Iron Law Research Articles

Gendering the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Or how organizing an official football team became a strategy of “passive revolution”

AbstractThe ongoing debate in organization and management studies regarding the transformation of oligarchic structures through rank‐and‐file participation often overlooks gender dynamics. Drawing from the experience of Argentine women playing football independently, this article argues that promoting gender inequalities and reinforcing masculine stereotypes can preserve class disparities in trade unions. Additionally, it highlights how trade unions, by extending control into women's leisure, can perpetuate oligarchic structures, emphasizing the importance of politicizing leisure as a domain of gender inequalities. In turn, the patriarchal‐oligarchic organization represents a unique form of class and gender domination that reconfigures itself by co‐opting informal solidarity networks.

Bending the Iron Law: The distribution of power within political parties

AbstractHow do political parties share power internally? We study the internal organization of political parties as the solution of a moral hazard problem between a party conference and its factions. Factions' mobilization efforts benefit the party electorally, but can only be imperfectly monitored. In contrast with the logic of Michel's Iron Law, we provide a functionalist rationale for intraparty power sharing: We show that internal power sharing can enhance a party's electoral performance. This effect is stronger in settings that award more resources to election winners: Low interparty power sharing produces high intraparty power sharing. We also show that intraparty power sharing should be more frequent within smaller parties, when monitoring of factional effort is more precise (e.g., preferential voting systems), and when factions' ideological disagreements span multiple dimensions.

The Paradox of Elites in Civil Society: A Comparative Study on Civil Society Leaders’ Satisfaction with Democracy in the UK and Sweden

AbstractThe presence of an elite group in civil society elicits a discursive friction between the long-standing normative understanding of civil society, acting as a check on government overreach and autocratic tendencies, and elite theories. Robert Michels’s iron law of oligarchy posits that as individuals rise in the ranks to become organizational leaders, they begin to take on elite attributes, and their priorities align with those of other elites and away from those of their constituents. Michels’s argument echoes with today’s populist anti-elitist rhetoric and the way populism rejects any intermediary bodies between the people and the political leaders, including interest organizations in civil society. As an attempt to empirically probe this theoretical tension, this paper explores satisfaction with the way democracy is working among the top-level leaders of the most well-resourced national-level civil society organizations in Sweden and in the UK, drawing on a survey study conducted in 2020–21.

Breaking a Molecular Scaling Relationship Using an Iron-Iron Fused Porphyrin Electrocatalyst for Oxygen Reduction.

The design of efficient electrocatalysts is limited by scaling relationships governing trade-offs between thermodynamic and kinetic performance metrics. This ″iron law″ of electrocatalysis arises from synthetic design strategies, where structural alterations to a catalyst must balance nucleophilic versus electrophilic character. Efforts to circumvent this fundamental impasse have focused on bioinspired applications of extended coordination spheres and charged sites proximal to a catalytic center. Herein, we report evidence for breaking a molecular scaling relationship involving electrocatalysis of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) by leveraging ligand design. We achieve this using a binuclear catalyst (a diiron porphyrin), featuring a macrocyclic ligand with extended electronic conjugation. This ligand motif delocalizes electrons across the molecular scaffold, improving the catalyst's nucleophilic and electrophilic character. As a result, our binuclear catalyst exhibits low overpotential and high catalytic turnover frequency, breaking the traditional trade-off between these two metrics.

Oligarchy in professional accounting bodies: Challenges for governance and leader‐member relations

AbstractDrawing on Robert Michels's “iron law” of oligarchy, this study examines a governance crisis that unfolded at one of the world's largest professional accounting bodies (PABs)—CPA Australia. We leverage Michels's century‐old contribution to the social sciences to explore how this crisis sheds light on the challenges that PAB governance arrangements can pose when PAB leadership and membership priorities conflict. By applying Michels's seminal work to theorize the origins, escalation, leadership collapse, and eventual resolution of this PAB governance crisis, we illuminate how governance arrangements fueled conflict and fostered a democratic deficit that frustrated sections of the membership in their attempts to debate issues, exercise accountability on leadership matters, and become involved in governance reform. Overall, our analysis reveals that despite espoused principles of equity and participation, PABs are vulnerable to oligarchy impacting how their leaders relate to the interests of their members. Implications for the capacity of PABs to accommodate member conflict and for member participation in the current‐day professional context are discussed.

