Community Driven Development,Collective Action and Elite Capture in Indonesia

In response to the well documented limitations of top‐down, modernist and authoritarian approaches that have dominated development, practitioners and academics increasingly promote more community‐based approaches. The World Bank uses the term ‘community driven development’ to describe projects that increase a community's control over the development process. In an analysis of a community driven poverty alleviation project in Indonesia, this article examines the vulnerability of such an approach to elite capture. The expected relationships among a community's capacity for collective action, elite control over project decisions and elite capture of project benefits were not found. In cases where the project was controlled by elites, benefits continued to be delivered to the poor, and where power was the most evenly distributed, resource allocation to the poor was restricted. Communities where both non‐elites and elites participated in democratic self‐governance, however, did demonstrate an ability to redress elite capture when it occurred.     

Elite transformation in central and eastern Europe

Changing configurations of national elites are shaping the prospects for democracy in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. There are three broad possibilities: (1) increasingly unchecked and violent power struggles between elites, with regimes oscillating between democratic and authoritarian forms; (2) restrained elite competitions in accordance with democratic game rules and tacit accommodations, with regimes gradually becoming stable democracies; (3) takeovers by ultra‐nationalist elites through coups or plebiscitary victories, with regimes becoming state‐corporatist in form and quasi‐fascist in operation. Crucial questions are the extent and nature of elite unity and differentiation. This article identifies elite configurations and the most likely regime outcomes in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.     

LETTER WRITING AND ELITE IDENTITY IN THE NETHERLANDS, 1770–1850

This essay argues that correspondence was an important means for the Dutch elite in the period 1770–1850 to develop, consolidate and express an elite identity. Children were taught a “natural” epistolary style, which often meant “decent” or “as fits an elite child”. In line with Bourdieu's thesis that elites are so confident of their leading position that they feel free to deviate from language norms, adolescents diverged from decent language, whereas lower‐class correspondents composed humble letters to their superiors. Daily correspondence and ceremonial letters served to keep upper‐class values in mind and to hold the elite together.     

Consensus and conflict among Australia's leaders∗

This paper reports and analyses survey data on the opinions of 353 top position‐holders in business, trade unions, federal and state politics, the Commonwealth Public Service, mass media, national voluntary associations, and major universities and research institutes during the latter half of 1975. Patterns of elite responses to 15 issue sets aggregating 46 separate opinion items are examined. The main focus is on the extent and configuration of elite conflict and consensus over economic policy, foreign and defence policy, industrial relations, social issues, and institutional structure. In general, substantial conflict between left‐of‐centre and right‐of‐centre elites in all major issue areas, save possibly that of social issues, is found. However, the extent of this conflict varies as between specific policies, over which it is relatively small, and the legitimacy or desirability of various group actions and major policy innovations, over which it is quite large. Whether conflict during 1975 was sufficiently great to threaten the fundamental unity of Australian elites is discussed.     

A power elite in the cultural field. A story of Norwegian neo-corporatism

The organizational culture elite is studied as a new elite group emerging within a stable neo-corporatist state. Does this new elite adopt existing modes of operation or place itself at bay from the more established elite groups? The emergence of and changes in the culture elite are discussed from a historical perspective in terms of social background, recruitment processes, occupational careers, gender composition, political outlooks, lobbying, and media strategies. The culture elite is systematically compared to two other elites: the university elite, the most similar among the elites, and the economic elite, assumedly representing the greatest contrast. Despite special characteristics in the social situations and political views of the culture elite, it is concluded that the mode of operation of this group indicates a high degree of adaptability to the general system of elites. A main reason is assumed to be the integrative power and liberal quality of the state in a neo-corporatist regime.     

Claiming the nation for the people: the dynamics of representation in German public discourse about immigrant integration

Against the backdrop of the current trend to criticise elite‐centred approaches to the study of nationalism, this article sheds light on ways in which elite and popular notions of nationhood are mediated. Thus, public discourse on national identity is explored as a discourse that ordinary people can influence and in which elites make claims to represent the people. To illustrate the dynamics of representative claim‐making and reception, the article uses a case study from German public discourse; the debate about Thilo Sarrazin's 2010 book Germany Does Away With Itself. It finds that, although Sarrazin clearly breaches well‐established rules in national identity discourse, his ideas gain traction from the moment he becomes accepted as representing ordinary Germans. The findings are discussed against the backdrop of the history of German national identity discourse and anti‐essentialist approaches treating nationhood as a political claim.     

