The Political Wealth of Nations

全球的政治精英比他们所代表的人群要富有得多。许多人担心，富有的公民可能会因为竞选费用高昂，或者因为担任公职需要放弃一份只有富人才能负担得起的工作而处于有利地位。还有人担心，富有的政客可能会将政策偏向于他们的经济利益--这些利益可能与大多数人的利益不同。但这些担忧有多严重？这个项目系统地收集了世界各国政治精英财富的数据，以总体评估(在财政上)有代表性的政客对其公民的影响。该项目分析了成本较低的竞选活动在多大程度上帮助较不富裕的候选人获胜，以及一国政治精英的财富在多大程度上影响了其社会和再分配政策。这项研究的结果有助于我们更好地理解不同类型政治制度中经济不平等、政策制定和代表性的原因和后果。由于缺乏关于政客财富的比较数据，目前几乎没有关于政治制度如何影响民选代表及其选民之间的财富差距的更大规模的跨国研究。这使得我们对代表性不平等的原因和后果的理解是不完整的，因为很难归因于广泛的原因并从现有的单一国家研究中推断出来。该项目收集了51个国家政客财富的数据，并创建了选民和公民财富的可比数据集。该项目以新颖的方式将这些数据与其他跨国数据集相结合，通过统计分析、自然实验和定量案例研究检查了一些相关的研究问题，例如竞选资金法规和选举规则对政客财富的影响，以及政客财富与一国社会保障网政策之间的关系。由此产生的数据库有助于促进对政治代表和政策制定的研究，并可用于为有关官员财务披露的设计、实施和使用的政策决策提供信息。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Political elites across the globe are considerably wealthier than the populations they represent. Many worry that wealthy citizens may be advantaged because election campaigns are expensive or because holding office requires giving up a job that only the wealthy may afford. There are also concerns that wealthy politicians may skew policies toward their economic interests—interests that may differ from much of the population. But how serious are these concerns? This project systematically collects data on the wealth of political elites in countries around the world to assess generally how (financially) representative politicians are of their citizens. The project analyzes such questions as the extent to which less expensive campaigns help the less wealthy candidates win, and how much the wealth of a country’s political elite influences its social and redistributive policies. The study’s results help us better understand the causes and consequences of economic inequality, policy-making and representation in different types of political systems.Due to the lack of comparative data on politicians' wealth, there is virtually no existing larger-N cross-national work on how political institutions affect the disparity between the wealth of elected representatives and their constituents. This leaves our understanding of the causes and consequences of representational inequalities incomplete, as it is difficult to ascribe broad causes and extrapolate from existing single-country studies. This project collects data on politicians' wealth in fifty-one countries and creates comparable datasets of constituency and citizen wealth. Combining these data in novel ways with other cross-national datasets, the project examines through statistical analyses, natural experiments, and quantitative case studies a number of related research questions, such as the effect of campaign finance regulations and electoral rules on politician wealth, and the relationship between politicians' wealth and a country's social safety net policies. The resultant database helps facilitates research on political representation and policy-making, and may be used to inform policy decisions about the design, implementation, and uses of office-holders’ financial disclosures.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.