Program Evaluation's Path to Greater Policy Relevance: Learning From Rossi's Iron Laws.

In a 1987 article, Peter R. Rossi promulgated "The Iron Law of Evaluation and Other Metallic Rules." The Metallic Laws were meant as an informal (and humorous) overstatement of the weakness of contemporary evaluations of social programs. Rossi' s underlying worry was not so much about the state of evaluation technology in the abstract, but, rather, in its inability to advance our broad understanding of social problems and what to do about them---in other words, to make evaluation policy relevant. Rossi attributed the continuing failure to develop successful "large-scale social programs" to the failure to build a strong knowledge base for this kind of "social engineering." The qualities of studies that enable such accumulated learning are variously labeled "external validity," "generalizability," "applicability," or "transferability." This Special Issue includes five papers that seek to explore and apply this understanding.

The Digital Party

Over two centuries political parties have stood as one of influential organizations in humankind. Besides playing several functions such as capturing and exercising state power, political socialization and interest aggregation, these organizations have not been free from controversies. At the centre of these controversies is the mass-elite divide which Robert Michels referred to as Iron Law of Oligarchy. Michel’s revelation was a revelation that elite interests were not necessarily compatible with those of the mass. This observation notwithstanding, political parties have remained the very influential actors in politics irrespective of some speculations that globalization is likely to lead to the withering away of political parties and the nation-state.

Transferability of Lessons From Program Evaluations: Iron Laws, Hiding Hands and the Evidence Ecosystem.

Assessing the transferability of lessons from social research or evaluation continues to raise challenges. Efforts to identify transferable lessons can be based on two different forms of argumentation. The first draws upon statistics and causal inferences. The second involves constructing a reasoned case based on weighing up different data collected along the causal chain from designing to delivery. Both approaches benefit from designing research based upon existing evidence and ensuring that the descriptions of the programme, context, and intended beneficiaries are sufficiently rich. Identifying transferable lessons should not be thought of as a one-off event but involves contributing to the iterative and learning of a scientific community. To understand the circumstances under which findings can be confidently transferred, we need to understand: (1) How far and why outcomes of interest have multiple, interacting and fluctuating causes. (2) The program design and implementation capacity. (3) Prior knowledge and causal landscapes (and how far these are included in the theory of change). (4) New and relevant knowledge; what can we learn in our 'disputatious community of truth seekers'.

Unveiling Oligarchy in Influence Networks From Partial Information

In modern society, individuals' opinions on various topics evolve as the result of their continuous interactions and are shaped by interpersonal influences and individual social power. Friedkin's reflected appraisal theory reveals how social power evolves along discussion sequences as a consequence of direct and indirect interpersonal influence over issue outcomes. This reflected appraisal theory also suggests how, in enduring social groups, a form of concentrated power in an entrenched minority arises as a near <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">iron law</i> of influence network dynamics. Motivated by theoretical and empirical findings, this paper studies oligarchic influence systems, that is systems in which the social power is accumulated within a small group of individuals. First, we propose a new mathematical model of the reflected appraisal mechanism and illustrate how, under appropriate conditions, this model leads the influence system to asymptotically converge to an oligarchy. Second and most importantly, we address the data-driven social power estimation problem, i.e., we propose algorithms to unveil oligarchies in influence networks along issue sequences. Our algorithmic approach is based upon (i) casting the problem of learning social power as a sparse recovery problem, and (ii) estimating individuals' social power directly from the observation of initial and final average opinions, without the burdensome intermediate step of social influence recovery. We prove that the social power estimation can be performed with partial sampling of initial opinions and we derive theoretical bounds on the estimation error in terms of the number of observations. We study sample complexity and computational requirements of the proposed methods. Finally, our findings are validated via numerical experiments.

