Final Comments

To conclude…

In this project we wanted to explore whether there is a relative age effect in politics, a difference in the prevalence of various months of birth.

Using a global dataset, we find that the first six months of the year has a higher density of politicians (+6.7%) in comparison to the second half. April was the best month with a +5.28% advantage over the population proportion, while October was the most disadvantaged at -5.83%.

Following this, we grouped our data by indicators such as HDI, mean years of schooling, income category, hemisphere, and V-Dem index to understand this effect further. No significant trends were observed, except a slight hemisphere difference.

On analysing gender, we found a striking disparity with males having a +55.6% advantage. The gender gap prevailed across countries both high and low on various indicators (HDI, MYS, V-Dem, Income). The gap was much larger for highly gender-unequal countries.

With regard to the zodiac, we found that the proportion of Scorpios and Sagittarians was lower and that of Cancerians and Taurans higher. However, this can be attributed to the monthly variation and does not indicate astrology to be true.

Investigation of politicians' names revealed that M and B were the most common for given and family names respectively. However due to the absence of global population data for names, we could not draw any conclusions.

However, there were issues with data quality, especially in developing countries which had very few records. Also, the EveryPolitician dataset lacked data about education and included historical data, limiting our analysis. Therefore, we decided to focus on the UK to investigate further.

Using data scraped from Wikipedia, we obtained data for all current UK MPs for a more robust analysis.

The average age of UK MPs was found to be 53.3 years, following a roughly normal distribution.

The University of Oxford was the most attended by MPs, followed by Cambridge and LSE. Of note is the absence of many top London universities, and a higher prevalence of regional ones.

While we uncovered some key differences in biographical characteristics of legislators, these questions must be explored further since the analysis is not conclusive. If furthered, these analyses have real-world policy implications, and are important to political theory as well. For it is normatively desirable that legislators are representative of the population and not just certain groups.