Political Dynasties and Party Strength: Evidence from Victorian Britain Carlos Velasco Rivera∗ First Draft: May 5, 2015 This Draft: August 23, 2017 Abstract Political dynasties raise concerns about elite entrenchment in democracies. Existing studies on dynastic politicians find these politicians have an electoral advantage. How- ever, they fail to consider strategies political parties use to cope with dynasts. By contrast, work on party organizations ignores issues of candidate selection. I bridge both literatures by developing a theory where parties face a trade-off between nom- inating strong but undisciplined dynastic politicians, or loyal but weak non-dynastic candidates. I predict parties rely on dynasts in districts where local organizations are weak. Using a novel data set of party strength in Victorian Britain, I show Liberal (but not Conservative) dynasts ran less often where local party organizations were present and dissented more frequently from the party line. These findings demonstrate party weakness is key to explaining the demise of traditional elites. This evidence is also consistent with work characterizing Conservative party organization as ineffectual in the pre-1880 period. ∗Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Email:
[email protected]. I thank Carles Boix, Rafaela Dancygier, Matias Iaryczower, and Kosuke Imai for their helpful comments and sug- gestions. I also thank Thomas Däubler, Anna Greene, Saumitra Jha, Gabriel Lopez-Moctezuma, Mona Morgan-Collins, Lucas Novaes, Yuki Shiraito, Dan Smith, Daniel Ziblatt, Adam Ziegfeld, members of the Imai Research Group, the Historical Working Group, seminar participants at ITAM, and participants at the 2015 Politics and History Network Annual Workshop and at the University of Bremen “Micro-foundations of Party Democracy” Workshop for their helpful suggestions and feedback.