Parliamentarians’ Communication Strategies: The Choice between being in Control and outsourcing Control to Parliamentary Assistants

Over the last thirty years, spin doctors’ influence on political actors’ communications and campaigns has been subject of considerable debate. However, studies usually focus on prominent actors in elections (e.g., party leaders and governments). There is little consideration of political communication outside of elections or parliamentarians’ day-to-day communication. The role of parliamentary assistants (PAs) in those communication efforts is also unclear. This paper aims to close this gap of knowledge by addressing the question of how much autonomy parliamentary assistants have in their parliamentarians’ political communication efforts. To capture this, 44 semi-structured interviews with previous and current parliamentary assistants have been conducted and analyzed through content analysis. The results suggest that approaches towards political communication differ among parliamentarians. Although there are various ways of how parliamentarians control the communication output, they can be organised in three different categories accounting for the degree of exerted control. Beyond a system to categorise those approaches, the findings provide insight into some of the factors that shape those approaches and the consequences of exercising different degrees of control. The results address a significant gap of research on PAs as communication officers outside election periods and illustrate the dynamics shaping the parliamentarians’ communication outputs.