Political Careers

O estudo mapeou e analisou a estrutura do campo científico sobre ambição política na Ciência Política. Utilizamos como fonte de dados a base indexadora Web of Science. A busca sistemática resultou em 252 documentos publicados entre 1989 e 2021. Através de análises cientométricas, utilizamos Análise de Redes Sociais (ARS) para examinar as coocorrências de palavras e cocitações de autores. Os resultados principais revelaram a existência de um campo científico segmentado em duas correntes teóricas rivais.

Women are the majority of the Brazilian electorate, almost half of the members of political parties, and even with the gender quotas law obliging the party list to have at least 30% female candidates, they still make up around 10% of the elected representatives to the Chamber of Deputies. The literature on this issue lists several barriers for these women, such as the socialization process focused on the private sphere of life, their supposed lack of interest in pursuing a political career and the lack of resources to conduct an electoral campaign. Analyzing the trajectory of city councilors elected in the municipal elections of 2016 in the city of São Paulo, this work investigates the ways candidates found to overcome these commonly imposed obstacles on women, with special interest in the political parties and partisan leadership presence in encouraging or dissuading their political career. Based mostly on in-depth interviews with female city council members, this dissertation describes their trajectory, from their first political involvement, going through the decision to run for office up until electoral campaigning to investigate how the narrative of these women about their electoral success and available data resonate with theories and evidences from previous studies about each of these stages. The main question asked is how much the party organization and its leaders have influenced, directly or indirectly, to make the candidature and success of these candidates effective; at the same time, I try to consider how and when these women have created or taken advantage of opportunities to run for - and win - elections. Results show that, although political parties are not always present in these women’s first political activities, the party organization and its leaderships - often as a family member of the candidate – have a crucial role in the decision to run and at the support throughout the electoral campaign, especially providing legitimacy and access to networks with other well established political figures. With these results, it is possible to question the established notion that Brazilian political parties have no relevance or influence in the electoral arena and in women’s sub representation, as well as to reassess the arguments and proposals for improving women's political participation.

This chapter examines the career trajectories of MPs in multi-level systems, and their consequences on their attitudes and behaviors. Both MPs at the national and regional levels are under analysis. The central question is do career patterns make a difference? Are MPs who have hopped across levels different from other MPs sitting in the same assembly. From the analysis run in this chapter, the answer is clear: career patterns make little difference. Differences in attitudes towards decentralisation, towards the promotion of regional interest, as well as towards MPs elected are other levels are strong between national and regional MPs. But there is no significant difference within these two groups that could be explained by the career trajectories of MPs. In that sense, institutional pressures seems to be much stronger than career socialization in understanding how MPs think and behaves in multi-level systems.

(co-authored with Ferdinand Müller-Rommel and Jan Berz) This book examines the changes in the career experiences and profiles of 350 European prime ministers in 26 European democracies from 1945 to 2020. It builds on a theoretical framework, which claims that the decline of party government along with the increase of populism, technocracy, and the presidentialization of politics have influenced the careers of prime ministers over the past 70 years. The findings show that prime ministers’ career experiences became less political and more technical. Moreover, their career profiles shifted from a traditional type of ‘party-agent’ to a new type of ‘party-principal’. These changes affected the recruitment of executive elites and their political representation in European democracies, albeit with different intensity and speed.

En los orígenes de la ciencia política como campo autónomo de conocimiento, el estudio de las elites políticas y sus dinámicas de coordinación, la resolución de conflictos y los procesos de renovación de las mismas, vinculadas a cambios sociales, han estado en el centro de la reflexión disciplinar (Mosca, 1896; Pareto, 1936: Dahl, 1961; Bobbio, 1976). Sin embargo, en Argentina queda mucho camino por recorrer en el estudio sistemático de los sectores dirigentes en general y de los políticos profesionales en particular. Con este trabajo intentamos realizar un aporte al conocimiento de las características de las personas que gobiernan la Argentina desde 1983. Para ello, nos concentramos en las particularidades de las carreras políticas en la provincia de Buenos Aires, el distrito más populoso del país. Específicamente, nos interesa analizar la vinculación de los titulares de los distintos cargos locales, provinciales y nacionales, y escrudiñar cuáles son los recorridos que se reiteraron, que indican la existencia de trayectorias típicas para develar la morfología de las estructuras de incentivos en las que se mueven los actores estudiados.

