Acceso usuarios
Michael Imre, Alejandro Ecker
Parliamentary speech is an important and highly visible feature of legislatures indemocracies. Time in parliament is scarce and the allocation of floor time ischaracterised by largely incompatible preferences between party leaders,aiming to preserve a unified party label, and individual members ofparliament (MPs), facing incentives to differentiate themselves and takealternative stances to maximise their personal reelection prospects. Thispaper investigates the role of MP policy positions in the allocation ofparliamentary speeches in different institutional settings. Measuring positionsusing a novel dataset containing tweets by MPs in three European countries,we find that MPs with positions diverging from the party line get allocatedless time on the parliamentary floor when floor time is exclusively controlledby parties, but not when parliamentary rules allow individual access to the floor.
