than actual election results. Moreover, in electoral campaigns in which the crisis was overshadowed by fundamental domestic political controversies such as constitutional issues, corruption of government officials, ethnic conflicts, or simply dissatisfaction with the political performance of the sitting government, observers may have underestimated the degree to which the crisis was actually looming large in these elections. 4 This seems especially appropriate since GDP growth has picked up faster than the other two indicators whose impact on the household budgets of citizens is more immediate while a rising economic growth does not immediate effects on the living conditions of ordinary citizens. 5 This was primarily due to the French electoral system of majority representation with its two rounds of voting, and an exceptionally low voter turnout of 48.7 percent and 42.6 percent. 6 For a detailed analysis of the arguments of these cultural critics see Hirschman (1991) and Femia (2001). 7 The re-­election rate in the US House of Representatives has been very high for most of the post-­World War II period, ranging between 80 percent and over 90 percent, with the exception of 1993 when it sank to 74 percent (Manning and Petersen 2016). 8 Because the authors analyzed the institutional determinants of turnover, they have not provided information on the development over time, on the impact of electoral volatility or on the consequences of high turnover rates for the legislative process.

References Achen, CH and Bartels, LM 2016, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Aron, R 1950, “Social Structure and the Ruling Class,” British Journal of Sociology, no.1, pp. 1–17; no. 2, pp. 126–143. Barnes, SH and Kaase, M 1979, Political Action, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills. Best, H 2007, “New Challenges, New Elites? Changes in the Recruitment and Career Patterns of European Representative Elites,” Comparative Sociology, vol. 6, no. 1–2, pp. 85–113. Best, H and Jahr, S 2006, “Politik als Prekäres Beschäftigungsverhältnis. Mythos und Realität der Sozialfigur des Berufspolitikers im Wiedervereinten Deutschland,” Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 63–79. Burstein, P 2003, “The Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy: A Review and an Agenda,” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 29–40. Chiaramonte, A and Emanuele, V 2015, Party System Volatility, Regeneration and De-­ institutionalization in Western Europe (1945–2015). Available from: http://journals. sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1354068815601330 [May 2, 2017]. Converse, PE 1964, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” in D Apter, (ed.), Ideology and Discontent, The Free Press, New York. Cotta, M and Verzichelli, L 2007a, Political Institutions in Italy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cotta, M and Verzichelli, L 2007b, “Paths of Institutional Development and Elite Transformations” in M Cotta and H Best (eds.), Democratic Representation in Europe, pp. 417–473, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   81 Crozier, M, Huntington, SP, and Watanuki, J 1975, The Crisis of Democracy. Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York University Press, New York. Dahl, RA 1971, Polyarchy. Participation and Opposition, Yale University Press, New Haven. Dahl, RA 1982, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, Yale University Press, New Haven. Dalton, RJ 2006, Citizen Politics, CQ Press, Washington DC. Dassoneville, R and Hooghe, M 2011, “Mapping Electoral Volatility in Europe,” paper presented to the 1st European Conference on Comparative Electoral Research, Sofia, December 1–3, 2011. Docherty, DC 1997, Mr. Smith Goes to Ottawa: Life in the House of Commons. UBC Press, Vancouver. Drummond, AJ 2006, “Electoral Volatility and Party Decline in Western Democracies 1970–1995,” Political Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 628–647. Edinger, M 2010, “Elitism in Central and Eastern Europe” in H Best and J Higley (eds.), Democratic Elitism: New Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives, pp.  129–151, Brill, Leiden. Emanuele, V 2015, “Dataset of Electoral Volatility and its Internal Components in Western Europe (1945–2015),” Italian Center for Electoral Studies, LUISS Gudo Carli. Available from: www.vincenzoemanuele.com/dataset-of-electoral-volatility.html [September 11, 2017]. Femia, J 2001, Against the Masses. Varieties of Anti-­Democratic Thought since the French Revolution, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Freye, S 2009, Führungswechsel. Die Wirtschaftselite und das Ende der Deutschland AG, Campus, Frankfurt/Main. Fuchs, D and Klingemann, HD 1995a, “Citizens and the State: A Changing Relationship?” in HD Klingemann and D Fuchs (eds.), Citizens and the State, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Fuchs, D and Klingemann, HD 1995b, “Citizens and the State: A Relationship Transformed” in HD Klingemann and D Fuchs (eds.), Citizens and the State, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Gille, M, de Rijke, J, and Gaiser, W 2017, “Politische Involvierung und Politische Partizipation von Jugendlichen und Jungen Erwachsenen—Empirische Erkenntnisse aus der FES-­Jugendstudie 2015” in W Kühnel and H Willems (eds.), Politisches Engagement im Jugendalter—Zwischen Wahlbeteiligung, Protest und Gewalt, pp.  47–77, Beltz Juventa, Weinheim. Heinz, JP, Laumann, EO, Nelson RL, and Salisbury, RH 1993, The Hollow Core. Private Interests in National Policy Making, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Hirschman, AO, 1991, The Rhetoric of Reaction. Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass. Huntington, SP 1974, “Postindustrial Politics: How Benign Will it Be?,” Comparative Politics, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 163–191. Inglehart, R 1997, Modernization and Postmodernization, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Inglehart, R 2005, “Postmodernization Erodes Respect for Authority, but Increases Support for Democracy” in P Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens. Global Support for Democratic Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Inglehart, R and Welzel, C 2005, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy. The Human Development Sequence, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

82   Ursula Hoffmann-Lange and Mindaugas Kuklys Kaase, M 1981, “Politische Beteiligung und Politische Ungleichheit” in L Albertin (ed.), Politische Parteien auf dem Weg zur parlamentarischen Demokratie, Droste, Düsseldorf. Keane, J 2009, The Life and Death of Democracy, Simon & Schuster, London. Keane, J 2011, “Monitory Democracy?” in S Alonso, W Merkel, and J Keane (eds.), The Future of Representative Democracy Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kempkens, S and Weiland, S 2013, Aus für 500 FDP-­Angestellte: Eine Fraktion wird Abgewickelt, 23 September 2013, SPIEGEL Online. Available from: www.spiegel.de. [May 26, 2017]. King, A 1975, “Overload: Problems of Governing in the 1970s,” Political Studies, vol. 23, no. 3/4, pp. 284–296. Kornhauser, W 1960, The Politics of Mass Society, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Kriesi, H 2005, Direct Democratic Choice: The Swiss Experience, Lexington Books, Lanham. Lane, JE and Ersson, S 2007, “Party System Instability in Europe: Persistent Differences in Volatility between West and East?” Democratization, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 92–110. Le Bon, G 2002 [1895], The Crowd, Dover Publications, Mineola. Lipset, SM 1960, Political Man, Heinemann, London. Lipset, SM, Trow, M, and Coleman, J 1956, Union Democracy, Anchor Books, Garden City. Maloney, WA 2015, “Much Ado about Something? Demand- and Supply-­Side Participation in a Dysfunctional Democratic Market” in T Poguntke, S Roßteutscher, R Schmitt­Beck, and S Zmerli (eds.), Citizenship and Democracy in an Era of Crisis, Routledge, London. Manning, JE and Petersen, RE 2016, First-­Term Members of the House of Representatives and Senate, 64th—114th Congresses. Congressional Research Service—CRS Report for Congress. Available from: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41283.pdf [May 26, 2017]. Matland, RE and Studlar, DT 2004, “Determinants of Legislative Turnover: A Cross-­ National Analysis,” British Journal of Political Science, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 87–108. Merkel, W 2011, “Entmachten Volksentscheide das Volk? Anmerkungen zu einem demokratischen Paradoxon,” WZB-­Mitteilungen, no. 131, pp. 10–13. Michels, R 1970 [1911], Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der Modernen Demokratie, Kröner, Stuttgart. Mosca, G 1939, The Ruling Class, McGraw-­Hill, New York. Naím, M 2013, The End of Power, Basic Books, New York. Nie, NH, Junn, J, and Stehlik-­Barry, K 1996, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Ortega y Gasset, J 1964 [1930], The Revolt of the Masses, Norton, New York. Papadopoulos, Y 2013, Democracy in Crisis? Palgrave Macmillan, London. Pew Research Center 2013, The New Sick Man of Europe: The European Union, Pew Research Center. Available from: www.pewglobal.org/2013/05/13/the-new-sick-manof-europe-the-european-union/. [September 1, 2013]. Polavieja, JG 2012, The Great Recession: Political Trust, Satisfaction with Democracy and Attitudes to Welfare-­state Redistribution in Europe, IMDEA Institute. Available from: www.repec.imdea.org/pdf/imdea-wp2012-08.pdf‎. [September 1, 2013]. Powell, EN and Tucker, JA 2013, “Revisiting Electoral Volatility in Post-­Communist Countries: New Data, New Results and New Approaches,” British Journal of Political Science, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 123–147.

