The bulk of Pareto‟s million-word Treatise was an attempt to answer this question and it is self-evident that no satisfactory answer to it can be offered here. The question requires conceptualizing a dynamic relationship between elites and non-elites in which, under specifiable conditions, elites override non-elites, but under different and equally specifiable conditions non-elites override elites. Where elites prevail, a theory must be content to specify the outer limits of possible elite behavior and, thus, of political outcomes.