Whose Knowledge? Patterns of Committee Witnesses in Spain’s Congress of Deputies

An important way of understanding the place of parliaments in democratic governance is their role as ‘knowledge institutions’ (Geddes 2023). How parliaments gather, use, interpret and produce knowledge is critical to their functions of scrutiny, representation, legislation and agenda-setting. But whose knowledge is heard in parliaments, particularly regarding issues critical to societal wellbeing? And why might this matter? This presentation explores these questions in the case of Spain’s Congress of Deputies, sharing early findings on patterns of invited witnesses to parliamentary committees during the current parliamentary session. It provides insights into ‘who is heard’ (and who is not), for example examining witnesses’ gender, region and organisational affiliation. It also considers the relative salience of the issues witnesses are invited to discuss. The presentation reflects on the findings in comparative perspective (especially in relation to the UK and Scottish parliaments) and their implications regarding the nature of the relationship between knowledge inputs and democratic processes of public scrutiny, citizen representation and law-making in Spain. This forms part of an ongoing comparative project, Studying Parliaments and the Role of Knowledge (SPARK), based at the University of Edinburgh.

Ewan Robertson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Studying Parliaments and the Role of Knowledge (SPARK) at the University of Edinburgh. Ewan has responsibility for data collection on the Spanish and Catalan parliaments, and helps advise on welfare policy analysis across the project. Ewan’s wider expertise includes the comparative analysis of the politics of welfare reform, the role of ideas and evidence in policymaking, and a substantive focus on social security, labour market policy and in-work poverty.