The Role of Political Elite Relations in the Elites Circulation

Abstract

Political elite's relations for maintaining power is an important key to analyse the government's behaviour. This paper presents a new network policy among the Iranian political elite using Social Network Analysis Method. How do they make the network? Is there Elite to Elite family relation based on ideological united or common interests? Network boundary is the political elites who have kinship relationship between themselves. The data were gathered by studying documents, biographies, interview, and web pages of Iranian political elites. We found “Marriage" is a new policy for raising, gaining and holding the power. We found there are 88 family groups and 1193 political elites who have family ties. The largest group consists of reformers and conservatives and has 690 actors. There are a strong family relation and weak elite circulation. The relationship between political elites is based on the concentration of power, wealth, and information in an intra-group network, so that the positioning of each group according to its structural position in the power layers (centre, half-perimeter, around).