How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concern... more How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concerns the extent to which leaders reflect the demographic features of the population they represent. To address this important issue in a systematic manner, we propose a unified approach for measuring descriptive representation. We apply this approach to newly collected data describing the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gender identities of over 50,000 leaders serving in 1,552 political bodies across 156 countries. Strikingly, no country represents social groups in rough proportion to their share of the population. To explain this shortfall, we focus on compositional factors—the size of political bodies as well as the number and relative size of social groups. We investigate these factors using a simple model based on random sampling and the original data described above. Our analyses demonstrate that roughly half of the variability in descriptive representation is attributable to compos...
It goes without saying that “leaders rule.” And it stands to reason that the background character... more It goes without saying that “leaders rule.” And it stands to reason that the background characteristics of leaders affect the way they rule. Who are the leaders of the world? We generate a composite portrait of the global political elite with data from the Global Leadership Project (GLP), the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders in most countries of the world. We offer comparisons across office, regions, regime types, and level of development. And we enlist the variables in the dataset in a latent class model to arrive at an empirical typology of political leaders around the world.
This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons ... more This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons of research on political leaders by providing the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders of most countries in the world. Currently, GLP encompasses 145 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. The leaders include members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. With this data, one can compare the characteristics of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The GLP thus serves as a fundamental resource for researchers, policymakers, and citizens. In this paper, we discuss the intellectual background of the project, its core elements, and its current status. Most importantly, we also illustrate several ways in which it improves our knowledge of politics across the world, providing a new, data-informed perspective on the demographic features of the global elite, including details about gender balance, age, ethnicity, education, languages spoken, education, salary, and length in current office, among other characteristics.
This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons ... more This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons of research on political leaders by providing the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders of most countries in the world. Currently, GLP encompasses 145 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. The leaders include members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. With this data, one can compare the characteristics of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The GLP thus serves as a fundamental resource for researchers, policymakers, and citizens. In this paper, we discuss the intellectual background of the project, its core elements, and its current status. Most importantly, we also illustrate several ways in which it improves our knowledge of politics across the world, providing a new, data-informed perspective on the demographic features of the global elite, including details about gender balance, age, ethnicity, education, languages spoken, education, salary, and length in current office, among other characteristics.
This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons ... more This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons of research on political leaders by providing the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders of most countries in the world. Currently, GLP encompasses 145 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. The leaders include members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. With this data, one can compare the characteristics of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The GLP thus serves as a fundamental resource for researchers, policymakers, and citizens. In this paper, we discuss the intellectual background of the project, its core elements, and its current status. Most importantly, we also illustrate several ways in which it improves our knowledge of politics across the world, providing a new, data-informed perspective on the demographic features of the global elite, including details about gender balance, age, ethnicity, education, languages spoken, education, salary, and length in current office, among other characteristics.
Are smaller ethnic groups less advantaged than large groups? This question has not been systemati... more Are smaller ethnic groups less advantaged than large groups? This question has not been systematically studied. Using two new datasets, we find that when group size and status are analyzed at national levels smaller groups are generally worse off than larger groups. By contrast, when group size and status are analyzed at subnational (regional or district) levels, smaller groups are better off than larger groups. "National" minorities are disadvantaged while "local" minorities are advantaged.We theorize that two factors are at work in generating this surprisingly consistent relationship. First, a synergy exists at national levels among three features of ethnic groups: size, power, and status. The second factor is based on social dynamics. Specifically, insofar as internal migration is characterized by positive selection, then migrants and their descendants should form the basis of small, privileged groups within the region that they migrate to. Insofar as distance enhances positive selection, this explains why smaller migrations are associated with more privileged groups and larger migrations with somewhat less privileged groups.
How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concern... more How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concerns the extent to which leaders reflect the demographic features of the population they represent. To address this important issue in a systematic manner, we propose a unified approach for measuring descriptive representation. We apply this approach to newly collected data describing the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gender identities of over fifty thousand leaders serving in 1,552 political bodies across 156 countries. Strikingly, no country represents social groups in rough proportion to their share of the population. To explain this shortfall, we focus on compositional factors—the size of political bodies as well as the number and relative size of social groups. We investigate these factors using a simple model based on random sampling and the original data described above. Our analyses demonstrate that roughly half of the variability in descriptive representation is attributable to compositional factors.
The impact of electoral rules on descriptive representation has generated a large body of work fo... more The impact of electoral rules on descriptive representation has generated a large body of work focused primarily on gender and secondarily on ethnicity. This study provides a parsimonious theory to explain these phenomena, centered on the size and dispersion of social groups. The theory is probed with simulations that test a complete set of counterfactuals, with a large dataset composed of mixed electoral system elections from around the world, and finally with case studies of individual elections in Russia and New Zealand. We find that multimember districts provide better representation than single-member districts only for geographically dispersed social groups that are large, but not too large, as a voting bloc (i.e., for women, understood as a group and a few ethnicities globally). Since most minority ethnic groups are concentrated in a particular region, district magnitude has little impact on their representation.
