Roberto Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Henry Jones Ford: Classical Insights and the Structure
of Contemporary American Politics
Author(s): Byron E. Shafer
Source: International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique, Vol.
12, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 185-218
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1601503
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PoliticalScienceReview(1991), Vol. 12, No. 3, 185-218
International
Roberto Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Henry
Jones Ford: Classical Insights and the Structure
of Contemporary American Politics
BYRON E. SHAFER
Historical analyses of prospects for democratization are used to
address the contours of contemporary American politics. Thus the "Iron
Law of Oligarchy" and associated propositions from Roberto Michels, the
"Circulation of Elites" and an associated framework from Vilfredo Pareto,
and the notion of "Party Efficiency" and its associated predictions from
Henry Jones Ford-all written at the turn of the century-are used to
address certain central and continuing descriptions of modern American
politics. Each of these writings makes its own contribution to revealing the
substantive character of that politics. Yet because the central empirical
between
point which unites all three analyses is the contemporary disjunction
political parties and public offices in the American context, the larger
contribution of such an exercise is to focus on a central question for
current-and future-American democracy: whether a satisfactory citizen
politics can be constructed in an effectively post-partisan era.
ABSTRACT.
Consequently, the question we have to discuss is not whether
ideal democracy is realizable, but rather to what point and in
what degree democracy is desirable, possible, and realizable at
a given moment. In the problem as thus stated, we recognize
the fundamental problem of politics as a science.
-Roberto Michels, 1962: 366
When a scientist comes upon an early and forgotten formulation, pauses to find it instructive, and thenhimselffollowsit up,
we have an authentic case of historical continuity of ideas,
despite the lapse of some years. But contrary to the story-book
version of scientific inquiry, this pattern seems to be infre-Robert K. Merton, 1968:16
quent.
0192-5121/91/03185-34 ? 1991InternationalPoliticalScienccAssociation
186
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
Historical
Insights and Contemporary
Writings
But to come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are
two very different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of
importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. (Alfred
North Whitehead, The Organization
of Thoughts,epigraph to Merton, 1968:1.)
Ideas to guide empirical research in political science can, at one end of the
continuum, come directly out of the public and collective debate about issues in
politics. Just as ideas can come, at the other end of the continuum, out of the private
and individual experience of the incipient investigator. Such ideas can be refined by
more or less direct progression, that is, by elucidation and elaboration. Or they can
be extended by idiosyncratic combination, a process often currently described as
"lateral thinking."
In principle, a return to historical texts, in search of contemporary insights, can
partake of each and all these characteristics. If this is all too infrequently the case in
practice, that is probably because works which have major theoretical contributions
to make to a scientific tradition are usually assumed to have become integratedintrinsic-to
that tradition. While works which have never yet had the apparent
potential to make such a contribution can reasonably be left to rest in peace, in a
sensible calculation of potential return on investment.
In any case, a deliberate return to early empirical theorizing by self-conscious
social scientists as a source of potential insights on currentAmerican politics could,
by extension, proceed in many ways. One simple and preliminary way to proceed,
however, is to take the central arguments of a smaller number of major, predecessor
facts"-of current
works, and confront these with the consensual parameters-"the
American politics.
Such an approach seeks immediate rewards by attempting to recast this
"consensual data" along the lines of a historical argument. Rewards can thus come
in two immediate ways. These contemporary perceptions can themselves be affirmed,
challenged, or refined by the historical framework. If they are not-if consensual
perceptions cannot even be mapped effectively into the historical framework-then
both those perceptions and that framework may be revised in the effort to explain
why this is so. Or, of course, either outcome may produce a third benefit, in the form
of empirical questions requiring subsequentanswers-and
thus subsequent research.
This approach, then, requires two elementary items. First, it requires a simple
summary body of contemporary political phenomena to be recast in this fashion.
Second, this approach requires an even smaller set of key historical texts, ideally with
thus, presumably, easily appliedstrong, central, and easily summarized-and
arguments.
Needless to say, only the most basic aspects of contemporary political phenomena
need to be consensual. Work on political parties, on governmental institutions, or on
the political order to which both contribute, can-and
always does-produce
numerous individual propositions for debate, and thus for further research. All that
is required here is a few, large, core perceptions to serve as "the data": the shift in
American political parties to a volunteer, activist base, for example; or the rise of
incumbency as the dominant explanation for electoral outcomes in Congress,
especially the House; or the coming, and institutionalization, of split partisan control
of national government.
Sources for historical insights on these contemporary perceptions are themselves
BYRONE. SHAFER
187
legion. Yet in a changing world perhaps best characterized through the spread of
their inevitably hopeful, and perpetually fraught,
incipient democracies-with
with fundamental arguments about democratization seem especially
prospects-works
relevant. Beyond that, in a world where the fragility of incipient democracies is their
most anxious and unsettling aspect, there may be particular grounds for turning to
those social theorists who were, historically, most pessimistic about the democratic
prospect.
This explains the choice both of Roberto Michels, best known through his "Iron
Law of Oligarchy," and of Vilfredo Pareto, most frequently characterized in political
science through his "Circulation of Elites." Yet because one of the strongest and most
immediate empirical "findings" about American politics when characterized in
Michelsian or Paretian terms (or at least, the perception most strongly underlined)
concerns the disjunction between political parties and public offices in American
a contemporary of Michels and Pareto, and
political life, another theorist-ideally
essential.
ideally with the same broad focus-seemed
That explains the further presence of Henry Jones Ford. While superficially much
more optimistic about democratization, at least in the American context, Ford
presents a further, provocative twist on the argument. For the very notion of "Party
Efficiency," through which Ford addressed the American disjunction between
political parties and public offices, providing him with his main reason for optimism
about the American political future, is precisely the notion that is most seriously
violated by the trend of contemporary American politics.
In short, the study of classical writings can be either deplorably useless or
wonderfully useful. It all depends on the form that study takes. For a vast
difference separates the anemic practice of mere commentary or banalization from
the active practice of following up and developing the theoretical leads of
significant predecessors. It is this difference that underlies the scientists'
ambivalence toward extensive reading in past writings. (Merton, 1968: 30)
Roberto Michels and the Iron Law of Oligarchy
Reduced to its most concrete expression, the fundamental sociological law of
political parties (the term "political" being here used in its most comprehensive
significance) may be formulated in the following terms: It is organization which
gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandatories
over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization,
says oligarchy. (Michels, 1962: 365)
has
It is indeed the "Iron Law"-"Who
says organization, says oligarchy"-that
come to characterize Political Parties by Roberto Michels, first published in 1911.1
And justifiably so: for sheer rhetorical force, as well as for parsimony, no single
element in that long and careful book can compare with the intellectual attraction
of the Law, to the point where it has acquired an effective life of its own, being
familiar to many who have never otherwise dipped into the work from whence it
came.
Yet, as a modern subtitle indicates explicitly-A
Sociological Study of the Oligarchical
Tendenciesof Modern Democracy-there is much more to the book, theoretically and
substantively, than just the Iron Law of Oligarchy. That central proposition is
embedded in thoughts about the necessity of leadership; the abilities (largely the
inabilities) of the mass public to constrain its leaders; the psychological supports,
188
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
from both leaders and masses, for this organizational situation; and the defects in
(all) the available alternatives to organizational oligarchy.
We are now aware that the law of historic necessity of oligarchy is primarilybased
upon a series of facts of experience. Like all other scientific laws, sociological laws
are derived from empirical observation. In order, however, to deprive our axiom
of its purely descriptive character, and to confer upon it that status of analytical
explanation which can alone transform a formula into a law, it does not suffice
to contemplate from a unitary outlook those phenomena which may be empirically
established; we must also study the determining causes of these phenomena.
(Michels, 1962: 364)
Michels centers his study of those causes on the political party, the main
organizational device for insuring actual democracy, with special attention to the selfconsciously democratic parties of his time. Alas, even in this presumedly easiest of
tests, the Iron Law proves inviolable: a collectivity requires an organization to
express its will effectively; the more effective this organization, the more differentiated
its organs and functions; the more fully realized these specialized units and roles, the
more rapidly-first by effect but ultimately by intent-they remove control of politics
from the rank and file, lodging it with a (self-perpetuating) leadership instead.
Thus, from a means, organization becomes an end. To the institutions and
qualities which at the outset were destined simply to ensure the good working of
the party machine (subordination, the harmonious cooperation of individual
members, hierarchical relationships, discretion, propriety of conduct), a greater
importancecomes ultimately to be attached than to the productiveof the machine.
(Michels, 1962: 338-339)
Worse, in terms of the reach of the Iron Law, these tendencies are invariably raised
to a second level by the parliamentary representatives acquired by a successful party.
Precisely because these representatives are the measureof party success, they acquire
the ability to threaten the party, far more than it can threaten them. Moreover, a
privileged position brings both the opportunities and the resources to secure their
positions further-specialized
knowledge and skills, plus contacts with others who
that elected parliamentarians become, in effect, an oligarchy
possess the same-so
within the oligarchy.
One who holds the office of delegate acquires a moral right to that office, and
delegates remain in office unless removed by extraordinarycircumstances or in
obedience to rules observed with exceptional strictness. An election made for a
definite purpose becomes a life incumbency. Customs become a right. One who
has for a certain time held the office of delegate ends by regarding that office as
his own property. (Michels, 1962: 81)
Michels then turns his organizational lens on both leaders and followers as categories,
uncovering an oligarchic symbiosis. From above, if the realization of a collective will
requires the forming of an organization, then the maintenance of that organization
requires professionalleadership. There are skills inherent in managing the organization
itself, and these aie not generally available within the mass public. There are further
skills inherent both in mobilizing that public at the polls and in pursuing party goals
in the legislature subsequently, and again, these are learned and not innate.
Technical competence alone might thus suffice to convert the leadership into an
oligarchy.
BYRONE. SHAFER
189
In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any
other association of the kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly.
The mechanism of the organization, while conferring a solidity of structure,
induces serious changes in the organized mass, completely inverting the respective
position of the leaders and the led. As a result of organization, every party or
professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of
directed. (Michels, 1962: 70)
This tendency is, however, perfectly complemented from below, by the organizational
disadvantages of the mass public. Its members, almost by definition, lack the
specialized skills which are either granted by birth and background or acquired by
doing the work of the party. But more to the point, most of those within the mass
its policies or its mechanicspublic have little interest in the details of politics-in
while those who do possess such interest must still devote most of their time and
energy to the normal tasks of daily life, to making a living, managing a family, and
so forth. Frequent indifference coupled with alternative pressures creates a
generalized need for guidance from the leaders, complementing the organizational
further encouraging them to stay in power.
drives of the leadership perfectly-and
The objective immaturity of the mass is not a mere transitory phenomenon which
will disappear
with the progress of democratization
....
