Practice makes ‘perfect’? The effect of committee specialization on the complexity of parliamentary speeches

Abstract

The complexity of parliamentary speeches is usually interpreted as an MP’s electoral strategy. We take the prism of parliamentary specialization and connect it to the use of issue-specific jargon learned during parliamentary work. We expect that membership in a parliamentary committee and increased experience within it increases the complexity of an MP’s speech about committee-related issues, and that the effect of the work in the committee is stronger for MPs without a previous committee-related professional background. We test our expectations on almost 54,000 speeches in the Czech Chamber of Deputies (2006–2021), using the Flesch Reading Ease formula adapted for the Czech language. The novel dataset connects parliamentary speeches to personal information about the MPs and to responsible committees. The results show the expected effect of committee membership and committee experience, and the interaction effect of a professional background.