Times of economic crisis and citizen unrest   83 Putnam, RD 1976, The Comparative Study of Political Elites, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice­Hall, New Jersey. Putnam, RD 1993, Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Putnam, RD 2000, Bowling Alone, Simon & Schuster, New York. Rosanvallon, P 2008, Counter-­Democracy. Politics in an Age of Distrust, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sartori, G 1987, The Theory of Democracy Revisited. Part One: The Contemporary Debate, Chatham House, Chatham. Schäfer, A and Schoen, H 2013, “Mehr Demokratie, aber nur für Wenige? Der Zielkonflikt zwischen mehr Beteiligung und politischer Gleichheit,” Leviathan, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 94–120. Schumpeter, JA 1994 [1943], Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Routledge, London. Shapiro, RY 2011, “Public Opinion and American Democracy,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 5, pp. 982–1017. Stammer, O 1951, “Das Elitenproblem in der Demokratie,” Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft, vol. 71, pp. 1–28. Tönnies, F 1887, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Fues’s Verlag, Leipzig. Verzichelli, L 2014, “Degradable Elites? Modes and Factors of Parliamentary Turnover in the Early XXI Century,” paper presented to the conference “Farewell to the elites?,” Jena, September 25–26, 2014. Zaller, JR 1992, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Part II

(Changing) elite structure

6 Degradable elites? Modes and factors of parliamentary turnover in Europe in the early twenty-­first century Luca Verzichelli Introduction: open questions about legislative turnover1 During the last decade of the twentieth century, the question of parliamentary turnover has been approached by several studies, in the attempt to explain a number of similarities and dissimilarities over time (Swain et al. 2000) and across countries (Somit et al. 1994, Best et al. 2000). All these efforts moved from the assumptions developed from classic theories grounded on the elitist foundation of representative democracy, and they speculated on the notion of “elite circulation.” According to this approach, an “usual” pace of elite circulation should be associated to a stable and “moderate” legislative turnover, that is to say a systematic rate not higher than 40 percent of newcomers within the elective branch(es) of the national parliaments (Best et al. 2000, see also Kuklys 2013). On the contrary, according to the paretian view, a high rate of turnover would represent the marker of a democratic crisis or, at least, a sign of discontinuity not just in the political elite but, at large, in the political regime. Moreover, no turnover or insignificant turnover means, basically, the risk of reconsolidation of that kind of oligarchic structures which had characterized the age of first democratization, before the emergence of mass parties organizations. The empirical applications of this argument, explaining a (more or less) usual rate of elite circulation by the proxy of parliamentary turnover, have been based on two basic assumptions: at first, the necessity of a fierce and effective competitiveness within the pool of individuals who aspire to get into the national group of rulers. Second, the assumption that, in all democratic realms, the national legislative assemblies embody the main arena for the selection of the most important sector of the ruling class. According to another fundamental conceptual pillar of the elite theory—the notion of political career—national parliaments are indeed the institutions where the different patterns of political professionalism can grow and, therefore, they become the typical springboard for the selection of democratic leaders (Verzichelli 2018). Most of the empirical research—if not all—conducted on the topic of legislative turnover pay therefore a tribute to the classic theory. However, such a clear and distinctive theoretical conjunction has never brought to strong generalizations: on the contrary, the extreme variability of the phenomenon across

88   Luca Verzichelli countries and the multitude of institutional and legal constraints over the practice of parliamentary selection make the study of legislative turnover a particularly complicated puzzle. Robert Putnam clearly addressed the problem in his classic introduction to the comparative study of political elites (Putnam 1976). Other scholars had then recalled the scarcity of systematic analyses, marking the difference between a case like the US and other democratic polities (Somit et al. 1994; Norris 1997). In the US, turnover seems to be historically limited by the strong electoral connection between congressmen and voters, and by a number of institutional constraints, in particular the plurality system. It is difficult to say why the other democracies are different, and what the main determinants of the dissimilarities in the patterns of legislative turnover are. In this respect, scholars have not yet found a sufficient agreement about a possible explanatory frame. An important improvement toward a systematic analysis was produced years ago thanks to a first comparative effort focused on 25 democracies (Matland and Studlar 2004). In the same period, other important findings appeared from a revitalized sociology of parliamentary elites, mainly thanks to the efforts of Heinrich Best. Playing a major role in the organization of a new comprehensive comparative project on parliamentary elites, and producing himself important contributions to the renewal of the elite theory, he has often approached the question of the historical and cross-­national dynamics of legislative turnover, focusing in particular on the European sphere. About 10 years ago, Best wrote an empirical assessment of the recent changes in the European parliamentary elites, illustrating a new breaking point that emerged in the late-­nineties, due to the “end of consensus challenge” and the “emergence of the legitimacy challenge.” Looking to the curves of elite renewal, he argued that the convergence among the trends of parliamentary turnover after 1990 is not a mere coincidence: “we consider these developments as the signs of a disturbance in the pre-­1990 regime of legislative recruitment that affected the established patterns of reproduction of Western representative elites” (Best 2007). Hence, all the classic country-­specific factors determining a large extent of diversity, even in the relatively cohesive area of the European democracies, should be monitored keeping in mind the new determinants of legislative turnover that seem to work in a more or less regular way across different democratic polities. This is what I plan to do in this chapter: producing an updated analysis of parliamentary turnover in a sufficient number of countries, controlling if (and to what extent) the “legitimacy challenge” emerged in the European democracies during the past 20 years has systematically increased the rate of turnover, thus making the different cases more similar to each other. In the next section I will review the recent literature, presenting the relevant hypotheses and the main inferences available. Then, I will illustrate the rationale of my own contribution, and the main points of innovation in the research design. The results of an explorative multivariate analysis will be illustrated in the central section of the chapter, followed by a more intensive analysis of some recent critical elections in Europe, when different determinants of parliamentary

Degradable elites?   89 turnover emerged. The final section will summarize the inferences, tracing the lines for further investigation on this topic.

Legislative turnover: hypotheses and evidence A comprehensive and extensive attempt to get some answers to the questions above recalled was made years ago in an oft-­quoted article by Richard E. Matland and Donley T. Studlar (2004). This study, based on a data set including two decades of parliamentary turnover in 25 democracies, moved from the distinction between voluntary and involuntary exits, and matched a number of alternative and/or complementary hypotheses based on several structural and institutional determinants. According to Matland and Studlar, the possible causes of legislative turnover are those reported in Table 6.1. This article has been indeed a major step in the direction of a truly comparative analysis of legislative turnover, but it has two limitations, partially considered in the discussion developed by the authors. The first problem lies in the multidimensional nature of some of the macro-­variables employed in the theoretical framework: the electoral systems, for instance, entail a number of mechanic effects which can work differently, favoring either the automatic de-­ selection (i.e., the close list allows a very centralized party to replace incumbents), or the inter-­party defeat (when forms of preference votes are allowed) or even a mix of inter/intra-­party electoral defeat (when a double listing of candidates is contemplate by the electoral procedures). The frequency of elections is an explanatory variable connected to two different general factors (the “intra-­party Table 6.1 Possible determinants of legislative turnover Type of exit

Cause of exit

Independent variable

Involuntary

De-selection

Electoral system: party strategy on replacing incumbents

Inter-party electoral defeat

Electoral system: personal vote Frequency of elections

Intra-party electoral defeat

Threat of losing to fellow party member

Intra/inter-party electoral defeat

Electoral system: double listing of candidates

Electoral defeat

Electoral volatility

Failure to be re-nominated

Party ideology

Pursue private career

Cost of staying

Desire to retire

Frequency of election

Dissatisfaction with being a legislator

Pleasure and power

Voluntary

Source: adapted by Matland and Studlar (2004).

90   Luca Verzichelli electoral defeat” which corresponds to an involuntary exit, and the desire to retire, which is on the contrary a voluntary reason to leave the parliament). One could add that the “party ideology” variable, associated by Matland and Studlar to the possibility of new nominations by the party establishment, can be connected to other general factors as for instance the existence of some specific tools of centralistic selection formalized by the intra-­party rules but also from the general framework of competition derived from the choice of a given electoral system. The second limitation has to do with the results of the study. Many of the hypotheses built by Matland and Studlar are somehow confirmed by their analysis, although some of them (namely those grounded on the variable of party ideology) prove to be less significant than others. Overall, the study concludes that electoral volatility and party system changes remain the most relevant factors of legislative turnover, but it also argues that our dependent variable can be also affected by a set of institutional factors stemming from the design of electoral institutions. From here, the authors call for a deeper and more advanced discussion of two critical theoretical points: the multidimensional effect of the electoral system variable and the counter-­intuitive evidence concerning the lower turnover rate in the systems exposing candidates to the threat of intra-­party electoral loss. Such a set of implications is a solid starting point for a new attempt to monitor the changeable effect of electoral and institutional determinants of legislative turnover, in the light of another decade of democratic life—the first decade of the twenty-­first century. Recent surveys based on a more limited number of cases (Best et al. 2000, Crowther and Matonyte 2007, Kuklys 2013, Edinger et al. 2014) have indeed confirmed the main implications of that article. However, the puzzle of turnover is far from being solved, and new projects have emerged, trying to integrate these findings in a broader framework considering the impact of new intervening variables and the changeable political conditions connected to the nature of new parties and new “structures of opportunities.” This is the goal of a promising project (Gouglas et al. 2017) based on a robust dataset including eight Western democracies. At the moment, this ongoing project has confirmed the multidimensional nature of the phenomenon of legislative turnover, providing solid evidence for the impact of four types of determinants: party preferences, electoral regimes, organizational choice of political parties, and the nature of the domestic structure of opportunity. The other merit of this fresher approach lies in its accurate reflection on the notion of turnover, which is here defined as the proportion of both first entry and returning members of parliament (MPs), out of the total membership in a legislative assembly. This definition responds to the necessity to study a typical outcome of a process of elite selection, as illustrated by Best and Cotta (2000), and therefore, to investigate the increasingly difficult relationship between political elites and public opinion. In this perspective, the analysis of changing patterns of legislative turnover can be included in a broader discussion developed over the years by the comparative scholars involved in the so called sociology of legislators