On the contrary, it
derives from the very nature of the mass as mass, for this, even when organized,
suffers from an incurable incompetence for the solution of the diverse problems
which present themselves for solutions, because the mass per se is amorphous,
and therefore needs divisions of labor, specialization, and guidance .... Man as
individual is by nature predestined to be guided, and to be guided all the more
in proportion as the functions of life undergo division and subdivision. To an
enormously greater degree is guidance necessary for the social group. (Michels,
1962: 367)
Yet Michels ventures even beyond this, to embed his grand organizational postulate
in a further, parallel and supporting, psychological argument. From one side, leaders
come inevitably to enjoy the exercise of power, and of its perquisites. They come
increasingly to see their own views as those which the masses would hold, if only the
latter fully understood the situation. And they come to identify the party's interests
with their own. From the other side, the mass public is aware of its need for
leadership, and thus supplements this genuine need with a genuine gratitude. Leaders
become transformed into heroes in the process. They are then personalized in ways
having little to do with politics or policy, but much to do with the ability to retain
public office.
The apathy of the masses and their need for guidance has as its counterpart in
the leaders a natural greed for power. Thus the development of the democratic
oligarchy is accelerated by the general characteristics of human nature. What was
initiated by the need for organization, administration, and strategy is completed
by psychological determinism. (Michels, 1962: 205)
Michels seeks ultimate closure on his argument in two ways. First, he attends to the
main theoretical assault on the Iron Law in his day, the claim of the Marxists that
they could escape the law in the long run through antidemocratic means in the short.
Second, he examines the main institutional devices touted as means to circumvent its
cruel prescriptions-the
referendum, the postulate of renunciation, syndicalism, and
190
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
anarchism. In the end, Marxism promises only to exaggerate the impact of the Iron
Law; the referendum and syndicalism only shift the location of its impact; and
renunciation and anarchism are potentially ably to defy the Law, but only so long as
they do not try to organize an alternative social order.
Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted
for the prevention of oligarchy. If laws are passed to control the dominion of the
leaders, it is the laws which gradually weaken, and not the leaders. Sometimes,
however, the democratic principle carrieswith it, if not a cure, at least a palliative,
for the disease of oligarchy. (Michels, 1962: 368-369)
The Iron Law and Contemporary
American
Politics
The democratic currents of history resemble successive waves. They break ever
on the same shoal. They are ever renewed. This enduring spectacle is
simultaneously encouraging and depressing. When democracies have gained a
certain stage of development, they undergo a gradual transformation,adopting
the aristocraticspirit, and in many cases also the aristocraticforms, against which
at the outset they struggled so fiercely. Now new accusers arise to denounce the
traitors; after an era of glorious combats and of inglorious power, they end by
fusing with the old dominant class; whereupononce more they are in turn attacked
by fresh opponents who appeal to the name of democracy. It is probable that this
cruel game will continue without end. (Michels, 1962: 371)
The pivotal fact in the confrontation between the Iron Law of Oligarchy and
contemporaryAmerican politics is that one of the major premises of the former is
instantly violated by a central characteristic of the latter. Michels took political
parties as the diagnostic institutions for testing any "Iron Law," because parties, as
organizations, shaped the selection of candidates for election and coordinated their
activities in government. Had he been aware of the growing American efforts even
in his own time to break down party organizations and thus transform the
organizational character of political parties, Michels would surely have predicted
either that they would not be implemented or that they would not succeed.
Yet in the late twentieth century, if "Who says organization" still "says oligarchy,"
then who says "American political parties" no longer says "organization." As a result,
the confrontation between Roberto Michels and contemporary American politics
must begin with a review of the way in which American political parties come to be
so thoroughly different from the party organizations whose behavior was styllized to
create the Iron Law. Such a review argues that reform and social change in the
American context really have made American political parties into contrary evidence,
by making them organizationally weak and marginally relevant to candidate selection
and to governmental management.
That hardly, however, exhausts the argument. For the dedicated Michelsian
remains entitled to ask: If political parties are not organizations and party leaders
are not oligarchs, then what are the relevant organizations for American national
politics? And by extension, who are their inevitably aspiring oligarchs? Said
differently, if the focus is to remain on the substantive thrust of an argument, rather
than on the particular institution at issue, then the analyst cannot escape from the
assertions of the Iron Law without a further look at the main elected institutions of
American politics, the Presidency and Congress, where relevant organizations (and
their oligarchs) must at least register any putative powers.
BYRONE. SHAFER
191
Seen in this light, the great American institutional innovation in the process of
democratic electoral politics was also to become the great American institutional
attack on the inevitability of "oligarchical tendencies." This was (and is) the primary
election:partisan nomination through a publicly guaranteed ballot, open to all those
willing to declare a preference for the political party. Ironically, Michels was writing
about the incentives for party leaders to avoid open, popular plebescites on public
officejust as the Progressive movement in the United States was beginning to succeed
with its proposals for primary elections as the means to governmental nominations.
(Key, 1942; Key, 1949; Key, 1956).
The primary was to become almost universal within the United States, though
Michels would remain impressively correct-accurate and sardonically prescientas a
about its fate within the world at large. In any case, the primary was conceived
direct challenge to those evident oligarchs of American politics in the late nineteenth
century, the party "bosses" who "gave" the mass public its candidates. It was,
however, only one major prong of a two-pronged assault on their (oligarchical)
powers, the other coming by way of civil service and procedural codes, to remove
governmental hiring and purchasing from their control.
The logical expectation for Michelsian analysts of the time, that institutional
tinkering would simply produce a different forum in which the same party oligarchs
(successfully) operated, might have proved true without this associated assault on
the informal resources of these oligarchs. Yet as the primary spread and as this
informal assault was increasingly successful, the result became, with the aid of
hindsight, ineluctable. Political parties, as serious-dense and continuing-party
organizations, went into decline. Party prerogatives, for whatever skeletal structures
remained, were formally circumscribed even then (Huckshorn, 1976; Epstein, 1986;
Sorauf, 1984).
Contemporary students of American political parties have performed a service by
re-emphasizing the limits on this decline (Cotter et al., 1984). Nevertheless, political
parties without power to nominate to public office; party hierarchies without
sufficient continuity even to create a "shadow oligarchy"; and party organizations
without immediate relevance to the operation of government: these are not the means
to a modern incarnation of any historic "law." "Who says organization, says
oligarchy" has obvious difficulties with parties which are labels,not organizations, as
they are in the United States. Nowhere else in the world has the attempt to repeal
the Iron Law been so self-conscious; nowhere else has it gone so far; nowhere else
has it been, on its own terms, so successful.
Yet before PoliticalPartiesis put back on the shelf, as a provocative rendering of a
world our great-grandfathers knew, the dedicated Michelsian is entitled to a further
suspicion: If the Iron Law was abstracted from the critical institutions of its time,
and if it does not now apply to political parties in the United States, then maybe all
that must be said is that American parties are no longer critical institutions. More
generally, an effort to avoid confusing the specific application with the underlying
formulation counsels checking to see whether the institutional
focus of politics has
changed. And this, in turn, suggests something very different: that any possible
applications of the Iron Law to contemporary American politics would reside, not
in the political parties, but in the public offices themselves.
The inescapable candidates, then, are the modern Presidency and the modern
Congress. The Presidency, however, presents immediate problems of its own. On the
one hand, any president acquires some "oligarchical" hallmark by definition. He is,
after all, the formal leader of the executive bureaucracy; more than that, he acquires
192
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
formal monopolization of the posts of head of state and head of government. On the
other hand, a president cannot acquire many other, alleged oligarchical traits. He
shares his bureaucratic powers with Congress, and for any given agency, Congress
may actually be the dominant influence. Beyond that, a two-term limit means that
he cannot work to perpetuate himself, and in fact suffers an informal weakeningthe "lame duck" period-well
before his formal term ends (Rockman, 1984;
Kellerman, 1984).
Moreover, in a familiar recapitulation, the previously critical institutions for
selectinga president no longer conceivably provide an implicit oligarchy. The national
party convention, as an institution, no longer shapes, but only ratifies, a presidential
nomination resolved in primary contests along the way. Its inhabitants, the delegates,
have become even more implausible as oligarchs. Often they hold no other party
office; normally they do not continue from convention to convention; frequently they
are bound by the outcome of a primary; reliably they have almost nothing to do at
the convention itself (on the convention, Shafer, 1988; on the delegates, Miller and
Jennings, 1986).
Yet if these delegates attest further to the practical weakening-the
"oligarchical
irrelevance"-of political parties, they also reaffirm the previous rule: A serious Iron
Law of Oligarchy, in presidential selection as in any institutional arrangement, must
operate on the organization which is critical, the one which does, in this case, actually
manage a presidential campaign. In the modern world, that means a private and
actual presidential campaign staff.
personal campaign organization-the
Indeed, in a world where nominating campaigns must be individually, personally,
and nationally constructed, the modern campaign organization does appear to be:
idiosyncratic to the individual at its center; largely removed from any national party
organization, and certainly from any larger organized framework; and able-even
encouraged-to
respond to the political landscape solely in terms of the needs of the
presidential contender. This organization is narrower, tighter, more personalistic, and
even more opportunistic than anything surveyed by that arch-student of oligarchy,
Michels (Shafer, 1988, ch. 2).2
On the other hand, in order not to extend the analysis much farther than it will
reasonably go-by taking only the data which "fit"-it must be noted that there are
usually numerous such campaign teams on the landscape of presidential politics,
precisely because successful reforms have disassembled the previously integrating
organizations. Said differently, the fate of these presidential campaigns has been
made subject, not to the wishes of a small set of party oligarchs, but to a far larger
set of primary electorates. Even more to the point, such teams are dedicated to
strengthening their candidate's position (and hence his supporters) so that they
encompass as much of the general public as possible. Finally, and decisively, they
are only a small-and
of the White House team of any
not reliably crucial-part
successful president, so that they hold only a modest promise of subsequently shaping
government (Seligman and Covington, 1989; Kessel, 1980; Kessel, 1984).
The contemporary Congress, on the other hand, almost calls out to be considered
on-translated
into-these
terms. Or at least, Congress, especially the House of
Representatives, has acquired a contemporary characterization, both scholarly and
journalistic, which a modern-day Michels would instantly recognize. The triumph of
word is not too strong-of
incumbency, the concomitant disappearance-the
electoral turnover, and the mobilization of the perquisites of the office itself in order
to maintain both outcomes: those are central analytic propositions, not about the
institution of 1915, but about the institution of 1990.
BYRONE. SHAFER
193
The facts, initially supportive this time, are not in dispute. Modern sitting
Congressmen are not defeated. They almost never suffer actual defeat at the primary
election. It may have devastated parties historically; it insulates public officials today.
