»Die Rolle von Eliten in demokratischen Transitionsprozessen und beim Zusammenbruch von Demokratien«. Stable democratic regimes depend heavily on the "consensual unity" of national elites. So long as elites remain disunified, political regimes are unstable, a condition which makes democratic transitions and democratic breakdowns merely temporary oscillations in the forms unstable regimes take. Disunity appears to be the generic condition of national elites, and disunity strongly tends to persist regardless of socioeconomic development and other changes in mass populations. The consensually unified elites that are necessary to stable democracies are created in only a few ways, two of the most important of which involve distinctive elite transformations. After elaborating this argument, we examine the relationship between elites and regimes in Western nation-states since they began to consolidate after 1500. We show that our approach makes good sense of the Western political record, that it does much to clarify prospects for stable democracies in developing societies today, and that it makes the increasingly elite-centered analysis of democratic transitions and breakdowns more systematic.
Efforts to reconeeptualize elite strueture and functioning in stable democracies, together with data from surveys of elite interaction networks in three demoeratie soeieties, suggest that the eonventional power elite, ruling class and pluralist perspeetives are only partly accurate and that fusing them in a more realistie model makes mueh sense. Using data from comparable surveys of national elites in the US, Australia and West Germany, we argue that the configurations of elite circles in these secieties reveal tight integration, as in the power elite and ruling dass models, together with representation of numerous, diverse groups, as in the pluralist model. We find comprehensive integration in eaeh of the three national elites, with a tunnel-like strueture of communieation networks that is inclusive of all sectors and heterogeneous in the soeial origins, attitudes and partyaffiliations of the several hundred most centrally loeated persons. We eontend that an informal interaction structure providing all major elite groups aeeess to decisionmaking is a precondition of any stable democracy.
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