Replication Data for: What comes after cabinet? Post-cabinet careers of German regional ministers between 1945 and 2014

Political elite studies have so far often dealt with career paths before entering a particular political position, focusing mostly on individual career states. However, they neglected what comes after a political office and the temporal-sequential character of biographies. This paper addresses these two issues. Using sequence analytic techniques, it examines the post-cabinet careers of ministers from the German states in the period 1945-2014 using a newly created, original dataset containing 1400 trajectories and over 12,000 coded person-years. The descriptive analysis shows partly significant differences in post-cabinet careers by gender, federal state, decade, and last portfolio, but less so by party membership. Three of the five clusters found represent comparatively homogeneous post-cabinet career structures. Whereas in the early years of the republic most politicians did not have a further (long) professional career after leaving office, changes to private business and, above all, remaining in politics at the state level represent the two largest career paths. A springboard career in federal politics, on the other hand, is rare, but certainly possible. From a methodological point of view this study shows the potential but also the prob-lems of sequence analysis for research on political elites and offers ideas on how to continue with this approach.