Iron Law of Oligarchy

The iron law of oligarchy contends that organizational democracy is an oxymoron. According to this “law” of classical political sociology, even organizations committed to democratic ideals and practices will inevitably succumb to rule by an elite few. Although elite control makes internal democracy unsustainable, it is also said to shape the long-term development of all organizations—including the rhetorically most radical—in a conservative direction.

Robert Michels spelled out the iron law of oligarchy in the first decade of the twentieth century in Political Parties, a brilliant comparative study of European socialist parties that drew extensively on his own experiences in the German Socialist Party (SPD). Influenced by Max Weber's analysis of bureaucracy as well as by Vilfredo Pareto's and Gaetano Mosca's theories of elite rule, Michels argued that organizational oligarchy resulted, most fundamentally, from the imperatives of modern organization: competent leadership, centralized authority, and the division of tasks within a professional bureaucracy. These organizational imperatives necessarily gave rise to a caste of leaders whose superior knowledge, skills, and status, when combined with their hierarchical control of key organizational resources such as internal communication and training, would allow them to dominate the broader membership and to domesticate dissenting groups. Michels supplemented this institutional analysis of internal power consolidation with psychological arguments drawn from Gustave Le Bon's crowd theory. From this perspective, Michels particularly emphasized the idea that elite domination also flowed from the way rank-and-file members craved guidance by and worshipped their leaders. Michels insisted that the chasm separating elite leaders from rank-and-file members would also steer organizations toward strategic moderation, as key organizational decisions would ultimately be taken more in accordance with leaders' self-serving priorities of organizational survival and stability than with members'preferences and demands.

The iron law became a central theme in the study of organized labor, political parties, and pluralist democracy in the postwar era. Although much of this scholarship basically confirmed Michels's arguments, a number of prominent works began to identify important anomalies and limitations to the iron law framework. Seymour Lipset, Martin Trow, and James Coleman's analysis of the International Typographical Union (ITU), for example, showed that sustained union democracy was possible given printers' relative equality of income and status, mastery of communication skills, and generalized political competence, which underpinned the ITU's unusual history of enduring two-party competition. In the party literature, Samuel Eldersveld argued that the power of organizational elites in Detroit was not nearly as concentrated as the iron law would suggest. He found party power relatively dispersed among different sectors and levels, in a “stratarchy” of shifting coalitions among component groups representing different social strata.

Subsequent studies of parties and unions, but also of other organizations such as voluntary associations and social movements, further qualified the iron law. These studies examined a broad range of factors—such as factional competition, purposive activism, interorganizational ties, and external opportunities and constraints—that highlighted both the contingent nature of organizational power and Michels's relative neglect of environmental context. Although the most recent work on the changing role of social institutions frequently revisits organizational dynamics and dilemmas examined by Michels, it generally does so from a more global perspective. Along these lines, scholars have begun to explore the strategic and internal-democratic implications of transnational resource flows, of state-sanctioned, decentralized policy networks, of cross-border political identities, and of the Internet as internal communication tool. The iron law of oligarchy will therefore remain a salient axis in the analysis of the internal politics of differentiated polities' societal associations, transnational advocacy networks, and multinational corporations, as well as of the broader nature of democratic politics in our globalizing Information Age.

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