The research yielded a plethora of different arguments over time on whether, and how, parliaments should use new forms of media to (re)establish parliament at the centre of democracy in mass media societies. In exploring parliamentarians’ media tactics, I discovered the central role played in these debates by divisions between political parties; government and the opposition; front and back benchers; and MPs from urban and rural constituencies. The high level of reflexivity among these groups on how the mediating of parliament would affect them differently was accentuated. Institutions usually strategize about their tactics internally; parliaments were unique in that their media strategies focused on mediating those tactical discussions publicly. Parliaments debate rather than implement, and are inherently divided between individual parliamentarians and political parties with conflicting objectives. This internal division has made it difficult for parliaments to communicate to the outside world with a single voice. The essence of parliament is in fact its multiplicity of voices – its main function is communicative as a forum of national debate. Consequently, I discovered a dialectic between parliamentarians’ individual media tactics and parliament’s institutional media strategy. Overall, the results highlight tactics: (1) parliamentarians’ media tactics were treated as the lower-level components of the higher-level institutional media strategies of parliaments; and (2) the ‘bottom-up’ media tactics of the comparatively ‘powerless’ individual parliamentarians’ (who lacked an institutional PR apparatus) were juxtaposed vis-à-vis the ‘top-down’ media strategies of the ‘powerful’ governments (which disposed of an institutional PR apparatus). Surprising results finally included the high prevalence of temporal and transnational learning curves: parliamentarians observed how other parliaments used media in Europe and beyond (notably the US, Canada, and Australia, but also for example Uganda); and parliamentarians in their argumentation frequently invoked parliaments’ experiences with earlier forms of media (how parliaments had used the press, radio, television in the past). To reach these results, I cleaned and enriched a corpus of digitised parliamentary proceedings together with a research engineer at the host institution, which has been made publicly available on the data storage platform Zenodo. We applied the digital method of topic modelling to this corpus. We also used the corpus to innovate with our new method of ‘structural collocation analysis’, in which we compared interventions by subgroups of MPs using meta data that we had added to the digitised proceedings. Results were exploited and disseminated through presentations, seminars, invited talks, conferences, teaching, publications, outreach activities, and (social) media.
