Still Rising: The Career Politician
in the British House of Commons,
the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet
Jamie Pow1
There is a public perception that politicians in the United
Kingdom are increasingly detached from the electorate
due to the apparent increase in the number of ‘career
politicians’ with a professional background in politics.
This article examines the occupational backgrounds of
successful candidates to the House of Commons of the
United Kingdom between the 1997 and 2010 general
elections, comparing the parliamentary compositions of
the three main political parties (Conservatives, Labour
and Liberal Democrats) during this period, and the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet as of 2014. By evaluating original and secondary quantitative data, it is argued that
professionalised politicians have increased in the House
of Commons relative to other occupational backgrounds,
and are even further disproportionately represented in
the senior teams of each major party.
1 Jamie Pow is in his final year of a BA in Politics at Queen’s University, Belfast. The
author would like to thank the Swiss Centre of Expertise of the Social Sciences for
granting access to the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS), as well as to Dr Peter
Allen (University of Bath) for very helpful suggestions on sources of quantitative data.
Thanks are also due to Dr Elodie Fabre (Queen’s University Belfast) for supervising the
project. Any errors are the author’s own. The author can be contacted at: jpow01@qub.
ac.uk.