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Which legislators become specialized in particular policy areas (hedgehogs), and which develop into policy generalists (foxes)? Instead of focusing on the individual characteristics of MPs, we build on institutionalist literature and argue that an MP's specialization arises from an interaction between MP and parliamentary leadership. These interactions generate demand for policy generalists depending on a leadership position, committee membership, government status, and parliamentary group size. Policy specialization is measured by how many different topics a legislator addresses in Parliament. Using data from Germany from 1998 to 2013, topic‐coded parliamentary questions are combined with MPs' personal and partisan data. Descriptively, foxes are common in Germany and dominate in Parliament. The subsequent estimation indicates that policy specialists are related to government status and parliamentary group size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the conditions under which female members of parliament (MPs) are more likely than male MPs to participate in political debates relating to a range of issues. Building on descriptive representation theory and parliamentary behaviour studies, we examine how the effect of the number of women in parliament, and women's access to leadership positions, on MPs' issue attention varies across policy areas and parliamentary venues. Looking at oral questions asked by male and female MPs in plenary sessions and parliamentary committees in Spain from 1982 to 2018, we found that numbers and leadership positions significantly affect female MPs' attention to those parliamentary activities that aim to highlight the merits of government action and in venues that are less open to public scrutiny. Our results also illustrate that the presence of women in parliament and their access to leadership positions have a significant impact on female MPs' attention to rights‐ and welfare‐related issues, but not issues traditionally linked to high‐profile political areas such as national security, macroeconomic policy, and government affairs. The presence of women in parliaments has increased globally, but inequalities in the gender distribution of issue attention persist, thereby reducing the capacity of female MPs to act on behalf of and stand up for women in political debates on most issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about monographic section of the Spanish Journal of Political Science (RECP) is to analyze the mobilization of interest groups during the pandemic generated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19). Topics include interest groups are reinforcing their role as key actors in the process of preparing public policies; and contribute to the political debate by channeling different ways of understanding the problems derived from the pandemic to the public powers.

This article examines the conditions under which interest groups interact with political parties. Existing research finds that interest group–political party interactions in most western democracies have become more open and contingent over time. The close ideological and formal organisational ties that once characterised these relations have gradually been replaced by alternative, more pragmatic forms of cooperation. However, most of this research stresses the importance of the structural factors underpinning these links over time and across countries, but sheds little light on the factors driving short-term interest group–party interactions. Here, by drawing on survey data on Spanish interest groups obtained between December 2016 and May 2017, this article seeks to fill this gap by taking into account party status, issue salience and a group's resources as explanatory variables. It shows that mainstream parties are the primary targets of interest groups, that groups dealing with salient issues are more likely to contact political parties and that the groups with most resources interact with a larger number of parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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