Speech data, August 2014 to August 2023

Why Leaders Talk about the West

What Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin say about the West, China, their neighbours and their own country's standing, passage by passage.

Start here

This page shows what we found when we labelled the three leaders' speeches, and lets you look at the labels and read the texts yourself, including for questions the paper does not ask.

How the labels were made

  1. Every labelled speech was cut into passages of three sentences, in Turkish, Russian, Hindi or English, as the leader spoke.
  2. A language model built for yes-or-no decisions (Jev, by TypeSafe) read each passage and answered a fixed set of questions about it, such as "Does the speaker criticize a policy of the United States?" For each question it gives how sure it is.
  3. We count an answer as yes when the model is at least 70% sure.
  4. To check the labels, five other language models answered the same questions for 420 passages. They agree with our labels on whether a passage criticizes someone about 19 times in 20, and on what a complaint is about roughly 4 times in 5.

Where to go next

Results for the paper
Our three tested expectations, shown as simple comparisons, with how sure we are of each.
Trends
How the labels add up year by year: whom each leader complains about, how, and about what.
Explore
Count any label among any group of passages, for new questions.
Search the texts
Find words or labels in the passages, read them in context, and translate them.
Raw data
Save the speech list, the labels and the texts as files.

Words used on this page

Passage
Three consecutive sentences of a speech. Every number on this page counts passages, or speeches with at least one such passage.
Complaint
The passage confronts a foreign actor, criticizes one of its policies, criticizes the actor itself (its intentions or character), or objects to its privileged place in an unequal world order.
Cooperation
The passage describes working together with a foreign actor, or a willingness to.
Claim to standing
The speaker says the country has, deserves or is regaining an important place, rank, respect or role in the world.
Complaint about respect
The speaker says the country is denied the standing, respect or voice it deserves.
The West
Labelled three ways: the West as a group (the West, Europe, the EU, NATO), a single Western country (such as Britain, France or Germany), and the United States. The paper's main definition counts all three.
Regional rival
Pakistan for Modi, Iran for Erdoğan, Ukraine for Putin.
Unnamed foreign actor
A foreign country or group the passage points to without naming it, such as "certain countries" or "those who cast an evil eye on our land".
At home, abroad
At home: rallies, addresses to the nation and party meetings. Abroad: speeches given abroad or before foreign guests. Other speeches (such as to parliament or to a domestic conference) are in neither group.
In every 100
Shares are written as "in every 100 passages" (or speeches): 6.5 in every 100 means 6.5%.

What the labels can and cannot tell you

  • Every label is a model's judgment of a passage. The models make mistakes: rarely on whether someone is criticized, more often on what a complaint is about.
  • Only speeches that mention a foreign country, group or institution were labelled, so shares are out of those passages and speeches.
  • 2014 starts in late August and 2023 ends in August, so those years hold fewer speeches.
  • The texts are shown as the leaders gave them. An English translation is a machine translation, made when you ask for it.

Texts come from the leaders' official websites. Putin's Russian texts come from the Kremlin transcripts compiled by Blinova et al. (2026), "Linked Multi-Modal Data on Russian Domestic and Foreign Policy Speeches", Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/SGI0VK. Please cite them when you use these texts.