Professionalization of Central and Eastern European Legislatures Through the Lens of Legislative Turnover

The proposed paper will tackle the question of legislative turnover in Central and Eastern Europe, given its close link to the professionalization of legislatures. While most research has focused on legislative turnover, the rate of renewal of members of parliament, measured on the level of political parties, this paper follows a strand of research that analyzes data on the individual legislator level. Most studies of legislative turnover focus on the U.S. and Western Europe, with much fewer studies existing on Central and Eastern Europe, and only a handful of them analyzing the region in a comparative perspective. Given that legislators with multiple terms of experience should be more competent in drafting bills that pass through congress and become laws, as suggested by some research, legislative turnover can be seen as a proxy measure for professionalization. Not only that, but voters also take the incumbency status of legislators into account when deciding who to vote for at the ballot, often preferring to keep the incumbents in parliament. However, given the unavailability of individual-level data, most research utilizes legislative turnover on an aggregated level. Due to this, there is very little information on how professionalized legislatures are in terms of long-term legislator experience, leading to legislative turnover being less meaningful of a proxy measure for professionalization. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first time an analysis of legislative turnover in Central and Eastern Europe differentiates incoming MPs into incumbents, returning MPs and first-term MPs, as proposed by Francois and Grossman (2015). Compared to the usual legislative turnover measure of incumbents and newcomers, differentiating first-term and returning MPs allows for a more consistent measure of professionalization. This is enabled thanks to a unique dataset of individual legislator observations in 11 Central and Eastern European countries spanning elections since the democratization of the region in the 1990s for a total of 86 unique legislative turnover rates on the country-year level and over 20000 observations of elected legislators. A regression model utilizing various political and institutional determinants will be utilized to provide robust results, which will be further interpreted in terms of which determinants influence legislative turnover. The proposed paper will improve the current understanding of legislative turnover in two important aspects. Firstly, it will analyze the temporal trends of turnover in Central and Eastern Europe, showing how legislative turnover and the rate of first-term MPs has evolved in the past three decades. Secondly, the differentiation of first-time and returning MPs will allow for a more fine-grained analysis of legislative turnover. This will result in a better understanding of legislator professionalization in the region, as well as help explain how careers of politicians differ not only across the various countries of Central and Eastern Europe, but also in time.