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

• Author: Stefanie Bailer,Tamaki Ohmura
• Published date: 01 August 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12192
• Date: 01 August 2018

STEFANIE BAILER

TAMAKI OHMURA

University of Basel

Exploring, Maintaining, and

Disengaging—The Three Phases

of a Legislator’s Life

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 pin-

points the age and career stage of MPs at the time of individual activities, namely,

attending votes, posing parliamentary questions, and holding rapporteurships, we iden-

tify 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 institu-

tions 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 parliamentar-

ians. 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 activi-

ties 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’ leg-

islative activity improves our understanding of legislators’ accountability

toward their party and voters.

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 43, 3, Au gust 2018

DOI: 10.1111 /lsq.12192

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C2017 Washington University in St. Louis

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Parliamentarians are rational actors who while seeking re-election

are restrained not only by voters, interest groups, and party leaders but

also by their individual resources such as career prospects and expertise.

Several of their actions will depend on the question of whether they

have suff‌icient time in parliament to conduct them and whether they are

capable of doing them. For instance, at the end of a career when the re-

election incentive is removed, it is rational for MPs to reduce their activi-

ties. While previous studies have investigated some of these factors,

such as growing expertise or the f‌inal career stages of parliamentarians,

few combine the factors of career prospects and accumulated legislative

knowledge to explain different forms of legislative behavior over a

longer period of time as we do.

At the start of their legislative mandate, we show that newcomers

lacking key parliamentary skills are limited to activities that require no

or little legislative expertise, such as participating in legislative votes or

asking parliamentary questions. Among newcomer MPs, it is younger

parliamentarians with potentially longer career prospects who are

expected to learn the tricks of the trade more quickly in order to establish

their position with voters and the party group leader.The activities in the

middle stage of their career then change in both number and nature. At

that point, the legislator has acquired the expertise to conduct activities

with a larger legislative impact, such as asking parliamentary questions

or reporting on committee recommendations. At the end of a parliamen-

tary career, however, activity levels are likely to decrease since MPs

have no career prospects and little time left in parliament to achieve

their legislative goals—despite their expertise. Indeed, parliamentarians

reduce their activities depending on whether they are anticipating the

end of their parliamentary careers. Unlike most studies on legislative

behavior, this analysis takes the “cause of the end of a career” into

account in explaining an MP’s behavior, thereby allowing us to study

this last-period problem.

We contend that the career stage and expertise are concepts that

help explain parliamentarians’ performance. The neglect of these factors

in the established literature is what motivates our empirical approach to

this question. The effects of career stage in conjunction with the age of

parliamentarians are investigated with an analysis of vote attendance,

parliamentary questions, and rapporteurships. After introducing previous

literature on the topic, we develop our model of the individual career

resources (career prospects and expertise) using a new data set compris-

ing legislative activities and biographical information for MPs in the

German Bundestag from the 15th through to the 17th legislative period

(2002–13).

2 Stefanie Bailer and Tamaki Ohmura

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