Robert M. Hartwell, in his path-breaking article on the transformation from the eighth to the sixteenth century, defined this transition as the demise and re-absorption of “a semihereditary professional bureaucratic elite” into “a multitude of local elite gentry families,” which it had hitherto coexisted with. Since Hartwell maintained that those local gentry elites had dominated the local scen...

Many theoretical approaches to Europeanization of EU applicant states portray the process as top-down: governing elites in applicant states conform to EU conditions, constituents provide a permissive consensus and all applicant states converge toward a single EU model. Such approaches direct less attention to how Europeanization is a dynamic, contradictory and contestable process. This case stu...

This article argues that by providing virtually unlimited sources of political information, the new media environment undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: If there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers. The difficulty of elites (political and media both) and academics in understanding the Lewinsky scandal stems from their failure to r...

The political trajectories of the post-Soviet states are varied, with democracy being the outcome in only a minority of these countries. The different outcomes are striking, given the similarity of starting points. The key to understanding a democratic outcome lies in the different relationships between old regime elites and civil society-based opposition forces, and the ethnic balance in the c...

Introduction While national character is a subject that has intrigued social scientists for many years, it is rarely considered in theories of international behavior. The major reasons seem to be that: (a) the study of national character is fraught with conceptual confusions and meth-odological difficulties; (b) many social scientists question whether modern, complex, culturally-mixed nations c...

Existing theories of coups against democracy emphasize that elites mount coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests. But holding interests constant, some potential plotters may have more influence over whether or not a coup succeeds. We develop a model where coups generate rents for elites and show that the likelihood of elite participation is increasing in their networ...

1. Betkiewicz, W., Kotnarowski, M., Wasilewski, J. (2018). Trzy generacje polityczne regionalnej elity samorządowej. Studia Socjologiczne, nr 1(228), s. 7-34. DOI: 10.24425/119085. CrossRef Google Scholar