Exploring, Maintaining, and Disengaging—The Three Phases of a Legislator's Life

Abstract

Building on the understanding that a career is a dynamic concept, this article applies the idea that parliamentarians' legislative activities vary according to their career stage and age. This is partly a function of experience and partly a function of future career prospects. Using a new data set of the German Bundestag (2002-13) that pinpoints the age and career stage of MPs at the time of individual activities, namely, attending votes, posing parliamentary questions, and holding rapporteurships, we identify practical and normative challenges to MPs' legislative work: It takes time to learn the trade and as the desire for re-election dissipates, a last-period problem arises. MPs significantly reduce their activity levels toward the end of their legislative careers, indicating a clear loss of accountability toward their parties and their constituents.Parliamentarians want to perform well in order to get re-selected, re-elected, and promoted to higher positions. In this they are limited by institutional structures such as election systems and selection procedures, but also by their own career prospects, expertise, and individual talent. While we already have substantial knowledge of the impact of institutions on parliamentarians' performance such as voting, our knowledge is more limited with regard to how the individually variable resources of career prospects and expertise either constrain or enable parliamentarians. Investigating the role of career prospects and expertise and their impact on the behavior of parliamentarians furthers our understanding of what limits and what drives parliamentarians during their course of their parliamentary career paths. In this study, we compare legislative activities with professional employment where people begin careers, learn a trade, and become active and efficient workers over the course of those careers. Careers are the product of rational, individual calculations (Daniel 2015), and including career prospects in an analysis of MPs' legislative activity improves our understanding of legislators' accountability toward their party and voters.

Gerontocracy in a comparative perspective: Explaining why political leaders are (almost always) older than their constituents

“…Aging parliamentarians have also been found to be less active in France (Gavoille, 2018), Germany (Bailer & Ohmura, 2018), and Japan (Ono, 2015). In the same spirit, Geys and Mause (2016) find that in the United Kingdom, retiring MPs (i.e., those over 65 who do not intend to run for reelection) are more prone to shirking in the strict sense—that is, substituting leisure for work (see also Willumsen & Goetz, 2017; Lott, 1990, and Clark & Lucas Williams, 2014 on the United States; Bailer & Ohmura, 2018 on Germany). Shorter time horizons may also be the reason behind the poor economic performance of aging leaders: in democracies, older politicians become less likely to invest in policies that would benefit growth in the long run (Atella & Carbonari, 2017; McClean, 2019); in autocracies, they become more likely to prey on the economy in order to maximize their own wealth (Jong‐A‐Pin & Mierau, 2011, p. 289).…”

“…This average—which encompasses for example military dictators, who have less political experience, and monarchs, who can access power at a very young age—masks important variations, and it probably takes longer to enter government in most democracies. For example, the average German MP has been a party member for some 17 years before entering parliament for the first time (Ceyhan, 2018); it would take this individual another 15 years on average to become a minister (Bailer & Ohmura, 2018). In France, ministers—most of which have served several terms as parliamentarians prior to their nomination—are in the beginning of their fifties when they take office (Grossmann and François, 2013).…”

Regional and Ethnic Minorities

“…In this sense, representatives from regional and ethnic minorities articulate public interests. Bailer and Ohmura (2018) show that in Germany parliamentarians from under-represented groups use parliamentary questions to represent 'their' group particularly at the beginning of their political career. Where studies are willing to identify minority interests, they often find an association between descriptive and substantive representation.…”

Every Single Word: A New Data Set Including All Parliamentary Materials Published in Germany

“…While this enables researchers to limit their study objects to some relevant text formats in an easier manner, the time-and computation-intensive task to reformat the documents into information ready for analysis with standard statistical software remains up to the users. Several researchers went to the effort of reformatting parts of the datafor example, presenting analyses of oral questions of MPs of immigrant origin between 1987 and 2009 (Wüst 2014) and all oral questions between 2002 and 2013 (Bailer and Ohmura 2018), federal legislation between 1976(Miller and Stecker 2008 or all motions between 1976 and 2002 (Manow and Burkhart 2007). Still, only a small share of the overall information is accessible and even these limited data are dispersed over a broad variety of sources.…”