The Iron Law of Institutions: retaining power at all costs

This law shows that leaders tend to assume very high costs in order not to lose influence.

There are people who would prefer a thousand times more to govern in a heap of ruins than to acknowledge that their administration is not doing well, and the iron law of institutions describes this phenomenon very well. Let's see it below.

• Related article, "What is Social Psychology?"

The iron law of institutions

Jonathan Schwartz described in 2007 the iron law of institutions, in which it is postulated that the people who control a certain organization are more concerned with preserving their power within the institution itself than with the power of the institution itself.. That is, according to this law, people who have won an important position in a given organization or who preside over it would prefer to keep their position, even if this would lead to the ruin of the institution, rather than cede power to someone more suitable.

This phenomenon is not at all uncommon. It is very common to see it in all kinds of human institutions, from elementary schools, medium and small companies and, at a very high level, large corporations, political parties and governments of sovereign states. It is something that has always been in history and, for better or worse, will continue to be there forever.

Origin of the concept

Schwartz first used the term to refer to Nancy Pelosi's tenure within the Democratic Party. Pelosi, who is currently the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, ran into trouble in 2007 when she tried to address the opinion of left-wing voters on the question of the war in Iraq.. The left was being very much against the conflict, but the Democratic party, supposedly belonging to the same spectrum, seemed to be in favor.

Nancy Pelosi was reluctant to consult on this issue with fellow Democrats, who did want the conflict to stop or be better managed, a useful slogan in her race for the U.S. presidency. It would appear that Pelosi feared that by giving other Democrats a voice and a vote, she would lose her standing to a candidate closer to the average American left-wing voter.

Examples

Let's look at some examples of the iron law of institutions.

Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party

A more recent case in American politics in which we can see how cruel the iron law of the institutions is can be seen in the case experienced by the Democratic Party and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential elections. In these same elections, the Democrats lost the presidency, winning the Republican candidate Donald J. Trump.

Bernie Sanders stood out among Democrats for his truly leftist views.critical of issues such as Palestine-Israel, civil rights and wages. This ideology was especially controversial for the Democratic leadership, who, despite supposedly being left-leaning and liberal, saw Sanders as a threat to their power within the party.

Sanders was gaining considerable popularity, which caused other Democrats, such as Neera Tanden and David Brock, to take the initiative to discredit and belittle both Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

The struggle to retain the top leadership and hierarchy within the organization, preventingand hierarchy, preventing Sanders from being able to climb it and become the party's leading candidate instead of Hillary Clinton, was crucial to the collapse of the Democratic Party in the 2016 election.

The rest is history. Hillary Clinton did not win the election as the new president of the United States, and Bernie Sanders ran for the U.S. Senate as an independent senator, not a member of the Democratic Party.

Stalin's purges

Another case is that of Iósif Stalin. The Soviet dictator ordered purges within the Red ArmyStalin killed many competent officers who would have strengthened the Soviet Union militarily and ensured the security of the federation. By assassinating them, Stalin caused a serious problem in the Union, since it was very weakened, being at the mercy of Adolf Hitler when he tried to invade the Soviets.

Difference with the iron law of oligarchy

There is another law whose name may lead to confusion with the one presented in this article. We speak of the iron law of oligarchy and it describes a phenomenon that would be more or less related to that of the institutions, although it is not the same thing.

This law was proposed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in 1911, in his book Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (On the Sociology of Parties in Modern Democracy). He stipulates that within a political party it is inevitable that an oligarchy will appear.The first step in this process was to create a group of power that is above the others and that manages it in a more or less authoritarian way, regardless of how democratic the institution was in its beginnings.

Michels came to this conclusion when he saw that, in complex institutions, it was very difficult to implement democracy, it was very difficult to implement direct democracythat is to say, that each of its members would give his or her voice and vote without intermediaries. In order to streamline the process and make the organization work, sooner or later a few people would be in charge of managing the entire institution.

As time goes by, in every organization, be it a political party as is the case described by Michels in his book, or any other type of institution less political, a ruling class will be formed. This same ruling class will be in charge of controlling the flow of information within the organization, allowing it to retain power and prevent dissenting opinions from arising.

The difference between this law and that of institutions is that the latter describes how the ruling class prefers to retain power, even if this means a detriment to the organization, while that of oligarchy would describe how this ruling class is formed within the organization, and what it does to continue to retain power.

Bibliographical references:

• James L. Hyland. Democratic theory: the philosophical foundations. Manchester, England, UK; New York, New York, USA: Manchester University Press ND, 1995. p. 247.
• Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, 1915, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), 241,