What explains cross-national variation in how citizens hold political elites accountable? This project argues that enduring differences in accountability are rooted in historically embedded leadership norms that shape expectations about how rulers should behave. To measure these norms, I construct a Leadership Norm Index (LNI) using a novel dataset of 1,542 texts spanning 59 countries and nearly five millennia. Using large language models, I code each text against 70 survey-style statements capturing normative expectations about rulers' personal conduct, responsiveness to subjects, adherence to law, deference to religion, and relationships with elites. To measure accountability, I assemble a new cross-national dataset of political leaders by systematically extracting biographical records of presidents and prime ministers over the past 50 years, tracking instances of misconduct and the consequences they face. Linking these data to the LNI, I show that societies whose intellectual traditions place greater emphasis on constraint-based leadership norms exhibit higher levels of political accountability, even after accounting for institutional, economic, and geographic factors.

Examines how electoral institutions shape legislators' emotional expression as a visible form of political accountability. Using multimodal evidence from South Korea's mixed-member system, this project shows that stronger personal accountability induces more adversarial emotional performance in legislative debate.

I construct the Leadership Norm Index (LNI), a cross-national measure of historically embedded leadership norms derived from pre-constitutional political texts. The index captures what canonical political thinkers across civilizations prescribed about how rulers should behave, and converts this textual content into comparable country-level normative profiles. The index is intended to support empirical research on the cultural determinants of political accountability and elite punishment. Codebook and replication materials will be made available upon publication. Currently, the corpus includes:

I maintain the Elite Scandal and Punishment Dataset, a cross-national database documenting political scandals and their institutional consequences for top political leaders. The dataset is intended to support empirical research on political accountability, elite behavior, and the conditions under which leaders face punishment for misconduct. Codebook and replication materials will be made available upon publication. Currently, the dataset includes:

A multimodal dataset of legislative speeches in South Korea’s 20th National Assembly (2016–2020), pairing video recordings with computationally extracted vocal and facial expression features. The dataset enables analysis of how legislators use emotional displays in parliamentary debate. Key features include:

A comprehensive corpus of presidential speeches spanning the entire history of the South Korean presidency. The dataset supports research on political rhetoric, executive communication, and the evolution of presidential discourse. Key features include: