With the process of regionalisation in formerly unitary democracies, there is a renewed interest for conceptual and empirical studies on political careers. Not only in new federal political systems, but also in established federations. Yet, critical questions remain unsolved on both methodological and empirical aspects. This proposal seeks to provide original answers based on a comparative analysis of four regions from established and new federal systems: Catalonia in Spain, Quebec in Canada, Scotland in the UK and Wallonia in Belgium. The paper proceeds in two stages.
From a methodological view, even though current research analyse individual trajectories, they do not take individual careers but predominantly inter-territorial movements as the unit of analysis. The risk is however that the movements between national and regional parliaments are overlooked to determine career patterns. Although a polity may present important inter-territorial changes, a mere analysis of movements tends to ‘hide’ those who do not move. This paper demonstrates that an individual approach – following every single trajectory over time and across territories – is a better unit of analysis to uncover all career patterns. Contrary to (some) previous findings, more than one pattern are identified for the four regions: national alternative careers, regional alternative careers, integrated careers and discrete careers often co-exist in Catalonia, Quebec, Scotland and Wallonia.
However, the magnitude of these patterns greatly varies not only between but also within the four regions. In a second step, data on more than 2.200 careers – for a period of times covering between 20 and 40 years of parliamentary life – were thus gathered to reveal the dynamics behind career patterns formation. A quantitative analysis tests several hypotheses to explain the emergence and the variance of career patterns according to variables linked to the structure of opportunities as well as to MPs’ socio-political attributes.
