Government-opposition relations are often measured using one of two parliamentary activities – legislative voting (e.g., Tuttnauer and Wegmann 2022), which is arguably the most important activity of legislatures (Saalfeld 1995) and speechmaking (e.g., Schwalbach 2022), which is among the most visible activity of members of parliament and a staple of representative democracy (Proksch and Slapin 2012). However, the extent to which the two activities align remains unclear. This paper will investigate whether government and opposition parties’ speech reflects their respective voting behaviour, relying on a uniquely broad dataset from 12 countries (Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, The United Kingdom, Ireland, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Sweden) representing different political, institutional, and cultural settings over roughly 20 years per country.

Combining vote (such as congruence measures and roll-call vote scaling) and automated text analysis (such as sentiment analysis and stance detection), we identify the conditions under which parties’ policy-making activities (voting) and communication activities (speechmaking) align to reflect government-opposition relations similarly, and those under which they differ. This has a twofold contribution. Voting and speechmaking have complementary advantages in terms of research, as the former is simpler to analyse, but the latter is more publicly available. Knowing when the two activities align will enable researchers to choose cases based on selection criteria rather than data availability or analytical capabilities. When the two activities do not align, this may reflect strategic differential behaviour by parties, opening the door to more focused research on the explanations for such discrepancies.