Elites and Collective Protest

Efforts to explain collective protest have increasingly stressed the causal significance of elite structure and behavior. This trend is an unexamined manifestation of the broader and widely discussed trend away from “pluralistic” theories and toward “political” theories. But thus far, applications of the elite concept have been largely ad hoc, with little attention paid to its theoretical status or to developing it as an analytical tool. This problem can be rectified by turning to the neoelitist paradigm on which a number of scholars have been working in recent years. In particular, the neoelitist paradigm provides a conceptualization of unified and disunified elites which is theoretically and empirically grounded, capable of operationalization, generally applicable, and which plausibly helps account for variations in political conflict. It therefore complements and carries forward recent developments in the collective protest literature. This implies that the neoelitist paradigm merits serious attention alongside pluralist and Marxist paradigms as a guiding framework for macro social and political analysis.