Reminiscing the Staff: How Do Former MPs Talk About the Everyday Administration of Parliament?

Everyday life in parliaments consists of various encounters between MPs and staff members. At the same time, these seemingly trivial contacts have a broader role in constructing the parliament as an institution and work environment (see Bevir & Rhodes 2010). In our paper, we focus on how former MPs talk about administration in the everyday work of Finnish Parliament, and situate the observations in relation to broader changes in the political and social environment. The analysis is based on text data from the Oral History Archive of Finnish Parliament, which consists of more than 450 extensive semi-structured interviews with former MPs. Asking questions pertaining to the changing character of the staff-MP-relations, we combine a close reading of a sample of interviews with former ministers (n=16) with an analysis of selected passages cross-cutting the entire collection, relying on key word searches. In our presentation, we also address the use of parliamentary oral history archive and interview data as a source for analyzing the personnel in parliaments. The paper is a part of a work package analyzing how former MPs depict changes in administration and politics in the Academy of Finland funded research project Democratic Government as Procedural Legitimacy (342880).