Rules and Speeches: Do Legislative Rules Affect the Content of MPs’ Speeches?

Debates in legislatures are receiving increasing attention among political scientists. A strand of the literature uses legislative speeches to estimate policy positions of parties and legislators (Laver, Benoit and Garry 2003; Slapin and Proksch 2008), while others take legislative speeches as a dependent variable by investigating the allocation of speaking time among parties and among legislators. Whereas several studies have focused on the US Congress, Martin and Vanberg (2008) emphasize the impact of intra-coalitional dynamics on speech-giving behaviour in parliamentary systems. More recently, Proksch and Slapin (2012) propose a model of parliamentary speech-making, where the allocation of speaking time depends both on electoral rules and intra-party politics. Within this research program two aspects have received less attention. First, the role of parliamentary rules governing debates has not been investigated, while some debates may be subject to fewer institutional constraints than others, and this in turn may have consequences on whom is allowed to speak on the floor. Second, the content of speeches has not been analysed, as restrictive rules might constrain not only the choice of the speaker, but also the content of the speeches that are delivered on the floor. If debates take place under permissive rules, we hypothesise that those who are allowed to speak will be freer to deviate from the party line. In this paper, we will use original data from legislative speeches delivered in the Italian Lower Chamber in order to evaluate the impact of different kinds of rules on both the choice of speech makers and on the content of the speeches delivered. Data for this study will be derived from three sources: legislator characteristics, legislative rules employed during specific chamber sessions when speeches were delivered and the content of speeches coded using computer based content analysis.