The Political Wealth of Nations

Political elites across the globe are considerably wealthier than the populations they represent. Many worry that wealthy citizens may be advantaged because election campaigns are expensive or because holding office requires giving up a job that only the wealthy may afford. There are also concerns that wealthy politicians may skew policies toward their economic interests—interests that may differ from much of the population.

But how serious are these concerns? This project systematically collects data on the wealth of political elites in countries around the world to assess generally how (financially) representative politicians are of their citizens. The project analyzes such questions as the extent to which less expensive campaigns help the less wealthy candidates win, and how much the wealth of a country’s political elite influences its social and redistributive policies.

The study’s results help us better understand the causes and consequences of economic inequality, policy-making and representation in different types of political systems.

Due to the lack of comparative data on politicians' wealth, there is virtually no existing larger-N cross-national work on how political institutions affect the disparity between the wealth of elected representatives and their constituents. This leaves our understanding of the causes and consequences of representational inequalities incomplete, as it is difficult to ascribe broad causes and extrapolate from existing single-country studies.

This project collects data on politicians' wealth in fifty-one countries and creates comparable datasets of constituency and citizen wealth. Combining these data in novel ways with other cross-national datasets, the project examines through statistical analyses, natural experiments, and quantitative case studies a number of related research questions, such as the effect of campaign finance regulations and electoral rules on politician wealth, and the relationship between politicians' wealth and a country's social safety net policies.

The resultant database helps facilitates research on political representation and policy-making, and may be used to inform policy decisions about the design, implementation, and uses of office-holders’ financial disclosures.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.