Philip Cowley of QMUL discusses the trials and tribulations of the political interview, offering sage advice on how to be successful in this area of research.

Few things in life can be more frustrating than trying to interview MPs. It can consume an enormous amount of time, often appearing to produce little of value in return. Each interview needs arranging, and often rearranging multiple times; there’s travel, always accompanied by a lot of waiting around, as the interviewee’s previous meetings run over; then the actual interview – “terribly sorry, very busy day today, afraid I’ve only got 20 minutes, remind me, what’s this about?” – after which there is more travel and the writing up of any notes. A single half hour interview can easily eat up half a day or more.

You will routinely come out of meetings thinking you’ve wasted your time entirely. They’ll ramble, obfuscate, get confused; they will get things wrong or just can’t remember; they’ll recount war stories, which have, like all well-told anecdotes, become so well polished over the years that they bear little resemblance to the original events; or they’ll pass on unsubstantiated gossip as if it was gospel; they often apply enormous amounts of retrospective judgment and try to place themselves at the centre of every key decision.

In much of this, they are normal human beings exhibiting normal behaviour. But, to misquote that famous line from Casablanca, politicians are like normal people, only more so. They pose especial problems for the interviewer. They are not easy to get to meet and once you’ve met them they are not easy to get stuff out of. This is because:

1. Politicians are busy people. Really busy. Busier than most people can imagine. Even the most junior has an almost infinite set of demands on their time. You are asking them to give up 30 minutes or so – sometimes more – of a packed diary. This is a non-trivial request. They will have plenty of better things they could be doing.

2. While some people might be flattered to be asked to take part in an academic study, politicians generally are not. They get bombarded with requests from school kids, university students, lecturers, pressure groups, and various randoms. If they said yes to everyone, they’d spend their entire day doing nothing else but filling in surveys or giving interviews.

3. You are asking them to do you a favour, in return for which they will likely get nothing. They don’t have to do this; you’re not a constituent. You’re not part of their core business, or even their peripheral business. You almost certainly can’t give them anything useful in return.

4. They can suffer from the bad habits of busy people: impatience, always needing to be elsewhere, with something else to do, constantly checking their phone, looking over your shoulder for someone more important. You are probably the least important thing they are doing that day; don’t assume they will give you much focus.

5. Some politicos are downright suspicious of academia and researchers. This can be an especial problem among parts of the right, who think – not entirely without justification, if we’re being honest – that academia is a hotbed of leftism, unlikely to give them a fair shake of the stick. But it can also be true on the left, especially the more traditional Trade Union-based left, wary of smarty pants academics. The Lib Dems, who often have a whiff of the Senior Common Room about them, used to be very accommodating towards academics but that’s not much help these days.

6. Even those who aren’t actively suspicious often think: what good will come of this? Why wash dirty linen in public? There’s no evidence that Bismarck ever uttered that much used quote about law and sausages – that no one should ever see either being made – but it is a view to which many politicians hold. Why risk it?

7. Politicians are used to evading difficult questions. It’s one of their core skills. If they don’t want to answer your question, they won’t. You’re in no position to probe aggressively – they can simply end the meeting if they don’t like the way things are going – and even if you could, it wouldn’t work. It is a never-ending source of amazement how many academics think they can rock up to an interview with a politician they’ve never met before and expect full disclosure. They may well not lie to you (although some will, without missing a beat) but they almost certainly won’t answer everything frankly. To expect anything else is naïve.

8. They are used to debating and challenging. Indeed, they love it. You can turn up with a list of ten carefully constructed questions, central to your research, only to find the MP doesn’t answer a single one of them in the way you expected. Worst case: they challenge the underlying assumptions of question one and go off on a long explanation of how you are essentially an idiot who doesn’t understand the subject. You never get to question two.

Based on my experience of doing around 1000 such interviews, over the last 30 or so years, this paper (available free of charge at SSRN) explains how best to overcome these problems, how best to get access to politicians, and then how to get the best out of the interviews you might do. The paper consists mostly of things I wish I’d been told at the beginning of my career – although whether I’d have listened is another matter entirely. 

Philip Cowley is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University London. To learn more about his research click here

Stephane Revillet considers whether the semi-virtual format for Prime Minister’s Question Time has improved or diminished the possibility for executive accountability.

In the face of the Covid-19 crisis, the Hansard Society asks in April of 2020 “how parliamentarians can conduct their core constitutional duties of holding the government to account, when [they] are all required to adopt rigorous social distancing”. This question is even more relevant in relation to PMQs insofar as it is the most attended and the most watched parliamentary event of the week.

Due to social distancing, far fewer MPs have been able to attend PMQs, and that has resulted in less noise being made and fewer raucous attacks levelled on the floor of the House. John Craig of Sky News recommends that “[they] need the Commons to return to its usual boisterous, raucous and spontaneous normality if government ministers are to be held truly accountable”. These remarks beg the question of whether disorder is an effective instrument in holding the government to account.  And what “truly accountable” means in the specific context of PMQs.

The interruption as a tool to hold the government to account

This blog will focus on two types of disorderly behaviour: interruptions and unparliamentary language which is here defined as ‘Face threatening acts’ (FTA), for example insults, soundbites or offensive remarks. Besides the adversarial and confrontational style of parliamentary politics, what may account for the extensive use of FTAs lies at the core of the function of PMQs: holding the government to account.

According to Graham P. Thomas’s definition of accountability, “criticising the government’s failure, incompetence or deceit” are FTAs per se, which inevitably causes disturbance especially when the PM counter-attacks to save face. More often than not, such departures from the rules are tolerated by the Speaker, very few FTAs are sanctioned. Sandra Harris mentions a very high level of tolerance of ‘illegal interventions.’ This tolerance towards disorderly language lies at the root of accountability. So, it is no wonder that MPs who want to make their point stronger should strike harder, which inevitably leads to an increase in the number and in the intensity of the attacks. In other words, the level of expected accountability might be reflected in the intensity and frequency of the attacks.

Whether they are challenging or dismissive backchanneling interruptions (if we use Cornilia Ilie’s typology), they serve the purpose of interrupting the scripted speech of the PM urging him/her to answer more spontaneously. Those impromptu answers are valuable in appraising the government’s accountability. The PM will be judged more on the answers they provide off the cuff than on ready-made answers.

The consequence (or the purpose) of such interruptions is to warn people about a message that is being delivered. Whether the interruption points out an inaccuracy or even a downright lie, it doesn’t matter. The government’s accountability doesn’t relate so much to the message or to the speech of the PM but to those signals sent out to the pubic prompting them to call into question specific points or even to a greater extent call into question the person’s credibility.

What does “true accountability” mean in the context of PMQs?

MPs represent their constituents in Parliament, and defend their interests. Unlike other parliamentary sessions, PMQs is a vehicle for individual backbenchers to raise the grievances of constituents. MPs are the voice of their constituents in Parliament. In this theatrical performance backbenchers do not remain a passive audience. They make themselves and the people’s voice heard by causing disturbance, by interrupting the speaking debaters. Backbenchers who are gathered in the House acting on behalf of the citizens take part in the debate through the noise they make in reaction to the speech of the leaders. This way of interacting with the executive in order to hold them accountable is popular in essence. It is the most watched parliamentary event of the week and that also means that PMQs involves a way of discursive interaction and styles of communication pertaining to and deriving from the people.

In ancient Athens, the thorubos (meaning the noise of the participants) was the expression of the sovereignty of the people (dèmos). Making noise and interrupting the debaters represented an active participation in the debate. The disruptions and roar of the backbenchers is the popular expression of the distrust, the discontent or the indignation of the people and in that case those feelings are not mediated by long-winded technical pre-scripted speeches.  Even though the House debates have been subject to a new configuration where the paradigms in terms of disorderly behaviour have critically changed, MPs are still prone to disorderly attacks and interruptions. It took MPs only seven sessions with social distancing before going back to their old ways.

It seems that causing some kind of disorder through FTAs and interruptions is a natural and inescapable process of holding the government to account, and that is what ‘true accountability’ implies, that is to say making the voice and the noise of the people heard by using the mode of communication of the ordinary citizens. This suggests that the distance between the government and the people should be reduced to increase government’s accountability.

How is the distance reduced?

In the orderly question-answer sequences those disruptions act as meta-discursive (or rather metadramatic I should say) short-cuts or substitutes for longer, more elaborate answers or counter-arguments. This simplification of the message makes it easier for people to grasp the meaning of the spontaneous intervention of a member. For Cornelia Ilie the emotional force of insults that is correlated to the (over)-simplification of the message is tremendous and outweighs their rational force. I would go as far as contending that insults produce the same effects as symbols. They condense a wide range of meanings and emotions.

For Murray Edelman, people think in terms of stereotypes and oversimplifications due to some incapacity to “tolerate ambiguous and complex situations and respond chiefly to symbols that oversimplify and distort”. My point here is that the use of interruptions and disruptions is a way to circumvent rationality thereby getting closer to the people, connecting with them in a more intimate way. The closer to the people, the better the accountability.

This blog is a summary of a presentation at our group conference.

To view the presentation see our Youtube Channel

Rosie Frost provides an overview of a recent report published by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy,  into the roles that parliaments can play in peacebuilding processes. The full report was written by Professor Nina Caspersen and Dr Gyda Sindre at the University of York and can be viewed here.

Parliaments: the missing piece?

Since 1992, Westminster Foundation for Democracy has supported democratic systems as they emerge out of conflict and into peace and stability. Currently, we have a number of programmes doing just that, from Lebanon to the Western Balkans, from Sri Lanka to Bangsamoro.

The existing academic literature on parliaments’ role in peacebuilding is scarce. Studies on conflict resolution and peacebuilding focus on peace agreements, multilateral organisations, state executives and the military, or at the other end of spectrum, on grassroots community groups and citizens.  Parliaments – the institutions with the capacity to bridge these two – have largely been overlooked.

We commissioned a research paper with the University of York to analyse the experience of some parliaments we’ve worked with, and help build an understanding of the role of legislatures in conflict-affected states. Using case studies, this research focused not on what parliaments could or should do, but what they have done.

The research is clear: parliaments matter. How they implement peace agreements, how they formally operate, and how they govern in relation to peacebuilding has an impact on the peacebuilding process. For WFD and other democracy assistance practitioners there are a few key takeaways for our work.

Facilitate parliaments’ support of peacebuilding

In some cases, parliaments have had a positive impact on peacebuilding. Parliaments have the ultimate legal responsibility for the implementation of peace agreements, including institutional reform and devolution. They have also led the implementation of transitional justice. For example, in South Africa, a parliamentary standing committee oversaw preparations for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and handled amnesty applications that came through that process.

In their formal structure, parliaments in a post-conflict state often guarantee the representation of all conflict identities or ethnicities, through a power-sharing design or when former armed groups participate in the democratic process as newly formed political parties.  Formal rules have also reserved seats for women, such as in Rwanda.

In the long-term, parliaments have great potential to act as platforms for constructive debate and collaboration between groups, govern in support of peace and stability, and help to set the state or region on a path to a more peaceful future.

Parliaments that can support peacebuilding tend to be strong and high-capacity. The challenges they face are more likely to be the result of political conditions, and so support from democracy assistance practitioners should be focused on broad notions of conflict resolution. WFD has a unique convening power which is an important tool to build connections both within parliament and between parliament and outside actors. This should be an important aspect of any peacebuilding initiatives.

Build up sidelined parliaments

Some parliaments have had a negative impact on peacebuilding processes because they are not strong enough to prevent executive dominance, or they are side-lined. For example, in Colombia, obstruction by the President who initially refused to sign Congress-approved legislation to implement the peace agreement, demonstrated the vulnerability of parliament to executive overreach. In such cases, especially where the parliament is new, capacity training and institutional support from WFD and others could be central to the long-term peacebuilding.

Parliament cannot be ignored

What we cannot do is ignore parliaments altogether. Parliaments can be significant spoilers in peace processes. All the characteristics of a pro-peacebuilding parliament could also be used to spoil a peace process. 

Their power to implement a peace agreement means that they can, of course, also choose not to. This includes national parliaments obstructing devolution to new regional ones. And a power-sharing parliament is far from a guaranteed success. Power-sharing arrangements usually include a minority veto, and this allows parties who wish to obstruct the peace process to do so. In Northern Ireland, deadlock saw direct rule imposed from Westminster four times in the first decade of Stormont’s existence, although our report finds that “collaboration is much more dominant than we might expect”.

Of course, parliament is a heterogeneous institution. It is made up of many separate component parts: MPs, staff, political parties, committees, as well as the processes and powers associated with the different roles it performs. Each of these can function differently, and so it is very hard to be clear cut about what impact a parliament is having on peacebuilding.

But we ignore parliaments at our peril. Parliaments may not hold all the power, but they are integral for the successful implementation of peace agreements and for progress towards long-term peace and stability.  There is a valid and important role for democracy support in peacebuilding processes, and a lot at stake from our absence.

Rosie Frost is the Evidence and Learning Officer at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, where she works on building the evidence base for democracy assistance.

In the first blog post from our annual conference series, Professor Meg Russell offers insight into the challenges, opportunities and lessons drawn from the parliamentary management of the pandemic.

In the UK and around the world parliaments have had to adjust their practices to the unexpected new environment of COVID-19. This has brought major challenges but, some suggest, also opportunities in terms of suggesting future means for parliaments to adapt. This post starts from the core principles of parliamentary functioning, briefly reviews practice under COVID-19, and considers the primary opportunities and challenges presented. It concludes that the future lessons from this unique period reinforce some familiar themes; but they also raise significant conundrums and trade-offs between the different essential principles of what parliaments are there to do.

Principles

Stripping back to the basics, what are parliaments for? Legislative studies scholars have suggested various overlapping lists of functions. For example in the Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies, Amie Kreppel provides a list of four, which I will boil down to three:

Other terms often mentioned in such classifications include deliberation –much of which takes place publicly – and legitimation, meaning all of parliaments’ functions help them generate broad public support for policy.

Practice

It is easy to see how the circumstances of COVID-19 have challenged some of these principles.

