thumb|right|[[Robert Michels, the sociologist who devised the iron law of oligarchy]]

The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of the organization.

According to Michels, all organizations eventually come to be run by a leadership class who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons, or political strategists for the organization. Far from being servants of the masses, Michels argues, this leadership class, rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures.

All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made "democratically" by members. In 1911, using anecdotes from the histories of political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically, Michels applied his argument to representative democracy at large.

Reasons

Michels stressed several factors that underlie the iron law of oligarchy. Darcy K. Leach summarized them briefly as: "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts."

Examples and exceptions

An example that Michels used in his book was Germany's Social Democratic Party. Lipset suggests a number of factors that existed in the ITU that are supposedly responsible for countering this tendency toward bureaucratic oligarchy.

University student unions

Titus Gregory argues that university students' unions today "exhibit both oligarchical and democratic tendencies". Unlike trade unions they have an ideologically diverse membership, and frequently have competitive democratic elections covered by independent campus media who guard their independence. These factors are strongly democratizing influences, creating conditions similar to those described by Lipset about the ITU. However, Gregory argues student unions can also be highly undemocratic and oligarchical as a result of the transient membership of the students involved. Every year between one quarter and one half of the membership turns over, and Gregory argues this creates a situation where elected student leaders become dependent on student union staff for institutional memory and guidance. Since many students' unions extract compulsory fees from their transient membership, and many smaller colleges and/or commuter campus can extract this money with little accountability, oligarchical behaviour becomes encouraged. For example, Gregory points out how often student union election rules "operate under tyrannical rules and regulations" that are used frequently by those in power to disqualify or exclude would-be election challengers. Gregory concludes that students' unions can "resist the iron law of oligarchy" if they have "an engaged student community", an "independent student media", a "strong tradition of freedom of information", and an "unbiased elections authority" capable of administrating elections fairly.

Participatory subgroups and countervailing power

Jonathan Fox's 1992 study of Mexican peasant organizations focuses on how participatory subgroups within a membership organization can generate a degree of countervailing power that can at least temporarily mitigate the iron law of oligarchy.

Wikipedia

thumb|upright=1.5|Cumulative growth in Wikipedia policy (red/solid line) and non-policy (green/dashed line) pages, overlaid on active population (blue/dotted line). Policy creation precedes the arrival of the majority of users, while the creation of non-policy pages, usually in the form of essay and commentary, lags the growth in population.

Research by Piotr Konieczny from 2009, a case study of the evolution of Wikipedia's policy on verifiability, argued that Wikipedia is not significantly affected by the iron law. A 2016 study by Bradi Heaberlin and Simon DeDeo concluded that the evolution of Wikipedia's network of norms over time is consistent with the iron law of oligarchy. Their quantitative analysis is based on data-mining over a decade of article and user information. It shows the emergence of an oligarchy derived from competencies in five significant "clusters", administration, article quality, collaboration, formatting, and content policy. Heaberlin and DeDeo note "The encyclopedia's core norms address universal principles, such as neutrality, verifiability, civility, and consensus. The ambiguity and interpretability of these abstract concepts may drive them to decouple from each other over time." Research on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) and peer production platforms, including Wikipedia, also supports the applicability of the Iron Law.

Reception

In 1954, Maurice Duverger expressed general agreement with Michels's thesis. In a 1966 article, political scientist Dankwart Rustow described Michels's thesis as "a brilliantly fallacious argument a fortiori". Rustow stated that the experience of the social democratic parties of Europe could not be generalized for other political parties.

According to a 2000 article, "To the extent that contemporary scholars ask at all about social movement organizations, they tend to reinforce Michels’s claim that bureaucratized, established organizations are more conservative in goals and tactics, though usually without explicitly engaging the iron law debate." The study however found that the iron law was malleable, and that established labor unions could under certain circumstances revitalize and experience radical change in line with its members' desires. One criticism is that power does not necessarily corrupt the leadership of organizations, and that the structure of organizations can check leaders.

While influential, the theory has attracted substantial criticism: scholars note counterexamples of long-standing democratic organizations and highlight mechanisms – such as rotating leadership, participatory governance, checks and balances, and collective decision-making – that can resist oligarchization. Recent perspectives, such as Drochon (2020), interpret Michels' law dynamically, suggesting that democracy involves an ongoing contestation of elite dominance rather than a fixed state, while Diefenbach (2019) points to egalitarian models like worker cooperatives and non-hierarchical systems as viable alternatives. Nonetheless, Michels' thesis endures as a powerful analytical lens on the structural pressures that continually challenge the maintenance of democracy in complex organizations, underscoring the need for constant vigilance to prevent elite capture.

Michels' thesis became popular once more in the postwar United States with the publication of Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1956) by Lipset, Trow, and Coleman.

Other

The iron law of oligarchy is similar to the concept in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a fictional book in the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell, who had written a review of James Burnham's book The Managerial Revolution several years earlier. That fictional book begins:

See also

  • Elite theory
  • Iron triangle (US politics)
  • Plato's five regimes
  • Post-democracy

Notes

References

  • Michels, Robert. 1915. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Translated into English by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. New York: The Free Press. From the 1911 German source.
  • Wagner, Gustav. "Robert Michels und das eherne Gesetz der Oligarchie". In "Wer wählt, hat seine Stimme abgegeben". Graswurzel Revolution pp. 28.
  • Nodia, Ghia. "Democracy's Inevitable Elites". Journal of Democracy 31, no. 1 (2020): 75–87.

Further reading

  • Osnos, Evan, "Ruling-Class Rules: How to thrive in the power elite – while declaring it your enemy", The New Yorker, 29 January 2024, pp. 18–23. "In the nineteen-twenties... American elites, some of whom feared a Bolshevik revolution, consented to reform... Under Franklin D. Roosevelt... the U.S. raised taxes, took steps to protect unions, and established a minimum wage. The costs, [[Peter Turchin|[Peter] Turchin]] writes, 'were borne by the American ruling class.'... Between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, a period that scholars call the Great Compression, economic equality narrowed, except among Black Americans... But by the nineteen-eighties the Great Compression was over. As the rich grew richer than ever, they sought to turn their money into political power; spending on politics soared." (p. 22.) "[N]o democracy can function well if people are unwilling to lose power – if a generation of leaders... becomes so entrenched that it ages into gerontocracy; if one of two major parties denies the arithmetic of elections; if a cohort of the ruling class loses status that it once enjoyed and sets out to salvage it." (p. 23.)
  • Political Parties by Robert Michels in PDF
  • Verstehen: Max Weber's Home Page By Frank W. Elwell. 'Oligarchy' section describes the Law. Last accessed on 27 May 2006.