Constitutive invisibility: Exploring the work of staff advisers in political position-making

Introduction: The ‘other means’ of politics

From its beginnings, Science and Technology Studies (STS) has argued that science ‘is politics by other means’ (Latour, 1993: 218); indeed, this has become one of the most recognized slogans in and for the field. STS is abundant with studies of scientific debates, which are typically analyzed as political controversies. As notable examples, the notion of ‘interessement’ (Callon, 1986) and the building of ‘alliances’ (Latour, 1993) have been identified as key to the political workings of science. But how far does this analogy carry if we analyze politics symmetrically to science – that is, paying close attention to the formation of political statements in a way similar to how laboratory studies (e.g. Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Latour and Woolgar, 1986) analyze the practical formation of scientific ones? While we do not wish to question the usefulness of the ‘political’ analogy in general, we believe it has its limitations (see also Brichzin, 2020). Hence, in this article we will specify how political apparatuses work out ‘binding positions’, comparing this to how scientific research arrives at ‘reliable facts’. Both imply controversy, conflict and invisible work; however, they do so for different statement-formations, driven by pre-structured contributions that are exposed to different critical registers.

What are the ‘other means’ by which politics is practically put into work? We approach this question by referring to the STS theme of ‘invisible work’ (Star and Strauss, 1999). Here, however, the reader is not invited to the back regions of labs and experiments, run by research assistants, but to the offices and hallways of parliaments, populated by advisers, secretaries and clerks. Like laboratories, parliaments provide back regions for carefully preparing binding statements for an upcoming publication. They work out contributions that may represent a whole faction or party, including its members, here and now and for the record.

Such work is invisible to the public, but simultaneously visible in the restricted circles of the back regions. A central claim of this paper is that this in/visibility is crucially tied to the micro-foundations of representative democracy, including its ‘ethnomethods’ (Garfinkel, 1967) of performativity, accountability and critique. Our findings confirm that science and politics are alike regarding the controversial nature of statements and the principal need for their invisible preparation; at the same time, our results stress the specific kinds of invisible work involved and how those ‘different means’ matter in relation to the fundamentally different statements-in-preparation. This helps us re-specify what it actually means that scientific work is concerned with producing reliable facts, while political work is oriented towards binding positions. The re-specification helps us, in conclusion, better distinguish the day-to-day conduct of natural science from that of politics.

As a native term from the field of politics, a ‘position’ can be initially understood as a public and, therefore, collectively binding statement – for and by all faction members – on a certain issue. A position processes an issue (Marres, 2007) by linking a problem with political measures against the background of certain ideological principles. Certain events serve as causes, demonstrations or manifestations of problems and issues. They urge or invite factions to take positions: to respond to a more or less pressing issue, threat or trouble by referring to it as a public problem that can be met with measures consistent with the factional principles. Factions debate and compete with one another and criticize each other by invoking these more or less consistent positions. Although politics operates through the competition of positions within and across public settings, there is a common tendency to underestimate or even overlook the fact that it takes much effort and skill to prepare them. Due to a narrow focus on political communication and its public reception, research on parliaments shows almost nothing about the work of position-making. Missing are accounts of the work going into positions, comparable to those offered by laboratory studies for the making of scientific knowledge. Here we follow the discursive work that is necessary to produce a position, but no longer visible in the final contributions themselves, by following the practices that go into the position’s making. Like facts in scientific debates, contributions to ‘official’ political discourse are carefully composed backstage. In relation to the discourse itself, however, facts and positions aim to serve quite different ends: While facts may be a way to end controversies (Latour, 2004), positions generally work to extend and prolong them. Due to their competitive nature, one key difficulty that often arises during the time before the position’s completion and authorization, is how to protect the preparation work being done by parliamentary representatives’ advisers.

The literature on political work in parliaments provides no substantial answers to that question. Although there is a growing number of qualitative and ethnographic studies on MPs’ work in Anglo-American (Crewe, 2005, 2015; Fenno, 1962, 1973, 1978; Freudenburg, 1986; Searing, 1994; Wodak, 2009) and in continental European parliaments (Abélès, 1992; Brichzin, 2016b; Dányi, 2012; Gardey, 2015; Holly, 1990; Patzelt, 1993), the staff’s work is commonly reduced to mere service for their bosses. Consequently, one should either pay attention to staff because of their potential influence on MPs (Kranenpohl, 1999: 363; Oertzen, 2006: 233; Romzek and Utter, 1997) or because the former might endanger the latter’s democratic legitimation (Fox and Hammond, 1978; Romzek and Utter, 1997). Despite those reservations, agency is fully ascribed to the individual MPs. Political work, thus, is accounted for in line with a more general ‘civil epistemology of democracy’ (Ezrahi, 1992). But what if we, as in lab studies, considered the assistants and staff members as co-constituting the political capacity and agency that is practically required by democratic politics?

Any ethnographic analysis of this practical constitution needs to reflect on why those co-constituents are made and kept invisible even by research in political science. This question leads us towards what we call constitutive invisibility. In parliaments, the constitutive invisibility of the staff’s work supports a central feature of democratic political discourse: the competition of different (integrated) problem-solutions. In normative democratic theory (Pitkin, 1967; Sartori, 1962), competing positions should represent voters’ choices, and any decision should represent the position that won the competition. These overlapping conduits of democracy, we argue, are embedded in the demanding discourse work spanning across offices, sessions and meetings. The discourse work concerns the distributed investments into position-making, including the members’ reflexive orientations towards ‘sacred’ normative premises of liberal-democratic theory. Hence, the discourse work is invisible not primarily due to the workers’ status in a hierarchy, but due to the object-in-formation: a fully-fledged discourse claim or contribution.