Moreover, these officials rarely suffer defeat at the general election either. A 90 per
cent reelection rate of those standing is no longer a surprise. In most years, more
Congressmen leave office through retirement than through defeat, which is to say,
by their choice rather than the choice of the electorate. The stifling blanket of
incumbency-or is it the Iron Law of Oligarchy-lies heavy on the institution
(Mayhew, 1974; Fiorina, 1977: the world they describe has only been exaggerated
in the interim).
Yet this is not nearly all. For incumbent Congressmen do not just benefit from a
dynamic; they use the resources of office to augment its impact. The office of the
modern Representative or Senator is a governmental dispensary, a brokerage house,
and a publicity machine-all aimed at securing the reelection of the incumbent. In
the process, of course, that "blanket" of incumbency becomes increasingly heavy
(Johannes, 1984; Cain et al., 1987).
Yet this must not obscure the fact that, within the Congress itself, the House and
Senate differ markedly. In truth, all of the preceding summary is more accurate as
commentary on the situation in the House. Senators, too, may not ordinarily lose in
primaries, but they can be weakened there for the general election. And Senators do
lose in general elections as in recent years, despite all those same tactics by which
Representatives sustain themselves. Which is to say, votersdo retire them.
Even then, even inside the House of Representatives, the contemporary incarnation
is still radically different from the version in existence at the time of framing of the
"Iron Law." If the modern body can be alleged to comprise "435 oligarchs,"
consciously dispersing institutional powers in order to further their individual
prospects, it is still light-years from its counterpart at the turn of the century, when
a handful of party leaders-true oligarchs-really could shape the composite product
of the institution, and thereby the fates of numerous members (Wilson, 1885;
Galloway, 1962; Barnes, 1990).
As a result, if the Iron Law of Oligarchy and its subpropositions had to be used
as a descriptive summary of contemporary American politics, in a textually faithful
extrapolation, they would have to be applied so metaphorically and stretched so
broadly as to include: (a) organizations which in reality are principally labels; (b)
institutions which formally proscribe Michelsian hallmarks; and (c) historical
changes which imply fundamental reconstitution. On the other hand, what such an
between
effort really does, instead, is to begin to emphasize thedisjunction
politicalparties
and public offices in the Americangovernmental
context,and then to go to suggest the
difficulties in using organizational-even institutional-checklists as lone and
summary measures of democratization.
Said differently, what an analysis initiated by the Iron Law and driven by a search
for "oligarchical tendencies" really does is to press the investigation onward: toward
the connectionsbetweena variety of alleged representatives and their underlying
constituencies. Thus even in the case of the House of Representatives-apparently
the last, best incarnation of the Iron Law in contemporary American politics-it
becomes crucial (given the conflicting evidence) to inquire into the nature of the
connections between Congressmen and their society, in order to separate genuine
"oligarchs" from authentic "representatives."Although this would not have been his
dominant emphasis, Michels, too, would have directed part of our attention there.
194
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
Leadership is indefinitely retained, not because it is the tangible expression of the
relationship between the forces existing in the party at any given moment, but
simply because it is already constituted. It is through gregarious idleness, or, if
we may employ the euphemism, it is in virtue of the law of inertia, that the leaders
are so often confirmed in their offices as long as they like. (Michels, 1962: 121)
Vilfredo
Pareto and the Circulation
of Elites
... the governing elite is always in a state of slow and continuous transformation.
It flows on like a river, never being today what it was yesterday. From time to
time, sudden and violent disturbances occur. There is a flood-the river overflows
its banks. Afterwards, the new governing elite again resumes its slow transformation. The flood has subsided, the river is again flowing normally in its wonted
bed. (Pareto, 1980: 279)
The relationship between key governmental actors and subgroups within their
societies was a much more explicit focus in the works of another major social theorist
at the turn of the century, Vilfredo Pareto. Michels actually made occasional direct
references to Pareto,3 and they shared some central observations about the character
of human society and its politics-the
tendency of those in power to seek to use that
power to maintain themselves in office, for example, or the apparently inevitable
conflation of party interests with national interests by leaders of the political parties.
Nevertheless, their central focuses remained sharply distinct. Michels concentrated
on the inherent impact of organization, as magnified by governmental institutions,
and on the tension between this impact and the ideals of democracy. Pareto
concentrated instead on the recurrent behavior of elite actors-on the generation of
incipient political elites, on the patterns of conflict and cooperation between existing
and emergent elites, and on the manner, speed, and totality of their replacementwith political parties and even governmental institutions cast largely as formal
adjuncts to this informal process.
Pareto's first effort at describing this dynamic was a long essay published in 1901,
specifically about the tensions between an older, bourgeois, governing elite and a
newer, socialist, challenging elite, though using both as the embodiment of a much
larger social dynamic. This was ultimately published in English in book format as
The Rise and Fall of the Elites.4 Yet the mature version of the complete sociological
framework, for which this became only a contemporary application, arrived in 1916
with what was translated into English as the Compendiumof General Sociology.5
Together, the two analyzed what Pareto described as "the matter of social
heterogeneousness and the question of circulation among its various elements"
(Pareto, 1980: 271).
In moving from one group to another, an individual brings with him certain
inclinations, sentiments, attitudes that he has acquired in the group from which
he comes, and that circumstance cannot be ignored. To this mixing, in the
particularcase in which only two groups, the elite and the non-elite, are envisaged,
the term "circulation of elites" has been applied . . . (Pareto, 1980: 275)
Pareto began with the differences among individual human beings, especially their
differences in ability and energy. Yet he moved immediately to the way these
individuals were gathered into groups, adding the heterogeneity of group bases
(ethnicity, religion, region, occupation, etc.) to the heterogeneity of individual
BYRONE. SHAFER
195
capacity. In a presumably unending competition among such groups over time, the
leadership (especially the governmental leadership) of previously dominant groups
was constantly challenged by new leaderships arising from groups of emerging
consequence.
Except during short intervals of time, people are always governed by an elite. I
use the word elite in its etymological sense, meaning the strongest, the most
energetic, and the most capable.... Hence-the history of man is the history of
the continuous replacement of certain elites: as one ascends, the other declines.
Such is the real phenomenon, though to us it may often appear under another
form. (Pareto, 1979: 36)
This process was indeed notarized as the "circulation of elites." It mattered, not
because any given elite was morally (or democratically) superior to any other, but
because the members of that elite brought the other, associated characteristics of
their background group into government with them, if they were politically
successful. In so doing, again for good or ill, they invigorated the government. Some
such circulation among elites was a natural and continual process. Yet both the
holders of major offices
extent and the velocity of changes in the governing elite-the
varied substantially over time.
within a given government-also
In most eras, such circulation, if ineluctable, was glacial. The search for able
support by an existing elite was met by the search for individual advancement by
non-elite members, in the kind of dynamic equilibrium which melded regularity with
change. Yet because there was always an inherent resistance to differentnew members
by an established elite, and because there were always more aspiring than possible
new elite members, this process was punctuated by larger upheavals. Indeed, when
the old elite became sufficiently decadent and excessively resistant, while some
aspiring elite became sufficiently vigorous and excessively repressed, the result could
be a classical revolution.
When an elite declines, we can generally observe two signs which manifest
themselves simultaneously: (1) The declining elite becomes softer, milder, more
humane, and less apt to defend its own power. (2) On the other hand, it does not
lose its rapacity and greed for the goods of others, but rather tends as much as
possible to increase its unlawful appropriations and to indulge in major
usurpations of the national patrimony.
Thus, on the one hand, it makes the yoke heavier, and on the other it has less
strength to maintain it. These two conditions cause the catastrophe in which the
elite perishes, whereas it could prosper if one of them were absent. (Pareto, 1979:
59)
Part and parcel of this same analysis was the presumption that the form of
inevitably the product of prior elite displacements, and
government itself-while
a derivative,
inevitably shaping the subsequent circulation of other elites-remained
not a fundamental, aspect. Hence democracies did not escape the circulation of elites.
Indeed, established democratic elites were every bit as unenthusiastic about altering
their composition as were established elites in other kinds of regimes.
Ignoring exceptions, which are few in number and of short duration, one finds
everywhere a governing class of relatively few individuals that keeps itself in power
partly by force and partly by the consent of the subject class, which is more
populous. The differences lie, principally, as regards substance, in the relative
196
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
proportions of force and consent; and as regards form, in the manner in which
the force is used and consent obtained. (Pareto, 1979: 331-332)
This very neutrality in analytic terms gave the works of Pareto a certain sardonic
bite. Moreover, he went on to insist on the moral equivalence of all his elites, an
insistence which gave that work an additionally sarcastic, even cynical tone. Yet the
resulting framework was meant as a neutral analytic tool, to give political analysis
some of the rigor of the evolving discipline of economics. As such, it is distinguished,
and
additionally, by a militantly self-conscious effort at being "scientific"-detached
by a determination to construct a general social theory, where even
empirical-and
such composite realms as politics and economics could still be just aspects of the larger
dynamic.6 Thus even a "deduction" as grand as "the circulation of elites" is intended
as just that-an implication of the framework, not the framework itself.
In the social "sciences,"almost all authorsof theories have hitherto been primarily
inspired by faith in some ideal; so that they have considered only such facts as
seemed to accord with that ideal, disregardingcontraryfacts almost entirely. Even
when such theories ape experimental forms, they tend to be metaphysical in
character. The derivations of "individualism"and "collectivism"may be put on
a par with Nominalism and Realism; and, though the analogies are not so striking,
even the derivations of "free trade" and "protectionism"are not so very different
from metaphysical theories. (Pareto, 1980: 390)
In the construction of this (grand and abstract) framework, Pareto divided the forces
acting on human beings into "sentiments," "residues," and "derivations"-at
different points on the continuum of deliberate cultural and intellectual construction.
From one side, the search was for further subcategories of each; from the other, it
was for the long-run "undulations" in the dominating "sentiments." If this framework
was complex, in the interdependence of its notions and in the desperately slippery
character of their boundaries, that fact only reflected the inherent methodological
difficulties of a true political science.
In the economic system, the non-logical is regulated entirely to tastes and
disregarded, since tastes are taken as data of fact. One might wonder whether the
same thing might not be done for the social system, whether we might not relegate
the non-logical element to the residues, then take the residues as data of fact and
proceed to examine the logical conduct that originates in the residues. That would
yield a science similar to pure, or even to applied, economics. But unfortunately,
the similarity ceases when we come to the question of the correspondencewith
reality ... .Far removed from politics, instead, is the hypothesis that human beings
draw logical inferences from residues and then proceed to act accordingly. In
activity based on residues, human beings use derivations more frequently than
strictly logical reasoning, and therefore to try to predict their conduct by
considering their manner of reasoning would be to lose all contact with reality.
(Pareto, 1980: 286-287)
This highly abstracted framework followed very directly from the earlier expositionthe social processes of Pareto's
almost, in effect, a "pre-application"-concerning
own time. In The Rise and Fall of the Elites, he had addressed "the religious sentiment,"
a kind of fundamental dynamic of human faith and ferment, and he had gone on to
exemplify its "residues" and its "derivations" by comparing Christianity and the
organized church of an earlier era with the Marxism and organized socialist
197
BYRONE. SHAFER
movements of his day.
