The Professor Will See You Now: Billionaires

4 min read10 October

In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: loadsamoney

It is common these days to hear complaints about a lack of political engagement, so let me cheer you up by telling you about a socio-demographic group where an astonishingly high one in nine of its members have sought political office.

Let me introduce you to perhaps the most politically active group of all. I am talking, of course, about billionaires.

Billionaires tend to aim high; if they are going to be mayor, it’s New York not Chigley

The Forbes Billionaires List – the so-called “three comma club” – contains about 2,000 names. According to a fascinating recent study, just over 11 per cent of them have gone for political office. It’s difficult to think of any other group in society with that level of political achievement. By political office we are, perhaps unsurprisingly, not talking service on the parish council. Billionaires tend to aim high; if they are going to be mayor, it’s New York not Chigley.

And in almost all cases, if they’ve sought office they’ve held it. Of the 198 direct elections featuring billionaires that the researchers identified, the billionaire candidate won in 80 per cent – and they only managed to find eight billionaires who had sought office but ultimately failed.

Perhaps the most interesting finding, though, is where we find these mega-rich politicians. There are obvious examples from the US, such as Donald Trump or Michael Bloomberg, but mainland China alone accounts for over 110 – that’s more than anywhere else, either measured in absolute terms or as a percentage of a country’s billionaires. Hong Kong adds 21. Those two make up more than half the total cases identified.

There were 21 such cases in the US, although one reason why the US has a lot of billionaire politicians is because it has a lot of billionaires – more than anywhere else in the world. Only around four per cent of them have sought political office, a figure that is only marginally higher than in many European countries. The relative rate is much higher in Russia and Singapore, both over 20 per cent.

On the other hand, in the majority of countries which have produced billionaires, precisely none have sought political office. In other words, that 11 per cent figure is the worldwide average but it is the product of a handful of countries with lots of mega-rich politicos and many more with very few or none.

There is an accompanying dataset – Billionaires in Politics Around the World – which allows you to play with the data if you are so inclined. You might well wonder if this is a sensible use of your time; the long winter evenings must just fly by, as Blackadder once put it. But it is surprisingly revealing.

Scan the list of British billionaires, for example, and you see plenty of familiar names, many of them very influential: newspaper owners, party donors, and so on. All influential, almost none of whom have run for office. The dataset, based on the 2017 list, identifies just two British cases – the Barclay brothers, one of whom is now dead, and both of whom are included due to their role in Sark, which is a pretty borderline and idiosyncratic case. Of the rest, nothing.

It can’t be because of the costs of entry. For the mega-rich these are a rounding error. But once there, what’s in it for them? Looking at the data it’s pretty clear that billionaires tend to enter politics in large numbers where politics is a way of making or preserving money. That is not true in most democracies. Billionaires can exercise influence in other ways, without all the hassle of the formal political process and the increased visibility that goes with it. Given that, who needs constituency surgeries every Friday in a draughty village hall?

Your further reading for this week: D Krcmaric et al, Billionaire Politicians: A Global Perspective, Perspectives on Politics (2023)

PoliticsHome Newsletters

Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.