Who Gets There

To say that Swedish parliamentarians make up a social elite would be an exaggeration. Yet one could scarcely call them ‘an average collection of ordinary people’ either, as Harold Laski once said of British MPs. ¹ As a group, Swedish MPs are a poor reflection of ordinary people in terms of social and economic status, and the same is true for British MPs. Laski was wrong. British parliamentarians, like their Swedish counterparts, are not proportionally drawn from all social strata; they are recruited – like legislators in nearly all nations – first and foremost from the privileged. MPs the world over tend to have held jobs of higher status, to come from more affluent backgrounds, and to be wealthier and better educated than the voters they represent. There are few findings in parliamentary research for which there is stronger evidence. ²