How to Get Information Out of Members of Parliament (Without Being Told Off by the Speaker)

Abstract

Based on experience of over 1000 interviews with British members of parliament, this article explains why members of parliament are difficult to get access to; offers tips to gain access to them, as well as ideas for how to get the most of out of them once they have agreed. It sets out one Golden Rule of dealing with political elites and also discusses the problems of attempting surveys.

For all the good advice contained in this symposium, and for all that it is perfectly possible to defend the practice (Cowley, 2021a), it would be a brave researcher who went into the field with another audit study of Westminster members of parliament (MPs) any time soon. So is it possible to get information out of MPs in other ways without getting into trouble? The answer, thankfully, is yes. Indeed, there is a long-standing tradition of research drawing on interviews with, or surveys of, MPs. Even a very brief indicative list of research on the British Parliament would include work by Donald Searing, Emma Crewe, Sarah Childs, Meg Russell, Philip Norton, Marc Geddes and many others. In my own work, I have used interviews with MPs extensively, either when writing about Parliament or British politics more generally.

That said, interviewing MPs – or other political elites – can be very different activity from other types of research interviews (Dexter, 2006). To misquote that line from Casablanca: politicians are like normal people, only more so. They pose special problems for the researcher. Interviewing them requires doggedness, flexibility, an understanding of the political mind-set, and a willingness to fly by the seat of one’s pants. Methods textbooks tend to discuss the pros and cons of interviews in general – whether they are worth carrying out, what limitations they have, and so on – but are often less useful when it comes to the practicalities of how you go about doing them. Drawing on experience of around 1000 interviews and multiple surveys, across various projects, this article sets out some ways to get information out of MPs, and other elite politicians, hopefully without getting into too much trouble in the process.

We need to start with why politicians are so difficult to interview or survey. This is because:

1. They are busy people. Even the most junior has an almost infinite set of demands on their time. For an interview, you are asking them to give up 30 minutes or so – sometimes more – of a packed diary. 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 others. If they said yes to everyone, they would 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 do not have to do this; you are not a constituent. ¹ You probably cannot give them anything useful in return.

4. Some are suspicious of academia and researchers. This can be a problem among parts of the right who think 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.

5. Even those who are not actively suspicious often think: what good will come of this? Why wash dirty linen in public? There is 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?

6. Politicians are used to evading difficult questions. It is one of their core skills. If they do not want to answer your questions, they won’t. You are in no position to probe aggressively – they can simply end the meeting if they do not like the way things are going – and even if you could, it would not work.

7. They are used to debating and challenging. They love it. You can turn up with a list of 10 carefully constructed questions, central to your research, only to find the MP does not answer a single one of them in the way you expected. The worst case sees them challenge the underlying assumptions of question 1 and go off on a long explanation of how you are essentially an idiot who does not understand the subject. You never get to question 2.

Of course, politicians are not the only people who are difficult to access; it is easy enough to think of lots of types of people who present their own unique challenges to the researcher. But this specific combination of characteristics probably does not apply to many other groups, and, at least in part, this may help explain why they reacted with such hostility to the study which provoked this symposium.

Threaded throughout these various difficulties is the fact that politicians are (relatively) powerful people – and, in David Richards’ (1996: 200) words, ‘conscious of their own importance’. An audit study conducted on private companies may annoy their human resources staff; audit studies carried out on parliament annoys MPs – and one of these groups is worse to cross.

The good news is that with a bit of work, it is possible to ameliorate, if never quite eliminate, most of these problems. What follows is what I have found useful, mostly based on experience with Westminster MPs or party staffers and strategists, although mutatis mutandis, I suspect most of it applies more widely to other political elites too.

As Goldstein (2002: 69) put it in his account of interviewing in the US, ‘getting in the door’ is ‘more art than science’. ² Here are the following seven unscientific tips for how to get an interview:

1. Aim high but be realistic. If your interview list includes the Prime Minister and multiple members of the Cabinet, and if you have never met these people before then you need a new interview list.

2. Think creatively about who might help. The head honcho is not always the best person. They will be harder to reach and probably less open even if you do get to them. Try them, if you must, but also think about the other people in the room: advisors, deputies, assistants, seconds-in-command. Think too about retired politicians or members of the House of Lords.

