Either there will be a restoration of the traditional power elites and General Musharraf's plans for a more democratic devolution of power will fall flat, or the armed forces will be obliged to engineer the results, leading to an erosion of legitimacy for the whole exercise.

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That is certainly not the only factor that stands between Venezuelan military elites and Chavez's grasp on power.

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Baburam Bhattarai, the Maoists' deputy leader, calls the government a coalition of elites bent on preserving their power and privileges.

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Mr Gandhi railed against the "gross" centralisation of political power by the elites, and the lack of meritocracy in politics and public systems.

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The libertarian core point, a deeply respectable one in a republic, is that the power belongs in the hands of the people, not the elites, and that society, not government, is far more likely to use the power to create jobs.

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Members of the international community hoped for certain benchmarks to be met among Mali's political elites and the military junta that still wields considerable power.

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The elites in any system not only have more political and economic power, they also have more access to information and control the distribution of information in any given system.

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Though it is more a product of tradition than design, it has turned into an efficient system for consolidating the power of the pope and the Church's other elites, he says.

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Since the late 1990s, a seismic shift has occurred, in which the candidates themselves are becoming irrelevant as Political Action Committees, party committees, and Independent Expenditure committees have become more dominant, strengthening the power of the political class and the insider and DC elites who work on their own or in concert with party functionaries.

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