@unpublished{praninskas2025wealth,
  author = {Praninskas, Gailius and Munroe, Ellen},
  title = {Wealth and Intergenerational Political Power Mobility},
  year = {2025},
  note = {Working Paper}
}

We provide a comprehensive account of the intergenerational relationship between individual wealth and political power over 133 years of democratization. Combining the biographical records of members of parliament (MPs) and other elite individuals in England and Wales with 17 million individual-level wealth-at-death (probate) records from 1858 to 1990, we establish four main facts. First, we find that the politically powerful are much wealthier than the average person, although this gap has narrowed in time. The median wealth-at-death percentile of MPs fell from above the 99.9th percentile in 1858 to the 97.5th percentile in 1990. Second, this pattern is largely driven by a declining share of entrants from extremely wealthy families. Using a surname-level analysis, we find that being at the very top of the wealth distribution is highly predictive of political entry, and that most gains in power mobility have occurred among upper-middle wealth surnames at the expense of the wealthiest. Third, we investigate the mechanisms behind this decline. The wealth advantage operated primarily through candidate selection rather than electoral success: the gap between candidates and the population was six times larger than the gap between winners and losers. Franchise expansion contributed to this transformation—under restricted franchise, the marginal effect of wealth on political entry was approximately ten times larger than under universal suffrage. Fourth, wealth matters not only for entering politics but also for sustaining political dynasties within families. Even within MPs, wealthier individuals see more of their descendants enter parliament and this effect persists after controlling for ancestral dynasties, education, career success, and social background. Exploiting quasi-random variation in estate tax incidence around regime changes, we show that this relationship is causal: inheritance taxation reduces dynastic persistence. Over our period of study, democratization substantially weakened but did not fully eliminate the relationship between dynastic wealth and political power.

• Danish Historical Political Economy Workshop (2025)
• Royal Economic Society Annual Conference (2025)
• 14th Annual Lithuanian Conference on Economic Research (2025)
• Warwick-LSE Political Economy PhD Conference (2025)
• Oxford University Political Economy Work in Progress (2025)
• LSE Political Science Political Economy Work in Progress (2025)
• LSE SPEECH (2024, 2025)
• LSE Workshop on Institutions and Political Economy (2024)

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