A New Macro-Micro Approach to the Study of Political Careers
Turner - Zwinkels, Tomas
DOI:
10.33612/diss.131055893
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Turner - Zwinkels, T. (2020). A New Macro-Micro Approach to the Study of Political Careers: Theoretical, Methodological and Empirical Challenges and Solutions. University of Groningen.
https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.131055893
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Chapter 4
Pathways to Power: the Role of Pre-Parliamentary
Careers and Political Human Capital in the Obtainment
of Cabinet Positions
Chapter is based on Turner‐Zwinkels, T., Mills, M.C. (2019). Pathways to Power: The Role of
Preparliamentary Careers and Political Human Capital in the Obtainment of Cabinet Positions.Legislative Studies Quarterly. 45(2), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12258
Chapter 4
Pathways to Power: the Role of
Preparliamentary Careers and
Political Human Capital in the
Obtainment of Cabinet Positions
Tomas Turner-Zwinkels, Melinda Mills
Abstract
Understanding the rise to power is central to the study of politics. However, we still know little about the career-paths of influential politicians like ministers. The literature assumes that dominant pre-parliamentary occupations (e.g., lawyer, local offices) predict promotion. We move beyond this potential ecological fallacy and suggest a perspective that emphasises the role of gatekeepers and polit-ical human capital like national politpolit-ical experience and education. We leverage complete career data of all Dutch MPs (N=1,263; 1947-2012) and study their (N=4,966) opportunities to obtain a cabinet position. A sequence analysis with fuzzy clustering reveals eight career paths in both the professional and political domain. A logistic regression analysis that uses these career-paths as predictors shows that prominent occupations and communicative experience do not constitute the pathway to minis-terial power. A university education and pre-parliamentary national political experience do. Findings support the value of political human capital theory to understand political promotion.
Understanding the rise to political power is central to the study of politics (Lasswell, 1936). The question of ‘who rises to power’ has far-reaching implications that underpin democratic processes (Swenson 1982, Kam, Bianco, Sened and Smyth 2011). However, we still know little about the ca-reer paths politicians take in the rise to influential positions like cabinet. Our study attempts to fill this gap and integrates the three key literatures of political elites, ministerial recruitment and labour market sociology. Previous research that tries to understand the selection of politicians suggests an empirical focus on the dominant occupations among political elites. This risks an ecological fallacy (Robinson 1950). We, instead of looking at positions that are common among those that reach in-fluential positions, focus on the political human capital (Becker 2009) that candidates can develop
by occupying these positions. More specifically, we suggest that MPs: who arehighly educated, have
pre-parliamentary national political experience and have been active as professional communicators are
most likely to obtain cabinet posts. We test these ideas on an new, detailed data-set that contains the complete pre-parliamentary careers of all Dutch MPs (N=1258) from 1947 to 2012, over 22 cohorts and their (N=4966) potential opportunities to obtain a cabinet position. We showcase and test the merit of using monthly, ‘complete life’ (age 18 till 65) career data. We apply sequence analysis with fuzzy clustering to simultaneously model the occurrence, duration and ordering of occupations. Subse-quently, we use a non-nested logistic regression model to determine which professional and political experience trajectories lead to the obtainment of cabinet positions while controlling for the within parliamentary career and the opportunity structure within parliament.
When it comes to understanding the career paths politicians take in the rise to influential posi-tions previous literature has so far only provided parts of the puzzle. Political elite scholars (e.g. Mills 1956, Putnam 1976, Best & Cotta 2000) have extensively studied the dominant occupations of polit-ical elites with aggregated snapshot data (see Patzelt 1999, Mackenzie 2014 for a review): looking at thefirst, last or formative occupation of representatives while taking entire parliaments as the unit
of analysis. With this aggregate lens, they have focused on dominant occupations (e.g. journalism, law & education), sectors (private/public) and political levels (local, regional- and national politics). A ‘politics-facilitating’ (Cairney 2007) perspective directs this literature. As Cairney (2007) outlines, this perspective suggests that frequently occurring occupations among ministers (law, journalism, be-ing a local representative) are inherently ‘facilitatbe-ing’ without reference to the properties that lead to this. The quiet assumption of this literature is that occupations that occur often among groups of
politicians, like ministers, are important to becoming a member of this group1. This risks an
eco-logical fallacy (Robinson 1950) because it entails the incorrect assumption that a group-level career characteristic among ministers tell us something about individual level career dynamics. If, for ex-ample, we see that a local politics background is much more dominant among ministers than people
1It is worthwhile noting here that authors themselves (e.g. Best and Cotta 2000, Patzelt 2000) are often careful in
the way they have talked about these results. This does however not withstand the fact that - by lack of better analytical strategies - we are left with relatively speaking less informative results that are quite widely interpreted to mean something that the authors themselves might have been careful to not explicitly claim
that worked full-time as a national party aide, we might conclude that the first is important, while the second is not. This argument however falls apart when we realise that there are probably about
1∗ 103positions in local politics but only a handful of positions in national parties.
In a second more recent literature, ministerial recruitment scholars have used individual level data to study the characteristics of politicians who make it to (Kam et al. 2011, Galasso 2011, Smith and Mar-tin 2016) or manage to hold on to (Berlinski, Dewan & Dowding 2010) ministerial office. However, this literature has typically not focused on the pre-parliamentary career paths of political candidates and has thus measured them in a relatively coarse-grained manner. Typically deductively classifying entire career paths into two categories, were candidates for ministerial positions are for example ei-ther ‘political insiders’ or ‘expert outsiders’ (Blondel and Tiebault 1991) or with biographical detailed ‘N=1’ narratives (e.g. van der Horst 2007).
A third literature, labour market sociology, has developed comprehensive methods (Mills 2011) as well as an extensive theory of human capital (Becker 2009) to study the upward career mobility of non-political workers (Sicherman & Galor 1990, Diprete & Eirich 2006). This literature highlights how previous career paths impact upward career mobility. Theoretically, we know from this literature that gatekeepers hire candidates with career sequences that signal for the career domain at hand relevant skills and resources. With sequence analysis these scholars also developed the methodological means needed to study complete career ladders. However, these theories and tools have so far only scarcely (see Ohmura, Bailer, Miessner, Selb 2017 for a notable methodological exception) been put to use in the political domain.
We integrate these three parallel literatures and break open the black box of ‘what type of career it takes’ to rise ministerial positions. We use the distinction between dominant occupations, sectors and political levels from the political elite literature, the practice of studying individual politicians from the ministerial selection literature, and the theory of human capital and sequence analysis methodology to study complete career ladders from labour market sociology.
Likewise, this paper contributes to these three literatures. The need to study career ladders is repeatedly recognized in the political elite literature (Patzelt 1999, Putnam 1976, Stolz 2003) but in practice the focus is on aggregated snapshot data. We use complete career data, which allows us to sketch a nuanced image of the extent to which prominent deductive career typologies (e.g. ‘expert outsiders’ versus ‘partisan insiders’) capture the full reality of pre-parliamentary and pre-ministerial career paths. We check if aggregated snapshots have more than mere descriptive value by inspecting what the dominant occupations of Dutch ministers teach us about the likelihood of MPs with these backgrounds to become a minister. In the interest of the ministerial recruitment literature we apply a more fine-grained conceptualization of previous career paths. Building on previous studies of political careers that claim that certain experienced is required for ministerial offices, we not only look at the occurrence (Kam 2009; Kam et al. 2010), duration (MacKenzie 2011) or number of years in one office
human capital that they have built up throughout their career paths that constitute their valence and political value.