O presidencialismo de coalizão brasileiro apresenta características peculiares, comuns em países da América Latina, no que tange à separação entre as arenas legislativa e executiva. Diferentemente do sistema norte-americano, a interação entre as duas esferas é grande, o que impacta as carreiras parlamentares no país. O presente trabalho busca apresentar estágio inicial de desenho de pesquisa com o intuito de explorar as diferentes características da conexão eleitoral no sistema político brasileiro. Com foco nos aspectos que não passam pela arena legislativa, pretende-se tratar sobre a importância da permeabilidade na burocracia pelos parlamentares de forma a garantir a reeleição e sobrevivência política dos mesmos. Para tal, discutiremos três dimensões de atuação parlamentar junto à burocracia: influência em nomeações, intermediação de demandas e ocupação de cargos, com apresentação de dados preliminares sobre alternância de cargos entre o legislativo e o executivo.

El descontento ante la democracia ha provocado
que el estudio del capital humano
que dirige las instituciones representativas
cobre relevancia. En este artículo se analiza
el perfil político de 382 diputados federales
del Partido Acción Nacional (pan) y del
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (pri)
de la lxi Legislatura. El análisis contempla
sus competencias profesionales, su
trayectoria y su experiencia política. Los
resultados muestran datos relevantes sobre
los personajes que ejercen los puestos
de representación política en México; la
revisión de sus competencias personales y
de su trayectoria profesional lleva a concluir
que la carrera política es un factor de gran
importancia para el mejor funcionamiento
de la democracia representativa.

Political elites and representation: investigating the contemporary literature on professional politicians. Political representation is one of the major longstanding issues in Political Science, encompassing both voters and representative institutions and the agents who, in pluralist democracies, operate these institutions: professional politi- cians. This article maps the international literature on professional politicians. 560 articles published between 2015 and 2018 in 263 scientific journals indexed on the Web of Science database were analyzed. To understand the existing patterns within this literature, the bibliometric network analysis software VOSviewer was used. Two types of networks were analyzed: co-occurrence of keywords to identify recurring as well as most recent researched topics; and biblio- graphic coupling between documents to identify not only clusters in this literature, but also the most influential works. The results showed the endurance of classic issues in the field (intra-elite interactions, political parties, elections, con- gress), in addition to a new agenda addressing Political Communication. The most impactful work in this collection is on populist politicians and social media.

The diffusion of multi-level political arrangements in formerly unitary states, has recently led to numerous studies being conducted of sub-national political elites, in addition to those devoted to traditional federal states. Most of these studies have focused on the formation of regional political classes distinct from national ones, and on the emergence of alternative career paths to the traditional, unidirectional bottom-up pattern. More recently, the influence of different career paths on the attitudes and behaviour of legislators has also been hypothesized. However, while political science has made significant progress in analysing and describing multi-level career patterns, much remains to be done in regard to the explanations for such patterns and their consequences.

(co-authored with Ferdinand Müller-Rommel and Corinna Kroeber) The concept of career, while ubiquitous in elite research, has hardly received any comprehensive analytical treatment in the study of political executives. This chapter will summarize and develop the basic theoretical and methodological approaches as well as empirical findings of studies investigating political careers of cabinet members in democratic parliamentary and semi-presidential systems at the national level. It is divided into three sections. The first provides a sketch of the basic research questions that have been raised (and discussed) in the field of executive careers studies over the past decades. The second part offers a systematic survey of the current state of the literature concerned with ministers’ and prime ministers’ political careers. The third section presents some avenues for future research, including the potential for further theoretical and methodological improvement, followed by some concluding remarks

This article compares supreme and high court judicial turnover with respect to voluntary exits and retirements in three Westminster parliamentary democracies, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, for the period 1970–2012. The findings of an event history model indicate that judges who author large numbers of opinions in a given year are likely to stay longer, while those who dissent from their colleagues frequently are more likely to exit early. It was also found that judges are more likely to resign if the party that appointed them was expected to lose government.

