FollowThis week’s SPIRe seminar series features SPIRe’s Dr. Jos Elkink and Dr. Alex Baturo from the Department of Law and Government at Dublin City University presenting their paper “Auctoritas or Potestas? Personal and Institutional Sources of Individual Political Influence” from 13:00-14:00 in G317 Newman (Arts) Building, UCD Belfield.
“Does the political office that an individual occupies primarily determine one’s overall political influence, or can the same office be strengthened or weakened depending on the office-holder? Thus far, it has proven difficult to empirically separate the office from the officeholder. We argue that provided there is an indicator for the overall individual political influence and there is sufficient variability among individuals taking the same office, being promoted and demoted into different offices, it is possible to estimate separate latent individual and institutional effects. Our model thus provides a new instrument to measure the level of (de)institutionalisation in a political regime. Using expert surveys that assess the ranking of the top political actors in Russia in the 1994-2011 period, we find that office dominates individual roughly by the order of two.”