Social inequality in advisory councils’ participation: the importance of cultural capital and bureaucratic knowledge

Most of studies of advisory councils assume that this institution has scarce capacity of inclusion from the point of view of class and educational inequalities. Inclusiveness would not be one of the democratic qualities of these participatory institutions in most cases, which would suppose other benefits such as plurality and heterogeneity in policy-networks and the distribution of information among a variety of associative agents. Departing from two surveys and more than one hundred interviews developed between 2017 and 2021 in Spain, we argue that socio-political inequalities are at the heart of the current model of advisory councils in Spain. As we will show, most participants in these institutions are cultural and technical professionals with high-level education, and this quantitative prevalence is not neutral or insignificant for it is accompanied by a dominant “expert” style based on legal and technical discussion which advises norms and legal documents. The current model of ACs in Spain undergoes such professionalization that we can hardly say that it preserves its original essence associated to political equality and inclusion. In this paper, we show that social inequalities in composition/deliberation are not only the result of an (external) inequitable distribution of political resources which affects all political activities (Verba et al., 1995; Scholzman et al., 2013); they are also produced by the specific requests that public authorities ask to associations, and how these entities respond back to governments. That is, social inequalities in ACs are not simply caused by external inequalities; they are produced by the form ACs are organized and designed and the specific petitions which governments make. Further, as we will show, cultural capital and legal expertise have become a central competence which administrations call for, and which organizations try to provide.