The AUTHLIB consortium and the Department of Political Science of the Central European University cordially invite you to the hybrid department seminar titled
Detecting Democratic Decline:
Political Leaders’ Public Speech as an Early Warning Signal
on
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. CET
at
REGISTER HERE
Political leaders signal their commitment to democratic or authoritarian values through public speeches. Such signals can constitute a breach of democratic norms (Schedler 2019) and can also indicate intent to undermine both formal and informal democratic institutions. By listening to what leaders say we are able to detect a crisis of democracy and its imminent risk of decline. In this article, we develop an Illiberal Speech Index (ISI) to capture the public rhetoric by leading representatives of a political regime. Utilizing a machine learning approach, we train two BERT models on two dimensions: values of political exclusion-inclusion and principles of power concentration-dispersion. We then use the trained BERT models to score 503,891 semantically coherent paragraphs from 38,309 speeches by political leaders representing over 400 administrations in 123 countries between 1990 and 2023. The resulting scores place leaders on an illiberal-liberal scale. Using structural equation modeling, our results show that the ISI can predict democratic decline, as captured by selected V-Dem indicators on features of democracy. We test the robustness of our explanation to country-level factors such as existing democratic institutions as well as international factors such as regional levels of democracy. We show that illiberal public discourse provides an early-warning signal of impending autocratization.
Speakers:
Carsten Q. Schneider, Central European University
Discussants:
Dean Schafer, Mississippi State University
Seraphine F. Maerz, University of Melbourne
REGISTER HERE
This event takes place in the framework of the “AUTHLIB – Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response” project.
Photo credit: Central European University
