Paths to power: A new dataset on the social profile of governments

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the context of the Comparative Politics Seminar Series, this session features a paper presentation by Jacob Nyrup (University of Oslo).

Systematised information on the background of cabinet ministers across long time-periods and all geographical regions remains limited. Hence, many questions related to the role of class, education, occupation, and geography in political representation remain hard to address. To enable such studies, we introduce Paths to Power (PtP), a dataset on the educational, occupational, and social background of cabinet ministers. PtP contains detailed individual- level data for cabinet members from 130 countries across 1966-2021. We first detail the data gathering process and discuss validity properties. We then demonstrate how PtP can be used to gain new insights using descriptive statistics and two applications. In the first application, we consider variation in cabinet working class representation, suggesting that autocratic regime ideology and party composition of democratic governments shape this. Next, we replicate the established finding that democracies have more educated leaders than autocracies, and then find that autocracies have similarly well-educated cabinet ministers.

Co-authors: Jacob Nyrup, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Peter Egge Langsæther, and Ina Lyftingsmo Kristiansen (University of Oslo)