Elite Rule Research Articles

The First Earl of Shaftesbury's Resolute Conscience and Aristocratic Constitutionalism

AbstractThis article provides a reappraisal of the first earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83) and challenges his reputation as an unprincipled politician. Conversely, it is argued that Shaftesbury's opposition to both Cromwell during the Protectorate and Charles II in the Restoration was guided by a resolute ‘conscience’. While there was certainly elasticity in his conduct, Shaftesbury was very much the product of a political education framed during the Civil War and Commonwealth eras. The article explicitly demonstrates through an exposition of his activity and thought in the 1650s and 1670s that four guiding values remained consistent in his career. Both periods were shaped by concerns over political and religious tyranny by an overbearing executive and a threat to ‘lives, liberty, and property’ from the ruler, the church, and the army. Shaftesbury's significance lies in the aristocratic constitutionalism he believed offered a restraint to encroachment by the executive and the people in government. Relying upon long-established traditions that positioned the nobility as an independent bridle against arbitrary government, Shaftesbury suggested a forward-thinking vision of elite rule supported by the people. In clarifying Shaftesbury's values, the article rejects interpretations of him as a republican, Neo-Harringtonian, or a believer in popular government (democracy).

The financialization of remittances and the individualization of development: A new power geometry of global development

The article argues that the increasing financialization of remittances produces an enormous shift in the political economy of development and contributes to a new power geometry of development. Exploring this power geometry, the article focuses on three main issues: First, migrants intend to support their friends and families on an individual level as remittance senders, and together with the corresponding recipients they form a translocal moral economy. On a macro level, the value of these transactions is high when currency hierarchies remain strong. Financialization of remittances amplifies this micro–macro divergence inherent to remittance flows. Deepening the financial “development” impact of remittances then goes hand in hand with cementing global inequality. Second, economic and political elites in remittance-receiving societies who are able to organize direct and indirect access to remittances with the help of financial instruments and through financialization are able to emancipate from national political control. This indirectly contributes to fostering elite rule in remittance-receiving societies. Third and finally, development is no longer a “national” objective but has become the individual risk of migrants and their relatives and friends. Financialization of remittances therefore consolidates an individualized notion of development. This paper aims to go beyond the narrow economistic and problem-solving approach on which many studies on remittances and financial inclusion draw. It illustrates how financialization of remittances (re)shapes power relations both within the Global South and between the Global South and the Global North.

OSMANLI-TÜRK MODERNLEŞMESİNDE DEVLET MERKEZLİ YAKLAŞIM VE METİN HEPER

The aim of this study is to describe the role of the state in Turkish modernization. For this purpose, Ottoman-Turkish political history is discussed in the context of the "center-periphery" model and Metin Heper's "strong state tradition". In this context, it is discussed whether the general validity of the center-periphery model continues. The center-periphery theory, which reduces modernization to tension and conflict between the superstructure institutions in Turkey, has made the opposition between the urban-secular-middle classes and the traditional-poor-lower classes its starting point. According to the strong state tradition thesis, the ruling elites, who took the modern values transferred from the West as a reference, were insensitive to the environment while constantly strengthening the center. The authoritarian structure of the state prevented the development of different social classes and non-governmental organizations. The strong state tradition transferred from the Ottoman Empire continued to be effective in the republic period as the subject of modernization. So much so that the bureaucratic structure that established the Republic identified itself with the state and strengthened the center until the multi-party system. Cultural conflict and tension between the ruling elites representing the center and traditional society segments representing the periphery have also been decisive in terms of the power struggle. The rise of the neo-liberal wave in the 1980s had reflections on the power struggle in Turkey and affected the relations between the center and the periphery. While the old elites forming the center became the periphery, the conservative sections forming the periphery became centralized and formed the new elites. In conclusion, it can be said that the center-periphery theory and strong state tradition are still functional in explaining Ottoman-Turkish modernization with some reservations. Key Words: Ruling elites, Center-Periphery Model, strong state tradition.

“What We Murmur behind Their Backs”: Hidden Transcripts of the North Korean Ruling Elite

ABSTRACT Based on in-depth interviews with 24 former high-ranking North Korean officials, we investigate the “hidden transcripts” of North Korean ruling elites. After discussing methodical issues in the first section, we analyze the hidden transcripts of the North Korean ruling class in the second section, including their questioning of Chuch’e ideology, rampant materialism, a “revolution by mouth”, and the South Korean wave. If hidden transcripts of powerful officials contain thoughts identical to those of powerless individuals, for whose benefit are they hidden? In the third section, we revise the theory of hidden transcripts to answer this question. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the future of North Korea.