Expanding the concept of ‘invisible work’

In their article on ‘layers of silence, arenas of voice’, Star and Strauss (1999) reflect on organized processes by which work invested and resources mobilized are – partially, never completely – absorbed. According to them, invisibility can result from rendering the work, the worker, or both invisible. Invisibility, thus, operates on various layers. It is about:

By asking what exactly work is, and to whom it might (or should) be rendered visible or invisible, Star and Strauss leave room for interpretation. One central question is whether and when invisibility is a means of exploitation of ‘unskilled’ or ‘secondary’ work done by subalterns (as in the cases of domestic helpers and nurses), or a necessary quality of work in fields that may, to a certain extent, require invisibilization. As already pointed out by Star and Strauss, invisible work is far from exotic. In fact, most work – whether that of car workers, civil servants or session musicians – is invisible to consumers or the wider public. It is exactly this normality and usualness of invisible work that deserves our attention. Only by explicating the ways of invisibilizing assistant advisers in political position-making can we understand how the unremarkably normal discourse objects of politics can eventually be received as belonging to elected representatives and their collectives.

Following Star and Strauss, we start from the premise that visibility and invisibility are neither good nor bad in themselves. However, instead of treating invisible work as resulting from the workers’ status in a hierarchy or from general power relations in society, we suggest focusing on invisible work as a required feature in the making of discourse objects. These objects could not be accomplished by sheer visibility ‘from the very beginning’. Visibility and invisibility then become accessible as co-dependent dimensions deriving from the organized co-production of discourse objects.

Other conceptual distinctions become relevant at this point: the backstage-frontstage relations, as explored by Goffman (1959) in general terms, or the distinction of in/transparency, as discussed by Barry (2010b) for cases of state accounting and administration. The background work we discuss here is not transparent from the general public’s point of view. Frontstage performances neglect the necessary investments that go into preparing them, such as collecting information, searching for good reasons, scripting situated versions, and so on. Political discourse work is rendered invisible to lend a strong, representative voice to the political performance in public. The impression fostered on the frontstage feeds into the civil idealizations of problem-centred opinion-formation, where representatives engage visibly in debates to test their arguments in front of critical audiences (Ezrahi, 1992). Following Star and Strauss’s conceptualization of invisible work, we will show that invisibility is necessary (a) to provide a protected space and time for provisional tinkering before the political position is made available to opponents’ criticism, and (b) to demonstrably uphold the central tenet of democratic theory that politics is the work of MPs elected to represent the electorate.

Versions of in/visibility in science, law and politics

In order to move the concept of ‘invisible work’ closer to domains that are concerned with the making of discourse objects, it is helpful to review research attending to various aspects of in/visibility in science, law and, finally, politics. Although the studies we discuss in this section do not explicitly understand the concept as introduced by Star and Strauss, reviewing them allows us to sketch out some commonalities and differences of invisibility with regard to their objects of concern: facts, cases and positions.

Studying invisibility in political position making

Our own research, located in a parliamentary setting, provided us with access to multiple facets of invisibility. However, we regard our approach as distinct from the studies of the US Congress mentioned above, both in terms of its research focus and in terms of its starting question. For one, we are primarily interested in processes of putting together positions as full-fledged political discourse objects. Our study does not strive to evaluate the parliament’s organization and procedures. It focuses on the practical demands that members face when attending to the hegemonic mode of doing politics. More precisely, we focus on the collective work of making political positions inside factions, a process that precedes and/or accompanies their public communication. In so doing, we are closer to the laboratory studies approach, starting with ethnographic observations and recordings of the successive steps constituting political statements inside MPs’ and factions’ offices. We trace position-making as discourse work by focusing on its ‘invisible’ makers (assistants and expert advisers) as well as on its ‘invisible’ intermediate products (drafts and preliminary versions).

Facets of in/visibility in making political positions

The MPs’ offices work on various problems, measures and ideological principles concurrently. They do so in order to develop valid political positions that could enter the manifold arenas of competitive political discourse. Positions are provoked by certain events that can be accounted for as a public problem. The position then involves a specific problematization and the claim of problem-solving capacity due to workable measures and desirable principles. Making a position, therefore, may be viewed as discursive work, necessary to contribute consistently to the political discourse. The work as such is no longer visible, which protects the political workers and the responsible faction against excessive critique. In other words, critique is oriented towards certain aspects which provide for legitimate expectations: that the problem is taken seriously, that its measures would be effective and that it is consistent with generalizable principles. In order to serve as full-fledged contributions, positions have to integrate problem(s), measures and principles (Scheffer, 2015b: 237–238). Positions, in other words, process issues by linking problems with political measures against the background of certain ideological principles. This tripartite integration reflects friendly as well as hostile reviews, supporting or rejecting a position in at least one of the three components and/or their mutual fit. Fitting problem-measures-principles is necessary for any local, situated positioning by the ‘talking heads’: the representatives of a faction, group, or any other political collective. Each collective applies its own procedures to internally regulate the more or less centralized representative positioning.