Degradable elites?   91 and legislatures (Best and Vogel 2013): the different trends of continuity or discontinuity in the composition of the parliamentary elites—easily combinable with other institutional and political data—do not just tell us about the “health” of a given democracy, but also illustrate an important effect of the changing structure of opportunity for the democratic ruling classes. All the comparative efforts mentioned above have stressed the incremental but remarkable trend toward higher levels of parliamentary turnover in many democratic realities. This observation does not take into account the relevant exception offered by the US, but it confirms the extent of variability for what concerns the European scenario. Indeed, these studies argue that, more or less between the beginning of the eighties and the mid-­nineties, a clear increase in the turnover rates of many European parliaments occurred, with a consequent increase of elite circulation. Of course, in some cases the de-­structuration of the classic “frozen” European party systems has been the cause of such a phenomenon, thus confirming the argument of the centrality of electoral volatility as the main factor of change in the structure of parliamentary elite among the contemporary democracies.2 This observation opens the perspective of new and intriguing interpretations about the current shape of parliamentary turnover, especially in Europe. The above mentioned inspiring article published by Best (2007) connects the increasing rates of turnover to the emergence of the “legitimacy challenge”: after decades of closure in the political market determined by the power of mass party organizations and political professionalism, a new type of competition among individual politicians (and new patterns of political professionalism) arises, influenced by different factors. Party cartelization, diffuse mistrust on democratic institutions and politicians, decreasing relevance of national parliaments as pool of aspirants to the leadership, as well as the emergence of a strong personalization of party leadership (Blondel and Thiebault 2013) are the most relevant elements to be investigated in the search for potential intervening factors of change in the rate of legislative turnover. In addition to the need for a more comprehensive interpretation of recent transformations, an important methodological suggestion emerges from the above mentioned work by Heinrich Best: the need for integrating quantitative inferences derived from large-­N analyses with more intensive assessments based on the examination of specific points in time. Namely, we have to investigate those critical elections that have determined, together with an evident reshaping of party systems, a significant turmoil in the structure of parliamentary elites. This mixed research strategy will be offered in this chapter: in fact, after a brief illustration of the overall trend concerning the explanandum, I will proceed with an extensive analysis of the determinants of legislative turnover in 17 European democracies. Later, I will pay our attention to a few recent stories of critical elections determining significant changes in the structure of parliamentary elites.

92   Luca Verzichelli

Legislative turnover 1990–2015: fresh evidence and a new interpretative framework So far I have presented the relevance of the phenomenon of legislative turnover, and discussed the implications illustrated by the recent comparative studies. Now, I can sketch the idea of a new explorative empirical test on the determinants of parliamentary elite transformation during the past two decades. My proposal is to adopt a notion of turnover based on the data on new parliamentary entries, thus focusing on the pure rate of elite renewal. I will therefore combine the diachronic comparative analysis of legislative turnover introduced by Matland and Studlar with some more selective in-­depth qualitative assessments. This will allow me to measure the overall meaning of change we can observe in the recent history of European democracies reflecting on the grid of explanatory factors and improving the exploration of the causal relationships proposed by Matland and Studlar. Let’s start with the explanandum: Table 6.2 summarizes the data about legislative turnover in 17 European democracies. According to what has been said already, the measurement utilized here is the indicator directly connected to the phenomenon of elite circulation that is the percentage of fresh MPs (newcomers). The main source for this indicator is var_43 from the Eurelite dataset (Best and Edinger 2005), which covers 14 of the 17 countries. Ten of them, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, are included in the old Western Eurelite DataCube, while four (Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania) come from the “central-­eastern leg” of that project (Edinger et al. 2014). Three other countries (Belgium, Israel, and Switzerland) have been included in order to have a broader (although still “European”) area of comparison with the work by Matland and Studlar. The work of updating has been done on the basis of official sources and with the help of a number of colleagues.3 Unfortunately, fresh data is still not available for all the countries already included in the original project (Norway and some of the Central-­Eastern European countries). The picture of a modest but widespread increase of legislative turnover seems to be confirmed: the mean percentage of newcomer MPs in the last 25 years has been more than 2 points higher than the average of the overall post-­war period (that is to say more than 5 points higher than in the 1978–1990 period). Ten of the 13 countries where the long-­run comparison is possible show an increase of legislative turnover, although the annual average measure shows a more modest growth. Of the four countries where the increase did not appear (Spain, Portugal, Finland, and Switzerland) two of them (the Iberian countries) represent examples of young democracies where a counter-­trend is to be expected as a result of the short period of democratization from the mid-­1970s to 1989. According to the classic elite theory, indeed, the rate of circulation should have been high and, in any event, above the “usual” average until the full consolidation of democratic institutions. The third country is Switzerland, which represents the only case of Directorate, a system of government where the lives of the executive and the legislative bodies are not connected.

Average turnover post 1945

39.2 40.5 29.4 33.8 39.4 28.3 43.7 37.5 44.6 51.5 39.1 50.5 44.2 56.9 41.2 33.6 25.4

39.2

Country

AUT BEL DEN FIN FRA GER HUN ISR ITA LIT NET POL POR ROM SPA SWI UK

Total

9.4

9.1 9.9 7.4 8.5 7.9 7.1 10.9 9.4 8.9 12.9 9.9 12.7 11.1 14.2 10.3 8.4 5.1

Mean annual rate turnover post 1945

71.6

49.0 60.0 39.1 39.0 50.8 43.4 63.5 44.0 70.8 71.6 49.0 68.7 56.1 68.6 58.9 40.5 37.0

Maximum

Table 6.2­ ­Legislative turnover in Europe: descriptive figures

9.8

19.0 24.0 14.9 24.5 27.0 17.7 30.3 35.0 26.8 35.5 22.8 35.2 31.0 43.2 27.4 26.0 9.8

Minimum

11.5

9.7 12.4 6.7 4.6 7.0 7.7 12.3 2.6 13.2 14.1 9.1 11.7 7.4 9.1 8.3 5.1 8.6

Std. deviation

33.2

35.4 27.2 23.4 34.6 36.5 21.3 – 36.1 33.2 – 33.4 – 46.4 – 46.4 35.2 23.8

Average turnover 1945–1989

41.3

40.7 48.1 32.4 33.5 41.8 31.4 43.7 38.1 49.5 51.5 42.5 50.6 43.7 56.9 39.3 32.9 26.2

Average turnover 1990–2015

9.9

9.1 11.7 8.1 8.4 8.4 7.8 10.9 9.5 9.9 12.9 10.6 12.6 11.0 14.2 9.8 8.2 5.2

Mean annual rate turnover 1990–2015

94   Luca Verzichelli The same evidence—a well-­distributed but very weak increase of turnover— is clarified by the scatterplot including all the observations collected so far (Figure 6.1). Hence, all the cognitive and interpretative questions presented in the previous section can be corroborated, although the phenomenon of a clear decline of elite stability does not seem so clearly confirmed by the data. On the contrary, these comprehensive descriptive figures seem to reintroduce the doubt that only electoral instability and occasional deep party system changes should be the reasons of legislative turnover, especially in those countries (for instance, Netherlands, Italy, and to some extent Denmark) where critical elections and party decline have recently left their mark on the political system. It is also interesting to notice that the data about Hungary, Lithuania, and Romania, countries where in the past decades high peaks of legislative turnover have occurred, reflect both the argument of the necessary institutionalization of the parliamentary elite followed by the regime transition, as well as the explanation based on continuous change in the party system’s supply side (Kuklys 2013).

/HJLVODWLYHWXUQRYHUDWWKHHOHFWLRQ









56T/LQHDU 

 











ĞŶŐƚŚ

ϲϬ

ĂďŝŶĞƚůĞŶŐƚŚ

ϱϬ

ǀĞƌĂŐĞůĞŶŐƚŚŽĨƚĞŶƵƌĞ ĨŽƌĂůůŵŝŶŝƐƚĞƌƐ

ϰϬ

ǀĞƌĂŐĞůĞŶŐƚŚŽĨƚĞŶƵƌĞ ĨŽƌƚĞĐŚŶŽĐƌĂƚƐ

ϯϬ ϮϬ

WŽŶƚĂϰ

WŽŶƚĂϯ

WŽŶƚĂϮ

WŽŶƚĂϭ

hŶŐƵƌĞĂŶƵ

ŽĐϮ

ŽĐϭ

dĂƌŝĐĞĂŶƵϮ

dĂƌŝĐĞĂŶƵϭ

EĂƐƚĂƐĞ

/ƐĂƌĞƐĐƵ

sĂƐŝůĞ

ŝŽƌďĞĂ

sĂĐĂƌŽŝƵ

^ƚŽůŽũĂŶ

ZŽŵĂŶϮ

Ϭ

ZŽŵĂŶϭ

ϭϬ

Figure 9.2 Length of tenure for all ministers and experts per each cabinet (months). Table 9.5 Average length of ministerial tenures Cabinet

Cabinet length (months)

Average length of tenure for all ministers (months)

Average length of tenure for technocrats (months)

