Pathways to Power and Role of Individual Political Capital in the Obtainment of Ministerial Offices

Understanding the rise to political power is central to the study of politics. Yet, we still know relatively little about how politicians rise to influential positions like ministerial offices. Most previous literature either assumes that dominant characteristics among ministers predict becoming a minister previous experience, or applies rough measures of previous experience, like years in parliament or the dichotomy between partisan-insiders and expert-outsiders. We present an alternative political capital perspective that emphasizes the importance of personal resources like political experience and communication skills. Key ideas are tested with original data on the complete pre-parliamentary careers of all Dutch MPs (N=1,263) from 1945 to 2012 over 22 cohorts. A sequence analysis with fuzzy clustering reveals eight unique career types in both the professional and political domain. Using this detailed conceptualization we show that frequently occurring career backgrounds among Dutch ministers are not predictive of the obtainment of ministerial offices. We find prominently used career differentiations to have limited predictive power, national political experience to be strongly positively related while communicative experience has the opposite effect.