Parliamentary party groups comprise of MPs with diverse preferences and different personal issue emphases. At the same time, speaking in plenary debates is a scarce resource. Thus, the recent literature has asked which mechanisms are at work when party leaders select speakers from a potentially larger group of MPs. The present paper asks what determines whether MPs get to speak on issues they care most about. The paper measures the issue emphasis that MPs devote to a set of issues in their plenary speeches and compares these emphases to those that can be derived from open access parliamentary activities that MPs engage in. Drawing on a novel data set, including all speeches held during the 17th German Bundestag combined with data on the co-sponsorship behavior and the individual characteristics of MPs enables identifying which factors affect to what degree MPs can give parliamentary speeches according to their personal issue preferences.
