The career ambitions of politicians may determine their political behavior. This has been recognized by the U.S. congressional literature. Yet elsewhere, research on political career behavior remains scarce. In the study of party-centred European political systems, the role of career ambitions has been dismissed on the ground that individual career behavior is irrelevant or even inadmissible because politicians are to pursue collective (party) goals, not their personal interests.

The two books reviewed here depart from these presumptions and add to a new burgeoning literature on the microfoundations of political behavior in representative democracies, where individual motivations need to be reconciled with collective party objectives. They assert that career ambitions shape politicians’ legislative behavior and strategies, and influence their long-term career trajectories. Whereas Patrik Öhberg studies progressive career ambitions for high positions of members of parliament (MPs) from the well-established Swedish Parliament, William T. Daniel scrutinizes the development of static career ambition and its implications for advancement within the still-institutionalizing European Parliament (EP).

Öhberg’s Ambitious Politicians is among the first books to look comparatively at political career ambitions in representative democracies, and is a must-read for all interested in the topic. There is a lot to praise and learn from its strong theoretical foundations and multifaceted empirical analyses. Öhberg focuses on Sweden as a least likely case for personal ambitions to matter due to strong party cohesion, the predominance of the seniority principle that dissuades intraparty competition, and a political culture that repudiates political ambition. If even in this setting politicians with real career ambition exist and are successful as a result of their ambition, he argues, then political career ambition must also be an effective motivator in other party-centred representative democracies.

In an eloquent and intellectually stimulating narrative, Öhberg embeds his arguments in political ambition theory going back to Aristotle and encompassing psychological, sociological, and rational-choice explanations. He then positions his work in the literature by meticulously defining ambitious politicians as ones who in the long run purposefully and actively pursue difficult-to-attain high positions outside parliament (cabinet minister and/or position within the European Union institutions). This definition sets apart progressive from static, enduring from opportunistic, and consequential from inconsequential ambition. The rest of the book is structured around five empirical questions: Are there MPs who aspire to high positions? Who are those MPs? Do they take action to achieve their goals? Are they successful? And, finally, does Sweden differ from other European democracies?

Relying on a unique MP survey with a nearly full response rate, the author shows that 18% of Swedish MPs report having progressive ambition. They are more likely to be from affluent families, young, multilingual, residents of the Stockholm area, committed to party politics, and professional politicians. Intriguingly, ambitious politicians do not concentrate in larger parties with higher chances of forming the government. In terms of their attitudes, rather than representing their constituency, individual voters, or party platforms, they value first and foremost the importance of representing their own convictions. Öhberg likens them to Burkeans, who equate representation with the need to “articulate public needs and interests” and to “balance conflicting interests in the country” (pp. 64–65). Ambitious politicians behave strategically, cultivating personal reputation by speaking up at party meetings and voting against the party line more frequently than other MPs, but they compensate for that by cultivating good relationships with party leadership. Considering their actual level of success 10 years on, crucially they are overrepresented in the most popular parliamentary committees and are unlikely to be “forced out” of parliament. While MPs who tend to break the party line fare worse in the long run, those who speak the most often at party meetings do better in their careers. So, career attainment requires more than compliance, Öhberg concludes.

Overall, contrary to common assumptions, MPs with career ambition do better, not worse, than others as a result of their efforts to advance their political careers. A comparison with 10 other European parliaments shows that ambitious politicians are more common in countries with a less egalitarian political culture and parliaments with lower turnover rates, irrespective of the electoral rules. A natural and essential question that the book leaves open, however, is whether parliaments with more ambitious MPs subsequently experience different policymaking dynamics and legislative output than parliaments with fewer ambitious MPs. Similarly, should we expect less legislative activity in parliaments with more members with progressive rather than static ambition, as the recent findings of Bjorn Høyland, Sara B. Hobolt, and Simon Hix’s study on the European Parliament would suggest (“Career Ambitions and Legislative Participation,” British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming)?

Daniel’s Career Behaviour and the European Parliament partially addresses this question by considering the relationship of candidate selection, electoral success, and the balance of power in the EP in a single analytical framework that combines rational-choice assumptions with insights from historical institutionalism. This book traces the coevolution of the EP and the career ambitions of its membership. Daniel offers a rich analysis of comprehensive, novel data on the career behavior of 5,000 EP members (MEPs) serving in the period 1979–2014, supplemented by three case studies on France, Germany, and Poland.

