Keywords

Introduction

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the notion of civil society elites and in the process of civil society hierarchisation. Excluded for many years from classical elite studies, recent research in this field has shown that civil society, as with other sectors, embodies actors with different interests who might compete for controlling ‘valuable resources, such as money, information, expertise and knowledge or ability to mobilize extensive numbers of people to push for policy change’ (Johansson & Uhlin, 2020, p. 83).

Starting from this point, we apply and critically evaluate the results of three different elite identification methods—the positional method, the reputational method, and claims-making analysis. The aim is to address the implications of different methods of elite identification for our understanding of civil society elites and to reflect on the methodological challenges in the study of civil society elites. Hence, we focus on comparing both the application and operationalisation of the methods and their results in terms of which actors are identified. We are interested both in the extent to which the identified actors overlap between methods and in the types of actors that tend to show up with one method and not the other.

The methods are applied to the context of Italian civil society. Common to all the three methods is that they address power stratification in Italian civil society by exploring the accumulation of different types of resources whose uneven distribution can give rise to civil society elites. The main contribution of the chapter is thus methodological. Two of the methods, the positional and reputational methods, are directly derived from elite studies (see Hoffman-Lange, 2017), while the third is ‘borrowed’ from social movement studies (e.g. Cinalli & Giugni, 2013). We will refer to this third method as ‘the visibility method’.

There is a clear link between the method of elite identification and the understanding of resources, power, and influence as expressed by Ursula Hoffman-Lange (2017) concerning political elites: ‘The choice of method for identifying and studying elites is associated with theoretical differences about the loci of power and influence in modern societies and also with different objectives of elite research’ (p. 86). Hence, we will briefly discuss some of the theoretical assumptions about resources and power for each method before delving into the application of the methods in the Italian context. We depart from the assumption that civil society is a heterogenous field made up of many different actors with different aims and characterised by soft and indirect forms of power (Scaramuzzino, 2020), which is why its stratification is based on different sources of power such as economic, political, organisational, individual, formal, and informal power.

Italian civil society is characterised by high degrees of informality in its governance (Polizzi & Bassoli, 2011). Recent studies have shown that access to arenas for decision-making and positions of power and influence is regulated by complex, opaque, and corporatist structures and procedures (Polizzi & Bassoli, 2011; Santilli & Scaramuzzino, 2021). These specificities make it evident that different methodologies for the identification of civil society elites can provide different understandings of who the elites are, for instance, depending on whether we focus on formal positions of power or on reputations of being powerful. The visibility method from social movement studies adds an important perspective to the study of civil society elites. In fact, there is a lack of systematic analysis of how these three aspects of power, that is, formal position, reputation, and visibility, tend to contribute to the stratification of power in civil society and can be used to identify the elites.

Methods of Elite Identification

The Positional Method

The positional approach in this chapter draws on a large-scale mapping of civil society organisations (CSOs) and their leaders at the national level based on indicators of resources (see the Appendix to this volume) that allow us to identify resource-rich organisations and their leaders.

In elite studies, there is a broad agreement with the assumption that formal leadership positions, or ‘command posts’, as termed by Mills (1956), are a relevant element for the identification of elites. In the last century the dominant theories on elites have defined and analysed elites as those occupying prestigious and stable positions in both the public and the private sectors (Schjif, 2013; Wedel, 2017). In fact, since the work of Robert Michels (2001) on the ‘oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy’, many strands of elite theory have related elitism to top positions in organisations. It was, according to Michels, within the complex, large-scale organisations of the labour movement that individuals monopolised and hoarded organisational means and resources thus producing an internal stratification that distanced the leaders from the masses. According to this assumption, resources are largely tied to positions of leadership in organisations of national relevance (Hoffman-Lange, 2017), and elites are those who can exert influence through their strategic positions in powerful organisations (Higley & Burton, 2006).

This approach has some pitfalls in the sense that it does not give any specific guidelines for specifying either the horizontal boundaries (i.e. the boundaries between civil society and other sectors) or the vertical boundaries (i.e. the boundaries between the elite and the non-elite). ‘The inclusion of elite sectors and the choice of cut-off criteria for distinguishing elite and non-elite positions have to rely on the results of previous research into the importance of different sectors, organisations, and leadership positions’ (Hoffman-Lange, 2017, p. 82).

