Elites as Status Groups in Democratic Societies by Fabien Accominotti (2026)

This chapter makes the case for conceptualizing elites as upper status groups—that is, as groups whom others perceive as having superior value in one respect or another. This conceptualization delineates an original research agenda for the study of elites in democratic societies premised on the reduction of status asymmetries between individuals. In such societies, the chapter argues, elites owe their existence to social processes that affirm or reaffirm, against a backdrop of democratic ideals, the very idea that people come in unequal degrees of value. Studying these processes means advancing a sociology of elites that goes beyond the analysis of elite personnel or of the attributes of elite status to instead chart, social domain after social domain, the emergence of beliefs in the existence of worthiness hierarchies among individuals. To illustrate what such a sociology might look like, the chapter revisits two empirical cases showing how a cultural and an academic elite, respectively, were made possible by the emergence of beliefs in the existence of (1) a hierarchy of cultural tastes in the Gilded Age United States and (2) a hierarchy of intelligence in the wake of the French and American revolutions.