CHINESE ESOTERIC BUDDHISM: AMOGHAVAJRA, THE RULING ELITE, AND THE EMERGENCE OF A TRADITION. By Geoffrey C.Goble. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv+319. Hardback, $70.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 47, Issue 1 p. 120-120 Short Reviews Of Recent Publications: East Asia CHINESE ESOTERIC BUDDHISM: AMOGHAVAJRA, THE RULING ELITE, AND THE EMERGENCE OF A TRADITION. By Goble, Geoffrey C.. New York, NY: C olumbia University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv+319. Hardback, $70.00. First published: 30 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.15152Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume47, Issue1March 2021Pages 120-120 RelatedInformation

Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra, the Ruling Elite, and the Emergence of a Tradition

Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra, the Ruling Elite, and the Emergence of a Tradition

Rents, the moral economy of remittances, and the rise of a new transnational development model

World remittances accounted for 714 billion $US in 2018 of which 550bn $US flew to the Global South. In today’s Global South, remittances are a major source of foreign exchange earnings. Remittances increasingly question the notion of the Global South as a commodity and raw material exporter. This article integrates remittances into rent theory. It argues for a broader understanding of rents and uses the explanatory power of rent theory. Conceptually, the article differentiates between sources of rent and their mode of appropriation. The article situates the causes for remittances both on a macro structural level in uneven global development and resulting inequalities as well as on the micro level within translocal moral economies between potential remittance senders in migratory host economies and their home economies. Remittances originate in global inequalities and the transnationalization of labor markets. Remittances are mediated through currency exchange rates, but remittances are negotiated within translocal moral economies. The article proposes to conceptualize remittances as labor differential rents. These rents give rise to a new transnational development model and an increasing number of economies specialize on remittances for their own social reproduction. Finally, the article points to the peculiarities of this development model: remittance-rents indirectly stabilize elite rule and shift political accountabilities from the political system to within transnational families. With the analysis of remittances, the article adds new structural economic mechanisms and institutional modes of rent appropriation that rent theory has thus far neglected.

The 'Futility Thesis' and the Uncomfortable Truth of Elite Rule

The 'Futility Thesis' and the Uncomfortable Truth of Elite Rule

Rise of “Business-Friendly” Local Elite Rule in the Philippines: How the Valdezes Developed San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte

Rise of “Business-Friendly” Local Elite Rule in the Philippines: How the Valdezes Developed San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte

FIGHTING THE OLIGARCHS: PRESIDENT DUTERTE AND THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ELITE RULE – A PERSPECTIVE FROM THE ACADEME

The focus of this study is the radical politics of President Rodrigo Duterte. The leader has clashed with influential businessmen on critical issues. This investigation examines the president’s battle against the oligarchy in the country. This research will try show that the rise to power of the first president from Mindanao is a reaction to elite rule. It seeks to reveal that the style of leadership of Duterte is reflective of the historical context that the critics of the president fail to account for. In arguing the case for Duterte’s non-conventional approach in overhauling Philippine politics and society, the issues involving some conglomerates in the country are mentioned. In terms of method, the interpretive and analytical approach will be used, citing the available literature and documents to strengthen the article’s arguments. The significance of this study has something to do with the idea of good governance. It argues that in the pursuit of a truly democratic society, the foundations of the basic structure must be strengthened. The pragmatic leadership of Duterte is a reflection of the deeper kind of radical change or substantive transformation that is needed to fight elite rule.

CHINESE ESOTERIC BUDDHISM: AMOGHAVAJRA, THE RULING ELITE, AND THE EMERGENCE OF A TRADITION. By Geoffrey C.Goble. The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. XII, 319. $70.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 46, Issue 2 p. 262-262 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Buddhism CHINESE ESOTERIC BUDDHISM: AMOGHAVAJRA, THE RULING ELITE, AND THE EMERGENCE OF A TRADITION. By Geoffrey C. Goble. The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. XII, 319. $70.00. First published: 03 July 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.14676Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume46, Issue2June 2020Pages 262-262 RelatedInformation

The Gender Factor in Shaping of Ruling Elites in the UK

The Gender Factor in Shaping of Ruling Elites in the UK

The Ruling Elite of Foreign Countries and Its Role in the Geopolitical Processes of Our Time

This study provides an overview of the geopolitical activity of the ruling elite in various countries of the world. One of the main and decisive actors that exist in the field of international politics are elites, primarily political ones. The article analyzes the mechanisms of influence of political and economic elites on the processes taking place in world politics and geopolitics. Political leaders of both the world’s leading States and countries whose geopolitical position is extremely important are considered. After all, they are the “leading locomotive” of any state on the planet. they are responsible for the choice of making certain political decisions that have a chain reaction of certain events not only within political- territorial entities, but also in interstate communications. The review of the ruling elites of the political and, in some cases, economic nature of some States of the world, States that have the greatest influence on global processes taking place on the planet, or are able, through their activities, to have a chain reaction effect on entire regions.

