The “Politics of Talk” Have Changed

Maltzman and Sigleman in 1996 found members of the House of Representatives largely pursued policy-based strategies (rather than electoral ones) when engaging in unconstrained floor speeches. We revisit their article on the “Politics of Talk” to assess whether changes in the electoral and congressional landscapes have affected how House members navigate decisions to engage in non-legislative debate. Since its publication, available data has also improved. Using the 103 rd and 116th Congresses, we note the use of one-minute speeches has declined. In addition, we find that electoral factors align more closely with the hypotheses in the 116 th Congress than they did in the original study. Some of the policy factors continue to hold today, but most notably we find that minority party members are no longer more likely to engage in one-minute speeches than majority members. We further update the original model to account for more recent trends in electoral politics, notably the “nationalization” of House elections and the rise of primary competition but find no effect. In short, the theoretical bases of the original article are still sound and through a re-application of the original model we can see how congressional rhetorical behavior around one-minute speeches has shifted in the almost 30 years since its publication.