Roman 1 Roman 2 Stolojan Vacaroiu Ciorbea Vasile Isarescu Nastase Tariceanu 1 Tariceanu 2 Boc 1 Boc 2 Ungureanu Ponta 1 Ponta 2 Ponta 3 Ponta 4

 – 16 13 49 16 20 12 48 27 20 10 25 3 8 14 9 11

 – 12.37 12.62 24.98 10.83 14.68 10.36 25.06 16.63 13.64 8.39 14.79 2.84 5.93 12.12 7.61 9.64

 – 11.92 13.00 25.57 6.22 14.14 9.50 16.08 16.20 10.33 10.00 10.75 3.00 4.60 11.20 8.00 8.50

156   Laurenţiu Ştefan Table 9.6 Ministerial status Rank of cabinet members

All (n)

Expert and non-partisan Expert and non-partisan ministers (n) ministers (%)

Prime Minister Deputy PM Minister Minister Delegate Deputy Minister

16 41 362 57 8

3 6 105 10 1

18.75 14.63 29.00 17.54 12.50

Total

484

125

25.82

Governor of the National Bank to take up the reins of the cabinet at the end of a turbulent electoral cycle, returning to the helm of the National Bank after one year as prime minister and a failed campaign to become president in 2000. The other two embarked on political careers: Stolojan became a presidential candidate in 2000, and then the leader of the National Liberal Party; since 2007 he has served as a member of the European Parliament. Vacaroiu became a prominent member of the Social-­Democratic Party (Speaker of the Upper Chamber) and has served as president of the Court of Accounts between 2008 and 2017. The rest of these data show no indication that technocrats have been relegated to inferior positions in the cabinet, with these ministers overwhelmingly being called to serve in the cabinet in the same way as their party-­affiliated peers. Political background Since experts have no party background, the only relevant non-­professional experience that may count when they are selected is any previous experience as deputy ministers. Table 9.7 shows that the share of expert and non-­partisan ministers with previous experience as a deputy minister is far higher than that of partisan ministers. This is evidence for the assertion that non-­partisan deputy ministers are more likely to eventually become full ministers than their partisan counterparts. Table 9.7 Experience as deputy ministers Ministers

All (n)

With experience as deputy minister (n)

With experience as deputy minister (%)

Non-partisan Partisan

125 357

56 105

44.8 29.4

Total

479

161

33.6

Recruitment of technocrats in Romania   157 Educational attainment Technocrats would logically be expected to have stronger academic credentials than people coming from the party ranks, as technocrats must compensate for their lack of party credentials through their professional expertise. While professional expertise, per se, is difficult to operationalize simply, two educational indicators may serve as good proxies: the level of education and, more precisely, whether a doctoral program was completed or not. For both level of education and completion of doctoral degrees, expert and non-­partisan ministers indeed out-­performed partisan ministers. Post-­ministerial careers Given their background as subject-­matter experts, as opposed to career politicians, technocrats might be expected to be more likely to return to their previous line of work after their ministerial stint, as opposed to embracing a political career. Overwhelmingly, the expert and non-­partisan ministers in this study indeed returned to non-­political activities after they finished their ministerial tenures. Even after taking into account the recent legislative elections of December 2016, the number of expert and non-­partisan ministers who eventually became members of the National and European Parliament is relatively small (a total of 29 out of 96). Although many other technocrats did join political parties or run for national elections, less than a third succeeded in reaching the status of a committed party politician—a status that has been definitively achieved when former ministers start a career under a party label in the National or European Parliament. Of these 29 expert and non-­partisan ministers who transitioned to political careers, 21 served as non-­partisan ministers in the Vacaroiu and Nastase cabinets; that is, a large majority came from PSD-­led governments. Moreover, Table 9.8 Ministers with postgraduate degrees Ministers

All

Postgraduates (n)

Postgraduates (%)

Non-partisan Partisan

124 355

  81 198

65.3 55.8

Total

479

279

58.2

Table 9.9 Ministers with PhDs Ministers

All

PhDs (n)

PhDs (%)

Non-partisan Partisan

124 355

  67 155

54.0 43.7

Total

479

222

46.3

158   Laurenţiu Ştefan Table 9.10 Technocratic ministers successfully running for the national and European parliament Year of entry in parliament

Technocrats (n)

Never (up to and including the elections of December 2016) 1996 2000 2004 2007* 2009* 2012 2014 2016

67 11 3 8 1 1 1 1 3

Total

96

Note * European Parliament.

24 of the 29 non-­partisan ministers turned M(E)Ps joined the Social-­Democratic Party. This may be one of the most interesting findings of this investigation: While both right- and left-­wing political parties invited technocrats to serve on the cabinet benches, the left-­wing PSD succeeded more than other right-­wing parties in convincing some of these technocrats to join the party ranks and start political careers within the party.

Conclusion No single unifying pattern was identified, and no single explanation can be offered for the selection of expert and non-­partisan ministers across time and cabinets. Various considerations and factors were prevalent at different periods of time: Especially in the early nineties, the political culture turned against parties. This was compounded by weak party structures, and by a lack of specialized personnel. The personalization of selection (i.e., the presidentialization factor) was especially strong in the first post-­communist decade, and has continued to the present day, favored by the pre-­eminence of the president and prime minister in the process of ministerial selection. These leaders have shown a consistent desire to promote personal loyalists from outside the party ranks to ministerial positions. Political crises such as cohabitation and unpopular cabinets, the economic crisis of 2008, and special efforts to address the requirements of the MCV all brought additional experts into the cabinet. Some ministries (i.e., finance, research and education, justice, European and foreign affairs, and agriculture) seem to be more open to experts than others (i.e., defense, interior affairs, and regional affairs). There is no hard evidence to suggest that expert and non-­partisan ministers have been considered second-­ class ministers, as their access to the highest echelons of the cabinets (including the position of prime minister) has been equal to that of their party-­affiliated

Recruitment of technocrats in Romania   159 peers. Indeed, when replacement ministers were brought in, expert and non-­ partisan ministers outnumbered partisan ministers, and their tenure (except for during the first 6 transitional years) was shorter. Expert and non-­partisan ministers had—unsurprisingly—higher educational attainment than partisan ministers; in aggregate terms, technocrats had a higher level of education and a larger proportion had completed doctoral programs. A path to becoming a government minister in Romania is clearly visible: In a very high percentage of cases, these expert and non-­partisan ministers started their public careers as deputy ministers. More than two-­thirds served as ministers more than once, and less than a third eventually embarked on party-­based political careers, as evidenced by successfully winning elections for the National or European Parliament.

Notes 1 The concept used by Poguntke and Webb (2005). 2 The book is based on the International Workshop, “Expert and Non-­Partisan Ministers in European Democracies,” Lisbon, March 22–23, 2013. 3 Antonio Costa Pinto and Pedro Tavares de Almeida, “Expert and Non-­partisan Ministers in Portuguese Democracy,” unpublished paper. 4 If one instead takes into account all the changes in the political composition of the cabinets (not only the most notable ones), there are a total of 26 cabinets. 5 When the expert Minister of Justice joined the main governing party.

References Andeweg, R 2000, “Political Recruitment and Party Government” in J Blondel and M  Cotta (eds.), The Nature of Party Government. A Comparative European Perspective, pp. 119–140. Palgrave, London. Best, H and Edinger, M 2005, “Converging Representative Elites in Europe? An Introduction to the EurElite Project,” Czech Sociological Review, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 499–510. Costa Pinto, A, Cotta, C and Tavares de Almeida, P (eds.) 2018, Technocratic Ministers and Political Leadership in European Democracies, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke/ New York. Dogan, M (ed.) 1989, Pathways to Power: Selecting Rulers in Pluralist Democracies, Westview, Boulder. Poguntke, T and Webb, P 2005, The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Societies, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Prewitt, K 1970, The Recruitment of Political Leaders: A Study of Citizen-­Politicians, Bobbs-­Merrill, Indianapolis/New York. Ștefan, L 2007, “De la un Stalinism la Altul. Dimensiunea Tehnocratică în Guvernele Gheorghiu-­Dej (1952–1965) Comparativ cu Guvernele Ceauşescu (1965–1974)” [From One Stalinism to Another. The Technocratic Dimension in Romanian Communist Governments], Elite comuniste înainte şi după 1989. Anuarul Institutului de Investigare a Crimelor Comunismului în România, pp. 15–61. Ștefan, L 2009, Pathways to Cabinet: Selecting Ministers in Post-­Communist Romania. University of Jena. Available from: www.sfb580.uni-jena.de/typo3/uploads/media/ Heft_08.pdf [July 13, 2017]. Ware, A 1996, Political Parties and Party Systems, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

10 Farewell to the party elites? Politically inexperienced ministers in Central and Eastern European cabinets Elena Semenova

Introduction In countries with parliamentary systems, a ministerial position in the national cabinet is the paramount achievement for anyone with political ambitions. Ministers are the core decision makers and the ones positioned to help set political agendas. The predominant position of ministers in parliamentary systems suggests the importance of scholarship that examines the most significant aspects of their careers and recruitment (Müller-Rommel and Keman 2012, p. 220). Most studies on ministerial recruitment and careers have focused on advanced democracies of Western Europe, highlighting links between the voters, political parties, and cabinets (Strom et al. 2008); the nature of party government (Woldendorp et al. 2000); and the strategies of political parties in distributing portfolios (Bäck et al. 2011). The starting point of these studies is the chain of delegation, in which the selection of ministers by the prime minister (PM) is a logical step leading from the voters to the political parties, which are responsible for forming governments and selecting the PM. For political parties, therefore, securing control over ministerial positions is vital. Nominating party-­affiliated ministers (Blondel and Thiébault 1991) and “shadowing” ministers appointed by the coalition partners (Carroll and Cox 2012) are the political parties’ means of realizing their policy preferences. Moreover, the prospect of becoming a minister (even one with relatively little influence) is an important incentive for politically interested individuals to pursue a political career. This long-­term process of gaining political experience is valued by political parties as a means of reducing agency problems that emerges from the lack of knowledge about the candidate’s ambitions and competences (Blondel and Müller-Rommel 1997; Dowding and Dumont 2009). The positive effect of parliamentary experience on the length of ministerial tenure in Western European cabinets has also been shown (Huber and Martinez-­Gallardo 2008). The topic of ministerial selection has not received the same kind of attention in the case of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries with parliamentary systems (with some notable exceptions, Blondel et al. 2007), despite the fact that these countries exhibit an interesting variation in their political and party system models as well as in terms of presidential power.

