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The "iron law of oligarchy" states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies, thus making true democracy practically and theoretically impossible, especially in large groups and complex organizations. The relative structural fluidity in a ...
Term Description Examples Autocracy: Autocracy is a system of government in which supreme power (social and political) is concentrated in the hands of one person or polity, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for the implicit threat of a coup d'état or mass insurrection).
The consolidation of power by a dominant religious or ethnic minority can be considered a form of oligarchy. [5] Examples include South Africa during apartheid, Liberia under Americo-Liberians, the Sultanate of Zanzibar, [citation needed] and Rhodesia. In these cases, oligarchic rule was often tied to the legacy of colonialism. [5]
Solon introduced the ideas of timokratia as a graded oligarchy in his Solonian Constitution for Athens in the early 6th century BC. His was the first known deliberately implemented form of timocracy, allocating political rights and economic responsibility depending on membership of one of four tiers of the population.
Meritocracy (merit, from Latin mereō, and -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος kratos 'strength, power') is the notion of a political system in which economic goods or political power are vested in individual people based on ability and talent, rather than wealth or social class. [1]
oligarchy: government by the few; timocracy: government by the honored or valued; tyranny: government by one for himself; aristocracy: government by the best (Plato's ideal form of government) Plato found flaws with all existing forms of government and thus concluded that aristocracy, which emphasizes virtue and wisdom, is the purest form of ...
More generally, an oligarch (from Ancient Greek ὀλίγος (oligos) 'few' and ἄρχειν (archein) 'rule') is a "member of an oligarchy; a person who is part of a small group holding power in a state". [3]
In philosophy, political science and sociology, elite theory is a theory of the state that seeks to describe and explain power relations in society.In its contemporary form in the 21st century, elite theory posits that (1) power in larger societies, especially nation-states, is concentrated at the top in relatively small elites; (2) power "flows predominantly in a top-down direction from ...