The Times are Changing? Electoral Shifts, Control and the Selection of Career Changers

The selection of career changers for parliamentary office is a double edged sword. From a party perspective, recruiting such political outsiders that have no prior political experience seems unlikely. Career changers are unknown, less embedded and unpredictable. Yet, at same-time selecting these 'high potential rookies' have the potential to bring fresh ideas, expertise and new voters. Previous research has shown that political parties do sometimes select career changers, but has not explored when. In this paper we hypothesize the selection of political outsiders to be due a `personalization reflex' which is induced by disappointing election results. As a result political parties temporarily prioritize the attraction of new voters via attractive outsiders over the selection of safe insiders. We investigate this idea with a new detailed data set that contains all the individual level pre-parliamentary political offices of Dutch (n=1151) and German (n=1396) MPs. Results confirm that vote share los in the previous election is predictive of the increased recruitment of political outsiders. This effect is particularly strong when the national party leadership controls the candidate selection process.