The Iron Law of Oligarchy

There are several useful "laws" of organizations, humorous but often accurate, including:

-  the Peter Principle (1): people will be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, and will then remain there, and it's corollary: over time all positions in an organization will come to be filled with people who have reached their level of incompetence.

- Parkinson's Law (2): Work will expand to fill the time allotted, and its more recent logical consequence, bureaucracies will inevitably grow without bound.

- Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior (3): organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and “specialist” positions & power structures.

I have just come across another that seems important.

In 1911 German sociologist Robert Michels proposed "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" (4) - all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise. Or, in shortened form, every organization, no matter how how it was originally organized, will end up primarily serving the interests of  an elite few.

That is certainly true of every large organization I was in, and it certainly seems to be true of our American government.

References:

1. The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, by Laurence J. Peter

2. Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration, by C. Northcot Parkinson

3. http://www.craiglarman.com

4. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, by Robert Michels