Timing Diversity: The Time-variant Logic of Parliamentary Debate

In most European parliaments bargaining, deliberation and policy formulation are virtually fully removed from plenary meetings and individual contributions in debates primarily serve to present, explain or criticize partisan positions to the public. Yet, MPs want to stand behind the lectern and compete for scarce speaking time. Drawing on recent models of party cohesion in legislative speech, we find that these models have strong temporal implications: The externalities of disunity should vary in their severity across the legislative term. In particular, we expect that for non-prominent MPs the likelihood of giving speeches is smallest at the end of a term. To evaluate our expectations we make use of a novel dataset covering more than 2,000 MPs and 30,000 debates from seven national parliaments. First results indicate that the timing of plenary debates has an effect on MPs’ chances to speak which is mediated by individual MP characteristics and parliamentary context.