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Billionaire Politicians: A Global Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2023

Daniel Krcmaric Open the ORCID record for Daniel Krcmaric [Opens in a new window] ,
Stephen C. Nelson Open the ORCID record for Stephen C. Nelson [Opens in a new window]  and
Andrew Roberts Open the ORCID record for Andrew Roberts [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

We introduce an original dataset of formal political participation for over 2,000 individuals included in the Forbes Billionaires List. We find that billionaire politicians are a surprisingly common phenomenon: Over 11% of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office. Even compared to other elite groups known for producing politicians from their ranks, this is a high rate of political participation. Moreover, billionaires focus their political ambitions on influential positions, have a strong track record of winning elections, and lean to the right ideologically. We also document substantial cross-national variation: a country’s number of billionaire politicians is not simply a product of its total number of billionaires, but is instead related to regime type. Specifically, billionaires formally enter the political sphere at a much higher rate in autocracies than in democracies. We conclude by discussing the normative implications of our findings and outlining a new research agenda on billionaire politicians.

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Perspectives on Politics , First View , pp. 1 - 15
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© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

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Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6P9SUS

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Supplementary material: Link

Krcmaric et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6P9SUS
Link