Under what conditions are political parties, ethnic, non-ethnic or multi-ethnic, able to incorporate elites from rising ethnic categories and retain their allegiance? General theories of party politics in multi-ethnic societies propose a sociological answer to this question, according to which success or failure in elite incorporation is determined by the pattern of conflict or harmony between ...

Conventional wisdom holds that democracy endures in rich countries but is unstable in poor ones. Building on Ansell and Samuels (2014), we suggest that the sources of democratic stability lie not just with a country’s aggregate level of wealth, but also with its distribution. However, we conceive of inequality and its political impact differently from previous work, which has focused on the med...

Challenging our fundamental conception of transformation as the antithesis of continuity, this chapter contends that in the case of the Russian youth movement Nashi, continuity and transformation have enjoyed a symbiotic, albeit restricted, relationship. Despite Nashi's resolute objective of securing the incumbent regime and maintaining political stability in the face of the perceived 'orange' ...

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...

Regimes controlled by a rich elite often collapse and make way for democracy amidst widespread social unrest. Such regime changes are often followed by redistribution to the poor at the expense of the former elite. We argue that the reason why the elite may have to resort to full-scale democratization, despite its apparent costs to themselves, may be that lesser concessions would be viewed as a...

We present a model in which the media endorses the character of offi ce-seeking candidates as a means to promote its own ideological agenda. In equilibrium, political parties completely pander to the elite-controlled media under moderate ideological conflict between voters and the elite. Larger ideological conflict leads to stochastic polarization– parties either adopt the role of media darling...

Because of their ever-growing importance, elite actors from the political sphere and news media have integrated social network sites and especially Twitter into their communication strategies. However, the extent of these adaptation processes is not yet fully understood. This article presents lists of U.S. actors from politics, news media and government. As an exploratory analysis, the influenc...