… As earlier findings indicate, our research shows that politicians from socially liberal parties use more complex language than politicians from socially conservative parties.
We analyzed 381,609 speeches delivered by politicians from Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. These speeches include not only those of 12 prime ministers but also those given in these countries’ parliaments and party congresses.
We used an automated method that evaluated each speech using the Flesch-Kincaid test. This measure was initially developed by education researchers to score readability of a text, expressed as the years of schooling required to understand a given text without difficulty. CONT.
Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher & Bert N. Bakker, Monkey Cage