Party Strategies, Constituency Links, and Legislative Speech

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12174
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Author: Margarita M. Ramírez,Jonathan B. Slapin,Eduardo Alemán
• Date: 01 November 2017

EDUARDO ALEM

AN

MARGARITA M. RAM

IREZ

University of Houston

JONATHAN B. SLAPIN

University of Essex

Party Strategies, Constituency

Links, and Legislative Speech

This article examines how parties organize legislative speech. Electoral incentives

and legislative institutions affect speech participation. When electoral systems create

personal vote-seeking incentives, parties are less concerned with screening speeches and

more supportive of members seeking to garner name recognition. But in many countries,

legislative rules and norms constrain opportunities for individual position taking during

the lawmaking debates. We argue that parties resolve this dilemma by organizing speech

participation into nonlegislative speeches and lawmaking debates. In each instance, dif-

ferent types of legislators are more likely to speak. We examine the case of Chile and

test the implications of our theory with data on congressional speeches.

Parties face a perennial challenge—How can leaders exercise suf-

f‌icient control over their members in Congress to build and maintain

the party’s ideological identity, while still providing legislators with

opportunities to establish a connection with constituents? On the one

hand, if parties give backbenchers free reign, these backbenchers may

express positions at odds with the party line, muddying the ideological

waters and doing harm to the party’s image. On the other hand, back-

benchers likely bolster their re-election chances by developing a

unique political identity and honing their constituency connection.

Moreover, parties clearly benef‌it when their members are good at

attracting votes.

This tension between establishing party loyalty and allowing for

some dissent exists in democracies across Latin America (Carey 2007,

2009), as well as in the United States (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1993;

Lindstadt and Vander Wielen 2011), Europe (e.g., Hix 2002; Lindst€

adt,

Slapin, and Vander Wielen 2011; Proksch and Slapin 2012), and else-

where (Kam 2009). However, the nature and extent of the tension

between partisan control and legislator freedom varies with electoral

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 4, November 2017 637

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12174

V

C2017 Washington University in St. Louis

incentives and institutions (e.g., Carey and Shugart 1995; Chang and

Golden 2007). Typically, scholars explore the manifestation of these ten-

sions by examining levels of party unity on roll-call votes (Carey 2009;

Morgenstern 2004). But roll-call votes can only tell part of the story.

They are subject to selection effects (Carrubba, Gabel, and Hug 2008)

and a very high degree of partisan control (Depauw and Martin 2009).

Recently, scholars have turned to other sources of data to examine the

effects of electoral incentives on intraparty dissent and representation,

including bill cosponsorship (Alem

an and Calvo 2013; Crisp, Kanthak,

and Leijonhufvud 2004; Kirkland 2012), press releases (Grimmer 2013),

and legislative debate participation (Proksch and Slapin 2012, 2015).

In this article, we present new data on legislative debate in Chile,

which we use to explain how parties organize the legislative agenda to

provide individuals with an opportunity to connect with constituents,

while still maintaining a coherent party message. Parties in Chile have

set aside time at the end of most legislative sessions for speeches unre-

lated to bills—the Hora de Incidentes (Incidents Hour)—during which

members can give speeches that may help them establish an electoral

connection with their constituents. While the parliamentary rules of pro-

cedure allow parties to strictly control access to the f‌loor at this time, we

f‌ind that parties do not prevent their members from speaking. Instead,

they create opportunities for their more rebellious and marginal members

to use nonideological speeches to connect with voters. Moreover, we

f‌ind that members who use this opportunity tend to fare better at the

polls.

Rules differ for debates on bills during the Orden del Dia (Order

of the Day). During these debates, the rules give all members the right to

speak. But rather than equal participation among all members, we f‌ind

that more experienced legislators, those with more inf‌luential committee

positions, and those from the governing parties participate more often in

lawmaking debates. The results suggest that parties use both formal rules

and informal norms (albeit in unexpected ways) to control which of their

members gain access to the f‌loor at different times. Formal rules during

the Hora de Incidentes ensure that parties can get f‌loor time for members

seeking to bolster their individual legislative prof‌ile among constituents.

And while technically parties cannot control who speaks during the

Orden del Dia, they appear to have developed norms that result in

experienced, senior members taking the f‌loor at this time.

Our f‌indings contribute to a growing literature on legislative

behavior in the US Congress (e.g., Grimmer 2013), European parliamen-

tary democracies (Martin and Vanberg 2008; Proksch and Slapin 2012),

and Latin American presidential systems (Crisp and Desposato 2004;

638 Eduardo Alem

an, Margarita M. Ram



ırez, and Jonathan B. Slapin