Do Politicians Accommodate their Parliamentary Speeches to Voters? Complexity in Political Speech of Parliamentary Party Members in the Czech Republic

It was found that parties accommodate their texts and speeches to their listeners. For example, rightist and green parties that aim to attract more sophisticated voters prepare more comprehensive and less readable manifestos than letfist parties (Dolezal et al. 2012), conservative politicians make less complex statements than liberal ones (Tetlock 1983). Once elected, parties are expected to represent their voters in parliament. Even when parliamentary speeches are intended to other legislators, they are public, and as such, they can serve a source of evaluation for voters. Parliamentary representatives should speak in the language that is accessible to their voters to understand them and feel represented. In the proposed paper, we ask: do parliamentary party members accommodate the complexity of their pariamentary speeches to their voters? We follow the expectation that rightist parties focus on more sophisticated voters than the leftist parties. Additionally, we concern on the speech complexity of representatives of populist parties. The complexity of each politician speech is measured using the word variance and index of readability. We expect that representatives of rightist parties speak in a more complex way than representatives of leftist and populist parties (when controlled for speakers’ education level, political experience, ministerial position, issues, etc.). We test the expectation on the parliamentary speeches in four electoral periods in the Czech Republic (2006-2019) that proves sufficient variability in party types, and allows to test the effect on different populist parties.