More pointedly, however, Pareto had looked in some detail at the decline (really
the degeneration) of the existing, essentially bourgeois elite, and then at the apparent
rise of a new elite, based not so much on a proletariat as on the most energetic and
most highly skilled members of the working class. While his asides about this
particular fall and rise remained characteristically acid, they also became the "data"
which would be generalized subsequently as the "circulation of elites."
In conclusion, we must pay special attention (1) in the case of one single group,
to the proportions between the total of the group and the number of individuals
who are nominally members of it but do not possess the qualities requisite for
effective membership; (2) in the case of various groups, to the ways in which
transitions from one group to the other occur, and to the intensity of that
movement-that is to say, to the velocity of the circulation. (Pareto, 1980: 275276)
The Circulation
of Elites and Contemporary
American
Politics
Such considerations serve to explain, along with the theoretical difficulties, how
the solutions that are usually found for the general problems have so little, and
sometimes, no, bearing on realities. Solutions of particular problems come closer
to the mark because, situated as they are in specific places and times, they present
fewer theoretical difficulties; and because practical empiricism implicitly takes
account of many circumstances that theory, until it has been carried to a state of
high perfection, cannot explicitly appraise. (Pareto, 1980: 309)
Anyone returning to Pareto for inspirations on American politics in the late twentieth
century would be struck by almost the opposite perception to someone who turned
to this politics by way of Michels. For the Paretian framework appears immediately
and directly applicable to developments in American party politics, more marginally
and indirectly applicable to the operations of American public office. Or at least, within
the last generation-plus, both political parties have experienced one of those
compressed elite displacements which the concept of the "circulation of elites" was
in part designed to address. On the other hand, changes in the operation of
governmental institutions appear less neatly captured by elite transformations, and
offer less obviously Paretian conclusions even when they are.
Something major has happened to both American political parties in recent years,
and if it is not ordinarily addressed in terms of elite displacements, it does translate
easily into these terms, with some further intellectual gains. The more usual way to
address this development is to say that both parties have undergone a structural
revolution since the 1960s. Before that, they could still both be treated as
professionalized organizations, or at least as official frameworks. After that, they were
better treated as volunteer operations, or perhaps even as activist networks (Broder,
1972; Mayhew, 1986). Yet behind this summary, as a focus on the circulation of elites
helps to suggest, is a more complex intermixture of social change, organizational
change, and elite change.
One way to cut into this complex of changes is to say that before the 1960s,
American political parties were sustained, principally, in two ways. One involved
disbursements of the concrete and divisible rewards of government-which
is to say,
"patronage"; the other involved a social solidarity linked with partisanship, making
local political parties an expression of local social identity. Since the 1960s, on the
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RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
other hand, it is more common to think of these parties, both of them, as depending
for their local (organizational) existence upon volunteer activists who are motivated,
not by patronage and social solidarity, but by concerns of an issue-based, or even
explicitly ideological, nature (Wilson, 1973; Clark and Wilson, 1961).
In truth, the Republican party reached this stage first in most geographic areas,
thanks largely to its status as the minority party, but also to its constituencies-more
middle-class, and hence more autonomously participant. Yet the more crucial point
is that both parties had achieved this condition by the late 1960s. The reasons for
this shift are, by now, also quite familiar. Indeed, they are in effect the same
institutional reform and gradual social change-which
make
reasons-deliberate
American parties difficult to analyze under the maxim "Who says organization, says
oligarchy."
But, in fact, as any dedicated Paretian would suspect, this basic change in the
organizational character of (both) political parties was associated, inseparably, with
a change in the social base-but
those parties.
especially the elite composition-of
Among the Democrats, what this meant was painfully clear: a sharp decrease in the
influence of elites based in blue-collar constituencies and a similar, sharp increasein
the influence of elites based in white-collar constituencies. A politics based on
patronage and social solidarity was a blue-collar politics; a politics based on ideology
and issue attachments was, just as inherently, a white-collar politics instead (Shafer,
1988, conclusion; Wilson, 1962; Kessel, 1968).
Among Republicans, the situation was less easily summarized. In part, this was
because the Republican party, being the white-collar party in American politics, had
already become more dependent on ideological and issue attachments. That is, rising
general influence and a growing middle class, coupled with participatory institutional
reforms, promised less change to a party which was already acclimated to the former.
In part, however, the party also experienced an internal issue upsurge so intense as
to overcome the usual relationship between political skills and social background,
courtesy of "cultural" issues-crime,
patriotism, permissiveness, religion, abortion,
and so forth. While partisans of these issues were among the less (not the more)
advantaged constituencies in society, they made up for their disadvantages, at least
intermittently, by caring intensely about the items which motivated them (Crawford,
1980; Phillips, 1982).
Both developments, of course, were classic grist for the Paretian mill, comprising
almost classic embodiments of the circulation of elites. Both, not surprisingly, did not
occur without substantial conflict-old
elites not surrendering willingly to newly
emergent competitors. For the Democrats, this conflict was dramatic, even explosive,
and its outcome decisive. For the Republicans, the conflict, being less temporally
focused, was less directly confrontational, more extendedly uneasy, and hence less
definitively resolved.
The Democratic National Convention of 1986, the one which nominated Hubert
Humphrey "in a sea of blood" (White, 1961: 376), became the symbol for the
Democratic change. Issue and ideological elites (white-collar elites) had been
displacing pecuniary and solidary elites (blue-collar elites) in doing the actual work
of the Democratic party in more and more areas, well before 1968. But the rules of
presidential selection, favoring holders of party office over independent activists, had
sustained the old elite at the presidential level. After the explosion of 1968, a series
of participatory reforms annihilated this advantage-and
completed a major instance
of elite circulation (Shafer, 1983; Ware, 1985).
The Republican party experienced no such single incident in its change, and, as
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199
a partial result, the old elite still jousts with the new. In the 1960s, while the
Democrats were going through their very public trauma, newly emergent, incipiently
Republican elites were actually, if cautiously, welcomed by the Republican old guard.
Religious evangelicals were the most clearly demarcated of these new elites, but there
were others who were merely focused on traditional social values or on nationalist
foreign policies. In any case, the Republican party, after thirty years in the wilderness
in the aftermath of the New Deal, was in sufficiently desperate shape at the mass
level that established party elites were prepared to consider any increments to their
mass base.
They were not, however, as enthusiastic about ceding influence to new elite
spokesmen, so that after only a short time, older elite members of the Republican
coalition came to look upon the new arrivals as a distinctly mixed blessing. Perhaps
inevitably, there was a price for adding new elites to the old coalition, paid in policy
changes on cultural and international issues-in greater social traditionalism and
foreign nationalism-and these views were often at variance with those of the older
Republican elites themselves. As a result, the Republican situation remained more
of a shifting accommodation than a completed circulation (Reichley, 1981; Peele,
1984; Rae, 1989).
While such perceptions do follow generally from the Paretian framework, Pareto
himself did not so much emphasize circulations in social classes or even ideologies,
conventionally understood. Instead, he focused most centrally on two major-and
opposite-"residues." He called the first of these (Class 1) the "instinct for
combinations," the second (Class II) the "persistence of aggregates." Translated,
they are roughly the difference between innovation and consolidation, between
experimentation and institutionalization, or between progressivism and traditionalism. While a further practical translation is not easy, contemporary partisan
developments can be recast in terms of these "residues," too (Pareto, 1980: ch. 6,
esp. 122-133).
Thus the rise of the white-collar rather than a blue-collar elite within the
Democratic party, simultaneously resulting from and implying the rise of issue
attachments over social solidarity, was a classic case of the triumph of Class 1 over
Class II residues, of "combinations" over "persistences." It was a sharply defined
clash; the outcome was equally clear-cut. The Republican version was equally
straightforward, even if the result was more an uneasy alteration than a pure
displacement. The new elites represented classically emergent Class II residues; they
settled in with, rather than fully displacing, the old proponents of Class 1.
Even more to the analytic point, however, Pareto would have insisted that such a
situation implied a clear, practical, ultimate outcome. Especially coming after a
period of governmental experimentation, in the form of the New Deal and the arrival
of the welfare state, the capture of an established coalition by Class I elites, while
the challenging coalition featured emergent Class II elites instead, meant that the
challenging elite-here the Republicans, as the opposition party-could be expectedto
enter a period of sustained dominance.
It is a tribute to the disjunction between party politics and institutional politics in
the American context-the
same disjunction which made application of the
Michelsian framework so problematic-that
this prediction is strikingly borne out
in one institutional realm, namely the Presidency, borne out not at all in a second
key realm, namely Congress. All of this follows, in turn, from the way in which
not-to
changes in the party system relate-or
changes in presidential and
congressional selection. Shifts within elite coalitions, and even more within the mass
200
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
constituencies behind them, have acquired a directly partisan translation with the
Presidency; such shifts have not acquired a similar translation with Congress, and
indeed, a focus on elites leads to unParetian conclusions there.7
The essentially open and plebescitary character of presidential nominations
explains how emerging social forces are transmitted directly into presidential politics.
Given the essentially anti-organizational character of nominating politics, these forces
are not so much reflected in a party structure,which then nominates a president.
is, shifting mass publics and their emerging elite
Rather, these forces-that
reflected directly both in presidential nominations and in party
spokesmen-are
operations. As a consequence, their influence can be seen at every level.
At the top, among presidential candidates themselves, both parties have-with
one striking exception-produced
presidential nominees exactly in keeping with the
needs and wishes of their emergentelites. Democrats have offered contemporary
may as well be described as "Class I nominees"-rooted
progressive nominees-they
and in their issue-oriented elites. Republicans
in
constituencies
white-collar
solidly
II nominees," of
have offered contemporary traditionalist nominees-"Class
course-rooted solidly in cultural conservative constituencies and in their ideological
elites. And exactly in line with Paretian hypothesis, Republicans have won (Shafer,
1991: ch. 3).
Moreover, the exception which proved the rule was the Democratic nomination of
1976. In that year, the party anointed the culturally conservative (Class II-oriented)
Jimmy Carter-the lone Democratic candidate of the "persistences" in the modern
era. When he then faced a classic "establishment" Republican, representing the old
Republican elite coalition, the Democratic Carter ("naturally") won.
At the middle level of presidential politics, at national party conventions where
elite actors formalistically nominate a president, the situation is equally stereotypical.
The newly emergent elite groups in both parties effectively set the agendaindependent liberal activists for the Democrats, independent conservative activists
for the Republicans. And they extract absolutely stereotypical policy promisescultural progressivism and foreign internationalism for the Democrats, cultural
traditionalism and foreign nationalism for the Republicans (Shafer, 1988: ch. 5;
Lengle, 1981; Wattier, 1983).