Farewell to the party elites?   161 The collapse of communism in the countries of CEE created enormous opportunities for groups that were underrepresented or even excluded from political participation under the old regime. New political parties and movements emerged almost overnight. Younger politicians suddenly entered the political arena after years of gerontocratic communist leadership. Across all post-­ communist countries, former political dissidents entered politics, although in most cases, their political presence was rather short term (Semenova et al. 2014a, p. 287). In many CEE countries, the absence of (communist) political experience was considered not a flaw but an electoral and moral advantage. Another crucial feature of CEE countries is that many of them opted for a semi-­presidential system (i.e., a system with dual executives) instead of a parliamentary system. The existence of a directly elected president has had various consequences. First, cabinets in semi-­presidential countries have been found to be less stable than those in parliamentary countries because of a high degree of intra-­executive conflicts between the president and the prime minister (Protsyk 2006). Second, in contrast to most presidents in Western Europe, East European presidents are vested with greater authority, often having the (usually shared) discretion to dismiss cabinets (e.g., in Russia) or even to appoint ministers (e.g., in Poland under the Small Constitution from 1991 until 1997). Greater presidential authority in CEE has been associated with increased presidential activism with regard to cabinet formation. More specifically, Tavits (2009) has argued that the proportion of non-­partisan ministers (used as a proxy for presidential activism) is higher under directly elected presidents. Political party systems in post-­communist countries have also differed from their Western European counterparts. First, political parties in the CEE countries have not developed along strong societal cleavages, as was the case in Western Europe (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). After the collapse of communism, only the communist successor parties possessed nationwide territorial party organizations (Bielasiak 1997, p. 37). Party systems in CEE countries were highly fractionalized, and political parties—highly unstable (Kreuzer and Pettai 2003; Sikk 2005). The level of genuine party activism among the general population was rather low (Keman and Müller-Rommel 2012, pp. 7–8), and as a result the supply of candidates for party positions was limited. Finally, none of the CEE countries could rely on experience in party government. Under communism, the absolute power of the Communist Party produced an extreme form of party government. Since the fall of communism, one-­party majority cabinets have been rather rare, while cabinets built on coalitions of at least two parties have been the norm. Parliamentary parties have therefore lacked experience in coalition formation, in reaching coalition agreements, and in selecting candidates for cabinet positions. Overall, former communist countries provided rather unfavorable environments for adopting Western-­style party governments. After the collapse of communism, in terms of the demand side of cabinet recruitment, the market size (i.e., the number of ministerial positions) increased slightly compared to the size of communist cabinets in the early 1990s (Lane and Ross 1994). But where ministerial selection principles have changed the most was the supply side.

162   Elena Semenova Political amateurs (i.e., candidates without any political experience) were preferred by the general population (particularly during transition). Yet what the emerging political parties needed were experienced and party-­affiliated candidates who could help them to secure influence through prestigious political appointments (particularly cabinet positions). For their part, powerful presidents sought to realize their policy preferences by either discretionally recruiting or promoting non-­partisan experts to cabinets. These opposing demands have generated different types of candidates for ministerial positions in CEE countries and broken the mold of the Western European model. In this chapter, I will examine which principles of ministerial recruitment have been dominant in the CEE countries and analyze the recruitment and careers of ministers with respect to their political and occupational profiles, portfolios, and cabinet tenure. A better understanding of the principles of ministerial selection as they are applied in the former communist countries of CEE is important for comparative studies focused on party government, cabinet stability, and presidential activism beyond the region.

Operationalization and data This analysis is based on the biographical information on 1,970 ministers from 63 cabinets. The data set encompasses the years 1991 to 2009. It includes information from 11 post-­communist EU member countries: the four Visegrád countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia); three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania); and four South East European countries (Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Romania). The selection of the sample follows a most similar cases design, including all new democracies that have managed to join the EU. The data set also includes information on two post-­Soviet countries without any immediate prospects for the EU membership—Ukraine and Moldova. Out of the sample, five countries (Estonia, Czech Republic, Latvia, Hungary, and Slovakia until 2000) have had parliamentary systems, while the remainder can be classified as semi-­presidential systems with a directly elected president and cabinets that report to the parliament (Elgie 1999, p. 13). Finally, in all of the selected countries, the cabinets have been or were appointed by the winning political parties, often in the form of coalitions. The countries differ, however, in the power of their parliaments (Fish and Kroenig 2009) and the powers of their presidents (Doyle and Elgie 2016). The data were collected by national experts within the framework of the EurElite project, which primarily investigated the patterns of parliamentary recruitment in Western and Eastern European countries (Best and Cotta 2000; Semenova et al. 2014b). The author would like to thank all CEE country experts for providing data on ministerial selection within the EurElite project (principal investigators: Heinrich Best and Maurizio Cotta; coordination: Michael Edinger). The structure of the data sets was identical for each country and is based on the common code book. Each data set includes variables covering the ministers’ social and occupational profiles, political experience, career paths, and major post-­cabinet positions (e.g., positions in the national parliament).

Farewell to the party elites?   163

Institutional framework In this section, I will examine the aspects of the institutional frameworks most important for cabinet formation and ministerial selection (i.e., the power of the parliament, the constitutional rules for cabinet formation and dismissal, the power of the president, and party systems). In most of the CEE countries analyzed in this chapter, the position of the parliament within the political system is a powerful one. Most CEE parliaments have received a high Parliamentary Power Index score of least 0.7 (most powerful parliaments receive the value of 1), with the Czech and Ukrainian parliaments as outliers (with scores of 0.81 and 0.59, respectively). In half of all countries examined, national parliamentarians are allowed to hold cabinet positions. This is the norm in parliamentary countries, with some exceptions. For example, the Slovakian and Estonian constitutions stipulate the “sleeping mandate”—in other words, the right to re-­assume a parliamentary mandate after serving in the cabinet (Table 10.2). Prime ministers (e.g., the Czech Prime Minister Stanislav Gross, 2004–2005) have sometimes forced their cabinet members to resign from parliament in order to focus entirely on their cabinet activities. In most CEE countries, the constitutional rules for cabinet formation stipulate that the candidacy of the PM should be formally proposed by the president of the country and requires the approval of the national parliament. In Slovenia, Moldova, and Croatia, the candidacy of the PM is proposed by the parliament. In some countries, when the PM candidacy fails to receive parliamentary support (as has occurred at least twice in Estonia and the Czech Republic and once in Poland), the right to nominate a PM is transferred from the president to the parliament. If the parliamentary nominated PM fails to form a government, early parliamentary elections will be held. In addition to the appointment of the PM, some constitutions specify the approval of individual ministers. In Estonia and the Czech Republic, for instance, the PM candidate must first have the cabinet approved by the parliament followed by the president. In Lithuania, however, the PM must only present the cabinet to the parliament after presidential approval. The PM’s ability to restructure the government has been limited in most cases. In Baltic countries, any changes to the cabinet structure can be made only via legislation. According to the Lithuanian Constitution, if more than half of all ministers of the cabinet have been changed, the government must once again receive approval from the parliament. In some countries (e.g., in Estonia and Ukraine), the PM can appoint ministers without portfolio at his or her discretion; this is not allowed in Lithuania, where ministers must be the heads of specific ministries. The constitutional rules in all of the countries of CEE allow for the dismissal of both the entire cabinet and individual ministers. Among these provisions, the constitutional rules regulating the vote of no confidence are the most prominent. In order to initiate a vote of no confidence, e.g., at least one-­fifth of Estonian MPs—a simple majority of the Lithuanian MPs, or an absolute majority of

164   Elena Semenova Czech MPs—must support this proposal. In Latvia, there is no official threshold for initiating a vote of no confidence. A vote of no confidence or the resignation of the PM can lead to the dismissal of an entire cabinet. Most CEE constitutions also allow a vote of no confidence for individual ministers (Table 10.1). Most new EU member states have adopted a semi-­presidential system of government, which combines the prime minister, selected by the winning parliamentary parties, and a directly elected president. Directly elected presidents are often considered more powerful than their indirectly elected colleagues (Tavits 2009). Using the Presidential Power Index by Doyle and Elgie (2016), the average score index of directly elected presidents in new EU member states is higher compared to that of indirectly elected presidents (the average scores of the each is 0.21 and 0.18, respectively). However, there is considerable variation among countries with directly and indirectly elected presidents with regard to the degree of presidential power. For example, the power of indirectly elected presidents in Hungary is comparable to that of their directly elected counterparts in Lithuania (Table 10.1). From the party-­specific factors affecting the selection of ministers in CEE cabinets, two indicators will be examined. The first is the degree of fractionalization of parliaments measured by the indicator Effective Number of Parties (Laakso and Taagepera 1979). The literature on cabinet stability has shown that highly fractionalized parliaments tend to produce highly fractionalized and short­lived cabinets (Warwick 1994), which in turn negatively impact the duration of ministerial careers (Huber and Martinez-­Gallardo 2008). The fractionalization of most CEE parliaments has been rather moderate: the average Effective Number of Parties for all of the CEE is four (Table 10.1). The most fractionalized CEE parliaments have been in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, and their cabinets have also reflected this fractionalization. For example, cabinets in Latvia, Slovenia, and Slovakia normally include members of three parties, whereas on average, CEE cabinets have been formed by two parties, as has also been the case in most Western European countries (Saalfeld 2010). In general, this description of institutional frameworks identifies the major selectorates for cabinet positions in CEE countries i.e., political parties, the presidents, and the prime ministers. In the following sections, I will examine whether the expectations derived from these institutional rules and the literature on party government about the importance of party and parliamentary experience for cabinet candidates are fulfilled in CEE cabinets.

