Speech-as-Data

This paper asks how patron–client ties among officials affect information flows inside bureaucratic hierarchies. The authors argue that lower-level officials with patronage ties to higher-level leaders undertake informal information campaigns—sending signals of diligence and defending themselves—to compete for favors. Drawing on newly assembled Chinese sources, including a corpus of internal emails between city patrons and county clients and original data on county governments’ public replies to citizen complaints, the study compares communication patterns between client and non-client counties. The contribution is a descriptive account showing greater upward communication from client counties without detectable differences in public-facing complaint responses.

This study asks how gender and status shape conversational dynamics in parliament and highlights interactional asymmetries as a mechanism of marginalization. Using parliamentary question-and-answer exchanges from Croatia, the authors analyze how MPs adjust the frequency, length and depth of engagement depending on the gender and executive status of interlocutors. The contribution frames withholding speech and abbreviated engagement as a form of non-cooperation that can reproduce parliaments as masculine institutions while shaping oversight quality.