Frederik Hjorth

🪙Do politicians signal partisan conflict through what they say?

➡️ Using Danish parliamentary debates, @mathiasoestergaard.bsky.social & @fghjorth.bsky.social show that vocal pitch signals partisan polarization, revealing the strategic use of nonverbal cues cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView

If you work on legislative politics, polarization, or computational methods, we hope this provides a new toolkit and motivates more work on nonverbal signals in democratic politics.

Full article (open access) here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Thanks for reading this far! 🙏 11/11

The paper concludes by outlining implications for representation, elite behavior, and experimental design. If emotional arousal is both perceivable and strategic, then public reactions—and misperceptions—may depend on vocal features that standard text-based analyses cannot detect. 10/11

Substantively, the results imply that elites communicate partisan conflict even when their words remain civil or non-polarized. Nonverbal cues allow legislators to signal conflict along dimensions not easily observed in text. 9/11

Methodologically, our findings highlight the value of audio as data for political science. Text alone cannot capture pitch, intensity, or prosody—yet these features encode meaningful political information. Multimodal approaches can enrich research on polarization and legislative behavior. 8/11

This distinguishes spontaneous emotional display from strategic communication. In parliamentary settings, vocal style appears to be *deliberately deployed* to influence audiences and coalition partners, not merely an uncontrolled affective reaction. 7/11

We then ask: are these signals strategic? Two results suggest yes.
• Legislators exhibit greater arousal in high-profile debates with substantial media attention.
• They signal more conflict toward parties with > bargaining leverage—i.e., parties that could shape alternative governments. 6/11

Importantly, these patterns persist *conditional on verbal content*. Even when sentiment, emotionality, and topic structure are held constant, pitch carries distinct information about partisan conflict. Nonverbal communication adds an independent dimension to elite polarization. 5/11

We also show that nonverbal conflict signals correspond closely to policy disagreement. When two parties vote differently on a bill, legislators’ pitch rises significantly in speeches addressing the opposing party. This is a robust, dyad-level pattern. 4/11

Our core finding: nonverbal arousal systematically tracks partisan polarization. Legislators speak with higher pitch when addressing out-bloc parties than in-bloc parties. This holds even after accounting for sentiment, rhetoric, and topic controls. 3/11

Using >20 years of Danish parliamentary audio (≈380,000 speeches), we develop a measure of emotional arousal based on within-speaker deviations in vocal pitch. Decades of psycholinguistics show that pitch rises when speakers are more emotionally activated. 2/11

Political communication research overwhelmingly relies on text. But parliamentary speech is multimodal! In our new @psrm.bsky.social article, Mathias Rask and I show that legislators also signal partisan conflict nonverbally— through changes in vocal pitch during floor speeches. 🧵 1/11 #polisky

In *the annotated sample alone*, these proportions correspond to ~1500 published survey experimental papers yearly, rising sharply. I'm no stranger to survey experiments myself, but seems a bit much.

Why has women's representation in parliament been lagging? Can it be that party elites have penalized women candidates? Come find out tomorrow at "Primaries and Candidate Selection" at 8.00 am in West 215. @fghjorth.bsky.social @fkjoeller.bsky.social @annalund.bsky.social @apsa.bsky.social

“The American president visited Paris today, instead of shooting Budweiser bottles out of his pickup truck”

📌

Liberal democracy is a fighting faith. Fight to defend it. Cynicism is an authoritarian government’s best friend.

I am an ardent Beamer user, but this take is correct 🥲

A magazine list showing #37, Zohran Mamdani, age 11, asked for Books, FIFA 2003 and SimCity 3000 video games.

we’re about to find out if loving SimCity makes you a better mayor

Mamdani was asked in 2002 by NY Mag what he wanted for Christmas and said SimCity 3000

Lastly, Friday 4.50pm, @fkjoeller.bsky.social will present a paper on the link between commuting costs and geographic inequality in representation 🌉 (thx to @carlsbergfondet.dk for support 🙏 ) 5/5

Thursday 1.10pm, I will present a paper on the role of family background in explaining affective polarization 👪 (thx to @erc.europa.eu for support 🇪🇺 ) 4/5

Thursday 11.20am, @olivialevinsen.bsky.social will present a paper on party nominations and long-term trends on women's descriptive representation 👩‍💼 (thx to @carlsbergfondet.dk for support 🙏 ) 3/5

Thursday 9.30am, @torewig.bsky.social will present a paper on measuring and explaining global variation in "critical social science" 🌎 2/5

Pumped to be at #EPSA2025 in sunny Madrid, where my esteemed coauthors and I will present four papers. Quick 🧵 on the papers in chronological order 👇 1/5

Abstract of "Offshore Outlaws: Brexit and Oil Spills in the North Sea" by Anthony Calacino, Federica Genovese, Hayley Pring (University of Oxford)

🚨 WP w/ @acalacino.bsky.social & @hayleypring.bsky.social

It’s been a turbulent decade of globalization backlash. Populist projects wanna take back control everywhere.

Focusing on the case of oil and Brexit, we offer a story of the danger of this narrative and concrete merits of multilateralism: 🧵

Excited to be presenting in shorts on this years' EPSA! 🩳

I'll be presenting joint work w. @fghjorth.bsky.social about geographical representation and commute time's effect on candidate supply 🗳️🧭

📍Friday 16:50-18:30 in room 0A.01

PhD Scholarship at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen (UCPH): Citizens’ Agenda-Setting in Democratic Systems (CASDS)

CfA: PhD scholarship in political theory @ucph.bsky.social

Part of my project "Citizens' Agenda-Setting in Democratic Systems," which will explore how citizens should participate in making political agendas

Apply by Aug. 3, 2025
➡️ employment.ku.dk/all-vacancie...

#PolTheory #demoinno

Tak for de pæne ord Søren!

The deadline is approaching (5 June)! So, I am just reposting this once more... Perhaps it can reach a few more junior scholars interested in lobbying?

Thanks Federica! And absolutely agree—reviewers very reasonably pushed me to discuss scope constraints