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Recent Western literature concerning the political determinants of economic and social outcomes has primarily concentrated on regime types and the effectiveness of state institutions. While this literature has been influential among scholars of and in the Middle East and North Africa, there has also been an emphasis in the region on the interests and networks of economic and political elites—the interactions between rulers, elites, and the broader citizenry—to explain divergent policy outcomes. This is largely due to the inability of dominant mainstream institutional and structural theories to explain much of what has been observed in the region, viewing it as exceptional in its authoritarianism and resistance to global trends. In fact, the seeds for a more sophisticated understanding can be found in the literature on the Arab world that emphasizes relational dynamics between political and economic actors. Synthesizing the insights of scholars of the region has the potential to contribute more broadly to global debates on how political factors and conditions within states shape the quality of life experienced by their residents. Such a shift to viewing regimes as networks provides a useful framework for bridging the broader trends in political science with the work emanating from scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa.

Technically a soc elite is a stratum of a pop occupying a position of superiority & influence. The superiority may rest on tradition, on special acquired skills & talents, & on a general body of skills & talents of all kinds. An elite is characterized by corporateness, exclusiveness, & always refers to a plurality of people. Its superiority must be of a very generalized kind extending beyond the mere possession of wealth or of educ, for example. In addition, the superior quality of elites must be imitable & worth imitating. It functions as a model & standard of what is proper & preferable in its society. Even specialized elites, as an elite of wealth, tends to set generalized standards, say, as regards moral, & pol'al beliefs. The imitableness may refer to these spill-over qualities rather than to the special quality giving origin tothe elite. A society may contain a number of elites. These may fall into a hierarchy. When they do not, their mutual rivalries & conflicting ideals may become a crucial problem. A gov class is not by itself the. pre-eiminent elite. Most interesting in the study of elites is their process of emergence. Elites tend to become rigid 4 thus, carry the seeds of their own decay. The cycle of transformation from growth to rigidity or from vitality to decay in a society may be studied indirectly through the study of elites. B. J. Keeley.