This dissertation consists of various studies that investigate the influence of political elites' incentives on their decision-making. I investigate the relationship between politicians and the pursuit of self-interest by focusing on arguably the most obvious proxy for self-interest: politicians' personal wealth. In chapter 2, I introduce the setting for the remainder of the dissertation: the Dutch political elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This period saw a radical economic, but also political change. This period arguably represents the country's transition from 'extractive' to 'inclusive' institutions, featuring rapid economic growth, and democratizing institutions.This chapter introduces the data on the wealth of the Dutch political elite, coming from newly-collected archival data on probate inventories. I document a pattern of extremely high wealth among politicians, up until the 1890's, after which the political elite's wealth declines slowly over time. This change in politicians' personal wealth coincides with the acceptance of important fiscal reforms. Even after several decades, and several suffrage extensions, the political elite remains extremely wealthy in comparison to the general population. The next chapter investigates the influence of politicians' personal wealth on the tendency to vote in favor of various far-reaching reforms. In particular, I focus on fiscal reforms, and on suffrage extensions. I leverage the fact that the fiscal reforms were progressive, such that wealthier politicians' expected future tax burden was higher than that of less wealthy politicians. I hypothesize that wealthier politicians are less likely to accept these laws. In the case of suffrage extensions, I hypothesize there is no effect of personal wealth. To establish causality, I make use of variation in the expected inheritance among politicians, and use exogenous variation in politicians' fathers' profession. The analyses show that there is an influence of personal wealth on the tendency to ...