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.
Thursday 30 October 2025 | Seminar Room 2
It’s Not Me, it’s You: Redistributive Preferences and Fairness
Fairness and deservingness are core principles for the formation of public policy, and yet little consensus exists about how meritocracy should influence redistributive policies such as a generous welfare state or social protection. On the one hand, some policies designed to ensure equal representation in education, employment, and government are perceived as corrective measures for differences in opportunity or for societal injustice. On the other, these same policies can be perceived as unfair given they come into direct conflict with meritocracy. Although classical economic theory suggests that preferences for redistribution are simply a function of economic self-interest, a large body of recent work including theoretical models, empirical evidence, and experiments has shown that preferences are a complex mosaic incorporating both selfish and other-regarding considerations. While an influential literature has shown that individuals condition their policy preferences on their views of fairness and deservingness (as a function of how earnings are determined), none of the existing work accounts for the reality that outcomes may be meritocratic for some but not others. To close this gap, we present results from a lab experiment representing the first causal investigation of redistributive preferences in the presence of asymmetric earnings conditions. Although we find little evidence that asymmetry as a general characteristic affects redistributive preferences, we find strong evidence that fairness considerations are asymmetric. Our results suggest that redistributive preferences are only malleable for the rich and that their views of deservingness are determined solely by the conditions of the poor. Further, our findings suggest that fairness considerations are reference dependent and counterfactual beliefs are an important moderator of the relationship between fairness and redistributive preferences.
Thursday 06 November 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
Thursday 11 December 2025 | Seminar Room 2
The Shape of Democracy: Jurisdiction Boundaries and the Siting of Renewable Energy Infrastructure
Political science has long studied how the size and shape of jurisdictions influence representation and governance, but much less is known about their effects on policy outcomes. This paper addresses that gap by examining how local jurisdictional structure shapes the siting of wind turbines—a critical challenge for the green energy transition. We develop a theoretical model which predicts how the division of voters into local jurisdictions influence the siting of wind turbines (or:.. which predicts how the geographical distribution of voters within local jurisdictions influence the siting of wind turbines). Using data on all Danish wind turbines built between 2007 and 2021, and exploiting Denmark’s 2007 municipal reform, which changed local boundaries while leaving the landscape unchanged, we show that shifts in local electorates strongly affect turbine siting. These results highlight how the political geography of local governments shapes renewable energy deployment, raising concerns about equity, efficiency, and democratic legitimacy in decentralized climate policy.