The Determination of Local Power Elites

Abstract

The commonest techniques for identifying a community's power elites are focused either upon position, delineating elites on the basis of formal status in the local economic or political-civic structures, or upon reputation, determining elites through nominations by "juries" of presumably knowledgeable local informants. Utilizing both techniques, research undertaken in a middle-sized midwestern community indicates that the two approaches produced sharply disparate results. Considering only the technique based on reputation, however, use of variously derived nominating panels did not yield significantly different results.