The DEPART data collection on politicians’ biographies will go much beyond any existing data source on political elites. This is possible because of the extremely comprehensive coding system that we have designed. It allows us to capture almost all potential episodes in a person’s biography, whether it is entering a political party, holding a certain job or public office, working for a specific interest group, joining a social movement, fighting in a rebel group, going to prison, publishing a book, or receiving the Nobel prize.
This will enable us to paint a much more detailed and comprehensive picture of the people who govern us than was possible in the past, while at the same time allowing for large-scale statistical analysis of the data.
Over the remainder of the project period, we will be using these data to tackle a number of important research questions: First, we will investigate how the role of political parties in the recruitment of government ministers has changed, and how this affects the representation of specific groups and interests in high political office. While research on representation is a well-established field in political science, our empirical approach will allow us to advance the field by capturing empirical complexity (e.g. changing affiliations to social classes over the life course) that empirical research has eschewed so far. Second, we will examine how the changing biographies of ministers affect policy outcomes, especially in the socio-economic realm. This will allow us to link research on unequal representation with the study of policy outcomes. Finally, we will study the impact of ministerial backgrounds on voting behavior – especially in voters’ attribution of responsibility for government performance to political parties. This work will deepen and advance our understanding of how politicians’ individual-level characteristics affect voting and how this relationship is shaped by political parties.