Our first central expectation explores the legitimacy of focusing on dominant occupations. We confirm that many Dutch ministers have local and regional experience. However, counter to earlier suggestions in the literature, we find that MPs with this background are relatively unlikely to make it to cabinet. Our second contribution is that we use fine-grained career data to show details in the path-ways to power that have so far remained unexplored in earlier work. We were able to classify 86.6% and 91% of Dutch pre-parliamentary professional labour market and political career paths, respec-tively, each into eight empirically derived types. In a third and final set of predictions we explore the value of ‘political human capital’ theory to understand promotion to cabinet / ministerial positions.
We focus oneducation and two additional key political human capital dimensions of communication
skills and pre-parliamentary national political contacts. Politicians and career types that stand out in
terms of these types of political human capital emerged from the data. We use these to confirm that pre-parliamentary national political experience (for example as an assistant to a minister) is predictive of obtaining a ministerial office. Communicative experience is, however, found to have a negative ef-fect, which we tentatively attribute to outside career alternatives of MPs with these backgrounds. We also confirm that being highly educated is strongly related to the obtainment of a ministerial office by parliamentarians. Finally, our results suggest that compensatory dynamics play a role in political promotion.
Pathways to Political Power
In the section that follows, we contrast the dominant occupations perspective with an alternative political human capital perspective. We introduce the institutional context of Dutch political careers and scrutinize the question of what it takes – in terms of education, communication skills and pre-parliamentary national political experience – for Dutch MPs to obtain a ministerial office.
The Institutional Context of Dutch Political Careers
Before we continue below to describe the merits of an political human capital perspective and the kinds data and analytical approach required to test our ideas, it is essential to understand the Dutch context.
The Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy, where the head of state has transferred power to cabinet ministers. Government consists of three levels: local, regional and national. Most national parties have representatives on all three levels. At the national level, legislative power is divided into the lower house (’Tweede Kamer’, 150 members) and the upper house (’Eerste Kamer’, 75 members). Upper house membership is a part-time job with modest financial compensation. Serving in the lower house, which is where all the politicians in this study at some point resided, is a full-time, well-paid job.
Election progresses through an open-list proportional representation system. Thus, it is possible for the electorate to directly elect candidates into the lower house, though, this rarely happens in practice. This selection process was - over the period under consideration (1947-2012) - less centralised than is commonly assumed in the comparative literature. The characterisation of the Netherlands as ‘one large electoral district’, only holds true for more recent years. Dutch political parties only properly started centralising candidate selection around the 1990’s. In the national elections of 1983 and 1989 for example, the average percentage of names repeated between election list across electoral districts was only 53.1% (analysis available upon request).
Individual politicians in the Netherlands do not have publicly known policy positions nor do they have personal constituencies. As such political recruitment is likely to occur largely independent from personal policy profiles (e.g. Downs 1957) and constituency considerations. The key consideration for parties when they are selecting political candidates is to select politicians that are likely to be of political value to the policy goals of the party; an important characteristic of the Dutch national parliament and its cabinet, which we leverage in this paper.
Another key characteristic of the Dutch political landscape is that it is a multi-party system. Usu-ally more than five parties hold seats in parliament and within the observation period (1947-2012) no party ever won enough seats to ensure a single party majority. Coalition governments generally re-quire two or three parties to make a governing coalition. Once the coalition is established, a cabinet is formed. The distribution of seats in parliament plays a key role in the negotiation for cabinet seats. Currently, most cabinet members are recruited from the lower house. In the past - at the start of our observation period (1947-2012) about half of the cabinet had previously sat in parliament (Secker 1991). MPs need to resign from their position in parliament when accepting a cabinet post. Cabinet positions are influential and prestigious, and parliamentarians typically accept them when offered. There are no constitutional limitations on the composition of the cabinet. Cabinets do not face an initial formal vote of confidence from parliament. Dutch cabinets consist out of full minister as well as junior-ministers. Since 1973 the number of junior-ministers roughly equals the number of full min-isters (analysis available upon request).
The gatekeepers to a position in the cabinet are the future prime minster and faction leaders of the coalition parties. Their decisions are the main determinants of this process. Although the outcome needs to be credible to both party members and the general electorate, the outcomes of this long process are generally acknowledged as carefully negotiated, and are therefore not subjected to strong outside scrutiny.
Figure 1: Analysing entire career paths versus the classic snapshot approach
Examining Career Trajectories by Occurrence, Duration and Sequence of
Po-sitions
Existing research has often simplified careers by using aggregated snapshots. Various studies have ei-ther looked at the occupation prior to election (Cairney 2007, Mellors 1978, Best and Cotta 2000, Criddle 1997, Norris & Lovenduski 2003, Van Den Berg 1983; Galasso & Nannicini 2011), the longest or ‘formative’ occupation (King 1981, Cairney 2007), the occupation right after education (Van Den Berg 1983) or the occurrence of instrumental or ‘stepping stone’ occupation(s) at any point in the career (Allen 2012). The most comprehensive attempts use either a combination of such snapshots (e.g. Matthews 1960) or qualitative classification schemes (Canon 1990). Typically the literature places importance on the occurrence of one job. Figure 1 illustrates this classic ‘snapshot’ approach and com-pares it to a complete approach. In a recent paper Ohmura, Bailer, Meissner & Selb (2017) have used sequence analysis to analyse political careers. Their focus is however more descriptive than ours and they do not use fuzzy clustering, which renders their classifications less reliable.
The literature’s primary focus on one job is arguably problematic. Indeed, next tooccurrence, also
theduration, order and co-occurrence of particular (non)political jobs is important. It takes time to
accumulate political human capital. A candidate with ten years of experience is considerably more
valuable than someone who has held such a position for only a couple of months. Thesequencing or
order of positions is likewise central. Stable upward mobility, as opposed to fragmented employment,
has been identified by labour market sociologists as an important signal of value on the job market (DiPrete & Eirich 2006). In sum, contrary to previous studies of political careers that argue that it is simply the occurrence (Kam 2009; Kam etal. 2010), duration (MacKenzie 2011) or number of years in a position that gives rise to MPs gaining ministerial positions, we anticipate instead that it is the entire career trajectory of politicians and the anticipated long-term political value of the candidates that underlies political promotion.
Dominant Occupations as a Theory of Political Career Mobility
We know from previous literature that certain occupational backgrounds are ‘dominant’ among MPs and ministers, especially law professions (Putnam 1976; Kurtz & Simon 2007), journalism, educa-tion (Mellors 1978) and senior posieduca-tions in the naeduca-tional civil service (van den Berg & van den Braak 2004). Holding an ‘instrumental occupation’ close to politics has also been identified as an important predictor for political promotion (e.g., Allen 2012).