3. Approach far more people than you need to speak to. Be prepared for rejection and do the best you can with the ones who show some interest.

4. Make it specific. Explain why you want to speak to them (‘I have read your speech on blah de blah . . .’, ‘because you are the longest-serving member of whatever’) and repeat that explanation if you do get to meet, because they will have long forgotten why they agreed to see you. This can sometimes be tricky if the reason is because I need a random selection of MPs of no particular merit – in which case, please do not say that.

5. Be as flexible about when and where you will meet as you can be. It is all very well announcing that you will be at Westminster on three mornings in February between 10 am and noon, but you will soon discover that the MP might not be. There is here a trade-off between flexibility – are you willing to travel just for a one-off interview? – and efficiency (because if you can stack several interviews on the same day, you get economies of scale in terms of things like travel time), but the more flexible you can be, the more interviews you will get. ³ Offering the possibility of phone or online interviews may help increase flexibility, and it may be that the experience of online meetings in 2020–2021 will make politicians more open to doing zoom or similar interviews in future. However, phone interviews are less useful than face-to-face-ones, and although online ones are slightly better, they are still not as good as sitting down with someone. It is another trade off, though; several online interviews that you can schedule are better than not being able to meet at all.

6. Leverage any contacts. If you are yourself a member of a political party, that will help – at least it will with members of that party. Or you may just be lucky enough to know an MP or two. But even if you are not (and when I started, I knew precisely nobody), once you meet with one person, if they seem helpful, ask them if they could introduce you to someone else. This is what the methods textbooks call ‘snowballing’.

7. Stress the academic nature of the project. Make it clear, it is not for immediate publication, but for a long-term project; that you would not repeat what they say, that it can be confidential (all depending on what terms you need and have agreed). For very junior researchers, it can sometimes help to include a letter from your supervisor or something stressing that this is a genuine project, although this probably only helps if your supervisor is someone they have actually heard of.

Craft the letter or email saying all of this carefully, but relatively briefly. Ideally, it should fit on one page of A4 or the equivalent length in pixels. ⁴ Even if you do all of this, and write the perfect letter, you will still get loads of people who say no, and even more who do not even respond at all. There is no point in getting despondent about this. If you have thrown the net wide enough, you will have something – and you have to work with what you have got.

When you actually do the interview, you will need to be ready to improvise. ⁵ The methods textbooks talk about semi-structured interviews; interviews with politicians are often better described as barely structured. Do not insist on working your way through your questions regardless. You will need to adapt. As Dexter (2006: 32) noted, in one of the few good works on elite interviews: ‘What may be suicidal or impractical for one interviewer or in one situation may be feasible or even the best way to proceed for another interviewer or in another situation’.

You will need to be on time. Anything else is self-defeating, as well as rude. And do not waste their time or yours with stuff you should already know or could find out from elsewhere. There are horror stories of MPs granting interviews, only to be asked what party they are in. At best, this results in them wasting your time telling you something you should already know; at worst, it derails the whole thing. If you can Google the answer to your question, then you should not be asking it. Indeed, go out of your way to show that you know your stuff. For your first actual question, ask something that shows the extent of your knowledge. ⁶ This helps reassure the MP that they are not wasting their time with you, but it also allows them to pitch their answer at the right level; else, you may get the very general school tour answer.

You need to think carefully about the order of the questions you want to ask and how you phrase them. Avoid jargon; talk to the politician in a language they would use, not in the language you might eventually write the article in. You may not have long (however long you were promised, you will probably get less), so cut to the chase and ask the more important stuff relatively early. The only caveat is that it is best to leave anything that might provoke a row towards the end – in case it results in the interview being terminated. I have never actually had anyone chuck me out, but I have asked ill-advised questions which have raised hackles early on, after which things have never recovered.

A little bit of flattery goes a long way. As so often in life, people like being told how good they are (‘I thought your speech on second reading was really impressive’ – a statement which has the merit of both demonstrating knowledge and sucking up a bit). Above all, let them talk. When it comes to interviewing MPs, monosyllabic answers are unlikely to be a problem. Fight the temptation to jump in and bring the conversation back on track. In his book, Working, Robert Caro (2019) says that he frequently writes SU in his notebook while interviewing. It is a reminder to himself to Shut Up, to let his subjects talk. The result may occasionally be a bit rambling, but it will usually end up more revealing than if you try to interrupt all the time. And, for similar reasons, avoid closed questions, which they will resist (Aberbach and Rockman, 2002).

You can obviously seek clarification, but do not argue. You may well think the person you are interviewing is talking total nonsense. If so, the correct response is to say, ‘that’s fascinating, do tell me more’. Occasionally, a ‘some people might say . . .’ question will work, just to see how they might respond to counter arguments, but you are not there to argue with them. Hold a question or two in reserve. Your interviewee may well walk you to the exit (although this has become a bit less common in recent years, as parliamentary staffs have grown in size). If so, use this time to ask something extra that you can drop in on the way out. And abandon your preconceptions. Some of those who you have always thought pretty horrible when you have seen them on TV will turn out to be charming; some of those who you have always thought of as your political heroes will turn out to be ghastly. Neither has any bearing on whether they will be useful.

In the same way people pilot surveys, to see if questions work or not, it is worth trying to pilot interviews. If you can, try out a few early interviews on people who are less central to your research. If it all goes wrong, it is no big deal and it gives you a chance to refine what you are asking before you speak to the key players. And, more generally, if some of your interviews are with individuals of varying importance, try to schedule the bigger players towards the end, so you can build up to them. In practice, this is harder than it sounds – juggling people’s diaries and so on – but at least try.

Say thank you, both at the time and afterwards. A thank you letter or email is always welcome, especially as surprisingly few people do it. It also does no harm to thank those – like the MP’s assistants or secretaries – who have helped actually organise the interview. Even fewer people do that. This is polite but may also pay dividends in the long run. And, if possible, share any eventual outputs that come out of the interviews. They will not have the time to read them, but that is not the point; the point is to show people that they did not give up their time in vain.

Your first reaction on reading all of the above may well has been to think that it so obvious – or prosaic. But you would be amazed how many people do not do it.

What about surveys? Response rates are now so low, that for the most part, I now no longer bother. Many politicians simply refuse to respond at all, no matter what the subject. There are two exceptions, where it may still be possible to get a usable sample. First, if work has the overt support of an organisation that may encourage MPs to take part. A good example is the research on parenthood in the Commons, which was supported by both the Speaker and the Commons Diversity and Inclusion Unit (Campbell and Childs, 2014). Second, if you can afford to use a professional survey company, most of which now run panels of interviews with MPs, by paying a donation to each MP who participates. This guarantees a sample of around 100 MPs or more, not huge but just enough to work with (e.g. Campbell and Lovenduski, 2015; Wager et al., 2021).

But it is worth noting that even with such authoritative backing, and despite being kept deliberately short to just six questions, the parenthood work (for example) still only had a 32% response rate, and even professional companies coughing up money have to contact hundreds of MPs to get their 100 or so respondents. ⁷ Surveys conducted without such methods will really struggle to generate anything approaching a representative sample of MPs and should be approached with great caution.

How do I know any of this works? I do not, really. This article is just those things that seem to have worked for me. It is stuff I have worked out over decades of doing interviews, with politicians of all parties, and, broadly, it seems to have been successful – in that I have done lots of interviews, got invited back to do more, and published work resulting from those interviews. And for what it is worth, it is broadly similar to the experience of those I have discussed the subject with and with the relatively scarce literature offering similar advice (see Harvey, 2011, for a good summary of what is out there).

It may be that some of my advice would not work so well for you, or that – over time – things will change anyway. Adapt what works for you, and your personality, and the topic that you are trying to research.

But there is one thing which you should not ignore, and which I think is something of a Golden Rule.

If a busy politician has, perhaps despite their doubts, granted you an interview and been met by someone who knew what they were doing, who asked sensible questions, was polite and seemed to do something useful with the information, then they may be more likely to grant another interview (to you, or others) in the future. If, however, you behaved like a dick, they won’t, and anyone coming after is more likely to find the door firmly shut. Whatever you do, try not to poison the well.