Switzerland

What determines the speechmaking behavior of legislators in the lower house (Nationalrat) and the upper house (Ständerat) of the Swiss federal parliament? In this chapter, we employ newly collected data on debates, covering the 46th–50th legislative periods (1999–2019), to investigate the determinants of participation in debates, and the verbosity of members’ speeches. The Swiss electoral system creates incentives for personal vote seeking in both chambers, but the institutional settings are markedly different in the lower and upper house. The smaller upper house has relatively free debates, while debates in the Nationalrat are tightly regulated. We find that faction leaders are more likely to participate in the lower house. At the same time, committee chairpersonship and seniority are the most important predictors of speechmaking behavior, increasing both the participation and verbosity of speeches. Gender, in turn, fails to play a role in speeches once we consider the effect of other covariates.