An associate of Max Weber’s, a certain Robert Michels, who taught in Turin wrote the book on the nature of the political parties in 1910 with the teasing subtitle: investigation of the oligarchic tendency of groups. In this he claimed to formulate ‘iron law of oligarchy.’
Michels is an interesting figure. He was a political activist in the Social Democratic party – near the anarchic edge – as well as a sociologist. Later, after WWI, he moved towards fascism. Thus, I pin him. So classic, this pinning gesture. The album of thinkers.
Robert Michels contrasted two ways of comparing democracies and monarchies/aristocracies. One was to compare the frequency of elections as the index of popular participation – and by this criteria, democracies were clearly more ‘democratic’. But the other way – comparing length of tenure of the officials – gave a more paradoxical result. In Germany, an official – in the legislature, in the party, as a minister – had much greater chance of having a longer tenure, or at least a more frequent one, then they did during the aristocratic/monarchical time.
Michels came up with certain psychological reasons for this unexpected datum. For instance, the democratic representative often is the recipient of gratitude for what he has done. An appointed official or an aristocrat, on the other hand, does what he does evidently for – his king or his family, thus arresting the impulse of gratitude. LI would actually institutionalize gratitude in terms of favors. In general, the frequency of election actually puts a greater stress on those factors that lead to the successful longevity of the representative – in other words, cost of entry goes up for the challenger, the longer the representative endures in office, the more the gratitude/favors logic works to ensure the closeness of supporters and the officeholder.
There are also, according to Michels, external reasons that help ensure length of tenure. For instance, “…the party that changes its leaders too often runs the risk of fining itself unable to contract useful alliances at an opportune moment. The two gravest defects of genuine democracy, its lack of stability (perpetuum mobile democraticum) and its difficulty of mobilization, are dependent on the recognized right of the sovereign masses to take part in the management of their own affairs.”
In the aftermath of WWII, Italy became an experiment for American foreign policy, which put major money in defeating the Communist party in the elections that brought to power the Christian Democrats. And so they remained, with little interruption, until the brief and corrupt reign of the so-called Socialist Party under Craxi from 1983-1987. Italy was remarked on by the Western press for having so many changes of government. But the changes of government were with a limited repertoire of politicians – the Christian Democratic party as the governing party would re-organize decade after decade. If we paid attention to Michels, we would diagnose Italy – as we should diagnose the United States – as suffering from the risk of narrowing democracy down to a very limited number of figures and clans. The democratic dream, hatched from the idea that the will of the people would create the pepetuum mobile democraticum, was captured by an electoral oligarchy, formed into parties.
I suspect that we are living at the end of the party system. New parties, such as that of Macron’s, quickly fill with old players – one of the oldest right now, Bayrou, is the prime minister, and he is flogging the same austerity budget he flogged thirty years ago. Basically, he is a useless cog in a machine that has so many useless cogs that we don’t quite know what it is there for anymore.
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