Following its application to the European Economic Community in 1987, Turkey was declared eligible to join the EU in 1999 and formally started the accession negotiations in 2005. However, the country's prospect to become a full member has not come close to realization to this day. We set out to explore how Turkish parties discuss the EU membership strategically through an analysis of a novel data-set covering all parliamentary debates spanning the period from 1994 until 2022.

Parliaments are often criticized for being mere party-political theaters rather than fora for substantial debate of proposed bills. But to what extent does this hold true? When do MPs provide bill-focused arguments and when do MPs resort to general grandstanding which goes beyond the actual content of a bill? We theorize various incentives regarding speech and bill characteristics  to speak 'on topic' in bill debates. We test our expectations with a new data set - ParlLawSpeech - that offers linked full-text vectors of parliamentary speeches and the bills and laws that federal parliaments and the European Parliament decide on. To this end, we construct various measures of bill focus (based on bag-of-words, tf-idf, and embedding approaches), which we validate through hand-coded speech texts. 

How do government-opposition dynamics look like in presidential systems in the daily interaction in parliament? In what way do different forms of electoral and presidential coalition influence legislative behaviour? And how do divided governments infuence party and coalition cohesion in these systems? We try to understand these mechanisms by analyzing parliamentary debates from three different countries in Latin America for more than 15 years.