Patterns of political career movements in multi-level systems: a cross-national comparison of twenty-seven countries

ABSTRACT

We introduce the special issue and provide an extensive review of the career patterns of politicians in twenty-seven multi-level countries worldwide, the largest number ever analyzed. Based on the wider evidence we provide a new synthesis and explanation of those patterns. While supporting previous claims on some of those factors our analysis shows that political, party, and electoral system features provide the strongest explanations for divergence in the development of career movement patterns in multi-level systems worldwide. We also introduce a set of novel factors, most notably, the existence of a dominant party, power-sharing agreements, and asymmetrical federal design. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our research and identify new avenues of research on political careers and comparative federalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Political careers
• political elites
• federalism
• multilevel governance
• ambition
• multilevel countries

Acknowledgements

The data collection was partly conducted within The Australia–Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme project ‘Political careers in federal countries: methodological and theoretical challenges’, which was financially supported by the German Academic Exchange Service and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (PIs: Elena Semenova and Keith Dowding; project number: 57217420) and the Universities Australia.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 However, while true of some countries (such as Argentina), it is not so in the Mexican case (Jones, Sanguinetti, and Tommasi 2000; Diaz-Cayeros 2006).

2 Other researchers also use this typology (e.g., Botella et al. 2010; Stolz 2015; Grimaldi and Vercesi 2018).

3 In this review, we do not cover careers in the European Union, focusing rather on careers in individual countries.

4 For countries of South Asia and Southeast Asia, the influence of British parliamentarism led to the establishment of a specific type of a political system (Eastminster parliamentarism), which differs from the British Westminster system (for a post-colonial perspective on Eastminster systems, see Kumarasingham 2016).

5 This decision, among others, was a catalyst for the Tigray War (see Gemechu 2023).

6 Of course, in addition to legally binding power-sharing agreements, political families come to informal agreements about contesting political offices at various territorial levels. More than 60 percent of Pakistani federal politicians belong to a political family – that is, have relatives with experience in the federal and/or provincial legislature (Mufti and Mohsin Ali this issue). Political families also install their relatives at the local level, helping to control financial resources distributed for constituency-level work: e.g., in Venezuela (Morgan 2018) and the United Arab Emirates (Yaghi and Antwi-Boateng 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [grant number 57217420]; Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst: [grant number 57217420]; Universities Australia [grant number 57217420].