At the bottom, finally, the subsequent electoral campaign inevitably centers on the
struggle to secure the support of two sets of social groups within the mass public,
whose loyalties have become problematic in the current circulation-though
here,
there are warnings of the limits on even an imaginatively translated Paretian
framework. The key groups, however, certainly include the one being squeezedout of
the Democratic elite coalition (namely, the better-off, blue-collar Democrats) and the
one being squeezed into the new Republican elite coalition (namely, the rural,
principally Southern, formerly Democratic identifiers).
The problem is that there is also a third, critical, "swing" group in the mass
electorate. This is the growing population of partisan independents, and it does not
fit neatly with much of the above. Partisan independents can hardly be said to
provide emergent elites for the party coalitions. Indeed, to the extent that these terms
are relevant, partisan independent elites are more likely to be found at Democratic
conventions, while partisan independent masses are more likely to vote Republican
for president (Shafer, 1991: ch. 3; Wattenberg, 1984; Keith et al., 1986).
All that this needs to imply, conceptually, is that a framework which was useful
in supplementing (rather than supplanting) current approaches to political parties
cannot by itself be used to monopolize study of the modern presidency either. On
BYRONE. SHAFER
201
the other hand, the US Congress presents considerably greater analytic difficulties,
though for an oddly related reason: If the circulation of elites is more useful than the
Iron Law in addressing contemporary, loosely structured and participatory, political
parties, those parties just have less to do with the selection of Congress than with the
selection of the president.
Congressional contests, especially those for the US House, have long fit badly with
the rest of the American party system. In the modern era of weak parties and strong
public offices, and therefore of strong incumbents, this tendency has only been
exaggerated. That fact must ultimately return the analysis, once again, to the curious,
underlying disjunction, between party and government. Before that, however,
application of the Paretian framework to Congress manages both to elaborate this
disjunction and to produce some very unParetian conclusions about the congressional
side of American politics.
Seen from below, the issues and forces which have agitated national-which is to
say, presidential-politics have not even automatically percolated into the majority
of congressional contests. Indeed, constituencies (and their elites) which are in
conflict nationally may well be either dominant or missing in any given district. Seen
from above, individual Congressmen-Senators, but especially Representativeshave been much freer to ignore party activists and adapt their own behavior and
positions to those of the mass publics in their districts. If party activists, established
or emergent, are thereby annoyed, then party activists be damned (Fenno, 1978;
Jacobson and Kernell, 1981; Fowler and McClure, 1989).
When the question of elites-of elite movements and elite coalitions-is taken into
Congress, that question confronts a further situation having relatively little to do with
the Paretian framework, much less the Paretian prediction. Put succinctly: Within
Congress, the Democratic party is so dominant that its network includes most of the
major elites in society-white and blue collar, issue and patronage oriented, Class I
and Class II. The Republican party, by contrast, must struggle to maintain
substantial elite representation in any of these sectors.
In other words, much of the full range of social (and elite) diversity is encapsulated
by Democratic congressional representation, especially in the case of the US House.
Thus older, blue-collar elites in the industrial Northeast and Midwest have receded
only in part. Even older, rural and commercial elites in the South and southern
border have receded only in part as well. Newly emergent, white-collar and issueoriented elites, accordingly, are dominant only in the Mountain and West Coast
states-thereby further enlarging, rather than redefining, their party (Ornstein,
1990; Seligman and King, 1980).
The Republican situation-really, the Republican problem-is strikingly different. If the Democrats have expanded within Congress by incorporating more and
wider elite coalitions, apparently without end, the Republicans are left incorporating
fewer and narrower. Said differently, the problem of the Republican party in
Congress is not how to accommodate widening pressures for elite representation.
Rather, the problem is how to find-how to recruit-sufficient elites to give the party
even a chance of expanding its congressional numbers.
Worse, for a minority party when the majority party is not withering, everything
goes wrong: To the extent that national Republican divisions between old and new
elites do surface in congressional contests, they merely make defeat in those contests
more likely. To the extent that those divisions are absent, this absence reflects a lack
of credible congressional challengers among newly emergent groups, and the gradual
atrophy of credible congressional challengers among their established counterparts
202
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
(Cohen, 1990; CongressionalQuarterlyWeeklyReport, 1990; Pressman, 1984).
In the case of contests for the US House, there is often literally no one waiting to
carry the Republican banner. In the case of contests for the US Senate, the situation
is less dire only for an ironic, and ultimately damaging, reason: the Republican
membership of the House provides the sole reliable source of recruitment for
Republican challengers in the Senate. An elite focus does make this situation very
pointed, but it does not at all point toward the process implicit in a "circulation of
elites."
Instead, the main surface fact about changes in elite composition of political parties
within Congress in recent years is still that those changes have largely not occurredand certainly have not occurred in a fashion which suggests elite displacement and
elite replacement. What the American context ultimately suggests, accordingly, with
Pareto as with Michels, is that the disjunction between operation of political parties
and the operation of governmental institutions is still sufficiently large as to require
some focus which would integrate that very disjunction. Pareto might well not have
been averse to such integration, though his focus was clearly elsewhere.
Among the complex phenomena observable in a society is the system of
government that is closely bound up with the character of the governing class,
and stands in a relationship of interdependence with all other social phenomena.
There are, as usual, wholly contrary theories: "political"theories that give great
importance to form and neglect substance, "economic" theories that ascribe little
or no importance to forms of government and, not only that, to substance as well.
Those who attach supreme importance to forms of governmentfind it important
to answer the question, "What is the best form of government?"But that question
has little or no meaning unless the society to which the Government is to be
applied is specific . . . (Pareto, 1980: 330-331)
Henry Jones Ford and Party Efficiency
It puzzles foreign observers to understand how any public responsibility can be
enforced under such a system .... The explanation of this mystery is that the
scattered powers of government are resumed by party organization, and this
concentration of power carries with it a public responsibility which may be
enforced. The soundness of the popular instinct on this point is shown by the
indifference of voters to the personal merits of candidates, when moved by
resentment against party organization. (Ford, 1967: 300)
The contemporary student of political life who did put the link between political
the
then the link between politics and society-at
parties and public office-and
center of his work was Henry Jones Ford. Originally a journalist and later a founding
member of the American Political Science Association, Ford would not have been
directly aware of the work of either Michels or Pareto. Nevertheless, if Ford was
unaware of the specific texts producing the "Iron Law" and the "Circulation of
Elites"-to the extent that he was acquainted with European writings about society,
it was much more with biological or anthropological writings (Ford, 1904a, 1907)he was fully aware of the phenomenato which both Michels and Pareto were pointing.
Yet where they strove for the irreducible invariants in human experience, factors
which set limits on the realization of democracy, Ford came at the problem "from
the other side." That is, he granted, implicitly, the link between organization and
oligarchy. But in accepting the original basis for this irony, that operationalizing the
BYRONE. SHAFER
203
public will requireorganization, he proceeded to focus instead on the ways in which
(party) organization could be used to maximize public wishes. In the same way, he
elite actors in order to operationalize the
granted the centrality-the
essentiality-of
public will. But he went on to emphasize the differences among different elite groups,
and among the policy consequences of replacing one with another.
It must, however, be apparent on reflection, that even in times of the most
contagious excitement there must be some modification of individual opinions to
secure an agreement of purpose among large bodies of citizens. It is reasonable
to infer that the habitual calculation of consequences, essential to the training of
every political leader, must affect his deference to the behests of his supporters.
(Ford, 1967: 128)
Ford's major exposition of the argument was actually his first work, The Rise and
Growth of American Politics, published in 1898. This was, as its subtitle indicates-A
Sketchof ConstitutionalDevelopment-an institutional history of American political life.8
Yet Ford targeted his institutional history toward two clear analytic goals: a set of
generalizations about (the preconditions of) political evolution and an application of
these generalizations to the politics (and political controversies) of his time. The ideas
of The Rise and Growth would subsequently be elaborated in a series of scholarly
articles, in more deliberately abstracted and tightly focused fashion (Ford, 1900a,
1900b, 1903, 1904b, 1904c), but most of these later ideas were present in, and integral
to, this first major work.
Party organization acts as a connective tissue, enfolding the separate organs of
government, and tending to establish a unity of control which shall adapt the
government to the uses of popular sovereignty. The adaptation is still so
incomplete that the administrative function is imperfectly carried on, and the
body-politic suffers acutely from its irregularity. (Ford, 1967: 215)9
In his emphasis on the beneficent influence of political parties, an influence which
even Ford admitted to be often more immanent than actual but upon which he
resolutely insisted, Ford stood in stark opposition to most intellectual opinion of his
time, which emphasized the corrupt and self-serving orientation of American political
parties, along with their apparent deviation from the original Constitutional design.
Ford, however, used both political history and contemporary analysis to argue that
it was the political parties which had actually permitteddemocratic responsiveness in
politics and effective coordination in government, to the extent that those existed at
all.
The occasion for it [party organization] was the need of means of concentration
so as to establish a control over the divided powers of government. Party
machinery was devised under the stimulus of necessity and has been submitted
to because there was no help for it. A paradoxical phrase, often used in regard to
this very matter, puts the case exactly as the people regard it. It is a necessary
evil. (Ford, 1967: 297-298)
In this view, the work of the founding fathers, informed by English governmental
forms and reacting against the overdemocratizing
tendencies of the postRevolutionary period, had been intended to break down party and to put the "best
orientation only weakly captured by asserting that they had
people" in charge-an
created "republican" and not "democratic" government. Nevertheless, after an initial
period of formalistically constitutional government, the American people had
204
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
reasserted their preference for democratic control, and political parties had inevitably
become (in effect though not always by intent) the crucial means for accomplishing
this, resulting in nothing short of "The Transformation of the Constitution" (Ford,
1967: ch. 17).
This transformation began with informal, internal parties, when the original elite
divided and quarreled within itself. But partisan divisions quickly became the means
for moving that quarrel out into society, as internal elites attempted to recruit
external masses in order to defeat their opponents. The resulting mass parties were
central to everything which happened thereafter. They converted public office into
"patronage," in order to build the "party machine"; they converted localized
politicking into a national politics, in order to secure full mobilization of resources
for partisan combat; they subverted the anti-democratic potential in the "aristocratic" elements of the original constitutional design, as with the Electoral College; they
elevated the great popularly representative institution of American politics, the
Presidency, to public preeminence.
The establishment of a new joint control became the instinctive object of party
effort. To supply the place of class interests and social connections which
originally provided the necessary unity of control, the convention system was
developed, and gradually its jurisdiction was confirmed until local, state, and
national politics were bound together in national party organization and all their
activities were subordinated to national interests. The magnitude and the extent
of the functions assumed have been sustained by an appropriate elaboration of
structure,giving to party organization in America a massiveness and a complexity
unknown in governments whose constitution leaves to party only its ordinary
office of propagating opinion and inciting the political activity of citizenship.