Research Method and Publications in Religious Studies

There is a well-known adage in scientific work that all results of scientific research for a thesis or dissertation, whether the aim is to discover or build a new theory, test a theoretical model, test a theory, or formulate a policy brief, must be published. Research for essay writing can also be published, while research for exam purposes is not intended to be published (Bailey, 2004). The publication of the results of our research is one of the ways according to Cumming (2006) and Epstein, Kenway &amp; Boden (2007) so that the findings of our scientific research can be accessed, known, and read widely so that the world knows each other and all scientific activities are connected to each other as a mutually enlightening system. All research must be published it is the iron law of history. The iron law that applies in the world of science has been widely known among academics and scientists, all research results, whatever their form, must be published in scientific journals so that they can be widely disseminated to world readers, or if not, they will only turn into piles of paper reports that become mere waste or perish. The results of scientific work will just be piled up as mere documentation as research reports, without outputs, let alone outcomes, which are proud and have a wide impact.

Professional bodies

AbstractOrganization structures and processes of UK-based professional associations and regulatory bodies (professional bodies) are analyzed across all professions and over the long term. These are successful, long lived, and important organizations which have been neglected in the sociological and organizational literatures. Numbers have been growing and on average these organizations have enjoyed consistent financial success. They have been changing, reacting in part to external challenges, but also in response to internal challenges arising from growth and strains due to reactions to changes from their primary stakeholders, their members. We trace substantial changes in their staffing, governance, and education activities. We evaluate whether these changes amount to corporatization, as has been found in other public and third-sector organizations. We evaluate whether the changes confirm the charge that these organizations demonstrate the iron law of oligarchy. We find corporatization has been substantial but limited and that the changes represent shifting toward strategy rather than oligarchy, though democratic weakening has occurred. We find organization responses to member confusion, concerns, and criticisms to be influential in driving these changes and contributing to the sustainability of these organizations.

Oligarchy and leader are twin brothers

The article is a review of the famous book by Robert Michels (1876-1936) published in 1911 but only recently translated into Russian, Political Parties. A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (Moscow: Publishing House “Delo”, 2022. 448 p.). This is its first translation from German into Russian by I. Ivakina under the scientific editorship of D. Karasev. Based on the analysis of the main ideas of the book related to the concepts of ‘leader’, ‘party’, ‘democracy’ and ‘masses’, the author considers the phenomenon of the power of oligarchy not only in traditional and conservative systems but also in the modern radical, democratic and socialist ones. Thus, the so-called “iron law of oligarchy” formulated by R. Michels remains topical.

OĞUZ-QIPÇAQ QRUPU TÜRK DİLLƏRİ DİALEKTLƏRİNDƏ AHƏNG QANUNUNUN MİLLİ İDENTİKLİYİ

The dialects of the Turkic language preserve very important facts about the development and history of the language. The direction of research in the conditions of mutual integration of dialects is multifaceted, and the examination of the phonetic law, which has become the «iron law» in Turkic languages, in the context of Turkic languages in general, gives very interesting facts. In Turkic languages, which are dialect languages, vowel harmony, especially the phonetic law, has a special importance. One of the most distinctive features of Turkic languages is vowel harmony (synharmonism) and the leading phonetic-morphological law of Turkic languages.While the term “law of harmony” in Turkology is meant vowel harmony in Turkic languages it is meant vowel harmony, harmony of vow-els and consonants, and harmony of consonants.

Aleatoric governance: using lotteries to break the iron law of oligarchy

Abstract Michels’ iron law of oligarchy states that political organizations tend inexorably towards oligarchy, to the likely detriment of the organizations themselves and, by extension, to the detriment of society more broadly. We suggest focal randomization as a historically proven countermeasure: a lottery decides who wins promotion from a preselected pool of highly qualified candidates. We draw on a historical case to assess the efficacy of focal randomization in eroding power monopolization and elite closure in 18th-century Basel, Switzerland. To combat widespread nepotism, starting in 1688, the city implemented a series of partly randomized selection regimes that were routinely applied in executive appointments to the city’s administration until 1798. Using data on all 2,587 appointments to the main governing body of the city between 1650 and 1798, we analyse how each selection regime affected elite closure. Our findings indicate that the targeted use of elements of chance in executive appointments eroded the elite’s ability to monopolize access to the highest political positions. Before the introduction of focal randomization, candidates from Basel’s elite were 4 times more likely to be appointed to top positions than candidates from non-elite families. After the introduction of focal randomization, the elites’ advantages declined, and members of non-elite families tripled their chances of advancing to the highest office. However, our study also cautions that this effect depended on several design choices. Focal randomization is effective in settings in which a surplus of qualified candidates competes for a limited number of coveted positions.