Ministerial recruitment in 13 Central European and Eastern European countries An analysis of the ministerial recruitment of all democratically appointed cabinets in CEE countries reveals that like their Western European counterparts (De Winter 1991, p.  44), national parliaments in CEE countries are the major springboards to cabinet positions (Table 10.2). Approximately 40 percent of all CEE ministers have been recruited from national parliaments. This recruitment

Parliamentary factors Parliamentary Power Index

HU

7.3 (3.5) 2.8 (1.5)

0.75 4.3 (1.7) 2.2 (0.7)

0.75

Yes No 0.24 0.28 (0.1) (0.0) No No Yes –

PL

6.2 (1.3) 3.3 (0.9)

0.72

Yes 0.11 (0.1) Yes Yes

SK

6.6 (1.3) 2.4 (0.8)

0.75

No 0.18 (0.0) Yes Yes

EE

5.7 (1.6) 2.4 (1.2)

0.78

Yes 0.28 (0.0) No Yes

LT

7.6 (1.2) 3.6 (0.9)

0.78

No 0.05 (0.1) No Yes

LA

BG

SI

4.2 (0.4) 2.6 (1.9)

0.78

4.1 (0.7) 1.3 (0.9)

0.78

6.1 (1.1) 3.5 (0.7)

0.75

Yes Yes Yes 0.31 0.16 0.12 (0.2) (0.1) (0.0) Yes Yes – Yes – –

HR

4.8 (1.5) 2.7 (1.6)

0.72

Yes 0.25 (0.0) No No

RO

4.0 (0.9) –

0.75

No 0.26 (0.1) Yes No

MD

–

–

0.59

Yes 0.40 (0.1) Yes Yes

UA

Notes Czech Republic (CZ), Hungary (HU), Poland (PL), Slovakia (SK), Estonia (EE), Latvia (LA), Lithuania (LT), Croatia (HR), Bulgaria (BG), Slovenia (SI), Romania (RO), Ukraine (UA), and Moldova (MD). PrPI (Presidential Power Index), from Doyle and Elgie (2016); PPI (Parliamentary Powers Index, 2007), from Fish and Kroenig (2009); Effective number of parties and Number of coalition parties, the standard deviation is in brackets. * Since 2013, the president of the Czech Republic is elected directly. Since 1999, the president of Slovakia is elected directly. Since 2000, the president of Moldova is elected indirectly.

Source: author’s own classification and calculations.

Number of coalition partners (mean)

4.9 (1.0) 2.3 (1.2)

0.81

Incompatibility (restrictions) Individual no confidence vote for ministers

Party system factors Effective number of parties (mean)

No 0.21 (0.1) Yes No

Constitutional rules Directly elected president* Presidential Power Index (PrPI)

CZ

Table 10.1 Institutional frameworks of the CEE countries

166   Elena Semenova pipeline from the parliament to the cabinet is a standard feature of parliamentary countries that is best described as the chain of delegation (Strom et al. 2008). As in the case of any relations between the principal and the agent, the selection of ministers involves the “agency problem,” where the lack of information about the agent’s intentions and behavior creates the need for oversight of that agent. While selecting ministers, the principals (in this case the prime minister and political parties) may decrease the likelihood of the agency problem by recruiting candidates to cabinet positions who have undergone an extensive ex ante screening. In Western European countries, parliaments are used as a platform for such screening because the principals have time and a wide selection of candidates to choose from. At the same time, the candidates have opportunities to gain political experience and to prove their party loyalty. Analyses of Western European ministers have shown that ministers with parliamentary experience survive longer in their positions compared to ministers without such experience (Berlinski et al. 2007; Huber and Martinez-­Gallardo 2008). In post-­communist countries as well, parliamentary tenure is an implicit expectation for a cabinet appointment. As our data set shows, on average, CEE cabinet appointees entered their positions after one legislative term. In Latvia and Estonia, politically experienced candidates tended to become cabinet ministers after only 2 years in parliament. Some candidates, however, managed to become ministers without any parliamentary tenure: approximately 9 percent of the ministers in our study declined their first parliamentary mandate and aimed instead for cabinet positions (Table 10.2). Our study showed that positions in regional parliaments or in the European Parliament had no apparent value as springboards to cabinet positions at the national level. We found that the second-­most common previous experience among cabinet members in CEE countries was in party leadership (Table 10.2). The high proportion of ministers who had such positions before their recruitment (almost 30 percent) was unexpected considering the overall instability of the party landscape in CEE countries (Table 10.1). Apparently, the instability of party systems is advantageous to both leaders of established parties and political entrepreneurs (i.e., leaders of genuinely new parties) who are aiming for higher political positions. For all party organizations, however, holding a leadership position at the national level increased one’s chances of becoming a cabinet minister (Table 10.3). This result underlines that the involvement in national political networks is a crucial factor in being promoted to ministerial positions in CEE countries. Local elective positions are the third-­most common type of political experience (Table 10.2). Approximately 35 percent of Ukrainian ministers held local positions, the highest proportion among all CEE ministers. Local positions are often used as an instrument for protecting political careers from the volatile preferences of voters, especially where the laws allow politicians to hold several positions. In our data, approximately 17 percent of cabinet candidates were drawn from within ministries, particularly those at the national level. As in Western European countries, junior ministerial and cabinet careers tend to run on separate tracks in CEE countries (Table 10.2). The only exception to this pattern is the

40 19 0 31 n.a. 1 39 110

National MP (deputy or senator)** With parliamentary experience Appointed to cabinet during MP’s first term European Parliament deputy Party leading positions (national level) Minister in a regional executive Junior minister No prior political experience N*** 35 10 0 24 n.a. – 52 133

20 n.a.

LT

56 5 0 36 n.a. 6 32 129

26 n.a.

LV

46 11 2 33 8 13 39 214

10 8

PL

39 3 0 22 2 4 40 112

16 3

SK

Notes Multiple codings are possible, as one person may have gained various experiences. n.a. not applicable * Referred to the year of the first democratically formed government in each country. ** The categories are mutually exclusive. *** Total number of individuals appointed.

Source: Semenova (2018) and author’s own calculations.

31 n.a.

Mayor or local councillor Regional deputy or councillor

EE

44 8 0 22 n.a. – 46 138

20 n.a.

CZ

46 16 0 41 n.a. 28 36 138

20 n.a.

HU

65 3 0 27 n.a. 0 66 112

17 n.a.

SK

35 13 2 37 n.a. 29 46 230

12 n.a.

RO

34 7 0 15 n.a. 10 55 130

26 n.a.

HR

36 10 0 21 n.a. – 51 154

11 n.a.

BG

Table 10.2 Political background of all first-time ministers in democratic cabinets, 1991/1992/1993*–2009 (percent)

18 14 2 12 n.a. – 66 106

3 n.a

SI

41 2 n.a. 38 0 47 46 184

35 0

UA

24 5 n.a. 26 n.a. 25 65 140

5 n.a.

MD

40 9 1 29 5 17 47  –

18 6

Mean

168   Elena Semenova Ukrainian cabinet, for which the position of junior minister is a crucial springboard to the national cabinet. In this respect, the recruitment strategy applied by the Ukrainian cabinet is similar to that of the cabinet in the Russian Federation (Semenova 2015). The most striking result in our findings, however, is that approximately half of all CEE ministers were appointed to cabinets without any previous party or parliamentary experience: in other words, they were political outsiders (Table 10.2). The outliers were the cabinets of Slovakia, Slovenia, and Moldova (approximately 66 percent of whose members are outsiders) as well as those of Latvia (32 percent of whose ministers are outsiders). This finding contradicts the expectations derived from the institutional framework of these countries mentioned above (refer to the section of institutional framework). By using the demand-­supply model of political recruitment (Norris 1997), I will examine the recruitment of ministers without party and parliamentary experience in detail— in particular the demand side (who recruits outsider ministers, when, and why) and the supply side of this recruitment (who are these outsider ministers, and what do they do in cabinets).

