Collaborative Research and the Members of Parliament Project

Abstract

This article gives an account of the ‘Members of Parliament Project’ based at Nottingham Trent and Sheffield universities, which reveals something of the team's working practices and intellectual strategy and concludes with reflections on the benefits and costs of collaboration. It also covers the research undertaken: the creation of a database on Conservative Parliamentarians in order to undertake research on a range of socio-economic, ideological and political variables; the use of cohort analysis to study the socio-economic profile of the Conservative elite; the development of a typology of British Conservatism; and the use of attitude surveys to empirically investigate a novel ‘ideological mapping technique.