About the project
Historically, the governing elite has consisted of people from a narrow segment of society, such as aristocrats. However, the rise of democracy may have opened the path to power and changed the incentives of the leader to select governing elites from a broader segment of society. These elites may, in turn, opt for broad-based policies. Nonetheless, many voters today do not think that democracy has delivered on this promise. They indicate that their governments are captured by wealthy elites who do not care about them. So, does democracy result in more representative, diverse, and competent governing elites?
Research does not offer a clear answer to this question. GETGOV will make up for this deficit by investigating whether democracy has changed who govern us; and in turn how this impacts the decisions that are made. GETGOV consists of three working packages (WPs). Moreover, it also manages the WhoGov dataset (can be downloaded below) and hosts an annual conference on political elites.
WP1: Creating a historical database on members of governments
In the first working package we will build a historical database on governing elites named HistGov. The database will contain bibliographic information, such as gender and party affiliation, on governing elites at least once a year in the period 1789-1966 in all independent countries with a population of more than 400,000 citizens.
The novel HistGov dataset can easily be combined with the existing WhoGov dataset which contains data on governing elites in the period 1966-2023.
WP2: Democracy's impact on the composition of governing elites
The objective of WP2 is to answer whether democracy results in government of the people. Or, in other words, do democracy generate governing elites that are more representative, diverse, and competent?
To do so, we will use the HistGov and WhoGov datasets to study who has governed us over the last 230 years to better understand the relationship between democracy and the composition of governing elites.
WP3: Governing elites’ impact on policies and outcomes
The objective of WP3 is to rigorously test whether the composition of governing elites impact policies and outcomes. In other words, we will test whether it matters who governs us.
Download WhoGov version 4.0.
The WhoGov dataset is described in our article: Nyrup, Jacob and Stuart Bramwell. 2020. Who Governs? A New Global Dataset on Members of Cabinets, American Political Science Review, 114(4), 1366-1374. WhoGov won the 2021 Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba award for best dataset in comparative politics.
Version 4.0. of the WhoGov dataset can be downloaded below. The update has been supported with funding from UiO:Democracy and expands WhoGov to 2025. We provide bibliographic information, such as gender and party affiliation, on cabinet members in July every year in the period 1966-2025 in all countries with a population of more than 400,000 citizens. In total, the dataset contains data on 60,348 cabinet members in 272,402 countries, adding up to 9,495 country-years.
You can download the research note describing the update here: access the research note for WhoGov v. 4.0 (PDF, 57kb).
Individual-level dataset
Country-year level dataset
WhoGov_crosssectional_V4.0.csv
WhoGov_crosssectional_V4.0.rds
WhoGov_crosssectional_V4.0.xlsx
