Do Actions Speak Louder than Words? Legislative Behavior in Speeches and Votes

Extant scholarship demonstrates that a government-opposition dimension accounts for the policy positions of Brazilian political parties, whether one estimates this latent variable from roll calls (Figueiredo and Limongi, 1999; Zucco, 2009) or from legislative speeches (Izumi and Medeiros, 2021). Moreover, at the aggregate level, there is a high and positive correlation between both measures. However, preliminary data suggest that while this congruence is observed at the aggregate (partisan) level, it vanishes at the individual (legislator) level. The goal of this paper, then, is to assess this dissonance. Why aren’t legislator’s policy positions retrieved from legislative voting congruent to these estimated based on speeches in Congress? We argue that this incongruency stems from the fact that legislators speak almost freely, but are whipped to toe the party line when voting. Party leaders have fewer incentives to coerce their co-partisans’ behavior in speeches than in roll calls because the earlier stages of the legislative process tend to be innocuous to policy outcomes. Moreover, legislative debates are used by representatives to justify publicly the compromises they made (Martin and Vanberg, 2008). Finally, the policy agendas of speeches and roll calls are not necessarily the same – many issues are debated, but few come to a vote on the floor. To test these expectations, this study estimates Brazilian legislators’ policy positions relying on roll calls and speeches. Leveraging on the growing literature on text-as-data analysis, we aim to advance the knowledge of political institutions and legislative behavior at the individual level. By combining a new frontier of legislative studies (speechmaking) with a traditional approach (voting), our contribution is intended to travel beyond the Brazilian case.