The inception of demographic theory in Serbia

This text contains an account of the first work on theoretical demography in Serbia, which was written in 1862 by Kosta Cukic, a doctor of philosophy from Heidelberg and the first widely recognised Serbian economist. He dealt with this topic in the second volume of his State Economy textbook, the title of which was Economic Policy. Writing about population problems in economic textbooks was a common European practice at that time. Although he wrote for a textbook, his work was not a retelling of generally accepted theories, but a critical discussion of issues that had not been resolved in contemporary science. Therefore, his work can be considered original in the full sense of the word. In the theoretical sense, Cukic relied on Malthus, but also provided significantly different perspectives on many issues. He accepted Malthus?s position that the amount of food is a limiting factor in population growth and that natural fertility is very high due to people?s strong sexual drive. But there were also important differences: in Cukic?s theoretical framework, the iron law of wages does not apply, i.e. wages do not always strive for the existential minimum, as Malthus argued. Cukic also argues that capital affects fertility, since it affects the amount of available resources. Cukic was not a pessimist like Malthus, and instead observed a significant population growth in Europe at the time, without mass famine and pestilence. As we can see, Cukic dealt a lot with Malthus and his theory. This is understandable considering that Malthus was the preeminent theoretician whose work focused on the population problem in those decades, and therefore determination according to his theory and discussion with him was inevitable for anyone who intended to write about population problems. Cukic also dealt with population policy and those aspects of it that were available to the governments of the time: immigration, emigration, and marriage. The basis of his views was strong and consistent liberalism in every respect. Cukic advocated for expanding personal freedoms, such as free decision-making about marriage, and free immigration to the country and emigration from it. In some places he would set minimum technical conditions. ?Personal freedom... is the ideal of the political consciousness of the present time?. Accordingly, he claimed that ?citizens are not just means for governmental purposes?, but on the contrary, it is the government?s duty to ?facilitate and support the aspirations of citizens to particular and general happiness?, thus repeating John Locke?s idea that the state exists for the sake of citizens, and not citizens for the sake of the state. Cukic belonged to a wide circle of authors in the mid-19th century who fundamentally rejected Malthus?s theory: on the one hand, economists who claimed that technological progress and a deepened division of labour would lead to economic progress that would forever postpone the existential crisis that Malthus feared; and on the other, demographers who believed that workers would control their fertility to preserve living standards to a greater extent than Malthus thought possible. Towards the end of the 19th century, the decline of fertility in Western countries provided strong evidence in favour of the latter.

Online Appendix to Empirical Foundations of the Iron Law of Regulation

Online Appendix to Empirical Foundations of the Iron Law of Regulation

Empirical Foundations of the Iron Law of Financial Regulation

Empirical Foundations of the Iron Law of Financial Regulation

2020 Rossi Award Lecture: The Evolving Art of Program Evaluation.

Evaluation of public programs has undergone many changes over the past four decades since Peter Rossi coined his "Iron Law" of program evaluation: "The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social program is zero." While that assessment may be somewhat overstated, the essence still holds. The failures far outnumber the successes, and the estimated favorable effects are rarely sizeable. Despite this grim assessment, much can be learned from "failed" experiments, and from ones that are successful in only some sites or subgroups. Advances in study design, statistical models, data, and how inferences are drawn from estimates have substantially improved our analyses and will continue to do so. However, the most actual learning about "what works" (and why, when, and where) is likely to come from gathering more detailed and comprehensive data on how the intervention was implemented and attempting to link that data to estimated impacts. Researchers need detailed data on the target population served, the content of the intervention, and the process by which it is delivered to participating service providers and individuals. Two examples presented here illustrate how researchers drew useful broader lessons from impact estimates for a set of related programs. Rossi posited three reasons most interventions fail-wrong question, wrong intervention, poor implementation. Speeding the accumulation of wisdom about how social programs can best help vulnerable populations will require that researchers work closely with program funders, developers, operators, and participants to gather and interpret these detailed data about program implementation.

