The Importance of Expertise: Political Careers, Personnel Turnover, and Throughput Legitimacy in the European Parliament

This chapter focuses on the political consequences of the career paths of members of the European Parliament (MEPs). We focus on two leadership positions—committee chairships and rapporteurships. We use an original dataset to consider the relationship among turnover, MEPs’ previous political experience, and throughput legitimacy. We find that while previous European Parliament (EP) experience is an important criterion for committee chair selection, such experience is less important for rapporteurship selection. This finding does not hold, however, for rapporteurs who receive a larger number of reports. We also observe, contrary to existing theoretical arguments, that throughput legitimacy suffers when politicians entering the EP are political outsiders but not when new MEPs have been professional politicians in their home country.