SUMMARYThis paper presents an exploratory study that meant to contribute to the comprehension of the process of formation of Portuguese political elites groups, especially to enlightening if the individual elite status is due to exceptional abilities, assessed by its resilience's categories and professional and academical backgrounds or by "inheritance", due to favorable factors as family and social relationships -that may have induced to a state power type formation that may have led, as one of the major factors, to inequality and mischaracterization of the concept of Democracy itself and to its disbelief, reinforced by the growing corruption and therefore facilitator of populist, dictatorial and xenophobes models that it's urgent to reverse. Concomitantly, it is fundamental to promote resilience-related aspects and merit, to restore society's trust in the system, as WHO (2017) recently explained the importance of trust, measured by the absence of corruption in business and government, to happiness and therefore well-being.Keywords: Resilience, Democracy, Meritocracy, political, elites.
STATE OF ARTIn the field of elites, mostly to explore, we must go back to 1570, as Monteiro (1997) elucidated that the leadership local role was recognized, by means of monarchic Portuguese legislation, to belong to the "influent people of the lands", in 1603 to the "better of the places" (Orders), in 1618 to the "better of the lands", and in 1709 to the "people of better nobility", according them the "primary positions of the Republic" in the diverse villages of the kingdom, i.e., the honorable positions of sate councils and superior positions of orders. (Foi a própria legislação da monarquia portuguesa a reconhecer o papel de liderança local que cabia às «pessoas principais das terras» (1570), aos , 1997) Despite the importance of the subject, there is a clear lack of studies in the field of elites' formation and resilience in general. Folke (2016) enlightens, resilience thinking has been used as an organizing principle by communities to challenge the status quo and to design and shape alternative futures. He elucidated that the last 15 years have seen an explosion of resilience research, as a search on resilience, at Google Scholar, presented, February 2016, over 1.25 million hits, about a million of those concerned resilience and the environment. But searching, January 2018, for studies with resilient individuals, only 7 were emerged.With the actual state of the art of resilience we can understand that resilience is a multidimensional ability to cope with change and adversity and to bounce back, learning from adverse experience and mutable condition, allowing the fundamental process of evolving to well-being, as if adversity had been part of the process and not subject of resentment, frustration or denial, but an opportunity to grow. Resilience can be developed or reinforced, by the training of its categories, which are enlightened by Werner & Smith (1982) (2016): good temperament; selfesteem; self-confidence; self-effica...
