Publication Type
Book Chapter
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
5-2019
Abstract
Commentators and some political scholars claim to have observed a “dumbing down” in the level of sophistication of political language, leading to anxiety over the quality of democratic deliberation, knowledge, policy design, and implementation. This work typically focuses on the president’s State of the Union addresses. Using quantitative indicators of textual complexity, we measure trends since 1790 in that and other key political corpora, including rulings of the Supreme Court, the Congressional Record, and presidential executive orders. To draw comparative lessons, we also study political texts from the United Kingdom, in the form of party broadcasts and manifestos. Not only do we cast shade on the supposed relentless simplification of the State of the Union corpus, we show that this trend is not evident in other forms of elite political communication, including presidential ones. Finally, we argue that a stylistic—rather than an obviously substantive—shift toward shorter sentences is driving much of the variation over time we see in traditional measures of political sophistication.
Keywords
Dumbing down, Measurement, Political communication, Political methodology, State of the Union, Text as data
Discipline
Political Science | Social Influence and Political Communication
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
Can America govern itself?
Editor
F. E. Lee & N. McCarty
First Page
154
Last Page
236
ISBN
9781108667357
Identifier
10.1017/9781108667357.009
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
City or Country
Cambridge
Citation
BENOIT, Kenneth, MUNGER, Kevin, & SPIRLING, Arthur. (2019). Dumbing down?: Trends in the complexity of political communication. In Can America govern itself? (pp. 154-236). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3975
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108667357.009