Proactive or Reactive: Communication Strategies of Parliamentarians' Offices in Scotland and Catalonia

Research on parliamentary staff has long neglected the role of parliamentary assistants (PAs), although their work has a significant impact on the parliamentary activities of their parliamentarians. An area where this becomes particularly apparent is political communication: The communication in the name of parliamentarians is usually planned, drafted, and distributed by their assistants with varying degrees of influence and control over the public-facing communication output of individual parliamentarians. Our research focuses on the approaches taken in those planning and drafting processes: While political communication research tends to focus on communication output, little is known about the processes in parliamentarians' offices and the reasoning of PAs shaping those outputs. We conducted 68 interviews with recent and former PAs working for MPs in the Scottish Parliament and Catalan Parliament, exploring their role and contribution to the political communication of their parliamentarians. Although our findings confirm that reacting to political events occupies substantial amounts of time, there is also a clear indication that proactive and strategic approaches are implemented. Those approaches manifest in various ways (e.g., addressing media values, strategic division of labour) but are ultimately shaped by systemic factors such as the electoral system, the parliamentary political culture, and the party system.