Such work takes a dominant occupations’ perspective. The key but somewhat dangerous, strat-egy that underlies these contributions is that the dominant occupations of political elites teach us how individuals make it into the elite. Matthews’ (1960) for example produces a “group portrait” or “col-lective biography” (idem p. 12) of U.S. senators to learn ‘how politicians make it’ to the U.S. Senate (idem p. 8). Schlesinger (1966) sees that certain U.S. states occur prominently in American politi-cal elite and concludes that regional backgrounds ‘structure ambition’. Blondel and Thiebault (1991) compare the dominant career backgrounds of ministers between countries to learn about ‘routes to ministerial offices’ (p. 55). Bovens (2006) and Bovens & Wille (2010) observe the Dutch national po-litical elite to be increasingly highly educated and conclude that a university education is needed to obtained high status offices. However, these arguments are ecologically flawed: a logical fallacy in the interpretation of statistical data where inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from [an] inference for the group to which those individuals belong (Robinson 1950). This concern is well illustrated by Cairney (2007) who warns against seeing certain occupations as inherently politics facilitating and suggests a refocus on “the properties of these occupations” (idem p.217).
This reasoning occurs prominently as an empirical strategy in the field. It is thus important to explore its consequences. Indeed, turning this into a causal statement, it is possible that some
occu-pations inherently facilitate political careers. While we would consider this a ‘thin theory2’ – in the
sense that it contains little reference as to why this might be the case – the thought is worth testing. Building on the dominant occupations perspective, we thus formulate the general expectation that occupational backgrounds that occur frequently among politicians in a certain political position are predictive of entry into that position. Or, when applied to ministerial recruitment, the key idea that:
Hypothesis 1 Dutch MPs with a political and professional career background that occurs frequently
among Dutch ministers will have a higher probability of obtaining a ministerial office than those with other political and professional occupational histories.
Support for this hypothesis would give merit to the ‘dominant occupation’ simplification that underlies a lot of the current literature. A lack of support would further strengthen Patzelt (1999) and Cairney (2007) their warning against taking a naive politics facilitating’ perspective.
2In fact, the idea that certain occupations inherently facilitate politics is not actually a theoretical claim because it is
Political Human Capital and the Mediated Political Labour Market
In contrast to the idea that certain pre-parliamentary jobs carry inherent value, we propose that path-ways provide a key opportunity to build political human capital (Becker 2009, Norris 1997 p. 90) that can be utilized to convince gatekeepers of a person’s ability to perform politically valuable
ac-tions. Building on Becker (2006) we define political human capital as the ’acquired stock of skills,
knowledge, contact and resources that enable access to political positions through an individuals’ ability to perform actions that produce political value’ (freely adopted from Becker 20093). It is worth noting
that the idea of ‘politics facilitating’ occupations and political human capital are not in disagreement with each other. The first just leaves unspecified what the latter tries to make explicit.
Political human capital theory is not only grounded in career mobility research (Becker 2009; Sicherman & Galor 1990), but also underlies much of the reasoning in the political elite and minis-terial selection literature, albeit mostly latently, not explicitly. Indeed, in the political elite literature, candidates are considered to possess ‘expertise’, believed to be related to their ‘educational credentials’, ‘occupational background’ and ‘exposure to relevant political roles’. Others emphasized the need to be “attractive to the electorate” (Hillebrand 1992), widely studied as the ‘political valence’ of candi-dates (e.g., Jacobson 1989; Galasso & Nannicini 2011). Yet others see practical skills like the ‘ability to run a campaign’ and ‘how to operate in a political position’ (Keane and Merlo, 2010) when, for example, ministers “face a hostile parliament” (Dowding and Dumont 2008, p.7) as crucial.
The idea that candidates differ in their valence or competence, for example in dealing with certain policy issues, is likewise central to the ministerial selection literature. Here it has been identified that building ‘loyalty’ and signalling a ‘strong track’ record within a political party is crucial for those that want to be considered for ministerial positions (Kam 2009; Kam et al. 2010). Political positions ‘allow politicians to build a reputation’ and for the electorate and party members to ‘screen’ for the best candidates (Galasso & Nannicini 2011). Party loyalty or those closely aligned with the party line or party’s ‘uncovered set’ have been shown to progress to ministerial positions (Kam et al. 2010). Who reads this literature with a political human capital lens recognizes the concept of ‘capital’ as central to the literature’s latent reasoning. However, it has not been subject of explicit reasoning, nor has it
been central to empirical investigations4.
We believe that taking an explicit political human capital perspective on career movements in the political labour market can further shape an understanding of upward political career mobility.
It emphasises how getting to influential positions requires candidates to convince gatekeepers of the
political value they bring with them. Especially in the Netherlands, with its open-list proportional representation system that gives a lot of power to gatekeepers (Leijenaar & Niemoller 2003). Labour market sociology considers this a ‘mediated labour market’, where careers are bounded by previous
3Becker’ definitions speaks about the stock of resources embodied in the ability to perform labour so as to produce
economic value.
4for one notable exception see the paper by Claveria & Verge (2015) in which the concept ‘political capital’ is explicitly
used to understand the value of hiring ex-ministers for post-ministerial offices.
career history, occupational identity and institutional constraints imposed by gatekeepers (King et al. 2005). From such work we also know that the early career impacts later career opportunities. Human capital is known to facilitate the accumulation of even more human capital (Diprete & Eirich 2006). Human capital does not decay (much) over time, like one’s level of education (Bovens 2014), or debating skills (Black 1972). The pre-parliamentary careers of politicians are as such likely to have a long-term career impact. For example on the likelihood of promotion from parliament to cabinet.
Political human capital theory suggests that particularly those MPs with a pre-parliamentary ca-reer path that exposed them to politically valuable capital are more likely to obtain ministerial office. The key question that then follows is what political human capital is valuable for political careers. We will now review some suggested answers to that question.
General and Specific Political Human Capital and Promotion to Cabinet
Human capital theory states that individuals can increase their human capital through education andexperience (Becker 2009). Education is a form ofgeneral human capital (a resource valued by all
employers) while experience leads tospecific human capital: skills, knowledge, contact and resources
that are valuable in specific contexts. An inspection of the political elites and ministerial recruitment literature reveals a key role for one key type of general capital (education) and two key types of specific political human capital (national experience and communication skills).