Following this method, we choose as our point of departure to focus on the formal leaders of CSOs of national relevance. This study draws on a sampling of relevant organisations active at the national level in Italy. The organisations were selected because of their high level of status and recognition both in civil society and by the state. In order to identify these organisations, we used five indicators that allow us a broad and complex interpretation of organisational resources following the Multi-Dimensional Measure of Resource Stratification in Civil Society and adapted to the Italian context (see Santilli & Scaramuzzino, 2021; Scaramuzzino & Lindellee, 2020).

The civil society elites would then be identified as the top leaders of the CSOs identified, which could include people in the following positions: the top representative leaders such as presidents, chairpersons and their deputies, and board members as well as the directors, secretary generals, and their deputies.

The method is considered to be quite inclusive leading to an overestimation of the size of the elites and thus leading to the inclusion of individuals whose actual power and influence can be questioned (Hoffman-Lange, 2017).

The Reputational Method

The reputational approach is based on an analysis of the perception that civil society leaders have on which actors are influential in society. The reputational approach is thus not directly bound to the organisational resources but rather to a subjective understanding of the power dynamics and power distribution by actors in the field. In fact, influence and power can also be informal and linked to other elements (e.g. indirect forms of influence, personal reputation, centrality in networks, and specific or exceptional skills) rather than to formal positions and to organisations or institutions (Wedel, 2017). Thus, the reputational method potentially takes into account both positional and personal resources (Hoffman-Lange, 2017).

The coexistence of informal charismatic and formal bureaucratic rules was already highlighted by Weber (1997), but classical elite studies have predominantly focused on formal organisational roles (see North et al., 2009, for an exception). Mainly associated with Floyd Hunter’s (1953) works, the reputational approach is often used in elite studies for identifying elites. It relies on experts’ opinions for defining elites and powerful actors. Some scholars have criticised this approach (Dahl, 1961; Scott, 2004) because it seems applicable only in relatively small communities where everyone knows each other, for example within an organisation or a specific policy field.

The method also has some pitfalls that can be described as the need for a broad range of experts in the field as well as a list of potential elite people for the experts to select from or with whom to rank the elite. This creates some methodological challenges in terms of setting up a representative and diverse expert group that covers different sub-fields as well as requiring them to assess a long list of names. Thus, the method has often been used in combination with other methods of elite identification. ‘In combination with the positional or decisional methods, however, asking respondents to identify top influencers in their own organisations or in policy decisions in which they have been personally involved makes sense and has been successfully applied by Laumann, Knoke, and others as a form of snowball sampling’ (Hoffman-Lange, 2017, p. 86).

To operationalise the reputational approach and to identify the power that derives from personal reputation, we rely on survey data focusing on the perceptions of national Italian leaders. The survey was conducted in 2021 and targeted 680 civil society elites, namely presidents, directors, and deputies of CSOs, based on the same mapping as in the positional approach. The survey received 133 answers (19% response rate). The survey was carried out based on the same mapping as in the positional approach but leaving it up to the leaders that responded to the survey to name who they consider to be influential and thus to be the elite. Due to the lack of previous studies about civil society elites, we chose the positional elite as our experts for applying the reputational method.

For similar reasons and for the purpose of potentially identifying individuals that the positional method had missed, we chose not to present a list of possible elite persons but to leave the respondents free to identify whomever they wanted. They were asked to identify three people. Also, the survey question used for the reputational approach was formulated in a quite open statement including both power, resources, and influence. Because we assumed that many individuals in civil society do not have a complete overview of the whole sector, we chose to narrow down the question to the issues with which they worked. The question also allowed us to indicate individuals by name or position and organisations. The question was the following: ‘Which three individuals in civil society do you consider to have most power, resources, or influence concerning the issues you work with? Please state names/positions and organisations’.

The method thus does not rely on actual resources wielded by the elite, as in the positional method, but rather on who has the most power, resources, or influence in the eyes of the positional elite (i.e. the leaders of the elite organisations).

The Visibility Method

The visibility method that we adopt in this study draws on a claims-making analysis that focuses on civil society actors’ interventions in the public domain. This approach is based on the assumption that public visibility, and not only formal positions or reputation, can contribute to leaders’ authority and legitimacy. Departing from this point, we can say that visibility is at the same time a sign and a result of power and influence. The individuals who have access to the public sphere are those with more power, and at the same time visibility gives them more influence and legitimacy. By focusing on individual political claims, in this case in national newspapers, as units of analysis, we can identify a group of civil society elites who are the most present in the public debate and thus potentially are the most influential when it comes to public opinion. In fact, many civil society organisations might be as interested in influencing public opinion as in influencing politicians and public policy. This is true for both interest groups and for social movements (Johansson et al., 2019).

The correspondence between the formal position, reputation, and public visibility of leaders in a movement or an arena is a central question in social movements analysis (Bassoli et al., 2014; Malinick et al., 2011). In the field of elite studies, as discussed above, the formal leadership position is considered the sign of elite status (Hoffman-Lange, 2017; Michels, 2001). Some recent studies, however, have shown that the correspondence between formal positions of leadership and actual power and influence is not always obvious in social movements (Diani, 2003; Malinick et al., 2011), thus stressing the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the influence, representativity, and legitimacy of leaders.

In recent years there has been a growing research interest in how visibility in the public sphere might contribute to achieving social groups’ and leaders’ authority and legitimacy (Cinalli & Giugni, 2013; Nepstad & Bob, 2006). Studies in the field of social movements have shown that not only is the institutional dimension of political context relevant (i.e. structural opportunities), but public discourse (i.e. discursive opportunities) matters too when it comes to gaining influence and mobilising social groups (Benford & Snow, 2000; Cinalli & Giugni, 2011). Cinalli and Giugni (2013) in their research about Muslims’ political participation in Europe showed, for instance, that the institutional and discursive dimensions are interconnected and that Muslims’ political participation stems ‘not only from the openness or closeness of the institutional settings’ but also from access to the public debate (ibid, p. 150). That is, visibility participates in the political prioritisation or de-prioritisation of a specific issue or group.

In order to capture the civil society actors who are most visible in the public debate, we rely on the method of claims analysis that consists of retrieving interventions in the public domain on a given issue by drawing from media sources, in this case newspapers (Cinalli & Giugni, 2011; Koopmans & Statham, 1999). To be operationalised, this method needs a specific issue on which the actors can construct their claims. This is of course also part of the method’s limitation because it will tend to only identify civil society elites based on visibility concerning specific policy issues. As will be discussed below, we chose to operationalise the method concerning one specific policy issue. However, an analysis based on a wide range of policy issues would have given a more complete picture of the ‘visible’ civil society elite.

Three Types of Elites

The Organisational Elite

Indicators of resources, as explained earlier, identify the organisational elite. The first two indicators that we used measured different forms of status and recognition internal to civil society: (1) organisations that held posts in decision-making bodies within umbrella organisations in specific policy areas and (2) organisations that were members of umbrella organisations representing the civil society sector. The last three indicators measured status and recognition external to civil society: (3) organisations that were included in the tax deduction scheme for private donations, (4) organisations that were included in specific ministries’ registries for consultations, and (5) organisations that held posts in the Council for the Third Sector, which is the consultation body between the state and civil society.

These indicators can thus be understood as conditions for the inclusion of specific organisations among the elite. Following the Multi-Dimensional Measure of Resource Stratification in Civil Society (see Santilli & Scaramuzzino, 2021; Scaramuzzino & Lindellee, 2020), we see these indicators as ‘conditions’ for organisations to be included in the sample. Based on an approach of including all organisations that fulfilled at least one condition, a total of 293 organisations were identified. Some organisations were identified by more than one condition.

If we were to assume that all of these 293 CSOs are elite organisations and that the elite positions are the top representative leaders (‘presidente’) and executive leaders (‘direttore’) and their deputies, we end up with quite a large population of civil society elites. Although we were not able to retrieve the names of the leaders of all organisations, we still ended up with a population of 680 leaders. This confirms that the positional method is potentially very inclusive in terms of how many resources are required to be considered part of a civil society elite.

