ABSTRACT
This chapter explores committee systems in Portugal and Spain. For all their importance in legislative organization, Iberian committees remain overlooked in the literature. Herein, following a discussion of significant theories of committee organization in parliamentary democracies, we focus on several key empirical indicators on structure, procedures and powers that enable us to compare how committees operate in the two countries. Subsequently, we explore the historical development of committees since democratization in the 1970s. Finally, we present empirical data on committees and compare how they operate in Portugal and Spain.