Visibility of ‘final’ political positions

The following episode describes how the ethnographer, after shadowing the making of a position paper for nine months, encounters it in its final material form at a party congress.

At the reception desk, I receive a name badge, the order of the day and the position paper, which refers to itself as a ‘leading motion’. The seven pages of text itself seem to be the same as in the last internal version I saw. Obvious changes are a remark after the heading that says, ‘Submitted on 31.10.2014’ and a list of names that the text categorizes as ‘submitters’. Besides the names of the two representatives who led the fabrication of the position paper, I recognize several names that belong to party members serving as MPs in the European Parliament, in the national parliament and in several state parliaments. In contrast to the members of staff, who provided drafts for parts of the paper, these ‘proposers’ were not involved in fabricating the position paper at all. No credit is given to the ‘ghostwriters’. (AT)

When encountering the final version of the position paper, the ethnographer experienced a reversal of visibility and invisibility. While most of those who appear as responsible for and supporting the paper never showed up in the long meetings of the working group, most of those who actually did actively participate in the meetings are invisible in the paper. Apart from the ethnographer, however, no participant would consider this surprising. No one seems to take offense with this invisibilization; no calls are made (publicly) to acknowledge the work done behind the scenes in the long meetings and the drafting of the text over the last nine months.

By contrast, the following scene from another parliament describes how the members themselves assess the visibility of one of their positions in the presence of the ethnographer, while also making certain connections of the position visible that would otherwise have remained invisible to the ethnographer-as-citizen.

At a meeting to prepare the upcoming committee session, the adviser greets the MP: ‘You can hang up Sunday’s [newspaper] prominently on your office wall! It has all your stuff in it!’ The mentioned issue features an extended interview with the state data protection officer, in which he commends the faction for its initiative for a data protection law and explicitly welcomes the corresponding motion. (DL)

In this episode, we can see that the mass media publicity of the faction’s positions is, indeed, what the members aim for. Visibility here refers to the position appearing in public. Looking more closely at the adviser’s comment in relation to the newspaper article, another aspect comes into view: In the article, the data protection officer actually names the faction as collective author of the position. By categorizing the position as ‘your stuff’, the adviser is here effectively tying the position back to one MP (rather than ascribing it to the efforts of a collective, as in the interview). This kind of ex-post individualization of ‘ownership’ crucially depends upon insiders’ knowledge about the production process. Thus, the members, in this episode, reveal aspects of what might be labelled the ‘division of credit’: Even while the position will be encountered as ‘the faction’s position’ by newspaper readers, internally, the MP is credited with its success. At the same time, however, this version of visibility makes many other contributors and contributions invisible, some of which we will unravel in the following sections.

In addition to party congresses and newspapers, we encountered final positions at expert conferences, hosted by the faction or party and addressing a wider audience of stakeholders.

On a table next to the reception desk, several brochures, flyers and programmatic papers are exhibited. This expert conference assembles diverse groups under the heading ‘rural development’: the alternative association of farmers, animal rights associations, municipal energy suppliers, and so on. I immediately recognize the brochure on ‘rural development’. I know it from the web – and I am still surprised by what has become of the formerly almost academic text: a colorful, easy-to-read, very inviting collection of recommendations for action. In her opening speech, one of the organizers refers to the brochure not as an end, but as a beginning of ‘a dialogue with you all, aiming at the future and its great challenges’. (BT)

Here, the ethnographer is ‘surprised’ about the outcome of a months-long drafting process he had accompanied, involving many MPs’ offices. The process resulted in a comprehensive paper spanning twenty pages and uniting many diverse policy fields (economy and finance, ecology, energy, agriculture, and so on). Not only does the flyer invisibilize who contributed what, the entire process of its creation is absorbed by the exigencies of the occasion. To become ‘easy-to-read [and] inviting’, to serve as the ‘beginning of dialogue’, the paper/brochure had to be reduced to a mere catalogue of measures, swallowing analytical side notes and more ‘ideological’ passages. What is more, any impression of a contested production had to vanish in favor of a unanimous stance.

Presence/absence and in/visibility

Although assistants and advisers might be invisible for audiences outside, they are quite present inside the physical offices and meeting venues. Let us start with some scenes on being present/absent in an MP’s office.

The expert adviser is relieved when his boss is out of office. Now he can focus on his work proper: the study and development of position components of various lobby groups to be proposed to the MP as suggestions ‘to decide upon’. He does not like to submit half-baked ideas. The co-presence of an impatient MP would push him to render insights visible or even public before time. And this of course could easily backfire on him. (BT)

The presence of the MP at the office provides opportunities for the staff’s internal efforts to be laid open. However, while the work on positions is still ongoing, visibility might not be sought after at all – and this not only vis-à-vis an external public, but even in relation to team members. Visibility, thus, might be seen as happening ‘too early’ due to the ongoing preparation and the current status of the object-in-formation.

