Speaking Up to Stay in Parliament: The Electoral Importance of Speeches and Other Parliamentary Activities

In flexible-list proportional representation systems, where voters have the option to cast candidate preference votes, the parties have much control over which candidates win seats. The influence of both party ballot rankings and preference votes, begs the question of whether more active legislators who run for re-election are rewarded by voters on Election Day. We test this question by analysing the effects of different types of parliamentary activities on preference votes for four legislative terms of the Czech Chamber of Deputies. Our study differs from most of the previous literature which typically focuses on a single parliamentary term or compares single parliamentary terms across countries. While the relationships between some activities and preference votes vary across the legislative periods in the Czech Republic, we observe consistency in the positive relationship between frequency of speaking in parliament and preference vote shares. The more sessions legislators speak in, the higher their share of preference votes in the following election.

Mary Stegmaier, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. Her research concentrates on elections and voting behavior in the U.S. and Europe and has been published in a variety of political science journals including East European Politics & Societies, Electoral Studies, Political Behavior, Public Choice, and the Annual Review of Political Science.  Her research on Czech politics has focused on how the Czech electoral system and preference voting rules impact gender representation in parliament, parliamentary party unity, and how voters make their voting choices. In addition to publishing in peer-reviewed journals, her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Brookings Institution Blog, the Democratic Audit, and the London School of Economics US Politics Blog.  Dr. Stegmaier has also served as an international election observer with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Macedonia, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan.