NEW Delhi, India (AP) — If North Korea’s new leader is looking for advice on how to carry on his family’s dynasty, he could turn to Rahul Gandhi, who is on a quest to become the fourth generation of his family to rule India. Or to Joseph Kabila, who is celebrating his questionable re-election to the Congolese presidency he inherited from his father. Or to former Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the country’s first president.

North Korea’s preparations to transfer power to a third generation of the Kim family, following the recent death of Kim Jong Il, is by no means an anomaly: In both democracies and dictatorships, political dynasties abound across the world.

While former President George W. Bush — the son of a president and the grandson of a senator — was never dubbed “the Great Successor,” and Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — who followed in her assassinated father’s footsteps — was never said to have been “born of heaven,” just like Kim Jong Un they ended up in the family business of running a country.

While some dictators pass on power to their children as a veritable inheritance, dynasties exert a powerful pull in democracies as well. The identity of a party might be deeply linked to a family. A familiar name might give a political scion an edge on the ballot, further strengthened by the family’s established political and fundraising machines. Sometimes the heir is a puppet, a brand name needed to rally the public, while backroom power brokers pull the levers. Or a nation in mourning over the death of its leader might turn to the grieving child for comfort and continuity.

Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar and author of “America’s Political Dynasties,” sees nothing unusual about politics becoming a family business.

“Aren’t bakers more likely to be bakers if their fathers were bakers?” he said in an email.

The most successful dynasty in the world is probably India’s Nehru-Gandhi family, which held the prime minister’s post for 37 of the country’s 64 years of independence and is working on bringing another generation to power.