Careers, Networks, and the Revolving Door in Policymaking Processes

Scholars have long debated whether and how corporations exercise political power in the United States. In this dissertation, I argue that the phenomenon of the ‘revolving door,’ or the circulation of personnel between public office and private sector lobbying, systematically shapes how corporations interact with the state. Through a multi-method research design, this dissertation addresses three questions: 1) how common is the revolving door?; 2) what effects does the revolving door have on individual careers and organizational resources?; and 3) how does the revolving door shape relationships between state and non-state organizations?

In Chapter 1, I propose a sequence analysis framework and method for measuring the revolving door. Prior literature on the revolving door has typically focused on individuals who leave government for lucrative lobbying jobs, explaining it as an economically rational move for individuals and non-state organizations. However, I show that these studies have vastly undermeasured the revolving door by using biased datasets and narrow definitions of the revolving door. To address these shortcomings, I employ sequence analysis on an original, population-level dataset of career trajectories of U.S. trade negotiators (n=658). I detect five distinct types of revolving doors and find that more than half of all trade negotiators employed from 2001-2020 have gone through a revolving door over their careers. Thus, revolving doors are more widespread and heterogeneous than previously detected.

In the second chapter, I argue that the revolving door not only generates economic value, but also acts as a mechanism for individuals to accumulate and convert economic, social, and cultural capital. Drawing on interviews conducted with 53 policy professionals about their career trajectories and transitions, I describe how the revolving door transforms individuals’ resources, including salaries, social connections, and credentials, over the course of their careers. As individuals move to different jobs, they also accumulate social and cultural capital that benefits the interest groups they work for. Thus, at an organizational level, the revolving door allows interest groups to convert money, used for lobbyists’ salaries, into both access and legitimacy with government officials.

Chapter 3 explores the structural consequences of revolving door careers. Using the career dataset from Chapter 1, I construct a network of organizations with employment ties to trade negotiators, revealing underlying social relations between state and non-state organizations. I explore features of the revolving door network that shed light on political influence and bias, as well as the existence of an inner circle of organizations. I find that some business organizations are well-positioned to exercise influence, but do not systematically impose bias and are absent from the inner circle. However, if acting collectively, business interests can become central actors in the revolving door network. These findings contribute to scholarly debates on lobbying, business power, and corporate cohesion, and provide directions for future research on social capital, elites, and policymaking.