(Ford, 1967: 220)
This argument, that party arose in order to help the public democratize the process
of politics and in order to help that same public coordinate the institutions of
government, gave rise to a simple, summary measure, "Party Efficiency," itself the
title of one of Ford's chapters (Ford, 1967: ch. 25). Party efficiency was the degree
to which a political party actually succeeded in connecting the mass public to its
representatives and in connecting governmental institutions to each other. American
party efficiency, at the turn of the century, was low but increasing.
An insistence on viewing American politics through the notion of party efficiency
had two further, major, and extremely pungent implications for the interpretation of
politics in Ford's own day. First, it implied that contemporary reformers had the
matter exactly wrong: They were dedicated to destroying the only thing which
permitted politics to work at all.
The present inadequacy of party organization for a true representationof public
opinion is so exasperating to impatient reformersthat they would like to shatter
it to bits; but that is not they way to better the state of affairs. Party rises to new
occasions by consulting its own interests. This consultative faculty in party
organization, mischievous as seems to be its irregularand irresponsibleoperation,
is that which sustains political development, and eventually it will perfect the
democratic type of government. (Ford, 1967: 333)10
Worse, and by extension, Ford was asserting a further American anathema: The form
of government created by the Constitution-and
hence that hallowed document
itself-did not work. It was saved from stagnation, and potential destruction, only by
205
BYRONE. SHAFER
those same, hated, political "machines."
That the constitution does not work well in practice is freely admitted; but of
course that is not its fault. The constitutional ideal is noble; but the politicians
are vile. If only the checks could be made more effective, if only a just balance of
power could be established beyond the strength of the politicians to disarrangeor, above all, if some barriers could be erected, so tight and strong as to shut the
politicians out altogether-the constitution would work perfectly. Therefore, more
checks upon the abuse of power; more contrivances to baffle the politicians, whose
machinations pervert the constitution and corrupt the government! (Ford, 1967:
334-335)"
Those were the most immediate, and pungent, implications of the generalizations
which Ford drew from the American case. But those same generalizations were
relevant to a larger-indeed,
about politics, and Ford did
international-argument
not shrink from this. Michels had found his central irony in the fact that successful
politics required organization, but organization had its own requirements. Pareto
had seen his irony in the fact that successful politics was necessarily an elite business,
but elites, too, had their own needs and incentives.
Ford merely accepted both ironies and focused his argument in the exact opposite
direction: a governmental structure which was intended to prevent the rise of any
national political organization, and to retain control of that government in the hands
of the founding figures and their intellectual progeny, had been undone by party
organization and new social elites. Ford thus offered his general formulation, in
language reminiscent of a Michels or a Pareto, with reference to the precise,
American context.
The rigid framework of the Constitution forced political development to find its
outlet in extra-constitutional agencies, bringing the executive and legislative
branches under a common control, despite the constitutional theory. The new
control was to be essentially as aristocratic as the old, for the political class is
none the less an aristocracy, although its muniments do not consist of social
privilege or territorial endowment, but rest upon proficiency in the management
of party organization too complex for any save professional experts to handle.
(Ford, 1967: 71)
Party Efficiency
and Contemporary
American
Politics
On the contrary, there is abundant evidence to confirm the opinion that party
organization continues to be the sole efficient means of administrative union
between the executive and the legislative branches of the government, and that
whatever tends to maintain and perfect the union makes for orderly politics and
constitutional progress; while whatever tends to impair that union, disturbs the
constitutional poise of the government, obstructs its functions, and introduces an
anarchic condition of affairs full of danger to all social interests. This. is the
cardinal principle of American politics. (Ford, 1967: 356)
Ford returned continually to the argument about the melding of political parties and
public offices, and hence about the linkage between society and politics. This
melding, in his view, was a practical inevitability, given the requirements of the
Constitution. It was also a democratic triumph, given the wishes of the public and
the governmental obstacles they confronted. If the result was still deeply flawed in
206
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
his time, with its representative function attenuated and its coordinating function
intermittent, despite the tremendous resources diverted (often with marginal legality)
to it, such a union was still the means-Party
which the
Efficiency, capitalized-by
passage of time and the evolution of institutions would improve American politics.
In this, Ford, too, was to be stunningly wrong. Not the disciplining but the
evisceration of party was to be a central theme of the years that followed. Yet to rest
content with saying that Ford, like his European contemporaries, had focused on a
dynamic clearly at variance with the character of American politics in the late
twentieth century would, once again, be to surrender contemporary assets needlessly.
At a minimum, there were further specific elements of his basic projection which still
read, on their own terms, as impressively prescient. Beyond that, the questionraised
the deterioration, rather than the purification,
by the failure of his larger design-by
of "party efficiency"-is
surely one of the great questions about the future of
American politics in our time, too.
The central element in Ford's prediction about the evolution of American politics
did prove strikingly inaccurate. The composite nature of that politics, as Ford
projected it, did not stop with a sanitized and improved party system uniting the
even that was to be wide of
institutions of American national government-though
the mark. Rather, this composite vision went on to include a particular order for
these institutions. In this, Congress would be tied crucially to the Presidency by a
national party largely energized by the president, and Congress would thereby
function almost like the lower house of a parliament, passing judgment on
presidential prerogatives and occasionally restraining them. By contrast, of course,
the eventual emergence of institutionalized, "divided government"-the
Presidency
more or less reliably in the hands of one major party, the Congress more or less
reliably in the hands of the other-is in most ways the precise opposite to both these
projections (Sundquist, 1988-89; Lipset, 1989; Shafer, 1991).
On the other hand, there was a major, ancillary prediction which has fared
considerably better. Much of the work which Ford expected the political party to do
in the evolution of American politics was envisioned to come either by-means-of or
by-virtue-of the evolution of the institution of the Presidency. Indeed, in a judgment
also at variance with the dominant intellectual currents of the day, but one which
looks much more prescient in ours, Ford saluted the Presidency as already (if still
implicitly) the dominant institution of American national government. Writing before
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, much less Franklin Roosevelt and Harry
Truman, Ford saw the Presidency both as the great triumph of democratic politics
and as the great energizer of American government.
The evidence which our history affords seems conclusive of the fact that the only
power which can end party duplicity and define issues in such a way that public
opinion can pass upon them decisively, is that which emanates from presidential
authority. It is the rule of our politics that no vexed question is settled except by
executive policy. Whatever may be the feeling of Congress towards the President,
it cannot avoid an issue which he insists upon making. And this holds good for
presidents who lose their party leadership as with those who retain it. (Ford, 1967:
283-284)
This would constitute an unimpressive "insight" into the politics of the late twentieth
century, if it were offered today. Yet it was made in a period preceding most of the
the rise of the presidency over the course of that
causes-for
explanations-the
century. Thus it was before the coming of the welfare state and positive government;
BYRONE. SHAFER
207
before the coming of the Cold War and a standing military establishment; before
formal assumption of responsibility for the status of the economy; and before effective
assumption of strategic leadership among the developed democracies (Binkley, 1958;
Cronin, 1980). Rather than the rise of governmental responsibilities, then, along with
the institutionally specific assets with which to address them, Ford looked to two
other explanatory factors, each also impressively "modern."
The first was simply formal powers. A single rather than a multi-headed agency
of government, the presidency already appeared, in 1898, to have potential by virtue
of that characteristic alone. Less speculatively, Ford paid further attention to the
invigoration of the veto-probably as unforeseen by the founding fathers as the
invigoration of judicial review by the Court-as a very practical means by which
institutional potential could be activated. From the other side, Ford emphasized what
Theodore Roosevelt would describe a decade thereafter as the "bully pulpit" aspect
of the presidency. Again, writing well before the concentrating and dramatizing
impact of the electronic media, Ford viewed presidents, and hence the presidency,
as potentially commanding press (and public) attention in a way no other institution
could. As a result, while its incumbents could hardly dictate outcomes on the issues
of the day, they could claim priority, often the crucial priority, in framing those issues
(Pious, 1979; Kernell, 1986).
The presidentialtype of governmentwhich democraticprogressis shaping in
Americais still imperfect.While the presidentialofficehas been transformedinto
a representativeinstitution,it lacksproperorgansforthe exerciseof thatfunction.
The nominationof a presidentialcandidateis accompaniedby a declarationof
party principles which he is pledged to enforce in the conduct of the
administration;but no constitutionalmeansare providedwherebyhe may carry
meanssuppliedby
out his pledges,and it is due solelyto the extra-constitutional
to
office
is
able
that
the
performthe function
presidential
party organization
imposedupon it of executingthe will of the nation. (Ford, 1967:214-215)
Nevertheless, even the success of this presidential prediction was to come in the
precise opposite manner to the one which Ford envisioned-by virtue of the decline
of, not the rise of, party as organization. For here, too, the very core of Ford's
iconoclastic approach to (all of) the politics of his time was to view partyas a necessary
responseto the structure of American government and the character of American
politics. Nowhere is this orientation more in evidence than in his six-chapter survey
of the active organs of national government, for which the main titles are "The House
of Representatives," "The Senate," "The Presidency," "Party Organization," "Party
Subsistence," and "Party Efficiency" (Ford, 1967: Part III).
In this view, the presidency and the parties would inevitably evolve, and rise, in
tandem. As a result, Ford could not guess that his main explanatory factors for the
peculiar potential of the presidency, formal powers and opinion leadership, would
become critical preciselybecauseparty would be decreasingly able to function as a
substitute. In a world where party did not mobilize the public and coordinate
government, whoever could best shape public opinion and dominate institutional
conflicts would be the critical actor. On the other hand, and perhaps surprisingly,
the main explanation for the failure of Ford's prediction lay precisely with the other
main dynamic upon which he focused so centrally, the growing democratization of
American politics.
Ford did place heavy emphasis on those "Democratic Tendencies" which were
responsible for replacing "Class Rule" with "Party Organization." (Ford, 1967: chs.
208
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
10, 5, and 23, respectively) These tendencies had already extended the suffrage,
eviscerated the Electoral College, called forth the mass party, created the national
convention, and energized the presidency. Yet those contemporary reformers whom
Ford was to excoriate on other grounds were already well launched upon their further
institutionally democratizing agenda, one which would shortly overtake and begin
to negate Ford's larger evolutionary argument.
The injection of the primary election into every facet of party politics was the
central institutional thrust of this, as reinforced crucially by civil service and
personnel systems, but there was to be much more. Thus Ford argued that the great
barrier to public control of government in his time was the indirectly elected and
effectively irresponsible Senate, and that the way to deal with this problem was for
the presidency to join forces with (and mobilize) the House of Representatives,
thereby forcing the Senate to negotiate with them, instead of the reverse. Most
reformers, however, and ultimately the general public as well, preferred a direct,
structurally democratizing response to the problem, by making the Senate directly
elected. Within a generation, they were to solve this problem through a constitutional
amendment, rather than through an alliance of other institutions (Mowry, 1958;
Croly, 1914).
