The article is devoted to the socio-political understanding of the functioning of the political and administrative elite in the modern information and communication space. The relevance of the research topic is based on the need to redefine, in current political and social reality, the concepts of political elite and administrative elite, as well as to identify its distinctive features. The authors lead theoretical foundations for defining the concepts of political elite and administrative elite from the point of view of linguistics and political science, analyse the approaches and models of western and domestic researchers on the problem of relations between the political and administrative elites, and put forward the thesis about the relative independence of the administrative elite as a category of political science analysis and the validity of studying public administration outside the framework of the concept of the dichotomy of political and administrative elites. The final part of provides the authors’ assessment of the role and the pathways of Western political elites in the context of modern geopolitical reality.