Taiwan’s legislative scholars rarely investigate congressional speech. Congressional speech is legally defined as legislative behavior, just as much as roll call vote. I attempt to look into congressional speech and investigate three targets of it- party, constituency, and information. Previous literature that deals with congressional speech targets start from one major question: does the majority caucus in Legislative Yuan help its members to engage in distributional lawmaking? In answering this question, there are two competing schools of thought. The first is Maltzman’s “conditional model,” and the second is Cox and McCubbins’ “party government model.” The two models prescribe two competing hypotheses, respectively. I found that Cox and McCubbins’ model is correct regarding the association between the majority party strength and the pro-earmark speech.
As far as the research design, I collected the legislative reports of the seventh Legislative Yuan, which includes eight sessions.These reports cover the information on many legislative speeches held by individual legislators. The dependent variable is the purposes of each of these speeches, and the independent variables include the majority party strength, issue salience and many others. This paper is by far the most complete investigation of congressional speech in Taiwan’s lawmaking literature. It is also the first paper in Chinese that deals with the theoretical debate between Maltzman and Cox and McCubbins regarding their views on the interaction of the party, constituency, and information in congressional committees.