Mutation grey wolf elite PSO balanced XGBoost for radar emitter individual identification based on measured signals

• Radar individual identification depends on signal subtle features. • Number of radar samples measured from real environment is imbalanced. • Parameters of XGBoost have great influence on the identification results . • PSO sometimes falls into local optimal solution. Radar emitter individual identification plays an increasingly important role in electronic support measures (ESM) system. To cope with the problems of low accuracy and poor stability of radar emitter individual identification, a novel method, named MGWEPSO-BXGBoost (Mutation Grey Wolf Elite Particle Swarm Optimization Balanced eXtreme Gradient Boosting), is proposed. In consideration of the fact that the number of radar signals measured from the real environment is usually imbalanced, a novel balance mechanism is designed for XGBoost. MGWEPSO is further proposed to simultaneously optimize the prime parameters, whose values and combinations have a great influence on the identification results, of BXGBoost to improve the identification accuracy. To overcome the local optimal solution problem, leadership mechanism in wolves, elite rule and the idea of mutation are adopted, which is also conducive to improving the ability to find the global optimal solution. Furthermore, experiments based on signals measured in the real environment are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results verify that MGWEPSO-BXGBoost has high accuracy and strong stability even when the sample size of each individual is limited and imbalanced.

Remittances, the Rescaling of Social Conflicts, and the Stasis of Elite Rule in El Salvador

Remittances are the dominant factor in the contemporary economy of El Salvador, which is enjoying a new comparative advantage in the international economic system—the export of cheap labor to the Global North and particularly the United States. The Salvadoran economy is part of a transnational economic space, but this space is perverse: Although the poor are nominally receiving more money, remittances cause them to be caught in a vicious cycle of economic instability. At the same time, the elites are able to access remittances indirectly by becoming a Keynesian oligarchy—an oligarchy that extracts wealth by controlling the demand structure of the economy instead of production. Remittances represent bread and butter for the poor and a vehicle for transnationalization for the rich, and this leads to a new stasis of elite rule: remittances provoke the rescaling of social conflicts in favor of elites. Transnationalism in this regard must be interpreted as an elite strategy for suppressing the bargaining power of the subaltern class. In this transnational remittances economy, opportunities for the subaltern class and migrants to participate directly in reshaping this economic space are limited or nonexistent. As a consequence, they must rely on translocal moral economies linking migrants with their families at home, where they are still able to impose some control. Meanwhile, elites foster transnationalism by dismantling these very modes of control. In this sense, remittances are the silver bullet for facilitating neoliberalism in the Global South. In El Salvador, they produce ultrastability for the oligarchy and chaos for the poor.Las remesas son el factor dominante en la economía contemporánea de El Salvador, que goza de una nueva ventaja comparativa en el sistema económico internacional en la exportación de mano de obra barata al Norte Global y particularmente a los Estados Unidos. La economía salvadoreña es parte de un espacio económico transnacional, pero este espacio es perverso: aunque los pobres reciben nominalmente más dinero, las remesas hacen que se encuentren atrapados en un círculo vicioso de inestabilidad económica. Al mismo tiempo, las élites pueden acceder a las remesas indirectamente al convertirse en una oligarquía keynesiana— una oligarquía que extrae riqueza controlando la estructura de la demanda de la economía en lugar de la producción. Las remesas representan el pan de cada día para los pobres y un vehículo para la transnacionalización de los ricos, y esto lleva a una nueva estasis del gobierno de la élites: las remesas provocan la reescalada de los conflictos sociales a favor de las élites. El transnacionalismo a este respecto debe interpretarse como una estrategia de élites para suprimir el poder de negociación de la clase subalterna. En esta economía transnacional de remesas, las oportunidades para que la clase subalterna y los migrantes participen directamente en la remodelación de este espacio económico son limitadas o inexistentes. Como consecuencia, deben contar con las economías morales translocales que vinculan a los migrantes con sus familias en El Salvador, donde aún es posible imponer cierto control. Mientras tanto, las élites fomentan el transnacionalismo desmantelando estos mismos modos de control. En este sentido, las remesas son la bala de plata para facilitar el neoliberalismo en el Sur Global. En El Salvador, producen ultra estabilidad para la oligarquía y caos para los pobres.

