Seeking British respondents to complete a survey:
Any former British special advisers who worked between 1 December 2014 to 1 December 2024
The survey will take approprixamtely 20 minutes to complete
Responses will be anonymous
To express interest in the survey or to seek more information please contact Dr Heath Pickering via UKspads@gmail.com before the end of August 2025
If you express interest, later in 2025, you will receive an email from the University of Oslo with a link to complete the survey.
The Comparative Political Adviser Survey (COMPAS) is the first survey-based comparative research on former political staff in 14 countries: Slovakia, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Portugal, the UK, Ireland, and Australia.
It aims to compare the roles, skills, attitudes, careers and relationships of political staff across different jurisdictions. This will be a unique resource to help understand how political advisers perceive their role and how they contribute to policy and political outcomes.
The lead researcher examining British special advisers for the COMPAS project is Dr Heath Pickering, Fellow in Political Science at the University of Melbourne and honorary Fellow at the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute in Belgium. His published research can be found at www.heathpickering.com. The British version of the project aims to be the largest survey since Yong and Hazell's 2014 seminal book on Special Advisers, and Ed Page's 2012 survey on British Spads.
The international core team for the COMPAS project includes the following:
Professor Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen - Aarhus University, Denmark
Professor Kristoffer Kolltveit - University of Oslo, Norway
Dr Erik-Jan van Dorp - Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Professor Richard Shaw - Massey University, New Zealand
Types of questions in the survey:
• Patterns of contact – how often you have contact with a range of actors
• Whose interests are in mind when you make decisions
• Last job before first recruited as an adviser
• Policy specialist or policy generalist
• Top 3 skills/resources for a political adviser to have
• How important was it to give different types of advice
• Relationships with public servants
• Whether the job opened up or limited future career opportunities
• Working conditions of staffers
Ethics:
The survey is undergoing human ethics approval in Europe and in the United Kingdom. All data will be anonymised, de-identified and stored in Norway in compliance with European and international privacy (GDPR) rules on information, informed consent and secure data storage. The names and email addresses of the former advisers who participate will be securely stored and not linked to the answers in the survey.