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Leader Language and Political Survival Strategies

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  • Leah Windsor
  • Nia Dowell
  • Alistair Windsor
  • John Kaltner

Abstract

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.

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  • Leah Windsor & Nia Dowell & Alistair Windsor & John Kaltner, 2018. "Leader Language and Political Survival Strategies," International Interactions, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 44(2), pages 321-336, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:ginixx:v:44:y:2018:i:2:p:321-336
    DOI: 10.1080/03050629.2017.1345737
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    Cited by:

    1. Andrea Mah & Eunkyung Song, 2024. "Elite Speech about Climate Change: Analysis of Sentiment from the United Nations Conference of Parties, 1995–2021," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(7), pages 1-27, March.

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