Political Candidates

Abstract

We treat federal parliamentary candidates as approximating Mosca’s ‘second stratum’, from which the ‘political class’ is recruited and selected. There is a good justification for analysing this early stage of political recruitment. In all modern parliamentary systems, parliamentary selection starts before elections and, during ‘pre-selection’, forms an important selective and elite-formative process. However, the importance of pre-selection and ‘candidacy’ should not be exaggerated. As many elite scholars warn us, elite qualities are only partly acquired through these early recruitment and selection processes. Many elite qualities are formed in the later stages of recruitment, in the process of elite apprenticeships and during elite tenures. Therefore the candidates should be looked at as a ‘recruitment pool’, and pre-selection treated as an important but preliminary stage of elite selection. The crucial question addressed here is whether or not (and to what extent) signs of elite malformation are detectable in this preliminary stage.

Knowledge and power are not truly united inside the ruling class. Mill 1958, 351

Democracy should be a selective polyarchy…a polyarchy of merit… The connection is that in conveying the idea of ‘worthy of choice’ the term elite points to a reference group—and precisely to a value reference group. Sartori 1987, 169