However, our method allows for a more exclusive approach to elite identification. If the conditions are the operationalisation of the indicators of resources, then resource accumulation could be measured by how many conditions the CSOs fulfil (Scaramuzzino & Lindellee, 2020). The accumulation of these indicators can thus be interpreted as an ‘elite score’ for an organisation. The organisations with elite scores of 4 or 5 (N = 15) would be at the top of the pyramid, those with an elite score of 3 (N = 35) would be in the middle, and those with scores of 1 or 2 would be at the base (N = 243). Using this elite score, it is possible to take a less-inclusive approach and to draw the vertical boundaries in a way that allows for the identification of a smaller group of high-score organisations and thus a smaller group of leaders comprising the civil society elite.

We chose the inclusive approach by sending out the survey to all 680 leaders. Although the survey, due to anonymity, would not allow any link between the respondent and their organisational affiliation, we were able to determine if the respondent was selected from an ‘elite score 1’, ‘elite score 2’, or ‘elite score 3’ organisation. The results of the survey clearly show that the elite score matters for some status-related variables. For instance, Italian leaders of organisations with higher scores have on average higher income than leaders of organisations with lower scores. They also tend to have networks of collaborations that span across multiple organisations.Footnote 1 These results, although only based on bivariate analyses, suggest that indeed the elite score of the organisation, which measures organisational resource accumulation, reflects the amount of resources that the leaders control.

Looking at the top elite organisations, that is, the organisations with an elite score of 4 or 5, we find 15 CSOs in Italy. Their 35 leaders could be seen as the positional civil society elite in Italy based on a very restrictive understanding of its boundaries.

The Reputational Elite

The reputational method draws on a survey of the civil society leaders of the organisations identified through the positional method. Only 60 individuals chose to answer the reputational question, and a few did not fill in all the information for all three suggested individuals. For the purpose of the reputational method, the level of analysis is not the respondent but rather the answer in terms of the identified elite. In this logic, each respondent gets three ‘votes’ that can be assigned to any individual they know of. Because no respondent would give more than one vote to the same person, a single individual would not be able to receive more than 60 votes. In our analysis, to be considered complete the answers should contain enough information to be able to identify at least the sector/organisation that the respondent had indicated for the elite person. After removing the answers that were not complete, we were left with 149 complete answers, which means that our 60 respondents had given 2.5 votes each on average.

In the reputational study, the respondents were asked to name three individuals in civil society whom they considered to have the most power, resources, or influence concerning the issues they work with. The question was clearly pointing at individuals within the sphere of civil society, although it left open the respondent’s interpretation of what it means to be ‘in civil society’. A sectoral analysis of the reputational elite, based on our theoretical understanding of the boundaries between societal sectors, in fact shows that many respondents tended to identify individuals belonging to other sectors.

Following a similar definition of the sector as we have used in the positional method (see method Appendix), 91 named individuals belonging to the civil society sector. It is clear, however, that 58 individuals identified by our respondents did not fall into our definition of organised civil society used in the positional method. However, in a broader understanding of civil society, we find leaders of three trade unions. We also find a hybrid organisation, Equo Garantito, that organises and represents fair trade producers and retailers that are both non-profit and for-profit. Finally, we also find three individuals engaged in civil society with no clear strong organisational affiliation. One is a university professor in physics who has been engaged in mobilisation and movements for world peace and the environment. The second is a former member of parliament and is engaged in many organisations working with issues of civil society and welfare. Both of these individuals can be considered examples of charismatic leaders whose role transcends their organisational affiliation. The third individual is not named but has a role in coordinating a consultative body for CSOs engaged in social promotion.

The second largest sector that is identified as the organisational affiliation of the civil society elite is the public sector (N = 41). Here we find both political and administrative positions at all levels of administration, including local, regional, national, and EU level. A small number of individuals identified by the respondents (N = 5) we would categorise as belonging to the business sector. It is interesting to note that these individuals tend to serve either representative bodies for the business sector, for instance employers’ organisations (and hence formally associations of employers), or parts of the business sector that are close to the civil society sector, and they are characterised by elements of idealism and a strong value base such as the fair trade movement. Close to this sector we also find one individual representing an umbrella organisation for public and private for-profit landlords. Other smaller categories that could belong to different sectors are the media (N = 2) and universities/research institutes (N = 2). These categories might include public, business, or civil society organisations. The largest group, however, consists of individuals holding positions in civil society organisations.

