Hello Everyone,
Please read the the Windsor and Windsor (in preparation) article and write a discussion board post by 9PM Monday, October 3rd. Leah will present on this research so your discussion posts can lead you to ask questions in the class portion, but also in directing questions towards Leah in the public presentation.
I am excited to discuss the ideas with you at 3PM on Wednesday, October 5th. Expect an email shortly with the article attached.
Hope you are all well!
Best,
Dr. Braasch
It is interesting that this paper takes real-world instances of speech-giving as its primary data, rather than first relying on an artificial experimental situation.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like there is an implicit bias: democracy = good, non-democracy = bad. This can be seen through the opposed terms "democratization";"backsliding," and through the claims that formal language is used by non-democratic leaders because of their inherent weakness or powerlessness. I'm not sure that these biases are well-grounded, let alone make for good scientific analysis. I'm not sure if the bias makes a difference later on, but thought it seemed noteworthy.
An argument from the text:
P1: If formality is a reflection of a the personality of some particular, then we would not find systematic differences in formality between regime types.
P2:We do find systematic differences in formality between regime types.
C: Therefore, formality is not a reflection of the personalities of particular leaders.
This argument is valid, but P1 is neither obviously true nor supported in the text. It might be that authoritarian leaders, for example, have personality traits in common (the paper, I think, even suggests this), such as desire for power or authority. The same made be said of democratic leaders, at least qua public faces. Systemic differences in formality might be a function of systemic differences in personality. Another way to make the point may be that authoritarian leaders are more "personalistic" (a claim supported in the text), "combative" or self-serving and that democratic leaders are (at least prima facie) more other-serving, and that formality is a function of this difference in directedness. The bottom line is that leader personality traits and regime type might be interrelated in systematic ways, and that making a distinction between these as cause of formality does not strike me as particularly helpful. It seems like throughout the article, we see how close these notions come to one another, despite the early attempt to separate them.
Relatedly, it seems odd not to construe formality as itself a structure and exercise of power, and instead ONLY as reflecting institutionalization. It seems to be at least both.
The "formula" for formality seems to be too simplistic; it is not obvious that formality really just is an average of certain characteristics. There are likely to be lower bounds on some characteristics or other, and these characteristics may differ in regard to their necessity or sufficiency for formality.
The data in general is very interesting. The claim, based on the data, that "more abstract language should appeal to a wide audience because it is incumbent upon the listener to interpret the meaning of the concept" is really, really cool.
I sometimes have a hard time wrapping my head around a corpus analysis as it pretty much is a VERY intense meta-analysis with texts! However, the topic being tackled here was very interesting and of course very timely. This paper did a fantastic job of first teaching and then explaining—which when you begin throwing around topics like referential cohesion having a decent amount of background knowledge can only be beneficial! One thing that bugs me a bit with corpus analyses is that so much of the paper is devoted to textual breakdown (which they did a fantastic job with and was very well organized in breaking down each of the 5 facets and presenting data on each facet) that it leaves very little room for what the results of the meta analyses really mean. I felt like the data set was so unbelievably rich and to make the final take home message that different regimes use different spoken language based on the constraints of the nations they represent, the audience they want to reach, and their stances on different topics, felt a bit obvious in a way. It just felt like the analyses confirmed something that most people already figured was correct.
ReplyDeleteShifting into replication gear, I felt this paper and type of research is fascinating in that analyses such as these are most likely highly replicable in that the same constraints the authors identified in language use will most likely continue to be in place so long as a a given regime continues to function as it usually does (i.e. democracy vs. non-democracy). Though it would be highly unusual, it would be interesting to see how the language of a speaker may change if they become an ambassador to a different country or something along those lines and to see if their language reflects the constraints of the new or old country or regime that they represent or represented.
This week reading is very interesting for for two main important reason, 1) current topic of this article is in the talking point because of the coming presidential election in November 2016, and 2) the author did a nice job organizing the paper and made it readable to general reader. This paper we introduce a new dataset of leaders’ speeches before the General Assembly for the 59th to 69th United Nations General Assembly sessions, using semantic analysis to evaluate the differences between authoritarian and democratic leaders’ speeches.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to see that the leaders’ from democratic countries use less formal language for two reasons: first, intentionally using less formal language is deliberate; and second, it reflects shared common ground with other democracies who believe in the same political philosophy. I did not the any difference with common practices of a democratic country leaders that I experienced so far that the author mentioned above.
