Project aim, main results and new questions
The main goal of the project was to analyze the ideological cohesion within political parties by analyzing the speeches delivered by Members of Parliament (MPs). By analyzing parliamentary debates, we are able to measure the degree of intra-party policy diversity within political parties, and to study the origins and consequences of diversity. One innovative aspect of the project is that we seriously take into account that political parties cannot be treated as "unitary actors", which much of the literature on the political process in modern democracies assumes. This assumption is problematic since parties represent divergent interests of various members in several regional and organizational units, and such ideological diversity within parties can have important political consequences.

The project aimed at collecting two types of data in a sample of European countries over two periods of office: (1) the speeches made in parliament are downloaded and coded, for example according to the policy area that the debate belongs to and the type of speech, and (2) information on the MPs and their background is coded, for example, their political background and positions. We focused on eight European countries that vary in their institutional structure and in the patterns of party system, party competition, and coalition governance. The data set, consisting of hundreds of thousands of speeches, is one of the main outputs of the project, which can be used in a number of different ways, and will be made available to other scholars, as soon as our articles and book are published. The case selection does not correspond completely to the selection that we described in the project proposal - one reason for this is that data on speeches was not always easily downloadable and analyzed. Our country sample is: Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway and Sweden. An advantage with the selection of countries is that we also include some Central and Eastern European countries, which makes it easier to generalize our results to a (non-Western) European context. We have not been able to collect data for all countries for two periods of office, due to lack of time and resources, as the coding of speeches has taken much longer time than expected.

One of the main results relates to a question which we had not foreseen that it would be so important when writing the project application, the result that gender seems to matter substantially in speech-making. A focus on such 'personal characteristics' of MPs is surprisingly missing in the literature on legislative activity and speech behavior. While a number of studies focusing on representation highlight the increasing share of women in parliaments and cabinets, discuss the effect of electoral systems and gender quotas, and stress the impact of women's presence in parliaments and cabinets on policy outputs, there are only few studies that analyze gender and legislative debates, which can be seen as a 'qualitative dimension' of gender equality in the process of legislative decision-making.

On the basis of comparative studies on portfolio allocation, which show that male politicians receive more 'prestigious' positions that deal with 'harder' policy areas, such as economics, foreign affairs or defense, we hypothesized that female MPs are in general less likely to take the floor, and that they are more likely to participate in debates dealing with 'softer' policy issues (e.g. welfare policy). Our expectations were supported when analyzing speechmaking in the Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian parliaments, i.e. female MPs are significantly less likely to take the floor, and there are some "gender patterns" in who speaks on what policy issues in parliament (Bäck, Debus and Müller 2014; Bäck and Debus 2016). However, we did not find significant gender differences in the other Western European or the Eastern European parliaments studied here, where descriptive representation was significantly lower. We discuss various potential explanations to this variation across countries in our book, for example, it could be due to that gender stereotypes are not counteracted in a setting that on surface seems 'equal'. Here further research is needed to fully explain why the pattern occurs.

Another important result found in our analyses using the data drawn from the speeches has more to do with the 'consequences' of intra-party cohesion or diversity, which was one of the aims with the project, and allows us to show how the policy positions drawn from the speeches can be used to predict which politicians become cabinet members. In a manuscript which is currently under review, we connect to the literature of cabinet governance which differentiates between various models of decision-making in coalition cabinets. In this article, we focus on the allocation of politicians to cabinet offices in various institutional settings. On the basis of the principal agent-approach, we argue that ministers are appointed with the aim of minimizing the policy distance to the most important principal, which could be the Prime Minister (PM), the coalition, or the individual coalition parties.

To evaluate our hypotheses we selected Austria, Germany and Sweden as political systems were coalition governments are frequent, but where the head of government has varying degrees of agenda-setting power. We expect that the appointment of ministers in Germany is influenced by the policy preferences of the relatively powerful Chancellor, whereas Austrian parties are likely to focus on the policy position of the coalition when allocating portfolios. The Swedish case is a bit more complex, but since coalition governance is relatively strong in recent years we predict that the coalition should play a dominant role in ministerial selection. We evaluate our hypotheses by estimating the policy positions of Austrian, German and Swedish MPs and cabinet members on the basis of a computerized content analysis of their speeches given in parliament. The results, derived from a logit model predicting cabinet membership, support our argument, and show that when controlling for a number of important variables, the policy distance towards the most important principal is important for becoming a cabinet member. That is, individuals who are ideologically "close" to some main political actor, are more likely to become ministers. We also show that which actor is the most important principal varies across institutional contexts. Here, further research is needed covering additional country contexts, to fully analyze the effects of institutional features on ministerial selection.