In an era of increasingly digitalized communication, the relation of presence/absence and visibility/invisibility undergoes an intriguing variation: Thanks to digital media, visible absence can be turned into an invisible presence. Knorr Cetina (2009), referring to Goffman (1983), describes these kinds of configurations as ‘response presence’: The participants are ‘present’ to each other in the sense of being able to respond to the others’ actions, although they are not physically present in the same space. This kind of ‘absent presence’ (see Law, 2004: 70–85), however, can be exercised not only by MPs, but also by staff members. In the next scene, the ethnographer is working as an assistant, writing statements adapting the party’s positions during an election campaign. This task consists of responding to questions about the party’s positions via digital communication:

Entering the faction’s intranet, I turn to another question ² marked as ‘status: open’. I call Jason, who is responsible for economy and finance. Jason asks me to read out the question to him. Then, he suggests that I take over the task of answering it. As a possible ‘text-module’, he mentions a ‘factsheet’ that has just been finished by a staff member of the ‘Europe-team’. After he receives my text, Jason thanks me via email for my ‘nice groundwork’, suggesting a few final changes. I edit the text accordingly. Later, Jason changes the ‘status’ of the text to ‘finished by responsible staff member’. This allows the content manager to upload the text to the party website and to publish it as an official question-answer pair. (AT)

Adapting existing positions for delivery to the audiences of an election campaign requires some coordination amongst the staff members via email. Here, MPs are not involved. During this process, the expert adviser renders the work of the ethnographer-as-assistant invisible by changing the object’s ‘status’ to ‘finished by responsible staff member’. The faction collects the ‘final’ statements co-produced by diverse staff members to enact the positions on the front stages of the election campaign.

Not all background work runs so smoothly. At times, it turns out to be rather burdensome, despite the supportive media-technological infrastructure. Such burden shows in the following episode, when the MP – unknowingly and unwillingly – ‘intrudes’ on the site of work:

The expert adviser is working on a rather complicated legislative motion, requiring quite a few cross-references, including their adaptation to reflect the changes. Furthermore, this motion is to be coordinated with all the other factions. While the adviser works on this, occasionally talking to colleagues on the phone, the phone rings once again. He seems slightly irritated but cannot help picking it up. It is one of the MPs from his policy fields. He wants to have some contents uploaded to the website ‘on the fly’. Hours later, having finished drafting the motion and sending it out to the other factions, he smugly thinks out loud: ‘I’ll put the MP in cc, it’s good to do this every once in a while, so they can see all the work we do here’ (DL)

While the adviser is heavily dependent (and indeed relies) on having his relevant colleagues within ‘response presence’ to do his complicated drafting work, being ‘response present’ to the MP himself makes possible a somewhat irritating distraction. However, hierarchy dictates that he cannot just turn down the request, even less make himself ‘response absent’ by not answering the phone. The request is dealt with accordingly and between the ‘actual work’, but not without complaining to those physically present: his office-mate and the participant observer. Apparently, this sort of distraction is normal business. His remark upon sending out the final draft motion explicates the fact that, due to the physical separation of MPs and advisers in different office spaces, combined with technologically enabled ‘response presence’, much of the current work is indeed invisible even to ‘insiders’ (here the MP). Making this work visible to the boss ‘once in a while’ is seemingly necessary in order to demonstrate the workload and to set limits on what can be expected for the work proper: the collaborative making of political positions.

The invisible connections (and divisions) between MPs’ offices

Having shown several instances of how in/visibilities in parliamentary work relate to workers being present/absent to each other and to the work invested in political positions, we now turn to the ways in which visibilities and invisibilities are involved in delineating and connecting different MPs’ offices as independent, yet collaborative working units. Here is one example of how invisibilization is involved in creating a collective subject (‘the office’) regarding a final position, while at the same time subsuming the staff’s work under that of the MP.

On Friday morning, during the weekly team meeting, the MP expresses dissatisfaction about a motion which the faction is expected to present in the next parliamentary session: ‘This cannot go out! We shall discuss it [in the working group] – we shall notify this.’ At this recommendation, the staff member jots down a reminder to send a note to the parliamentary group concerning the motion, so that it can be discussed before being proposed in parliament. (BT)

There is something peculiar here in the MP’s usage of the term ‘we’. For him, ‘we’ means each staff member whom he requests to follow up an issue on his own behalf. By this reference, the MP is not only contributing to the creation of a collective subject, that is, the team working on the same issues, but – using Shapin’s (1994) notion – he can also be seen as performing an act of ‘subsumption’ with regard to such work. The case of working group meetings within the faction is similar: Even in this wider context (compared to the MP’s team meeting), individual MPs offer to take care of certain matters personally. In this context, utterances like ‘I’ll do this’ or ‘we’ll manage that’ serve as implicit callings to the staff members, sitting beside the speaker. The attributed assistant would note down the issue to be followed up. In turn, the staff members’ ‘we’ signifies the team in its accepted servicing position in relation to the MP as principal.

Such invisibility of the staff grants (and is intended to grant) the MP a certain degree of autonomy and individuality from their parliamentary group, in that they can claim their ability to produce positions. This ability is based on their reliance on a team that feels obliged to back and substantiate its MP’s ideas. This echoes a second aspect of Star and Strauss’ description of invisible work: the disembedding of background work (elaborated in the following section). At the same time, we observed the tendency to project the MP’s position onto the whole of his/her team. For example, a conflict between disagreeing personal views among staff members raised surprise in other advisers. The members apply a ‘non-person’ rule: By showing their surprise about the disagreement, they highlight the normal expectation that the staff does not (visibly) express personal opinions, especially not if they differ from those of the MP. Assistants are supposed to merge seamlessly into the team, such that the latter could, for all practical purposes, be taken as one subject, speaking with a single voice: a mere extension of the MP.

