About the project
In most countries, cabinets - a handful of individuals wielding overall responsibility for governing a state - are the nucleus of political power. Their actions can significantly influence the lives of millions. Yet, systematized information on cabinet members across extensive periods of time and world regions remains limited.
The "Paths to Power”-project (PtP) address this and introduces a new dataset featuring systematized information on the social profiles of cabinets and governing elites. The dataset is described in our article: Nyrup, J., Knutsen, C. H., Langsæther, P. E., & Kristiansen, I. L. (2025). Paths to power: A new dataset on the social profile of governments. British Journal of Political Science: 55 (e129).
PtP covers 141 countries, globally, with populations exceeding 10 million; all OECD and EU countries; and several other smaller countries. We collect information---whenever identifiable---on 44,789 cabinet members holding office across 1966-2021, regarding their level, type, and location of education, place of birth, family- and class origins, prior occupation, and political background. These are widely considered important variables for a host of research questions pertaining to the study of politicians, and thus politics, more generally.
PtP is not the first dataset to register information on the social profiles of political elites. Yet, reflecting a multi-year coding effort involving more than 30 research assistants and researchers across the globe, it is the most comprehensive one in terms of combined geographical, temporal, and variable coverage.
We hope that scholars studying various aspects, causes, or consequences of political elite behavior and representation---across regions and political regime types---will use this new resource to address important social science questions that, until now, have been difficult to answer fully.
You can contact us at paths-to-power@stv.uio.no if you have any queries or suggestions for corrections.
WhoGov Mini-Conference on Political Elites 2026
We are happy to announce the call for papers for the third WhoGov Mini-Conference on Political Elites. It will be held on August 20-21st, 2026 in Oslo. The deadline for applications is now closed and the program will be released in July 2026.
You can find the call here: https://bit.ly/whogovminiconference2026
Complimentary datasets
PtP is a separate dataset, but it has its origins in the WhoGov dataset PtP adds information on the educational, occupational, and social background of cabinet members, while WhoGov contains the core units, e.g. the list of cabinet members, and basic information such as gender, party-affiliation, and year of birth. To make it easy to use PtP, we have included these variables in PtP as well. However, we kindly ask you to cite both PtP and WhoGov, when you use PtP.
The team behind PtP and WhoGov are continuously working on improving, updating, and expanding information on governing elites. We will update this page, when new data is released.
Funding
This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway Grant, pnr 300777 and a Småforsk Grant by the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo.
Collaborators
We would like to thank the many people who helped us with gathering the data: Anna Nybu, Chandler Williams, Eirik Haugen, Gabriel Lönn, Javier Leal, Johanne Skar, Jonas Berge, Lee Cojocaru, Lisa Løkkebø, Mari Flaathen, Ragnhild Dalen, Stephany Amaya Pérez, Tuda Oussous, and Vera Hansen. Furthermore, we would like to thank Aliyah Siddika, Akash Chopra, Dércio Tsandzana, Ella Prihatini, Grace Evans, Ha Eun Choi, Jalal Fetrati, Janina Beiser-McGrath, John Rovic Catangay, Kenya Amano, Lauren Robertson, Johnathan James Guy, Josef Woldense, Jou-Fei Huang, Ratchakit Khonkam, Saida Hassan, Sanghoon Park, Saber Khani, Saowanee Alexander, William Kakenmaster, Jens Koning, Roman Gabriel-Olar, and Yosef Tadesse who have helped code their countries of expertise for us.