Gradual professionalization among CEE cabinet ministers: testing a hypothesis The fall of communism resulted in many suddenly vacant political positions. This development resulted from both generational changes and lustration, or the exclusion of former communists from political careers in the new regime. The regime changes provided new opportunities for candidates with little to no political experience to enter national politics. My hypothesis that the highest proportion of outsider ministers would be found in cabinets in the early 1990s, when post-­communist countries transitioned to democracy, was indeed confirmed: in the early to mid-­1990s, approximately 50 percent of all ministers in the countries included in our data set were political outsiders. Using the concept of professionalization (Best and Cotta 2000), I anticipated that the gradual democratization of post-­communist countries would lead their parliaments to become more institutionalized and professionalized. Moreover, party systems would presumably experience stabilization and become less volatile in terms of their ideology and organization. As a consequence, a growing proportion of politically experienced ministers would be recruited over time (Semenova 2018). The empirical results have shown a more complicated picture than the expected gradual professionalization. In a cross-­country comparison, four major patterns of professionalization emerged. The first pattern is the gradual professionalization of cabinet ministers, as in the case of Estonian, Lithuanian, Croatian, and Bulgarian cabinets, to which an increasing proportion of politically experienced ministers has been recruited over time. The second pattern can be found in Latvia, Slovakia, and Hungary, where cabinets gradually professionalized until the early 2000s, at which point increasing numbers of outsider

Farewell to the party elites?   169 ministers again began to be appointed. The third pattern is that of increasing de-­ professionalization, as shown by the Czech and Slovak cabinets, in which the number of outsider ministers has continually increased, particularly in the 2000s. Finally, the fourth pattern is that of volatile professionalization; in Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova, no clear trend has emerged in the appointment of outsiders to cabinet positions. The political professionalization hypothesis could therefore only be partly confirmed. In CEE cabinets, the political control of parties over cabinet appointments slightly increased during the 1990s and the early 2000s but has been decreasing ever since.

The demand side: structural characteristics of the recruitment of outsiders It is evident that the recruitment of outsider ministers is only partly explained by the gradual professionalization among post-­communist cabinet ministers. By looking at the demand and supply sides of the selection process, I aim to identify which other factors contribute to the establishment of such recruitment pattern. In this section, I will examine the demand side of the process of the ministerial selection (i.e., who recruits outsider ministers, when and why). Are outsider ministers more prone to be appointed to specific types of cabinets or under specific circumstances? I will examine the constitutional, cabinet-­specific, and parliamentary factors that may increase the propensity to appoint outsiders to cabinet positions. The major constitutional feature expected to influence the recruitment of outsider ministers to CEE cabinets is the type of political system. As elaborated above, in parliamentary systems, the major selectorates for the ministers are the prime minister and political parties, and the ministerial selection is subject to party control. However, some CEE countries have opted for a semi-­presidential political system. In such systems, the selection of ministers is under the control of not only the prime minister and party but also the president. The president actively intervenes in this process either because he possesses discretionary powers to appoint some ministers (e.g., the minister of foreign affairs in Ukraine) or because he has an informal political monopoly over ministerial appointments (e.g., Tudjman in Croatia; Semenova and Dowding 2017). Based on these differences between parliamentary and semi-­presidential systems, outsider ministers should be more common in semi-­presidential countries. Empirically, this assumption was indeed supported. Approximately 73 percent of all outsider ministers were recruited to cabinets in semi-­presidential countries. Regarding cabinet-­specific factors, the type of government is an important predictor for the proportion of outsider ministers recruited (Semenova 2018). Outsider ministers would be expected to dominate caretaker governments because of the short-­term duration of such cabinets and their specific functions limited to the maintenance of government functioning. Compared to caretaker cabinets, minority cabinets would be expected to include fewer outsider

170   Elena Semenova ministers because the fragility of a government without majority support in parliament is extremely high, and governing parties would want to minimize the probability of the agency problem that would emerge from the recruitment of outsiders to cabinet positions. In majority cabinets, the PMs enjoy parliamentary support and have more power to replace ministers, particularly from the prime minister’s party (Huber and Martinez-­Gallardo 2008). They therefore have more freedom to recruit outsiders. In the case of CEE cabinets, these expectations were largely confirmed. Approximately 57 percent of all ministers recruited to majority cabinets were political outsiders; in contrast, only 20 percent of ministers recruited to minority cabinets had no parliamentary or party leadership experience. As expected, outsider ministers were the major recruitment pool for caretaker cabinets (approximately 75 percent of all ministers in such cabinets). One interesting feature of certain CEE countries is the ability of presidents not only to form cabinets but also to appoint some ministers discretionally (e.g., in pre-­1997 Poland and Ukraine). More than half of all ministers in such cabinets are political outsiders; this finding supports our hypothesis about the increased presence of outsiders in semi-­presidential cabinets. Parliamentary factors may also increase the probability of recruiting outsider ministers. Coalition research identified that strongly fractionalized parliaments tend to produce highly heterogeneous coalitions (Warwick 1994). The higher the number of coalition partners, the greater the probability of intra- and inter-­party conflicts, which increase the probability that such cabinets will break down. I expected heterogeneous coalitions to include more outsider ministers because each appointed outsider candidate potentially decreases conflicts among coalition partners, in particular if that outsider minister is appointed to lead a policy area that provokes many inter-­party conflicts. In order to prove this assumption, I tested the effects of the Effective Number of Parties as well as the number of coalition partners on the proportion of political outsiders in CEE cabinets. Both variables, however, failed to reach the level of statistical significance. In addition, in the Visegrád and Baltic countries, the cabinets formed by leftist parties tended to include more outsider ministers than the cabinets with the dominance of right-­wing parties, although this relationship was also statistically insignificant (Semenova 2018). As indicated above, constitutional and cabinet factors are the strongest predictors of the presence of outsider ministers in CEE governments. Moreover, the recruitment of outsider ministers may be subject to the preferences of the prime minister as well as the political situation surrounding the formation of the cabinet. Now that we have accounted for the demand for outsiders in the cabinet recruitment process, we turn to the supply side to answer the question of who these outside ministers are, where they come from, and what kinds of positions they are chosen for.

Farewell to the party elites?   171

The supply side: the profiles of political outsiders Theoretically, outsider ministers may possess specific areas of expertise or specific qualifications that are needed for the fulfillment of ministerial responsibilities and are therefore valued by the selectorates. There are two sources of expertise that may be considered important for a cabinet position. The first is based on the candidates’ educational qualifications (e.g., their degrees, academic titles, or specific training). The second is based on their occupational expertise. Both sources will be examined below. In CEE cabinets, outsider ministers tend to be highly qualified and predominantly hold degrees in the technical and natural sciences (Table 10.3). Considering the fact that many social sciences were either underdeveloped or simply forbidden during communism, it comes as no surprise that approximately 30 percent of outsider ministers studied economics and social sciences. Approximately 19 percent of outsider ministers were educated in law. The distribution of educational degrees possessed by outsider ministers is similar to that of politically experienced ministers and most parliamentarians in CEE countries (Semenova et al. 2014a, pp. 288–289). The major difference in educational qualifications between outsider and politically experienced ministers is the high proportion of outsider ministers holding PhDs (Semenova 2018). In particular, the cabinets in the Visegrád countries tend to recruit outsider ministers with doctorates (Table 10.3). These educational achievements are also reflected in the higher age of political outsiders compared to the ages of politically experienced ministers (48 and 46 years, respectively). In addition to being highly educated, most outsider ministers were drawn from positions of high social and economic prestige, in particular from high-­ranking civil service, management of large enterprises, and universities (Table 10.3). This selection pattern partly corresponds to the general development of parliamentary representation in CEE countries, with increasing proportions of civil servants and managers among legislators (Semenova et al. 2014a, pp. 290–292). The dominance of each occupational group, however, has varied across CEE cabinets. While the average proportion of high-­ranking civil servants in CEE countries was as high as 38 percent, in non-­EU post-­Soviet countries (i.e., in Moldova and Ukraine), approximately 60 percent to 70 percent of all outsider ministers were drawn from this occupational group. Russian cabinets also include a comparable proportion of high-­ranking bureaucrats (Semenova 2015); this feature originated in the Soviet tradition of executive recruitment. Almost 18 percent of outsider ministers were drawn from the sphere of university education. Among CEE countries, Slovenian and Estonian cabinets have included the highest proportion of members from the educated elite (i.e., professors and presidents of universities) among outsider ministers (41 percent and 33 percent respectively). In addition, managers and owners of large enterprises comprised approximately 17 percent of outsider ministers, with Hungary recruiting the largest proportion among CEE cabinets of outsider ministers with business backgrounds (36 percent).

14 50 97 57 19 33 34 18 20 41 2 12 25 61

Female Mean age (at first cabinet recruitment) University graduates … with a PhD degree

Academic field* Law Economics, social sciences Natural sciences, engineering, architecture, medicine Humanities

Occupation Business (managers) Higher civil servant Lawyer Teacher, lecturer, professor Others N 25 17 8 33 17 43

24 27 37 12

12 43 100 12

EE

16 49 3 10 22 69

14 30 57 7

4 48 100 42

LT

17 29 5 15 34 41

18 31 53 18

22 42 100 22

LV

17 30 5 27 21 84

19 40 32 12

17 51 100 59

PL

36 20 6 26 12 50

28 41 39 12

6 52 98 82

HU

Note * Percentages may add up to more than 100% as some ministers have two or more university degrees.

