Political dynasties have long been present in democracies, raising concerns that inequality in the distribution of political power may reflect imperfections in democratic representation. However, the persistence of political elites may simply reflect differences in ability or political vocation...

"We present a model where a long run player is allowed to use both money transfers and threats to influence the decisions of a sequence of short run players. We show that threats might be used credibly (even in arbitrarily short repeated games) by a long-lived player who gains by developing a...