Reading the Runes: Conflict, Culture and "Evidence" in Law-making in the UK

In public discourse the idea of “evidence-based” law-making implies that expert opinion consists of incontrovertible facts that can be turned into solutions, irrespective of politics. Laws about children are often conceived as if they are especially free from the contamination by politics. This paper will challenge such assumptions, relying on a contemporary historical and ethnographic study to demonstrate how evidence and politics are entangled when you have conflicts over cultural change. I followed one clause about parenting as it made its journey through the Westminster Houses of Parliament to be transformed from a bill into the Children and Families Act 2014, observing the rituals of the chamber and committees, and the more discursive private discussions with civil society, which led to changes to the parliamentary texts. I found a complex web of relationships behind the public performances and underneath these texts and meetings between Ministers, civil servants, Parliamentarians, activists, lawyers, social workers, fathers, mothers and children. Making law is more about negotiating between clashing interests and values and reading the runes than weighing up evidence and planning the future as if it could be predicted

Ethnographies of Parliament: culture and uncertainty in shallow democracies

This paper considers the challenges, advantages and limits of ethnographical approaches to the study of Parliament. Challenges in the study of political institutions emerge because they can be fast-changing, difficult to gain access to, have starkly contrasting public and private faces and, in the case of national Parliaments, are intimately connected to rest of the nation. Ethnography usually tends to be difficult to plan in advance, but especially so when Parliament is the focus. Research in Parliament requires clear questions but an emergent approach for answering them – working out your assumptions, deciding on the most appropriate methods depending on what wish to find out, and continually reviewing progress. Its great strengths are flexibility, ability to encompass wider historical and cultural practices into the study, getting under the surface and achieving philosophical rigour. Rigour is partly achieved through reflexivity. One implication of this is that not only will each study of Parliament be different, because each is embedded in different histories, cultures, and politics, but the study of the same Parliament will contain variations if a team is involved. Ethnographical research is a social and political process of relating; interpreting texts, events and conversations; and representing the ‘other’ as seen by observers

Ethnography of Parliament: Finding Culture and Politics Entangled in the Commons and the Lords

Ethnographic approaches are beginning to percolate through political science, but are often taken up as a ‘method’, rather than an approach to methodology and theory. I describe my experience of doing ethnography in the Houses of Lords and Commons. Through the themes of whipping and gender, I explain how theory and method were interwoven and how reflexivity improves rigour. Dealing with the methodological challenge of disjunctions and contradictions is explored through the case studies of constituency work, law-making and ceremonies. Finally, I remark on how ethnographic approaches to ethics entail attention to process and relationships rather than compliance with rules

The Anthropology of Parliaments

The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world. Crewe’s insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work. This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations

An Ethnography of Parliamentary Ethnographers: riffs, rhythms and rituals in their research

Social science has witnessed a growing respect towards ethnography albeit in an uneven way across regions and disciplines [1]. The tolerance for ethnography in parliamentary studies seems to be far higher in the United Kingdom (UK) than in the USA, but perhaps less fulsome than it is in France (Rozenburg, 2018). This is hardly surprising as the first ethnographic study of a parliament in Europe was carried out by Marc Ab eles on the French Assembly and the relationship between the local and the centre in French politics (1991, 2000). Assessing attitudes among scholars towards ethnography requires an ethnography in itself, and this is a complex task because it demands more than a survey of outputs. Just as parliaments should not only be judged by the laws, policies and other texts they produce but by its embodied performances, so too the history of any branch of scholarship requires more than a study of publications. The community of ethnographic enquirers in parliaments is not only writers but also students, networkers, speakers, activists and teachers, with allies and critics in the academy but also in civil society as well as organisations of the state, contending with a web of academic hierarchies and national or disciplinary regimes and norms. Furthermore, what and how they study is not only shaped by their location and discipline but their own varying sources of inspiration, habitus and identity. In this essay, I will merely offer some preliminary insights into the thought collective of ethnographers of parliament

Rhythms, riffs, and rituals in political parties: An anthropological view of complex coalitions

From an anthropological perspective politics is a form of work that involves political struggles in the face of difference. The discipline of anthropology has the potential to offer rigorous and in-depth accounts of politics by relying on reflexivity, attention to plurality and multi-disciplinarity. Within political institutions in democracies, these struggles take place in different sites but a key one is political parties and yet these complex coalitions have been relatively neglected within anthropology. To understand political parties it makes sense to go beyond the aggregation of individual behaviour or investigation into coalitions as systems, structures or culture, to look at relationships, processes of relating and change in these relations. To make sense of the endless contradictions and dynamism created by these relationships, it is necessary to focus on those patterns that reveal how politicians are similar and divergent. The key ones influencing political work, including that of political parties, are rhythms of performance, riffs of meaning, and rituals and symbols

Anthropology of Parliaments

Parliaments are of the centre of webs created by democracy, complex sites where culture meets economics, psychology and politics; elected politicians consult with lobbyists, constituents and each other; and the political work of law-making and scrutiny is achieved. Inter-disciplinary approaches are vital in fathoming this complexity. Relationships are at the heart of politics so it is surprising to find that few anthropologists have ventured into parliaments. Their findings have revealed the hidden everyday workings of democratic politics in several countries but their approach is poorly understood. In this chapter, ethnographic research by anthropologists over thirty five years is reviewed and contrasted with ethnographies by political scientists, to explain how the theories, methods and contributions of different disciplines are complementary. With the capacity to offer rich accounts of specific parliaments, and generalise about the patterns found across different times and sites, anthropologists in collaboration with other disciplines have the potential to transform the study of parliament into a more entangled form of inquiry

Ethnographic research in gendered organizations: the case of the Westminster parliament

An account of undertaking ethnographic research in the House of Lords and the House of Commons and contrasting the findings. Ethnographic methods could be valuable for feminist scholars of political institutions in encouraging them to pay more attention to their own assumptions and their informants’ cultural specificity and context, to diversity between informants and within social groups, and to social change. Universal models should be treated with caution, as rules are embedded within the specific cultural meaning making and social relations in that particular place, time, and organization. Gendered differences may be universal, but the forms they take are endlessly varied

An Anthropology of Parliaments: Entanglements in Democratic Politics

The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world. Crewe’s insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work. This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations