Tag: Cultural liberalism

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. They found that culturally liberal politicians tended to use more complex language in their speeches. “We find that speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties. We find this evidence by analyzing 381,609 speeches given by politicians from five parliaments, by twelve European prime ministers, as well as speeches from party congresses over time and across countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden). “For instance, our scores show that former culturally liberal British Prime Minister Gordon Brown delivered speeches that were markedly more complex than his successor, the culturally conservative David Cameron.” “We saw the same thing in Spain, where the language used by liberal Prime Minister José Zapatero was much more complex than that of his successor, the conservative Mariano Rajoy,” Schoonvelde explained. First, it would be interesting to study the differences in language complexity by politicians of the same political party. Or do they do this because their language use actually reflects differences in the personality of these politicians,” Bakker said. The study, “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches”, was authored by Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher, Bert N. Bakker.