At the core of the crisis of representative democracy is the recurring critique that political elites have become a self-serving caste separated from, and unresponsive to, civil society. In this paper, we investigate the extent of this phenomenon. Drawing on the literatures on party organizations and political careers, we map the careers trajectories politicians follow before becoming ministers. We delineate three domains: amateur politics, professional politics, and the non-political realm. This allows us to distinguish between ministers who have mostly lived for politics, off politics, or outside of politics. We develop a theoretical framework explaining the prevalence of certain career paths based on the characteristics of political institutions, party systems, and party organisations. To that end, we draw on the most comprehensive data source on political careers to date, comprising several thousand individuals in 30 European democracies between 1945 and 2020. Using unsupervised clustering techniques, we identify career types and contrast them with our theoretical expectations. We discuss the implications of our findings for the linkages between civil society, political parties and the state.