On a day-to-day level, MPs’ staff members are quite visible to each other. They (generally) know each other’s e-mail addresses, discuss common concerns (for example, collective papers) on the phone or at lunch, or gather for spontaneous cigarette breaks. Invisible networks and alliances can emerge among staff members who share a common geographic origin, educational background, preference for certain hobbies (such as football) or habits (such as smoking). In some cases, staff members got involved in long-term collaborations within parliamentary groups due to their regular networking capacities.

For this, what the members ironically called ‘Zwergenrunde’ – directly translated as ‘dwarfs’ round’ ³ – the presence of an MP is unnecessary, or could be even disruptive. The members of the round neither circulate a formal invitation, nor do they produce minutes or protocols. Each member takes his or her own jottings on tasks, news, or contacts. They note what to talk about with their MP or inquiries for the next meeting. (BT)

Informal collaborative groups such as the ‘Zwergenrunde’ help to avoid the risk of doing the same work twice, and generally to build a necessary level of trust. These rounds lower the border lines that separate the offices, so that one could leave short notes on each other’s desks, ask for help via telephone, or enter into more than just small talk on the corridors.

Such minor and informal bonds on the staff level are also used strategically to circumvent or at least mitigate expected controversies on MP level and to ease otherwise complicated processes of coordination. The invisibility of the connections serves as a strong diplomatic resource.

This morning, the expert adviser started drafting a legislative motion crossing several policy fields (at least justice, religion, education and migration). It is clear from the outset that the planned motion can expect quite some intra-faction controversy. The same day he began the drafting, the adviser meets with several colleagues responsible for the respective other fields to discuss the motion over lunch. No MP is present. However, the conversation is very much centred on the MPs’ known or expected positions on the issue. The advisers also discuss ‘where the motion will have to go’ – that is, in which faction-internal working groups and parliamentary committees it might have to be discussed – and which order might be most advisable. (DL)

Here, the advisers seem to rely on the fact that a motion coming to the MP’s desk in print, maybe even already carrying the endorsement of (a majority in) one or several of the faction’s internal working groups, will be more favourably received than an informal, merely verbal expression of intent. Therefore, it becomes important for this ad-hoc ‘Zwergenrunde’ to know not only where the relevant MPs stand on the issue, but also to strategize about the order in which they should receive and support the motion. This example reminds us of the pivotal role of the MPs for the development of positions, even if much work is done without them. On the other hand, the scene also shows that the staff members, who are invisibilized vis-à-vis outside audiences, are very much visible to each other. They use these direct availabilities to forge manifold ties between their MPs’ offices.

Beyond this example of an institutionalized (internal) visibility behind (external) invisibility, all faction members must know and respect border lines between MPs’ offices:

The press department called. Would the MP like to position himself concerning an upcoming event? The staff member is unsure and turns to colleagues. The office manager remembers that the MP ‘handed over’ the issue to another MP’s office. She concludes: ‘We shouldn’t do anything on that. Let’s ask them whether they’ve planned to write about it.’ Later, she will meet the staff member of the concerned office, who will confirm her judgement. (BT)

The mentioned borders delineate MPs’ fields of competence that are mutually acknowledged by all MPs belonging to a parliamentary group. One risk of transgressing these borders is that staff members would delve into thematic fields that they are not well acquainted with, which – considering the rather hectic pace of work – may result in partial, not properly grounded, positions. The division of fields of expertise is generally known among the staff and MPs, but is explicated (and thus made visible to the ethnographers) only on particular occasions, as the following episode from another parliament shows.

On my first day in the adviser’s office, we begin to prepare tomorrow’s committee meeting. This entails printing out all the motions to be discussed and sorting them into folders for our individual MPs. While we are busy doing this, the adviser turns to his colleague, inquiring: ‘Who’s actually in charge of animal protection now?’ (DL)

This and the previous episode, from two different parliaments, show that the internal division of expertise is generally known implicitly (and thus mostly invisibly) in the members’ practices. However, at least occasional uncertainties and/or recent changes require constant update and application of this knowledge. We can see the relevance of this in the following scene:

Another MP has given an interview on a topic that ‘our’ MP regards as his field of expertise. He is angry about the incident. For him, the colleague has ‘stolen’ his issue. His anger and critique, however, remain internal for now. (BT)

This episode suggests that there is more at stake in this division of competence than only the quality of performance. Here, the complaint is not about the position articulated by the other MP; it is about the mere fact of the other MP’s ‘intrusive’ articulation. Our MP claims that he owns this policy (sub-)field. In particular, his anger suggests that this is much like a personal insult – the policy field has become part of the MP’s self. Paraphrasing Goffman’s (1971) concept of ‘territories of self’, we might speak of ‘territories of competence’, the transgression of which is liable to cause personal and collective injury. The division of competences demands mutual respect. Its validity should be legitimately expectable from all members of the collective.

