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What factors determine the office entry age of political leaders? This paper explains the significance of the sociological process of party system institutionalization in determining the office entry age of political leaders. This process involves time and resource investments in building and maintaining the party's societal bases and networks, which has different implications for aged versus young leaders. Aged leaders have invested more time into building and nurturing societal bases, whereas young leaders have not had this opportunity and thus find themselves in a more competitive political space. As a result, a highly institutionalized party system consistently produces relatively older political leaders, which is supported in the analysis of over 1200 political leaders entering the office from 1946 and 2015. This finding holds even after controlling for the leaders’ entry nature, level of democracy, and domestic terrorism and civil wars.
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