The Effect of Parliamentary Activity on the Media Visibility of Politicians in the UK and Norway

A large body of scholarly inquiry in the study of legislative behavior has built on the assumption that engagement in parliamentary activities in legislatures helps further representatives’ career prospects by enhancing their media and public visibility. While this assertion has found some empirical support, results still vary considerably across political settings and research designs. Moreover, there is little research on the conditionality of the visibility-boosting effect of legislative speechmaking. We believe these gaps restrict our understanding of both the consequences of, as well as the motivations behind, legislative behavior. This study therefore presents a unique combination of data covering nearly 600,000 news appearances and 850,000 parliamentary speeches of MPs in the UK and Norway over more than 15 years to examine the link between parliamentary speechmaking and the news visibility of legislators. Our results suggest that the effect of speeches on media visibility is surprisingly similar across systems but differential across representatives, with senior MPs and government party MPs benefiting more from legislative speechmaking. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for legislative politics and political communication in representative democracies.