The audience effect: Leaders’ speeches over decentralization in different contexts

Political party leaders have to address different scenarios. These scenarios contain different audiences, and leaders need different groups to support them. At the same time that their audience is changing, they have to change their speeches. Their speeches are not only based on the traditional left-right scale position to explain every single issue but also on multiple issues that are based on more than just divisions on the traditional left-right dimension. Issues like decentralization or devolution have developed the political discussion beyond the ideological cleavage. These demands are greater in multilevel countries, where party leaders require support from different territorial audiences. In an audience like parliaments, the influence of MPs from high regional identity territories and how political leaders manage this presence are essential for the content of their speeches. Their influence focuses on parliamentary confidence maintenance and supporting legislation approvals. Are Parliamentary speeches significantly more decentralized than Party conference speeches with respect to speeches' position over decentralization? The primary assumption is that political party leaders change their speeches over decentralization depending on their audience. To predict party leaders' position over decentralization, I use the results from a supervised machine-learning analysis of speeches from the United Kingdom and Spain. I distinguish between the demands placed on party leaders between parliamentary investiture speeches focused on attracting parliamentary support and national party conference speeches that are focused more on internal divisions as different audiences. I expect that party leaders take a stronger position over decentralization when they take a position in front of MPs from different regions than when they present to intra-party audiences. These results hold relevant implications in terms of studying political leaders' communication strategies in multilevel institutions and multilevel countries. Also, the use of quantitative text analysis methods contributes a novel approach to identifying specific policy dimensions beyond the current left-right scale.