Education AsWesterndemocraciesmodernizedknowledgebecameanincreasinglycrucialresource for political careers. Higher education provides direct and indirect access to this resource for individ-uals and fosters its accumulation in contexts beyond the university by providing individindivid-uals with the cognitive skills to understand, interpret and store new information. Being highly educated has been coined a crucial resource for those wishing to become part of the political elite (e.g. Bovens 2014) and is thought to be specifically important in the rise to ministerial position (e.g. Kurtz & Simon 2007, Kam et al. 2010, Bovens & Wille 2010). Theoretically, most work emphasises the role of both supply
side factors and demand side factors.Supply has changed over time as the percentage of citizens with a
higher education has increased in the general population (Bovens and Wille 2010). Ministerial offices
are also said todemand characteristics that are facilitate by a university education. For example, the
social status and cultural capital (Bakema & Secker 1988, Gaxie & Godmer 2007) and the verbal pro-ficiency that comes with a university education (Bovens and Wille 2010). Building on this literature we expect that higher education will be crucial political capital for ministerial obtainment. Hence, we formulate the first political capital theory-based hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2 MPs with a university degree have a higher probability of obtaining a cabinet post than
those that are not university educated.
percentage is higher then in the Dutch parliament (Bovens & Wille 2010). Still, our test of this hypoth-esis is novel in two key ways. First, our test uses disaggregated data and applies time‐sensitive statistical methodology. MPs typically enter cabinet after roughly 4 terms in parliament (see appendix C). This makes comparing percentages of higher educated MPs and ministers at the same point in time risky. We use individual level data. Second, verbal proficiency is suggested to be one of the key ways in which a higher education facilitates promotion to cabinet. If this is true then controlling for experience in communicative jobs - as we do in this paper - might (partially) render away the effect of a university education.
Pre-parliamentary National Political Experience A second key type of political capital emerg-ing from the literature are social relations with other politicians. Particularly those active in national politics. From sociological career research we know that a threefold underlying mechanism is
respon-sible for the career value of contacts in the regular job domain: information about positions
trav-els through social networks (Granovetter 1973), positions are given as an act ofreciprocity (Portes
1998, also see Hillebrand 1992) and social networks provide opportunities forenforceable trust (Portes,
1998). The latter might be of particular importance in the political domain, and the principal-agent like dependencies characterizing ministerial recruitment (Andeweg 2002, Berlinski, Dewan & Dowd-ing 2010). Full-time national political positions require politicians to ‘give up’ alternatives before en-try into parliament. Because of this, candidates with pre-parliamentary national political experience become dependent on their political network for career safety. The party can ‘make or break’ these politicians. This makes them controllable and thus valuable, particularly for cabinet posts because it increases the relative power that the party (leader) holds over the candidate. Additionally, politicians that are already embedded in the national party might also profit from this with additional resources, which is also part of their political human capital. On basis of this specified version of human capital theory, we can thus also formulate the following expectation:
Hypothesis 3 MPs with a pre-parliamentary political career defined primarily by national political
experience will have a higher probability to obtain ministerial office than those who followed other pre-parliamentary political career trajectories.
Hypothesis 3 is concerned with the occurrence and duration of pre-parliamentary national polit-ical experience. The order/sequence of this experience is also likely to be important. This is particu-larly true for pre-parliamentary national political experience, which might need to happen at a critical
stage in the career because contacts dilute over time as network5positions change (e.g. the minister
5We are aware that there are more direct ways to measure one’s position in a network. For example an ‘interlocking
directorate’ (e.g. Freitag 1975) operationalization where ties represent shared board membership. This however requires biographical information from not only MPs but also from other national politicians that never occupied a seat in parlia-ment. We informational currently do not have access to this information.
you worked for retired). Such a ‘decay of contact capital’ has been demonstrated in sociological stud-ies (e.g. King et al, 2005, p. 1001), and has also been suggested in the political domain (Niklasson 2005). Therefore, we expect that:
Hypothesis 4 The likelihood of obtaining cabinet position is especially high for politicians with
pre-parliamentary national political experience concentrated at the end of the pre-pre-parliamentary political career.
Communication skills The second type of political human capital occurring prominently are communication skills, like debating skills (Black 1972), and the ability to give a charismatic speech (Weber & Eisenstadt 1968; Bovens 2014). Indeed, although this descriptive literature itself does not immediately shed light on what it exactly is that makes professions in journalism, law and educa-tion (Allen 2012; Cairney 2007) occur as frequently as they do, many see communicaeduca-tion skills as the explanation for their prominence. Alternatively, ‘communicative’ professions also carry a social capi-tal element. They expose MPs to law makers, bureaucrats, or other people whose voice matter in the
policy-making process, particularly for journalists6. Previous work emphasising the importance of
po-litical valence and attractiveness of (ministerial) candidates (Hillebrand 1992, Jacobson 1989; Galasso & Nannicini 2011) also points to the importance of communication skills. This leads to our third political human capital inspired proposition:
Hypothesis 5 MPs with a professional career defined by occupations where strong communication
skills are essential will have a higher probability of obtaining cabinet position than those with a history of primarily non-communicative jobs7.
Compensation Dynamics Key to the idea of political human capital is that gatekeepers ‘score’ candidates on one general political value dimension. These dimensions can have sub-elements (e.g. communications skills) but in its core all of these elements are assumed to be aggregated into one gen-eral ovgen-erall dimension against which all candidates are measured. This would mean that candidates that score low on one dimension of political capital (e.g. not having a university education) should be able to compensate with more political human capital on another dimension. Such compensatory dynamics are often observed in regular labour markets, for example when candidates compensate for a lack of education with on-the-job training (Becker 2009). We expect similar dynamics to be at work in the political domain. Thus, taking our test of the value of political human capital theory a step
further, we formulate the expectation8that:
6we unfortunately - despite our long time-frame lack the statistical power to reliably estimate effects for each of these
occupational groups separately.
7In Appendix D we check if this effect changes over time.
8Please note that hypothesis 6 is purposefully formulated as a one-way test. This might seem counter-intuitive because
Hypothesis 6 Having a pre-parliamentary career defined by either national political experience or communications skills is especially important for the obtainment of cabinet positions for MPs that do
nothave a university degree.
Method
Data and sample
To test these hypotheses we use information from the Dutch Parliamentary Documentation Cen-tre (PDC). We digitalized key parts of this online archive to get our hands on complete career data and characteristics such as sex, education and age. We included all members of the Dutch National Parliament between 1947 and 2012, spanning a total of 22 parliamentary terms.
We use the Dutch case for three key reasons. First, trends in the Dutch cases offer nice coverage
both in terms of thelevel of centralisation(fromrelativelydecentralisedselectiontoparliamentaround
1950 to highly centralised selection in 2012) and the extent to which ministers are recruited fromoutside
or within parliament (from a situation of where about 50% of ministers was recruited from outside in
the 1950 to one where the far majority is recruited has previously been a member of parliament in 2012). This helps the generalisability of our findings. Second, because of the aforementioned characteristics of the electoral system gatekeepers control the election process. This means that in the Dutch case the preferences of the electorate only introduce minimal ‘noise’ into our measurements. This makes the Netherlands is a particular helpful cases to study the preferences of party gatekeepers. Third and finally, data-availability played an important role in our case selection. Reporting requirements and an active interest by the Dutch political science community has let to situation where for all Dutch MPs highly detailed pre-parliamentary career information is available not only in the political domain (which is more common, e.g. Ohmura et.al. 2018 for Germany) but also in the professional ‘non-political’ domain. These three characteristic make the Dutch case a particularly good cases to study the questions at hand.