Deserving to Whom? Investigating Heterogeneity in the Impact of Social Constructions of Target Populations on Support for Affirmative Action

The social construction of target populations has emerged as an influential framework for understanding the public policy process. In particular, target populations have been shown to shape the allocation of benefits and burdens by political elites. However, existing studies focus on the elite level, which overlooks whether public preferences are aligned with the allocation of policy benefits and burdens by political elites. Moreover, many studies treat social constructions as homogenous, which this paper calls into question. Using a nation‐wide survey experiment, I investigate variation in public support for affirmative action policies with randomly assigned target populations. The findings indicate that the public formulates policy preferences on the basis of perceived deservingness of target groups similar to political elites. In addition, the findings uncover heterogeneity in the effect of targeting on public opinion based on ideology and racial/ethnic group identity.     

Unstable stability: Turkish politics at the crossroads?

The Justice and Development Party has been in power in Turkey since 2002 after a sweeping victory. The party has since implemented a successful economic stabilization programme and led the country into membership negotiations with the European Union. The educated modern‐urban segments of the population, however, continue to harbour suspicion that the government party has a secret agenda of turning Turkey into an Islamic state. Although the evidence for such a fear is not fully convincing, it can be understood within the broader framework of Turkish modernization which was carried out by a highly centralized state in the cultural‐educational domain in an uncompromising fashion, generating a social bifurcation between the moderns and the traditionalists. After the transition to competitive politics, elected politicians worked to curb the power of the state elites that have been the exponents of modernization policies. Supported also by economic development that has expanded society's power against the state, the political elites have worked to expand their scope for decision‐making. Such redistribution of power in society has been problematical and has twice resulted in military interventions. The shift in the balance of power in favour of the political (elected) elite is nearing completion. The struggle is currently centered on the election of a new president by the parliament in May 2007 because historically the presidency has been seen as a position that counterbalances the preferences of the political elite by those of the state elite. Although likely to cause perturbations, the president will be elected by the Justice and Development Party. Consolidation of Turkey's democracy is continuing.     

Elites in Local Development in the Philippines

For many Philippine provinces, decentralization and more autonomous local development planning did not lead to the desired outcomes. This article examines the experiences of the two provinces of Cebu and Leyte. While Cebu became a centre of trade and industry, Leyte is still struggling with its local economy oriented to natural resources. A main reason for the divergent development paths of the two islands can be found in the emergence of different elite structures, which resulted in different path‐dependent patterns of economic specialization. Despite this different historical experience, both provinces today suffer from similar institutional infirmities in their planning system for promoting local development. Local planning capacity constraints, such as regional and local co‐ordination and co‐operation patterns, local finances, human capital and knowledge are analysed. The Cebuano elites used the room for manoeuvre provided by decentralization reforms more successfully than elites in Leyte. This created pockets of efficiency in Cebu leading to more development‐friendly investment policies. In order to increase local and regional planning capacity, short‐term interventions and policy reforms at the local, regional and national level are discussed.     

Discrimination is what ethnic groups make of it: subjective perceptions of peripherality among the Mohajirs of Pakistan

The article attends to the dynamic of subjective interpretation of socio‐economic conditions by ethnic elites in ways that convince co‐ethnics of their relative deprivation and discrimination. The article asserts that it is essential to move beyond structuralist explanations relative to economic deprivation and discrimination for they stand to essentialise social and economic conditions as defined by ethnic entrepreneurs themselves. In studying the crystallisation of Mohajir ethnicity in the 1970s and 1980s, the article seeks to (re) present alternative interpretations relative to political, economic and social facts of discrimination as subjectively presented by the Mohajir ethnic elite. The article locates peripherality not in the political system that disadvantaged the Mohajirs but in the discourse of discrimination propagated by the new Mohajir ethnopolitical elite. It is in this sense that discrimination becomes what ethnic groups make of it.     

