Language Complexity in Parliament: Use and Effect of Simple Language Among Populist and Mainstream Actors in Parliamentary Debates

Populist politicians often claim that mainstream politics are too complex and far away from ‘ordinary’ citizens. Therefore, populist actors aim to be closer to the ‘ordinary’ citizens and act in their will. One strategy of populist actors is to simplify political problems. This can be achieved through oversimplification of complex problems, but also through using simpler language. Current studies are divided whether populist actors actually use simpler language in their rhetorical strategies or not. Thus, there is much theoretical and anecdotal evidence about the simplification of populist rhetoric. Also, quantitative evidence has been provided presenting, however, mixed results. This paper aims to shed light on these contradictory results by looking at parliamentary debates in Germany. Analyzing a huge text corpus of parliamentary debates from March 1991 to December 2018 this research paper aims to answer the following research questions: Do populist actors use simpler language than other political actors in parliamentary debates? And to what extend does simple language transmit between political actors leading to overall more simplified parliamentary debates? To answer the research questions quantitative text analysis strategies are employed using different measures of language complexity and political sophistication. The paper poses the hypothesis that populist actors use simpler language than other actors following their ideal of a simplified world between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Also, it argues that simple language does not transmit from populist actors towards mainstream actors. It rather has the opposite effect.