Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the

Why this matters here

Robert Michels’s Political Parties argues that modern organizations—including democratic parties—tend toward oligarchy: leadership concentrates, and organizational necessity hardens into durable elite control (the “iron law of oligarchy”). When Authority Outlives Accountability cites that tendency when legitimacy transfers beyond the conditions that earned it. Michels diagnoses oligarchical drift in mass organizations; the book asks how transferred legitimacy can outrun the constraints that once made authority answerable.