Iron law of oligarchy
[4] In 1911 using anecdotes from the histories of political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically, Michels considered his argument applicable to representative democracy at large.
[6] According to Michels, this process is further compounded as delegation is necessary in any large organization, as thousands—sometimes hundreds of thousands—of members cannot make decisions via participatory democracy.
They result in the rise of a group of professional administrators in a hierarchical organization, which in turn leads to the rationalization and routinization of authority and decision-making, a process described first and perhaps best by Max Weber, later by John Kenneth Galbraith, and to a lesser and more cynical extent by the Peter principle.
[10] Lipset suggests a number of factors that existed in the ITU that are supposedly responsible for countering this tendency toward bureaucratic oligarchy.
Leaders that are unchecked tend to develop larger salaries and more sumptuous lifestyles, making them unwilling to go back to their previous jobs.
For this latter point he draws upon Aristotle who argued that a democratic polity was most likely where there was a large, stable middle class, and the extremes of wealth and poverty were not great.
Finally, the authors note the irregular work hours which led shop mates to spend more of their leisure time together.
These latter factors are less persuasive, since they do not apply to many industrial forms of organization, where the greatest amount of trade union democracy has developed in recent times.
Titus Gregory argues that university students' unions today "exhibit both oligarchical and democratic tendencies".
[13] However, a 2016 study by Bradi Heaberlin and Simon DeDeo has found that the evolution of Wikipedia's network of norms over time is consistent with the iron law of oligarchy.
It shows the emergence of an oligarchy derived from competencies in five significant "clusters": administration, article quality, collaboration, formatting, and content policy.
Heaberlin and DeDeo note: "The encyclopedia's core norms address universal principles, such as neutrality, verifiability, civility, and consensus.
"[14] In his book Gemeindefreiheit als Rettung Europas, published in 1943 (first edition in German) with a second edition in 1947 (in German), Adolf Gasser stated the following requirements for a representative democracy in order to remain stable, unaffected by Michels' iron law of oligarchy: In 1954, Maurice Duverger expressed general agreement with Michels's thesis.
[15] In a 1966 article, political scientist Dankwart Rustow described Michels's thesis as "a brilliantly fallacious argument a fortiori".
"[18] The study however found that the iron law was malleable, and that established labor unions could under certain circumstances revitalize and experience radical change in line with its members' desires.
[18] According to a 2005 study, "Despite almost a century of scholarly debate on this question ... there is still no consensus about whether and under what conditions Michels’s claim holds true.
That fictional book begins:[21] Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low.
Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.
