The Professor Will See You Now: How do you solve a problem like Maria?
4 min read
Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: what's in a politician's name?
Wondering what to do during recess? Unsure how to fill the time? Let me introduce you to the Global Legislators Database.
It’s the largest-ever individual-level database of parliamentarians, containing details on the members of 97 legislatures. Lower chambers only; no riff raff, as Basil Fawlty put it. That’s still over 19,000 individuals, with data covering party, age, education, gender, and occupation.
Anyone who has ever tried to collect this sort of stuff can tell you what a slog it is – even doing it for just one parliament. To have ticked off almost 100 is a Stakhanovite exercise in data collection. Reading through the additional information – yes, I know how to enjoy myself – reveals the work involved. Time and again there are phrases like: “Very little information could be obtained through internet searches”; “Attempts were made to contact individual legislators with missing information but these were unsuccessful”; “We rarely received a response from these inquiries”.
Occupation is always a swine to do. Do you go for first occupation? Last? Main? Here they focus on last held before election to political office, coded both in full and then according to the International Labor Organization’s coding schema. What do you think is the single most popular occupation for parliamentarians? Lawyers. The UK sits comfortably mid-table on that one. Fourth on the list of politicians’ professions worldwide comes professor. Lawyers and academics? That must be why we are all so well-governed.
So yes, there’s some missing data, and all the usual issues about coding. There’s nothing on ethnicity or type of schooling (as opposed to educational attainment) or sexuality – but then you try coding those, worldwide. The work involved means there is a time lag; the British data comes from the 2015-17 parliament; less than a third of those MPs are still in the Commons. But overall they have data on over 90 per cent of parliamentarians for age, education and occupation; over 99 per cent for gender. It’ll be a while before anyone improves on this.
Parliamentary middle-aged spread is ubiquitous
The youngest parliament in the dataset was Bolivia, average age just over 43; the oldest was Trinidad and Tobago (over 60 on average). Ditto for the prevalence of parliamentarians who have been through higher education. Teaching this stuff to students, who are mostly very keen on the idea of a socially representative parliament, I point out that it would mean fewer MPs like them. Ah, but that’s different, they always say.
The most common politician worldwide? A middle-class 50-year-old man, who is a former lawyer with a Bachelors degree. The average age of parliamentarians across the world is 50; 75 per cent are men; and almost 90 per cent have a degree.
Playing with the data, for one glorious moment I thought the most common politician’s name was David Smith – which is what it provides when you ask for the most common first and last names. But dig a bit deeper and there are issues with middle names (David Lindon Lammy, for example, is coded with the first name “David Lindon”). Control for that and the most popular first name of politicians worldwide seems to be Maria (suspect you didn’t see that one coming – I know I didn’t); but then you take into account the various spellings of Mohammed and things gets trickier still.
Whatever their names, though, there aren’t many working class politicians. The total figure, worldwide, was three per cent. A figure of just five per cent at the time the data was gathered, was enough to get Westminster into the top third of legislatures worldwide for working class parliamentarians. This aspect of representation is never taken seriously enough in the UK; it turns out we are not alone.
Further reading: N Carnes et al, The Global Legislators Database: Characteristics of National Legislators in the World’s Democracies, British Journal of Political Science (2025)
