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

There is some evidence that liberal politicians use more complex language than conservative politicians. This evidence, however, is based on a specific set of speeches of US Congress members and UK members of Parliament. This raises the question whether the relationship between ideology and linguistic complexity is a more general phenomenon or specific to this small group of politicians. To address this question, this paper analyzes 381,609 speeches from five parliaments, from twelve European prime ministers, and from party congresses across time and across countries. Our results replicate and generalize these earlier findings: speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties. Economic left-right differences, on the other hand, are not systematically linked to linguistic complexity.

现有研究指出，自由派政治家相较于保守派政治家，倾向于使用更为复杂的语言。然而，这一论断的依据仅限于美国国会议员和英国议会成员的特定演讲集。这引发了关于意识形态与语言复杂度之间关系是普遍现象，还是仅限于这一小群政治家的疑问。为解答此问题，本文对来自五个议会、十二位欧洲首相以及跨越不同国家和时代的政党大会的381,609篇演讲进行了分析。研究结果证实并推广了早期的发现：文化上倾向于自由主义的政党发言人相较于文化上倾向于保守主义的政党发言人，其语言更为复杂。另一方面，经济左派与右派之间的差异并未系统地与语言复杂度相关联。