Speaking for Their Own Audience: Complexity of MP’s Speeches According to the Sophistication of the Electorate

Giving speeches in parliamentary debates belongs to important MPs’ activities. They are public, so the parliamentary floor enables MPs’ statements to be presented and justified in front of the represented. As well, MPs are expected to be motivated electorally, which means that they speak in parliament to signal to voters that they are working for them, hoping to secure their reelection. This leads to expectable strategy of party MPs to accomodate the speeches to the audience they aim to attract. This paper asks if the politicians accomodate their parliamentary speeches to their expected audience? Complexity of speeches connected to the desired voters’ cognitive skills belongs to the underdeveloped dependent variables in the study of parliamentary speeches and this paper attempts to fill this gap. I expect that the MPs of parties that focus on the less educated electorate will speak in smaller complexity than MPs of parties that aim on more sophisticated voters. The hypothesis will be tested on the dataset of MPs speeches in the Czech Chamber of Deputies since 2002 as this time range enables sufficient variability of parties. The dependent variable is the complexity of speeches measuerd by the FOG index (general measure of the readability of texts), the explaining variable is the sophistication of voters measured by the post-electoral surveys. Among the control variables will be implemented individual features of MPs (political and parliamentary experience, parliamentary position, previous occupation, gender, age) and parties (government/opposition, parliamentary experience).