Rules and Speeches: How Parliamentary Rules Affect Legislators' Speech‐Making Behavior

• Date: 01 August 2016
• Author: Andrea Pedrazzani,Daniela Giannetti
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12130

DANIELA GIANNETTI

ANDREA PEDRAZZANI

University of Bologna

Rules and Speeches: How

Parliamentary Rules Affect

Legislators’ Speech-Making

Behavior

By extending existing theories of legislative speech making, this study explores

the importance of parliamentary rules governing floor debates for government and

opposition parties. An original data set including speeches of members of the Italian

Chamber of Deputies between 2001 and 2006 is used to test two hypotheses under

different institutional scenarios, that is, rules either restricting or granting open access to

the floor. Parliamentary rules are found to affect allocation of speaking time within both

governing and opposition parties. Governing parties’ leaders exploit their agenda control

to a higher degree when allocating speaking time. Under restrictive rules, government

party leaders control their MPs by essentially limiting the number of speeches and allo-

cating them to frontbenchers. Restrictive rules give opposition party leaders an

important chance to select MPs who are closer to their own position.

Research about legislative assemblies shows a connection between

legislative behavior and the incentives created by electoral systems.

Undoubtedly, both ballot structure (Carey 2007; Carey and Shugart

1995; Hix 2004) and candidate selection mechanisms (Gallagher and

Marsh 1988; Rahat and Hazan 2001) may signif‌icantly affect the way in

which parties interact, as well as legislators’ propensity to behave in a

coordinated fashion with other members of their own party. Neverthe-

less, as mixed results in the legislative studies literature reveal (Carey

2007; Depauw and Martin 2009; Hix 2004), how politicians are elected

and selected does not seem to fully account for their behavior in the

legislature. This article shows that the type of legislative rules adopted

and their use by party leaders play an important role in explaining how

representatives act on the parliamentary f‌loor.

This is because legislative behavior is shaped by a second impor-

tant set of incentives related to payoffs arising within the legislature, that

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 3, August 2016 771

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12130

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C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

is, off‌ices endowed with special agenda-setting powers: speakers, chairs,

and committee members at the legislative level; and presidents, premiers,

and senior and junior ministers at the executive level. The powers

assigned to these special off‌ices include the choice of voting procedures,

the appointment of legislative posts, and the allocation of scarce speak-

ing time. Party leaders f‌ill these positions in a way that enhances the

enactment of parties’ policy goals—which in turn feeds back to enhanc-

ing the electoral value of the party label (Cox 2006). Martin (2014) has

recently demonstrated that party-centered rules for allocating legislative

off‌ices (and promoting legislators to executive off‌ices) counterbalance

the effects of candidate-centered electoral systems such as Ireland’s

single transferable vote, thus granting party unity in parliament.

Indeed, in parliamentary systems where government survival cru-

cially depends on retaining the conf‌idence of the legislature, party

leaders have big incentives to maintain party unity. Party discipline mat-

ters for government parties, as they aim at keeping f‌irm control over the

government, as well as for opposition parties, as they want to challenge

successfully the incumbent government (Giannetti and Laver 2009). For

both governing and opposition parties, incentives for maintaining party

unity are not purely associated with the protection of the party label, that

is, they do not depend entirely on electoral considerations. Without con-

trolling a disciplined bloc of legislators, opposition party leaders cannot

pose any credible threat to the stability of the government’s supporting

coalition. Party discipline is even more valuable for leaders of governing

parties, who can secure the support of a legislative majority and the

enactment of the government’s electoral program only if they rely on the

loyalty of parliamentary parties’ members.

These considerations suggest that to fully understand legislative

behavior we need to analyze how parliamentary rules are used by party

leaders to keep control of legislators. In this article, the focus will be on

rules governing speech making. Despite recent contributions (Proksch

and Slapin 2012; Rasch 2011), this is a relatively understudied topic in

comparison to other subf‌ields of comparative political research such as

the study of voting rules. What is the impact of different parliamentary

institutions regulating debates on individual speech-making behavior?

Do party leaders make use of these rules to enforce party discipline dur-

ing plenary debates? Our work attempts to answering these questions by

exploring the role of legislative rules in shaping individual behavior and

by showing how different rules are used by party leaders to manage

intraparty conf‌licts in the legislative arena.

We selected Italian Legislature XIV (2001–2006) as a case study

because, starting with this legislature, Italy adopted different rules for

772 Daniela Giannetti and Andrea Pedrazzani