Entry, Exit, and Everything in Between: A Study of Political Ambition in Belgium

Political candidacy constitutes a crucial gateway into parliamentary politics, yet the processes through which individuals decide to enter, and later not to continue along, remain insufficiently understood. At the core of these processes lies (electoral) political ambition, which shapes why individuals choose to run for parliament, why they persist in doing so, and why they decide not to run (anymore). This paper investigates how political ambition emerges and is constrained in Belgium, thereby shedding light on how political trajectories into, and away from, parliament are socially structured. The literature on political ambition is dominated by North American quantitative research that conceptualises ambition in relatively static and individualised terms. It focuses primarily on nascent political ambition (i.e., very early interest in candidacy) among lay citizens, rather than on expressive ambition (i.e., active interest in candidacy) as experienced by actual candidates. Moreover, it often neglects how ambition is shaped by institutional contexts such as proportional representation (PR lists) and multiparty competition. As a result, we still know little about how prospective parliamentary actors in European systems experience, interpret, and navigate their pathways to parliament over time. This paper addresses these gaps through a theory-building qualitative study of how political ambition structures entry into and disengagement from parliamentary candidacy in Belgium. It develops a conceptual model of candidacy mapping reasons for entry and for exit. The methodology is based on a two-phased qualitative design combining narrative and semi-structured interviews with a diverse set of federal and regional election candidates. The sample includes both “rookies” running for the first time in 2024 and “discretes” who stood as candidates in 2019 but chose not to run again in 2024, allowing the analysis to capture both entry into and withdrawal from the parliamentary track. Soft quotas ensure variation across parties to examine how ideological positioning shapes motivations to (not) run (anymore). By focusing on the Belgian case, this paper uncovers what motivates individuals to seek parliamentary office and what barriers lead them to refrain from running again in a proportional, multiparty European context. In doing so, it contributes to the study of parliamentary actors by showing how political pathways are produced before individuals ever take a seat, with important implications for the composition of parliaments and for whose voices ultimately come to be represented within them.