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.

本研究报告利用新颖的数据集来分析乌拉圭议会立法者的行为。通过比较基于发言和唱名投票的立法者立场，讨论立法者个人与政党之间的话语与投票的关系。该数据集包含 1985 年至 2015 年间 1000 多名乌拉圭立法者的 57000 多篇演讲及其相关的 R 包。该研究根据唱名投票和发言演讲这两个数据源估计政党的政策立场，然后比较两个结果。与预期相反，两种缩放方法之间没有出现明显的关联，这表明投票和立法演讲可能反映了具有潜在冲突目标的个别立法者的行为。战略计算或政党纪律可能是对文本和点名规模方法获得的不同结果的合理解释。