Do Actions Speak Louder than Words? Party Rewards for Loyal Speech and Voting Behavior in the U.S. House of Representatives

Abstract

Parties seek to hold their members accountable for their actions, but we know little of how this functions outside of voting behavior. We create a measure of how well each member's floor speeches fit with those of their party - speech fit - and compare it to a similar measure of voting fit in order to study how parties hold members accountable for both floor speeches and votes. We show that parties reward members whose speeches fit the goals of their party by providing them more resources. Interestingly, we find that parties do not reward members based on a similar measure of how well their voting behavior fits with that of the party, computed from DW-NOMINATE. We discuss implications for Congressional research - ours is the first quantitative study that extends party loyalty to spoken behavior - and text research, where our approach has broad applications.