Fortunate Sons: Elite Political Selection in American History | NBER
Skip to main content
Search
Search
Fortunate Sons: Elite Political Selection in American History
James J. Feigenbaum,
Andrew B. Hall,
Daniel M. Thompson
& Jesse Yoder
Share
Bluesky
Threads
Link
Working Paper 35569
DOI 10.3386/w35569
Issue Date August 2026
We trace the family origins of Members of Congress (MC) born between 1830 and 1950, linking each MC, their parents, and their brothers to the complete-count censuses. Future MCs have always been economic outliers. By 1940, close to 60 percent of MCs aged 18--40 held a college degree, against under 5 percent of comparable young men outside Congress. In the 19th-century censuses, MCs as adults held roughly three times the wealth of demographically matched controls. They also come from economically elite families: their fathers earn more, attain more education, and hold more wealth. The brothers of future MCs sit between the population and the MCs themselves. Across the socioeconomic measures we compare, we calculate that roughly half of an MC's adult premium is shared with his brother and the other half is his own. Even as the American economy and political system have changed, the family background gap has widened over the last century and a half. Wealth, household servants, and four separate occupation-based scores all show the gap holding or growing across cohorts. We study four Progressive-Era reforms in a triple-difference design---women's suffrage, the secret ballot, direct primaries, and the direct election of senators---and none produce detectable shifts in who reaches Congress. Our results document a Congress drawn from the most fortunate families in American society in every cohort we observe.
Acknowledgements and Disclosures
This draft subsumes and substantially expands on NBER WP 26156. For research assistance, the authors thank Brittany Dutton, Qianmin Hu, Elise Kostial, Anna Nakai, Conor Orton, Josh Rose, and Anish Sundar, as well as Joseph Price’s Record Linking Lab at BYU. For helpful discussion, the authors thank Ran Abramitzky, Avi Acharya, Alberto Alesina, Sam Bazzi, Matilde Bombardini, David Broockman, Jacob Brown, Nick Carnes, Dan Carpenter, Karen Clay, Cesi Cruz, Ernesto Dal Bó, Robert Erikson, Martin Fiszbein, Anthony Fowler, Matt Gentzkow, Liz Gerber, Rob Gillezeau, Ed Glaeser, Claudia Goldin, Josh Goodman, Justin Grimmer, Alisa Hall, Tarek Hassan, Seth Hill, Brian Knight, Shiro Kuriwaki, Eddie Lazear, Greg Martin, Jaakko Meriläinen, Christopher Muller, Suresh Naidu, Paul Novosad, Max Palmer, Daniele Paserman, Vincent Pons, Joseph Price, Hunter Rendleman, Dominic Rohner, Jesus Rojas Venzor, Wendy Schiller, Benjamin Schneer, Jesse Shapiro, Erik Snowberg, Jim Snyder, Marco Tabellini, Chris Tausanovitch, Danielle Thomsen, Francesco Trebbi, Jessica Trounstine, Jennifer Nicoll Victor, Zachary Ward, Ruthie Zussman, the students of Econ 220 in the Fall 2018–2019 quarter, seminar participants at BU, UBC, the Stanford Economics Brown Bag Lunch, the NBER Spring Political Economy Conference, the members of Stanford’s Democracy Policy Lab, the Center for Effective Lawmaking Conference, the 2019 Congress and History conference at MIT and Harvard, the University of Toronto Economic History Conference, and the Harvard Political Economy Seminar. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Citation and Citation Data
Copy Citation
James J. Feigenbaum, Andrew B. Hall, Daniel M. Thompson, and Jesse Yoder, "Fortunate Sons: Elite Political Selection in American History," NBER Working Paper 35569 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35569.
Copy to Clipboard
Download Citation
MARC
RIS
BibTeΧ
Download Citation Data
Related
Topics
Public Economics
Subnational Fiscal Issues
History
Labor and Health History
Programs
Development of the American Economy
Political Economy
More from the NBER
In addition to working papers, the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter, the NBER Digest, the Bulletin on Health, and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship — as well as online conference reports, video lectures, and interviews.
2026, 18th Annual Feldstein Lecture, Mark Duggan, "Social Security Reform in an Era of Fiscal Deficits"
Feldstein Lecture
Presenter:
Mark Duggan
Mark Duggan, who is currently the Wayne and Jodi Cooperman Professor of Economics at Stanford University and will soon...
2026, Methods Lecture, Melissa Dell and Ashesh Rambachan, "Estimation and Inference with AI-Generated Data"
Methods Lectures
Presenters:
Melissa Dell
& Ashesh Rambachan
Research Associate Melissa Dell of Harvard University and Ashesh Rambachan of MIT delivered the 2026 Methods...
2026, SI Household Finance, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, "Using AI in Household Finance Research: A Practical...