Political Dynasties in the UK House of Commons: The Null Effect of Narrow Electoral Selection

• Author: Brenda van Coppenolle
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12164
• Date: 01 August 2017
• Published date: 01 August 2017

BRENDA VAN COPPENOLLE

Leiden University

Political Dynasties in the UK House

of Commons: The Null Effect of

Narrow Electoral Selection

Does power persist within families? This article considers whether members of

the UK House of Commons with longer legislative careers after 1832 were more likely

to establish a political dynasty. Tenure can create opportunities to promote relatives. A

regression discontinuity design for re-election races helps to rule out the confounding

influence of inheritable traits. There is no evidence for a causal effect of tenure length

on establishing or continuing a dynasty. Established families may have constrained fur-

ther dynasty development, explaining the null result of tenure.

In the 19th century, UK parliamentary politics was dominated by a

few established families. The peerages of the House of Lords were

bequeathed from generation to generation. The House of Commons too

was dominated by a few landowning families (Canandine 1999). During

that century power would gradually shift away from these aristocratic

elites along with widening democratic participation. Political dynasties

seemingly became part of the past: The number of MPs from the same

families declined over time. However, they never disappeared entirely:

Certain political dynasties survived, and some new entrants would see

relatives entering in their footsteps. Does power then still persist within

families in democracies?

Dynastic succession occurs in all professions. However, for the

profession of politics in democracies succession is not organized along

dynastic lines but depends on running successful electoral campaigns.

Understanding whether political power can still be bequeathed through

elections is then particularly important. The tension between dynastic

persistence and democratic representation has long been a central

concern for political science (Michels [1911] 1968; Mosca [1896] 1939).

Yet identifying what constitutes such power bequests in democracies is

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 3, August 2017 449

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12164

V

C2017 The Authors Legislative Studies Quarterly published by Wiley

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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and

distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the

use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

diff‌icult. Elections (or peerages in the United Kingdom) are not won at

random. The same talents or drive that voters appreciate in the founders

of the dynasty may explain the election of their successors. In spite of

these challenges to identifying an effect of holding power on transmit-

ting power to relatives, recent research provides evidence for such a

causal connection by exploiting exogenous sources of power (Dal B

o,

Dal B

o, and Snyder 2009; Querubin 2015; Rossi 2015). One such identi-

f‌ied cause of dynasties is the tenure length of a politician. Holding power

for longer may create advantages for relatives such as name recognition

or an extensive political network that are independent from f‌ixed charac-

teristics shared within families, such as peerages and landholdings of

prominent families in the UK context.

This article considers what evidence there is in the United King-

dom for a tenure effect on dynasty formation as has been found for the

United States (Dal B

o, Dal B

o, and Snyder 2009). Surprisingly, in light

of many historical anecdotes of its powerful families, I f‌ind no evidence

in favor of power bequest through elections in 19th-century United

Kingdom, nor afterwards. Employing a regression discontinuity design

to close re-elections, I f‌ind that MPs who served longer were no more or

less likely to establish or continue a political dynasty. A breakup of the

analysis over different time periods provides qualitatively similar results:

throughout the 19th century, or even beyond until as recently as 2001,

there is little evidence for power bequest through elections.

This null result of narrow electoral selection means that tenure

does not cause dynastic power to persist in the United Kingdom, at least

not for marginally re-elected individuals who served longer due to good

fortune at the polls. Having several senior relatives as well as the total

number of years of political experience in the family, while not distribut-

ed at random among MPs, are much stronger predictors of dynasty

formation than tenure, and the probability of continuing the dynasty for

such junior relatives is not signif‌icantly increased or decreased by

narrowly winning a f‌irst re-election. Perhaps power bequest did not

occur through parliamentary service. Throughout the 19th century, pow-

er became increasingly concentrated in the cabinet, shifting away from

individual MPs and parliament (Cox 1987). Therefore, the success of the

relatives of cabinet ministers is one obvious way to study the importance

of having relevant political connections. I f‌ind that junior dynastic MPs

were more likely to obtain a cabinet position, but only conditional on

being the political heir of an MP who had previously served in the

cabinet. While selection to the cabinet is not random, cabinet service

forms a good predictor of starting a dynasty, and there is no heteroge-

nous effect of tenure length for these future cabinet ministers. While

450 Brenda Van Coppenolle