  Parliamentary recordings provide a rich source of data for studying how
politicians use speech to convey their messages and influence their audience.
This provides a unique context for studying how politicians use speech,
especially prosody, to achieve their goals. Here we analyzed a corpus of
parliamentary speeches in the Finnish parliament between the years 2008-2020
and highlight methodological considerations related to the robustness of signal
based features with respect to varying recording conditions and corpus design.
We also present results of long term changes pertaining to speakers' status
with respect to their party being in government or in opposition. Looking at
large scale averages of fundamental frequency - a robust prosodic feature - we
found systematic changes in speech prosody with respect opposition status and
the election term. Reflecting a different level of urgency, members of the
parliament have higher f0 at the beginning of the term or when they are in
opposition.
