Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words? Party Rewards for Loyal Speech and Voting Behavior in the US House of Representatives

Parties seek to hold their members accountable for their actions, but we know little of how this functions outside of voting behavior. We create a measure of how well each member’s floor speeches fit with those of their party — speech fit — and compare it to a similar measure of voting fit in order to study how parties hold members accountable for both floor speeches and votes. Using evidence from the 97th-108th United States Congresses, we show that parties reward members whose speech behavior fits with the party by providing them more resources related to the party’s electoral goals, and that parties reward members based on a similar measure of how well their voting behavior fits with that of the party with resources more related to electoral goals. We discuss implications for Congressional research and text research, where our approach has broad applications.