Teamwork or Groupwork? Approaches of parliamentary offices to organise political communication

Parliamentary Assistants (PAs) to Members of Parliament (MPs) are often referred to as "jack-of-all-trades" who undertake a variety of tasks with very little specialisation. Although it has been recognised that they are crucial for the functioning of the parliament, only minimal scholarly attention has been paid to this kind of parliamentary staff, with the former Speaker of the House of Commons (John Bercow) referring to them as the "unsung heroes of the Westminster Village". Similarly, very little research has been done on PAs in the Scottish Parliament. It is not surprising that neither their working practices nor the dynamics within the parliamentary office have been explored for either parliament. This paper aims to explore the "black box" of parliamentary offices by focusing on the dynamics around the organisation of communication-related tasks. Two research questions are addressed in this paper: RQ1) How do parliamentarians organise communication-related tasks among their employed assistants? RQ2) Which implications do the different organisational arrangements have on the creation of communication strategy and output? The paper will include the House of Commons as well as the Scottish Parliament to allow for a comparative approach. The latter was conceived in 1999 with the introduction of devolution and designed under the notion of "new politics" aimed to be different to Westminster (e.g., different electoral systems). Adding to this, having limited policy-making power and less funding provides an interesting foundation to investigate whether and how those differences affect dynamics within parliamentary offices. This exploratory research has been conducted through 58 semi-structured interviews with recent and former PAs of MPs and Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs); it includes parliamentarians and staff members of parliamentary party groups. Their accounts provide an insight into the inner workings of parliamentary offices. While often described as idiosyncratically structured, patterns emerged in the data, illustrating three different approaches, explained through the Groups-Teams distinction: a) Solo efforts by an individual PA designated to undertake all relevant communication tasks. b) Group efforts by several PAs to undertake specific communication tasks with a fixed division of labour. c) Team efforts in which PAs are not designated to undertake specific communication tasks; the allocation is ad hoc and circumstantial. The findings suggest that the implementation of these approaches is far-reaching and goes beyond the design and dissemination of communication output. They affect individual learning and professionalisation processes, agency over the work output, workload, staff turnover, and, with it, the office's capacity to perform its tasks. The study also indicates that despite having a different parliamentary set-up, parliamentary offices in the Scottish Parliament compared to the House of Commons are remarkably similar in their organisation, challenges and overall set-up. Interviewees who have worked in both environments noted that the differences between parliamentary offices in the House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament are mainly due to the priorities and preferences of the individual parliamentarian, irrespective of the type of mandate (constituency or party list) or whether the person they are working for is an MP or MSP.