Paths to Power: A New Dataset on the Social Profile of Government

• In Event: Strategies of Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

In this article, we introduce a new dataset on the educational, occupational, and social background of cabinet ministers across the world. More specifically, we expand the recent WhoGov dataset (Nyrup and Bramwell, 2020), which covers more than 50,000 cabinet ministers from 177 countries in the period 1966-2021, by coding ministers’ level, type, and location of education as well as their place of birth, family- and class background, and prior occupation. The dataset presented in this article is, by far, the most extensive and detailed of its kind, and it opens up for studying a number of key questions in the social sciences pertaining, for instance, to the role of class, education, and geography in political representation at the highest level, the individual-level determinants of career patterns, and the role of educational and occupational expertise for policy selection and outcomes. After describing the specific variables, we detail the coding rules and procedures used for this data collection effort and discuss validity and reliability properties of the data. Next, we use the data to describe global and regional patterns and trends in the educational and class background profile of cabinet ministers. We also discuss how these patterns vary systematically according to regime type. Finally, we present empirical applications, where we use the data to replicate and then substantially extend on two studies considering the background of political leaders as, respectively, dependent and independent variables. First, we reinvestigate whether democracies select more educated leaders than autocracies by considering not only the top leadership, but also cabinet ministers. Second, we re-assess whether leaders experiencing economic hardship during youth enhances social welfare spending. In this analysis, we extend on previous work by, for instance, studying this relationship under different regime types, including non-democracies.

Authors

• Jacob Nyrup, University of Oslo

• Peter Egge Langsæther, University of Oslo