ABSTRACT
Analysing the continuation of political careers is one of the most relevant tasks for the elite scholarship. Nevertheless, whether political careers can be explained by connecting more open candidate selection rules and the personalization of politics is still a neglected issue, which may reveal certain patterns that are still under researched. By focusing on the Italian case between 2006 and 2016, this chapter aims at explaining whether relevant changes in the candidate selection rules and the intra-party-personalization levels might foster the selection of politicians for more relevant parliamentary or governmental offices. After having detected four groups of MPs via a latent class analysis, an ordinal logistic regression highlights that more open candidate selection rules do not have a boosting effect either as an independent or as a conditioning variable. Conversely, the empirical analysis shows a significant effect of a face of intra-party personalization (the control of party organizations by their leaders), that, if interacted with the candidate selection rules variable, makes wider candidate selection rules a boost for more relevant offices, and also favours the obtaining of higher offices by MPs without a classical party or institutional career.