From this data we produced three subsequent samples. The first sample is a recurrent-event
(see Mills 2011)person-month career file, starting at monthly observations from age 18. We divided
MP’s pre-parliamentary activities according to two categories:professional labour market job episodes
(N=5,295) andpolitical job episodes (N=6,605). This distinction is important because politicians
of-ten have parallel political positions and professional jobs9. In both domains, when there was overlap
in the timing of jobs, we adopted the decision rule to have the higher status position overwrite the
that national political experience is particularly important for MPs without a university education as well as that having a higher education is of particular importance for those that lack national political experience. Statistically however, this entails the same comparison (i.e. we are comparing the same group means).
9Analysis with a combined state-space resulted in a problematically large number of categories. Career clusters did not
delineate along relevant dimensions illustrating high levels of information loss (available upon request). For the erratic co-occurrence pattern of the two typologies see Appendix E
lower status one10. After missing data was accounted for (see Appendix A), our final sample included
4,315 labour market job episodes and 4,050 political job episodes. We only include experiences before parliament to avoid the arbitrary decision of until when to measure the experience of those that did not make it a cabinet positions.
From this detailed career data a second,MP sample, was generated. This sample contains all
(N=1,263) unique members of the Dutch National Parliament between 1947 and 2012. It encompasses both basic characteristics and an detailed career classification for each MP. For the latter sequence analysis was used, which is described in detail below.
The third analytical sample we use is arepeated measures sample that contains all (N=4,966)
pos-sible opportunities that Dutch MPs had to obtain a cabinet position after entry into parliament.
Op-portunities are all occasions at which an MP’s party was part of the governing coalition in the ten11
subsequent parliaments after entry, including the first parliament itself. We exclude as an opportunity those observations in which politicians are not alive anymore or have passed the age of 80. Because party leaders of governing parties only select members of their own parties for ministerial offices we furthermore restricted the sample to include only those parliamentary cohorts in which a politician’ party was in the governing coalition. As a result of these sample restrictions all MPs in the opportu-nities sample are actually at risk to obtain a cabinet position.
To avoid sample selection on our dependent variable (obtainment of a cabinet position) we only include politicians in our analytical sample that previously sat in parliament. Our target population thus explicitly does not include ministers that were recruited without having ever been in parliament.
Measurement of variables
Variables for the sequence analysis
Political jobs. Political jobs were classified to distinguish between local, regional, national and Eu-ropean politics. This in accordance with the political elite literature’s key interest in political levels (e.g. Best and Cotta 2000, Stolz 2003). Likewise following the literature we distinguish between rep-resentative positions (posts that require election) and non-reprep-resentative positions. We furthermore distinguish whether someone is ‘active part-time’ or whether they are ‘active full-time’. The result is
a total of 12 political job types: 1)local politics active, 2) local politics full-time, 3) local politics in faction,
4)regional politics active, 5) regional politics full-time, 6) regional politics in faction, 7) national politics active, 8) national upper house, 9) national politics full-time, 10) European politics active, 11) European politics full-time; and, 12) European politics in faction. (see Appendix B for more details).
10In the professional domain this was determined via the ISEI-08 ranking of the ISCO-08 coding. In the political
domain, elected jobs overwrote non-elected, and those in which many people are represented overwrite lesser ones.
11”An inspection of the data revealed that no MP in the sample has ever obtained a cabinet seat later then this, see the
Professional jobs werecodedusingtheInternationalStandardClassificationofOccupations(ISCO-08) (ILO, 2012), which was extended to include politically relevant categories (see Appendix B). Given our aim to examine if prominent distinctions from the political elite literature have more than just
descriptive value, we aggregated these over 700 different ISCO-08 job codes to differentiateprivate
andpublic-sector jobs, special interest and journalism. We also differentiate between jobs that require
extensive communication skills, using previously established categorizations12. This ‘communication
skill sensitive’ state space allows a cluster with professional communicators to emerge if such a clus-ter exists, which we need to test hypothesis 5-6. The resulting state-space distinguishes between eight
professional occupation types: 1)regular private sector jobs (e.g., CEOs), 2) communicative private
sec-tor jobs (e.g., lawyers, PR professionals), 3) regular public secsec-tor jobs (e.g., manager at ministries, policy
administrator), 4)communicative public sector jobs (e.g. teaching, judges), 5) regular special interest
jobs (e.g., project manager at NGO), 6) communicative special interest jobs (e.g., PR professional at
union), 7)journalism (e.g., print media, television) and 8) other jobs (see Appendix B for a detailed
overview).
Variables for the regression analysis
Obtainment of a cabinet position The dependent variable in the second part of our analysis is
entry into cabinet13. The variable is measured on a dichotomous scale (0-1), were obtaining a cabinet
position refers to a score of 1 (one) and a score of 0 (zero) means that no cabinet position is held in this
specific parliament. Of all (N=1263) politicians in the sample, 20.0% (n=252)ever obtained a cabinet
position. Of all N=4,966 chances to do so in theopportunities sample, 6.82% resulted (n=339) in a
cabinet post.
Party membership was taken from our file of time-varyingParty membership information. Initial
analyses showed Dutch politicians switch between political parties on a semi-regular basis (also see Turner-Zwinkels et.al 2020). Given aforementioned sample selection criteria, our resulting analytical sample contains all parties that ever were in a governing coalition. We also include predecessor and descendant parties. The resulting parties in our sample are PPR (Green), PvdA (Labour), D66 and VVD (left and right wing liberal parties respectively), ARP, CHU, CDA, KVP and CU (Christian), LPF, PVV (Populists) and SGP (conservatives).
The level of Education when entering parliament was taken from our educational career file. We used ISCED 2011 (International Standard Classification of Education) classification (Schneider 2009). This scheme distinguishes between ISCED 0 to 8, the main groups of educational degrees, which
12As a guide we used the specification by van der Werfhorst and Kraaykamp (2001). Coding was conducted in
consul-tation with occupational coding experts (e.g., Prof. H.B.G. Ganzeboom) using the coding platform CodeThing.net
13For 91 individuals (9.17%) a State Secretary position was the highest cabinet position they obtained; similarly there
are 133 (13.41%) Ministers and 13 (1.31%) Prime Ministers in the final sample
we collapsed these into the two categories:University education (ISCED 7 & 8), and not university educated (ISCED 1 to 6). Whereas in the UK or the US attending Oxbridge or Ivy League schools
are predictors of upward political mobility (Kam et al. 2010, Kurtz & Simon 2007), the Netherlands lacks such ranked universities.
Parliamentary term describes when a politician was in parliament. Each term starts at the
in-auguration day of the parliament and ends the day before inin-auguration of the next parliament. In
parliament is a dummy (1 = yes, 0 =no) indicating whether a politician is currently in parliament.
This is the case for 45.13% (n=2241) of the observations in the opportunities sample.Tenure refers to
the number of times a politician has been in parliament, with 0 representing the first time a politicians was in parliament.
Number of seats available (M = 11.54, SD = 5.18) reflects the total number of seats that a politician’ party managed to negotiate for the cabinet. The distribution of seats in parliament plays a key role in the negotiation for cabinet seats.
