Revolving doors across different administrative traditions (RevDo)

The phenomenon of "revolving doors" refers to individuals transitioning positions between public and private sectors, which has profound implications for corporate governance, policy development, and societal ethics. This phenomenon plays a central role in developing corporate political capital and connections, allowing firms to build networks and public expertise through former public officials. Building on this, Sun et al (2016) define board political capital (BPC) as a corporate political tactic [consisting of] appointing individuals to the board of directors who have served in some political capacity (e.g., Hillman, 2005; Lester, Hillman, Zardkoohi, & Cannella, 2008; Sun, Mellahi, & Wright, 2012). Other influential authors, such as Faccio (2006), use the borader concept of politically connected firms, defined as firms where least one of the companys large shareholders or top directors is: (1) a member of parliament, (2) a minister or the head of state, or (3) is closely related to a top official. While this research focuses on the narrower concept of board political capital, we will build on the broader literature on politically connect firms.

While there are several defining features of BPC and board politcal connections, not much is known about its functioning beyond its existence. Research on revolving doors and political capital is currently fragmented, as existent studies usually adopt narrow, static designs, focusing on specific countries and industries and is predominantly centered on its immediate impacts, without considering the broader temporal and cross-national variations.

Additionally, there is a notable gap in comparative research and the analysis of how different administrative traditions, legal frameworks, and personal backgrounds affect the relevance and perfomrance of revolving doors. This limits the ability to generalize findings or draw insights applicable across multiple governance models.

Due to these reasons, in this project, we aim to explore the effects of different varieties of revolving doors in corporate boards of directors across industries and countries within the Europe. We aim to develop a research project that goes beyond hand-coded data by incorporating and building on large language models to code large amounts of board director biographic data. Hence we will be able to cover many companies, industries, and countries, but also to expand our analysis temporally. Our aim is to cover 6000 unique board directors from 300 listed firms, across European countries with an Anglosaxon, Napoleanic, and Germanic adminsitrative legal traditions, and across 8 years.

Analyzing revolving doors and board political capital on this larger scale will advance research in the field by providing more generalizable insights into the key drivers of this phenomenon and its impact on firm performance. This will enable scholars to better understand the evolution of political capital within firms over time while offering a comprehensive and comparative view of the phenomenon of revolving doors across Europe. Furthermore, as the research intersects with themes of business transparency, governance, and economic performance, we anticipate that our findings will contribute to bridging disciplines such as political science, economics, and business ethics, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and broadening the applicability of our results.