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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 357-371 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Perspectives on Politics |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 25 2024 |
Funding
The authors are grateful to these extraordinary Northwestern University undergraduate research assistants: Antonio Amram, Nathan Andriessen, Eli Baum, Isaac Bushnell, Andrew Cao, Samuel Cole, Alexander Deckler, Sophia Esquenazi, Claudia Garin, Vivien Liu, Carter Wietecha, and Mary Yang. Northwestern’s Farrell Fellowship and URAP programs provided generous financial support. For helpful comments, they thank Iza Ding, Victor Shih, Hye Young You, participants at the 2021 Frontiers of Money in Politics conference, Perspectives editor Michael Bernhard, and the anonymous reviewers.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations