Committee Hearings as a Site of Political Representation: Evidence from Germany

Committee hearings play an increasingly important role in the German Bundestag’s legislative process and can be scheduled at the request of a mere quarter of a committee’s members. During a hearing, the summoned interest group representatives and experts engage in a detailed discussion with legislators, providing them with valuable background information and opinions. A committee hearing can therefore have a notable impact on subsequent political debates, and often leads to substantial amendments to a legislative proposal under discussion. Hearings thus represent a central site of political representation understood as a process of “making and receiving, accepting and rejecting claims” (Saward 2010, 36). Nevertheless, they constitute a blind spot in empirical political research, largely ignored by representation scholars. This paper analyses the substantive political representation of women’s interests by legislators and experts during all hearings in the Bundestag’s standing committees during the 18th legislative period (2013-2017). First, it inquires whether female experiences and gendered perspectives have become cross-cutting issues that can be found throughout all committees and subject areas. Second, it asks which representatives, interest groups, and experts are more prone to bring forward arguments or inputs relating to women’s interests, and under which circumstances. Third, it differentiates between conservative and progressive positions relating to women’s role in family and society and locates political actors spatially. This paper’s approach thereby fills in two gaps much empirical research on women’s representation leaves open. First, many studies suffer from a narrow thematic scope and only investigate the so-called “soft” policy areas or issues deemed feminine. Second, scholars often focus exclusively on the plenary debates in a legislature, ignoring large parts of the legislative process, especially in a working parliament like the Bundestag. The backbone of this study forms a novel, comprehensive dataset including all 486 hearings held during the 18th legislative period of the German Bundestag. Drawing on the hearings’ verbatim records, every single utterance was separated from the rest of the corpus and complemented by meta data concerning the respective speaker, e.g. name, political office, and party or interest group affiliation. References Saward, Michael (2010): The Representative Claim. Oxford: Oxford University Press.