Political parties in Belgium are free to decide on their methods of candidate selection. Hence, one could wonder whether the way parties draft their electoral lists may impact the kind of candidates running for office under the party banner. This paper aims at uncovering to what extent intraparty features may be relevant to features of the political elite at large, and in particular to the extent to which candidates are experienced in politics (both in campaign and in elected office). For doing so, this research analyses the mechanisms of candidate selection in eleven Belgian political parties. These parties selected no less than 4319 candidates who were rank-ordered on 189 electoral lists submitted for the triple regional, federal and European election of May 2014. Witht the aim of running a quantitative analysis of candidates' characteristics substantiated by a qualitative analysis of party selection processes, the paper draws on party statutes, interviews with selectors in parties and descriptive and career data on all electoral candidates. This paper demonstrates the significance of candidate selection mechanisms not only for themselves but also for the entire political process. When political parties determine their type of selection procedures, they may also indirectly determine the type of candidates who will run for office – more or less experienced in politics, and accordingly the kind of representatives who will pass the laws – outsiders or insiders to our representative democracies' systems.

The paper analyses the phenomenon of politicization within the Spanish executive elite, focusing in two highest politico-administrative strata: cabinet ministers and junior ministers. The degree of politicization at each level and its evolution along time is identified through the examination of the respective individual characteristics and previous political careers in the period 1977-2010. This allows us to check for patterns of variation in the degree of politicisation between and within each group, as well as to determine the possible rationales behind the phenomenon – basically, rewarding party members or keeping partisan control over policy making within public administration. Then, the analysis try to explain these differences, focusing on the following explanatory factors: 1) the inner characteristics of the position (i.e., we hypothesize junior ministers are less politicised vis à vis cabinet ministers given the lower political saliency of the office and the higher weight of policy and administrative functions); 2) the type of portfolio involved (there are some portfolios where politicisation is more likely to observe compared to others; and 3) political context, this referring to several characteristics of the respective government – party in office, government stability (type of majority in parliament supporting the government, and prime-ministerial style). Our analysis uses data on the whole population of Spanish cabinet ministers and secretaries of State between 1977 and 2010, containing information both on their social and professional background, as well as on their entire political careers (before and after occupying the position) coded in longitudinal form.

This article investigates the career paths of Central European Members of the European Parliament. Based on an analysis of biographies and the results of a quantitative survey about career ambitions with MEPs from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, this paper outlines both the career paths that lead to the European Parliament and the perspectives for a career after the EP mandate. Central European MEPs are more strongly linked to national politics than the MEPs of the EU-15, and they are even more embedded in their countries of origin than the MEPs of the first directly elected EP were in 1979. However, local politics is a much less frequent recruitment base for future MEPs in Central Europe than in the "old" Member States. The political experience and career ambitions of Central European MEPs disprove the popular myth, according to which the European Parliament is essentially a retirement home for politicians who have no future political goals. The majority of Central European MEPs plan further career steps at the European or national levels, and only approximately a third of them can be considered as "European pensioners".

Political careers are a classic subject of elite studies. Scholars have sought to understand what affects political profiles and career patterns’ formation. However, political career research is characterized by a variety of approaches and explanations, which often do not communicate each other. A framework that integrates existing contributions is lacking, and this undermines the process of accumulation of knowledge. A comprehensive assessment of the literature is necessary in view of this potentially welcomed undertaking. After a conceptual introduction, I provide here a general overview of the approaches used in political career research, classifiable into two main ‘schools. It is stressed their theoretical arguments, methodological strategies, and deficits. The note will provide bases for developing further the research field, by underling epistemological, theoretical, and methodological lessons.

A disciplina passa em revista problemas teóricos e empíricos no estudo de políticos profissionais. O objetivo é apresentar discussões contemporâneas sobre o tema, além de demonstrar, através de uma oficina, o processo de construção de um banco de dados sobre políticos profissionais brasileiros. A ideia é estabelecer um terreno de discussão comum para, em seguida, avançar na construção de novas formas de mensuração do perfil e do comportamento político desse grupo específico de elite.

