Studies of MPs’ careers have limited themselves to the representativeness or lack thereof of parliaments as regards society as a whole, comparing the composition of legislatures by occupational groups or levels of educational attainment (Best and Cotta, 2000). The drawback of these studies lies in the snapshot view they take of an MP’s occupational background. Building on the understanding that a career is a dynamic concept, this paper analyses how incentives, opportunities and attitudes vary according to the career stage of an MP. On the one hand socialization literature predicts that parliamentarians adopt the values of their party and parliament over the course of their work in the plenary. On the other hand, a rational choice oriented approach based on the principal agent model would postulate that parliamentarians behave according to the principals they are most dependent on, be it voters or party group leaders. The dependency and therefore the orientation toward the party group leadership should be the strongest in the early stages of an MP’s career while the opportunities and incentives to create a personal profile should rise during the course of his career. This development should culminate at the end of an MP’s career, producing the so-called last-period problem. Based on these considerations, we suggest an exploratory investigation of attitudes, voting and campaigning behaviour of German parliamentarians from the 14th through to the current 17th legislative period setting an emphasis on changes in these variables according to the respective career stage. Considering parliamentarians over four legislative periods allows to study whether voting deviations become more or less frequent, whether attitudes become more adapted or independent and whether the focus of campaigning becomes more party oriented or personalized over the course and towards the end of a career.
