This paper examines how senior executives at the UK’s largest publicly listed companies financially benefited from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), and seeks to explain this phenomenon with the concept of elite welfare. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we analyse the impact of participation in the CJRS on executive remuneration between 2019 and 2023. Drawing on a sample of Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 350 firms (n = 246), we find that receipt of furlough support in 2020 was associated with significant increases in chief executive officer (CEO) performance pay and total remuneration in the immediate post-pandemic year. We interpret these results through a new analytical approach that understands elite income derived from rent-extraction facilitated by public policy or expenditure as a form of welfare. Unlike conventional welfare, which typically comprises relatively modest payments and concessions to broad sections of the population, elite welfare accrues to a small minority in privileged positions, taking the form of extractions of rent arising through opportunities created by government policy. We argue that recognising elite welfare as a parallel welfare system – largely insulated from competitive constraint and market discipline – provides a valuable new perspective on the interdependencies between inequality, public policy and the redistributive logics of the modern state.

This article provides a multi-dimensional perspective on parliamentary composition in an era of political turbulence. It extends existing turnover models by proposing a three-dimensional framework to understand persistence which includes the structure of the ballot, electoral volatility and institutional career opportunities. Using novel comparative data from 14 European democracies (1965–2021), where we distinguish between newcomers, seniors (3+ terms) and super-seniors (5+ terms), we find that persistence is most likely in politico-institutional contexts characterised by candidate control over ballot access, low electoral volatility and unicameral legislatures. Super-seniors seem to occupy an advantaged position, as prior seniority levels strongly shape subsequent ones, and they are also less vulnerable to electoral shocks. At the same time, we descriptively show that none of the countries in our sample provide the full configuration conducive to persistence, suggesting that contemporary democracies contain institutional arrangements that promote circulation within the legislative elite and limit concentration.

Upper-class people have long described near-total turnover from “old” to “new” money during major socioeconomic shifts, but quantitative measures of elite persistence often contradict their claims. Oil boom Dallas is one such case. Midcentury Dallas socialites consistently alleged that “new money” oil families replaced “old money” cotton families during the 1930s oil boom, but a dataset of the full upper class (n = 12,353) and most wealthy oilmen (n = 325) demonstrates that cotton families generally remained upper class, oilmen were mostly born upper class, and most upper-class people had both cotton men and oilmen somewhere in their family networks. What explains the disparity between upper-class perceptions and demographic reality? I argue that upper-class social worlds are often perceived and narrativized in terms of “prototypical elites,” who are especially wealthy and tied to regionally specific industries. Elite perceptions of total turnover reflect real churn among prototypical tycoons rather than churn among the upper class as a whole. Approaches to the study of elites and inequality that focus on ultra-rich individuals divorced from their relational contexts similarly overemphasize change and underemphasize persistence.

Violent upheavals in landownership following conquest often change not only the concentration of land across individuals, but also the inequality of its distribution between groups. We argue that variation in landowners’ group identity has important implications for the provision of local public goods. We test this claim by studying the aftermath of the Cromwellian Settlement in seventeenth-century Ireland. Leveraging the lottery-based allocation of expropriated Catholic land to distinct groups of English Protestants, we find significant local variation in the extent of Protestant landownership. Drawing on rich original data, we find fewer local public goods in the long run in areas with more Protestant elites, with the largest reductions in goods that were either directly elite-funded or disproportionately benefited the Catholic majority. The results illustrate how conquest reshapes not just institutions but also long-run local inequalities, and highlight the distinct consequences of between-group inequality for the provision of public goods.

This article explores the strategies of politicians from the pastoralist Samburu of northern Kenya since the country’s 2013 devolution – a reform ostensibly designed to remedy Kenya’s corrosive and often violent elite politics. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered between 2021 and 2025, I argue that devolution has rendered the political arena in north-central Kenya more diffuse, convoluted and contested. Ahead of elections, shifting coalitions of actors – cutting across the political structures and scales created by devolution – deploy the material rewards of government to intervene in Samburu beliefs around cattle prestige, gerontocratic norms and spiritual life. They do so to assert political influence, mobilise violence against rival groups, and win local elections. Rather than resolving Kenya’s elite problems, devolution has thus refracted them through new structures, producing distinctive patterns of power and violence across the northern pastoralist landscape.

This article explores how people imagine a 21st-century persona-indexing register as emanating from a 19th-century person-indexing register. The persona in question is the Philippine conyo, regarded as spoiled, empty-headed, rich kids who speak a distinct style of “Taglish” (Tagalog-English). The person in question is José Rizal, one of the most celebrated Filipino historical figures. Drawing on ethnographic and media data, I trace how Rizal is regarded as “the original conyo,” as its first author or animator. Examining how this type-token interdiscursive link between persona and person plays on the inversion of a chronotopic frame, I consider what conceptualizing elite historical continuity accomplishes socially and economically. I argue that citing Rizal creates a channel to move value.

This article highlights the role of a Parisian primary public school serving elite demographics in shaping children’s class identities by teaching privilege management. Based on a year of ethnographic observations in 4th and 5th grade classrooms, this study examines the daily practices of a privileged school and its philanthropy program, Giving is Good. Drawing on critical scholarship on the education of elites, exposure and intervention are the two mechanisms through which the class transforms children’s immediate social environment into a resource for philanthropic engagement. The results indicate that privilege management generates a disposition to talk about and navigate inequality with ease while maintaining face and privilege. Results also show a profound gendered discrepancy in how children “learn to give.” In light of recent evolutions in citizenship education, the article discusses the implications of teaching philanthropy in public schools for political culture and how privileged children learn to think about other children who do not belong to the same social class.

This paper critically examines the concept of populism, challenging the predominant ideological definition by highlighting the importance of political relations between populist actors and elites. It argues that populism should be conceptualized as a political phenomenon characterized by conflict with dominant elites, rather than solely as a set of ideas centered on ‘the people’ and ‘elites’. Through a comparative analysis of four politicians – Tony Blair, Emmanuel Macron, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon – the study demonstrates that although some actors utilize populist rhetoric, their tendency to generate conflict with elites distinguishes populist actors from other uses of populist ideas. The cases empirically demonstrate that ‘softer’ cases of populism indeed do not contain conflict and, thus, according to my approach, are not really populist. Thus, I demonstrate the inclination of ideational definitions to overstretch the concept of populism.