No abstract

(MPs) dedicate a significant amount of their time to preparing speeches and participating in legislative debates. Yet, political scientists know surprisingly little about the role of political parties in debate, the institutions that govern access to the floor, and the strategic nature of the messages legislators try to convey. We put forward a comparative institutional theory of legislative debate in which we view speeches as the result of strategic choices made by party leaders and backbenchers. As a consequence of this strategic interaction, observed floor speeches may not reflect the true distribution of preferences within a party group. Party leaders must decide whether and to whom to delegate floor time. They have an incentive to present voters with a coherent party message, but some MPs may prefer to give a speech at odds with their party leadership, especially if doing so might help their own reelection bid. These strategic cal- The authors are listed alphabetically. Both authors have contributed equally to all work. We thank Kira Killermann, Linh Nguyen, and Sander Ensink for excellent research assistance and Serra Boranbay, Thomas Bräuninger, Thomas Gschwend, Christopher Kam, Thomas König, Elisabeth Schulte, Georg Vanberg, Jonathan Woon, and seminar participants at the University of Mannheim, Rice University, EITM Europe, and the DVPW Working Group on Behavioral Decision Making for helpful comments and suggestions. We especially thank Thomas Gschwend, Hermann Schmitt, Andreas Wüst, and Thomas Zittel for sharing the German candidate survey data. Sven-Oliver Proksch acknowledges that the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007(FP7/ -2013 under grant agreement number 239268 (Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant).culations can lead to substantial selection effects in the choice of speaker and the content of the speech.This study proceeds by introducing our comparative theory of legislative debate and by discussing the empirical implications of our model for a variety of political systems. In scenarios where party unity matters for running successful election campaigns, party leaders should be reluctant to delegate speaking time to ideologically extreme members. Instead, as a party becomes ideologically more polarized, party leaders are likely to give more speeches representing the party line and delegate less often to members. In political systems where party unity matters less, but developing a personal reputation in parliament is essential for reelection, parties develop rules that make it easier for members of parliament with dissident views to take the floor. As a result, partisan rules governing legislative debate are endogenous to electoral considerations.We test the most important implications of the model using newly collected legislative speech data from two

This article examines how national parties and their members position themselves in European Parliament (EP) debates, estimating the principal latent dimension of spoken conflict using word counts from legislative speeches. We then examine whether the estimated ideal points reflect partisan conflict on a left–right, European integration or national politics dimension. Using independent measures of national party positions on these three dimensions, we find that the corpus of EP speeches reflects partisan divisions over EU integration and national divisions rather than left–right politics. These results are robust to both the choice of language used to scale the speeches and to a range of statistical models that account for measurement error of the independent variables and the hierarchical structure of the data.

Delegation in the European Union (EU) involves a series of principal‐agent problems, and the various chains of delegation involve voters, parties, parliaments, governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament. While the literature has focused on how government parties attempt to monitor EU affairs through committees in national parliaments and through Council committees at the EU level, much less is known about the strategies opposition parties use to reduce informational deficits regarding European issues. This article argues that the European Parliament (EP) offers opposition parties an arena to pursue executive oversight through the use of written parliamentary questions. Using a novel dataset on parliamentary questions in the EP, this article examines why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) ask questions of specific Commissioners. It transpires that MEPs from national opposition parties are more likely to ask questions of Commissioners. Questions provide these parties with inexpensive access to executive scrutiny. This finding has implications for the study of parliamentary delegation and party politics inside federal legislatures such as the EP.

Legislative speeches are an important part of parliamentary activity in the European Parliament (EP). Using a new dataset on EP speeches, this paper offers an explanation for participation in legislative debates. We argue that floor speeches partially serve as a communication tool between members of parliament, their national parties, and their European political groups. EP group dissidents often go on record by taking the floor when there is a conflict between their national party and their European political group. In this instance, members give speeches for two reasons: to explain their national party's position to other members of their EP political group, and to create a positive record for themselves in the eyes of the national party to serve their own reelection purposes.