Ex-post invisibility in knowledge processing

The staff’s task of preparing speeches is particularly interesting for the relation of invisibility and visibility. It makes the conflation of the ‘invisible’ production phase and its ‘visible’ performance by the MP noticeable in and for fieldwork. Some examples:

The staff member and a colleague collaborate in preparing the speech. The office worker writes five pages with facts and figures on the issue, which will be used by the colleague as materials to inform and finalize the draft. After the speech, the office worker is proud: ‘He [the MP] really knows little about this. But he’s a great speaker!’ His own background work resulted in a good stage performance. (BT)

Regarding speeches, this staff member disagrees with his MP: ‘She just expects short notes upon which she’ll base her intervention, but it would be better to formulate full sentences – they would make it easier to recollect our position later, for example, when we write a press release.’ The MP decides on the format in which the material is served on her. She prefers just a list of written prompts to speak. (BT)

Regarding the products worked upon in these episodes, not only those supplying the contents are invisible, but, as Star and Strauss suggested, so are the procedures constituting the flow of work. For the audience (the broader public sphere as much as the parliamentary session) listening to or reading a speech, what really counts is the position transmitted. It seems a pure technicality whether it was composed by one staff member or in a group; whether it consists, in its written form, of phrases or just catchwords. Delving deeper into the production of positions, we realized that these work procedures are invisible because the ‘raw materials’ from which positions are manufactured are mostly invisible in the final product. The staff members deal with technical knowledge, experience-based forecasts, and, to a certain extent, intuitions about the contingencies of the political process.

While preparing the speech, [the staff member] draws from articles (filed in an archive of more than a hundred folders), from the Parliament’s online archive, as well as from digital resources such as the minutes from parliamentary sessions and previous MPs’ speeches. Whenever he cannot find a specific piece of information, he falls back on a Google search. His description about this ‘method’ is: ‘My approach is eclectic – I take everything that is useful’. (BT)

Here, the expert adviser consciously speaks of a ‘method’ because he does not (and could not) work in an arbitrary way. He rather appears as a tinkerer of knowledge, of new and old pieces of information that are, at least ideally, assembled and composed to offer the ‘right position at the right time’. This work is, indeed, ‘invisible’; the materials from which positions are built – the office’s archive and/or the public pool of information – may derive from generally known sources. They can be recollected and followed up in paper clips on news, by hastily written notes on chats and phone calls, and through follow-up versions of drafts and papers.

We can also see this ‘recollection’ of invisible contributions in the following field note:

I am astonished: After almost nine months of closely shadowing the working group who composed the position paper, only the MPs are visible in the final version for the party congress. Later, when the motion is presented on stage by the two MPs in the lead, they explicitly thank the external expert adviser for accompanying the process. However, all the other internal expert members who contributed are not even mentioned. Their help is taken for granted. (AT)

While the ethnographer in this scene is struck by the fact that only one of the many background workers is mentioned by the official authors, there is another aspect that is important here. Although the MPs refer to the presence of the expert who drafted the position paper, they do so by obscuring his agency. The external expert drafted and edited the position paper version by version, and is thanked for ‘accompanying the process’ – which is what the ethnographer more obviously did. It seems that MPs can only mention a background worker on the frontstage by weakening his or her agency. Sidelining the external adviser in this way makes it possible to render him as somehow being involved but not as politically responsible for the position. To put it differently, co-producing a position paper may be a basic necessity, but it may not be accountable as such on the front stages of politics in light of the normative claim of MPs being the ‘one[s] who act’ (Pitkin, 1967: 21; cf. also Ezrahi, 1992). According to this claim, the advisers’ role is presented only insofar as it extends the MPs’ ability and agency to deliver representations. Through such helpers, the MP gains a second body, next to his physical one (see Kantorowicz, 1994): an apparatus attached to him as part of his/her mandate. Consider the following experiences of the ethnographer:

The adviser shows me a draft motion for a resolution she has ‘finished’ in the absence of the MP (who is abroad on committee business). Later the same day, she presents me a new version of the same text, emerging from an email exchange with the MP. She alerts me to one particular, entirely new paragraph that ‘the MP has inserted’. From this, I infer that the other changes – mainly rearranging portions of existing text – were her own. The next day, the motion is discussed at the faction working group meeting, still in the MP’s absence. Here, the motion receives some substantial criticism, and the adviser – after a short phone call with the MP – immediately begins the re-drafting. A few weeks later, at my desk at the university, I follow up on the motion by searching for it on the online parliamentary documentation centre. At the very bottom of the text, the names of the two faction co-chairs and the MP appear – although she was hardly ever there during the drafting! Almost needless to say, the adviser’s name is nowhere to be found. (DL)

The process recounted here is not quite typical, in that MPs are not usually absent from the working group discussions of ‘their’ positions. However, it is quite typical in the way that the actual work of drafting and re-drafting positions is distributed among MPs and advisers – the bulk of this work is done by the latter, inter alia because the former are away (though not always abroad for an entire week) on committee and other business much of the time. Nonetheless, the official parliamentary ‘printed matters’ documenting and materializing the positions always only mention faction chairs and the responsible ‘speakers’ (that is, MPs) for the respective policy field(s). Those who are mostly ‘visible’ to the ethnographer observing positions-in-the-making are mostly ‘invisible’ to the public receiving the final positions.

