Working Paper: Concentration of Secondary Schooling for Irish and UK Elite Politicians

The study of elites and their formation has returned to centre stage in recent years. The lessons from these studies can be made more universal if a measure of elite formation could be developed that is comparable. The multifaceted nature of the concept of elite formation makes this complex. However, in this paper, by building upon measures used in other fields, such as industrial economics, we offer such a measure that facilitates comparison of elite formation. We illustrate this measure through a comparison of the schooling of Irish and British political elites