American Elites Revisited

With Amy Black, Wheaton College

I am working on this new elite study, a replication of an earlier Center sponsored book, American Elites, with Professor Amy Black of Wheaton College. Our work was interrupted when Professor Black received a prestigious Congressional Fellowship for postdoctoral work in the fall of 2002.

We employed the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) to conduct the survey of elite groups. For a variety of reasons we decided to conduct telephone interviews. We began with federal judges and journalists and added other groups on a rolling basis. Most interviewees found the questionnaire interesting, and for most groups our return rate has exceeded 60%. We are now analyzing the data and expect to complete a book length manuscript by the f2004.

Many of the questions we used are the same as those we relied on in the first elite study. This will enable us to determine what changes have taken place in the social and political outlooks of various elite groups in the past 10 years. We have added two new groups, leaders of women's organizations, and leaders of African American organizations such as the NAACP.

We have found significantly larger numbers of women and minorities in our elite samples than we did in our last study. Comparisons of men and women and respondents of different racial and ethnic backgrounds have allowed us to test important hypotheses about newer concerns pertaining to race and gender relations. We have found greater emphasis on multiculturalism, increased skepticism about "traditional" women's roles, more concern about group representation, and increased anger expressed by both feminist and black leaders manifested in a desire to change the system. Particularly in the area of affirmative action, we have found evidence of increasing racial polarization and tension.

In my original elite study I found sharp differences between businessmen and the creators of mass culture (including journalists and TV and motion picture elites). The former were more conservative on economic as well as cultural issues than was the latter group. That is they were less supportive of government intervention in the economic realm, and were less likely than cultural elites to be supportive of abortion, adultery or homosexuality. Our current study finds, as we had anticipated, that while all groups are now somewhat less supportive of government intervention in the economy, businessmen and other groups have become significantly less hostile to the beliefs once limited to cultural elites. In short the creators and distributors of mass culture seem, temporarily at least, to have won the "culture wars" among elite groups.

Several articles from this study have been published and some more have been completed and are now circulating among academic publishers. We plan to write two or three more quasi-popular articles as well. To view references to the articles we have published on this topic, Click Here.

We expect to complete our book by the late fall of 2002. Chapter two of the book deals in capsule form with many of the issues which will become part of the analysis presented in America in Decline?

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