“Democracies use less formal language than non-democracies”- the author mentioned this as a core findings of the article. As citizen of a democratic country I also felt the same. So when I was reading this article I was asking a to myself, why democracies use less formal language? And I got the the answer right after that- the script of the democratic leaders’ are specifically written to be less formal so they apply to a broader audience and to reflect the common ground they share with other democracies. On the other hand, the author also presents few very good examples of using more honorifics and deferential language when a non democratic leader address in a bigger platform like UNGA (e.g. Language used in 2009 by the Ethiopian representative).
This paper also states that democratic and non-democratic regimes use very different linguistic strategies in international forums. In terms of leader’s speech wise more more institutionalized regimes have more bureaucratic and advisory oversight. However, less institutionalized regimes or traditional govt. system have less bureaucratic and advisory oversight overall, leading to the use of more formal language.
I thought this article was extremely interesting, and I'm really excited to hear Dr. Windsor's presentation on it! I thought it was so cool that different types of world leaders use different kinds of language in international forums. Democratic leaders tend to use more informal language, as they are generally more accepted by their peers. Regime leaders, on the other hand, use formal language, perhaps as a way to appear legitimate to others. Also, I had no idea there were so many different types of regimes! I had to look them all up to understand the slight differences between them. This article is relevant to discuss now because we are in the midst of a presidential election, and this data shows that how a leader speaks conveys a lot about the nation they represent.
ReplyDeleteOne question I have about the article is whether the speeches given at the UN are given in English or in the speaker's native language. If all of the speeches were in English, assuming it is the speaker's second language, that might account for some of the overly formal language used. It would also explain a decrease in imagery and story-telling. The authors didn't address this point, so I'm curious!
I would love to see an analysis like this performed on presidential candidates, to see how their language makes them appear to the general public. I think I heard that Dr. Windsor conducts research along those lines, so I'm hoping she touches on it a little in her presentation. It would also be interesting to see how a politician's language changes throughout their career, and if their speeches become less formal as they become more accepted as a member of the political party or community. Can't wait to discuss this article in class!
This article is very different from other articles because it was not conducted based on an experiment, and the data was collected from a real international forum, which is new to me. The authors tested two hypotheses through semantic analysis on authoritarian and democratic leaders’ speeches, the first hypothesis is that “Countries with more institutional constraints (democracies) should use less formal language than those with fewer constraints (non-democracies)”, and the second hypothesis is that “Authoritarian regimes should use more formal language than democratic regimes”. However, these two hypotheses seem to convey the same meaning, which is that democratic regimes tend to use less formal language than non-democratic regimes.
ReplyDeleteWhen authors mentioned that linguistic style matters because it provides information about the speakers’ group membership and audience, then the authors focus on the political factors that influenced leaders speech. I wonder whether there are other important reasons that can also lead to the leaders language, such as the culture of the country, the economic status of the country comparing other countries. For example, people from Asian countries such as China are less direct in the way of communication than people from western countries, which may be one reason why syntax complexity increases from democratic to non-democratic. But it is a more cultural difference, just based on my guess.
As regards to replication, I think it is a very interesting topic to use semantic analysis to evaluate differences between authoritarian and democratic leaders’ speeches. To replicate the study, I would be curious to know the differences between people’s speeches that are influenced by institutional features. For example, presidential debate, the differences between leaders’ speeches from developing countries and developed countries, or the leader’s speeches between non-profit organizations and profit organizations.
Agreeing with what seems to be the consensus, I also enjoyed this article! It seems like common sense that different styles of leadership would lead to different speaking styles, but I had never looked into research on this topic. I think the findings were quite interesting, but slightly simplified. I second what Edward mentioned...there were definitely some implicit biases at work here. While we in the United States obviously consider a democracy the best form of government, that is not a universal sentiment and I have a difficult time accepting it as such. I wonder how this data would have been interpreted by a researcher in a non-democratic ("not free," according to the article) country.
