Femonationalism – the use of gendered rhetoric to promote nativist anti-immigration views – is thought to be on the rise across Western European democracies, but scholars lack a systematic understanding of its prevalence across parties and countries, the conditions under which it appears, and the role gender plays in its use. To make progress on these questions, this study explores the use of femonationalism in legislative speeches from five Western European countries from 2009 to 2024. Combining dictionary methods with topic modeling, we find that far-right parties are most likely to use femonationalist rhetoric, increasing these appeals when party opponents threaten their issue distinctiveness by converging towards their anti-immigration policy position. Crucially, our analysis also highlights the role of gender in shaping femonationalist rhetoric: while the overall strategy is party-driven, men and women legislators emphasize different dimensions of femonationalism, with men focusing on security concerns and women invoking gender equality.

Why do politicians sometimes deliver passionate speeches and sometimes tedious monologues? Even though the delivery is key to understanding political speech, we know little about when and why political actors choose particular delivery styles. Focusing on legislative speech, we expect legislators to deliver more emphatic speeches when their vote is aligned with the preferences of their constituents. To test this proposition, we develop and apply an automated video analysis model to speech recordings from the US House of Representatives. We match the speech emphasis with district preferences on key bills using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find that House members who rise in opposition to a bill give more passionate speeches when public preferences are aligned with their vote. The results suggest that political actors are not only mindful of public opinion in what they say but also in how they say it.

The sentiment expressed in a legislator’s speech is informative. However, extracting legislators’ sentiment requires human-annotated data. Instead, we propose exploiting closing debates on a bill in Japan, where legislators in effect label their speech as either pro or con. We utilize debate speeches as the training dataset, fine-tune a pretrained model, and calculate the sentiment scores of other speeches. We show that the more senior the opposition members are, the more negative their sentiment. Additionally, we show that opposition members become more negative as the next election approaches. We also demonstrate that legislators’ sentiments can be used to predict their behaviors by using the case in which government members rebelled in the historic vote of no confidence in 1993.

This article analyzes the effect of procedural rule change on the dynamics of parliamentary speeches in the Canadian House of Commons between 1901 and 2015. During this period, several new rules were introduced to reduce the opportunities for private members to speak during the debates so that the government could get its business done within an acceptable amount of time. Our analysis looks at the impact of these rule changes on the content and orientation of all individual speeches made by members of Parliament. The results indicate that parliamentary rules had an important effect on the topic and duration of debates. Our findings also confirm that procedural changes contributed to a heightening of partisan polarization in the Canadian Parliament over time and disproportionately reduced the influence of government backbenchers in the legislative process.