Agenda-Setting in Parliamentary Speeches: A computer based content analysis of legislative debates in the Austrian Nationalrat

Parliamentary speeches are an important communication channel for political parties. A growing amount of literature suggests that parties use them to send policy signals and perform agenda-setting. Although this perspective has become more popular in the literature, there is a lack of empirical studies to verify it. This paper takes a step towards closing this research gap. Theoretically, it focuses on the institutional context of parliamentary speeches. Empirically, the paper uses a novel approach by classifying parliamentary speeches in the Austrian Nationalrat (2002-2019) at sentence level. The results show that issue communication in parliamentary speeches is strongly influenced by the institutional context leading to similar issue agendas for all parties. However, differences stemming from party issue preferences can be observed. Hence, the parliamentary context limits agenda-setting by parties in parliamentary speeches, but leaves them with some room for manoeuvre.