The aim of this qualitative study is to explore factors that influence social workers' decision to participate in parliamentary politics, and to identify important policy-making skills and competencies of social workers holding elected office. Seven semi-structured biographical interviews with social workers in Switzerland who are serving as elected politicians at local, state, or national levels were conducted and analyzed according to the principles of qualitative content analysis. Based on the Civic Voluntarism Model as well as previous studies in the field of socialization research, this study identifies families of origin and mobilization networks as main influencing factors, alongside with professional experience in social work that also plays a significant role. It can be further concluded that important skills to be successful in policy-making processes are acquired through social work education and professional practice. The results support existing findings and emphasize that to further promote political engagement, political action should be more strongly integrated into social work education and encouraged by professional associations.

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While ethical documents all around the globe call upon social workers to actively participate in policymaking processes, there is little evidence of their actual engagement in this type of practice. In particular, the fact that social workers also engage in party-politics by running for or holding elected office has been neglected in most of the existing research. Therefore, this article focuses on this very specific route of policy engagement by examining strategies for influencing policymaking processes used by Swiss social workers holding political office. To do so, 31 social workers holding elected office in the German-speaking part of Switzerland were invited to write a book chapter in an edited volume. The authors were explicitly asked to describe in detail their strategies and methods for influencing policymaking processes, and to place social work issues on the political agenda. Based on a qualitative content analysis of the book chapters, the following strategies were identified: (1) bringing social work’s professional expertise into policymaking processes, (2) doing good and talking about it, (3) presenting facts and figures, (4) organizing the profession, (5) networking, and (6) “normalizing” policy engagement in social work. The findings suggest that political content should be strengthened in social work education and further promoted by professional associations. This would empower more social workers to run for political office and enable them to contribute their specific skills, knowledge, and expertise to policymaking processes.