New research from Europe has found that culturally liberal politicians use more complex language than their socially conservative counterparts. The findings have been published in the open-access scientific journal PLOS One.
“Many have ridiculed Donald Trump for his use of simple language with low levels of linguistic complexity. The Washington Post, for instance, reported that Trump “speaks like a 5th grader” (here), while other politicians used language as complex as that of 6th-8th grader,” said study author Bert N. Bakker (@bnbakker) of the University of Amsterdam.
“Beyond its headline-grabbing appeal, this finding speaks to the more general claim in political science (and psychology) that conservative politicians use simpler, less complex language than liberals. See for instance the intriguing work by Philip Tetlock (1983 and 1984) and John Jost (2016) on the topic.”
“We were wondering how their findings that liberals and conservatives differ in their language complexity would translate into the European party system where parties don’t only differ on more than one ideological dimension,” Bakker said.
The researchers used the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which is based on average sentence length and average number of syllables per word, to analyze political speeches from European countries between 1946-2017. They found that culturally liberal politicians tended to use more complex…