How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concern... more How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concerns the extent to which leaders reflect the demographic features of the population they represent. To address this important issue in a systematic manner, we propose a unified approach for measuring descriptive representation. We apply this approach to newly collected data describing the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gender identities of over 50,000 leaders serving in 1,552 political bodies across 156 countries. Strikingly, no country represents social groups in rough proportion to their share of the population. To explain this shortfall, we focus on compositional factors—the size of political bodies as well as the number and relative size of social groups. We investigate these factors using a simple model based on random sampling and the original data described above. Our analyses demonstrate that roughly half of the variability in descriptive representation is attributable to compos...
It goes without saying that “leaders rule.” And it stands to reason that the background character... more It goes without saying that “leaders rule.” And it stands to reason that the background characteristics of leaders affect the way they rule. Who are the leaders of the world? We generate a composite portrait of the global political elite with data from the Global Leadership Project (GLP), the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders in most countries of the world. We offer comparisons across office, regions, regime types, and level of development. And we enlist the variables in the dataset in a latent class model to arrive at an empirical typology of political leaders around the world.
This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons ... more This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons of research on political leaders by providing the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders of most countries in the world. Currently, GLP encompasses 145 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. The leaders include members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. With this data, one can compare the characteristics of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The GLP thus serves as a fundamental resource for researchers, policymakers, and citizens. In this paper, we discuss the intellectual background of the project, its core elements, and its current status. Most importantly, we also illustrate several ways in which it improves our knowledge of politics across the world, providing a new, data-informed perspective on the demographic features of the global elite, including details about gender balance, age, ethnicity, education, languages spoken, education, salary, and length in current office, among other characteristics.
This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons ... more This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons of research on political leaders by providing the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders of most countries in the world. Currently, GLP encompasses 145 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. The leaders include members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. With this data, one can compare the characteristics of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The GLP thus serves as a fundamental resource for researchers, policymakers, and citizens. In this paper, we discuss the intellectual background of the project, its core elements, and its current status. Most importantly, we also illustrate several ways in which it improves our knowledge of politics across the world, providing a new, data-informed perspective on the demographic features of the global elite, including details about gender balance, age, ethnicity, education, languages spoken, education, salary, and length in current office, among other characteristics.
This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons ... more This paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which promises to expand the horizons of research on political leaders by providing the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders of most countries in the world. Currently, GLP encompasses 145 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. The leaders include members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. With this data, one can compare the characteristics of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The GLP thus serves as a fundamental resource for researchers, policymakers, and citizens. In this paper, we discuss the intellectual background of the project, its core elements, and its current status. Most importantly, we also illustrate several ways in which it improves our knowledge of politics across the world, providing a new, data-informed perspective on the demographic features of the global elite, including details about gender balance, age, ethnicity, education, languages spoken, education, salary, and length in current office, among other characteristics.
Are smaller ethnic groups less advantaged than large groups? This question has not been systemati... more Are smaller ethnic groups less advantaged than large groups? This question has not been systematically studied. Using two new datasets, we find that when group size and status are analyzed at national levels smaller groups are generally worse off than larger groups. By contrast, when group size and status are analyzed at subnational (regional or district) levels, smaller groups are better off than larger groups. "National" minorities are disadvantaged while "local" minorities are advantaged.We theorize that two factors are at work in generating this surprisingly consistent relationship. First, a synergy exists at national levels among three features of ethnic groups: size, power, and status. The second factor is based on social dynamics. Specifically, insofar as internal migration is characterized by positive selection, then migrants and their descendants should form the basis of small, privileged groups within the region that they migrate to. Insofar as distance enhances positive selection, this explains why smaller migrations are associated with more privileged groups and larger migrations with somewhat less privileged groups.
How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concern... more How well do governments represent the societies they serve? A key aspect of this question concerns the extent to which leaders reflect the demographic features of the population they represent. To address this important issue in a systematic manner, we propose a unified approach for measuring descriptive representation. We apply this approach to newly collected data describing the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gender identities of over fifty thousand leaders serving in 1,552 political bodies across 156 countries. Strikingly, no country represents social groups in rough proportion to their share of the population. To explain this shortfall, we focus on compositional factors—the size of political bodies as well as the number and relative size of social groups. We investigate these factors using a simple model based on random sampling and the original data described above. Our analyses demonstrate that roughly half of the variability in descriptive representation is attributable to compositional factors.
The impact of electoral rules on descriptive representation has generated a large body of work fo... more The impact of electoral rules on descriptive representation has generated a large body of work focused primarily on gender and secondarily on ethnicity. This study provides a parsimonious theory to explain these phenomena, centered on the size and dispersion of social groups. The theory is probed with simulations that test a complete set of counterfactuals, with a large dataset composed of mixed electoral system elections from around the world, and finally with case studies of individual elections in Russia and New Zealand. We find that multimember districts provide better representation than single-member districts only for geographically dispersed social groups that are large, but not too large, as a voting bloc (i.e., for women, understood as a group and a few ethnicities globally). Since most minority ethnic groups are concentrated in a particular region, district magnitude has little impact on their representation.
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