The Political Class in Advanced Democracies

Bibliographic Data

ID7092849
AuthorsRobert Kaye (London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume55
Issue4
Pages589-590
Publication date2004-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBritish Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-1315 • E-ISSN: 1468-4446
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1468-4446.2004.00040_2.x
OpenAlexW2040832356
LanguageEN
Citations received10

Borchert Jens and Zeiss Jürgen , The Political Class in Advanced Democracies Oxford , University Press 2004 425 pp. $ 99.00 (hardback) This book – previously published in a German edition – aims to study comparatively the development of a ‘political class’. Drawing on previous work by Borchert and Golsch (Die politische Klass’ in W. Röhrich (ed.) 1995 Demokratische Elitenherrschaft, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft), the notion of political class is taken as involving two key distinctions: from Marx, a distinction between a ‘class in itself’ and a ‘class for itself’; and from Weber, a distinction between ‘living for politics’ and ‘living off politics’. For the editors, a political class (as opposed to a political elite, ruling class or professional politicians) must be a ‘class for itself, living off politics’: that is to say there must be a collective class self-interest, and the political class must be capable of acting as a single agent. In an attempt to examine the development of a political class across the developed world, the book devotes a chapter to every advanced industrial country, with the exception of Greece and Austria, with twenty years of continuous democracy and a population of over a million. In retrospect, this seems overambitious. With twenty countries to cover, a great deal of space is taken up by an introduction to each state’s political institutional arrangements, curtailing the scope for thematic discussion. The criteria for inclusion necessarily skews the book towards Western Europe (fourteen countries), and Anglo-Saxon legislatures (five, including the UK). Only Israel and Japan do not fall into one or other camp and the concentration on nation-states unfortunately excludes European Union institutions. It is the cultural outliers, however, like Israel and Japan, and to a certain extent Switzerland, that provide the most stimulating discussions of political class. The volume is presented as a handbook (the countries in turn appear in alphabetical order), with a common format for each chapter. The material is further shoehorned into fixed headings: political professionalization in historical perspective; institutional context; the political class (size and composition; political recruitment and political careers; and living off politics); and the political class and institutional reform. Potentially the most interesting of these, political recruitment and political careers, tends to fall back into a discussion on electoral law, the party system and incumbency. While the editors argue for extending analysis beyond either legislative or party research, this is undermined by the book’s taking national legislatures as the ‘ “central committee” of the political class’. Although numerous contributors stress the extra-legislative elements of the political class – party workers, elected officials, political appointees, possibly even judges and journalists – they ultimately all concentrate on parliamentary careers. Typical of this is Borchert and Gary Copeland’s chapter on the USA, which notes that there are over a half a million elected offices in the USA before retreating into a discussion of state and federal legislators. Consequently, the ‘class for itself’/‘living off politics’ analysis collapses into two proxy discussions – the rewards of public office, in particular formal provisions relating to the payment of legislators; and the attitudes of MPs towards institutional reform. Moreover, the assumption that opposition to institutional reform reflects some sort of political class consciousness is flawed, ascribing agency to the class, rather than its various members who – as beneficiaries of the status quo– share a common interest in maintaining it. Indeed, Borchert’s own reference to a ‘cartel of incumbents’ seems to point at such an unholy alliance. These problems could have been cured by one or more thematic discussions following the country chapters. However, the book lacks even a conclusion, again, possibly because of the scale of the survey. There is no attempt, for instance, to draw cross-national comparisons, even where factors such as gender and the background of MPs recur more or less throughout the chapters. To a political scientist this might be an interesting handbook, not least for each chapter’s introductions to that country’s political system. Readers hoping to learn about the sociology of political elites, however, are likely to be disappointed

Democracy · Elite · Legislature · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · European Union Policy and Governance · Law · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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