Speaking Fast and Low: The Acoustics of Authoritarian Politics

Do political regimes shape how citizens speak? Exploiting a large audio corpus, we compare the voices of  Mandarin speakers from Mainland China (an authoritarian regime) vs Taiwan (a democracy) reading randomly assigned sentences. We find that, compared to Taiwanese, mainland Chinese men speak "fast and low" about political content: with about 0.2 SD higher tempo and 0.4 SD lower volume, consistent with low-arousal fear in Mandarin phonetics. Mirroring the gendered pattern of political repression, we find no comparable effect among women. Historical repression amplifies these patterns: within China, tempo is faster in provinces with higher Cultural Revolution fatalities, but not in those more repressed today. Citizens' daily speech can reveal the institutional setting they live under, with normative and methodological implications for the study of self-censorship, deliberation, and data collection under authoritarian rule.

Link to paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6753838