Financial elites are considered different; set apart not just from ordinary people, but also other elite groups (Moran, 1981, Hall, 2009, Moran and Flaherty, 2023). In the UK, conventional wisdom has imbued financial elites with an extraordinary mystique of power. Critics have highlighted the influence of the financial sector in shaping economic policy, its perceived role in the UK’s relative economic decline, and its importance to the rise of Britain’s ‘second empire’, which has been integral to the development of the contemporary global financial system, the financialisation of advanced economies, and the global wealth-defence industry.
Yet despite the breadth and depth of critical scholarship on the UK financial sector, there is a surprising lack of systematic, empirical research on UK financial elites, and how much they differ from other economic elites. This paper seeks to address several competing claims within the literature on UK-based financial elites concerning who they are, how they act politically, and how they come together. It compares financial and non-financial business elites using a novel dataset of the directors and senior partners from the UK’s 1,000 largest financial and non-financial companies. In addition to presenting demographic data on age, nationality, gender, and aristocratic lineage, the paper compares the political donations of the two elite groups, as well as measures of intra-elite cohesion based on contemporary and past working relationships within private companies and civil society organisations.
Presented by:
Gary Fooks (University of Bristol) and Tom Mills (Aston University)
Date & time:
June 18, 2025 12:30 pm - June 18, 2025 1:30 pm
Venue:
2N2.4.16
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