IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/stpchp/978-0-387-89672-4_11.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Speeches and Legislative Extremism in the U.S. Senate

In: Do They Walk Like They Talk?

Author

Listed:
  • Jean François Godbout

    (Simon Fraser University
    Duke University)

  • Bei Yu

    (Northwestern University)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Jean François Godbout & Bei Yu, 2009. "Speeches and Legislative Extremism in the U.S. Senate," Studies in Public Choice, in: Louis M. Imbeau (ed.), Do They Walk Like They Talk?, chapter 0, pages 185-205, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:stpchp:978-0-387-89672-4_11
    DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-89672-4_11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:stpchp:978-0-387-89672-4_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.