A well-connected family helps if you want to be in Congress:
Across all Congresses — House and Senate — from 1789 to 1986, nearly nine percent of legislators came from families that had previously sent a member to Congress. The prevalence of these dynastic legislators has decreased over time. “While 11 percent of legislators were dynastic between 1789 and 1858, only 7 percent were dynastic after 1966,” the authors write. And that number has been mostly flat, according to an October 2013 analysis by Chris Wilson of Time, who found that 6.9 percent of current House and Senate members — 37 in total — come from dynastic families.
As for senators, 13.5 percent have come from dynastic families, versus only 7.7 percent of representatives. One of the key findings of the dynasty paper is that political power is self-perpetuating: “Legislators who hold power for longer become more likely to have relatives entering Congress in the future. Thus, in politics, power begets power.”
Aaron Blake notes that ” for everyone who professes to be disgusted with the idea of another Bush or another Clinton inhabiting the White House, there are many more people who are quite fond of the predictability and ease of voting for a name they know”:
Case in point: The new Washington Post-ABC News poll. The poll shows both the Bush and Clinton political dynasties are viewed in quite positive lights, though the Clinton family reigns superior for now. While 64 percent of registered voters have a favorable view of the Clinton family, 56 percent say the same about the Bushes. And in an age in which it’s hard to get a majority of Americans to agree on anything and especially any politician, that level of support is striking.
Amy Davidson is troubled by American support of political dynasties:
We talk so much about the role of money in politics. Why isn’t all that investment yielding us any truly interesting products in the candidacy sector? It is as if our entire political portfolio were put into the same few stocks that had been there forever. Maybe it is money that, perversely or purposefully, stifles political entrepreneurship and innovation; maybe other factors are at work. In either case, the current situation can’t be for the best, if it serves to make politics seem like a deadened realm rather than a place to bring and work out grievances. We are stretched out, paralyzed, in the polls. What hurts the most is that we may be suffering from a national failure of political imagination.
The Dish 