ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the social and political backgrounds of local elites to discover the credentials needed for local leadership positions, which in turn will tell us who have power, and thus, get some understanding of social bias in elite recruitment for local government. Social background analysis can tell people much about the routes to power, or to put it differently, the structure of opportunities within the system at the local level. One is the "hierarchical" differences in elite social backgrounds that are the differences in the degree of social bias, the structure of opportunities, the routes to power at the national and local levels of US, Dutch and Swedish systems. The proposition has long been accepted that: education in modern societies is the key route to achieve elite status, and in so far as social class origins constrain access to higher education, the probabilities of lower class persons being selected to elite positions are minimal.