Voices from the Top of the Pile: Elite Perceptions of Poverty and the Poor in the Philippines

How do elites perceive poverty and the poor? In this article, we present the results of interviews with eighty members of the Filipino elite, undertaken as part of a larger six‐country study of elite perceptions of poverty and the poor. Poverty, we argue, is a highly subjective phenomenon. People's perceptions of poverty, of who is and who is not poor, of how poverty affects them and others, and of how poverty can be effectively tackled, vary enormously between different types of people (defined in terms of class, status, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, gender or a myriad of other social identities). Wherever people cohere as groups, classes or other social constructs, perceptions of poverty are aggregated and refined and then embedded in social dynamics. The study of elite perceptions of poverty and the poor, we conclude, can both add to our understanding of the social dynamics of poverty and inequality and inform pro‐poor public policy.     

Nationalism,ethnic conflict,and job competition: non‐Russian collective action in the USSR under perestroika†

ABSTRACT. The article examines the effects of job competition on ethnic relations within a multinational state. It argues that demographic increase leads to competition for blue‐collar jobs while an increase in the number of graduates from higher education leads to competition over elite jobs. In the first case, people risk unemployment, in the second, blocked career opportunities. Mass‐level unemployment may lead to anger‐driven mass riots, while an intelligentsia will formulate more rational strategies to eliminate threatening competitors from the labour market. One such strategy is to insist that the state ought to be a national state, in which the national elites will be in control. While questions of identity no doubt also may have an enormously mobilising power in times of national resurgence, identity issues are normally intimately intertwined with interest politics. These mechanisms are traced in the history of ethnic mobilisation in the Soviet Union and the post‐Soviet states during and after perestroika.     

Domestic troubles,national identity discourse,and China's attitude towards the West, 2003–2012

Prior to its recent, much discussed international ‘assertiveness’, China's attitude to the West had deteriorated, as reflected in official discourse of national identity. Drawing from political science and social psychology literature on identity studies, I argue that the discursive pattern of national identity can shift as a function of an elite strategy to exclude internal others through opposition to foreign others. Internally exclusionary nationalism, often employed by elites during major crises, is instrumental to consolidating control and maintaining order. But when targeting internal opponents alone is politically inconvenient or lacks public resonance, elites will accentuate ethnocentric national identity discourse vis‐a‐vis foreign nations in order to reinforce internal battles and divert popular discontent externally. An interpretive analysis of the official texts of Chinese national identity discourse during the Hu Jintao decade, supplemented by quantitative data, shows a significant correlation between the regime's fear of internal instability and bottom‐up political opposition on the one hand and the timing and intensity of ethnocentric identity discourse regarding the West on the other. The party‐state negatively framed the West in order to shift the blame for domestic troubles onto foreigners and discredit internal resistance.     

AUTHORITY, POLITY, AND TENUOUS ELITES IN IRON AGE EDOM (JORDAN)

Summary.   The strategies political elites implement to garner political authority and legitimacy in emergent polities are scrutinized in a case study from Iron Age Edom, located in modern southern Jordan and the south-east corner of the State of Israel. Edom provides a productive context in which to conduct this investigation as local elites managed a fractious polity consisting of unstable segmentary identities, while at the same time, remaining loyal to the successive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires that dominated them. This tenuous position required elites to maintain a flexible elite identity while promoting broader metaphors of attachment (e.g. Edomite) among their disparate constituents. This case study ultimately moves toward an understanding of political polities, not as disembodied entities (e.g. States), but as embedded phenomena within the societies they comprise.     

“They hate pigs,Chinese farmers … everything!” Beastly Racialization in Multiethnic Malaysia

Abstract: This paper details the construction of the pig and the pig industry in Malaysia. It argues that a pattern of “animal‐linked racialization” continually polices the boundary between the dominant, elite Malay‐Muslim hegemony and the comparatively less powerful Chinese pig farmers. Often subtle and implicit, such beastly racialization, drawing frequently from religious and nationalist tropes, renders visible the taboo subjects of race and racism in Malaysia. While a simplistic form of beastly racialization in relation to the pig industry is held by the political elites and non‐Chinese community, one cannot say that such a racialization has produced or sustained distinct racisms. Nonetheless, it is through the process of beastly racialization that we unravel the seemingly random acts of coercive policies that, taken in their entirety, threaten to stymie the future viability of the industry and continue to accentuate the visible social‐cultural disjuncture between the two biggest ethnic groups in Malaysia.     

