Seminar series

Speaking fast and low

The acoustics of authoritarian politics

Add to calendar 2025-10-09 17:00 2025-10-09 18:30 Europe/Rome Speaking fast and low Seminar Room 2 Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD

Scheduled dates

Oct 09 2025

17:00 - 18:30 CEST

Seminar Room 2, Badia Fiesolana

Organised by

Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the context of the Comparative Politics Seminar Series, this session features a presentation by Marco Giani (King's College).

Do citizens embody their political institutions? We test this by examining whether speech reflects freedom of speech with a comparative political behavior approach. Using speech corpora intended for AI speech-to-text recognition, we show that when exogenously assigned sentences with political content in a discrete online environment, Mandarin speakers from China—an authoritarian regime with low freedom of speech—change the acoustics of their speech relative to Mandarin speakers from Taiwan—a democracy with high freedom of speech— controlling for both sentence and individual fixed effects. DiD estimates suggest that Mainland Chinese speak 'fast and low', increase their tempo and decrease their volume by and standard deviations (2 decibels/2 seconds) relative to Taiwanese speakers, robust to using alternative variable or treatment definitions as well as alternative sampling and modelling strategies. Neither Mandarin Bots nor English speakers display a similar pattern. 'Speaking fast and low' about politics is a prerogative of men. Further analysis suggests that the gendered acoustics of authoritarian politics—which do not come up with traditional survey analysis—are channeled by a 'historical legacy' mechanism more than by a 'statistical discrimination' one. Speakers with accents from provinces that experienced stronger repression during the 1964 Cultural Revolution display significantly stronger stress, whereas speakers from coastal provinces and special economic zones speak about politics in a more normal manner. Authoritarianism is not only written in laws, memories, and institutions—it is also spoken, in hurried and hushed tones, every time politics comes up.