RESUMEN: La afiliación partidaria de los ministros es una dimensión analítica clave en el estudio de los gabinetes de gobierno. Aquí sostenemos que el criterio operacional más difundido para tratar el fenómeno, válido para gran parte de las democracias parlamentarias consolidadas, puede resultar ineficiente o inadecuado para sistemas con jefes de gobierno fuertes y agrupaciones políticas fluidas como los regímenes presidencialistas latinoamericanos. El artículo identifica cuatro desafíos operativos asociados a la modalidad estándar de codificar ministros partidistas; propone una estrategia metodológica para dar cuenta de los mismos, y discute su aplicación práctica con un análisis exploratorio del caso argentino. ABSTRACT: Partisan affiliation of ministers is a key analytical dimension in the study of government, cabinets being an integral aspect of the most basic categorizations of the literature. Here we argue that the most widespread operational criterion for dealing with the phenomenon , valid for a large part of consolidated parliamentary democracies, may prove inefficient and inadequate for systems with strong heads of government and fluid political organizations like the Latin American presidential regimes. The article identifies four operational challenges

Politische Ämter gewinnen ihre Attraktivität durch die materielle und personelle Ausstattung, vor allem aber durch die Gestaltungschancen, die sie eröffnen. Besetzt werden sie vorwiegend mit erfahrenen Parteipolitikern. Die Kritik daran ist nur in Teilen berechtigt und läuft Gefahr, durch überzogene Ansprüche und Erwartungen die Ämter abzuwerten und geeignete Kandidaten abzuschrecken.

Este artículo analiza las carreras políticas de aquellos actores que, tras cumplir un solo período en la legislatura, no vuelven a ocupar otros espacios de elección popular o de influencia pública. Para el efecto, se recurre a un modelo de investigación mixto en el que se vincula una base de datos inédita sobre la trayectoria de los legisladores del Ecuador entre 1979 y 2007 con entrevistas, revisión de medios de comunicación escrita y fuentes secundarias. De forma contra intuitiva, los hallazgos empíricos señalan que casi la mitad de los diputados ecuatorianos reproducen este tipo de comportamiento político, al que Schlesinger (1966) denominó carreras legislativas discretas. Adicionalmente, el artículo argumenta que la débil institucionalización de los partidos, entendida como la monopolización de los mecanismos de selección de candidatos alrededor de las cúpulas, explica la presencia de este comportamiento político. Bajo este argumento, y contrariamente a lo que plantean las teorías de la conexión electoral y de la ambición política, las carreras legislativas discretas constituirían un patrón de conducta sistemático en algunas legislaturas de América Latina.

(co-authored with Selena Grimaldi) This article focuses on Italian regional chief executives and aims to investigate if and how the Italian regionalisation process has affected regional chief executives’ career trajectories. Our analysis is based on an original dataset on political careers of regional heads of government in Italy from 1970 to 2015. After presenting our two research expectations, we find that the direct election of regional presidents and the decentralisation process have gone hand in hand with the selection of more regional political outsiders and visible politicians as well as with a higher integration between institutional levels in terms of career paths

The circulation of the ruling class has been a relevant concern in political analysis, but investigation of the determinants of a successful career still remains relatively neglected. This article aims at filling this interpretative gap by focusing on long-term transformations of ministerial careers in Italy. By using an original dataset on ministerial careers between 1976 and 2015, the article explains the patterns of intra-governmental career by analysing the selection for higher government offices. A first descriptive analysis leads to the formulation of a working proposition based on the increasing complexity of the patterns of governmental careers. In this context, the new role of the Prime Minister as a principal in the process of ministerial selection and other procedural constraints are discussed. An ordinal logistic regression analysis confirms the validity of such a general proposition, highlighting the relevance of personalisation and policy expertise in the evolution of intra-governmental careers.

Em trabalho anterior tomou-se busca eleitoral como motivação dos partidos políticos a integrar a coalizão de governo. Foi detectado que ministros não-partidários não apresentaram candidatura e mesmo filiação partidária após saírem do governo, o que os excluiu da fase final da pesquisa. Percebeu-se, contudo, que havia diferenças entre os ministros partidários quanto à busca eleitoral em termos de experiência eleitoral, objetivos de carreira, e ambição política. O objetivo deste trabalho é aprofundar esses resultados por meio de novas análises, destrinchando a variável "candidatura anterior" e os grupos de cargos em que os ministros têm experiência e se candidatam após o gabinete.

O presente trabalho busca trazer uma revisão bibliográfica acerca do tema de carreiras políticas no Brasil, considerando principalmente ambição na ocupação de cargos no Legislativo e Executivo, e analisar o fenômeno da alternância de cargos entre as duas esferas. Procura-se identificar se a ocupação de cargos no Executivo implica em incompatibilidade com a carreira legislativa e se há uma relação direta entre a ocupação de cargos no Executivo e a força eleitoral dos parlamentares. Com esse objetivo, foi feita uma análise dos eleitos no pleito de 1998, buscando identificar, em um horizonte temporal mais contínuo, variáveis relevantes à alternância de cargos entre os dois poderes, analisando legislaturas anterior e posterior a 51ª Legislatura, buscando entender o comportamento e trajetória daqueles que optaram por renunciar seus cargos de Deputados Federais para ocupar cargos de alto escalão no Executivo (municipal, estadual ou federal). O argumento desenvolvido é que há atratividade em cargos do Legislativo e que a ambição extra-legislativa ou dinâmica pode ser explicada por variações nas oportunidades políticas e de carreira e pelo contexto histórico do país. Além disso, observa-se que as duas carreiras não são excludentes e a ocupação de cargos no Executivo não necessariamente converte-se em um resultado eleitoral positivo ao analisarmos as taxas de reeleição.

This article focuses on the patterns of parliamentary representation and careers in post-communist Ukraine. The data includes individual information on 1768 members (with substitutes) of the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, from the parliamentary elections in 1990 through to 2007. Low chances for the social upward mobility of socio-demographic groups such as women and poorly-educated people were identified, as well as the high impact of social status on inclusion in the political ruling strata, as exemplified by business elites. Furthermore, MPs with an entrepreneurial background have a greater chance of staying in parliament for three or more legislative terms. The chances of remaining in the Verkhovna Rada are also greater for former Supreme Council parliamentarians, while a high-ranking nomenklatura position has no significant effect on the status of an incumbent. Experience in a political party is crucial for a career in parliament. Parliamentarians with leading party experience prior to their recruitment are likely to obtain an incumbent status, while MPs who substitute their elected colleagues have lower chances of becoming long-standing incumbents.

The aim of this paper is to observe the explain of such type of ministers at the Spanish cabinet. In a descriptive approach, we focus the cabinet dynamic behind the ministerial appointments and the differences between the more political type of ministers and those other ones coming from outside political pathways. The presentation of the case will be delivered in three parts. First, we will present the Spanish institutional framework, to place with the predominant figure of the head of government and the weight of the parties in the life of executives. Then we will have a review of the dynamics of the cabinets, in order to present the relationship between the political and nonpolitical profile variation among ministers. Finally, we will conduct an initial analysis of the selection and deselection of ministers to understand the impact and consequences of the appointment of independent and technocratic ministers in the Spanish governments. We will start discussing the difficulties of the concepts used so far to address this problem and will set our framework for the rest of the paper.

Ce  chapitre a pour objectif de  pointer  les  grandes  lignes d'interrogation  qui  traversent  les recherches sur la sociographie des parlementaires.  Il s'ouvre sur une analyse de ce qui est généralement étudié quand on s’intéresse à ce personnel politique, et de la manière dont on s’y intéresse. La seconde partie propose  une  synthèse  des  principaux  résultats  sur  le  profil  des  parlementaires français d'hier à aujourd'hui. La suivante revient sur une question centrale dans les champs scientifique et politique contemporains : celle de la « professionnalisation » de la vie politique.