A growing literature has examined how speech making activity in legislative assemblies is affected by the electoral incentives of party leaders and individual legislators; and how parliamentary rules regulating debates are used by party leaders to keep control of legislators. These contributions focus mostly on legislative debates as an arena for understanding intra-party politics. In this paper we focus on the allocation of speaking time for plenary debates on bills, by combining an inter-party perspective with a focus on agenda setting powers of parliamentary parties' chairpersons and other legislative officers. Using Italy (2001-2013) as a case study, we examine the duration of plenary debates on legislation. Our expectation is that the allocation of speaking time for plenary debates on bills will be affected by the divisiveness of bills, as measured in terms of ideological distance among political actors, and the salience of the policy area to which a bill belongs.
