Elites as Status Groups in Democratic Societies

Fabien Accominotti, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This article makes the case for conceptualizing elites as upper status groups – that is, as groups whom others perceive as having superior value in one respect or another. This conceptualization accounts for dominant definitions of elites as groups with disproportionate access to valuable resources and as groups with superior power, while acknowledging that many resource-rich or powerful groups can hardly be referred to as elites. Most importantly, seeing elites as upper status groups delineates an original research agenda for the study of elites in democratic societies premised on the reduction of status asymmetries between individuals. In such societies, I argue, elites owe their existence to social processes that affirm or reaffirm, against a backdrop of democratic ideals, the idea that people come in greater or lesser degrees of value. Studying these processes means advancing a sociology of elites that goes beyond the description of elite personnel or of the attributes of elite status and instead charts, social domain after social domain, the emergence and cultivation of beliefs in the existence of worthiness hierarchies among individuals. To illustrate what such a sociology might look like, the article revisits two empirical cases showing how a cultural and an academic elite, respectively, were made possible by (1) the emergence of collective beliefs in the existence of a hierarchy of cultural tastes in the Gilded United States and (2) the rise of collective beliefs in the existence of a hierarchy of intelligence in the wake of the French and American democratic revolutions.

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 Presented in Session 201. Public Life and Democratic Order