Compared to the positional method, we find that our approach using the reputational method allows us to question the self-evidence of the concept of ‘in civil society’ as a sector characterised by clear demarcations and to instead suggest blurred horizontal boundaries of the elites. The understanding of ‘civil society’ in the Italian context among the positional elite seems to be broader than the academic understanding of it, including not only people with less clear organisational affiliations (the non-organisational civil society elite) but also trade union representatives, representatives for business interests, and political leaders.

Among the 91 individuals who were stated to be affiliated with the civil society sector among the reputational elite, we were able to link 89 individuals to a specific CSO (based on our definition of civil society). Some CSOs turned up more than once, resulting in a total of 56 CSOs whose representatives were deemed to be a civil society elite. As in the positional method, the number of mentions in the reputational method can also be seen as an indicator of the accumulation of reputational resources. If we look closer at the organisations that got at least two mentions, we find 12 CSOs.

Among the 56 CSOs identified by the reputational method, the number of organisations also identified through the positional method is 24, which means a consistent overlap with the positional method. However, among the 12 CSOs mentioned more than once in the reputational method, the overlap is even larger. In fact, eight of them were also identified through the positional method. The fact that many of the civil society actors identified through the reputational approach overlap with the more resource-rich organisations identified through the positional approach suggests that the resource indicators applied in the positional method and the inclusive approach that was adopted here tend to draw vertical boundaries between the elite and the non-elite, who also include the reputational elite to a large extent.

It is, however, also interesting to look at what the reputational approach adds in terms of vertical boundaries. What actors do we identify in terms of having the ‘most power, resources or influence’ that we do not capture with our indicators? A few CSOs (N = 6) that were identified through the reputational method could not have been included in the positional method due to the fact that the positional method was targeting CSOs active at the national level, while these organisations were local or based at the EU level. This of course challenges the assumption that the civil society elite are by definition a national phenomenon.

The other CSOs (N = 26) could have been included in the positional method but were not, supposedly because they did not fulfil any of the conditions determined by the organisational resource indicators. Among these, a large category are the bank foundations (N = 8) whose influence on civil society is mostly based on their control over funding. In this sense they tend to function in a similar way as public funding, although they are themselves civil society actors (see Chap. 9 in this volume).

It is interesting to note that, although our question would allow the identification of charismatic leaders whose elite status would not be linked to organisational affiliation, we only find three individuals among the reputational elite with no clear organisational affiliation. This suggests that the positional elite tend to share a view of civil society elites as organisational rather than individual.

The Visible Elite

As discussed earlier, claims-making analysis requires a focus on a specific issue for which the claims are made. The issue considered in our study is that of migration, which is one of the main contentious public issues in recent years in Italy (Della Porta, 2018). There is, in fact, an open conflict between many civil society actors (not only actors belonging to the migration sub-field) and the government since the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 (Santilli & Scaramuzzino, 2022). The data were gathered following a two-step procedure normally used in claims-making analysis (Cinalli & Giugni, 2011, 2013). In the first step, we selected the following four national newspapers (available online through the source Factiva): Il Corriere della Sera, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Il Giornale, and La Repubblica. The choice of newspapers was to ensure a sample as representative and unbiased as possible. Il Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, and Il Fatto Quotidiano are the most relevant newspapers in Italy. The first historically represents the moderate Italian bourgeoisie, the second has a progressive centre-left orientation, and Il Fatto Quotidiano is a relatively recent newspaper that has a liberal orientation. Il Giornale is a conservative newspaper. The articles were harvested by using relevant keywords (focusing both on the actors and the issue) for the period 2015–2019, starting in the year when the debates around the so-called refugee crisis began until the year of the greatest clash on the issue and its spillover to the whole civil society sector (Santilli & Scaramuzzino, 2022).

With this method the unit of analysis is the single claim, which is an intervention made by any actor in the media linked to the issues of migration and civil society. One article may of course include more than one claim, and one claim could be made by more than one actor. In total, 400 claims were coded by random sampling of 701 claims selected from the newspapers. For each claim, we identified the claimant, the form, the addressee, the content, the object, and the framing. This methodology allowed us to analyse which actors have visibility in the public debate.

