Career Politicians: Clarifying Concepts and Testing Claims

The professionalization of politics is a phenomenon found in most advanced democracies. Professional politicians are full-time politicians. Career politicians, we shall argue, are a sub-set of professional politicians. They are known by their lack of significant occupational experience in the outside world, and by other distinctive attributes for which they are both praised and condemned with arguments grounded in typically untested informal theories. They are praised for their strong commitment and hard work. They are condemned for diminishing competence in government, undermining descriptive representation, increasing careerism and gridlock and weakening public service orientations. From the compliments and condemnations put forward by political scientists, journalists, publics, and politicians themselves, we will clarify the concept’s principal dimensions as multi-level and multidimensional, and fitting Wittgenstein’s family resemblance structure, which is how we will measure them. To do so we will use a longitudinal data set on British MPs who were interviewed in 1971-73, re-interviewed in 2012-2015, and for whom detailed career data have been collected on both their pre-political and parliamentary careers. These data include many non-career as well as many career politicians and are therefore well-suited to our inquiry. They will enable us to construct and validate the measures and use them to investigate hypotheses about character traits including desires for power and status, public service motivation, ideological rigidity, intensity of partisanship, Machiavellianism and tolerance for compromise. We will also investigate consequences for hypothesized behaviors including voting patterns, speeches, time spent in constituencies and other choices that have shaped their political careers.