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

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

📌

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

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