A sectoral analysis of the most relevant actors of the claims across the timespan from 2015 to 2019 shows that the most common types of actors were civil society actors amounting to 68% of all claims. This category includes CSOs, informal actors, non-organised actors, trade unions, and civil society as an unspecified actor. The second most relevant actors are state and political actors, making up 30% of the claims. The third group present in the sample are international public actors with 2% of the claims. Similarly to the reputational approach, we find mostly claims by civil society actors, but also claims by public national (mostly) and international political actors. This shows that civil society elites tend to appear in the public sphere in dialogue and interaction (more or less contentiously) with public authorities.

In Table 4.1, we look at the civil society actors’ claims (N = 274). The columns distinguish between collective actors and individual actors as claimants.

Table 4.1 Number of claims by type of civil society actor
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As shown in Table 4.1, we found 162 claims by collective actors (59%) and 112 claims by individuals (41%). Among the group of collective actors, the main actors were CSOs (59%) followed by unspecified actors, for instance ‘a group of citizens’ or ‘civil society’ (25%), specific citizens groups (9%), and trade unions (7%).

In the remaining 112 claims, the main actor is an individual. Analysing this group, we can see that some individuals represent a specific organisation or citizens’ group in the claim. In the case of these 45 claims, the name of the person is followed by the name of the organisation she or he represents (33 claims refer to CSOs). Hence, in 67 claims we find as main actors individuals without any reference to an organisation. Among these claims, a majority of individuals (N = 37) clearly belong to one or more organisations, while the rest (N = 30) do not belong to a specific CSO. The claims-making analysis thus seems to open for a less-organisational understanding of civil society elites. This is evident both in terms of identifying individual leaders making claims without mentioning which CSOs they represent and individuals who are not immediately linkable to a specific CSO.

In order to see if there is any correspondence between the three types of elites, we look at the CSOs that are present in at least one claim. This analysis includes the organisations mentioned in the claims, the individuals mentioned in the claims with organisational affiliation, and the individuals for whom we are able to identify an organisational affiliation. We can identify 42 CSOs through the claims-making analysis, 26 of whom are also identified by the positional approach with an overlap of 61%. The overlap with the reputational method is nine CSOs, corresponding to 21%. It might be important, however, to keep in mind that the inclusive approach in the positional method produced a much larger group of organisations (293) than the reputational method (56).

As with the other methods of identification, we can use the number of claims made by a specific actor as a measure of resource accumulation. We find 23 CSOs that are involved in at least 3 claims with 2 actors having 30 claims each. Compared to the positional elite and the reputational elite, we find a larger overlap among these highly visible CSOs. The overlap is 69% (N = 16) for the positional method and 35% (N = 8) for the reputational method.

The horizontal boundaries of this visible elite are not only defined by the definition of civil society but also defined according to the issue-centred method, in our case with a focus on the migration issue. Although it is clear from this analysis that many of the representatives of the visible elite are organisations that are working with many different issues, the bias towards the migration policy area is evident from the presence of some specific CSOs that are working mostly with refugees. Among these we find CSOs such as Seawatch and Mediterranea running rescue operation in the Mediterranean Sea and local associations such as Centro Astalli running refugee centres in Rome and Baobab working with social inclusion mostly with migrants. Some CSOs also tend to gain visibility though charismatic leaders who are present in claims sometimes as individuals without any reference to the organisation. Here we find leaders such as Pope Franciscus I, don Ciotti, a Catholic priest involved in the fight against organised crime, Gino Strada, a doctor and founder of Emergency, an organisation giving humanitarian medical help to victims of conflicts, and Carola Rackete, the captain of a rescue ship that challenged the Italian government’s attempt to enforce the blockade of all ports for migrants.

Moving from the organisational level to the individual level, the individuals who have made more than one claim in the media without any reference or clear affiliation to an organisation are all public figures who have been visible in the debate but do not have a clear sectoral position. Roberto Saviano (N = 7) is a famous journalist and writer, Luigi Manconi (N = 7) is a former politician, MEP, and academic (sociology), Mimmo Lucano (N = 5) is a former politician at the local level and mayor of a small town in southern Italy, while Aboubakar Soumhaoro (N = 2) is an activist for migrants’ labour rights.

The visible elite thus seem to be less bound to organisations, and this might have to do with the personified public debate (Andrews & Caren, 2010) suggesting the need for a ‘face’ in claims-making, even when the statement comes from a collective actor. It also suggests that while some institutional channels for resources and influence might be reserved for formal organisations (e.g. funding, interest representation), the public debate is much more open for individual charismatic leaders.

Conclusion

The application of the three methods of elite identification have highlighted some crucial challenges when it comes to civil society elites. The first challenge relates to the issue of the horizontal boundaries of the elite, that is, the boundaries of civil society. In our operationalisation of the approaches, the positional and the claims-making approach require that a sectoral delimitation be applied by the researcher. Where to draw the line for the civil society sector is a methodological challenge common to both approaches. The reputational approach, in our application, instead leaves the definition to the respondent, and from our study it is clear that the respondents’ understanding of ‘actors in civil society’ did not match our expectations. In fact, many respondents identified politicians and representatives of the state as civil society elites. This suggests a lack of consensus around the sphere of civil society and its boundaries. There is probably also a tension between ‘elites in civil society’ as elite groups that have influence in civil society and ‘civil society elites’ as elites whose societal influence is derived from a position in civil society. Although our understanding is the latter, it is possible that some respondents interpreted our question as referring to the former definition.

Another relevant challenge can be related to the tension between individuals and organisations when it comes to civil society elites. As an elite, the civil society elite is made up of individuals, while civil society is most often described as being composed of collective actors. There is thus a need for handling the tension between a sector in which ‘belonging’ is often ascribed through membership or affiliation with a collective actor (organisation or movement) and a category (elite) that defines a group based on individual characteristics. It is clear that the positional approach subordinates the identification of individuals to the identification of organisations while the reputational and the claims-making approaches allow more flexibility when it comes to what type of actor can be identified, including individuals with no clear organisational affiliation.

A third methodological challenge is related to the segmentation of civil society in policy areas. We find this challenge in all of our methods. Some of the indicators are bound to specific policy areas when it comes to both public consultations and umbrella organisations. The reputational method needs to take into consideration that civil society actors might not have an overview of the power relations in the whole sector but rather a more narrow view linked to their specific issue. The claims-making analysis needs to be linked to a specific issue, and thus any selection of policy areas, no matter how numerous, is potentially biased.

A fourth challenge that we can identify is related to the vertical boundaries of the elite. In our application, all three approaches are more or less inclusive based on measures of accumulation in terms of numbers of conditions fulfilled, votes given by respondents, or claims made in the newspapers. Because the approaches measure status, resources, and power differently, they can also be used in combination by looking at different forms of overlap between the elites. Also, because power is more diffuse in the sphere of civil society than in other spheres, we can see the methods of elite identification as complementing each other and allowing us to identify an ‘inner-core’ elite drawing on all three types of power—positional, reputational, and visible. Accordingly, it is at the intersection and overlap of these elites that we need to look in order to be able to identify the ‘inner-core’ (see Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1
A Venn diagram represents the methods of elite identification and their intersection. The circle 1 represents the visible elite, circle 2 represents the reputational elite, and the circle 3 represents the positional elite. The intersection or common between the 3 circles represents the inner core.

Methods of elite identification and their intersection. (Source: Figure made by the authors)

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The model illustrates our finding that the three elites, identified with the three methods, tend to overlap. In our case we find, for instance, eight CSOs that are identified as part of all three elites and that in our understanding could be seen as an ‘inner-core’. It should of course be kept in mind that the visibility approach in this chapter has a bias towards the migration policy area. To be more representative of the civil society sector in Italy, our study should have been complemented with a claims-making analysis focusing on other important policy issues (e.g. welfare, environment, and international solidarity). Such claims-making analyses would probably have allowed us to identify other CSOs and their leaders as the visible elite and thus to expand the ‘inner core’.

More in general, one of the challenges of identifying civil society elites boils down to the fact that ‘civil society’, although a concept frequently used in research, is not self-evident for many actors and not easily circumscribed in the field work. Although drawing the boundaries of the elite is acknowledged as a main methodological challenge by many elite scholars, it might be an even greater obstacle when it comes to civil society.