Leader language and political survival strategies

Authoritarian leaders’ language provides clues to their survival strategies for remaining in office. This line of inquiry fits within an emerging literature that refocuses attention from state-level features to the dynamic role that individual heads of state and government play in international relations, especially in authoritarian regimes. The burgeoning text-as-data field can be used to deepen our understanding of the nuances of leader survival and political choices; for example, language can serve as a leading indicator of leader approval, which itself is a good predictor of leader survival. In this paper, we apply computational linguistics tools to an authoritarian leader corpus consisting of 102 speeches from nine leaders of countries across the Middle East and North Africa between 2009 and 2012. We find systematic differences in the language of these leaders, which help advance a more broadly applicable theory of authoritarian leader language and tenure.

威权领袖的语言，可为其维系执政地位的生存策略提供重要线索。此类研究契合当前新兴的学术脉络：该类研究将研究重心从国家层面特征，转向个体国家元首与政府首脑在国际关系中扮演的动态角色，尤其聚焦威权政体场景。蓬勃发展的文本即数据（text-as-data）研究领域，可用于深化我们对领袖执政存续与政治抉择的细微差异的理解；举例而言，语言可作为领袖认可度的先行指标，而领袖认可度本身正是预测其执政存续性的良好预测因子。本研究中，我们将计算语言学工具应用于一套威权领袖语料库：该语料库涵盖2009至2012年间，中东与北非地区9位国家领袖的102篇演讲。我们发现这些领袖的语言存在系统性差异，该发现有助于推动一套适用性更广的威权领袖语言与执政存续理论的发展。