The Unequal Distribution of Speaking Time in Parliamentary‐Party Groups

• Published date: 01 February 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12222
• Author: Jochen Müller,Marc Debus,Markus Baumann,Hanna Bäck
• Date: 01 February 2019

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 44, 1, February 2019

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12222

HA NNA BÄCK

Lund University

MARKUS BAUMANN

Heidelberg University

MA RC DEBUS

University of Mannheim

JOCHEN MÜLLER

University of Greifswald

The Unequal Distribution of Speaking

Time in Parliamentary-Party Groups

Parliamentary debates provide an arena where Members of Parliament

(MPs) present, challenge, or defend public policies. However, the “plenary bottle-

neck” allows the party leadership to decide who participates in a debate. We argue

that in this decision the timing of a debate matters: in proximity of elections, the

leadership should be concerned with maintaining its brand name and therefore

restrict floor access, in particular if the debate is salient for the respective party.

We evaluate our hypotheses in a cross-country study drawing on a novel data set

covering all speeches given during one or two legislative terms in six European

parliaments. We find that the electoral cycle matters for the distribution of speak-

ing time: Party leaders do restrict parliamentary speechmaking to a smaller num-

ber of MPs at the end of the term. This has important implications for our un-

derstanding of parliaments as an electoral arena and for our understanding of

intraparty politics.

Speaking in p arliament is the quintessentia l and most widely

recognized activity of individual parliamentarians. Debates pro-

vide an arena where Members of Parliament (MPs) and parties

can present, question, or defend political ideas and public poli-

cies. However, in many cases there is likely to be an antagonism

between indiv idual MPs’ preferences and the atte mpts of the party

leadership to com municate coherent messages to th e voters. Only

a limited number of comparative studies on intraparty conflict

and cohesion look at the allocation of speaking ti me and, thus, at

the access to the parliamentary floor (e.g., Bäck and Debus 2016;

Proksch and Slapin 2014). These studies mostly emphasize incen-

tives created by the ele ctoral system (see, e.g., Proksch and Slapin

© 2018 Washing ton University in St. Louis

164 Bäck et al.

2012). In first-past-the-post systems, for instanc e, MPs with more

extreme views are able to pre sent these in debates while the party

leadership might prevent them from taking the floor in propor-

tional representation (PR) systems. We build on this argument

and assess the logic behind the intraparty selection of speakers

by analyzing the distribution of speaking time in parliamentary

debates.

We start from the idea that electoral considerations matter

when it comes to the allocation of speaking time. If disunity is

harmful, the party leadership should be particularly concerned

about its party’s brand name under two circumstances: first, in

the build-up to elections—that is, during election campaigns.

Second, in issue areas that are of key interest for its core voter

clientele and are decisive for the party’s brand recognition. We

hypothesize that parliamentary speaking time will be more con-

centrated, that is, parties allocate floor access to a smaller set of

MPs, at the end of the electoral c ycle. For salient issues, t he party

leadership faces a trade-off since it may be important to show a

cohesive profile in particular on such “core issues,” so that the

speaking time in parliament is more concentrated on fewer MPs

the more salient the topic of a debate is for the respective party.

In this article, we provide an empirical analysis that com-

pares the concentration of speaking time across political parties

and over time in several European parliaments: the Estonian

Riigikogu, the Finnish Edusku nta, the German Bundestag, the

Irish Daíl, the Norwegian Storting, and the Swedish Riksdag. We

draw on a novel data set covering all speeches given during one

(or in one case, two) legislative term(s) in these six parliaments

(Bäck and Debus 2016; Baumann, Debus, and Müller 2015) and

introduce Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients as tools for evalu-

ating legislative behavior.

We find that the electoral cycle matters for the concentra-

tion of speechmaking in the parliaments under study: fewer MPs

give more speeches in the months before elections. We argue that

this implie s that the parliamentary-part y group leadership selects

speakers on the grounds of electoral considerations, lending sup-

port to recent the oretical contributions that emphasize i ncentives

to control legislative debates. With respect to the issue areas, we

find that parliamentary-party group leaders do not curtail f loor

access on issues that are of particular relevance for the parties

according to their election manifestos. Both findings have im-

plications for research concerned with intraparty politics and