Economic Performance Indicators and Party Valence Choices in Parliamentary Debates

This study examines how political parties strategically adjust their rhetorical emphasis between valence traits and positional issues in response to exogenous national economic conditions. Building on theories of valence politics and issue competition, it investigates how governing and opposition parties respond to country-specific economic performance indicators through distinct messaging strategies within parliamentary debates. Parliamentary plenary debates constitute a central arena of political accountability, where parties publicly justify policy choices, assign responsibility, and signal competence or failure. While research on economic voting has extensively documented how macroeconomic conditions affect electoral outcomes, much less is known about how these conditions shape rhetorical strategies inside parliaments. In this setting, parties face a strategic trade-off between emphasizing positional policy arguments and deploying valence rhetoric centered on competence, credibility, and blame. Economic performance alters this trade-off by shaping incentives for credit-claiming and accountability: favorable conditions may incentivize governing parties to stress valence traits, while oppositions emphasize positional economic issues; conversely, adverse conditions may encourage valence-based attacks that portray governments as incompetent, while incumbents shift toward policy defense. Empirically, the study combines macroeconomic indicators with a cross-national corpus of parliamentary debates (ParlLawSpeech) and addresses a core measurement challenge: distinguishing valence rhetoric from substantive policy argumentation in long and technical legislative speeches. To identify economy-related interventions, large language models are first used for topic-specific filtering. Subsequently, adapter-based transformer classifiers are fine-tuned to classify speeches as valence-oriented or positional. Preliminary analyses suggest that governments and oppositions respond asymmetrically to economic conditions, with oppositions increasing valence-based rhetoric during downturns, while incumbents rely more heavily on positional arguments when performance improves. By linking exogenous national economic indicators with party rhetoric, this study not only advances our understanding of strategic issue emphasis and political responsiveness, but also showcases the potential of adapter-based transformers for nuanced content classification in political text analysis.