Consultations across levels and governments. Comparing advisory committees in Spain and Belgium

Advisory committees are venues via which members of the executive and societal stakeholders interact on regular bases, exchanging technical and political information on specific policy problems. Consultation mechanisms such as advisory committees have generated an intense and exciting debate among interest groups and agenda-setting scholars for decades. For some, the institutionalization of consultations is important for interest groups to supply expertise and technical information, and hence, to contribute to the policy process. For others, advisory committees simply reinforce the privileged position of some types of interest groups, at the expense of other types. However, there is not much systematic comparative empirical research about how such committees operate, which representatives of private interests actually participate and how biased such systems of interest representation are. This paper analyses this question focusing on the level of concentration of interest groups representation across policy areas and political systems. Our dependent variable is the concentration of interest representation on one type of interest compared to other interest group types (for instance, business interests versus non-business interests). We expect significant differences depending on the extent to which a government has substantial powers in a particular area, the political leaning of the government, and the overall density of groups mobilized in a system. The analysis relies on a dataset of more than a 1.000 advisory governmental committees and compares consultation patterns for six governments in two parliamentary democracies – Belgium and Spain—at the central state and subnational level (Flanders, Wallonia, Catalonia, the Basque country, Belgian federal government, and the Spanish central state government).