Stepping stones or party placements? Post-ministerial cabinet careers of Belgian ministerial advisers (1999–2020)

What do ministerial advisers do once they leave office? This article examines the post-ministerial cabinet careers of Belgian federal advisers, analyzing whether these trajectories reflect individual stepping stones or party-driven placements. Using a new dataset of 6107 career positions held by 767 advisers (1999–2020), we test two perspectives. The first posits that cabinet service accelerates career advancement by providing political and administrative capital. The second, grounded in politicization and party–state theory, argues that parties shape post-ministerial cabinet careers. We introduce a novel ranking algorithm based on large language model-driven pairwise comparisons to assess career progression and use cosine similarity to measure how closely advisers’ post-ministerial cabinet careers align with their party’s typical trajectory versus their pre-ministerial cabinet path. We find no clear evidence that cabinet service inherently drives upward mobility. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of advisers pursue post-ministerial cabinet careers more aligned with their party than their own pre-cabinet trajectory. This effect is especially strong among cartel parties, who possess greater access to state resources. These findings highlight how parties shape elite careers and deepen our understanding of politicization beyond formal office.