Number of competitors (M = 73.80, SD = 45.53) reflects the total number of other parliamentar-ians in the same party as subject that - looking at the typically sweet-spot of entry into parliament 2 to 4 terms ago (see appendix C - is also ‘in the running’ for a cabinet post.
left right To control for the ideology of political party we use the left/right score from the parl-gov.org data (M = 5.47, SD = 1.35).
Gender 23.33% of the politicians in our sample are female.
Analytical methods
Our analytical approach involved two steps. In the first step sequence analysis - described in detail in
a moment - was used on theperson-month career file to analyse both the professional labour market
pathways and political pathways. The result is MP-level data with two classifications of job trajectories
for each MP: one in thepolitical domain and one in the professional domain. In the second step, using
the criteria outlined above, we merge these pathway classifications into ourrepeated measures sample
and engage in a logistic regression analysis predicting the probability of entry into cabinet position. We use sequence analysis (which captures occurrence, duration and order) to generate the main independent variables instead of using simple experience counts (duration e.g. Mackenzie 2011) and dummies (occurrence) (Aisenbrey & Fasang 2010; Blanchard, Bühlmann & Gauthier 2014). This ap-proach is necessary for three key reasons. First, with its focus on complete career trajectories, hypoth-esis 1 demands a method that takes into account the complete career sequences of politicians. Second,
the desire to understand the impact of having pre-parliamentary national political experience (Hy-pothesis 3) especially towards the end of the career (Hy(Hy-pothesis 4), requires insight into order effects. Representing this information as a count (years national experience) or a dummy (any national ex-perience) variable approach would inflate the number of variables needed far beyond the available
degrees or freedom14. A third key reason, which applies to all hypotheses, is the necessity to
statisti-cally control for order effects. General order effects are both likely to occur15and to bias both count
and dummy based beta-estimates when not controlled for.
The use of Sequence analysis and fuzzy clustering to extract pathways. We conducted a se-quence analysis using the TraMiner package in R (Gabadinho et al. 2010). First, we produced an NxN sized distance matrix representing the similarity between the career pathways of politicians. We then used this dissimilarity matrix to classify career types maximising between cluster dissimilarities. Given our interest in occurrence, duration and order, it was most appropriate to use LCS (Longest Common Sub-sequence) as the similarity measure. The decision to use LCS also entails the decision
to ignore career gaps (unemployment)16. The results are robust to using other Optimal Matching
(OM) specifications (available upon request).
A key innovation needed for our analysis is that for the splitting algorithm, we use fuzzy clustering instead of hierarchical clustering. The reason for this is that fuzzy clustering provides membership coefficients, not hard categories, which allows uncertain cases to be grouped together in a residual cluster. For this we used a membership cut-off value of 0.95, representing our desire for a ‘confident’
classification17. This method enables the existence of a residual cluster. As a result of this the core
career clusters do not contain ‘rest’ cases. These rest cases followed a career path rather different from all observed career types and should thus not be classified as one of them.
To get theoretically meaningful career cluster we used a two-step procedure. As opposed to using a data driven explained variance based procedures such as the ‘elbow criteria’ (Tibshirani, Walther
and Hastie 2001) we adopted a ‘down18-up19procedure’. This procedure signifies the idea that the
optimal number of clusters depends on both the empirical diversity of the sequence data (captured by
the down steps) and the desired theoretical focus (captured by the up steps)20. This procedure leads –
14Sequence analysis captures occurrence, duration, and order as well as possible interactions. If we would represent a
‘j’ state space this way, we need 2 ∗ (j((j!)) variables. A 8(= j) job space thus requires 6.4105variables.
15There are order effects when certain career states only have value when another specific career states is a predecessors.
For example, the necessity to have experience in a local council to be a successful Alderman.
16OM alternatives that do use information about career gaps tend to cluster on periods of inactivity. This is undesirable
in our case as political careers have quite some non-informative inactivity.
17This allows a Bonferroni-like adjustment to the clustering which assures that the overall level of false assignment is
below a certain level (0.05 in our case). As such, we are confident that the obtained classification reveals real differences between politicians in terms of their pre-parliamentary pathway to parliament.
18The first (down) step is to increase the number of clusters until each sub-cluster has clearly recognizable boundaries.
E.g. all in the cluster started in local and ended in regional -politics.
19In the second (up) step we aggregate the clusters to reflect hypotheses. Our ‘upward stop criteria’ was to only combine
clusters whose members were exposed to the same political capital in the same order (see appendix 2).
20Silhouette plots show low structure for ‘local’ and ‘regional –representatives’ (they combine statically different but
if empirical reality allows21– to delineated clusters with clear characteristic, which optimises internal
validity.
Logistic regression. In the second part of the analysis, we test our key hypotheses by estimating the likelihood that MPs obtain a cabinet position in a specific term. The unit of analysis is all possible
opportunities MPs had to obtain a cabinet position. The variable to be predicted is the obtainment of a cabinet position (1 = yes, 0 = no). We build up this model in six steps. The key predictors are the two
classifications derived from the sequence analysis22.
In the first three steps (model 1, 2, 3 and 4) we develop the control model. We subsequently add
controls for the opportunity structure (model 2,number of seats available), the within parliamentary
career (model 3,tenure, in parliament23), and party ideology (left right) static individual level
charac-teristics (model 4,age, gender). In model 4 we also add the dummy not university educated, which we
use to test hypothesis 2 and 6. We then subsequently add thepolitical (model 5) and the professional
(model 6) pathway classifications from part one to the model. We test hypothesis 1 and, 2 to 5 with model 6.
Our key interest here is to find out what groups are most likely to become a cabinet member. Each hypothesis requires different groups to be compared against each other. To get at these key compar-isons we calculate derived estimates and their confidence intervals with the Delta Method (Casella & Berger 2001). We focus specifically on four contrasts. To test hypothesis 1 we inspect the probability of MPs the enter cabinet when they have a dominantly occurring pre-parliamentary pathway. Second,
we test ifhaving a university degree increases the relative chances of MPs (hypothesis 2). Third and
fourth, we compare odds and estimated probabilities between those with and without
communica-tive (hypothesis 5) and national political pathways (hypothesis 3). Finally, in the fifth and last contrast
calculation, we calculate the specific effect of having anational and communicative pathway has for
(not) university educated politicians to test the compensation hypothesis (hypothesis 6).
substantially similar career types) and medium structure for other clusters. Available upon request.
21A key - not trivial - question in pursuing the investigation of a large volume of political career data is the question to
what extent patterns were to be expected. So far, two rather divergent images of this exist in the literature. Some studies suggest that the diversity is limited (i.e., the ‘political insider’ vs. the ‘expert outsider’). On the other hand, we find single case studies/autobiographies which emphasises the uniqueness of each career (e.g. van der Horst 2007). It it thus not a given that fine-grained political career data can actually be harnessed into discrete categories.
22It might not have escaped the reader’ attention that this strategy assumes that our sequence analysis will reveal the
existence of pre-parliamentary career pathways that are clearly delineated among theoretically relevant dimensions (e.g. the emergence of a career cluster that clearly stands out in terms of non-parliamentary national political experience). This strategy is somewhat risky, as there is no certainty a-priori that all of the required career clusters will emerge. There is no problem when career clusters that are clearly delineated among dimension of interest do emerge. They can then simply be used. It is however also possible that the career cluster that would be needed to test certain hypotheses do not emerge.
23Although not the key analytical focus of this paper, we spent substantive effort to appropriately control for the typical
The political and professional pathways to parliament of Dutch
MPs
Our first set of results concerns a detailed classification of professional and political pathways. The results of our detailed sequence analysis suggest that there is substantive yet patterned diversity in
both theprofessional and the political domain. In either domain we were able to empirically classify
about 90% of pre-parliamentary careers into a discrete set of eight pathways that share substantive empirical and theoretical similarities.
The Political Pathways
In the political domain, eight distinctive political pathways to parliament emerge. This typology fits 91% of the empirically observed political pathways. 86 pathways remain unclassified. Figure 2 shows the sequence plots and table 1 summarises the key characteristics of each career cluster.
The largest group in the political domain arelocal representatives (29%) with a previous career
in local politics, including city council members, local faction leaders or local party board members. They make the transition to parliament after 3–15 years in local politics.
The second largest group (24%) ofnewcomers have no known pre-parliamentary political career
before entering parliament. This group constitute what the ministerial recruitment literature might call ‘expert outsiders’, albeit be it at entry to parliament. Newcomers are relatively old and are
rela-tively professionally experienced24upon entry. Newcomers are relatively often women.
Party volunteers (20%) are characterised by an episode of voluntary work for the national party
organisation before entering parliament. Typically, they occupy positions on the party board, in com-munication work groups (e.g. campaign team) or substantive (e.g. economic development, agricul-ture) work-groups. They enter parliament after ±5 years in these positions.
Regional representatives (8%) have a pre-parliamentary political career as a regional representative
for 3–20 years and then enter parliament at the relatively late average age of M=46 years. They often occupy regional party board positions.
Full-time party aides have a short episode of full-time work as an aide in national politics. This
is a small (5%) group. Typically, they are assistants of MPs/ministers or policy administrators and PR professionals for national party offices. They are what Cairney (2007) calls politicians with an ‘instrumental occupation’. This pathway is distinguished from party volunteers by the low entry age (38) and the full-time, facilitative (non-executive) nature of the jobs typically held by those in this career cluster.
24Newcomers on average have 19.2 years of professional work experience. Those in the other political pathways 15.3
years, with t(413.21) = 4.96, p < .001, d = 7.02
Figure 2: Sequence plots of the political pathways to the Dutch parliament
Note: Each plot represents a career cluster. The vertical axis represents individual pathways. Each horizontal line
represents the pathway of one politician. The horizontal axis represents years after the 18th birthday. The different
colours/shades represent different career states. We can for example see in the bottom right thatsenators enter
parliament at a relative high age (±45 years) and almost always (except for three of the 11 cases) enter parliament (Tweede Kamer / lower-house) directly after their episode in the upper house (Eerste Kamer).
Tab le 1: D escription of political career path w ay sto Parliament
4
Steady climbers (2%) move from local to regional politics, followed by parliament. Interestingly,
on each of these levels they typically occupy board – not representative – positions. Although the-oretically often considered the ‘typical’ political career in the literature (e.g., Stolz 2003), our results
show that only a small fraction (2%) of Dutch MPs follows the pathway of thesteady climber.
European representatives (1%) were in European politics before they entered parliament. Given
recent developments in European bureaucracy, this is a new pathway that occurs mainly in recent parliamentary cohorts.
Senators (1%) served one or more terms in the Dutch upper house (Eerste Kamer) before entering
parliament.
Importantly these results reveal two national political pathways (party volunteers &full-time party
aides). This allows us to investigate in a moment if politicians with these pathways are indeed more
likely to make it to cabinet, as hypothesis 3 states. A cluster of MPs with national political experi-ence that was concentrated towards the sequexperi-ences did not emerge from the data. This means that hypothesis 4 will remain untested.
The Professional Pathways
Our analysis in the professional domain was tailored to be sensitive to pathways in the public and the private sector and communication intensive jobs. The career typology of professional pre-parliamentary pathways that emerged from the data (summarised in Table 2) captures 86.6% of the empirically
ob-served pathways, which can be classified with confidence into one of these eight types25. Table 2
sum-marises the key characteristics of each pathway and Figure 3 shows the sequence plots.
The largest group of politicians areprivate sector business professionals (24.9%), in the form of
CEOs, business administrative and management positions (and some farmers) in the production or service sectors, or what C.W. Mills (1956) would have called ‘the corporate rich’.
The second largest group (22.1%) areregular civil servants who typically have a long (±12 years)
civil service career. Interestingly – contrary to what is often suggested (van den Berg & van den Braak 2004) – our detailed investigation revealed that they are generally not ‘top level officials,’ but actually mid-level managers, policy administrators and education managers. These people typically have no experience in communicative jobs.
Public sector communication professionals (13.4%) constitute the group of politicians with commu-nicative positions in the public sector, such as teaching or being a judge. All in this cluster followed
pathways of subsequent jobs for which communication skills were a primary resource. Most worked 5–20 years in these communicative public sector jobs before entering parliament.
Figure 3: Sequence plots of the professional pathways to the Dutch parliament
∗ Comparison opportunity within the private sector. ∗∗ Comparison opportunity within the public sector.
Tab le 2: D escription of prof essional career path w ay sto Parliament
Unionists (9.9%) had paid full-time (board) positions in labour unions before entering
parlia-ment. Only 26% of unionist have any experience in communicative jobs.
Private sector communication professionals (5%) are typically private sector lawyers, with some
public relation professionals and private sector teachers. Table 1 shows that most of them have 9–25 years of work experience in communicative jobs.
A subgroup ofjournalists (4.9%) (prior experience in journalism) had short episodes in private
sector jobs. A relatively large percentage (37%) are women. According to our definition, journalists have substantive experience (9–22 years) in communication-related jobs.
As popular expression has it, thepolitical leisure class (3.8%) ‘haven’t worked a day of their lives’,
and have done no (non-political) paid work before entering parliament. The age profile is this cluster is similar to that of the other clusters.
Army officers are a historically-contained (only occur in parliamentary terms until 1977) and
in-frequent pathway (2.7%). None are women and most lack experience in communicative jobs. These results provide unprecedented fine-grained descriptive insight into the professional path-ways to parliament. Importantly, both ‘communicative’ and ‘less communicative’ pathpath-ways emerged (see figure 3).The hypothesised effect of communication skills 5) as well as the compensation
hypothe-sis (hypothehypothe-sis 6 can be tested. Areprivate sector and public sector -communication professionals indeed
more likely to obtain a ministerial post? This analysis follows below.
Prominent Pathways among MPs and the Obtainment of a Cabinet Seat
Having established thepolitical and professional pathways to parliament of Dutch MPs, we now move
to step two of our analysis where we estimate the probability of parliamentarians with these pathways to obtain a cabinet position.
