These applications share one trait: They equate important substantive characteristics of political, economic, or legal communication-such as clarity or sophistication-with indexes such as the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) score (Flesch 1948). Finally, as a meta‐analysis to defend against charges of elitism and jargon (e.g., Kristof 2014), Cann, Goelzhauser, and Johnson ( 2014) show that while the reading ease of articles in the top political science journals has declined since 1910, the typical political science article requires less reading ability than the average article in Time Magazine or Reader's Digest. Studying postwar Austrian and German elections, Bischof and Senninger ( 2018) find that simpler manifestos make for better‐informed voters. In the context of the British parliament, Spirling ( 2016) applies readability measures to document the democratizing effects of franchise reform on elite speeches. Likewise, Owens and Wedeking ( 2011) and Spriggs ( 1996) examine the complexity of Supreme Court decisions, pointing to the importance of clarity in court opinions. Jansen ( 2011), for instance, studies the reading level of communications from four central banks, equating lower reading levels of bank communication with greater clarity, which they link to positive effects on the volatility of financial market returns. 1īy contrast, and with more optimistic conclusions, other social science studies have used measures of textual complexity to link linguistic sophistication to outcomes, with a focus on the concrete benefits of clarity. Such concerns are echoed in popular presentations, and it is not uncommon to see media analysis assessing political speeches in terms of the (purported lower) school grade level required to understand them. Typically as part of a broader discussion concerning “dumbing down” (Gatto 2002), scholars have applied measures of textual complexity from educational fields to find that the sophistication of political language has steadily decreased over the past 200 years (e.g., Lim 2008). At the same time that the challenges of governing have grown in complexity, the sophistication of political speech, by many measures, appears to have declined.

We reanalyze the State of the Union corpus to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using our improved approach, including the ability to compare complexity as a function of covariates.Ī key concern in the study of politics is how the nature of political communication has changed. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and rescaled to political texts in a way that facilitates probabilistic comparisons. This includes previously excluded features such as parts of speech and a measure of word rarity derived from dynamic term frequencies in the Google Books data set. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text snippets and incorporate these results into a statistical model of sophistication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. Political scientists lack domain‐specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication.

Lucius smith lowe political views