Discuss the importance of power elite' in democracy. (UPSC CSE Mains 2016 - Sociology, Paper 1)
- The term “power elite” was minted by Charles Wright Mills in his book” the Power Elites” 1956. In political and theory, power elites consider a small group of people who control a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, and access to decision-making of global consequence.
- The relationship between the democratic state and its elites is a matter of some controversy. The debate has undergone several vicissitudes since the “classical elitists” began it in the late nineteenth century. The role of elites within democratic governments presents democratic theorists with one of their thorniest problems.
- On the one hand, democracies are based upon some type of political equality among citizens an equality which must be politically significant. On the other hand, wherever we look, we find political inequalities, sometimes great ones, within democracies.
- Democratic theorists have long held that there is a practical and theoretical problem concerning the place of elites within democratic politics. We cannot attain a balanced appreciation of the role elites play on political democracy until we appreciate the important distinction between democratic organization and a democratic polity. Largely interred in the inter-war years, it was resurrected by Wright Mills and others in the 1950sand given impetus by electoral studies and the “political behaviour” movement. There were some who saw elites and elitist tendencies as inimical of democracy and those who believed the two could quite easily be reconciled. Among the latter were the so-called “democratic elitists”.
- J.A. Schumpeter tries to make democracy and elitism compatible. His accounts on democratic elitism because he reasons that free elections introduce an element of competition among elites. He defines democratic elitism as a political method to arrive at political legislative and administrative decisions by placing in certain individuals the power to decide on all matters as a consequence of their successful arrival through people’s vote. Schumpeter believes that powerful social forces limit participation in politics and liberal democracy at the very best is a restrictive endeavour for selecting legitimacy through elections. Further, Schumpeter rejects the idea of common good in classical democratic theorists as misleading. He declares that the notion of common good is an unacceptable element of Democratic Theory and as opposed to the class of democratic theorists, he believes that decisions of non—democratic agencies may sometimes prove more acceptable to people than democratic decisions.
- People can be nothing more than the producers of government, a mechanism to select the men who are able to do the deciding. Hence he disputes the notion of the popular will as a social construct that has no rational basis. Popular will is manufactured and not a genuine popular will. It is a product and not the motive power for the political process.
- Democracy merely legitimises competition among government elites for he accepts the inevitability of hierarchy and considers the democratic process as a procedure or simply an institutional arrangement for reaching political decisions and not as an end in itself. He draws an analogy between policies and market behaviour where leaders compete for people’s vote.
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