The revolving door in Brussels: a process-oriented approach to employee recruitment by interest organisations

The staff flow between the public sector and organised interests is metaphorically defined as ‘revolving door’. This paper seeks to explain variation in hiring behaviour across interest organisations (IOs). Using data from the Comparative Interest Group-survey project, we show that revolving door practices do not occur systematically across IOs but that, under specific conditions, IOs are more likely to attract employees from the public sector than others. Our main findings demonstrate that citizen organisations are more likely to hire employees with public sector background, compared with professional and business organisations. We also show that the effect of group type is resource-sensitive, as wealthy citizen groups are more likely to hire from the public sector than wealthy business organisations. Additionally, we demonstrate that contextual factors such as the degree of political involvement and the perceived complexity of the policy environment predict hiring from the public sector.