The legislators, judges, and higher civil servants running a country are not merely elite, they are also embedded in occupationally defined quests for career development. How then is the long-term working life of these individuals affected by sudden and thorough upheavals, such as the transition from socialist autocracy to capitalist democracy? This dissertation aims to understand the long-term career evolution of government elites in societies racked by revolution, with special focus on post-socialist Romania. The first chapter investigates how political purges fail to replace the old regime’s cadres. To that end I develop and leverage a novel, demographic, agent-based model of vacancy chain processes which allows me to simulate the career development of bureaucrats in organisations subjected to purges. A series of simulation experiments reveals surprising findings, among which that short and hard purges may retard the retirement rate of old regime figures. The next chapter studies a novel phenomenon: elite professions that are gender integrated or female dominated. Treating the case of Romanian judges (75% women) and prosecutors (50% women), this chapter leverages social sequence analysis to uncover patterns in the career development of male and female professionals. This chapter is the first to rigorously describe the career trajectories of a new and theoretically important elite occupational group, paving the way for future research on the effects of gender in genuinely equal occupations. Finally, the third chapter studies how an active judicial anti-corruption drive affects the careers of parliamentarians. Studying Romanian legislators this chapter shows that indicting politicians affects party switching and early retirement by initiating leadership struggles and directly threatening legislators with jail, but not by making them learn from the negative example of convicted colleagues. Romanian anticorruption does not seem to have qualitatively changed political practice in that country, with the implication that such anticorruption drives are only effective when active: once gone legislative life may well return to the bad old ways. Taken together, these three articles explore the ways in which the long-term activities of government elites are channelled by the organisations in which they are embedded.