Bequests of political power are certainly not limited to autocracies.
In the world's largest democracy, India, the next prospective leader
being groomed is Rahul Gandhi, the great-grandson of Indian founding
father Jawaharlal Nehru, the grandson of one other Indian Prime Minister
(Indira Gandhi) and the son of yet another (Rajiv Gandhi). Earlier this
month Rahul lunched with a counterpart leader-being-groomed from
Pakistan: 23-year-old Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who is the son of both
Pakistan's current president and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto,
the grandson of another prime minister, and is himself already chairman
of the Pakistan People's Party. On the other side of South Asia in
Bangladesh, the prime minister is Sheikh Hasina, who is a daughter of
the country's founding father and first prime minister.
The United States is no stranger to such family political legacies.
The presumptive presidential nominee of one of the two political parties
is the son of a prominent governor and national figure in the
Republican Party. The immediate past president was son of a previous
president (one of three father-son, or grandfather-son, pairs in the
history of the U.S. presidency). In the Democratic Party there have been
similar family ties, with the Kennedys probably the best known.
Four possible explanations, or combinations of them, can account for
the frequency of political power being inherited by the children of
political leaders. One can think of them as affecting different stages
in the progeny's personal history, from conception to the progeny's own
political career. The first explanation is genetic. It may be a factor,
although probably a limited one, given the normal genetic variation even
among blood relatives and the uncertainty of linking any gene with
political success.
A second explanation involves nurturing during childhood. The
children of political leaders grow up in an environment in which
political sensibility and associated ambition are more likely to be
imparted over the dinner table than they are over other families' dinner
tables.
A third explanation involves the opportunities--in education, in
business, or in politics itself--that open more readily to the offspring
of the powerful and famous (and the rich) than they do to others. The
biographies of many political scions indicate this is a strong and
probably the strongest explanation. Bo Xilai's 24-year-old son Bo Guagua
may have now seen his own political prospects sink with those of his
father, but his family relationship certainly seems to have opened
opportunities for him. Neil Heywood, the deceased Briton who had close
ties to Bo Xilai's wife and whose mysterious death is involved in the
current controversies about the family, reportedly told others
that he had used his influence to get Bo Guagua admitted to the
exclusive Harrow School in Britain (where Heywood was an alumnus). The
young Bo is now a student at the Kennedy School at Harvard, where
officials decline to say whether his family connections played a role in
his admission, issuing only the usual boilerplate about a "holistic"
approach that takes leadership potential into account. To the extent
this third explanation is in play, that is unfortunate from the
standpoint of having the most able political leaders rise to positions
of power. The differential opportunities are a matter of privilege, not
of merit.
