Organisational, Reputational, and Visible Leaders: A Comparison of Three Approaches to Civil Society Elite Identification

This chapter compares three different types of elite identification methods—the positional method, the reputational method, and claims-making analysis. The aim is to address the implications of different methods of elite identification for our understanding of civil society elites and to reflect on the methodological challenges in the study of civil society elites. Hence, we focus on comparing both the application and operationalisation of the methods and their results in terms of which actors are identified. The methods are applied to the context of Italian civil society. Common to all three methods is that they address power stratification in Italian civil society by exploring the accumulation of different types of resources whose uneven distribution can give rise to civil society elites. The application of the three methods of elite identification in civil society highlights some crucial challenges when it comes to drawing the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the elite.