Hypotheses

In accordance with our theoretical framework, we propose the following hypotheses for our research. The first is the Latent Power Structure Hypothesis: when the ‘invisible rulers’ are included, the main structural characteristics of the resulting government network are significantly altered. This resulting network reveals the existence of relational power resources within a government that are undetectable without including the LPS. Our second hypothesis is the Chain of Opportunities Hypothesis (White Reference White1970): when a government is formed, departing officials leave vacancies in the executive that are occupied by former or new leaders. These promoted leaders are associates of those ex-officials who, as a result, remain connected to the government. These movements reflect a process of circulation of elites that favours internal elite members and can be considered as a blocked or inbred renovation mechanism.

How is it going to be done? Official versus expanded networks

We first study the formal or institutional network structure of each government, and then introduce the LPS into each executive network to analyse the differences between the two types of network: official and expanded networks.

For this purpose, we first perform an SNA of the structure formed by the most important members of each government (president, ministers and deputy ministers), considering the links established between them by shared affiliations to organizations in five power institutions or dimensions prior to their recruitment: (1) former governments; (2) parliamentary groups; (3) partisan structures; (4) enterprise boards; and (5) bureaucratic bodies. These five dimensions were chosen to cover the most relevant institutions in a democratic society, according to earlier studies of elites in Spain (Baena Reference Baena1999; Baena and Pizarro Reference Baena, Pizarro and Moore1985). In order to build our relational data set, we consulted official sites and public documents, such as the Official Bulletin of the State (BOE), the Official Bulletins of each Spanish autonomous community, and the website of the Congress of the Deputies, as well as the official websites for the diverse and numerous regional chambers in Spain.

In this way, we are able to show the ‘zero degree’ of a government formation process (i.e. the structure of a government at the very beginning of a political term), described as a reticular structure that shows, on the one hand, the pre-existing political and professional ties within the executive, and, on the other, the types of organizations from which each government official was recruited.

Since we obtain the links between government members for each of the five relational dimensions (i.e. former governments, parliaments, political parties, company boards and bureaucratic bodies), we aggregate them into a single network that thus comprises all the types of relationships between the government officials. Although we realize that each of these five dimensions may have its own particularities, and that certain features may be obscured in this process, separate analyses of the five dimensions and of different combinations of them have shown that the study and observation of this resulting network offer the most complete, realistic and coherent approach to the analysis of the configuration of power in the present case; in particular, as we will see further, it provides a crystal-clear idea of the distribution of relational power and social factions within the government (especially, political, business and regional factions).

Thus, given the set V of government members at time t and organization O at time n included in one of the five dimensions, we define the official network:

$$G_{{\rm Off}} = ( V, \;\;R_{{\rm Off}}) /\{ {i, \;\;j} \} \in V\wedge R_{{\rm Off}}( {i, \;\;j} ) \forall \{ {i, \;\;j} \} \in O_n/t > n$$

Next, we proceed to build the expanded network. To do so, we incorporate the ‘invisible rulers’ into each official network, and we analyse them using standard SNA tools. For this purpose, in the next subsection we introduce the idea of the LPS, first with its theoretically specific background, and second, with a formal definition.

The Latent Power Structure (LPS): theoretical background

The LPS, as an original concept, is derived and drawn from earlier theoretical reflections about power elites. For example, Mills (Reference Mills1956) explained that what he called the ‘political directory’ (i.e. the politicians' social circle) was surrounded by business and military circles and that an accurate analysis of the power elite would thus have to consider the existence of these connections. Pareto (Reference Pareto1917) distinguished between a ‘government elite’ and a ‘non-government elite’, meaning that, though both were powerful and influential, only one of them was officially in power. For his part, Tom Bottomore (Reference Bottomore1993) has argued that ‘those who appear to have power in the formal system of government are in fact subject to the power of other individuals or groups outside this system’.

Studying Mexico, Jorge Gil Mendieta and Samuel Schmidt (Reference Gil Mendieta and Schmidt2005) have considered the importance of the influence of ex-presidents for determining the election of a certain candidate for president and thus guaranteeing the hegemonic continuity of the party that governed the country for 70 consecutive years (1929–2000). This type of underlying influence that contributes to explaining official power has been researched by Franziska Keller (Reference Keller2016) in the context of the Chinese communist political elite and its ‘patronage networks’. In several analyses, Keller argues that co-worker ties and shared past professional experiences are most likely to structure informal politics among contemporary Chinese elites. Like other scholars (Shih et al. Reference Shih, Adolph and Liu2012), Keller also argues that this network approach analyses current Chinese officials as being embedded in a web of relationships created by previous interactions with the other elites, who may or may have not retired from the Chinese Communist Party (Keller Reference Keller2016).

The Latent Power Structure (LPS): definition and formalization

The LPS is based on the idea that relationships can persist over time beyond the context in which they originated. Thus, the LPS is defined by the set of ties that members of a government have with other people with whom they have been involved in a previous government or in other institutions – such as the national parliament, the political party, former governments or company boards – and who belong not to the current government but to important organizations inside the social structure.

