The 2012 Romanian local elections came into notice for the high number of members of parliament who run for a city manager positions. At least forty MPs stood for offices like mayor or chief of councilors, and twenty three of them won elections. The attractiveness of the local government offices for the MPs is not recent; at the previous local elections few MPs had the same behavior. Why, in the absence of any legal compulsion, MPs decide to leave the parliament? The paper will study the career pathways of the Romanian parliamentarians from the central to local offices.
The Romanian political ladder has four main acendenting steps: local government, parliament, central government, and presidency. The political ladder is usually seen as having the local government at the base and the presidency at the edge. The literature on career professionalization of MPs inquires chiefly into the way MPs climb up on this ladder and how parties select their candidates for legislative and less about moving down on the political ladder, from central to local politics. Much progress has been done lately in the study of the professionalization of the regional politics but still little is known about the local career pathways and nothing yet, to the best of my knowledge, about the backwards-orientated career pathway from the central to local politics. The fundamental question that this paper is addressing is: how can be explained the moving down on the political career ladder of the Romanian MPs from the central office to the local office? The paper does not pretend to comprehend all explications about this political phenomenon, but more to find the adequate variables for describing and explaining it. Nevertheless, the paper does not study the legislative turnover, but the legislative departure.
