Studying ministerial advisers' careers and profiles: the prosopographic method

Prosopographic research collects and analyses statistically relevant quantities of biographical data about a well-defined group of individuals. Traditionally used in historical research and in French research on advisers, it offers a key methodology capable of further dragging ministerial advisers out of the shadows in different contexts across the globe. In this chapter, we start by clarifying what prosopography is and why it is a fruitful approach. We then demonstrate some of the common features of prosopographic studies, and show that the main variables of interest relate to socio-demographic backgrounds, education, partisanship, and the various professional trajectories and experience of advisers. We use a heuristic to distinguish advisers’ career stages by identifying in-flow, flow-through, and outflow characteristics, and identify a number of research practices, both in terms of data collection and analysis. Reviewing the relevant literature thus far, we spot several under-investigated areas, and report on some of the limitations and challenges of prosopographic methods.