The Role of Elitism in the Elitism-Populism-Nexus: Conceptual Issues

While the concept of populism (for better or for worse) has been one of the most used and most contested social science concepts in recent years, the concept of "elitism" still is strangely underspecified. Yet even in the debate centering solely on populism, the idea that there is a "significant other", a counterpart that populism is up against and vice versa, is clearly gaining ground breeding notions of "anti-populism", "technocracy", "technocratic populism" and the like. The paper argues that Peter Bachrach's "theory of democratic elitism" (1967) tried to capture precisely that phenomenon -- which also means that it is a rather old phenomenon. Interestingly enough, 'democratic elitism', much like 'populism', almost never was a self-description of any political force. Rather, both terms were created and are mostly used pejoratively for a position the author despises. Hence the task remains to really capture the political thought of actors pursuing an elitist agenda (as with those pursuing a populist one). Again in both cases, this prevailing negative judgment has a point but is somewhat premature at the same time. Representative democracy, I argue, is inconceivable without political elites. And it would probably be much worse without the continuous reminder of the promise of democracy which populism provides. The pathologies entailed in both cases come with the inherent tendency to overstretch one aspect of democracy at the expense of others. Moreover, the greatest for "real-existing democracies" (Schmitter) arise not from any one of the two phenomena under review, I argue, but from the strong interaction and cumulated effects they tend to produce over time. What I call the "elitism-populism nexus" is an attempt to conceptually grasp that connection. Approaching the issue from the under-studied side of elitism, I will first try to capture the ambivalence of "elitism" by outlining both its realist and its normative (or prescriptive) sides as presented in elite theories as well as in theories of democracy. I will then point to the interaction effects between elitism and populism in democratic systems. Finally, I will try to summarize the likely combined impact they have in the long run on representative democracy. The goal of the paper is to outline a research agenda that puts elitism, populism, and the current transformation of democracy into a unified conceptual framework