My overall aim was to research politicians’ economic ideas inductively, in order to describe them accurately, being relatively open about the main themes that would emerge, following an interpretivist epistemological approach (Bevir & Rhodes 2003; Cramer 2016). This book is based on the dominant themes that emerged from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 85 elected politicians and 14 political advisers from the UK, France, Germany, Denmark and the United States. The interviews were conducted primarily by video conference, between February 2020 and December 2022.

I was responsible for the “politician strand” of a broader project exploring economic thinking. It was based in the Politics Department at University College London. I have used the first-person singular, “I”, throughout the book to reflect my responsibility for much of the research design, and for the data collection and analysis. However, as I acknowledge in the preface, the wider research team had already made some decisions, helped me make others and contributed to some of the interviewing. Therefore, in this appendix I use a mix of “I” and “we” as appropriate. I set out details about our case selection, choice of interview as method, interview design, analysis, recruitment strategy and characteristics of those interviewed.

Case selection

The research team chose Germany, France, Denmark, the UK and United States to research for two reasons. First, they are long-established democracies with varying institutional traditions in degrees of federalism, separation of powers and voting systems. Second, they have relatively well-functioning economies and some autonomy over their economic policies. They correspond both to “varieties of capitalism” (Hall & Soskice 2001), ranging across coordinated to liberal and Scandinavian categories, and to growth models (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016), ranging across consumption and export-led categories. However, as I stress in Chapter 1, the primary aim is not to focus on how different economies and political traditions may affect politicians’ economic thinking, but to describe their attitudes to economists and voters.

Why interview politicians?

The research team has heeded the call for descriptive studies of ideas to “primarily rely on direct evidence of policy actors’ ideas and belief” (Daigneault 2014: 463). Politicians’ economic ideas at the general level have been neglected.