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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
Elvish government seems, by all accounts available, to be rather authoritarian (in the strictest sense of the word), along hereditary lines. Elrond was the senior Elf of his line, his rule over the remnants of Doriath of Beleriand. Galadriel ruled over Elves that had never been west of the Misty Mountains, but was deemed the greatest (along with Celeborn) and most worthy to rule. Thranduil is a bit of a mystery. How old is he said to have been? Clearly his authority is also hereditary.
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Thranduil is a good 3000+ years old at the time of the War of the Ring, and I would hazard that he was a good deal older. With his father Oropher, he had fought in the War of the Last Alliance. And it was from Oropher that he inherited the realm of Mirkwood.
Now, Oropher was a Sindarin Elf of Doriath, and seems have belonged to the noble class. Beyond that, we do not know anythng about him. Fanfiction likes to speculate that he was related to Celeborn, and thus to Thingol, and so would have something of a heritary right to rule the Elves of Mirkwood, who were primarily Telerin in stock, but whether or not they would have recognized his claim, or honoured it, or even whether or it existed (it is based on a very slender line from Celeborn, addressing Legolas, when he calls the Elves of Mirkwood his "kin"), we cannot say.
Elrond, in addition to being the direct heir of Thingol, was also (with the death of Gil-galad) the most direct heir of Finwë, and so the rightful chief of all the Eldar in Middle-Earth, though he seems not to have stressed this particularly much.