The paper aims at presenting a theoretical framework for speechmaking that takes into account a diverse set of incentives for delivering speeches in parliament. In contrast to standard models of legislative speechmaking, our theoretical account is based on three decisive features that may impact speech making in parliaments: these features include a) personal characteristics of MPs like their gender, education, professional background and political experience b) party specific features like organizational structures and ideological background, and c) system based features like the structure of the party system and electoral incentives. We test our expectations on a dataset that covers information on the number of speeches delivered by individual MPs in the parliaments of nine European countries that vary in their institutional structure and in the patterns of party system, party competition, government formation and coalition governance.