The Mirage of Democratic Socialism

This paper reiterates the classical liberal critique of socialism in the format of alternative history. The history described here is identical to ‘ours’ up until just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. From then on, it deviates. In this alternative version, German reunification never happens. Instead, East Germans elect a government of idealistic socialist reformers. East Germany remains a sovereign country, a democratic country with a socialist economy. The new government tries its best to democratise that economy from within. They try to move away from the old top-down way of doing things and towards a participatory model of socialism. Our fictional socialist leaders have the best of intentions. They share the ideals of democratic socialist thinkers such as Noam Chomsky or Owen Jones. There is no Stalin-like character among them. Our alternative history is technically set in East Germany, but it is not really about that particular example of socialism. It is about the very idea of socialism itself. The paper illustrates how, for a number of structural reasons, socialism must always lead to the rule of a technocratic elite, to political repression, and to economic failure – no matter how noble the intentions of its protagonists may be.

Telegram as a Means of Political Communication and its use by Russia’s Ruling Elite

This article examines the use of Telegram as a means of political communication by the ruling political elite in Russia (both external, i.e., communication with the society and other political forces, and internal, i.e., between different, often rival, groups within the elite itself). While Telegram is illegal at the official level, and attempts have been made to block it in Russia since April 2018, unofficially the Russian authorities continue to actively use Telegram channels for political communication and influencing public opinion as well as for monitoring the mood of the public. What is the reason for this ambivalent attitude toward Telegram? What makes it so attractive for the Russian establishment? How are the authorities using Telegram for their own purposes? Answering these questions is the main goal of this study.

Love at first sight? Populist attitudes and support for direct democracy

Do citizens who strongly exhibit populist attitudes support direct democracy? Existing studies tend to claim that populists support direct democracy because of their stealth-democratic orientation or argue that stealth democrats want direct democracy due to the populist nature of stealth-democratic attitudes. Yet, albeit both populists and stealth democrats reject elite rule, they prefer direct democracy for different reasons. Populists support direct democracy as a means to implement the volonté générale, whereas stealth democrats view it as holding politicians accountable for ineffective policy solutions. Our analysis of representative survey data in four European democracies (France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) reveals that individuals with stronger populist attitudes indeed support direct democracy more than citizens with no strong populist attitudes. This effect is observed when controlling for stealth-democratic orientations and when using a measure separating the feature populism shares with stealth democracy – anti-elitism – from the one unique to populism, people-centrism.

Confucian democracy as popular sovereignty

ABSTRACTIs Confucian democracy philosophically justifiable? In recent decades, prominent Confucian theorists have answered this question in the negative, arguing that the political system that is consistent with Confucianism is political meritocracy or elite rule. This position presupposes an antithetical relation between democracy and Confucianism. In order to counter such a position, this article proposes a philosophically justifiable normative conception of Confucian democracy. By carefully examining democracy theories of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Carl Schmitt in the civic humanist republican tradition and Confucian political philosophy in the Mencian tradition, this article demonstrates that the substantive value of democracy as popular sovereignty is a fundamental idea undergirding and safeguarding the ideal Confucian politics.

Общественное мнение и политическое участие: возвращаясь к работам Дж. Брайса

В современных дискуссиях о функциях опросов общественного мнения можно выделить две линии рассуждения. Одни авторы доказывают, что опросы должны с точностью передавать предпочтения и нужды граждан и работать как инструмент контроля народных представителей. За этим подходом кроется определенное видение демократии как правления элит в соответствии с интересами граждан, и общественного мнения как суммы индивидуальных предпочтений избирателей. Джордж Гэллап — одна из ключевых фигур, стоящих за первым подходом. Вместе с тем существует альтернативное видение, согласно которому общественное мнение есть процесс принятия демократических коллективных решений. В нашей статье мы сначала разбираем ограничения первого подхода. Мы демонстрируем, что второй подход помогает увидеть, как контролирующая функция опросов превращается в аккламационную. Далее мы показываем, что второй подход намного ближе к теории общественного мнения Джеймса Брайса, чем подход Джорджа Гэллапа и авторов, наследующих ему.