Abstract Congressional scholars rely on legislators’ career concerns to motivate theories of institutional development and legislative behavior. Previous studies, however, pay insufficient attention to political mobility – the movement of elites into and out of the public sector and between positions within it. We propose a flexible mixed Markov model for studying political mobility that can accommodate both heterogeneity and serial dependence – two common features of longitudinal career data – and apply it to an original dataset of career sequences for members of the House of Representatives between 1849 and 1944. We identify four latent classes exhibiting distinct patterns of political mobility and show how class membership changes over time. We find that class membership is related to members’ occupational background and partisanship, regional differences and the size of the public sector. Class membership, in turn, is responsible for large differences in politicians’ decisions to stay in offices, move elsewhere or leave politics altogether. We find that these same choices are also shaped by duration in office, party competition and states’ adoption of Australian ballot reforms, with the effects varying by class. Overall, these findings illuminate the factors shaping political mobility in this formative era and with it, the nature of political recruitment and representation.
observations into transitions that result in continuing in an office, moves to the private sector and moves to other offices. For the latter, we distinguish between upward moves (e.g., state legislature to House) and those that suggest downward mobility (e.g., high state to state administrative). We analyze politicians’ choices using a discrete time competing risks hazard model (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997). In addition to segment membership, we examine the effects of electoral, institutional and personal attributes that previous studies suggest might influence members’ choices. Given the diversity of offices we examine, we focus on broad aspects of the electoral and institutional environment as well as personal characteristics that vary over the course of a career. One contribution of event history analyses of congressional career choices is the attention they give to duration dependence. Politicians’ choices are conditional on surviving long enough in an office to make a choice at time t. We account for duration dependence in our hazard model by counting the number of consecutive two-year intervals a politician has occupied a state at time t and taking its log transformation (see Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997). In general, we expect duration to decrease the probability of continuing while increasing the likelihood of moving up and, perhaps, opting for private-sector activity. We are also interested in examining whether members’ sensitivity to time spent in an office depends on segment membership. Previous research demonstrates that electoral vulnerability is a major factor dictating the retirement decisions of members of Congress (Kiewiet and Zeng 1993; Brady et al. 1999; Fukumoto 2009) as well as the entry decisions of challengers (Jacobson and Kernell 1981; Carson and Roberts 2005). We believe that a favorable electoral environment is conducive to political career development more generally. Politicians who enjoy large partisan advantages typically have more opportunities to serve and can remain longer in public offices. These
the assignment of politicians to latent segments. We also investigated the consequences of segment membership for politicians’ career choices. We found that segment membership is responsible for large differences in the probability of continuing in office and leaving politics altogether. Equally important, segment membership appears to condition the effects of the electoral environment and states’ adoption of Australian ballot reforms. We believe further progress in understanding political mobility can be made by extending our LSMC model to other offices and other time periods. One limitation of our application of the model to House members serving from 1849 to 1944 is that our estimates of the initial distribution, λj, and transition probabilities, ajk, might not be generalizable. Our population of House members likely does not constitute a random sample of politicians occupying other offices or states, such as governor and state legislator. We hope to add career sequences of other officeholders, including senators, governors, cabinet members, judges and others who did not serve in the House (see Kernell and MacKenzie 2011), and determine whether the political mobility patterns we identify are specific to particular destination offices or suggest more general features of a national structure of political opportunity. References Abramson, Paul R., John H. Aldrich and David W. Rohde. 1987. “Progressive Ambition among United States Senators: 1972-1988.” Journal of Politics 47: 3-35. Aldrich, John H. 1995. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Andrews, Rick L. and Imran S. Currim. 2003. “A Comparison of Segment Retention Criteria for Finite Mixture Logit Models.” Journal of Marketing Research 40(2): 235-243.