Replication Data for: Pronoun Usage as a Measure of Personalisation

How can we ex ante identify and measure the growing personalisation of power? Extant measures in the authoritarian literature have traditionally focused on institutional constraints and more recently on the individual behaviour – e.g., the purging of opposition members from and the packing of allies into government bodies. In this paper I offer a different strategy that examines the individual rhetoric of leaders. Specifically, I focus on patterns of pronoun usage for the first-person. I argue as leaders personalise power, they use fewer ‘I’-s – a pronoun linked to credit-claiming and blame-minimizing. Instead, there is an increase in the use of ‘we’ where the leader either speaks for the populace or with the populace. To test this argument, I focus on all major, scheduled speeches by all chief executive in the entire Chinese-speaking world – i.e., China, Singapore, and Taiwan – since independence. I find a robust pattern between the first-person pronouns and political constraints. To ensure the results are not driven by the Chinese sample, I also consider the rhetoric of four other political leaders: Albania’s Hoxha, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, Hungary’s Orbán, and Ecuador’s Correa. The implications of this project suggest how leaders talk can provide us with insights of how they perceive their rule.我们如何能够事前识别并衡量日益凸显的权力个人化现象？威权主义研究领域的现有衡量范式传统上聚焦于制度约束，近年来则转向个体行为维度——例如清除执政体系内的反对成员、安插亲信进入政府机构。本文提出一种差异化研究策略，聚焦领导者的个体修辞表达。具体而言，本文关注第一人称代词的使用模式。本文主张，随着领导者推进权力个人化，其使用"我"（I）的频率会有所降低：这类代词与邀功诿过的行为直接相关。反之，领导者使用"我们"（we）的频率会相应上升，此时领导者要么以民众的代表自居，要么与民众形成同频的立场表达。为验证这一论点，本文选取华语世界所有行政首长自独立以来发表的全部重要既定日程演讲作为研究样本——涵盖中国、新加坡及中国台湾地区。研究发现，第一人称代词的使用模式与政治约束之间存在稳健的关联模式。为确保研究结果并非仅由中国样本驱动，本文还额外分析了另外四位政治领导人的修辞表达：阿尔巴尼亚的霍查、朝鲜的金日成、匈牙利的欧尔班以及厄瓜多尔的科雷亚。本研究的启示在于，领导者的言谈方式可为我们洞悉其对自身执政地位的认知提供重要视角。