Coalitions and the Allocation of Speaking Time in Legislatures

• In Event: Policy Preferences, Conflict, and Legislative Speech

Abstract

Many parliamentary democracies are governed by coalitions of two or more parties with distinct policy goals and electoral interests. For such coalition governments to function smoothly in office, all parties involved typically agree to a set of principles or rules for managing the coalition, both in the cabinet and in the legislature. In the cabinet, these principles often concern the allocation of cabinet posts, and norms of proportionality are widespread and generally inflexible for the duration of coalition governance. We focus on the politics behind the allocation of speaking time in legislatures and its relation to parties’ policy-seeking and vote-seeking goals. Unlike cabinet posts, speaking time is adjustable over time and across legislative committees and debates. When two coalition partners are of asymmetric size, we argue that deviations from a norm of proportionality in speaking time can occur when the junior coalition partner wants to signal policy salience or disagreement to its constituents, or when public opinion polls suggest that the larger coalition partner is electorally vulnerable. We test our theoretical predictions with extensive committee-level data on all legislative speeches in Japan from 2000 to the present.

Authors

• Max Goplerud, University of Pittsburgh

• Daniel M. Smith, Columbia University