“Folklore” and “popular religion” in Britain during the middle ages

This article explores whether the bi‐polar model of “elite” and “folk” or “popular religion” can be maintained for the medieval period. In fact, there were many strands to medieval religious culture, and people from a variety of backgrounds participated at a variety of levels on different occasions. Using a variety of chronicles and other sources, rather than the more dogmatic penitentials and canon law texts usually cited, this article argues that historians should make room for “local religious culture” in their taxonomies, in which both elites (including clerics) and people could participate.     

The birth of a united Europe: on why the EU has generated a ‘non‐emotional’ identity

ABSTRACT. In several respects, the European Union (EU) represents both a novel system of quasi‐supranational governance and a novel form of political community or polity. But it is also a relatively fragile construction: it remains a community still in the making with an incipient sense of identity, within which powerful forces are at work. This article has three main aims. Firstly, to analyse the reasons and key ideas that prompted a selected elite to construct a set of institutions and treaties destined to unite European nations in such a way that the mere idea of a ‘civil war’ among them would become impossible. Secondly, to examine the specific top‐down processes that led to the emergence of a united Europe and the subsequent emergence of the EU, thus emphasising the constant distance between the elites and the masses in the development of the European project. Finally, to explain why the EU has generated what I call a ‘non‐emotional’ identity, radically different from the emotionally charged and still prevailing national identities present in its member states.     

Post‐totalitarian national identity: public memory in Germany and Russia

Through a comparative analysis of Germany and Russia, this paper explores how participation in the memorialization process affects and reflects national identity formation in post‐totalitarian societies. These post‐totalitarian societies face the common problem of re‐presenting their national character as civic and democratic, in great part because their national identities were closely bound to oppressive regimes. Through a comparison of three memorial sites—Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial in Germany, and Lubianka Square and the Park of Arts in Russia—we argue that even where dramatic reductions in state power and the opening of civil society have occurred, a simple elite–public dichotomy cannot adequately capture the nature of participation in the process of memory re‐formation. Rather, mutual interactions among multiple publics and elites, differing in kind and intensity across contexts, combine to form a complex pastiche of public memory that both interprets a nation's past and suggests desirable models for its future. The domination of a ‘Western’ style of memorialization in former East Germany illustrates how even relatively open debates can lead to the exclusion of certain representations of the nation. Nonetheless, Germany has had comparatively vigorous public debates about memorializing its totalitarian periods. In contrast, Russian elite groups have typically circumvented or manipulated participation in the memorialization process, reflecting both a reluctance to deal with Russia's totalitarian past and a emerging national identity less civic and democratic than in Germany.     

汉代豪民与乡里政权

乡里政权是汉王朝派出的最基层行政机构,乡官里吏尽管职卑禄薄或根本无禄,但职轻责重,构成汉王朝最基本的政权基础。汉代豪民在类型上可大致划分为工商豪民和乡里豪民。汉武帝官营工商以后,乡里豪民成为豪民阶层的主体,并逐渐有效地控制了乡里政权,成为汉政权维系地方封建统治的重要支柱。同时,豪民又渔肉乡里,破坏封建秩序,在一定条件下可以转化为统一国家的对立物。     

NORTHERN EUROPEAN ELITES IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

The history of elites has gained popularity among researchers during the last few decades. This article explains the historiographical conditions and significance of this phenomenon. The rise of different schools in the history of elites has been made possible by, on the one hand, structuralistic social history, which has taken impressions and theories from neighbouring sciences, and, on the other hand, by the new cultural history, which often uses the concept of ‘elite’ more metaphorically. This article also serves as an introduction to this special issue. The history of elites is here defined as a diverse branch of research, which is interesting partly because of the influential role of the studied individuals in their own time and partly because of their often strong social identity.