Let's talk about religion: Legislators, their religiosity, and their parliamentary speeches

Drawing on the literature on individual behavior of legislators, legislative studies, and religious representation, this paper aims to assess the influence of legislators' religiosity on their legislative behavior. In their legislative work, legislators must constantly balance the interests of external (party group, constituency, interest groups) and internal (own preferences) principals. According to Burden (2007), their proactive behavior (e.g. parliamentary speeches or (co-)sponsorship of bills and motions) can be influenced by their preferences, which are mainly shaped by four sources: partisan ideology, self-interest, prior knowledge, or information and values. The latter are typically formulated at an early age and can be influenced by religion. Drawing on recent research, I argue that individual religiosity and other personal characteristics play a role in shaping the proactive legislative behavior of legislators, especially in their parliamentary speeches on religious issues. My research design focuses on parliamentary speeches on religious issues in the German Bundestag from 2000 to 2018. Using the Parlspeech dataset (Rauh & Schwalbach 2020) and a dictionary approach, I create a data set containing speeches on religious issues at the level of individual MPs and combine it with individual data from, for example, the comparative legislator database (Göbel & Munzert 2022). Using text-as-data approaches, I analyze the relationship between individual religious affiliation and the legislative behavior of politicians who spoke on these issues and assess how strong this effect is by controlling for partisan ideology, the different roles of MPs in their parliamentary groups and parties, and constituency-related factors.