Last year, extra funding was offered to MPs to help them and their offices cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. The public outcry that ensued showed the confusion and misunderstandings amongst the public about the work of MPs and the staff who support them. But even before COVID-19 hit us, the job of an MPs’ staffer was difficult to decipher from the outside and most people know very little about the 3,000 people who play key roles in the functioning of our democracy.

Rebecca McKee presents the first data from her project on MPs’ staff, summarising her findings in response to the question ‘who works for MPs? Much of the data presented here is from a survey of MPs’ staff and more information about the survey can be found on the project webpage.

We know more than ever about our MPs – who they are, what motivates them, and what they say and do in the course of their work. They work hard, and their workload is growing. But this work is supported by just over 3,000 staff, working in offices across the UK, and we know very little about these ‘unsung heroes’, as former Commons Speaker John Bercow called them. They undertake a wide variety of roles, as gatekeepers, controlling access by constituents and interest groups; they are resources, providing research and policy advice; they are channels, linking the constituency to Westminster; and they are providers of essential administrative support. They sit at what has been termed the ‘representational nexus’, as they represent the constituents to the MP and the MP to their constituents.

These individuals have an unusual employment status; they are not public servants in the way that a civil servant is. MPs are responsible for employing their own staff directly and they are able to set the direction of work and the roles of the staff needed to support them, essentially running 650 small businesses. They do so within a framework covering salaries and job descriptions, overseen by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA). There is no formal hiring process and staff may lack some of the usual employment protections and support systems. Yet these roles can also provide the incumbents with significant benefits. Staff may be able to trade on the valuable experience they have gained and the networks they have become privy to. Some, but not all jobs, can be a stepping stone to a career as a parliamentarian, a political journalist, in a public affairs agency, or other role where knowledge of ‘the inside’ and a demonstrable ability to engage with it counts for a lot.

Yet not everyone can take advantage of these opportunities. The experience of a caseworker in a constituency office will differ from that of a parliamentary researcher in the Westminster office, simply on account of the different work they do, their exposure to Westminster politics and the people they interact with as part of their job.

Given the importance of these staff in supporting MPs and the hugely varied experiences they have, we should ask who are these people who work for MPs?

IPSA routinely publishes some data on MPs’ staff, but as it’s collected for monitoring MPs’ expenditure and payroll purposes it is quite limited. In autumn 2019 I conducted a survey, sent to the offices of all MPs. I asked questions on three key themes: equality and diversity, capacity and skills, and employment practices and opportunities. I am very grateful for the responses I received, and that staff took the time to engage with this project. Where it was possible to compare with existing IPSA data, I could see that I achieved a sample that was largely representative in terms of gender and category of job (job family – see later) but less so in terms of political party, so the data have been weighted to take account of party in the analysis. More information about the survey is available on the project webpage. The figures cited in the following sections come from the survey, except in some cases where the data is taken from IPSA’s website. In these cases I have added a link to the source.

Who works for an MP?

Taking an average of the data, a ‘typical’ staff member is female, 37 years old, white, a state educated university graduate who is working in a junior executive role, for example a Junior Caseworker, in the constituency office. Overall, about 56% of MP’s staff are female, and 93% are White. More than half are over 30 years old, the longest serving staff member according to an IPSA FOI in 2018 had been working for an MP for almost 39 years. Their educational backgrounds vary. Almost 70% received their secondary education at a state comprehensive or secondary modern school, 15% attended an independent (fee-paying) school, and 14% attended a state grammar school. The proportion who attended an independent fee-paying school is almost double the average for the UK population (7%), but half of that of MPs themselves (29% in 2019).

This is a skilled workforce, as judged by formal qualifications. Around three quarters of all staff have a university degree, and around a fifth have a postgraduate degree. Of those with a degree 48% received it from a Russell Group University, including 7% from Oxbridge. The vast majority of degrees are in the Humanities or Social Sciences – of those with degrees, 90% at undergraduate and 82% at postgraduate level have degrees in these subjects. The rest are divided among the Sciences, Business, Education, and Planning.