ReplyDeleteThe timeliness of this article is somewhat comical. I find it very interesting how presidential candidate Donald Trump has been continuously criticized for his lack of fancy words and complicated syntax when he speaks, especially since according to this article, that is exactly how he should be speaking! Regardless of which candidate you support, it’s difficult to disagree with the fact that Mr. Trump’s speech is very informal when compared to Secretary Clinton’s. Like the article pointed out, this informal speech is used to appeal to the masses, which would explain why Mr. Trump has an amount of support that most never expected.
While the research at hand basically eliminated the possibility of individual differences having an effect, I think cultural background may have something to do with these differences in speech as well. I think it’s crucial to take into consideration cultural differences between more individualistic or collectivistic countries, as this will no doubt influence the way in which politicians speak. I don’t think we can simply chalk up speech differences to differences in government.
As far as replication goes, I would really like to see data like this interpreted at the level of Republicans and Democrats here in the United States. I think it would be very interesting to see how each candidate uses different tactics to appeal to their intended audience, or how the candidates change their speech to appeal to the entire country nearing election time.
This article was certainly distinct from all other readings thus far and provided an opportunity to step outside my comfort zone within psychology. It also represented a fairly significant shift from the controlled laboratory environment to the messy, but more ecologically valid, world outside. As such, it provided an opportunity to try to tease apart a more natural study.
ReplyDeleteThere were a number of explanations put forth by the researchers which seemed to be very effective at explaining the variability in linguistic formality. I felt the discussion of advisory influence was particularly useful in explaining this phenomenon. In democratic countries, it is easy to see the heated debates which occur between parties, as well as the spectrum of variation between the individual representatives of these parties. It makes sense, then, that this diverse input would influence the content and form of the leaders’ speech. For instance, if an economic plan is put forth and advisors are allowed to heatedly debate its value, more diverse opinions will be shared which allows the leader to see what the best possible methods of persuasion are, as well as which concerns need to be addressed. Conversely, as suggested in the reading, advisors in a more autocratic society may be more likely to blindly support the leaders plans.
Although the rationale was very logically sound, this is one area where the noise from a more ecological study presents some limitations. They were able to demonstrate the proposed relationship between linguistic formality and the levels of freedom; however, there are many questions which remain regarding the cause of this relationship. Correlation and regression are quite useful in describing this relationship, but without experimental manipulation, it is hard to see any support for one explanation (e.g. the role of the advisors) over another (e.g. power differentials or the intended purpose of their speech). Understandably, however, it would be extremely difficult to analyze this phenomenon in a laboratory, so the methods employed are appropriate. It may be informative, though, to dive into the subjective/qualitative underpinnings of these findings. For example, what was going on in each country at that time? Were the autocratic leaders requesting something (e.g. financial assistance)? If so, it seems that this relationship may be the result of the power differential between countries. That is, as described in the introduction, subordinates use more formal speech to supervisors, so perhaps this is what is occurring here.
To be clear, these latter points were just speculation to illustrate some of the consequences of a more ecologically valid study in contrast to its fairly obvious benefits in generalizability (which might be a word).
Reading through this week's article, a few things came to mind. First, I noticed that the language used in the article portrayed "democratic" nations as credible, possessing "inherent legitimacy" (p. 6), while "non-democratic" nations were depicted as virtually unilaterally illegitimate, which could explain certain language use if similar views constitute the milieu of the UN. That is, a context in which certain nations are inherently discredited prior to speaking could elicit and perpetuate patterns in its own right. The authors also use the terms “non-democratic” and “authoritarian” interchangeably throughout most of the text, which incites me to wonder how many of the non-democratic nations operate in an authoritarian manner as typically defined and in which ways. What one considers to be truly authoritarian or self-serving could vary significantly by researcher, altering how nations are categorized at any given point in time. This becomes increasingly vague if one considers authoritarian practices rather than broad categorizations. For instance, Cuba has been depicted in America as a caricature of the pitfalls of Communism, with a wealthy ruling class rising from a façade of social unity to subjugate citizens for personal gain. Yet, how this differs from Corporatocracy aside from the level of obfuscation in the means of application alludes me. Further, authoritarianism may vary greatly depending on the population toward which practices are focused; America may seem as a whole minimally authoritarian domestically, though this may not be true for certain domestic sub-groups (e.g. women, minorities, LGBT individuals, etc.), while considerably more authoritarian internationally (e.g. American dealings with the entire Middle East, treatment of Puerto Rico and Samoa, etc.). This is further complicated by the expanded categorization of nations into “not free”, “partially free”, and “free”, as some of the countries included under the "partially free" label may operate as democracies while not portraying all traits of a “western” democracy. In terms of replication, I imagine that these issues could elicit discrepancies depending on the culture and nationality of the researchers conducting the study. Given that even those living within more typically “western” democracies may hold different perspectives of democratic practices and ideal qualities (e.g. American portrayals of Scandinavian and Eastern European democracies), I wonder what underlying differences may exist and how researcher bias may influence the interpretation of such differences.