By request and by call: Interest Group Access and Parliamentary Hearings in the Portuguese democracy

Although some researchers point to a weakening of relations between political parties and interest groups, the most current data points not to their disappearance but to a change in the way both political actors interact. At the same time, the ties between groups and parties play a fundamental role in the practical operation of representation, and the patterns of collaboration between them contribute to the quality of democracies. Thus, rather than the so far more typical concentration on the question of if, we want to understand how political parties and interest groups are linked in contemporary democracies. This work attempts to offer a longitudinal insight into interest group population and mobilization in the Portuguese parliamentary hearings. Relying on an original data set that comprises information on hearings by request (audiências, in Portuguese) and hearings by call (audições) in terms of issues, committees, and entities between the IV Legislature and the mid-XIII Legislature (1985- 2017), we will, at first, look at parliamentary hearings at large in order to understand more about these institutional functions, and, secondly, observe and understand general patterns of interest group access in parliamentary hearings, with the theoretical focus on issues (mobilization) and entities (population) and regarding committees and legislatures. Therefore, this work offers a mapping of interest group presence at the institutional level, with the future goal of analyzing the policy-making process and party-group relations in the Parliament. Concomitantly, it provides a roadmap for the coming endeavor of understanding interest group influence, building on the present theoretical concentration on access.