(Re-)Assessing Political Careers Patterns in Multi-level systems. Insights from Wallonia

The establishment of regional Parliaments in Western Europe has renewed the study of political careers. Since the beginning of the 21st century, an increasing number of – conceptual and empirical – studies have been published on political careers in multi-level systems. Despite the richness of the novel analytical approaches proposed, I argue that the current trend in the literature that consists to label a whole region (or even a country) as illustrations of integrated, alternative, or hierarchical careers pattern (might) produce an imperfect picture of the reality – or even worse, could lead to a misleading conclusion. I rather hypothesize that, within a single region, the possibility of multiple careers patterns has to be a priori considered: distinct professional political classes might co-exist. In this respect, two methodological elements must be integrated into the research design. Firstly, from a heuristic point of view, researchers should move from the (mere) analysis of level-hopping movements between two elections and rather adopt a microscopic point of view through the study of every single individual political careers (internal validity). Secondly, the cases under investigation should be selected only if they display a critical amount of legislatures in order to observe robust and non-contingent career patterns (external validity). For the sake of parsimony and clarity of my demonstration, I recourse to an in-depth case study – Walloon political careers – but cross-sectional research are certainly determinant to (in-)valid this hypothesis