We explore the possibility that the US political system can usefully be characterized as oligarchic. Using a material-based definition drawn from Aristotle, we argue that oligarchy is not inconsistent with democracy; that oligarchs need not occupy formal office or conspire together or even engage extensively in politics in order to prevail; that great wealth can provide both the resources and the motivation to exert potent political influence. Data on the US distributions of income and wealth are used to construct several Material Power Indices, which suggest that the wealthiest Americans may exert vastly greater political influence than average citizens and that a very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufficient power to dominate policy in certain key areas. A brief review of the literature suggests possible mechanisms by which such influence could occur, through lobbying, the electoral process, opinion shaping, and the US Constitution itself.T here is widespread agreement that the United States is a democracy. But is it possible that the US political system is also oligarchic? We believe that the concept of oligarchy can be fruitfully applied not only to places like Singapore, Colombia, Russia, and Indonesia, but also to the contemporary United States.Key to this belief is the fact that oligarchy and democracy are not mutually exclusive but rather can coexist comfortably-indeed, can be fused integrally-into governments that Aristotle conceived to be an "admixture of the two elements." 1 Moreover, the existence of oligarchy need not depend upon oligarchs' holding formal government positions (indirect influence is sufficient) or upon explicit coordination or cohesion among oligarchs. It need not be affected by the circulation of elites. It does not require extensive political engagement by oligarchs themselves. It is not subject to "canceling" effects from pluralistic struggles in which oligarchs compete with each other or with other major political forces. Oligarchy can exist with respect to certain limited but crucial policy issues at the same time that many other important issues are governed through pluralistic competition or even populistic democracy.One of the present authors, Winters, is completing an extensive study of oligarchy in various countries. Our purpose here is not to give a full theoretical or empirical account of the nature and workings of oligarchy, but merely to suggest that the concept helps illuminate important aspects of the contemporary US case. We believe that minority power is a fact of life in any complex society, with representative government changing the character and extent, but not the fact, of majority exclusion. On this point Robert Michels was right, even if his famous "iron law" muddles the most important aspects of oligarchy by focusing on organizational complexity rather than power. 2 Contrary to elite theory (and to a range of writings on oligarchy that are confused versions of elite theory), we argue that the concept of oligarchy ...
For centuries, oligarchs were viewed as empowered by wealth, an idea muddled by elite theory early in the twentieth century. The common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines them, empowers them and inherently exposes them to threats. The existential motive of all oligarchs is wealth defense. How they respond varies with the threats they confront, including how directly involved they are in supplying the coercion underlying all property claims and whether they act separately or collectively. These variations yield four types of oligarchy: warring, ruling, sultanistic and civil. Moreover, the rule of law problem in many societies is a matter of taming oligarchs. Cases studied in this book include the United States, ancient Athens and Rome, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, medieval Venice and Siena, mafia commissions in the United States and Italy, feuding Appalachian families and early chiefs cum oligarchs dating from 2300 BCE.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Cambridge University Press and Trustees of Princeton University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Politics. 420 WORLD POLITICS unpropertied struggled bitterly for generations to gain access to these exclusive representative bodies. But the victories, when won, were always partial: laborers and their allies never achieved full democratic control over society and all its resources but rather only managed to gain the opportunity to shape (in the limited sense of tinkering at the margins with profit differentials and other inducements) the climate within which private investors deployed their capital.3 Except in extraordinary moments, more direct and binding influence on how a society's investment capital should be allocated has remained elusive. For one, the very institution of private property precludes any such thing as "a society's investment capital." Instead, a small number of individuals control capital, and they happen to be grouped and protected along nation-state lines.The underlying ideology of capitalism maintains that far from being a source of tension, this arrangement of keeping the "economic government" strictly private is the best way to assure the prosperity and stability of the entire community.4 The reality, meanwhile, is that conflict is widespread. And for many postcolonial systems in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, even the partial sort of democracy achieved in advanced-industrial countries is far from assured.5 Workers struggle for the surplus against those who control the means of production.6As it turns out, communities and societies quite often are not well served by the investment activity of capital controllers.7 And even officials Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, among others at the Constitutional Convention, was that "political equality might conflict with political liberty." They "had been alarmed by the prospect that democracy, political equality, majority rule, and even political liberty itself would endanger the rights of property owners to preserve their property and use it as they chose" (p. 2). Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 3 Rudolf Goldscheid writes that "the masses which eventually acquired greater power in the State saw themselves cheated of their prize when they got not the rich State but the poor one." In the era of constitutional government "state and property became separated" for the first time in history. "The rising bourgeois classes wanted a poor State, a State depending for its revenue on their good graces, because these classes knew their own power to depend upon what the State did or did not have money for" (p. 205). staffing t...
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