Coalition parties face a unity-differentiation dilemma: they must uphold compromise to govern effectively, while maintaining distinct identities to maximize electoral success. Existing measures of coalition differentiation almost exclusively rely on static proxies to infer behavior, and the few dynamic measures often only cover a limited sample of governments, limiting comparative analysis. This article introduces a comparative, dynamic measure of rhetorical differentiation based on supervised classification of legislative speeches. Higher classification accuracy indicates greater rhetorical distinctiveness between coalition partners, while misclassification indicates greater rhetorical overlap. The measure provides monthly party-level scores for close to 50 coalition governments, across six European democracies, and thereby enables the dynamic analysis of coalition party differentiation in a public-facing arena, for a sizable comparative sample.

How do women’s pre-election experiences influence their behavior in government? We examine women’s participation in rebel groups as a form of masculine socialization and theorize that former rebel women elected in the national legislature will continue to defy gender norms by being more active than their other women colleagues and more frequently discussing topics that are male-dominated and relate to their wartime experience. Using novel datasets of parliamentary speeches and rebel ties of elected MPs in Uganda and Zimbabwe, we find that women ex-rebels make more legislative speeches, including speeches on topics related to wartime experience. We find mixed evidence for speeches on ‘hard’ topics. These findings contribute to theoretical debates on women’s political representation, gender and conflict, and legislative politics.