How the ‘Revolving Door’ Shapes the Lobby-Landscape

Across European countries, a growing number of individuals work as professional lobbyists employing positions across interest groups, private corporations and lobby companies. Many of these lobbyists have prior career experience from working in parliament or within the government bureaucracy. Yet, our knowledge about how these prior experiences shape the specific positions that lobbyists employ and their work and strengths as lobbyists is limited. This paper draws on new data about 2,000 Danish lobbyist working across a wide range of lobby organizations. It combines a detailed mapping of careers with survey-based measures of current job positions and job content. This allows us to provide new insights into the relation between career experience and lobbyism – and therefore also to speak to normative concerns about how the ‘revolving door’ phenomena may distort the balance between different societal interests.