Does power persist within families? This article considers whether members of the UK House of Commons with longer legislative careers after 1832 were more likely to establish a political dynasty. Tenure can create opportunities to promote relatives. A regression discontinuity design for re‐election races helps to rule out the confounding influence of inheritable traits. There is no evidence for a causal effect of tenure length on establishing or continuing a dynasty. Established families may have constrained further dynasty development, explaining the null result of tenure.

Using evidence from the Second Reform Act, introduced in the United Kingdom in 1867, we analyze the impact of extending the vote to the unskilled urban population on the composition of the Cabinet and the background characteristics of Members of Parliament. Exploiting the sharp change in the electorate caused by franchise extension, we separate the effect of reform from that of underlying constituency‐level traits correlated with the voting population. Our results are broadly supportive of a claim first made by Laski (1928): there is no causal effect of the reform on the political role played by the British aristocracy.

How is the use of political lotteries related to party development? This article discusses the effects of a lottery-based procedure used to distribute committee appointments that was once common across legislatures in nineteenth-century Europe. The authors analyze the effects of a political lottery in budget committee selection in the French Third Republic using a microlevel data set of French deputies from 1877 to 1914. They argue that the adoption and benefit of lottery-based procedures were to prevent the capture of early institutions by party factions or groups of self-interested political elites. The authors find that partial randomization of selection resulted in the appointment of young, skilled, middle-class deputies at the expense of influential elites. When parties gained control of committee assignments in 1910, selection once again favored elites and loyal party members. The authors link lottery-based procedures to party development by showing that cohesive parties were behind the institutional reform that ultimately dismantled this selection process. Lottery-based procedures thus played a sanitizing role during the transformation of emerging parliamentary groups into unified, cohesive political parties.

What is the value of committee service to an individual legislator? Self-selection and party control of appointments typically obscure this relationship. We estimate the causal effect of committee service on legislative behavior and parliamentary careers by exploiting a natural experiment in the French Third Republic (1870-1940). Yearly lotteries divided the legislature into groups that nominated members to the budget committee, and we use the random composition of these groups as an instrument for individual appointment. We find that appointment increased legislative entrepreneurship concerning budget legislation but not other types, suggesting that committee members acquire specialized expertise. Committee service also led to ministerial appointment but not to higher office that does not require specific policy expertise, such as party or senatorial positions. Finally, we discuss alternative mechanisms, including reputation effects, political networks, and distributional targeting via pork barrel legislation.

The hereditary transfer of political power within families is a prominent feature of premodern societies and persists in some form even in modern democracies. This chapter reviews the role of dynasties in the historical development of states and how patterns in dynastic politics serve as a useful metric for understanding the evolution of power and state organization in historical political economy research. The chapter identifies and describes three broad declines in the role of dynasties in politics: (1) a decline of monarchy in favor of democracy and other forms of government, (2) a decline in the prevalence of elected members of dynasties in democracies, and (3) a decline in the gendered differences in dynastic entry into politics. Despite these general declines, dynastic ties remain advantageous to politicians’ careers in many countries, especially when it comes to reaching the top echelons of power in the executive.