Managing parliament's image

This project aims to understand the extent to which parliaments in Europe control and conceptualise their corporate image, in particular in relation to their websites. More specifically, it aims to uncover the processes supporting the management, content and scope of the websites of five parliaments in Europe and to ascertain the extent to which the image projected on these websites corresponds to strategic decisions about how these parliaments want to be perceived.
The parliaments are the British, European, French, Portuguese and Scottish. We will enquire into the extent to which the management of parliament's image is integrated in the wider governance of parliament, asking in particular who decides on the content and scope of parliamentary websites and whether these are administrative, political or technical decisions.
The comparative nature of this project will allow us to investigate differences and similarities in the systems of governance of parliament's image in different institutional contexts. This is a two-year research project. It adopts mainly a qualitative research approach and it is based on 50 in-depth interviews with senior parliamentary staff and politicians across the five parliaments, complemented by a content analysis of the respective parliamentary websites.