Guide to Qualitative Research in Parliaments

The first chapter introduces the focus and goals of the volume, by explaining its hands-on approach to research and outlining its qualitative interpretive methodological nature. The aim is to provide concrete tips on how to overcome fieldwork obstacles as well as serve as invaluable background or context material for anyone who aims to research the European Parliament, with useful pointers for anyone who wants to work on political institutions and do qualitative interviews. Attention is drawn to the utility of the volume for researchers who examine highly divisive subjects like equality policies or the ways of dealing with radical-right actors in qualitative research when holding opposing views. Instead of merely analysing research results, the book is an honest account of how they were obtained.

Prior to conducting any research, it is crucial to understand and familiarise oneself with the research context and setting. The chapter provides an overview of the existing research on the European Parliament and its political groups, as well as key information on the Parliament as a setting for qualitative research. Following the step-by-step approach of the book, Chapter 2 provides the readers with key preliminary insights about the European Parliament with regard to conducting qualitative research. It engages with key concepts in qualitative research on parliaments and discusses them in light of the uniqueness of the European Parliament. Specifically, the cultural and linguistic diversity and its highly technical legislative process and complex institutional context make the European Parliament a rich albeit challenging site of qualitative research. The chapter stresses the high level of informality in the parliamentary work of the European Parliament and highlights the contributions qualitative research makes to a field still largely dominated by quantitative research. The study of everyday dynamics and informal practices reinforces the importance of utilising a qualitative toolkit and data, like interviews and ethnography, and that of broadening the range of research participants to parliamentary staff from political elites only.

The data was gathered with the aim to generate empirical knowledge about gendered European party politics and the ways in which these affect the prospects for democracy and gender equality in Europe. It also aimed to innovate the study of formal and informal institutions and discourses in party politics. This chapter presents the data and highlights the methodological innovations they generated in the understanding of genderedness of the European Parliament. The chapter outlines how data collection occurred in two phases: a pilot study and the main data-gathering period. Overall, 140 interviews, 193 pages of fieldnotes and a wealth of internal documents from the European Parliament and its political groups were gathered during these two phases. Tables illustrate the distribution by gender and nationality, as well as the political group affiliation and role of the research participants in the European Parliament to stress the variety of the data. The chapter explains and demonstrates recording practices and techniques for parliamentary ethnography, which enabled a detailed understanding of informal political group dynamics. Finally, the chapter describes how the research data was processed, archived and categorised, drawing on lessons from the pilot study.

The chapter describes the process of gathering data for research interviews and ethnography in the context of the European Parliament. First, the ethical review process is reviewed and discussed in light of the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on interviews and ethnography. This chapter provides a detailed overview of how the interviews were conducted, outlines the selection and recruitment of interviewees and describes the preparatory steps ahead of the interview. It also offers various ethnographic practices that researchers can use in parliamentary research. Simultaneously, the chapter discusses the specificities of the research site that influenced data gathering. For example, in the European Parliament Strasbourg site, the long hours and close-knit community provided unique opportunities for building relationships and gaining credibility as ‘insiders’ through informal dialogues and shared experiences. However, the intense schedule and overlapping meetings made it challenging to secure interviews. Finally, the impact of Covid-19 on how the interviews were conducted and how the European Parliament operated, in general, is also discussed.

Next to gathering qualitative data, coding of data lies at the core of qualitative research. The chapter is the first of two that dig into the specificities of data analysis. Coding is one way of organising dense data and making sense of it, for instance by identifying patterns. Whilst there exist various approaches to coding, this chapter presents a set of strategies to code dense interview, ethnographic and document data. Additionally, we present the technicalities of coding data collaboratively, as part of teamwork. Importantly, Chapter 5 yields important tips and concrete examples regarding the use of software tools for qualitative analysis, such as Atlas.ti and the intricacies of using it as a team. Specifically, the chapter discusses the initial stages of developing code lists in inductive and deductive ways, the technicalities pertaining to actually coding the text of the data with Atlas.ti, and presents an overview of the advantages of some tools, such as creating code families, to make sense of the data. Throughout the chapter, we discuss the collaborative nature of our coding work by reviewing the pros and cons and by examining issues pertaining to intercoder reliability.

Once the data (or part of it) is coded it becomes possible to move on to the next step, which is to interpret the data in view of answering research questions. Interpreting the data is a crucial step in the qualitative research process—it is core to qualitative data analysis. Hence, the volume dedicates a whole chapter to it. This Chapter presents key methodological steps and strategies to interpret the data for the purpose of individual studies for peer-reviewed articles. It covers practical steps such as exporting code reports from Atlas.ti and reviewing them in a collaborative fashion. It also includes methodological steps, such as the review of epistemological reflections pertaining to interpreting qualitative data. The chapter further digs into the specificities of interpreting frames and discourses from coded qualitative data, but also interpreting formal and informal practices from ‘text’ and, finally, extracting information about the parliamentary policy processes. The chapter provides a guide to conducting qualitative analysis driven by research questions that are inherently constructivist, interpretivist and/or post-structuralist. In particular, we explore how qualitative data can be interpreted in a way that sheds light on the power dynamics, genderedness and informality of parliamentary work.

Beyond summarising the core themes of the book, namely that of reflecting on qualitative research in parliament; research collaboration, expertise-sharing and project management; as well as assessing the practices to make qualitative research known to and accessible to actors in the European Parliament, the concluding chapter is an open-ended discussion on the future venues for qualitative research in political institutions generally and the European Parliament more specifically. We discuss the epistemic benefits of how our research adds to and/or challenges the ‘traditional’ political science approaches. In conclusion, we also provide a thorough and transparent discussion of what we would do differently from the perspective of time. We conclude by proposing what could be next for qualitative research in the European Parliament. For instance, we debate both the potential for new legislative and institutional powers as well as future crises inevitably bringing issues in terms of research topics and access. Finally, we stress the informality of many procedures, practices and mechanisms we witnessed and discuss its meaning for transparency and democracy.