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.

Does electoral accountability shape not only what legislators say, but how they emote? Drawing on variation generated by a mixed-member electoral system, we argue that electoral accountability pressures systematically induce strategic emotional displays in legislative settings. Legislators elected in single-member districts face stronger personal accountability than party-list legislators, incentivizing visible criticism and vigilance as signals of responsiveness. We test this argument using a newly constructed multimodal dataset that integrates automated video-based emotion recognition, legislative transcripts, and biographical metadata for individual legislators, drawn from the full universe of plenary sessions—over 784 sessions (over 1,750 total hours)—of the Korean National Assembly between 2010 and 2025. We find a systematic relationship between electoral institutions and affective performance: legislators elected from single-member districts exhibit higher levels of adversarial emotional expression than proportional-representation legislators, and among district-elected legislators, those representing more electorally competitive constituencies exhibit higher levels of emotionally charged opposition. Exploiting within-legislator transitions from party-list to district seats, we further show that the same individuals increase their use of emotionally charged opposition as they move to district seats, strengthening a causal interpretation of the relationship between electoral incentives and emotional performance.

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: