Between Westminster and Brussels: Practicing ‘Parliamentary Ethnography’ in two legislative settings

Gender and politics scholars are increasingly making appeals to ethnographic methodology in order to build in heterogeneity into their analyses of gender relations in parliamentary settings, and to capture the notion that gender is performed over time. This academic movement has accompanied a practitioner movement to work towards gender-sensitive parliaments. This paper broadly asks: how do the tools and practices of ethnography travel between different parliaments? This paper draws upon fieldwork conducted in the UK parliament and European parliament, to discuss some of the tensions when ethnographic practices are applied to different parliamentary settings. The paper has three sections to examine advantages, and limitations when conducting ethnographies in different legislative settings. It draws upon (1) the legislative differences of the parliamentary settings; (2) feminist institutionalism; and (3) the practical differences in terms of facilitating a parliamentary ethnography of gender in a debating and working parliament. Overall, this paper contributes to emerging methodological debates about conducting ethnography in parliamentary settings.