Speeches vs. Votes: Text Analysis Uncovers Bigger Swiss Party Preferences

Estimating preferences within legislative parties is tricky.

💡 Key Question: Do speeches or votes better capture these differences?

We compared text-based scaling of ideal points with vote-based scaling in the Swiss legislature. Legislators speak more freely on most bills than they vote, making speech analysis less constrained by party discipline.

Our findings: Text scalings reveal greater intra-party disagreement than roll call data does.

Using regression models, we explained these differences as reflecting constituency-level preferences for energy policy.