80 Political Theory
still less as a ‘ruling class’, they nevertheless accept that a liberal democracy
is a ‘deformed polyarchy’ in which business usually exerts pre-eminent
influence, especially over the economic agenda.
New Right ideas and theories became increasingly influential from the
1970s onwards. Like neo-pluralism, they built upon traditional liberal
foundations but now constitute a major rival to classical pluralism. The
New Right, or at least its neo-liberal or libertarian wing, is distinguished
by strong antipathy towards government intervention in economic and
social life, born of the belief that the state is a parasitic growth which
threatens both individual liberty and economic security. The state is no
longer an impartial referee but has become a self-serving monster, a
‘nanny’ or ‘leviathan’ state, interfering in every aspect of life. New Right
thinkers have tried, in particular, to highlight the forces that have led to the
growth of state intervention and which, in their view, must be countered.
Criticism has, for instance, focused upon the process of party competition,
or what Samuel Britten (1977) called ‘the economic consequences of
democracy’. In this view, the democratic process encourages politicians
to outbid one another by making vote-winning promises to the electorate,
and encourages electors to vote according to short-term self-interest rather
than long-term well-being. Equally, closer links between government and
major economic interests, business and trade unions in particular, has
greatly increased pressure for subsidies, grants, public investment, higher
wages, welfare benefits and so forth, so leading to the problem of
‘government overload’. Public choice theorists such as William Niskanen
(1971) have also suggested that ‘big’ government has been generated from
within the machinery of the state itself by the problem of ‘bureaucratic
over-supply’. Pressure for the expansion of the state comes from civil
servants and other public employees, who recognize that it will bring them
job security, higher pay and improved promotion prospects.
Pluralism has been more radically rejected by elitist thinkers who believe
that behind the fac¸ade of liberal democracy there lies the permanent power
of a ‘ruling elite’. Classical elitists such as Gaetano Mosca (1857–1941),
Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and Robert Michels (1876–1936) were concerned
to demonstrate that political power always lies in the hands of a
small elite and that egalitarian ideas, such as socialism and democracy, are
a myth. Modern elitists, by contrast, have put forward strictly empirical
theories about the distribution of power in particular societies, but have
nevertheless drawn the conclusion that political power is concentrated in
the hands of the few. An example of this was Joseph Schumpeter (see
p. 223), whose Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy ([1944] 1976)
suggested the theory of democratic elitism. Schumpeter described democracy
as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in
which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive