Autonomy and Constraints: Political communication by parliamentary staff in Scotland and Catalonia

Parliamentary staff usually receive very little scholarly attention; parliamentary assistants (PAs), parliamentarians' personal assistants and staff members of parliamentary party groups, even less so. What is known about their working practices and how their relationships with the politicians they serve affect their work is minimal. Consequently, it is not surprising that their involvement in the political communication of parliamentary groups and individual parliamentarians is a known unknown: Their general importance for the work of elected representatives and the functioning of the parliament is recognised. Their exact role, the degree of autonomy they enjoy and how much control and oversight is exercised in their work on behalf of parliamentarians, however, is yet to be explored. This gap is problematic for several reasons. For one, public communication on behalf of parliamentarians might not be authentic but driven by the staff members unbeknown to the recipients of the communication efforts. Second, communicating their position and activities on policies and politics is one of the core tasks of parliamentarians and parliamentary party groups; knowledge of their procedures, practices and dynamics is vital to understanding the communication output itself. The paper attempts to address this gap of knowledge by exploring their role in designing political communication strategies and communication output. It will focus on the agency PAs have in their communication-related work by answering two research questions: 1. How much autonomy do PAs have in designing communication strategies and creating and disseminating communication output? 2. How much control do parliamentarians have over the political communication on their behalf, and how is this control exercised? To answer those questions, we focused on two substate parliaments with substantial legislative powers in their respective systems: Scotland in the UK and Catalonia in Spain. The rationale for choosing these two cases was the substantial differences in both political systems, which helped us to identify common traits, making our findings transferable beyond the selected cases. Focusing on sub-state parliaments is motivated by the absence of any research on this type of parliamentary staff below the state level: While very limited research has been done on national parliaments, to the best of our knowledge, sub-state parliaments have been ignored in scholarly debates. We conducted our exploratory study by undertaking 68 semi-structured interviews with recent former staff members of parliamentary groups and parliamentarians of the Scottish Parliament and Parlament de Catalunya. Our interviewees' accounts provided us with an insight into the dynamics of parliamentary offices' communication efforts. Our findings indicate that while trust is a multifaceted key determinant affecting the autonomy of PAs as well as control measures by parliamentarians, the electoral system, political culture and party system are crucial to understanding the role of agency of PAs over their work and parliamentarians approach towards controlling the communication strategy and communication output. The interviews also revealed that those findings have implications in other areas of their work well beyond their role as political communicators, demonstrating that there is a further need for scholarly engagement with this key actor of the parliamentary machinery.