THE MAIN PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO CONTRIBUTE TO the continuing debate on the manner in which power is exercised in Western-style democracies from a democratic–elite — or what I prefer to term a demo–elite — perspective. This is to be done through a theoretical exposition placing this perspective in the spectrum of the main theories on the same topic, with special reference to the classical democratic–elite theories of Max Weber, Gaetano Mosca, Joseph Schumpeter, and Raymond Aron, and the contemporary pluralistelitist theories of Robert Dahl and Giovanni Sartori.

‘EUROPESSIMISM’, SAID THE ECONOMIST IN 1984, ‘IS A FASHION that comes and goes’. The newspaper added that ‘The idea of a technology gap, with an uncompetitive Europe on the wrong side of it, deserves a very cold eye’. But it still covered its bets with the view that, despite reservations, ‘few doubt that Europe is in real trouble’. Europe experienced a previous peak of alarm about a ‘technology gap’ in the late 1960s. Concern then focused only on the United States was epitomized by Jean-Jacques Salomon's Le Défi Américain of 1967, and spawned a large literature. This petered out in the early 1970s as the United States experienced its own crises over Vietnam and Watergate, and by the end of the decade and the Carter presidency some Americans were becoming seriously worried about their own technological standing. One now had books with such titles as America's Technology Slip and The European Revenge: How the American Challenge was Rebuffed. However, by 1984 in a chapter entitled ‘“Europeanizing” the US Economy: The Enduring Appeal of the Corporatist State’ Melvyn Krauss was able to be far more sceptical: in his words ‘. . . the call for a new industrial policy in the US amounts to a call to catch up with the losers’. The Chairman of the European Committee for Research and Development had warned even in 1979 that while certain favourable factors guaranteed Europe's ‘survival, and perhaps even relatively comfortable existence’, this would be only ‘for a period that is difficult to predict but is probably no more than a few decades’.