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I wonder if it is possible to incorporate complementary information to provide a better foundation for the assumptions underlying the interpretations. For instance, the study assumes that the institutionalization of the countries included in the analyses differs depending on governance and that institutionalization constrains the language of democratic leaders. Some measure of the policies and practices comprising such differences may shed light on whether these assumptions are fully justified. In addition, supplemental information may help explain why greater constraints relate with more informal speech. The article suggests that constraining and revising speeches in democratic countries tailors them to serve certain purposes, for which levying in-group feeling is beneficial, but I am unsure of the extent to which this portrays differences in regime type over differences in culture, as all speeches are being catered to the inherently American and European system which structures the UN. This issue is further compounded by the problem that many of the non-democratic countries fall within similar economic statuses and socio-historical contexts, with no North American or European countries considered authoritarian.
Despite my lack of knowledge with language, I really enjoyed this article. I was initially thrown off when the article skipped straight to data and then the methods, but I really enjoyed reading about this meta-analysis. While a little over my head in term of statistical analysis, I can see how beneficial this type of study can be in terms of research as it really extends to real-life situations. Obviously, this type of external validity is difficult to achieve in some areas of research but this study seems to embrace the real-life application of their data and results. I also appreciated the background and informational provided, as it was very well organized and allowed for a conceptual understanding of how they were defining formal language and its place in this study. I do agree, this paper definitely leaned in favor of a democracy and I wonder if this would change if the research was done in a non-democratic setting/country.
ReplyDeleteWith the upcoming election, I wonder how this analysis would look if done on strictly presidential candidates and how they produce speech when addressing the general public. While it would be interesting to see how they speak at debates, conventions, etc. I feel it would be more eye-opening to look at how they are speaking to the public in a more personal way. For instance, how do they answer the questions of the people, not an interviewer such as Lester Holt? How would their speech present itself if they were speaking to a group of college students in a student union? Or a town hall meeting where cameras aren’t allowed? What types of language would be see in these situations? I would assume the formality of their language would decrease depending on the status of the audience, location, and media coverage of the event.
This paper was the most difficult for me to read so far. I was surprised since I've read a lot of NLP papers and have even looked at some of the second author's math papers on ergodic theory (which I understand better than this... ha). I think it is the domain-specific words that are making it difficult.
ReplyDeleteThe only takeaway I really got is that official's of rich countries give speeches using different words than official's of poor countries. Although the authors keep making the distinction between democratic countries and not, looking at Fig. 8 makes me think it could just as easily be rich vs poor.
I'm really unclear what the implications for this could be. The only thing the authors say is "leaders of democracies should be more concerned with this than leaders of authoritarian regimes." But why should they be concerned with this? Based on Fig. 8, most of the countries are more formal, so it would be rather rare to be communicating with the informal countries anyway, if all else is equal.
While I knew that the reading was meant to be about political discourse, it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. From the outset, it seemed very clear that there were some underlying research biases that were present, insofar as the language painted a picture of democracy and “non-democracy” in a very value-laden manner. These biases kind of soured the article for me, because I feel like these sorts of ideological skews should not be present in scientific literature. With that said, I think that it would be interesting to see the results that might arise and which factor would be evaluated if such a study were to be directly replicated with a researcher with opposing biases—like say, one that is from one of these non-democratic countries.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, it appears that there’s some notions of formal/informal speech that I’m wondering might just be accounted for by cultural factors—It’s well known that many Asian cultures generally speak with more deference, and their being democratic or not might have nothing to do with the political discourse. Furthermore, I thought it was strange that they made a claim about “linguistic simplicity” and “syntactical complexity” as evidence for disingenuous speech—Rather than independently validating the information presented as the measure of authenticity.
