Mapping Party Leaders’ Careers across Countries: Career Capital and Leadership Survival

Party leaders play an important role in parliamentary democracies. They are the face of political campaigns during elections and lead coalition negotiations afterwards. Once a coalition is formed, party leaders often become prime minister or obtain an important cabinet position. While the literature on party leaders extensively addresses what kind of leaders are selected and how they are selected, how they got there remains an underexposed topic. Here, I study what political careers party leaders have and how they vary between parties in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Multi-channel sequence analysis including three career dimensions (executive, legislative and party careers) is used to measure and describe accumulated career experience, or career capital. Subsequently, this measure is then used to test whether party leaders with more career capital manage to stay in office longer. Preliminary evidence suggests that especially those party leaders who start accumulating national political experience at a young age are more likely to ascend the political ladder, regardless of party.