Navigating the complexity of impartiality in parliamentary research services

Description

For parliamentary officials across the world impartiality – the ability to set aside personal opinions in order to equally serve different political actors – is a fundamental part of their role. In the UK Parliament Select Committee staff see themselves as having to be ‘passionately impartial’ (Geddes, 2019) and such is the importance of impartiality that ministerial involvement in the appointment and departure of parliamentary officials has come under intense scrutiny in recent years (UK Parliament Constitution Committee, 2023). Unsurprisingly this commitment to the principle of impartiality is also writ large in parliamentary departments such as libraries and research services, where it tends to be presented as a straightforward, relatively unproblematic aspect of their work. This paper draws on interviews with parliamentary research staff from 12 Commonwealth countries that were carried out during research into how parliamentary research services access and use academic research. During the interviews we identified several tensions between the work of parliamentary research services and the principle of impartiality. These include the need to provide research and information proactively as well as reactively, to access and represent research equitably, to form links and relationships with academics, and to demonstrate the value and impact of their work. We will conclude our discussion with some suggestions of how political studies (and other) academics might navigate these tensions when building relationships with parliamentary research services.

Period	25 Mar 2024 → 27 Mar 2024
Event title	Political Studies Association
Event type	Conference
Location	GlasgowShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International