Who Plans What for Whom Under the “Iron Law” of Megaprojects? The Discourse Analysis of the Belgrade Waterfront Project

Urban megaprojects exhibit various distortions: special regulations, budget overrun, additional funding sources, long-term timeframes, and ad-hoc actor networks. Coping with such challenges seems to be demanding even for the welfare states and advanced democracies built upon the governmental control of megaproject development. Therefore, it is interesting to observe the nature of urban governance of megaproject development in a transitional society facing immature institutional and regulatory frameworks. Against such background, this article examines the main forces behind the flagship project of contemporary Serbia—the Belgrade Waterfront megaproject. By collecting 38 articles from the daily press, the paper identifies relevant stakeholders and present their statements to depict their positions, interests, and specific value frameworks. Using the discourse analysis to interpret the statements, the paper offers the following results: first, recognition of conflicts and coalitions; second, elucidation of the decision-making flows, and third, identification of power structures in the mentioned project. In addition, valuable insights into the problematic contextual features, e.g., tycoon-initiated urban development, the politics-led planning process, and weak civil engagement mechanisms, are elucidated. Concluding lessons on how to curb the extra-nature of urban megaprojects appear relevant for similar socio-spatial settings.

Development of the digital economy in the conditions of globalization and digital society (by the example of China)

The relevance of the study of the topic is that the development of the digital economy in the context of globalization and the digital society has received great development. Globalization is the free movement of markets, capitals, people, finances, capitals, technologies, goods, services, information that develops across national borders and is the result of a multi-scale need in many industries, including automotive and aviation, mobile operating systems, retail, web servers.&#x0D; The purpose of the study is to analyze the development of the digital economy in the context of globalization and the digital society (on the example of China).&#x0D; Research objectives: 1) to reveal the directions of development of the digital economy in the context of globalization and digital society; 2) justify the development of the global economy of China as the most powerful world leader; 3) show the expansion of China's regional influence through the development of digital technologies that contribute to the improvement of the digital society and its image.&#x0D; Methodology. The study of the digital society in China is based on Agile methodology and Agile philosophy as a new methodology of the digital economy, representing the methodology of complexity, as well as systemic, informational, institutional methods and approaches, which made it possible to fully represent a country like China and its development prospects . Methods of analysis and synthesis, generalization and systematization, historical and logical and comparative and axiological methods were used. The scientific novelty of the study is that the development of China's digital economy in the context of globalization and digital society is associated with advanced innovative technologies that are just entering the forefront of historical development and show how one can become a competitive state on the world stage. China today is a large digital and industrial state, which is on the path of a market and digital economy, developing digital strategies at all levels. The mania for new economies in anticipation of a new "economic miracle" began with China, which has been growing very fast for two decades, and since 1998 at 8% annually. The lucky number 8 has become the iron law of the Chinese economy. Digital market mechanisms are a powerful microeconomic tool in China. The digital economy is based on learning, gaining the skills needed for greater deregulation, free markets, and a clear focus on short-term income generation. China's economic development was only one part of the "economic miracle", but it is not felt by the entire population of China, most of whom feel insecure. The People's Republic of China has a mixed economy with a three-tier enterprise system, consisting of large government companies, local hybrid and foreign firms, and small businesses. The development of the digital economy in the context of globalization and China's digital society in the face of exponential reality and stochastic uncertainty has shown that technology is making us increasingly interconnected, dependent and vulnerable.&#x0D; The value of the study lies in the development of practical recommendations for improving the digital economy based on knowledge and digital technologies, within which new opportunities for society, business and the state are realized.&#x0D; Key words: digital economy, globalization, digital society.