Simple politics for the people? Complexity in campaign messages and political knowledge

Abstract

Which parties use simple language in their campaign messages, and do simple campaign messages resonate with voters’ information about parties? This study introduces a novel link between the language applied during election campaigns and citizens’ ability to position parties in the ideological space. To this end, how complexity of campaign messages varies across parties as well as how it affects voters’ knowledge about party positions is investigated. Theoretically, it is suggested that populist parties are more likely to simplify their campaign messages to demarcate themselves from mainstream competitors. In turn, voters should perceive and process simpler campaign messages better and, therefore, have more knowledge about the position of parties that communicate simpler campaign messages. The article presents and validates a measure of complexity and uses it to assess the language of manifestos in Austria and Germany in the period 1945–2013. It shows that political parties, in general, use barely comprehensible language to communicate their policy positions. However, differences between parties exist and support is found for the conjecture about populist parties as they employ significantly less complex language in their manifestos. Second, evidence is found that individuals are better able to place parties in the ideological space if parties use less complex campaign messages. The findings lead to greater understanding of mass‐elite linkages during election campaigns and have important consequences for the future analysis of manifesto data.

Liberals Lecture, Conservatives Communicate: analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 speeches

“…These effect sizes are thus generally small. But this is in line with the political psychology literature that studies the association between ideology language use of politicians and other elites [9,10,12]. Fig 2a thus provides consistent evidence that the link between ideology and language complexity exists across countries; where speech complexity appears to be increasing over time.…”

“…Conservative political bloggers use less complex language than their liberal counterparts [10] and conservative citizens use language that scores lower on integrative complexity than liberal citizens [11]. The only study outside of the AngloSaxon context finds that politicians from the Alternative for Germany-a populist, culturally conservative party-use simpler language than mainstream politicians [12].…”

The Sound of Rebellion: Voting Dissent and Legislative Speech in the UK House of Commons

“…During the nineteenth century, extension of the franchise in the United Kingdom led frontbenchers to appeal to new voters through simpler parliamentary rhetoric (Spirling ). Currently, members of populist parties use simpler language in both campaigns and in parliament (Bischof and Senninger ; Brosius et al. ).…”

“…Recent studies have argued, for example, that simpler language is associated with the expansion of the franchise in the 19th United Kingdom, as cabinet ministers, in particular, attempted to make themselves comprehensible to new voters (Spirling ). Others have demonstrated that populist politicians use less complex language to distinguish themselves from other politicians and to reach voters (Bischof and Senninger ; Brosius et al ; Lin and Osnabrügge ). And, of course, much literature in the American context suggests that the tone and rhetoric of politics and campaigns can impact voter engagement and turnout (e.g., Ansolabehere and Iyengar ; Lau and Pomper ).…”

Friends With Text as Data Benefits: Assessing and Extending the Use of Automated Text Analysis in Political Science and Political Psychology

“…Sentiment analysis can assess the level and direction of emotional arousal in a text, as well as the presence of specific discrete emotions (usually: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise). Much of this work is based on dictionaries, such as the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) (Bradley Hermann (1980Hermann ( , 2002 Complexity is another feature of text that is occasionally analyzed in political science (Hermann 2002;Thoemmes and Conway III 2007;Tetlock 1981;Conway et al 2014;Bischof and Senninger 2017). In its most basic form, complexity is measured as the number of words per sentence, and the length of the words in the sentences.…”