Coalitions and the Allocation of Speaking Time in Legislatures

In coalition governments, participating parties must bargain over the distribution of power in various forms. In the cabinet, this bargain involves portfolio allocation, and norms of proportionality (Gamson’s Law) are widespread and generally inflexible for the duration of the government. We focus instead on the allocation of speaking time in legislatures and its relationship to parties’ electoral incentives. Unlike portfolios, speaking time is adjustable over time and across committees and debates. We argue that a Gamsonian rule (with a small-party bias) will also govern speaking time within coalitions. However, a junior partner may negotiate ad hoc increases in speaking time when it wants to signal policy achievements or disputes to its followers, or when opinion polls suggest that its senior partner is unpopular heading into elections. We test and confirm our theoretical predictions with comparative data on legislative speeches in 17 parliamentary democracies and extensive committee-level speech data from Japan.