Contextualización de la problemática territorial por el conflicto armado en el Centro

The emergence of elite theory as a paradigm of explaining social reality is credited to the works of Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941), Vilfredo Pareto (1848- 1923), Roberto Mitchels (1876-1936) and Charles W. Mills (1916-1962). Central to all of their arguments is that inevitably a small minority rules the masses in society.

Mosca emphasizes the ways in which a small minority manipulated and ruled the masses because of their material, intellectual or even moral superiority as seen in their organisational abilities. Pareto on the other hand asserts that some individuals (elites) were born with differential intrinsic intellectual endowments which he chose to call residues. And that social mobility in an ideal society will favour those endowed with these residues but in an actual society, social mobility favours those individuals endowed with the power of persuasion and force. Borrowing from Pareto, elites are persons who by virtue of their strategic locations in large or otherwise pivotal organisations and movements are able to affect political outcomes regularly and substantially (Femia, 2001; Higley, 2006). In other words, these are individuals who by virtue of their strategic locations wield the capacity to influence real political

change in any given society. These are the people C. W. Mills has come to characterise as power elites. Using his insight of the USA, Mills (1956) identified the most powerful institutions as the corporations, the government and the military. Over time, the leaders within these institutions (i.e the chief executives, political party leaders and military generals) use their strategic locations in society to constitute the power elite. They ensure purity and continuity of their stratum by strictly recruiting leaders from the same social backgrounds. Mills argues that these are the individuals who exercise power in the USA as opposed to the popular democratic belief that the people are in charge through elections. The rule is perpetuated through media and other propaganda apparatus, where an enduring illusion of control is created.

According to the elite school of thought, voters are objects of political activity with passive roles (Walker, 1966). Robert Michels studying the German Social Democratic Party claimed that the creation of organisational authority inherent in party politics confer most of the resources (personal status, visibility, finances, monopoly over means of communications) to the party leaders (Coleman, 1990; Bartels, 2008). In cognition of the foregoing observations, elite democracy is a strategy for power or an ideology in service of the elites not an instrument of empowerment as citizens can be reduced to mere pawns in the game of political power as was observed in 2007 general elections in Kenya (Ake, 1993:240; Omotola, 2009). During 2007 general elections, as elections approached, politicians entered into deals dubbed by the media then as ―horse trading‖, where alliances were drawn on the basis of ethnic

arithmetic. Party members were left with no options but to vote for leaders chosen for them by their party elites with little regard to their wishes. Instructively in this respect, PNU came into being by collapsing a number of political parties into one (PNU), without consulting members of those collapsed political parties. The justification was that party bigwigs knew what they were doing and that whatever they did was in the best interest of members. The task of justifying the actions of the Kenyan elite was left for the media.

According to this school of thought, democracy should and is based on the wisdom, loyalty and skill of the elites not the populace. Because at the heart of Elite theory is the presumption of the average citizens political inadequacies. The argument for the elite rule is partly based on the assumption that liberal democracy is endowed with the necessary infrastructure to arbitrate elite conflicts and protect their privileged positions when and if they arose. For this reason, it is believed Elites are bound to protect the liberal democratic system even if the general populace preferred another alternative (Walker, 1966:286-7). The reason for this gerrymandering, liberal democrats argue that classical democracy with its emphasis on popular participation is utopian hence the need to transform its normative foundations to bring it in sync with the obtaining political behaviour.

Critics of the elite democracy claim that the elites are more interested in the development of the system as opposed to the development of the individual. The elite school substituted individual development with stability and

efficiency of the system. This is in contradiction with the classical school which posited that the individual through popular participation will come to understand the intrigues of the society‘s working and hence a higher sense of responsibility beyond the confines of private life.

Another criticism of the elite claim is that voters are naive and passive in participatory rates across the world. This shows that voters are not naive for they are responding to the socio-political environment. And even if apathy was admitted as a fact among voters, this has many causes ranging from personal inadequacy, fear of endangering important personal relationships, lack of interests in issues and lack of group stimulation. It is some of these unconvincing explanations for apathy and political inadequacies of the populace that elite theory fails to explain voting behaviour and we turn to the Marxist school as an alternative.