Of course, university is not the only place where people gain experience and skills. Because there are 650 individual offices, each with a small number of staff, a higher proportion are in the senior roles needed to run them. Just under a third are in the top employment band including, for example, Office Managers and Senior Parliamentary Assistants, which gives them experience in taking responsibility that will be very useful in future roles. Overall, staff have worked in a broad range of sectors, including but not limited to hospitality, consulting, marketing, retail, law, finance, research and health and social care. The most common settings are the charity – or ‘third – sector’ (11%) and public services and administration (18%), such as local government, the Civil Service, government agencies or elsewhere in parliament. Around 15% had previously worked in an administrative role. This makes sense when we consider that many MPs depend on skilled administrators and office managers. While it is clearly valuable to have staff who bring expertise from outside, it’s always possible for staff to learn on the job, making use of the vast experience offered to them once they’re in the door. As Chris Skidmore MP explained, a background in Tudor History doesn’t preclude you from getting a job with an MP, working your way up through the system, getting elected yourself and one day becoming the Universities and Science Minister. 

Staff have a wide range of political experience. Just over 20% said that they had held party office at local level, 13% had been elected as a local councillor, and 4% had been a candidate for the UK or European Parliament. However, the goal of becoming an MP is not universal – when asked how likely it was that they would ever run for parliament, almost 50% stated that the chance was zero.

The structure of staffing: Job families

MPs are responsible for staffing their offices, creating roles that are in line with the job descriptions and salary brackets set out by IPSA, whilst not exceeding their overall staffing budget. Ideally MPs will use this budget to staff an office with the appropriate mix of roles to support their work, within the budget they are given. In 2018, each MP had 4.3 people on average supporting them. However, the way that MPs staff their offices varies hugely; some MPs choose to have all staff in the constituency office and have no one in Westminster, instead making use of pooled research services, others choose to have a large number of junior researchers in Westminster, and some – very few – have no staff at all.

Job titles, job descriptions, and pay levels are brought together as ‘job families’ by IPSA. There are three job families; administrative, executive, and research, they sit amongst three levels of seniority which link to the job description and salary bands. IPSA asks that MPs employ their staff within this structure. Despite the wide range of possible job titles, over 50% of staff reported having one of four; Caseworker, Parliamentary Assistant, Office Manager, and Senior Caseworker. Whilst this structure is used by MPs to staff their offices, it’s recognised by many that in practice staff often work across the spectrum. In the survey I asked staff to write in an alternative job title if they felt their job wasn’t fully reflected in the IPSA structure. Just under 10% chose to do so, although many of the additional suggestions were within the same job family or tier.

Table 1 shows how staff are formally split across this framework. Administrative roles are split across three tiers, whilst executive and research roles are split across two.

Using this framework to look at who works for an MP, we can see how staff in different roles may have different experiences. Perhaps the greatest difference relates to where they are mainly based, in the MP’s constituency or Westminster offices. Approximately 85% of research staff are based in the Westminster office. This drops to around 30% for administrative staff, and further to only 12% for executive staff. The experiences of staff across all 650 MPs offices will be different, but there is some association between where they work, their role, and the experiences they will have.

In the NHS, women have traditionally been more likely to work in administrative and human resources roles – in 2017, 75% of HR staff were women. We can see a similar pattern for MPs’ staff – almost three quarters of administrative staff are women, occupying roles such as secretaries or personal assistants, traditionally held by women. A January 2018 FOI request to IPSA revealed that, within the senior tier of the administrative job family, although 83% of Principal Secretaries were women, this was the case for only 35% of people with the job title Chief of Staff.

There are also more women than men working in the executive job family, but whilst the majority of caseworker and support staff were women, men are in the majority when it comes to communications roles. The story is different amongst research staff, who are more likely to be male but the distribution among different job titles is more balanced. 

Other characteristics also vary. The largest differences are between the administrative and research staff, with executive staff falling roughly in the middle. The average age of an administrative staff member (42 years) is almost double that of a researcher (22 years).

Over 90% of research staff have a degree, compared with 62% of administrative staff.

Why does this matter?

These staff make an important contribution to the democratic process, sitting at the heart of this ‘representational nexus’. They present parliament to the world and they present the world back to parliament. When we talk about accessibility and diversity in the House of Commons or the Cabinet, we need to apply that same logic to those who work for MPs and support the valuable work that they do.

If some jobs, such as research roles based in Westminster, provide greater opportunities to gain experience and develop networks that are valuable for political career advancement, but exclude those in other roles, then we need to think carefully about how and why the characteristics of those working in these roles is so different. This is especially so given the prevailing informal hiring practices, which can make it difficult to understand who is employed in each role and why. We need to know more about how the process of hiring staff works, what experiences staff gain in their roles, and what their career progression is like. My staff survey goes a long way to shedding light on this. More information from the survey will be available shortly and published in future blog posts, as well as in a Constitution Unit report due in late autumn.

This blog post has been kindly shared by the Constitution Unit Blog. The content was also presented at the PSA Parliaments Group Conference, and is available to view.

This project is ongoing, so if you work for an MP, or have worked for an MP and would like to discuss the project or are available for interview please do get in touch using the contact information on this webpage.  The author would like to say a thank you to former and current staff who have assisted with this project, who have either discussed their experiences in person, completed the survey, offered advice or who have read over drafts. It is very much appreciated. This project is funded by the British Academy as part of a Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr Rebecca McKee is a Research Fellow at the Constitution Unit. Rebecca is researching representation and diversity in parliament and is currently running a project on MPs’ staff.

Felix Wiebrecht, PhD Candidate in the Department of Government and Public Administration at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, summarises his recently published study on the notable differences in strength of legislatures in authoritarian regimes.

Barbara Geddes famously stated that “different kinds of authoritarianism differ from each other as much as they differ from democracy” and the same is true for their legislatures. From country-specific case studies we know that some of them neatly fit into the long-dominating narrative of authoritarian legislatures being merely of a ceremonial nature and nothing more than ‘rubberstamps’. Examples of this would include the parliaments of Belarus, Turkmenistan, Sudan, and in one of the most extreme cases that of North Korea.

Other parliaments, however, enjoy a wider range of powers, at least in the constitution if not necessarily in practice such as the Vietnamese National Assembly or the Grand National Assembly in Turkey’s past authoritarian periods. Among the de facto powers, the Parliament of Singapore is an example that fulfils a lot of the important functions of being able to remove the Head of State or investigate the executive independently. Prior research, such as the Parliamentary Powers Index (PPI) developed by Fish and Kroenig, provides evidence that, perhaps not surprisingly, legislatures in democracies tend to be more powerful when compared to those in authoritarian regimes. But how do we make sense of the great variance of legislative strength, i.e., the accumulation (or absence) of different powers of legislatures vis-à-vis the executive, across authoritarian regimes?

I find that across authoritarian regimes the level of democracy is also a highly significant but relatively weak predictor of how strong legislatures are. Three other factors are more pronouncedly linked to legislative strength, namely whether the regime is headed by a personalist dictator, whether it holds elections and whether an opposition is represented in the legislature.

Not all dictators are personalist leaders, i.e., those that control “access to key political posts, as well as most major policy decisions” (Frantz, 2018:76) such as Mao Zedong, Alexander Lukashenko or Muammar Gaddafi that face almost no constrains in their rule from regime insiders or outsiders. However, the closer an authoritarian leader comes to this ‘ideal-type’ of a dictator, the weaker the legislature tends to be.

However, when authoritarian regimes allow an opposition in parliament and when they hold elections, they also have stronger legislatures on average. In the tradition of literature on authoritarian regimes this can be seen as the manifestation of the cooptation mechanism. Most prominently put forward by Jennifer Gandhi, cooptation denotes that once a dictator feels threatened by the opposition that aims to overthrow him, he can establish institutions such as legislatures and invite the opposition to participate in governing the country through the legislature. Indeed, these institutions have to be stronger since otherwise the opposition may not agree to work through them and instead try to overthrow the dictator.

While these factors would suggest that when a dictator has to give up some control the legislatures also become stronger, there is a caveat to that. I find that before 1990 legislatures have often been used as ‘bargaining chips’ by dictators. It appears that it was a popular strategy to weaken legislatures whenever elections were reformed to be more open and competitive. In this way, dictators could afford to have less control over the elections, simply because the stakes, that is, the strength of the legislature, were lower.

After the Cold War, however, the nature of many authoritarian regimes has changed fundamentally. We are currently in the era of ‘competitive authoritarianism’ in which most authoritarian regimes have legislatures and allow some opposition parties to participate in elections. In this background, more competitive or liberalizing elements in the electoral and legislative processes are indeed associated with stronger legislatures after 1990. This is in line with recent research on legislatures in Africa that highlight that less dictatorial meddling in legislative processes is an important condition for legislative development. Legislative strength has not been a widely used concept regarding authoritarian legislatures. However, as we move to understand their roles in authoritarian governance in more depth, it may be useful to pursue more research investigating the effects of legislative strength. It helps us differentiate between ‘pure’ rubberstamps and those that are stronger vis-à-vis the dictator.

Felix Wiebrecht, PhD Candidate in the Department of Government and Public Administration at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, @FelixWiebrecht

Prof. Cristina Leston-Bandeira reflects on the different elements entailed within the concept of public engagement and why it is useful to think about it as a journey rather than as a linear succession of steps. 

I started writing this blog post about a year ago. But a little thing called ‘pandemic’ happened and I’ve been on catch-up mode ever since. Plus, I really don’t like writing, so although I’ve spoken about the public engagement journey many times and I even have a pretty graph for it (see below), actually writing it down just takes time for me. But here I am. Our International Parliament Engagement Network annual conference is taking place this Friday, which has finally prompted me into motion to fit this in somehow. If you’re into public engagement, read on; if not, then I’ve probably lost you by now in any case:).

This is a post about what public engagement entails – simply because it’s one of those terms so commonly used now, but with so many understandings. I identify some of its elements below, but also how they relate to each other; and why it seems more meaningful to talk of a journey of public engagement, than about a ladder of engagement. And that engagement is not participation – often these are used interchangeably.

My context of research is parliament, so I’m thinking specifically about public engagement with parliament. But actually the starting point of the reflection for this post is exactly that public engagement is not a political thing; if anything, it’s more of an education thing really – when all is said and done, it’s about empowering people in relation to their surroundings. Public engagement is regularly used as if there is a common understanding of what the thing entails; whilst simultaneously being used to refer to lots of different types of activities. It is also commonly assumed as a well-established concept regardless of culture, when many languages don’t actually have a term for public engagement (love Brazilians, in absence of the term in Portuguese, they’ve adopted the English one and there we have it, the birth of “engajamento”;)).

Despite its obvious connections with politics, public engagement has been a strong concept in other disciplines, namely in the arts and the sciences (e.g., Devonshire and Hathway 2014, Meehan 2012, Shein et al 2015). As politics, the sciences and the arts can be perceived as subjects for the elites, necessitating a pro-active approach to public engagement in order to make these more accessible to the general public. The very concept and practice of public engagement “is often credited as emerging from the sciences where, since the 1970s, there have been concerted attempts to nurture public understanding of science” (Sanders and Moles, p.24). The sciences’ focus on public understanding is such, that it constitutes a sub-discipline in itself, with its own journal and acronyms (Public Understanding of Science – PUS). In both the sciences and the arts, there is a core discussion around the extent to which disseminating information can be termed of public engagement, or if this requires a more active involvement from the public; something that chimes with many discussions I’ve been part of, within political engagement. The discussion is reflected in a move over the last decade from the PUS paradigm (Public Understanding of Science) to the PEST one (Public Engagement with Science and technology) (got to love the acronyms) (Davies 2013). In many ways, this reflects some of the tensions inherent to public engagement with parliament, and its multiplicities of expression.

Public engagement has also been approached, however, as a primarily participatory activity. This is clearly expressed in urban studies, where public engagement emerges as a way of involving the public in community matters (e.g. Arnstein 1969; Glass 1979). This literature may in fact not use the term of “public engagement” but more of “public (or citizen) participation”. The key driver here is about promoting communities that are planned and developed with a more inclusive involvement of all those affected. Naturally, here there has been a stronger focus on the mechanisms that may enable listening to people’s views and possibly integrating these into decision-making processes. But also within these studies there is a recognition of different elements of public engagement, from information to citizen control or representational input. In parallel of course the vast literature on democratic theory also has direct relevance to the understanding of public engagement, namely the scholarly contributions on participatory democracy (e.g. Pateman 1975) and the deliberative turn (e.g. Dryzek 2002).

The adoption of the concept of public engagement to political institutions draws from this wide range of contributions and, naturally, it reflects different types of activity. These may be more at the level of informing and educating the public about the institution’s role and activity, which may encapsulate mainly communication and publicising activities. It may however also refer to activities whereby the public has a say on a policy, or may even be co-producers of this policy. So, although they may translate into very different types of activities, they are all about public engagement.

In order to encapsulate this diversity, I’ve identified before five elements to public engagement with parliament:

• Information: citizens have access to information about parliament.
• Understanding: citizens engage with this information developing an understanding of the parliament (the understanding can be at its simplest form, such as recognising the difference between legislature and executive).
• Identification: citizens can see parliament’s relevance and are able to link parliamentary activity to their own lives and experiences.
• Participation: citizens feel compelled to participate in a parliamentary output to act on an area that matters to them.
• Intervention: citizens lead a participatory process and engage with parliamentarians in the discussion that contributes to a parliamentary decision.

Besides the types of elements, processes or activities that engagement entails, another common discussion is how they relate to each other and, specifically whether citizens need to be first informed and educated, to then be able to participate. It’s what’s often referred to as the ladder of engagement or the hierarchy of engagement. I prefer to speak of the journey of public engagement, as shown in the figure below:

The journey aims to (1) differentiate several elements of public engagement and (2) emphasise an inter-connectedness between these elements, rather than a path, hierarchy or linear relationship. In my original conceptualisation of public engagement, I spoke of steps – again following the idea of a ladder – but the more my research developed, the more I’ve spoken to participants involved in public engagement, the more I’ve become convinced of the non-linearity of these elements. Rather than talking about different steps and a linear relationship between different stages that people need to accomplish, I find it more useful to talk about a cycle (journey) with inter-connected elements of engagement, which do not always need to happen – different types of activity may refer to separate elements of the public engagement journey. Putting this into practice means that some people may decide to create a petition because they are really fed up with an issue; and not necessarily because they know how the political system works or because they woke up in the morning with a burning desire to participate. However, without the information and the understanding of the system, they’re unlikely to achieve a lot. Likewise, educating young people about parliament doesn’t mean they will eagerly start leading campaigns. The different elements of the journey are inter-connected and supplement each other.

So there you have it – not sure it was worth waiting a year to finish this, but here you are, some reflections on the different elements of public engagement; the need to speak of a journey and of inter-connected elements of engagement, rather than separating them out and focusing just on information, or just on participation, for instance; and to value how citizens process the information, how they reflect on it and how they act on it. And ultimately the fact that public engagement is not necessarily about politics; it’s about empowering people in relation to their surroundings.

This blog was kindly shared by the Centre for Democratic Engagement. See the original post here

Cristina Leston-Bandeira is Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds and Co-Director of the Centre for Democratic Engagement (tweets as @estrangeirada).

A highly intelligent, well-informed report with clear recommendations has emerged from a Select Committee. ‘What is going on?’ asks Ray Snoddy

Reaction to the recommendations of the House of Commons Select Committees is usually in direct proportion to how outlandish they are.

Argue that it’s time to replace the BBC or privatise Channel 4 and heavy headlines are guaranteed.

Come up with well-argued, moderate recommendations, that after studying the full implications, the status quo should continue with the BBC licence fee surviving until at least 2038, and all is quiet.

The main reason for such a suggestion is that the Government has failed to come up with a workable alternative and has effectively run out of time.

The response has been muted, not least because newspapers like The Times, Daily Mail and the Sun, have been arguing for decades for the “reform” of the licence fee.

In recent years this has morphed into arguments for the abolition of the licence fee and its replacement by a form of voluntary subscription – just like Netflix.

It is the sort of attack that has come directly from Downing Street in the early days of the Johnson Premiership when Dominic Cummings was a power in the land.

Yet suddenly, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s report on the future of public service broadcasting comes-up with something so unexpectedly rooted in the status quo that it becomes positively radical.

The argument of the Select Committee can be summed-up in one weighty paragraph.

“It’s clear that the BBC TV licence has a limited shelf-life in a digital media landscape,” the central theme begins. So far so good. We all know that public service broadcasters are facing enormous competitive pressure from the streaming services and associated difficulty reaching young audiences.

“However, the Government has missed the boat to reform it. Instead of coming up with a workable alternative, it has sealed its own fate through a failure to develop a broadband infrastructure that would allow serious consideration of other means to fund the BBC,” the Committee argues.

The eleven-person panel chaired by Conservative Julian Knight, and with an inbuilt Conservative majority, looked at three main alternatives – household or individual fee, state budget funding, or subscription with supplementary taxation.

“None of these were sufficiently better as a whole to recommend as an alternative,” the Committee tellingly concludes.

It has not been shy to draw clear conclusion from its analysis either.

The Government now needs to come out with a clear alternative to the licence fee that it can put to Parliament – with the implication that none exists at the moment- or strongly support the current model for at least the next 10-year Charter period.

They go further. If there is no workable alternative at present then the Government should actually help the BBC in driving down evasion.

Where on earth could such a radical interpretation of the status quo have sprung from? A highly intelligent, well-informed report with clear recommendations has emerged from a Select Committee. What is going on?

A look at the personnel is revealing. No less than three of the six Conservatives have worked for the BBC at some stage in their careers and another is an actor. Damian Green, former deputy Prime Minister has worked for both the BBC and Channel 4.

Those seeking to undermine the BBC will cry fix. An alternative view is that some of those involved might actually know what they are talking about.

There is another aspect to the Committee membership. No less than five of the six Conservatives were for Remain, and that of course is a taint that excludes otherwise qualified people from the Cabinet – doubly so if they failed to support Boris Johnson for the leadership.

Could it be that refugees from this Government have, by default, helped to raise the quality of select committees?

If the licence fee is to continue through the next Charter period until 2038 then other implications click in as night follows day.

Almost by definition, the Communications Act 2003 is hopelessly out of date and needs to be urgently replaced. Despite the pandemic the Select Committee wants to see new legislation enacted before 2022.

In particular, if the current structure of public service broadcasting is to survive in anything like its present form then, as the Committee recommends, PSBs should have on screen prominence that goes beyond the current electronic programme guide.

As Carolyn McCall, chief executive of ITV has argued, if your audience cannot find your programmes the business ultimately cannot survive.

The Committee is also spot-on in arguing that the PSBs should also help themselves and not just rely on the Government by taking steps to maximise their own bargaining power in the digital age.

It suggests that the five PSBs should explore options for collaboration on a single on-demand video platform – rather like Project Kangaroo of blessed memory- and that Ofcom should offer support.

Surely that is another sensible suggestion from the Committee and would give the established broadcasters more of a chance in the never-ending battle with the multiple-billion California streaming services.

Will the Government take any notice of this well-grounded report?

Another truism about Select Committees, the more sensible they are, the more likely they are to be ignored.

But facts and technology are right behind the arguments. Subscription funding for the BBC will not be a practical option for years, and it may never be a good idea if you want to preserve a national broadcaster for all.

It is impossible because millions do not have the broadband connections and many millions more do not have the necessary black boxes.

Even if it were technically possible, the overall cost of broadband subscription, box and BBC subscription would be much higher than the current BBC licence fee.

As the Committee astutely suggests – the Government has already missed the boat in being able to bring in a workable alternative way of funding the BBC in time for the start of a new charter.

Common sense is slowing winning in the face of the initial Johnson/ Cummings attack on the BBC, complete with thoroughly bad ideas such as decriminalising the licence fee, something that has now been quietly dropped.

As Damian Green noted at the time of the Johnson/Cummings attacks, there was nothing in the Conservative manifesto about destroying the BBC.

You can be cynical about the output of Select Committees. Somewhere there must be a mountain of ignored and discarded reports.

This one could mark a turning point in the direction towards sanity.

This blog was originally published on Mediatel News. See the original post on their website.

Raymond Snoddy is a freelance writer and media consultant. He is the former media editor of @thetimes and @FT, and presenter of @newswatchbbc.