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Agenda Setting and Intra-Party Deliberation: Who gets represented at party national meetings?

National party meetings provide members with opportunities to express distinct preferences and issue priorities that guide the party’s future policies. Although scholars recognize that party leaders dominate the structure and content of meetings, little empirical research examines the extent of their agenda setting role. Who gets to speak and whose preferences get represented? Adapting theories of legislative agenda setting to the intra-party context, we hypothesize that party candidates are less likely to be chosen as speakers at party conferences when the party’s leadership most demands unity due to their incumbency status. Using self-placements from candidate surveys, we predict the likelihood that MPs and leaders speak at parties’ national meetings in the U.K. We then link candidates’ self-placements to the content of speeches using automated text analysis. These results add to a broad theory of party decision-making which perceives parties’ national meetings as a forum for information sharing, intra-party competition and deliberation. More broadly, evidence in line with this approach suggests that treating parties as unitary actors in a range of settings overlooks important intra-party divisions.