The place of political experience in lobbyist careers: Decisive, divergent or diverse?

Abstract

There is broad consensus that lobbyists with government experience are valuable to those who employ them, principally because they possess contacts in government and unique insights into the policy process. Yet the near exclusive focus on government experience as the defining feature of lobbyist careers, means the literature has neglected analysis of the mix of different (and important) experiences that actual lobbyists likely accumulate during their careers. We address these gaps through analysis of the career sequences of over 600 lobbyists operating across contract and in‐house roles in Australia. Using the tools of sequence and cluster analysis, we identify four broad types of careers among lobbyists. While half of all lobbyists have had roles with some direct political experience, we find that distinctions between types of lobbying careers are differentiated by experience in other fields such as journalism, public relations, associations and corporate life. Moreover, our multivariate analysis shows that different career types are more strongly associated with in‐house versus contract lobbying roles. We conclude that scholars should move beyond a focus on ‘revolving doors’ to more directly analyse the range of experiences that lobbyists leverage in their professional lives.

Revolving doors in Europe: does hiring from the public sector facilitate access?

“…Moreover, our data does not allow us to account for the duration of public sector experience, or the proportion of an organization's staff sourced from the public sector. Subsequent research could address this limitation by integrating organizational data with information about the career backgrounds of group staff to gain a more detailed understanding of the relationship between revolving doors and access (Halpin and Lotric 2023). Lastly, it is important to note that our statistical analyses do allow us to establish the causal claims we propose, and it remains plausible that the causal direction of certain multivariate findings could be reversed.…”

“…The revolving door phenomenon is commonly defined as the movement of individuals from the public sector to interest groups (Gormley 1979). This definition has been sourced from a body of literature emphasizing the importance of individual lobbyists' career trajectories, highlighting their personal incentives and motivations to enter the revolving door (Shepherd and You 2020;Bolton and McCrain 2023;Halpin and Lotric 2023;Lee and You 2023). For instance, scholars have demonstrated that these individuals can leverage their public sector experience to increase their earnings, receiving higher salaries compared to regular lobbyists (Blanes i Vidal et al 2012).…”