Conceptually speaking, some of the claims seemed to be intuitive in a way, and perhaps what you would expect the results to be. I wasn’t shocked by their results, but I do think that there could be innumerable confounds that would prevent a substantially reliable analysis of the information. I think that the venue in which the speech was analyzed (in a UN general debate assembly) might also reflect differential formality, in that most of the non-democratic countries are in less positions of political and economic power (given that most of them were in poorer regions) and feel the need to be more informal in order to have an appearance of respect that might influence the more powerful, democratic nations. It might have something to do with trying to “legitimize” their regime, but I think that it still easily could be explained by other factors.
I know we aren't meant to read posts ahead of time, but I wanted to get a measure of how everyone had felt about this article up to this point. One particular thread that seems to be emerging that I would like to address the appropriateness of value-laden research. This has been a particularly fascinating question for me in Political Science. It doesn't take much work to realize that much of what is assigned in graduate Political Science departments comes from a specific group, and that a number of value laden judgments can be made (although these have a serious history of debate within the field).
ReplyDeleteThe question of how to even define democracy has been particularly vexing. It can be almost impossible to not impose your own value judgments in creating and proposing measures in a field such as democratization. What is "free" or "democracy" to you? Is it merely a minimalist definition whereby procedural rules that guarantee elections exist? To what extent are those elections expected to be frequent and fair (and what do we mean by fair?)? Do we, as is typical in the west, associate democracy with a number of personal and political freedoms that may not fit other cultural conceptions of democracy? Certain cultures that are more collectivist in nature may not see these rights as essential to "democracy."
I think in this light, it is important to remember that much of the study of politics occurs in an arena of such social complexity, that creating any measures at all without any sense of bias is hard. The important thing to do is approach the study of politics as openly about your measures as you can. If we make certain normative judgments, we need to be as transparent as possible.
Onto other concepts from the article. I do agree that confounding variables may help explain or explain entirely the differences we see between regime types. Culture is certainly something to be considered. Getting into causal mechanisms can be extremely challenging in this method of research. We would hope a strong theoretical grounding would help to lead us to accurate conclusions, but even in the best designed theory, this can be challenging.
It would certainly be interesting to evaluate the claims about institutionalization in another forum by comparing the language used by agents of differing organizations with different institutionalization and organizational culture. Replicating this study within a different domain would be highly informative.
The speeches sampled in this paper were only from annual addresses given at the United Nations General Assembly. I would be curious to know if these findings generalize to speeches given at other venues in other contexts. From what I read in this paper, it sounded like leaders of democratic countries and non-democratic countries separately both use informal language when they are speaking to their own populations, but when speaking to each other, democratic countries use informal language while non-democratic countries use formal language. This change comes from a given leader’s different objectives for their different speeches based on their audiences. Toward the beginning of the paper, the authors mention that previous research has looked at leaders of democratic countries and leaders of non-democratic countries in isolation, but I am curious whether or not previous research has analyzed multiple leaders of democratic countries across different speech contexts (in front of different audiences). It would be interesting to see a study directly comparing one country across different outlets to see if leaders of non-democratic countries actually do speak differently in different contexts in front of different audiences.
ReplyDeleteI think some examples of more formal and less formal speeches or texts would have made it easier for me to wrap my head around some of the concepts that were constantly being referenced in this paper, like cohesion and narrativity. The authors did descriptively explain the concepts that makes something more or less formal, but I think some examples would have made it more intuitive. Also, some of the formality variables were in the opposite direction as the authors had predicted. I would have liked to see their interpretation of why this occurred.
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ReplyDeleteThis article was rather different from previous ones. Before reading, I was a bit worried about this article since I don't have any academic knowledge about politics. Lucky for me, this article was well-organized and message was clear. Democratic leaders use less formal language in order to share common ground with other democracies and to seek support for their perspectives. Their tone of speech is conversational and they use peripheral route of persuasion to appeal emotions. Also, democratic leaders are restricted and influenced by regimes and inner circle. On the other hand, authoritarian leaders use more formal language to defend themselves. Authoritarian leaders employed central, direct route to persuasion and they are less constrained by domestic rule or audiences.
