Bienvenue or Access Denied? Recruiting French Political Elites for In-Depth Interviews

Abstract

Interviewing French political elites is often considered an arduous task. French politicians and bureaucrats are commonly said to mistrust transparency — at least when compared to Scandinavian standards — which is why they are reluctant to give insider information to social scientists or to accord interviews at all. This paper concentrates on the question of how to get access to French political elites for in-depth interviews. Drawing on the author's research on French European policy-making in the context of divided government, the article in a guidebook style presents various approaches to ‘getting in Parisian doors’. The pessimistic perspectives on scheduling elite interviews are not confirmed by the author's own experiences. However, since the author's ‘techniques’ are not properly validated, for example, by experiments, the article is designed as a research report and not as a rigorous methodological treatise.