Past Session
Monday, November 10, 2025
17:30h
Presented by
Avaro La Parra-Pérez (Weber State University)
https://sites.google.com/site/alvarolaparraperez/

Revolving Doors Under Democracy and Autocracy 

Abstract

Who uses revolving doors under democracy and autocracy? Existing research often focuses on one-way, single-time transitions — either from business to politics or vice versa — in either democracy or autocracy, overlooking the revolving door as a dynamic, multi-state process unfolding across regime types over the course of individuals' careers. We propose a typology that distinguishes direct and indirect transitions, and specialized roles from concurrent roles. Using a novel dataset tracking the trajectories of nearly 100,000 public officials and entrepreneurs in Spain between 1920 and 2023, we test whether economic power translates into formal political power, and vice versa, across regimes. We find that regime type shapes transitions from politics to business, but less so from business to politics. Highly connected businesspeople enter politics regardless of regime type. In contrast, although politically influential individuals move to business under both regime types, they may be more likely to do so under autocracy.

About this workshop

The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.

The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.

Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.