Where do they land? The post-government professional afterlife of British special advisers

The article examines the post-government career path of 505 former British special advisers in the period 1997-2017. Two fundamental research questions are answered. First, where do special advisers land and what roles do they perform in their post-government professional afterlife? Do they enter politics, do they revolve out of government to business and lobbying, or do they enter other professions? Second, what explains variability in the jobs special advisers perform in their post-government afterlife? In order to answer these questions, we have assembled a unique biographical dataset that maps the first job role on which each special adviser landed after leaving government. We find that the vast majority of special advisers in our sample revolve from government to lobbying with political roles coming as second choice and advocacy non-profit roles. Third, we conducted a multi-nominal logistic regression to test two explanatory hypotheses: 1) prior professional experience (occupational path dependence) and 2) political party affiliation. We find partial confirmation for both these hypotheses. These findings lend weight to increasing concerns about the revolving door and politics for hire in the Anglo-American tradition.