Revolving Doors or emergency exits? Career paths and the structure of influence in the European defense sector

Public debate over “revolving doors” in the defence sector typically centres on high-profile cases in which senior officials move into industry or executives transition into public agencies. Yet research in organisational sociology suggests that lower-level movements—by middle managers and technical staff with crucial process knowledge—may be at least as consequential for shaping firms’ access, influence, and performance. This paper advances a comparative analysis of these understudied, low-visibility career flows across the European defence sector. We argue that existing rules governing post-employment and pre-appointment conduct, although symbolically important for public trust, have limited structural effects on career trajectories. Instead, we theorize that national “governance ecosystems” shape the incentives for public-to-private and private-to-public mobility in distinct ways: public governance ecosystems generate opportunities for cross-sector movement, while private governance ecosystems dampen the incentives that motivate these movements. To establish a baseline for future longitudinal analysis, the paper maps current cross-sector mobility patterns using publicly available biographical data from LinkedIn for 350000 lower-ranking officials and industry employees. The findings provide the first comparative mapping of lower-level revolving-door movements in the sector, showing how institutional environments channel career mobility in patterned and predictable ways.