Grounded in the dominant occupations perspective, hypothesis 1 posits that it is the most fre-quently occurring pathways among cabinet members that should predict obtaining a cabinet posi-tion. To test this idea, table 4 shows prominent pathways among cabinet members and the estimated probability for MPs with these pathways to become a cabinet member. These results contradict the
dominant occupations hypothesis (H1). Indeed, table 4 showsprominent pathways with low
rela-tive probabilities, as well asinfrequently occurring pathways with high estimates. Members of the
political leisure class for example, are a relatively infrequent (5.1%) political pathway among cabinet members. However, the estimated probability for an MP with this background to obtain a cabinet position is high: 0.199[0.034, 0.356]. Similarly, the estimated probability to secure a cabinet post forlocal representatives is 0.180 [0.086, 0.274] which renders them among the least probable groups
to get a cabinet post, yet contrary to what the dominant occupations perspective would promote, a lot of cabinet members (21.9%) do have this background. These results underline Patzelt’ (1999) and Cairney’ (2007) warning against the idea that dominant occupations are inherently ‘facilitating’.
Tab le 3: Logistic regression model predicting obtainment of acabinet positions for n=4966 politicians nested in 22 parliaments and 11 parties. Dependent variable: Cabinet (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (Intercept) − 2.974 ∗∗∗ (0.195) − 3.002 ∗∗∗ (0.182) − 1.668 ∗∗∗ (0.171) − 1.426 ∗∗∗ (0.213) − 1.693 ∗∗∗ (0.270) − 1.518 ∗∗∗ (0.326) Parliament year − 0.001 (0.009) 0.019 ∗∗ (0.008) 0.014 (0.009) 0.014 (0.009) 0.013 (0.009) NR seats available 0.029 (0.019) 0.014 (0.019) 0.016 (0.019) 0.016 (0.020) 0.016 (0.020) Number of competitors − 0.004 ∗(0.003) − 0.004 ∗(0.003) − 0.003 (0.003) − 0.003 (0.003) − 0.003 (0.003) Tenure 0.306 ∗∗∗ (0.052) 0.372 ∗∗∗ (0.067) 0.371 ∗∗∗ (0.067) 0.371 ∗∗∗ (0.068) Not in parliament − 2.061 ∗∗∗ (0.198) − 1.856 ∗∗∗ (0.205) − 1.862 ∗∗∗ (0.206) − 1.854 ∗∗∗ (0.206) Tenure 2 − 0.071 ∗∗∗ (0.019) − 0.040 ∗∗ (0.020) − 0.041 ∗∗ (0.020) − 0.042 ∗∗ (0.020) Tenure:Not in parliament − 0.629 ∗∗∗ (0.109) − 0.536 ∗∗∗ (0.113) − 0.534 ∗∗∗ (0.113) − 0.528 ∗∗∗ (0.114) left/right 0.102 (0.085) 0.103 (0.085) 0.096 (0.086) Gender: female − 0.112 (0.254) − 0.129 (0.255) − 0.116 (0.258) indiv. age at entry − 0.111 ∗∗∗ (0.021) − 0.113 ∗∗∗ (0.021) − 0.114 ∗∗∗ (0.021) indiv. age at entry 2 − 0.007 ∗∗∗ (0.001) − 0.007 ∗∗∗ (0.001) − 0.007 ∗∗∗ (0.001) N ot univ ersity ed uc ate d − 0.968 ∗∗∗ (0.245) − 0.913 ∗∗∗ (0.247) − 0.998 ∗∗∗ (0.260) Po litic al pr e-p arliamen tary car eer (r ef er enc ec luster is ‘loc al repr esen tativ e’) European-representatives 1.214 (0.771) 1.218 (0.779) Full-time-party-aides 0.861 ∗(0.448) 0.870 ∗(0.453) Newcomers 0.478 ∗(0.279) 0.498 ∗(0.286) Party-volunteers 0.303 (0.291) 0.343 (0.296) Regional-representatives − 0.406 (0.465) − 0.396 (0.469) Senators 1.556 ∗(0.870) 1.631 ∗(0.874) Steady-climbers − 0.276 (0.850) − 0.281 (0.856) Unclassifiable pol. 0.274 (0.396) 0.276 (0.398) Pr of essional pr e-p arliamen tary car eer (r ef er enc ec luster is priv ate se ctor business pr of essionals ’) Arm y-officers 0.632 (0.620) Journalists − 0.372 (0.540) Political leisure class 0.129 (0.511) Pri.Sec.Comm-Prof − 0.329 (0.504) Pub.Sec.Comm-Prof − 0.332 (0.353) Regular-Civil-Servants − 0.207 (0.309) Unclassifiable prof. − 0.396 (0.354) Unionists − 0.235 (0.382) Random effects ————————– Politician-level var 3.078 3.194 3.300 3.424 3.320 3.300 (0.202) (0.213) (0.258) (0.239) (0.264) (0.254) Parliament-level var 0.299 0.169 0.207 0.223 0.237 0.240 (0.202) (0.193) (0.232) (0.239) (0.241) (0.236) Party-level var 0.088 0.088 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 (0.249) (0.251) (0.160) (0.097) (0.138) (0.086) Diagnostics Log Likelihood − 1,140.238 − 1,137.548 − 962.987 − 914.004 − 905.373 − 902.344 Note 1: ∗p< 0.1; ∗∗p< 0.05; ∗∗∗ p< 0.01 Note 2: National political path ways are Full-time party aides ,Party volunteers ,Senators and European representatives Note 3: Communicative path ways are Journalists and Public and Priv ate sector communication professionals .
Table 4: Frequently occurring professional and political pathways among Dutch ministers and the relative odds of MPS with these pathways to obtain a ministerial position
note a: results from specific contrasts from table 3, model 6
note b: ** estimated prob. for higher educated MPSin parliament after 5 terms that are local representatives
note c: *** estimated prob. for higher educated MPSin parliament after 5 terms that are in the private sector business professionals
Higher Education and Cabinet Positions
Having established empirical support for reluctance towards the dominant occupations perspective, we now inspect the value of our alternative political human capital approach. As a first test of our alternative political human capital perspective on political career mobility, hypothesis 2 states that highly educated MPs are relatively more likely to obtain ministerial offices. The results support hy-pothesis 2. Model 6 in table 3 and the derived probability estimates and odds ratios summarised in figure 4 show that in comparison to those that are not higher educated, higher educated MPS (those with an University education) are roughly 2.714 times more likely to get a cabinet position. Increasing the estimated probability to become a member of the cabinet from roughly 7% [0.03, 0.12] to roughly
18% [0.09, 0.27]26.
Pre-parliamentary Communicative and National Political Experience and the
Obtainment of Cabinet Positions
Next to being higher educated, we also suggest that politicians with pre-parliamentary national po-litical experience are more likely to obtain cabinet posts than those who followed alternative popo-litical pathways. The results in table 3 and the derived estimates in figures 4 and 5 scrutinise this hypoth-esis. As predicted (Hypothesis 3), Figure 4 shows the general effect and suggests that substantive
26calculated for the stylised case of a male MP after 4 terms in parliament in the year 1986, with an average age that was
alocal representative and a private sector business professional
