Identifying and Explaining Career Patterns in Multi-level Democracies. A Comparative analysis of Catalonia, Quebec, Scotland and Wallonia

With the processes of regionalization and Europeanization in formerly unitary democracies, there is a renewed interest for conceptual and empirical studies on political careers in multi-level systems. Not only in new federal political systems, but also in established federations. Yet, critical questions remain unsolved on both methodological and empirical issues. This paper seeks to provide original answers based on a comparative analysis of four regions from established and new federal systems: Catalonia in Spain, Quebec in Canada, Scotland in the UK and Wallonia in Belgium. The paper proceeds in two stages. From a methodological view, even though current studies analyse individual trajectories, they do not take individual careers but predominantly level-hopping movements as the unit of analysis. This paper demonstrates that an individual approach – following every single trajectory over time and across levels – is a better unit of analysis to uncover all career patterns. Based on a survival analysis of 2.443 careers, a quantitative analysis tests several hypotheses to explain variations in career patterns across regions. Two covariates of interest are more particularly tested: the effect of former regional/national experience and the differences of survival rates between regionalist and national political parties