More precisely, these past links are defined as a recruitment relationship R _o between an actor i and an actor j, such that i was the direct supervisor of j in one or several organizations O (a parliament, a ministry, a government, a firm etc.). Thus, the LPS is a network G _LPS = (V, R _LPS) defined by the R _LPS relationship between an actor i who does not belong to the current government G and an actor j who does belong to the current government G. More formally:

$$G_{{\rm LPS}} = ( V, \;\;R_{{\rm LPS}}) /\{ {i, \;\;j} \} \in V\wedge R_{{\rm LPS}}( {i, \;\;j} ) \forall R_{\rm o}( {i, \;\;j} ) /i\notin G\wedge j\in G$$

Relationship criteria

However, since a recruitment relationship implies trust and affinity between the supervisor and the recruit, we have established two criteria of which at least one has to be fulfilled in order to consider that the recruitment relationship R _o gives rise to a relationship R _LPS.

The first is a qualitative criterion, according to which the length of the relationship R _o must be more than four years (R _o > 4 years).Footnote ¹ The second is a quantitative criterion, according to which actor i is included in the LPS if he or she has been a supervisor (in one or several organizations) of at least two members j and k of the current government G, regardless of the duration of R _o. Thus:

$$R_{{\rm LPS}}( {i, \;\;j} ) \leftrightarrow R_{{\rm LPS}}( {i, \;\;k} ) \forall R_{\rm o}( {i, \;\;j} ) \wedge R_{\rm o}( {i, \;\;k} ) /i\notin G\wedge \{ {\,j, \;\;k} \} \in G$$

Let's take an example. Suppose that j is a government minister who worked for eight years as a secretary of state (i.e. a deputy minister) in a previous government ministry, and that he or she was recruited twice by i for two periods of four years each. Given this relation, we consider that i is a relevant contact of j and, though i is now heading a financial enterprise, he or she could influence j's current governmental behaviour. Therefore, i integrates the LPS and is thus considered an invisible ruler. Similarly, if i previously recruited j and k, both members of the same government, regardless of the time of recruitment, we consider that i can influence this government through these two actors, and therefore he or she is in the LPS. Most of the LPS members are former ministers or ex-prime ministers who have retired, are in charge of European or worldwide institutions, or sit on the boards of directors of private firms. But there are also others who have never been appointed as ministers and who have always belonged to the business sector, exerting a ‘pure’ business influence on the government structure.

The most important structural features of government networks: factions, connectivity and cohesion

Figures 2–5 in the Online Appendix display the relational structure of the PP and PSOE governments, first, in their official and manifest appearance and, second, when the LPS is included. According to the methodological approach outlined above, these figures show the accumulation of links and contacts in the past among the members of each of the governments, and, when the LPS is included, some more individuals who were not finally recruited but who were strongly linked to them before the government was constituted.

Circulation of elites and social reproduction processes: two different chains of opportunity

As we have already observed in this section, in both cases many ex-ministers from earlier periods did not return to government. This situation has generated a series of vacancies in both government structures, as well as two different processes of circulation or renovation.

In the case of the PP government, a soft process of political renovations can be inferred, mostly due to the role of the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, as a bridge between the ‘old guard’ and the younger generation of PP leaders: three of the 14 ministers in 2012 (including Rajoy himself) had been ministers between 1996 and 2004; four more had been deputy ministers; three were parliament leaders with strong links to the classic political party structure, and two were regional and local leaders with links closely associated with the original party chiefs. The soft political transition inside the structure of the PP created a government network in 2012 that was more cohesive than its socialist counterpart and that reflects strong ties to governments and structures of the past. In this case, the political party structure, which did not suffer huge electoral defeats in 2004 and 2008, helps to maintain a strong connection between both types of leaders.

For its part, former ministers and directors in the PSOE also left major vacancies when they withdrew from politics. Most of these vacancies were occupied in 2004 by Rodríguez-Zapatero's new political team, but there was a bigger breakup between the two generations of socialist leaders. Nevertheless, the data and cohesive blocks analyses show that this breakup depends on the LPS dynamics: some important leaders in 2004 who acquired ministerial rank, such as José Bono (minister of defence) and Pedro Solbes (minister of the economy), were strongly bound to the ‘old guard’, as were many of the members of the more technical ministries. The lack of governmental experience of Rodríguez-Zapatero's inner circle forced the new prime minister to rely on technicians who were much more related to former socialist ministers and less to the political party structures, generating a sort of ‘bureaucratic inertia’. The LPS members are therefore relevant and influential because they mediate in the relationship between the political and the bureaucratic factions of the 2004 government elite.

Consequently, as Harrison White (Reference White1970) noted in his book Chain of Opportunities, in both cases we see that professional or political careers are far from being independent of the decisions and trajectories of others. The LPS is relevant to explaining part of the trajectory and upward mobility of some of the current government members, showing that this network has its own dynamics of promotion of individuals. In addition to this, the mechanism for creating vacancies that we have already mentioned constitutes a particular version of the ‘circulation of elites’: the new governments are, on the one hand, composed by some ministers from former periods who are now returning and, on the other hand, by former high-ranking officials who have been promoted thanks to their experience and the professional contacts acquired in previous governments. This circulation process appears to be a ‘blocked’ or inbred one, because the vast majority of the recruitments are based on former contacts inside leading organizations.