Daniel examines previous assertions that a career in the EP has served as a stepping stone to a career in national politics or a retirement home, rather than being the main interest. In line with his expectations, he shows that the external empowerment and institutional professionalization of the EP have had a significant, albeit weak, positive effect on the number of MEPs seeking reelection, a sign of increasingly common static career ambitions in the EP. It is persistent country-level differences that account for most variation in MEPs’ career behavior. As Daniel concludes, “most major differences in the face of the EP remain geographic and not temporal” (p. 160). MEPs from some countries tend to seek longer-term EP careers than others. This is the case for legislators from federal and functionally decentralized political systems (e.g., Germany) where political parties are accustomed to selecting distinct pools for candidates across multiple levels of government and politicians advance within, rather than across, these levels. As a result, he concludes, power concentrates in the hands of member states with stable EP membership, capable of accruing the seniority and specialization needed to influence EP legislation. Yet such a generalization needs to be qualified, as there are vast differences in formal and informal practices of candidate selection among political parties, not only between but also within countries (e.g., Elena Frech’s Re-Selecting Members of the European Parliament, 2018). Daniel considers this, but only in the case studies.

The book further explores whether EP seniority, used as a proxy for static career ambition, affects the legislative activities of legislators. Daniel finds that longer-serving MEPs with higher levels of education exercise greater influence over the EP’s legislative positions via the allocation of legislative reports. While this implies that the EP is an increasingly specialized legislature, he also raises concerns that the concentration of power in an elite clique of legislators “may also serve as a detriment to representative democracy in the EU” (p. 105).

The book’s gloomy conclusions about the undue influence of some member states and legislators in the EP, however, are partially driven by its author’s theoretical conceptualization and empirical choices. In particular, it understates the significant role of the European party groups and the EP’s institutional rules in moderating legislative behavior.

Firstly, it is party group leaders that MEPs need to cater to in order to fulfill their static ambitions. While MEPs depend on their national parties for reelection, their party group leaders allocate EP offices, such as committee seats and chair positions, legislative reports, and so on. Disloyal party group members are given the opportunity to write significantly fewer legislative reports, irrespective of, or despite, their seniority or expertise (see Antoine Yoshinaka, Gail McElroy, and Shaun Bowler’s “The Appointment of Rapporteurs in the European Parliament,” Legislative Studies Quarterly, 35[November], 2010; Nikoleta Yordanova, Organizing the European Parliament, 2013)—a regularity that holds in recent EP terms (fourth to sixth), even if not in earlier years, as Daniel’s pooled analysis implies (p. 100). Successful party disciplining is one of the explanations for the surprisingly high and rising party group cohesion in the European Parliament, as demonstrated in Simon Hix, Abdul Noury, and Gérard Roland’s Democratic Politics in the European Parliament (2007).

Secondly, the leverage of rapporteurs is limited, as they need to acquire the consent of their committees for their legislative reports. For instance, Anne Rasmussen and Christine Reh (“The Consequences of Concluding Codecision Early,” Journal of European Public Policy, 20(7), 2013) show that even in the now-standard informal bicameral negotiations and early agreements between the EP and the Council of Ministers, where the rapporteurs negotiate on behalf of the parliament, rapporteurs have been unable to pull final legislative outcomes closer to the positions of their own party groups. The EP open-amendment rule and majority voting in committee and plenary ensure that policy outcomes do not deviate significantly from the preferences of the plenary median.

Nevertheless, Daniel’s study elucidates the undoubtedly essential relationship between national parties and their MEPs, as shaped by candidate selection and recruitment, about which we still know surprisingly little. Its original conceptualization of career trajectories as institutions that can be studied via theories of institutional change opens new horizons for the study of political career ambitions and behavior.

Both books have moved away from general assumptions about the vote, office, and policy-seeking goals of politicians and offered concrete insights on what motivates politicians, under which conditions various motivations prevail, and how these motivations affect legislative activities and career trajectories. The books convince one that political career ambition exists and shapes political behavior and office attainment in party-centred political systems. This begs the question of how politicians’ ambition subsequently influences their representational focus and policy positions, policymaking in general, and, ultimately, the functioning of representative democracy.