Aging faster in office? the effect of extended service in political office on longevity

ABSTRACT

Politicians’ health problems are often publicly related to occupational stress. We investigate the effect of serving longer time in office on US governors’ life expectancy. Results indicate that health problems are relevant for the decision to continue a political career. We find no evidence that serving longer in political office is detrimental to health.

KEYWORDS:

• Longevity analysis
• politicians’ health
• regression discontinuity

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I10
• I18

Notes

¹ A total of 75% of governors who lose re-election are never elected to a public office again. A total of 26 persons are re-elected as governor at a later point in time, 19 become US senators. Of those who move to the private sector, the majority continue to work in law, business or banking. A total of 4% retire immediately.

² Data were gathered using web scraping. The full set of gubernatorial elections from OurCampaigns.com was restricted to general elections and then matched by family name and state to the socio-economic information collected from nga.org. We perform sanity checks with regard to plausible age ranges and spelling mistakes. The list of general elections is incomplete, but other data sets, e.g. the ICPSR Candidate and Constituency Statistics of Elections in the United States, contain even less observations. We do not expect a systematic bias arising from incomplete data.