In this chapter, I – necessarily – explore only one dimension of political discursive practices in detail: politics as usual on the backstage. This implies investigating the daily work of politicians in their respective workplace – national and transnational political institutions. In sum, I ask the question: what do politicians do? In the following, I first summarize some relevant approaches to the study of discourse and politics. Thereafter I present my own interdisciplinary theory to ‘performing politics’ and illustrate it with some examples of recent ethnography in European Union institutions.