Keep Options Open: How Non-Political Career Alternatives Impact the Career Decisions of Politicians

There is a longstanding interest in the composition of democratic bodies and, as a consequence, the career choices of politicians. Particularly, how politicians respond to the risks they face when they decide to run for re-election or a higher office has attracted attention (Black 1972, Maddox 2004, Keane and Merlo 2007). A weakness of this rich literature is that although the opportunity costs that arise from their outside options (i.e. non-political alternatives) are widely assumed to play a key role, these factors have not been subject to empirical investigation. Already Black (1972) complained that there is a “lack of data on councilman’s non-political alternatives” (footnote 21), an important roadblock that has not been overcome so far. Here, we study an original dataset of all Dutch MPs careers (N=1,263) from 1945 to 2012 over 22 cohorts, also containing detailed information about MP’s non-political activities before, and during their work as a parliamentarian. With this data, we test a hypothesis that follows from Black's (1972) seminal theory stating that politicians’ reaction to the risks they perceive depends on whether or not they have outside options. We use event history analysis to test our central expectation that outside alternatives make politicians more responsive to risk. More specifically, we expect two main effects of risk: the tendencies for MPs to not run for re-election when faced with uncertainty about a safe seat at the next parliamentary election, and the tendency for MPs to not run for a higher office when faced with a strong competitor will be moderated by outside alternatives.