Born leaders: political selection and the relative age effect in the US Congress: D. Muller and L. Page. (18th December 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Muller, Daniel; Page, Lionel
• Is Part Of: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Volume 179:Number 3(2016:Jul.)
• Page Start: 809
• Page End: 829
• Publication Date: 2015-12-18
• Subjects: Leadership -- Political selection -- Regression discontinuity design -- Relative age effect -- School entry cut‐off dates; Social sciences -- Statistical methods -- Periodicals; Statistics -- Periodicals; 300.15195
• DOI: 10.1111/rssa.12154
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0964-1998

Abstract

Summary: We present substantial evidence for the existence of a bias in the distribution of births of leading US politicians in favour of those who were the eldest in their cohort at school. This result adds to the research on the long‐term effects of relative age among peers at school. We discuss parametric and non‐parametric tests to identify this effect, and we show that it is not driven by measurement error, redshirting or a sorting effect of highly educated parents. The magnitude of the effect that we estimate is larger than what other studies on 'relative age effects' have found for broader populations but is in general consistent with research that looks at professional sportsmen. We also find that relative age does not seem to correlate with the quality of elected politicians.