Why do Legislators COF? Congressional Open Forum Speeches and Electoral Incentives in Presidential America

This dissertation studies legislative behavior under open speech forums on the congress floor. Recent scholarship has found that under collective vote-gathering incentives, party leaders are more likely to give speeches, screen who speaks, and delegate less often to backbenchers. On the other hand, under personal incentives, leaders are more likely to give vulnerable legislators and ideologically extreme legislators opportunities to strengthen their links with their constituencies. Even more recent findings, however, complicate this neat categorization. Evidence shows differences between the types of legislators who speak during bill debates and those who speak during non-lawmaking venues, and different categories within. In this dissertation, I present evidence suggesting that electoral incentives do not shape lawmakers’ behavior in non-lawmaking venues during the legislative session. I argue that in less visible venues that allow legislators to speak on the topics of their choice, legislators who are in electorally and institutionally disadvantageous positions are more likely to deliver a speech under scenarios that promote collective incentives. I analyze which members of congress deliver non-lawmaking speeches under the electoral incentives of differing nations: Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama, and Chile. This dissertation uses a novel dataset created by collecting and coding these speeches for each country, except Chile. The results suggest that legislative incentives do not drive the behavior of legislators in congressional open forums. In addition, it also suggests that there is no clear, specific institutional and electoral trait affecting the legislators’ probability of giving a speech during these venues.