Abstract
The following chapter investigates the relationship between legislative activity and legislative speech in the U.S. Senate between the 101st and 108th Congress. The analysis measures the link between the quantity of speech used on the floor by particular senators and their individual level of legislative productivity. This chapter focuses on the number of bills introduced and cosponsored by senators. Controls for party affiliation, majority status, ideology, and proximity to an election were also added to determine whether certain context specific factors have an impact on the amount of floor speeches. The analysis demonstrates that the existence of a relationship between speech and action in the policy processes. However, this relationship is mitigated by ideology (liberals speak more) and by the distribution of partisanship in the Senate (senators in the minority obstruct more). The analysis also indicates that in later congresses, more conservative senators began to behave just like their liberal counterpart. The previous findings seem to indicate that the recent increase in roll call polarization in the U.S. Congress is also present in legislative debates and proceedings.
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- 1.
For example, in the highly polarized 104th Congress, the Republican majority filed 82 cloture motions between January 1995 and October 1996, whereas in the first session of the 110th Congress alone, the Democratic minority filed 80 cloture motions.
- 2.
An example of a processed text can be found in the online Appendix. This process is the same used by Diermeier et al. (2007).
- 3.
A typical word file for a senator in a specific Congress contains all the words that he or she has spoken on the floor. These words can be adjectives, nouns, verbs, etc. The automated cleaning process that was used is not 100% reliable, but any errors, such as the inclusion of an article not read on the floor but included in the Daily Records, is assumed to have been distributed randomly in the data.
- 4.
Word count is not a measure as precise as syllable count which is generally preferred by linguists to assess speech rates. The dependent variable in our analysis (number of words spoken in one Congress by individual Senators) was replaced by the total number of bytes associated with a Senator’s speech record in one Congress (which theoretically should account for longer words or different word length). Our conclusions were not affected by this change. We basically obtained the same statistically significant relationship between our variables.
- 5.
This number is based on the number of days in session between 101st and 108th Congresses.
- 6.
Pimsleur et al. (1977) give the average speech rate to be between 130 and 220 words per minute in the English language. Thus, assuming that Senator Harry Reid speaks 220 words per minute, he would have spoken non-stop for 54 hours in the 108th Congress. This number seems plausible since Reid was both a committee ranking member and introduced 108 bills in this Congress. The Senate met for 300 days or a total of 2,485 hours in the 108th Congress. In other words, Reid spoke for about 2% of that time.
- 7.
We note here that Hank Brown served the full term.
- 8.
This assumption makes sense unless someone believes that liberals (or Democrats) speak faster than conservatives (Republicans).
- 9.
In our dataset, the variance of words spoken is 14,932,333,234, which is 7,000 greater than the mean. Because our dependant variable is count data, it follows the negative binomial distribution. The negative binomial distribution has a variance which is larger than the mean. In contrast, the Poisson distribution has a variance which is equal to the mean.
- 10.
Between the 101st and 103rd Congress, the Republicans were in the minority. Between the 104th and 105th Congress, the Democrats were in the minority. In the 107th Congress, the Republicans are assumed to be in the minority. The Republicans controlled the 107th Congress from January 20th to June 6th 2000, until Senator James Jeffords switched party. The remaining Congress was controlled by the Democrats until the end in January 2003. In he 108th Congress, the Democrats are in the minority.
- 11.
The analysis does not include a measure of electoral vulnerability since Senators compete in elections every six years. The influence of electoral vulnerability is therefore hard to determine.
- 12.
S.3065. A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to expand the Hope Scholarship Credit for expenses of individuals receiving certain State scholarships.
- 13.
The Incidence Rate Ratios are not shown in the tables.
- 14.
It is important to note here that the substantive effect of this interactive variable explains why the NOMINATE variable is insignificant, and why the Democratic Party variable has a negative impact on the number of words spoken by the senator.
- 15.
Available at http://www.sfu.ca/∼jga16
- 16.
The actual number of filibusters: 108th – 49; 107th – 58; 106th – 58; 105th – 53; 104th – 48; 103rd – 40; 102nd – 47; 101st – 24. Source from http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/18218.html accessed 2/10/08.
- 17.
Source from Margaret Talev, McClatchy Newspapers http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/18218.html accessed 2/10/08.
- 18.
For example, Rick Santorum organized in the 108th Congress a 39-hour debate on four federal judge nominations, attempting unsuccessfully to overcome a Democratic Filibuster. Quinn et al.’s (2006) data shows that 87 speeches were made and that over 230,000 words were spoken on that topic in one day.
- 19.
This is clearly above the average for the 101st–108th Congress of 47 filibusters for two legislative sessions.
- 20.
The polarization in legislative behavior is a well documented fact in recent Congresses; see Poole and Rosenthal (1997, 2007).
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Daniel Diermeier and the Ford Motor Company Center for Global Citizenship for allowing us to use the data on senatorial speech. All errors are the authors’ responsibility.
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Godbout, J.F., Yu, B. (2009). Speeches and Legislative Extremism in the U.S. Senate. In: Imbeau, L. (eds) Do They Walk Like They Talk?. Studies in Public Choice, vol 15. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89672-4_11
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