The threats to representation were pretty immediate and obvious. With limits on travel, requirements for social distancing, and heightened risks for people with certain health conditions, parliamentarians gathering from all over the country immediately became a problem. Some legislatures responded by limiting the number who could participate – with those decisions often taken by leaders and whips. Others moved their proceedings online. The UK House of Commons initially did the latter, but then rolled this back in a quite problematic way which breached principles of equal participation.

Effects on linkage were perhaps less dramatic, but the pandemic has clearly made it more difficult for MPs to meet their constituents, and others, face-to-face.

With respect to policy-making there has been concern in the UK and many other countries about the extent of emergency powers granted to executives to deal with the crisis, and the limits on parliamentary oversight. That’s the most obvious effect. But there have also been others. In some legislatures (including initially the House of Commons) limits were applied to ‘non-urgent’ business, such as private members’ bills. This raises questions about who decides what’s urgent. In addition, there are clear interactions between these different effects – if the mode of representation is impacted, that will affect policy-making as well, as discussed below.

Opportunities

It may be counterintuitive to see opportunities in such a difficult situation, but the hasty move to virtual proceedings in many parliaments has demonstrated that there may be positive lessons to learn.

These primarily affect representation. Remote working, where available, has facilitated continued participation for parliamentarians with caring responsibilities, or health conditions, or who may not be able to travel. This has raised questions about whether such modes of working could help, longer term, in supporting more diverse legislators. For example the Centenary Action Group, which promotes enhanced women’s representation, has a campaign ‘to promote the benefits of virtual parliament measures for women and minority groups and encourage the continued use of technological advances’.

Although they remain largely untested during the pandemic, changes to greater virtual working could also have important impacts on linkage. If MPs work more frequently from home, this could facilitate greater local presence and local work. If available, such options would surely be taken up – particularly by MPs with more distant constituencies. But this would raise familiar conundrums about the extent to which constituency work compromises the effectiveness of MPs’ policy work in parliament.

In terms of that policy-making function, most of the impacts have been negative (see below). But clearly there would be benefits in more diverse participation – not just by parliamentarians, but for example by witnesses to parliamentary committees being able to give evidence remotely.

Challenges

Unsurprisingly, the list of challenges is longer. If MPs are shut out (as remains the case in the Commons, despite repeated complaints), that obviously damages representation. At one level this might just be considered a UK quirk, but it highlights the first of many problems with COVID-19 and policy-making.

The Commons is famously an executive-dominated institution, particularly with respect to setting the agenda – Standing Order No. 14 guarantees default government control. In May ministers chose not to renew the temporary order facilitating virtual participation, causing this to lapse – despite opposition by the chamber’s Procedure Committee. This illustrates how, if parliaments do not control their own agendas, this creates opportunities for government (and sometimes opposition) leaders to centralise power.

Similar centralisation is seen in the emergency powers taken by governments to tackle the pandemic. In the UK, MPs often felt shut out – with numerous statutory instruments published at short notice and brought into effect without parliamentary oversight. It was six months before backbenchers forced concessions out of government via a threatened rebellion on renewal of the Coronavirus Act, gaining promises of future votes.

But the challenges for policy-making go far further, and some are far more subtle. While formal proceedings – for example questions, committees and scrutiny of legislation – have been maintained as far as possible during the crisis, much of legislatures’ most crucial influence normally goes on informally and behind-the-scenes. Meetings between parliamentarians (both within and across parties), between them and party leaders or ministers, and between all of these groups and journalists, facilitate crucial informal communication. Some of this is planned, but much depends on chance ‘corridor conversations’. In addition to lacking these communications, ministers, whips and others find it difficult to ‘read the mood’ when the chamber and corridors are largely empty, and some members are logging in over Zoom.

Summing up the lessons

Some of the lessons from the crisis are obvious, and reinforce things that legislative studies scholars already knew. For example, the government’s control of the House of Commons agenda is problematic; extensive policy-making via delegated legislation is undesirable, and scrutiny mechanisms badly need improvement; much of parliament’s power is exerted informally and behind the scenes.

Where it gets difficult, however, is that the potential benefits of virtual participation for parliaments’ representative functions, and possibly linkage functions, become threats when considering impacts on their policy-making functions. The crucial role of informal and behind-the-scenes communications mean that parliamentary effectiveness will greatly suffer if many members are not physically present. In the UK, in the middle of a continuing pandemic, arguments for maximal virtual participation remain principled ones, to restore parliamentarians’ equal rights. But longer term, this isn’t just an argument about tradition versus modernity – it raises complex questions about how to balance the different functions of parliaments and their needs to operate effectively.

Professor Meg Russell FBA is Director of the Constitution Unit, and a Senior Fellow at The UK in a Changing Europe studying ‘Brexit, Parliament and the Constitution’.