The selection of career changers for parliamentary office is a double edged sword. From a traditional party perspective, recruiting such political outsiders that have no prior political experience seems unlikely. Career changers are unknown, less embedded and unpredictable. Yet, selecting these 'high potential rookies' has the potential to bring fresh ideas, expertise and new voters. Previous research has shown that political parties do sometimes select career changers, but has not explored why. In this paper we hypothesize the selection of these political outsiders to be due a 'personalization reflex' which is induced by disappointing election results, as a result of which political parties temporarily prioritize the attraction of new voters via attractive outsiders over the selection of safe insiders. We investigate this idea with a new detailed data-set that contains all the individual level pre-parliamentary political activities of (N=1151) Dutch and (N=1396) German MPS. Using non-nested multi-level logistic regression models we confirm vote-share losses in the previous election to be strongly predictive of the increased recruitment of political outsiders. Results also support our hypothesis that this relation is partly mediated by ideological change reflected in the manifestos of these party. When it comes to the impact of ideological change itself we find interesting cross-party differences that warrant further investigation.
