The Comparative Politics Seminar Series in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute is a venue for the presentation of work in progress by scholars from across the subfield of comparative politics.
It usually takes place on Thursdays from 17:00 to 18:30 at Seminar Room 2, in Badia Fiesolana (Fiesole). See below or sync the calendar for the exact location for each meeting. See previous events.
The series is organized by Elias Dinas, Simon Hix, and Filip Kostelka, Sascha Riaz, with support by Paloma Abril Poncela and Carmen Ramirez Folch.
Thursday 09 October 2025 | Seminar Room 2
Speaking fast and low: The acoustics of authoritarian politics
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.
Wednesday 11 June 2025 | Seminar Room 2
A generative theory of party systems
I present a generative model of party systems. For a given system size N, the model generates shares and positions of parties on an economic left-right dimension. The model first generates shares with a mean vector as described in Taagepera and Allik (2003) drawn from a Dirichlet distribution as described in Cohen and Hanretty (2024). Positions are then drawn according to four mechanisms: (1) positions weakly centred on the position of the mean voter; (2) initial bimodality of the positions of the largest party, (3) system autoregressive positions for the second-largest to the last party, whereby positions of the nth party are repelled by the share-weighted positions of all larger parties, and (4) increasing dispersion with decreasing vote share. The model is trained on data from over 300 elections. I discuss the implications of this generative model for party system congruence and for polarization.
Thursday 20 November 2025 | Seminar Room 2
Propaganda is already influencing large language models: evidence from training data, audits, and real-world usage
Abstract TBD