Political Campaign Career Trajectories

• In Event: Measuring Politics

Abstract

Studies of political influence, interest group activity, and party politics typically rely on financial flows to trace organizational behavior: “follow the money.” In this paper, we outline an alternative approach to understanding how political influence operates in an increasingly complex organizational ecosystem: follow the people. Using a combination of hand-coding and automated online scraping, we collect complete career trajectory data up to 2025 for a sample of all staffers employed by a U.S. congressional campaign in 2014 (n=1,210). We deploy sequence analysis to detect organizational pipelines between campaigns, U.S. Congress, advocacy groups, PACs, consulting firms, and parties. Contrary to popular belief, campaigns may not be an “entry point” into public service. We observe that campaign staffers tend to have prior political experience and go on to work for consulting firms and advocacy groups. While campaigns and House offices are tightly linked, House campaigns do not seem to be significant entry points for the U.S. Senate or other forms of substantive policy or legal work. These findings imply a disconnect between elections and policy, as well as a potential disconnect between campaign staff and the general public. Future research will investigate how careers vary by demographics (race, gender, education), party, and electoral outcomes, as well as boundaries between different career trajectories and typologies.

Authors

• Wendy Y. Li, Johns Hopkins University

• Alexander Torpey, Johns Hopkins University