Testing Staff Roles in the Danish Parliament

Abstract

Investments in parliamentary staff in many countries raise the question: What tasks do they perform in exchange for the public money with which they are paid? So far, academics have mainly described the work of such employees in individual legislatures and have studied them more sophisticatedly in the US and the European Parliament. However, theory-driven empirical comparisons between national parliamentary staff in Europe are mostly missing, especially regarding their partisan side. An exception is the conceptual model developed by Brandsma and Otjes (2024) in a study about all employees of the Dutch lower house. This article applies that tool to another case, the Danish parliament (Folketing), with the dual aims of finding patterns by comparing it to the Netherlands and assessing the comprehensiveness of the model. Interviews with almost all political parties and three managers of the non-partisan staff of the Folketing suggest that the categorization of Brandsma and Otjes (2024) mostly covers the tasks of their staff, but omits important subroles regarding international diplomacy.