The Economic Backgrounds of Politicians

Research on the economic backgrounds of politicians is once again flourishing in political science. In this article, we describe the economic characteristics that scholars have recently studied and the common threads that have emerged in modern work on this topic. This growing literature is largely united by a shared concern about the unequal economic makeup of institutions: Recent studies generally agree that politicians tend to be vastly better off than citizens on every economic measure and that politicians from different economic backgrounds tend to think and behave differently in office. However, the literature is far from a consensus regarding why politicians are so economically advantaged. Going forward, there are numerous opportunities for future work to address this gap; to extend the literature to new countries, institutions, and time periods; and to better understand how economic backgrounds intersect with race, gender, and other social characteristics.

Duke Scholars

Author Nicholas W. Carnes Sanford School of Public Policy