Committee Parliamentary Specialization Index. Explaining MPs’ specialisation in the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados^*

* A first, less ambitious version of the Parliamentary Specialization Index was presented at the 12th Workshop of Parliamentary Scholars and Parliamentarians, Wroxton, July 2015.

ABSTRACT

Nowadays legislatures are largely based on committee systems. This enables a division of work and specialisation, in the context of highly complex politics and policy development. It seems clear that MP specialisation in the field of the committee they serve on is an important political asset, both for MPs and their parliamentary party group. This paper presents the Committee Parliamentary Specialization Index. This index measures the degree an MP is specialised in the jurisdiction of the committee they serve on. In the second part of the paper, the index is applied to the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados, an interesting case for testing this multi-faceted index, to find institutional, political and individual factors that better explain the degree of MP specialisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Parliaments
• legislatures
• committee system
• MPs
• committee assignment
• MP specialisation and expertise
• professional politics
• Congreso de los Diputados
• Spain

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank Beatriz Camacho for her contribution in those initial steps.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Pablo Oñate is professor of Political Science at the Universidad de Valencia. He earned his degree in Law and Ph. D. in political science at Uniersidad Autonoma de Madrid. He has published extensively on political behaviour, elections, electoral systems, political parties and parlamentary elites. His research interests deal with representation and political elites. He was the chair of the European Confederation of Political Science Associations and currently he is a member of IPSA’s Executive Committee.

Carmen Ortega is an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Granada. She has published extensively on electoral behaviour and electoral systems.

ORCID

Pablo Oñate http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3547-1825

Notes

* A first, less ambitious version of the Parliamentary Specialization Index was presented at the 12th Workshop of Parliamentary Scholars and Parliamentarians, Wroxton, July 2015.

1. We analysed the 8th and 9th Congresses (2004–2008 and 2008–2011). Data belong to the ‘GIAEP-Project Dataset’ that gathers information from national and regional MPs (1977–2015) on a wide range of individual, political, institutional, and contextual variables.

2. Traditionally female/male profile of the committees registers a high correlation with the level of prestige of the respective committee, as proved by a survey among academics and parliamentary clerks (Oñate, 2014).