Applied Economics Lunch Seminar

Du 23/05/2023 de 12:30 à 13:30

Salle R2.01, Campus jourdan

NEDREGARD Oda (BI Norwegian Business School)

Speech is Silver, Silence is Gold: Trade-offs between local and collective representation

How does strong party discipline affect MPs’ willingness to represent local interests during times of distress? This paper uses parliamentary speech from Norway together with unique data on parliamentary attendance and politicians’ travels to study how local economic hardship, proxied by unemployment, shapes legislators’ representational efforts in national parliament. Contrary to what one would expect, I find that MPs deliver significantly fewer speeches and talk less about unemployment during economic downturns. Using word embeddings together with recently developed methods to identify choices in high-dimensional data, I show that, conditional on speaking, MPs tend to deviate more in floor speeches when their districts are in distress. Such deviations are favoured by local voters, but penalized financially by the party. These results demonstrate how it can be rational for party elites in well-functioning democracies to restrict MPs from representing local interests because they want to prevent deviations from the party line from compromising the party brand.