Western parliamentarians are assumed to have substantive experience in local politics (Allen 2012), occupy instrumental occupations before entering parliament (Cairney 2007) and spend the majority of their career in national political positions (Stolz 2007, Fennema 2003). However, since previous research has focused on small parts of the career and not complete careers, the extent to which these commonly assumed career types actually exist, remains unknown. We solve this problem by using a new individual career data (all jobs from age 16 till age 65) of all Dutch parliamentarians from the parliamentary cohorts 1945-2013. Using sequence analysis we first generate the major clusters of the most common career trajectories and show that previously proposed typologies only cover a limited percentage of existing careers. We then introduce a new set of empirically-based career typologies and we theorize and test what kinds of politicians are more likely to follow specific career trajectories.