Moreover, behind all these developments was a continuing anti-party strand of
American thinking about politics. The founding fathers had operationalized this,
right from the start. Ford himself was confronting a successor version, in the
arguments of the Progressive reformers of his day. Yet this mentality was ultimately
to have a much stronger mass resonance than even Ford would guess. Given the choice
between "purifying" the political parties or making governmental decisions directly,
the American public was to opt, reliably, for the latter (Madison, 1961a; Ceaser,
1979).
This is not to say that there have been no countervailing tendencies in the
intervening century, and a focus on Party Efficiency does lead directly to two, in
particular. The first of these involves increasing ideational coherence for the political
parties; the second involves limits on the decline in the strength of party-ingovernment. If these are still themselves the incipient, and hardly the dominant,
tendencies of their age, they do run in the direction which Ford both projected and
preferred.
In the first of these tendencies, a world-the world of American politics-which
has featured the decline of orthodox party organizationhas actually featured the rise
of ideological and issue coherence among those party activists who now do the work
of the official party. Especially given the problematic links between political parties
and public offices in the American context, this development has hardly remade
parties as the great link between the public and the government, and among different
governmental institutions, which Ford envisioned. But the decay of party machinery
did coincide with, and even facilitate, the coming of more ideologically integrated
parties, and that ideological integration is a potential counterweight to other
fragmenting forces (Shafer, 1988: ch. 3; Miller and Jennings, 1986: ch. 8).
In the second of these modern tendencies which run (somewhat perversely) in a
Fordian direction, the influence of party-in-government has in fact declined less than
the influence of the political party in other realms. Or, at least, in the classic tripartite
conceptual approach to political parties-party in the electorate, party as organization, and party in government (Key, 1942)-it is party-as-organization which has
suffered the greatest decline, party-in-government which has suffered the least. Both
at the national level and in the states, common party identifications among elected
209
BYRONE. SHAFER
officials still serve as the most readily available and fundamental means of
coordinating government. The inescapable irony, of course, is that in an era of
"divided government"-a
frequent phenomenon in the states as well-the remaining
strength of party-in-government can as easily be a handicap as an asset to effective
representation and effective coordination. (Maass, 1983; Price, 1984).
What remains, then, is the great question about the possibilities and prospects in
American politics, raised continually and explicitly in the work of Henry Jones Ford,
raised more indirectly but not less insistently in the work of Roberto Michels and
Vilfredo Pareto, and thus reserved appropriately for the concluding section of this
paper. This is the question, depending on the side from which it is viewed, of the
necessity of political parties or of the possibility of citizen politics. Given the actual,
subsequent evolution of American politics, Ford's complaint about the politics of his
own day can be merged easily into ours, as one introduction to that fundamental
question.
Party organization is compelled to act through executive and legislative deputies,
who, while always far from disavowing their party obligations, are quite free to
use their own discretion as to the way in which they shall interpret and fulfil the
party pledges. Meanwhile they are shielded, by the constitutional partitions of
privilege and distributions of authority, from any direct and specific responsibility
for delay or failure in coming to an agreement for the accomplishment of party
purposes. Authority being divided, responsibility is uncertain and confused, and
the accountability of the government to the people is not at all definite or precise.
When a party meets with disaster at the polls, every one may form his own opinion
as to the cause. It is purely a matter of speculation. (Ford, 1967: 326-327)
Historical
Writings
and Contemporary
Insights
American politics is in a transition state. Throes of change rack the state with
pain in every limb and evoke continual groans. A cry for relief is the burden of
public utterance. A ready ear is given to quackery, and many political nostrums
are recommended with pathetic credulity by large bodies of respectable people.
Fortunately for the safety of the state and the development of the constitution, the
character and circumstances of the mass of the people are such that efforts to
physic American politics are futile. The agencies which have carried on the
process of change will continue to do so, in spite of all outcry and remonstrance,
until the democratic type government is perfected. (Ford, 1967: 215-216)
Whether Ford himself, or an intellectual successor with the same concerns and
prejudices, would feel as sanguine in the late twentieth century as he managed to
feel in the late nineteenth is unclear, and presumably unanswerable. His major focus,
however, along with the central question which follows from it, remains as powerful
now as then:
*
*
Stated from the side of those who share a version of the Fordian perspective
on the necessity of political parties, the question is: Can a structure of
government by itself, in the absence of political parties to link the public with
government and to connect the institutions of governments to each other,
possibly lead to a democratic political process? (Caraley, 1989; Burnham,
1965).
Stated from the other side, the side of those who view political parties as a past
210
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
impediment and a present irrelevance in the progress of American politics, the
same question reads: Can a true citizen politics, in which individuals combine
and recombine freely in pursuit of their wishes, use institutional structures and
institutional reform to produce a democratic process? (Sundquist, 1986; Lurie,
1980).
What neither Ford nor Pareto nor Michels could have known was that all were
writing at a crucial turning point in the practical attemptto answer this question, by
way of American politics. The late nineteenth century appears, with the benefit of a
further century of hindsight, as the period when a long partisan era in American
politics was drawing to a close. Parties as organizations were to go into a slow but
century-long decline. Parties as objects of public identification would go into a
delayed but ultimately as ineluctable a descent. Parties as governmental instruments
would follow the same trajectory, though not, as yet, to the same depths (McCormick,
1986; Silbey, 1991).12
In their place, both the ideology and, especially, the institutional embodiments of
citizen politics were to enjoy an equally long, albeit sporadic, rise. The progress of
the great institutional symbol of all this, the primary election, is a reasonable
metaphor for the entire process. Gradually but ineluctably, the primary became the
formal means, and the distinctively American means, for making citizen control (not
just of elections but also of nominations) possible. Along the way, political parties
ceased to be private organizations and became instead public frameworks, and
increasingly emptyframeworks at that.
It would actually take until the 1970s (!) before the primary had conquered the
last bastions of party mediation, in presidential nominations and the national party
convention. But this fact only underlined the century-long character of the move
away from the partisan era, with its strong parties, through the non-partisan era,
with its reliance on formal institutions of government themselves as the means for
tying the public to those institutions and then coordinating them (see especially
Epstein, 1986).
The progression of the primary was thus only a metaphor, however attractively
concrete, for a much larger development. For what the primary really introduced
was the fate of political parties and the shift in grand political eras. And what this
fate and this shift actually implied, at bottom, was that the nation was moving back
the
informal reality remains, of course, the central question-to
formally-the
governmental arrangements envisioned by the drafters of the Constitution. In this,
institutions with shared
the checks and balances of that document itself-separate
to be the means by which
powers, in which ambition counteracted ambition-were
the public would be guaranteed both responsiveness and coordination (Madison,
1961b, 1961c).
Ford would have treated this as a great irony: A mass public which had needed
political parties in order to secure democratic control of government had then turned
on the vehicle of that control and set back its own democratic progress.13 But it is
not at all clear that the general public shared this view. Rather, having attempted
to domesticate the government by means of political parties, the public then moved
on to address the next set of problems-created
by those parties-by attempting to
domesticate them as well.
Such a trajectory does raise the question of further turning points, or even of grand
political cycles. Originally, having succeeded only very incompletely in realizing an
ideal democracy by way of simple constitutional engineering, the American public
BYRONE. SHAFER
211
turned to political parties as a further way to seek its wishes. Perhaps now, having
succeeded only very incompletely in realizing an ideal democracy by way of
institutional reform which was aimed at displacingparties and enshrining citizen
politics, that same public will turn again and look for (inevitably new and different,
but still intellectually related) means of reinvigorating the parties?
It is safe to say that most of the current political scene-in the rise of partisan
independence, the coming of narrower organized interests, the presence of major but
cross-cutting public issues, the injection of formal rights and standards into party
governance-argues against such a turning point (Lunch, 1987; Shafer, 1986). Yet
it is also wise to remember that Ford, Pareto, and Michels, writing just as the last
turning point had been reached, would also have been perfectly comfortable in noting
that "most of the current political scene" did not suggest it.
In any case, Michels himself would presumably not have been drawn into an
argument phrased this way: neither partisan nor citizen politics held any prospect
of escaping a genuine "Iron Law." On the other hand, a contemporary analyst of
American politics, borrowing the Michelsian framework, would have particular
reason to heap scorn on the notion of a politics without serious parties: If no
organization could escape oligarchical tendencies, no concentration of the public will
was even possiblewithout organization.
Said differently, if parties are not the organizational basis of politics, then
something else will be. This might actually be government itself, organized so as to
form its own internal oligarchy. More probably, if parties are not to be the
organizational means for creating dominance overgovernment, then something else,
and probably something worse, will spring up to do just that. Indeed, the narrowly
personalistic campaigns of the current era, the burgeoning of Political Action
Committees, the rise of professional consulting firms, the mobilizing of "single
interests," the continuation of great economic organizations-all these would serve
to keep a contemporary Michelsian supplied with intellectual ammunition.
By the same token, the ghost of Pareto could presumably not be laid by a nonexistent choice: The Circulation of Elites should continue at the center of grand
politics, whatever the institutional arrangements, formal or informal, around it. Yet
again, a contemporary analyst of American politics, using the Paretian framework,
on the opposite side of the argument this time: If
just might be drawn in-though
no merely formal political device could balk a fundamental social dynamic, current
American political parties (as seen through this framework) still appear to offer
particularly distortive advantages to certain narrowly constituted elites.
Political parties have been separated from public offices in the modern world in a
way that Pareto (and Michels, for that matter) could not have foreseen. Yet a further
analysis of the existing parties, in a search for elite emergence and displacement
within them, suggests something else: that the newly ideological and coherent parties
resulting from an activist structure have retained substantial influence over the course
of American politics. If they no longer control nominations directly, they do still
shape many political issues as these emerge. If they no longer effectively coordinate
government, they do still need to be conciliated by their elected office-holders on
many issues. In short, on lesser issues frequently, and on greater issues intermittently,
they do retain a major influence on government (Madden, 1976; Elving, 1988; Shafer,
1988: 223-225).
However, being less formally relevant to nominations and less practically able to
coordinate government, contemporary political parties were also less constrained by
any responsibility to the general public, and less concerned with reflecting public
212
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
wishes. In turn, having fewer direct policy rewards to distribute, however great their
indirect influence, they could mobilize only a particularly narrow and distorted
sample of the general public to do the remaining party work. They were, effectively,
"remnant parties." As a result, the very device which a contemporary Fordian would
need in order to begin rebuilding his democratic vision was far morethe narrow and
self-serving vehicle of Paretian theory than was the array of modern public offices
which political parties were somehow once again to discipline.
