Pronoun Usage as a Measure of Power Personalization: A General Theory with Evidence from the Chinese-Speaking World

Amy H Liu

doi:10.1017/s0007123421000181

Abstract

AbstractHow can the growing personalization of power be identified and measured ex ante? Extant measures in the authoritarian literature have traditionally focused on institutional constraints and more recently on individual behaviour – such as purging opposition members from (and packing allies into) government bodies. This article offers a different strategy that examines leaders’ individual rhetoric. It focuses on patterns of pronoun usage for the first person. The author argues that as leaders personalize power, they are less likely to use ‘I’ (a pronoun linked to credit claiming and blame minimizing) and more likely to use ‘we’ (the leader speaks for – or with – the populace). To test this argument, the study focuses on all major, scheduled speeches by all chief executives in the entire Chinese-speaking world – that is, China, Singapore and Taiwan – since independence. It finds a robust pattern between first-person pronouns and political constraints. To ensure the results are not driven by the Chinese sample, the rhetoric of four other political leaders is considered: Albania's Hoxha, North Korea's Kim Il Sung, Hungary's Orbán and Ecuador's Correa. The implications of this project suggest that how leaders talk can provide insights into how they perceive their rule.

Highlights

In April 2017, Turkish President Erdoğan narrowly won a referendum
How do we ex ante identify and measure the growing personalization of power? One strategy is to focus on the institutional constraints – that is, who checks and balances the executive (Geddes, Wright and Frantz 2014)
There is the assumption of mutual exclusivity: personalism only happens in the absence of institutions

Summary

Pronouns and Executive Constraints

Language is more than just a vehicle of communication. It reflects how we see the world (Chen 2013; Liu et al 2018; Pérez and Tavits 2017). Importance for the country’ (italicized for emphasis) In both of these speeches, we see over-claiming of credit (for example, support of the party) and a clear demarcation of responsibility for the bad (for example, voting for Imre Nagy). Both of these mechanisms manifest through the use of the singular first person – for example, ‘I’ and ‘me’. When we fought for deep democracy, [critics] would say we were guerrillas, terrorists’ (emphasis added).9 Whether it is an exclusive royal ‘we’ or an inclusive collective identity ‘we’, I contend that the first-person plural pronoun creeps increasingly into a leader’s rhetoric when they believe there are minimal obstacles to getting what they want. The following hypothesis summarizes this argument: HYPOTHESIS 2 (‘We’ Hypothesis): The frequency of the first-person plural pronoun increases as executive constraints decrease

Research Design

Predicting Future Personalization

Findings

Conclusion