Studies of MPs’ careers have limited themselves to the representativeness of parliaments as regards society as a whole, comparing the composition of legislatures by occupational groups or levels of educational attainment. The drawback of these studies lies in the snapshot view they take of an MP’s occupational background, neglecting the dynamic aspects of MPs' careers. This paper analyses how incentives, opportunities and attitudes vary according to the career stage of an MP. On the one hand socialization literature predicts that parliamentarians adopt the values of their party and parliament over the course of their work in the plenary. On the other hand, a rational choice oriented approach based on the principal agent model would postulate that parliamentarians behave according to the principals they are most dependent on, be it voters or party group leaders. The dependency on the party group leadership should be the strongest in the early stages of an MP’s career, and decline as MPs exploit the opportunities and incentives to create a personal profile during the course of their career.
Based on these considerations, we suggest an exploratory analysis of legislative activity and parliamentary behavior and the question of how these change according to the respective career stage, measured in terms of age, the length of the career span and career success (as regards appointments to higher positions). This analysis is based on a novel dataset combining the career phase with the respective attitudes, parliamentary votes and questions as well as campaigning behavior of German parliamentarians from the 14th through to the 17th Bundestag (1998–2012). This allows us to study whether voting deviations become more or less frequent, whether attitudes become more adapted or independent and whether the focus of campaigning becomes more party-oriented or personalized over the course and towards the end of a career.
