Revolving Door

The ‘revolving door’ is a metaphor for the circulation of personnel between government office and private sector lobbying. In both popular discourse and social science research, the phenomenon has been identified as a source of corporate capture, influence, and even corruption. In this line of research, I explore several questions:

  • How common is the revolving door, and how can we measure it?

  • Why do individuals pursue revolving door careers?

  • What impacts do revolving doors have on the policymaking process?

Working Paper: “Trading Places? A Sequence Analysis of the Revolving Door in U.S. Trade Policy”
Preprint Available Here
The revolving door, or the movement of personnel between public office and private sector lobbying, has been identified by commentators and scholars as a potential source of corporate influence in politics. Yet, methods for the measurement of this phenomenon in the U.S. have to date relied on anecdotal or incomplete data. In this paper, I employ sequence analysis methods to systematically measure the patterns and prevalence of the revolving door. Through descriptive analysis of the complete career trajectories of the population of employees at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) from 2001-2020 (n=658), I show that the revolving door is widespread and heterogeneous in its timing and sequences. Over half of all employees (51.5%) have worked in both lobbying and public office. Five distinct types of career paths illustrate the heterogeneity of revolving door careers, as well as different mechanisms of capital reconversion and accumulation. These findings suggest that prior studies of the revolving door have undermeasured and under-conceptualized the heterogeneity of these careers.

Working Paper: “The Revolving Door as Capital Accumulation”
Available by request
What happens when political elites move through the revolving door? The revolving door is typically conceptualized as a mechanism for government employees to “cash out” and use their knowledge and connections for lobbying. However, this single transition only provides an incomplete picture of a revolving door career. In this paper, I argue that the revolving door should be conceptualized through a capital-based framework, in which individuals and organizations use the revolving door to reconvert and accumulate different forms of capital – economic, social, and cultural – over the course of their careers. Through interviews with revolving door lobbyists, I illustrate the processes through which individuals and organizations describe their own capital, seek opportunities for reconversion, and mobilize such capital in pursuit of political influence and power.

Working Paper: “The Latent Core: Business Power and Revolving Door Networks”
Available by request
Do business interests dominate U.S. policymaking? While some argue that business interests are becoming more fractured and ineffectual (Chu and Davis 2016; Mizruchi 2013; Waterhouse 2013), others have observed that coordinated business interests still dominate policymaking through central policy planning organizations (Banerjee and Murray 2021; Dreiling and Darves 2016; Mills and Domhoff 2023; Murray 2017). However, these studies typically focus on relations among business organizations to understand political power, rather than relations between a wide range of state and non-state policy organizations. To provide another viewpoint on this debate, I propose the analysis of revolving door (RD) networks, which represent organizational relations generated through the circulation of policy personnel between jobs. Such an approach recognizes that individuals build social and cultural capital over their careers that enhance an organization’s capacity to communicate, coordinate with, and influence other organizations. Based on an analysis of the revolving door network of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative from 2001-2020, I argue that business power is both latent and modular in U.S. trade policy. Revolving doors allow businesses to develop resources that enable them to act unilaterally as well as through industry coalitions and class-wide associations. However, businesses are only dominant in the network if they can unite through collective action.

In Progress: “The Moral Career of a Revolving Door Lobbyist”
Popular accounts of Washington, D.C. cast the city as a swamp full of self-interested, well-connected elites who spin through the revolving door, from public service into corporate lobbying and vice versa. The revolving door, or the movement of political elites between the public and private sectors, has long been recognized as a source of corruption, corporate influence, and political inequality in the United States. Yet the Washington area is home to hundreds of thousands of policy professionals who arrive in the city, often ideologically motivated, to pursue careers in public policy and public service. How do individuals' sense of self, and ideas of impact, change over time? What factors guide career decisionmaking, and how do individuals frame and justify the career choices that they make? In this ongoing interview study, I examine patterns in the career trajectories of 50+ individuals who have worked in government, non-profits, law, consulting, lobbying, and policy research. I explore how personal relationships, perceived financial constraints, and conceptions of ambition and impact shape individuals’ decisions to become revolving door lobbyists. I conclude that any effort at government reform which aims to crack down on the revolving door must pay attention to the cultural and social contexts in which policy professionals work.

In Progress: “Becoming a Lobbyist”
What factors drive policymakers to leave government and become lobbyists? Drawing on a dataset of career trajectories of U.S. trade negotiators, I examine the timing and contexts in which bureaucrats become lobbyists.