Replication Data for: Legislators' Emotional Engagement with Women's Issues: Gendered Patterns of Vocal Pitch in the German Bundestag

Through an innovative analysis of audio recordings of plenary speeches, Dietrich, Hayes and O'Brien (2019) find that women in the US House of Representatives speak with greater emotional intensity about women than about other issues, but men do not. With vocal pitch as a new measure of personal issue commitment that is less affected by extrinsic considerations than the textual content of speech, the finding suggests that women legislators' efforts to work on behalf of women are the result of intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation. Here I ask whether the same is true in an alternative parliamentary setting where personal preferences play a very different role due to strict party discipline, the German Bundestag. The answer is yes. Analyzing audio and text data of more than 30,000 speeches in the Bundestag between 2011 and 2020, I find that women in the Bundestag address women more frequently and with greater emotional intensity than men and compared to themselves when talking about other issues. The results suggest that women legislators are more emotionally invested in women-related issues than men, and that this is true irrespective of large differences in the institutional incentive structures in Germany and the US.