International connections
The project has been based on a close cooperation with foremost Professor Marc Debus at University of Mannheim, with whom data has been collected and analyzed, and the book has been written. We have also cooperated closely with Professor Wolfgang C. Müller at University of Vienna. Several project meetings have been held (in Lund, Vienna and Mannheim). We have participated extensively in important international workshops and panels, and we have organized panels at two of the most important European political science conferences, at the ECPR General conference in Bordeaux 2013 and at the ECPR General conference in Glasgow 2014. We have also presented papers at a number of international conferences. The main papers are presented in the list of publications.

Main publications, publication strategy and societal information
We have aimed to publish both in journal articles and in a book (monography), in order to fully present the results of this large-scale comparative project. We currently have one manuscript in the review process at an international peer-reviewed journal, and we have published articles in Political Research Quarterly and Swiss Political Science Review. The article in Political Research Quarterly presented one of the main findings regarding gender and speechmaking (see above) and this article has been made open access immediately. The Swiss Political Science Review article will be made open access through Lund University Publications.

Our book manuscript, titled Political Parties, Parliaments and Legislative Speechmaking is currently in production by Palgrave MacMillan and is scheduled to be released in March 2016. The book manuscript is clearly the main publication of the project. The book focuses on two main questions: (1) Why do some Members of Parliament (MPs) take the parliamentary floor and speak more than others?, and (2) Why do some MPs deviate more than others from the ideological position of their party? The book develops hypotheses on legislative speechmaking and evaluates them by analyzing parliamentary debates in seven European democracies as mentioned above. Assuming that MPs are concerned with policy-making, career advancement, and re-election, we discuss various incentives to taking the floor, and elaborate on the role of gender and psychological incentives in speechmaking. We evaluate our expectations on the novel dataset described above covering information on the number of speeches held by MPs and the policy positions MPs adopted when delivering a speech.

The result that gender matters in speech-making (together with some other results), was presented in a seminar at the Swedish Riksdag, organized by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Torbjörn Eng), titled 'Vem talar i parlamentet?'. These results were also discussed and presented on one of the main political science blogs in Sweden, Politologerna, by Hanna Bäck and Alvina Erman (see link below).

Publications

Monography

Hanna Bäck & Marc Debus. (Forthcoming). “Political Parties, Parliaments and Legislative Speechmaking”.
In production, Palgrave MacMillan (publication date: March 2016).

Articles (published and submitted)

Hanna Bäck, Marc Debus & Wolfgang C. Müller. (Forthcoming). “Intra-party Diversity and Ministerial Selection in Coalition Governments”. Unpublished manuscript, Revise and Resubmit.

Hanna Bäck, Marc Debus & Jochen Müller. 2014. “Who Takes the Parliamentary Floor? The Role of Gender in Speech-making in the Swedish Riksdag”. Political Research Quarterly 67: 504–518.

Marc Debus & Hanna Bäck. 2014. “Der Einfluss von Mandatstyp und Wahlkreiseigenschaften auf die inhaltlichen Positionen in Parlamentsreden”. Swiss Political Science Review 20: 330–353.

Hanna Bäck. 2012. “The Ideological Cohesion of Parliamentary Parties and Its Implications for Decision-Making in Modern Democracies”. Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 114: 68–76.

Conference papers

Hanna Bäck, Markus Baumann, Marc Debus & Jochen Müller. 2014. “Campaigning in the House. The Unequal Distribution of Speaking Time in European Parliamentary Party Groups”. Paper presented at the EPSA Annual Meeting in Edinburgh, 19–21 June, and the ECPR General conference in Glasgow.

Hanna Bäck, Marc Debus & Wolfgang C. Müller. 2013. “Intra-party Diversity and Ministerial Selection in Coalition Governments”. Paper presented at the ECPR General conference in Bordeaux, 4–7 September, and at the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments Conference in Leiden, 24–25 November.

Hanna Bäck, Marc Debus & Jochen Müller. 2013. “Who is allowed to take the floor? The role of saliency and gender when explaining speech-making in the Swedish Riksdag”. Paper presented at the 71st Annual MPSA conference in Chicago, 11–14 April and at the 3rd Annual EPSA conference in Barcelona, 20–22 June.

Links to webpages

http://www.svet.lu.se/en/hanna-back
https://maktochpolitik.wordpress.com/
http://politologerna.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/ett-av-varldens-mest-jamstallda-parlament-men-mannen-tar-mer-plats/
http://www.rj.se/svenska/130/var/newsID/778
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/political-parties--parliaments-and-legislative-speechmaking-hanna-b--ck/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137484543