This paper presents ongoing methodological research concerning the emergence and dynamic behavior of political elites in transitional democracies in Eastern Europe. After the fall of the iron curtain in 1989, the research on political elites in the Eastern European democracies has been mainly guided by the interest in their origins, characteristics, functionalities, and political roles. These studies have raised several methodological issues concerning the collection of data on the political elite, and the validity and reliability of survey data.
Our approach focuses on a complexity paradigm: instead of a causality-based approaching of elites’ characteristics, functionalities and roles, we suggest a complexity-based approach by studying the social and political generative mechanisms which could illustrate elites’ emergence and dynamics. To this goal, we introduce a research methodology based on simulation modelling which constructs (bottom-up) virtual political elite. This type of approach enhances the study of several issues which are too complex to be studied by classic analytical and empirical means: (a) the emergence and self-organization of political elites as context-dependent and path-dependent phenomenon, (b) the recursive nature of their generative processes.
Our experimental research has focused on the class of privilege-generative mechanisms which model the emergence of political elites as complex recursive phenomena in the Central and Eastern European post-communist societies. The notion of “privilege” defines a power mechanism. After the 1990s, the democratization processes in these countries have often been questioned for their poor capacity to overcome the privilege-generating administrative structures and policy mechanisms in both legislative and Government institutions. Our approach describes the privilege-generative policies as based on mechanisms aimed to obtain and retain power in the post-communist polities in Eastern and Central Europe. The methodological issues approached in this experimental setting are concerned with (a) the construction of the context (artificial society), (b) the construction of the entities, which are specified as “elite” (agent-based technologies), and the achievement of their dynamics as dependent on their cognitive, behavioral and (political) cultural specifications. The methodological research has also stimulated the investigation of the generative processes and mechanisms, a hotly debated issue in the philosophy of science, especially concerned with the area of Social Simulation, that is, a simulation-based modelling of complex social and political phenomena.
The preliminary results have pointed out the necessity to develop a conceptual framework and a methodological approach of the virtual construction of political environments such that the “political elites” could be identified as entities belonging to the defined domain.
