Workshops

Workshop 17:Paths to power : A new dataset on the social profile of governments

SpeakerCarl Henrik Knutsen [Dept. of Political Science, University of Oslo]

Date:April 4, 2023/16:00‐17:30 (JST)

Location:Zoom

Language:English

Target::Open to the public

Abstract:We introduce a new dataset on the educational, occupational, and social background of cabinet ministers across the world. We expand the recent WhoGov dataset by adding this information on more than 30,000 cabinet ministers from 123 countries in the period 1966-2021 (data-gathering is still ongoing). The dataset presented in this article is, by far, the most extensive and detailed of its kind, and it opens up for studying several key questions in the social sciences. Examples are questions pertaining to the role of class, education, and geography in political representation, the individual-level determinants of career paths, and how educational and occupational expertise shape policy. In this paper, we present the contents of the dataset, detail the coding rules and data gathering process, and discuss reliability and validity properties. We also show how the dataset can be used to gain new insights through, first, descriptive analysis and, second, by replicating and extending one existing study on (regime type and) the education of leaders by also including cabinet ministers.