Revolving doors —the movement of individuals between public and private sectors— are a global phenomenon with profound implications for the role of money in politics. However, existing literature remains fragmented, often focusing on one-directional transitions, either from business to politics or politics to business. These works overlook the complexity of revolving doors a dynamic phenomenon involving multiple states over individuals’ trajectories.
This paper addresses this gap by analyzing a novel dataset comprising 100,000 unique individuals who occupied posts in the private and public sectors between 1920 and 2020. Our first contribution is to offer a refined operationalization of revolving doors. Moving beyond a binary understanding of transitions, we introduce a typology that captures direct transitions, movements involving a “cooling period” between roles, and concurrent involvement in both spheres. Our second contribution is to theorize who engages in revolving doors. Drawing on a longstanding literature on business power, we test competing explanations on how the structural power of economic sectors shapes revolving door patterns. Our findings illuminate the complexity of these dynamics and offer a comprehensive view of the mechanisms underpinning the intersections of politics and business.