Dumbing Down?

Commentators and some political scholars claim to have observed a “dumbing down” of the level of sophistication of political language, leading to anxiety over the quality of democratic deliberation, knowledge, and 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 towards shorter sentences is driving much of the over-time variation we see in traditional measures of political sophistication. ∗Prepared as a chapter for a book arising from the SSRC-funded “Anxieties of Democracy” workshop, held at Princeton University, 28-29 October 2016. We are grateful to Burt Monroe and other colleagues present for their very helpful comments. †Professor of Quantitative Social Research Methods, London School of Economics. kbenoit@lse.ac.uk. ‡PhD Candidate, Department of Politics, New York University. km2713@nyu.edu. §Associate Professor of Politics and Data Science, New York University. arthur.spirling@nyu.edu