What do Portuguese ministers do after they leave office? Which private interests conflict or might conflict with their former public duties? In the area of Elite Studies, little research has been conducted on the topic of post-ministerial careers since Blondel’s seminal work in the early nineties. Existing studies have mainly – and understandably – focused their attention on the North American case, and the topic remains scarcely explored elsewhere. Based on a new dataset covering all ministers that have been in office since 1983, this configurative-idiographic paper analyses the professional paths of ex-ministers in Portugal. The research was driven by three distinctive goals: (i) identify the patterns of Portuguese ministers’ post-ministerial occupations; (ii) debate and reassess Blondel’s findings; (iii) propose a new analytical framework before launching a novel, in-depth, longitudinal, and comparative study that will investigate former ministers’ careers within a wide-ranging set of Western democracies.
