| Description |
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.
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