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How do political elites persist? Political selection, political inequality and empirical historical research

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Abstract

How do political elites persist? Populist movements highlight the continued tension between citizens and political elites. This article reviews some recent research on political selection and inequality. I consider political inequality as the persistent political selection of specific individuals or their relatives over time. Empirical historical research employing statistical analysis of natural experiments can help to understand the connection between specific democratic institutions, such as elections or lotteries, and political selection, political behaviour, or political inequality over time. Some democratic features enable elites to persist, yet there is much variation in political inequality over time and space. Further research could aim to disentangle institutional causes of this variation from determinants of institutional choice.

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Notes

  1. See Becher et al. (2017), Bedock (2014, 2017), Koß (2018) to understand individual legislative, and executive support for (and obstruction of) institutional change in representative democracies.

  2. Research designs for causal inference are now widely employed throughout the social sciences (e.g. Banerjee and Duflo 2009; Lee and Lemieux 2010).

  3. It is likely that merely identifying a characteristic as politically relevant by building representative institutions reflecting the divisions, makes it so.

  4. A decrease in the capacity to remember at least one representative’s name indicates that such electoral system rules also affect how politicians campaign using more individual messages (Van Coppenolle 2018) under certain electoral rules.

  5. A natural experiment is a case where “the assignment of treatments to subjects is haphazard and possibly random” (Sekhon and Titiunik 2012). These techniques effectively exclude potentially confounding factors from the causal relation of interest. This approach relies on a number of assumptions, which are not always met, but can be supported by statistical tests (Eggers et al. 2015). A key limitation of natural experiments is that the experiment is typically restricted to a particular context. Therefore, careful interpretation of the external validity of findings across space and time is essential.

  6. As measured by education levels, dynastic candidates were in some cases found to be of lower political quality (Geys 2017).

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  1. Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

    Brenda Van Coppenolle

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Van Coppenolle, B. How do political elites persist? Political selection, political inequality and empirical historical research. Fr Polit 18, 175–188 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-020-00106-w

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