New Political Elites: Formation, Consolidation, and Contestation

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The formation of new political elites is an often fraught process that sees intense episodes of intra-elite competition and contestation. This panel looks to unpack this process, focusing on the determinants of elite access, survival, and turnover in cases of revolutionary state capture, democratic transitions, and military coups d’état. Matching novel micro-level data, as well as qualitative and other source material, with a range of different research designs, the individual papers trace the formation and transformation of new political elites in a number of understudied cases. In doing so, the papers address several related questions: Why do some ideological factions and not others triumph in processes of elite consolidation? Which prior biographical characteristics shape membership of new state elites following episodes of state capture? How does gender and identity mediate access to elite networks? How do political factions within an elite consolidate control following abortive challenges emanating from with the state? How do judicial processes inform elite purges in new democracies?

The panel includes five papers:

Gilad Wenig and Neil Ketchley use biographical registers to reconstruct who was brought in to staff the state elite following the 1952 Egyptian Revolution.

Maryam Alemzadeh uses interviews, published memoirs, meeting minutes, and newspaper reports to understand elite-level struggles in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Harunobu Saijo draws on career and retirement data to analyze factional competition amongst state elites following a major failed coup attempt in the Japanese Army.

Mohamed Dhia Hammami uses social network analysis to analyze how gender and national identity mediate access to political elites in post-Ben Ali Tunisia.

Monika Nalepa and Barbara Piotrowska propose a formal model and use archival data to explain how a new state elite oversaw purges in post-communist Poland.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Staffing the Revolutionary State - Neil Ketchley, University of Oxford; Gilad Wenig, University of California, Los Angeles

• Informality as Form: How Islamists Captured the Iranian State after 1979 - Maryam Alemzadeh, University of Oxford

• Gender and Informational Inequality: Evidence from Tunisia - Mohamed-Dhia Hammami, Maxwell School, Syracuse University

• The Appeal of Appeals - Monika Nalepa, University of Chicago; Barbara Maria Piotrowska, King's College London

Chair

• Mai Omer Hassan MIT

Discussant

• Mark Beissinger Princeton University