Government-Opposition Dynamics in Legislative Speeches in Latin America

Legislative representatives are central figures of democratic systems. Their behavior has a decisive influence on policy outputs and thus on the entire political process. In turn, the behavior of individual MPs is significantly shaped by the institutional context, which differs significantly between presidential and parliamentary systems. Comparative analyses, however, largely focus on parliamentary systems and case studies often study the US system. We argue that especially government-opposition dynamics do not travel to Latin American presidential systems due to the differences in legislative-vs-executive relationships. We hypothesize that MPs from governing parties will be less united in parliamentary debate and less coordinated with the executive in presidential systems. We also expect MPs from governing parties to be more critical to the executive in presidential systems, since there is no principal-agent link. In order to test our theoretical expectations, we scraped and structured all parliamentary records from Chile, Mexico, Argentina and Peru for more than 25 years. This novel dataset of full-text annotated speeches not only opens up the possibility of comparing four presidential democracies over a substantial period of time. The common language allows comparable analyses with text-as-data approaches. We apply sentiment analysis to measure the tone of opposition and governing parties vis-à-vis presidential executive dynamics. Furthermore, we test whether the tone of parliamentary speech varies across the presidential (electoral) cycle. Our results have important implications for our understanding of how MPs in presidential systems behave and to what extent this depends on country and time-specific factors.