“Coping with the information overload”: An exploration of assistants’ backstage role in the everyday practice of European Parliament politics

The Lisbon Treaty further empowered the European Parliament (EP) and expanded its competence into new legislative areas. This has increased the workload of individual members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Empirical evidence suggests they can feel they are suffering from “information overload” due to the increased workload, highly technical nature of EU legislation, and volume of daily communications they receive. This paper explores the role of assistants in helping MEPs to cope with this information overloaded work environment with an exploratory, descriptive, and interdisciplinary approach. Ethnographic research (including observation in three MEP offices) has been conducted.
We argue that assistants play an important and yet under-estimated role in the everyday practice of politics inside the institution. As well as participating in the legislative process themselves, assistants play a key role in providing MEPs with information to make decisions and give credible and thus persuasive frontstage performances. These hidden actors therefore affect individual MEPs’ capacity to exert influence. This influence is achieved through the information ‘interface’ mechanism. We argue that assistants act as an information ‘interface’ within the MEP office and therefore play a part in MEPs’ decision-making process and practice of politics. This ethnographic paper explores how they do this; assistants ‘filter’ information and provide ‘tailored’ information to MEPs. We discuss why the assistants are important, who they are and what they do, their role as information ‘interfaces’, their sources of information, communication practices, and we highlight the importance of information sharing within national party delegations. This study sheds light on backstage dynamics and provides a deeper understanding of the role of these hidden actors in MEPs’ decision-making, everyday practice of politics, and ability to successfully exert influence.