Oral history and political elites: Interviewing (and transcribing) lobbyists

This chapter discusses some of the methodological issues which arose in my interviews with lobbyists in Washington, London and Brussels. While all research projects are different, this chapter attempts to highlight some key issues around interviewing which researchers need to consider – such as interview structure, the ethics of transcribing, and editing transcriptions for publication – and to provide an account of how they were addressed in the course of this particular project. It ends by urging that such transcripts become generally available to other researchers, as they constitute a potentially fruitful data resource of no less importance than the quantitative datasets which tend to be more commonly available.