Career Patterns in Multi-level Systems. A Survival Analysis of Political Careers in Catalonia, Quebec, Scotland, and Wallonia.

With the process of regionalisation in formerly unitary democracies, there is a renewed interest for conceptual and empirical studies on political careers. Not only in new federal political systems, but also in established federations. Yet, critical questions remain unsolved on both methodological and empirical aspects. This proposal 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 research analyse individual trajectories, they do not take individual careers but predominantly inter-territorial movements as the unit of analysis. This paper demonstrates that an individual approach – following every single trajectory over time and across territories – 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 the variations in career patterns across regions. Two covariates of interest are more particularly tested: the effect of former regional/national experience on political career; the differences of survival rates at the regional and national levels between regionalist and national parties.