Insiders in committee hearings: participation patterns and gendered dynamics

To form independent positions on policy problems, legislative committees rely, among other resources, on the involvement of policy actors through parliamentary appearances. Existing research has focused mainly on interest groups, paying much less attention to other actors such as public officials and authorities, particularly in parliamentary democracies. As insiders, these actors have access to privileged information with the potential to shape decision-making processes and policy implementation. To address this gap, this article examines their participation in the discussion of budget bills in Spain, specifically when they appear before the budget committee to justify budget requests. We investigate whether authorities with technical or political profiles (civil servants vs. politically appointed officials) are more likely to be invited to these appearances, whether male and female authorities address different policy issues, and under what conditions the information they provide influences both the proposal of amendments to the budget bill and their likelihood of being accepted. Does the information provided by male and female authorities in these hearings differ significantly? Does this information have a different effect on legislators’ behavior? Are amendments proposed after hearings with male authorities more likely to be accepted? The analysis draws on a new and original dataset that includes information on budget amendments and parliamentary appearances for all budget bills discussed in the Spanish Parliament between 1997 and 2019. The dataset was constructed using web-scraping and text-parsing techniques applied to legislative documents. Topic modelling and machine-learning classification models, using supervised and unsupervised approaches, are employed to categorize the type of information provided.