Making comprehensible speeches when your constituents need it

Abstract

Parliamentary speech is a prominent avenue that political elites can use in parliament to communicate with the electorate. However, we have little understanding of how exactly Members of Parliament craft their speeches to communicate with the districts they represent. We expect that Members of Parliament adapt the comprehensibility of their speeches to their constituents’ linguistic skills since doing so facilitates effective communication. Using parliamentary speeches from the German Bundestag, we reveal that Members of Parliament tend to make their speeches less complicated when their constituents are relatively poor, less educated, and come from an immigration background. Our findings have important implications for the study of political representation and communication strategies.

Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches

“…Contributing to the validity of the Flesch-Kincaid scores for measuring language complexity, Merry [53, p.64] found that the Flesch-Kincaid scores “correspond(s) to the complexity of the content of communications; statements with low grade levels are fairly basic, while those with high grade levels are more difficult to understand.” More recently, studies used Flesch-Kincaid scores to show that when politicians speak to their constituents, they tailor their speech to their constituents’ linguistic skills. In other words, politicians use simpler language when appealing to less educated constituents with fewer linguistic skills [27, 54]. Along these lines, Flesch-Kincaid scores have been used to make the point that during WWII, U.S. President Roosevelt and Australian President Curtis “developed political communication to create the resemblance of a closer relationship between the nation’s leader and citizens” [55, p. 77].…”

Expression of Concern: Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches

“…Wang and colleagues found that the Flesch-Kincaid grade level was the most commonly used readability formula in medicine [3]. In political science, the measure is also widely used to examine political language [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Flesch-Kincaid is criticized for having weak construct validity, because it is "not based on theories of reading or comprehension but rather rely on statistical correlations to develop predictive power" [2].…”

Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments

“…This argument builds upon recent research, which shows that elites' rhetoric changes in response to voter incentives. Previous research provides evidence that politicians adapt the comprehensibility of their speeches to their constituents' linguistic skills to facilitate effective communication (Lin and Osnabrügge 2018;Slapin and Kirkland 2020;Spirling 2016). For example, ministers of the UK became significantly easier to understand, relative to backbenchers, immediately after the 1868 election, when the electorate doubled with the incorporation of mostly poorer and less educated voters (Spirling 2016).…”