Advantages of and counter-tactics to the ecology of in/visible work

Although the division of visibility and invisibility portrayed in the previous section is constitutive with regard to rendering representatives fully responsible for positions, it is not fixed. The mutual divisions and liminalities of visibility and invisibility become visible themselves in instances during which the members reflect upon, criticize and translate one into the other. This includes deliberate decisions between the two in certain instances, as well as repair-work to make invisible work visible and vice versa. These movements underpin the fact that the ecology of in/visibility leaves room for situational, pragmatic adjustments. The members know how to move from one to the other or, at least, they deliberate about the consequences of either mode of work.

During our work on producing political positions in the workings of parliaments, the members occasionally also alerted us to certain advantages that come with (one’s work) being invisible in this particular field.

I am riding along with the adviser in his car on the way to a two-day seminar the faction is organizing for its staff. On the way, I tell him about the idea of ‘invisible work’ in STS and feminist studies that I am often reminded of during my fieldwork, and that our research group is planning a paper on this. He seems interested in the concept, and I inquire about the frustrations, which (I naively anticipated) stem from one’s work never being publicly acknowledged. His response surprises me. Working in the background, he explains, is not so much frustrating as liberating for him. If anything goes wrong, such as a position receiving harsh criticism in public, he will not have to stand up for it, but rather the MP(s) will have to do so. For him, invisibility is like a shield behind which he can work more freely than his constantly visible boss. (DL)

This story reminds us of the two sides of the visibility/invisibility relation, which forges the MP-staff relationship: If the MP has a voice and his/her staff remain unheard (and unseen), it is also true that, out of his/her legitimate role as a representative, it is the MP who will have to stand and answer for a position. Here, comparing the scientific laboratory and the Parliament regarding the production of validity claims and authorship proves fruitful. Unlike (natural) philosophers, MPs do not, in general, claim authorship but an exclusive mandate for representing positions. Their assistants do the major work of developing the positions that will be enacted by (and only by) the elected MPs.

Occasionally, the ecology of visibility and invisibility may be turned inside out by staff members to obtain a certain degree of accountability. We were able to observe an interesting instance of such counter-tactics during the writing of a position paper to be presented at the annual party congress. The following scene from an internal meeting of a working group shows how an MP is forced to shed light on the usually invisible background work.

The MP begins by reporting an expert staff member’s ‘resistance’ to the task of re-making the social policy positions of the party. If the process ends up with a position he is unable to support, he threatens to quit his function. (AT)

By voicing his resistance so strongly, the expert staff member, who is very experienced and thus important for the party’s political work, becomes visible as a much-needed co-producer. On occasions not directly linked to parliamentary procedure, expert advisers can also attain surprising levels of visibility, for instance, as authors of an entire law.

During an expert meeting assembling party members, MPs and civil society actors in the constituency office of one MP, one of the advisers acting as an expert on the panel is introduced as ‘the author of [a state] law’. I am quite surprised: This is the first (and will remain the only) time that I have heard such an ascription of authorship of a law. I can also see that this introduction elicits a somewhat shy smile from the mentioned adviser. Later it turns out that not only is the law not enacted yet, the legislative motion calling for the law has not even been introduced into the proper parliamentary procedure! (DL)

Making the adviser visible as the ‘author’ of a particular law seems to be possible on this occasion because it serves to assign him expertise and thus enacts him as a legitimate panellist for the meeting. At the same time, it seems that it is only possible because the meeting is not directly concerned with the legislative procedure itself. The scene thus illustrates the intimate connection between invisibility of staff (and their work) and the legitimacy of the legislative process. It is one thing to make the adviser visible to a handful of potential allies, but quite another to announce his authorship to an anonymous, potentially hostile public.

Conclusion: Towards a better understanding of relevancies

Turning to the co-production (Jasanoff, 2005) of science, technology and society has led STS scholars to consider parliaments as relevant sites for empirical investigation. However, while the focus of much STS research has been on the various institutionalized and thus visible ways in which scientists and other publics are involved in the formation of political issues, the mundane and daily discourse work inside parliament offices has been largely ignored. But if, as Asdal (2008: 911) points out, the ‘delegation of political issues to experts’ is a core reason in STS ‘for exploring sites such as ministries and parliament’, then we should not limit our investigations to such public and publicized sites as parliamentary fact-finding or inquiry committees (Barry, 2010a; Bogner and Menz, 2006). Rather, we should also seek to understand the more mundane modes of delegating the preparation work for contributing to professional politics or its various public discourses which, as Asdal and Hobæk (2020) highlight, might even include parliamentarians publicly expressing resistance to being assisted by advisers. Research, then, ought to turn to the work of creating discourse objects, a kind of work that is not and should not become visible to the public.

This article has dealt with such an invisibility, namely the discourse work that assistants and expert advisers invest into parliamentary groups’ political positions. Indeed, one of our central claims is that the in/visibility of making political positions is closely tied to the constitution of democratic politics-as-usual. The ordinariness and legitimacy of parliamentary procedure resides in its character as driven by MPs; invisibilizing the staff’s work thus serves to uphold that basic legitimacy. By providing ethnographic descriptions, we have shown that invisibilizing the delegation of discourse work is a constitutive but implicit element of political work. The argument has been that distributed agency in position-making in fact must be invisibilized so that the competition of positions can be perceived as something driven by individual MPs, thereby sustaining the normative order of parliamentary politics. According to this ideal of democratic representation, MPs ought to represent the electorate, and in doing so they may be technically assisted by – but must not depend upon – staff members. Positions, moreover, should not come across as complex co-constructions, but as straightforward articulations of the reasonable politicians’ convictions.

