The Regional and National Careers Project (RENACA Project): Shifting Political Careers in a Changing Multilevel World

In representative democracies, the study of elected politicians is central in social and political sciences. With the increasing transfers of authority from national to regional tiers of government, the study of political careers in multilevel systems has significantly evolved over the last 15 years. Processes of regionalization multiply sites of political decision-making and transform political careers. The literature showed that regional political arenas are not (anymore) reserved to second-order and powerless elites but, on the opposite, became powerful political centres where professionalized careers are conducted. Despite this key finding in the literature, the conditions explaining why and how candidates develop regional and/or national ambition remain partially unknown. The analysis of political careers is however paramount in multilevel systems because they condition the emergence of the regional and/or the national political class. Without the development of a regional political class, regional politics tends to remain dominated by national priorities while regional elites not integrated in the national political class are more inclined to develop strong autonomous claims or even independence. Therefore, this project seeks to fil this gap in the literature and assess not only the diversity of career patterns of Members of Parliaments in multilevel systems, but also explain this variety through the institutional and socio-political dimensions of regionalism. For that aims, the project sets out an innovative comparative research design that covers 16 regions from 8 countries combining established federations and newly regionalized countries as well as polities with strong and weak regionalism. Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, the ultimate ambition of this project is to test but also to enrich current theories of career patterns in multilevel systems.