How do Affiliations to External Interests Affect Parliamentarians’ Assignment to Committees in the German Bundestag?

Parliamentary party groups (PPG) are in charge of assigning their members of parliament (MPs) to committees. Still, little is known about the processes behind this assignment and findings of research on the topic remain inconclusive. Apart from regional factors and constituency demands, reassignment and connections to interest groups appear to play a role (Mickler 2018: 517). On the one hand, these connections may serve parliamentary work as they carry external expertise into committees, but on the other hand, they also open the possibility for influence that is unwanted by or to the disadvantage of voters. It is therefore crucial to understand the role connections to outside interests play in the assignment to committees, where the Bundestag’s main legislative work takes place. Drawing on theories of legislative organisation, the proposed paper examines the different types of outside activities of German parliamentarians and their impact on committee assignment. As a working parliament, the German Bundestag has a strong committee system in which the individual committees have a considerable impact on legislation. This makes the Bundestag, especially its committees, a relevant target for interest groups seeking to influence legislation (Eising & Spohr 2017: 314). However, research thus far has only started to uncover the degree of interest representation that takes place in the German Bundestag and has primarily focused either on public committee sessions or on individual members of parliament without an explicit focus on committees. Thus, the proposed paper will combine these two strands of research by aiming to answer the research question of how ties to external interests affect parliamentarians’ assignment to committees. Since outside activities are liable to publication, I collected these indications on the Bundestag’s website for the 19th German Bundestag (2017-2021) which resulted in a database of 3763 outside activities for all members of parliament combined. In the paper, I first present descriptive statistics on the different types of interest affiliations for members of various committees in the 19th German Bundestag. In a second step, I provide a regression analysis on outside affiliations’ impact on assignment to committees in the subsequent 20th Bundestag while also considering previous committee membership, occupational background, the PPG, the manner of election, and length of term as possible confounders. In line with the informational perspective on legislative organisation, the analysis shows that connections to external interests primarily matter for the assignment to information-driven committees. Overall, the proposed paper adds to the literature on interest group studies as well as committee assignment and parliamentary careers.