2025 Award Recipient | John Higley
Lecture: The Democracy Ideal and Elites
With increased economic productivity and knowledge of the physical world, population majorities in most Western countries have been substantially disarmed by material affluence. Predacious and fierce political behavior has declined sufficiently so that political ideals have an influence on people鈥檚 lives. The standard that expresses and, to some degree, enforces ideals is 鈥渄emocracy.鈥 Unquestionably, profession of the democracy ideal has brought many advantages to the score or so of Western populations that have attained a high level of socio-economic development. Yet some of the major crises facing Western countries today arise from the widespread tendency to mistake the democracy ideal for political reality. This Lecture argues that behavioral patterns of elites are the most fundamental distinction between political systems. Elite persons propose, question, evade, modify, and sometimes clearly declare public policies that always contain arbitrary advantages for some people and disadvantages for others. They do so subject to possible non-elite vetoes or resistance, although in practice the non-elite limitation tends to be vague and general.
Biography
John Higley has been one of the key figures in the revival of elite theory in social science. He is Emeritus Professor of Government and Sociology at the University of Texas Austin where he chaired the Department of Government, founded and directed the Edward A. Clark Center for Australian & New Zealand Studies while chairing IPSA鈥檚 Research Committee (RC02) on Political Elites.
In numerous books and articles, Prof. Higley has distinguished basic patterns of elite political behavior, the origins of each, and consequences for the persistent stability or instability of political regimes during modern history and at present. Prof. Higley鈥檚 recent books include The Endangered West. Myopic Elites and Fragile Social Orders in a Threatening World (Routledge, 2016), Elites, Non-Elites, and Political Realism. Diminishing Futures for Western Societies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics. Avoiding Calamity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). His earlier work, Since Elitism (1980), was re-published by Routledge in 2013. Additionally, he was the senior co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Political Elites (2018).
