Several studies concentrate on the representation of minority groups and the policy goals that members of these groups highlight when becoming candidates for public offices. However, we do not know much about the degree of parliamentary representation of sexual minorities and what ideological profile politicians with an LGB+ identity adopt. We aim at filling this gap by analysing the ideological stances of LGB+ candidates on key policy dimensions. Using data from the 2021 German candidate study, we find that the self-identification as LGB+ contributes significantly to adopting progressive stances on the socio-cultural dimension and more favourable positions on welfare state expansion, regardless of further important factors like party affiliation. Moreover, candidates who consider themselves LGB+ do take on significantly less traditional positions on the socio-cultural dimension compared to the position of their party, indicating that increasing descriptive representation of LGB+ individuals in parliament leads to a strengthening of more progressive voices in parliament and a stronger substantive representation of LGB+ interests.

This research note takes advantage of a novel dataset to analyze legislators’ behavior in Uruguay’s Parliament. Comparing the positions of legislators based on floor speeches and roll-call voting, it discusses the relationship between discourse and voting among individual legislators and parties. The dataset contains more than 57,000 speeches from more than 1,000 Uruguayan legislators between 1985 and 2015 and its related R package. The study estimates the parties’ policy positions on the basis of two data sources, roll-call votes and floor speeches, and then compares both results. Contrary to expectations, no clear association appears between the two scaling methods, demonstrating that vote and legislative speech may reflect the behavior of individual legislators with potentially conflicting goals. Strategic calculations or party discipline may be plausible explanations for the divergent results obtained from text and roll-call scaling methods.

This research note explores whether the government-opposition dimension that emerges from voting records of Brazilian legislatures also arises in legislative speechmaking. Since the earlier stages of the legislative process are innocuous to policy outcomes, party leaders would have fewer incentives to coerce their copartisans’ behavior in speeches than in roll calls. To test this expectation, this study estimates Brazilian political parties’ policy positions, relying on a sentiment analysis approach to classify 64,000 senators’ speeches. The results suggest that the president and the party leadership exert significant influence not only over how legislators vote but also over how they speak. We speculate that these unforeseen findings are backed by the decisiveness of speeches in passing legislation, the importance leadership gives to party brand, and legislators’ need to signal their positions to leaders and the government.