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There is broad consensus that lobbyists with government experience are valuable to those who employ them, principally because they possess contacts in government and unique insights into the policy process. Yet the near exclusive focus on government experience as the defining feature of lobbyist careers, means the literature has neglected analysis of the mix of different (and important) experiences that actual lobbyists likely accumulate during their careers. We address these gaps through analysis of the career sequences of over 600 lobbyists operating across contract and in‐house roles in Australia. Using the tools of sequence and cluster analysis, we identify four broad types of careers among lobbyists. While half of all lobbyists have had roles with some direct political experience, we find that distinctions between types of lobbying careers are differentiated by experience in other fields such as journalism, public relations, associations and corporate life. Moreover, our multivariate analysis shows that different career types are more strongly associated with in‐house versus contract lobbying roles. We conclude that scholars should move beyond a focus on 'revolving doors' to more directly analyse the range of experiences that lobbyists leverage in their professional lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas about what makes a 'good citizen' continue to evolve alongside the digitalisation of political participation. We examine these interrelated trends through an in-depth analysis of the normative basis for contemporary online petitioning. This article uses original survey data in Australia and Germany to confirm the emergence of distinctive 'contribution' citizenship norms which emphasise the importance of sharing content through networked communications infrastructures. We then examine the relationship between these novel citizenship norms and online petitioning, differentiating online petitioning along two dimensions of mode (signing versus sharing) and frequency. First, we find 'contribution' norms are more associated with sharing online petitions than signing them. Second, 'contribution' norms are more associated with high-frequency sharing and signing, as opposed to more casual instances of participation. In combination, these findings show that contribution norms are distinctively associated with more intensive forms of online petitioning (e.g. frequent sharing), while more casual forms (such as casual signing) are supported by a more diverse range of normative orientations. We conclude that the way citizens engage with online petitions reflects, in part, their normative orientation to contributing information towards networked communication infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]