Source: Semenova (2018) and author’s own calculations.

CZ

Ministers without political background

12 37 2 26 23 68

22 33 41 25

13 47 100 46

HR

13 47 1 10 29 79

22 27 47 7

11 50 99 44

BG

18 49 3 18 12 105

15 25 50 12

7 49 99 45

RO

12 27 0 41 20 69

14 56 26 4

16 48 98 48

SI

12 73 0 10 5 85

13 28 63 10

1 48 100 19

UA

Table 10.3 Selected socio-demographic characteristics of first-time OUTSIDER ministers, 1991/1992/1993–2009 (percent)

17 57 2 7 17 91

15 25 42 19

10 46 100 22

MD

18 2 9 16 55 44

18 23 50 16

11 47 100 47

SK

17 38 3 18 24  –

19 32 46 15

11 48 99 38

Mean

Farewell to the party elites?   173 It is worth mentioning that in contrast to Western European cabinets (Thiébault 1991, p. 22), legal professionals are rarely recruited to CEE cabinets in general; lawyers account for less than 2 percent of all outsider ministers. Another interesting finding is that in contrast to Western European cabinets, in which the ministry of defense is usually led by a civilian minister, these positions in CEE cabinets are usually occupied by professional military officers, who also tend to be political outsiders. Since the mid-­1990s, women have increasingly found their way into post-­ communist national parliaments (Semenova et al. 2014a, pp. 288–289), although they are still rarely appointed as members of national cabinets. Female ministers have accounted for 10 percent of all ministers recruited since 1990 across CEE countries. Women who become ministers have usually achieved this position through nonpolitical tracks: they are typically drawn from high-­level civil service (64 percent) and management of large enterprises (58 percent). The underrepresentation of women in CEE parliaments was explained by the lower activity of women in party organizations as well as the barriers at the stage of nomination and election that have been observed in the case of new democracies (Matland and Montgomery 2003). Where the parliamentary route to national cabinet appointments is hindered, women often prefer to move to the executive branch and specialize in the area that corresponds to a particular ministry. Highly skilled female bureaucrats have good chances of being recruited to cabinets in CEE countries. The recruitment patterns of political outsiders to cabinet positions reveal that the selectorates (i.e., the prime minister, the president, and political parties) value the outsiders’ expertise and qualifications. Outsiders are highly educated and are generally drawn from professions that enjoy high social prestige.

The supply side: portfolios of outsiders The highly stable number of outsider ministers recruited to CEE cabinets challenges existing coalition research, according to which the distribution of portfolios in cabinets follows the ideological, proportional (Gamson’s law), and salience principles. Gamson’s law, according to which parties receive the number of portfolios in a given cabinet that is proportional to their share of parliamentary seats (Falcó-Gimeno and Indridason 2013), is automatically violated by the recruitment of outsider ministers, most of whom are also non-­ partisan (approximately 53 percent). Similarly, the recruitment of non-­partisan outsiders contravenes the ideological principle of portfolio allocation, according to which parties prefer portfolios that enable them to realize their ideological preferences—for example, social democratic parties usually lead ministries of social affairs (Bäck et al. 2011). In both cases, any portfolio given to a non-­ partisan outsider minister is one payoff fewer for the parties that participate in the governing coalition. Whether the salience principle of portfolio distribution (Browne and Feste 1975; Warwick and Druckman 2001) is also violated because of the recruitment

174   Elena Semenova of outsider ministers to CEE cabinets is another issue. Based on expert surveys, Druckman and Roberts (2008) have argued that the most desirable portfolios in CEE countries are prime ministerial and vice-­prime ministerial positions, followed by the ministries of defense, the interior, foreign affairs, finance, and justice. Coalition research suggests that independently from their ideological orientations, all parties prefer to hold one of these most salient portfolios because of their redistributive resources. The recruitment of outsider ministers to the most salient portfolios points to the failure of party government to establish control over cabinet positions. This hypothesis was only partly confirmed. The most prestigious cabinet portfolios (i.e., that of the PM and the vice-­PM) were assigned very rarely to outsider ministers, except in the case of interim governments or governments with strong party conflicts. However, outsiders were often assigned to other prestigious portfolios. In particular, portfolios in the areas of finance and the economy were usually occupied by outsider ministers (Table 10.4). Moreover, outsider ministers were also often assigned to portfolios of foreign affairs, defense, justice, and the interior. A cross-­country analysis of portfolio distribution to outsiders allows us to distinguish three major patterns. The first is the continuing dominance of outsider minsters over virtually all salient portfolios (foreign affairs, defense, justice, finance, and the interior) in Ukrainian, Moldavian, Slovenian, and Croatian cabinets. The second pattern is the dominance of outsider ministers (usually economists and lawyers) over the portfolios of finance/economy and justice; this can be found in the cabinets of Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. The third pattern is the dominance of outsider ministers over portfolios associated with external and internal security (i.e., foreign affairs, defense, and the interior), as shown in the cases of the Czech, Lithuanian, Estonian, Slovakian, and Romanian cabinets. The data on the distribution of less prestigious portfolios showed that outsider ministers usually held positions of ministers without portfolio and ministers for special purposes. In addition, portfolios related to welfare, education, culture, agriculture, and industry were often assigned to outsider ministers (Table 10.4). In most aforementioned cases, outsiders were recruited because of their expertise in the respective policy areas: doctors were appointed to the ministry of health; presidents of universities were appointed to the ministry of science; theater managers were appointed to the ministry of culture; and engineers were appointed to the ministries of transport and industry. In sum, the assignment of outsider ministers to both more prestigious and less prestigious portfolios usually followed the performance-­based principle of portfolio allocation (i.e., the assignment of outsiders to portfolios in which they could best perform; Semenova 2018). This very pragmatic and technocratic principle of ministerial recruitment was exhibited by most former post-­communist cabinets.

(24) (57) 39 56 59 (43) 47 47 63

Economy and Finance Justice Welfare (Social Affairs, Health, Family) Education, Science, and Culture Defense and Foreign Affairs The Interior, Regional Affairs Agriculture, Environment Transport, Construction/Housing/Planning** N

41 (40) (29) 60 (12) 55 (14) 83 43

EE

Notes * Excluding Prime Ministers and ministers without portfolio. ** Percentages in brackets: few cases.

Source: author’s own calculations.

CZ

Ministries 71 (29) 59 53 (20) 50 53 53 69

LT 20 (33) 62 40 (25) (8) 40 0 41

LV 60 (29) 33 50 48 (47) (19) 48 86

PL 36 71 46 33 41 50 (30) 39 44

SK 65 (57) 33 36 (30) (14) 28 31 50

HU

BG

54 57 (63) 70 60 67 (60) 47 (50) (29) (50) (36) (100) 66 70 62 67 79

HR

Table 10.4 First-time OUTSIDER ministers in different types of portfolios, 1991/1992/1993–2009 (percent)*

46 (27) 32 52 55 (50) 63 53 105

RO

UA 71 61 (100) (20) 79 36 41 54 57 90 75 (67) (56) 19 (57) (56) 69 85

SI

81 (63) 56 69 82 (100) (64) 64 91

MD

53 48 46 50 45 49 41 53  –

Mean

176   Elena Semenova

The supply side: career trajectories of outsider ministers Outsider ministers are numerous and tend to occupy specific types of portfolios. The question arises as to whether they also tend to remain in cabinets or whether they suffer an increased risk of de-­selection. This question will be answered in the following section by analyzing both the movements of outsiders across different portfolios and the overall duration of their ministerial careers. The analysis of movements across portfolios aims to prove our finding that the expertise of outsider ministers is what the selectorates value most about them. If this is indeed the case, the outsiders will hold the same portfolio in each cabinet to which they are appointed. If, however, there are some regular features in the movements of outsiders across portfolios, additional factors (e.g., the personal loyalty to the principal) may be at work in their appointments. According to the data, the mobility of outsiders was largely restricted. Only 24 percent of outsider ministers changed portfolios either within the same cabinet (i.e., in the case of restructuring of the cabinet) or in consecutive cabinets. Among politically experienced ministers, the proportion of those who changed portfolios was as high as 30 percent. In other words, the difference in mobility between insider and outsider ministers was not substantial. The second aspect of career trajectories is the duration of outsider ministers’ careers within their ministries. Research on ministerial stability discovered that a long ministerial tenure can be used as a proxy for the performance of a minister in office (i.e., the better a minister performs, the longer this minister will stay in the cabinet; Berlinski et al. 2010). However, the performance of outsider ministers is related to but not determined by their expertise because in politics, the ability to navigate among various (often conflictual) party and personal interests is just as important as competence. Compared to their politically experienced colleagues, outsider ministers had significantly shorter tenures. The survival analysis of the ministerial tenures in CEE countries revealed that the hazard rates for politically experienced ministers were approximately 20 percent lower than for outsider ministers (p < 0.001). This finding is rather unexpected considering the numerous outsider ministers in CEE cabinets. The differences in ministerial tenure between outsider ministers and politically experienced ministers have varied across the countries studied. In three Visegrád countries (i.e., in the Czech, Slovakian, and Polish cabinets) and in Estonia, the chances to remain in the cabinet (in months) for outsider ministers are significantly lower than the chances of their politically experienced colleagues (Semenova 2018). In Hungary and Bulgaria, the hazard rates for outsider ministers were also higher than for ministers with political experience (exp(B) = 1.41, p