The revolving door in Brussels: a process-oriented approach to employee recruitment by interest organisations

ABSTRACT

The staff flow between the public sector and organised interests is metaphorically defined as ‘revolving door’. This paper seeks to explain variation in hiring behaviour across interest organisations (IOs). Using data from the Comparative Interest Group-survey project, we show that revolving door practices do not occur systematically across IOs but that, under specific conditions, IOs are more likely to attract employees from the public sector than others. Our main findings demonstrate that citizen organisations are more likely to hire employees with public sector background, compared with professional and business organisations. We also show that the effect of group type is resource-sensitive, as wealthy citizen groups are more likely to hire from the public sector than wealthy business organisations. Additionally, we demonstrate that contextual factors such as the degree of political involvement and the perceived complexity of the policy environment predict hiring from the public sector.

KEYWORDS:

• Hiring behaviour
• interest organisations
• revolving door

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jan Beyers, Timothy LaPira, Stefaan Walgrave, Frédéric Varone Evelien Willems and Michael Bauer for their feedback and comments on the early versions of this manuscript. We are also grateful for comments received from the participants of EUSA (2019) and from the participants of multiple workshops and webinars organised by members of the ECPR Standing Group on Interest Group, where drafts of this paper were presented. Not least of all, we are grateful to the three anonymous referees for constructive feedback and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Supporting data and materials for this article can be accessed at the Comparative Interest Group Survey https://www.cigsurvey.eu/ and are available upon request.

Notes

1 Information about the survey is available at https://www.cigsurvey.eu/data/.

2 Steps were taken by analysing the polychronic correlation matrix (see Appendix A2).

3 We ran two models without the categories ‘Background in Party Politics’, which constitute just the 7% of our sample. Results were consistent with the chosen models (see Appendix A9).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [grant number ERC-2013-CoG 616702-IBias] and the Research Foundation Flanders-Flanders [FWO-V grant number G032814N], [FWO-V grant number G062517N].

Notes on contributors

Sharon S. Belli

Sharon S. Belli is a Ph.D. Candidate in social science at the University of Antwerp (Departement of Political Science). She is part of the research group Politics and Public Governance (P&PG). She held a MA in Political Science she obtained at Central European University (2015-2017). Her research interests focus on European Union (EU) politics. Particularly, she focuses on interest representation and elite behaviour in multi-level political systems, and research methods.

Peter Bursens

Peter Bursens is a professor of political science at the Departement of Political Science. He is senior member of the Politics and Public Governance Research Group (P&PG). His research agenda focuses on European decision-making, Europeanization, federalism and democratic legitimacy of multi-level political systems. His research is embedded in the GOVTRUST Centre of Excellence, which focuses on trust and distrust in multilevel settings.