Career Patterns in Lobbying: Insights from LinkedIn Profiles of Interest Group Representatives in Germany

While interest group research has only rarely and selectively described the characteristics of lobbyist careers, the proliferation of professional social media platforms such as LinkedIn, where interest group organizations and their staff are widely represented, provides unique data to gain insights into the composition and structure of political elites. To date, the literature has seldomly considered LinkedIn as a platform in the context of politics (for an exception, see Kreiss & Jasinksi, 2016), and a limited number of studies have traced the career paths of professionals from different fields (e.g., Hickey et al., 2022, for engineering, or Richardsen et al., 2024, for CIOs). A recent study, based in part on LinkedIn profile data, examines more than 600 Australian lobbyists and finds that while political experience is a widespread feature of their careers (see revolving door hypothesis), it is other experiences, such as public relations, that shape the differences between the types of career pathways identified (Halpin & Lotric, 2024). This evidence of the simultaneous importance of government and corporate roles contrasts with research on EU affairs managers, who have distinctive careers in either the public or private sector (Coen & Vannoni, 2016; cf. Halpin & Lotric, 2024: 196). My paper aims to extend the study of lobbyists' careers by examining the professional trajectories of interest group representatives in a hitherto unexplored context, national lobbying in Germany. To define a population of lobbyists, I use the German lobby register, which lists both interest group organizations and their authorized representatives. I rely on publicly available LinkedIn bios as a data source to extract information about education and career paths. The existence of LinkedIn profiles was checked for over 12,000 representatives with direct lobbying activities from around 3,500 interest organizations. My study employs text mining to extract information from a partially standardized corpus of career data, using hierarchical clustering to explore the structure and diversity of career trajectories among interest group representatives. After distinguishing different and potentially unexplored types of career paths from an inductive perspective, I relate them to the classification of interest groups derived from the INTERARENA project (Binderkrantz et al., 2020). I hypothesize that the career trajectories of interest group representatives reflect not only individual professional strategies, but also the strategic goals and organizational structures of the groups they represent. Drawing on the distinction between inside and outside lobbying (Kollman, 1998) as strategies for influencing the policy-making process, generally associated more with either sectional or public groups, I expect the careers of business group leaders with their emphasis on informal lobbying to mirror the politicis–business revolving door (e.g., Heinz et al., 1993). Due to the presumed similar level of professionalization across the interest group industry (Klüver & Saurugger, 2013), representatives of both sectional and public groups are expected to follow linear career paths, although specializations may vary.