This political invisibility, we conclude, systematically differs from invisibilities employed in the everyday conduct of natural science in a number of ways. First, there is a major difference regarding the entities considered to be discourse contributors. In science, focus is on individual authorship and the individuals considered authors, even if there are several of them. By contrast, contributions to political discourse are made in the name of entire collectives, even if single MPs are performing them. This implies a different scope of invisibilizing. Whereas laboratory assistants’ activities may be an indirect part of accounts, for instance by recounting the calibration of instruments in passive voice, parliamentary assistants’ work on making positions is not part of situated deliveries of positions, whether in a speech or text or both. While it is not delegitimizing for scientific authors to indicate that part of the work leading to their findings was provided by an anonymous team of assistants, disclosing the partaking of unelected assistants writing position papers, motions or speeches would jeopardize our understanding of a political representative as ‘the one who acts’ in the name of a faction or party. Invisibilizing assistants’ and advisers’ work ensures the MPs’ representative function.

Second, invisibilities in science and politics differ with regard to the cultural functions of their discourse objects. The invisibilization of laboratory assistants makes it possible for the outcome of the collective work to appear in public as stemming from ‘facts of nature’, discovered by the natural philosopher/scientist. By contrast, invisibilization of assistants in parliaments makes the work of creating positions appear as MPs’ work. The aim, however, is not to make MP’s accountable as the authors or originators of positions, but as the agents representing them and being responsible for them. If a position receives great enthusiasm or harsh criticism in public, it is not the staff adviser who will receive credit or have to stand up for it. The invisibilization of position-making, in other words, enables that positions can be received as belonging to elected representatives and their collectives. This close and unmediated bond between politician and positions allows the latter to serve as ‘key medium’ (Scheffer, 2015a) of democratic competition. While the making of ‘facts’ in natural science aim to end scientific debates and, in doing so, contribute to the authors’ reputations, ‘positions’ are meant to feed debates and thereby provide the grounds for political distinction. Accounting for positions as programmatic ideas belonging to politicians allows the latter and their factions to distinguish themselves from competitors’ political programmes.

Third, whereas STS research on issue formation points towards the competitive and combative process of turning objects of science, technology or nature into political statements (e.g. Asdal, 2008; Asdal and Hobæk, 2016; Barry, 2010a; Bogner and Menz, 2006), it does not sensitize us to the parliamentary invisibilities involved in preparing these statements. Hence, it remains external to the status and relevance of the prepared discourse contributions. An alternative, we argue, is a middle-range theorizing trying to grasp the relevant careers of the objects-in-becoming, something we call ‘formative objects’ (Scheffer, 2010). These objects, as complete(d) political statements that hold those accountable whom they represent (e.g. the faction), require particular internal relations between their obligatory components. In turn, those components are oriented towards the ongoing discourse they contribute to. They are thus tasked to anticipate the critical repertoires of their counterparts in all those respects. In scientific formations, reliable facts are performed as, provisionally put, a unity of occurrence-method-theory, whereas the binding position is performed as a unity of problem-measure-ideology. The work to be invested is oriented towards the collection and integration of the components until they merge into one coherent triad. In terms of a relevancy career, the unities may bind a larger circle of authorities, while they can be attacked according to each single component.

Fourth, looking at the relevance of the formative objects in which actors are invested, we may better grasp the political character of science beyond a rather metaphorical understanding of politics as carrying out conflicts of truth. It is no longer just the ‘different means’ but also the different orientations distinguishing politics from science, specifying the indirect contributions across the fields, in both directions. Scientific statements may populate the political triad via the ‘problems’ (as occasions) to be met by measures in light of ideological principles. Binding positions, in return, may populate science via the ‘occasions’ (as public problems) that deserve further trials of understanding and explanation. These ‘couplings’ (Luhmann, 1998) between politics and science are just single aspects of the respective statements-in-formations. Both political positions and reliable facts are tested, questioned and might fail in light of empirical formations.

Where does this differentiation leave an STS-inspired understanding of politics? One implication to be drawn from our study is the need to investigate in more detail the practical foundations of theoretical and normative understandings of democratic politics. As Brichzin (2016a) points out in her review of the current state of research on parliaments, the institutional concept of democratic representation is still the unquestioned starting point of studies, not their object of study. Our study shows that this taken-for-grantedness is itself established and upheld by careful and mundane practices of invisibilizing the distributed character of doing political discourse. Against this background, we sympathize with approaches that study politics in terms of work rather than ‘representation’ (Asdal and Hobæk, 2016, 2020; Brichzin, 2020; Dányi, 2018). As Marres (2007: 763–764) suggested, STS research on politics should indeed be more sensitive to follow practices-in-the-making. This sensitivity, we suggest, involves a stronger focus on the discourse objects-in-formation specific to politics and which may differ from those in other fields, such as science. This object-centred view, moreover, tries to avoid inappropriate generalizations from laboratory studies’ research and inflationary usages of the notion of politics. Focusing on constitutive invisibility reminds STS to study the particularities of parliamentary practices in accordance with and in contrast to the laboratory studies of doing science.