John Higley Named the Recipient of the 2025 Mattei Dogan Foundation Award

The International Political Science Association (IPSA) Committee on Organization, Procedures, and Awards (COPA) is proud to announce John Higley as the recipient of the 2025 Prize of the Foundation Mattei Dogan. 

Every year, IPSA selects a scholar of high international reputation in recognition of her/his contribution to the advancement of political science, with a particular focus on recognizing outstanding scholarship on comparative studies of political elites, following a nomination by the IPSA Research Committee (RC02) on Political Elites. The prize is funded by the Mattei Dogan Foundation.

The 2025 Award Lecture: The Democracy Ideal and Elites

Prof. Higley will deliver a virtual award lecture, titled The Democracy Ideal and Elites, at the 2025 IPSA World Congress of Political Science in Seoul on 16 July 2025.

With increased economic productivity and knowledge of the physical world, population majorities in most Western countries have been substantially disarmed by material affluence. Predacious and fierce political behavior has declined sufficiently so that political ideals have an influence on people’s lives. The standard that expresses and, to some degree, enforces ideals is “democracy.” Unquestionably, profession of the democratic ideal has brought many advantages to the score or so of Western populations that have attained a high level of socio-economic development. Yet some of the major crises facing Western countries today arise from the widespread tendency to mistake the democracy ideal for political reality. This Lecture argues that behavioral patterns of elites are the most fundamental distinction between political systems. Elite persons propose, question, evade, modify, and sometimes clearly declare public policies that always contain arbitrary advantages for some people and disadvantages for others. They do so subject to possible non-elite vetoes or resistance, although in practice the non-elite limitation tends to be vague and general. 

John Higley 

John Higley has been one of the key figures in the revival of elite theory in social science. He is Emeritus Professor of Government and Sociology at the University of Texas Austin where he chaired the Department of Government, founded and directed the Edward A. Clark Center for Australian & New Zealand Studies while chairing IPSA’s Research Committee (RC02) on Political Elites. 

In numerous books and articles, Prof. Higley has distinguished basic patterns of elite political behavior, the origins of each, and consequences for the persistent stability or instability of political regimes during modern history and at present. Prof. Higley’s recent books include The Endangered West. Myopic Elites and Fragile Social Orders in a Threatening World (Routledge, 2016), Elites, Non-Elites, and Political Realism. Diminishing Futures for Western Societies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics. Avoiding Calamity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). His earlier work, Since Elitism (1980), was re-published by Routledge in 2013. Additionally, he was the senior co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Political Elites (2018).