ReplyDeleteFrom topic to results, this article was new to me, but interesting to read because this article tried to provide a feasible results that political positions affect their language and academic proofs. Actually, results consistent with my general impression about political speeches. However, I think that we should be careful to generalize these result. Authors examined languages in terms of regimes in real situation (UNGA), so I think observing real situation is rather tricky to control, and there are lots of spaces to contaminate the results by unexpected factors. And, the language of political leaders is subject to topic of forum or their political stance at that time. Therefore, I think that in order to expand the results here, we need more experiments and observation in various political circumstances.
In terms of replication, I am curious that what result I would obtain if I look into linguistic differences between different academic fields. Under interdisciplinary feature of neuroscience, I encountered many people from different academic fields, from mathematics and computer science to economics, even painting major. When we work on same project, I, actually we all, felt that each one uses different language on the same thing. For example, when we talk about brain signal, I said electrical transduction in neuron, the mathematics major brought up Gaussian function, and the painting major said prism (I still don’t know why he thought prism though…). I am not sure language difference in academic fields is as important as those in politics, but it seems interesting if I would replicate this study. Also, I am curious whether we can obtain consistent results if replicate this research in more controlled experimental settings such as assessing political leaders’ spontaneous speech in the lab without audience, just imagine making public speech.
As always, I am looking forward to hearing Leah talk on this in more depth. The state the draft is in shows that this is very fresh stuff, and an interesting topic too!
ReplyDeleteThat being said, there are some general questions I have regarding the data analyses, especially since linguistics is nowhere near my strong suit. Perhaps it is because the paper is in the draft stage, but it seems like this study/paper was much more informal than ones we have previously encountered. To that extent, I am curious how the “Formality” equation on page 18 works. How valid and reliable is this equation for measuring formality of speech? Has it been used or tested in previous research? Is it an established part of the Coh-Metrix tool used, or did the researchers come up with the formula and input it into this tool? Could it be used to properly analyze formality of not only these speeches, other types of speech, such as online conversations or fictional books? These are all questions I would like to know when keeping replication in mind.
Additionally, I accidentally saw Ed’s post when I got on Blogger, and noticed “bias.” I had the same thought run through my head reading over this, and was curious how interpretations from someone in a democratic society could be heavily influenced by such bias. This made me think, what if someone from a non-democratic society were to interpret the same results? I guess the informality of the paper makes me curious how much is based on assumptions and how much is based on research.
I think this will be a very interesting discussion week, and look forward to it.
This article was really interesting. I wasn’t aware of the differences in speech performance between authoritarian and democratic leaders. I think it is very insightful that the author noticed this. The fact that democratic leaders tend to use more informal language, but to script it more, was very unexpected. While I was unaware what would be in this particular article, I had an idea from what Jason had mentioned during class. I would have thought that authoritarian leaders would have adopted informal language more so than democratic leaders, almost like a middle school bully trying to seem nonchalant to a teacher. But in this case, the teacher would be the United Nations General Assembly. I’m glad I was wrong and that it turns out that authoritarian leaders use more formal language, because of the implications pointed out by the author. Specifically, the idea of the “in-group” of democracies being able to chat like old friends, while nondemocracies having to defend each part of their speech and give explanations for each piece, gives me hope that authoritarian styles of government really will someday die out. I also didn’t really understand how they were able to analyze formality of language, but that’s more than likely due to my own lack of expertise and experience. I have a hard time imagining how to “weight” words, which worries me as to the articles validity. Again, though, it’s likely due to the fact I have not had exposure to this topic before.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t fully understand how they were able to control for differences between leaders. They said they “used the Beta 4.0 version of Archigos data set that provides information about leader age and time in office.” I see how that could help somewhat, since demographics of some sort are always good to include, but what about how one authoritarian leader differs from another in policy? A Stalin vs Kim Jong Un perspective would have been interesting to look at. I guess the Gastil Index helps with that, but I still don’t fully understand how that works. It would have been nice if they could have provided some more information regarding their methods rather than assuming prior knowledge. I assume the Gastil Index is a fairly well known one, but I’ve never heard of it before this paper. I think one reason they weren’t able to find a significant difference between “Partly Free” and “Not Free” nations was that, of course, the entire thing falls on a spectrum, so it may be that most “Partly Free” nations are more “Not Free” than “Free.”
As far as replication goes, it would be interesting to see if they could similar differences between more true democracies (like India) and republics or parliamentary democracies (like the US or the UK). Similarly, as I mentioned above, would there be differences between nondemocratic countries, such as between Russia and North Korea?