Accordingly, the modern student of Pareto might quite reasonably decry these
parties, and focus instead on those aspects of modern society which, at the very least,
make citizen politics more feasible now than it could ever have been in the era of the
Progressives, the era of Michels and Pareto. Rising levels of education, vastly
improved communications, generally increased affluence, obviously extended
leisure-these
certainly make a "citizen politics" moreplausible. Disciples of Henry
Jones Ford could still make the obvious ripostes, too: From one side, such conditions
still do not make a true citizen politics plausible enough (Neuman, 1986); from the
other, the currently enfeebled political parties can hardly be used as evidence of what
invigorated parties would resemble.
And it may be best to leave an irresolvable debate there. Neither Michels, nor
Pareto, nor Ford could, in practice, resolve this question in their time, though all
tried and all insisted. If their efforts remain applicable to the debate in our time, this
relevance still requires something of them and something of us. From them, of course,
it requires a powerful argument, which is nothing if not still present, and centrally
captured, in the notions of the Iron Law, the Circulation of Elites, and Party
Efficiency. These notions are lasting generalizations, not period details.
From us, such an application requires a certain mentality about using historical
writings to address contemporary politics. To be more precise, it requires us to
beware of any analysis which, while superficially devoted to textual fidelity, actually
reduces these works to period detail. The specifics of politics in their own periods
were, of course, used to develop their generalizations; this was their "data." Yet if
those generalizations then prove not to fit the specifics of politics in our period, as
they inevitably will not, this cannot be permitted to dismiss the larger argument.14
Instead, that argument must be pressed in a slightly more abstracted sense, not just
to see where it might be true and why it is no longer true on its home groundto see where it leads in the attempt to interpret
though that alone has value-but
contemporary politics and, especially, to use it in wrestling with the great issues of
a modern day.
And that, in turn, brings us back to the great question, capable of being stated in
its own terms in the modern world, but, perhaps surprisingly, generated autonomously by an odyssey through Michels, Pareto, and Ford as well. Can government
be designed to produce democratization through its own mechanics? (Kammen,
1986; Foley, 1990). Must political parties be the operative essence of democratic
government? (Ginsberg and Shefter, 1990; Chubb and Peterson, 1989). Can a selfconscious citizen politics be created anywhere, on its own? Should we concentrate
centrally on the health of political parties instead?
Those are all restatements of the same question. The eighteenth-century answer
was citizen politics-democracy
and governance through institutional engineering.
The nineteenth-century answer was partisan politics-democracy
and governance
by way of political parties. The twentieth century has gone backto citizen politics. The
twenty-first century must either extendthat preference, trying actually to make it true
in practice, or become another era-and another variant-of party politics instead.
BYRONE. SHAFER
213
Democracy is a treasure which no one will ever discover by deliberate search. But
in continuing our search, in laboring indefatigably to discover the undiscoverable,
we shall perform a work which will have fertile results in the democratic sense.
(Michels, 1962; 368)
Notes
1. Originally published as Roberto Michels, Zur Soziologiedes Parteiwesensin der modernen
Demokratie(Stuttgart: Alfred Kr6ner, 1911). The version used for direct citation here is
of ModernDemocracy,
Michels, PoliticalParties:A Sociological
Studyof theOligarchicalTendencies
trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, intro. Seymour Martin Lipset (New York: The Free Press,
1962).
2. Modern criticisms of the resulting behavior could actually borrow turn-of-the-century
rhetoric:
It may be noticed that in the democratic party of today, the great conflicts of view
are fought out to an ever-diminishing extent in the field of ideas and with the
weapons of pure theory, that they therefore degenerate more and more into
personal struggles and invectives, to be settled finally upon considerations of a
purely superficial character. (Michels, 1962: 334).
3. None of them laudatory. Among the mildest is his complaint about the major Paretian
concept of the study of politics, the circulation of elites:
Pareto's thiorie de la circulationdes elites must, however, be accepted with
considerable reserve, for in most cases there is not a simple replacement of one
group of elites with another, but a continuous process of intermixture, the old
elements incessantly attracting, absorbing, and assimilating the new (Michels,
1962: 343).
In the prologue to this summary, Michels numbers Pareto among "Those who do not
believe in the god of democracy. ..."
4. Originally published as Vilfredo Pareto, "Un applicazione di teorie sociologiche," Revista
Italiana di Sociologia(1901), 402-456. The version used for direct citation here is Pareto,
TheRise andFall of theElites: An Applicationof Theoretical
Sociology,intro. Hans L. Zetterberg
(New York: Arno Press, 1979).
5. Originally published as Vilfredo Pareto, Trattatodi SociologiaGenerale,3 vols. (Florence:
of General
Barbera, 1916). The version used for direct citation here is Pareto, Compendium
Sociology, abr, Giulio Farina, trans. Elizabeth Abbott (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1980).
6. Pareto in fact insisted continually not just that economic changes could create conflicts
which then shaped politics, but that political elites could pursue policies which then
shaped economies, thereby sometimes precipitating their own demise. Perhaps more
provocative, for an era (and a paper) where incipient and spreading democratization
should be a subtext, is the conjoint political and economic observation on regime changes.
When, in a country, classes that for any reason have long remained separate
suddenly mingle or, in more general terms, when a class-circulation that has been
sluggish suddenly acquires an intensity at all considerable, almost always
observable is an appreciable increase in intellectual, economic, and political
prosperity in the country in question. And that is why periods of transition from
oligarchic to more or less democratic regimes are often periods of prosperity.
If the prosperity in question were due to different systems of government, the
prosperity should continue as long as the new regime endured. But that is not the
case. The fluoresence lasts for a certain length of time and then comes a decline.
(Pareto, 1980: 372).
7. Once again, the most intriguing prospective
examination of politically relevant elites is from
David S. Broder (Broder, 1980). Note, however, that here, too, the focus is on sectors
outside of public office. Pareto himself actually had difficulty utilizing the American case.
214
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
RobertoMichels,VilfredoPareto,andHenryJonesFord
In Europe, he argued, the alteration between periods of stasis and periods of convulsion
was testimony to the inherent foolishness of established elites. But in America, the presence
of more or less constant tumult and change was evidence, not of elite perceptiveness, but
of social peculiarity:
An instance in our day would be the United States of America, where this upward
thrust of members of the lower classes strong in Class II residues is very intense;
and in that country, one witnesses the rise of no end of strange and wholly
unscientific religions .. . and a mass of hypocritical laws for the enforcementof
morality that are replicas of laws of the European Middle Ages. (Pareto, 1980:
277).
Politics:A Sketch
Originally published as Henry Jones Ford, TheRiseandGrowthof American
(New York: Macmillan). The version used for direct citation
of Constitutional
Development
here is a precise reprint, Ford, The Rise and Growthof AmericanPolitics, intro. Elmer E.
Cornwell, Jr. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1967).
Though he put the perception to very different uses, Pareto also shared this perception:
One extreme is marked by the Rome of the praetorians, where the chief de facto
instrument of governing, and even more so the visible instrument, was armed
force. The other extreme is represented by the United States of America, where
the chief actual instrument of government, and to a somewhat lesser extent the
apparent instrument, is the political "machine." (Pareto, 1980: 336)
Ford would later summarize this view even more sarcastically:
A favorite excuse of reformers, for the failure of their schemes to produce the
results expected, exactly parallels the logic of the tailor who contended that the
coat he had made was a good coat but the boy was too small. It is argued that
popular character has declined under the influence of something or other
("commercialism"is just now the stock phrase), so that good political institutions
lose their fitness and that the only thing to do is to develop a proper stature of
citizenship. (Ford, 1903: 225)
This, too, occasioned an even more general and pessimistic summary subsequently:
Inquiry into the political history of our cities will show that before party rule
became firmly established, they were subject to gang rule, and impartial
observation at the present time will show that by so much as restrictivelegislation
is effective in removing municipal government from regular party control, it tends
to pass under gang rule again. Lower than this our politics can hardly get, for the
principle of personal leadership defies all schemes of pulverizing society into
atoms, and the ideal of a community without differentiationof political functions
in the mass of its citizenship can never be realized. Nominations to office will
always be made by the few, no matter how many may seem to participate, and
the only open questions are the extent and the location of the responsibility. (Ford,
1900b: 186)
A further indication of the scope of the change was the shift in the competitive status of
the two parties. In the period before this change, both parties were generally competitive;
in the period after, each party had long periods of predominance. Writing at the turning
point, however, Ford was convinced that parties must-and would-produce a more or
less automatic restoration of competition:
An important consequence of this party instinct of comprehensionis the tendency
of opposing party organizations to equalize each other in strength. The practical
purpose of their formation causes each to compete for popular favor in ways that
tend towards an approximately equal division of popular support. Even in the
greatest victories at the polls, the preponderance of the triumphant party is but
a small percentage of the total vote. If a party becomes so hopelessly discredited
that it has no chance of success, it disappears like the Federalists or the old
National Republican party, and a new party takes its place based on contemporaneous divisions of public sentiment. (Ford, 1967: 127-128)
In other arguments, he was to go further still:
BYRONE. SHAFER
215
At the outset, the stubborn fact confronts us that those of our political institutions
which work most badly are those which have been reformed the most. Indeed, it
may be said that the satisfactoriness of our political institutions is in inverse order
to the frequency with which they have been subjected to reform. The national
government, which has been least reformed, works with superior vigor and
efficiency in every part of administration; our state governments, which every now
and then are fitted out with the newest fashions of reform, come a long way behind
in quality of administration; and municipal government, which is always being
reformed, is the perpetual subject of malediction and despair. (Ford, 1903: 224)
14. At the risk of the obvious, it should be added that this must not become an argument for
the opposite error. Anyone returning to works which can be so powerfully summarized
and brought back into play through powerful summary notions will also be struck by the
way in which the evidence used to generate their central concepts was cudgeled more to
extract uniformity than to seek variation. Accordingly, if there is a danger that modern
differences in (mere) period detail will be permitted to dismiss original-and lastingtheoretical insights, there is a counterpart danger that a determination to sustain the
original insights against mere period dismissalwill militate, once more, against attending
to crucial variations and inconsistencies.
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BiographicalNote
BYRONE. SHAFERis Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at
Nuffield College, Oxford University. He is editor and contributor to Is America
Different?: A New Look at AmericanExceptionalism(1991, Oxford University Press) and
The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras (1991, University of
Wisconsin Press), and is currently at work on a book with William J.M. Claggett
tentatively entitled ThePolitical Structureof AmericanPolitics: Issues, Actors,and Institutions
in the Era of Divided Government(forthcoming, Johns Hopkins University Press).
ADDRESS:Nuffield College, Oxford, OX1 1NF, United Kingdom.
This paper was first presented at the Annual Meetings of the American
Acknowledgments.
Political Science Association, San Francisco, 1990. The author thanks Sudhir Hazareesingh,
Martin Landau, Robert E. Lane, Jean Laponce, Robert K. Merton, David B. Truman, and
Vincent Wright for encouragement in its pursuit.