Complexity in Political Speech in Austria

Abstract

Objective – The aim of this paper is to evaluate the readability and comprehensibility of written campaign messages of Austrian parliamentary parties. What is the impact of the topic, the text type and the parties’ ideological positions on the readability of those texts?

Methods – TextLab, the software applied to determine text-comprehensibility, is based on the “Hohenheim Comprehensibility Index” (HIX, with 0 indicating an extremely low and 20 an extremely high comprehensibility). It statistically evaluates word- and sentence-length parameters. As a “readability approach” this method restrains to statistical parameters of the text surface exclusively: average sentence length and clause length in words, average word-length in letters as well as the percentage of words longer than six letters, sentences longer than 20 words and clauses longer than 12 words.

Results and Conclusions – As anticipated there is a significant difference in readability dependent on the text type – with an HIX-value lower than 5 with party manifestos, about 10 with webtexts and close to 16 with social media messages. Concerning the topic, texts on environmental issues appear to have a slightly higher readability than those on education, but a significantly higher one than those on migration. Depending on the text type there is a clear differentiation between texts that stem from different parties. But opposed to US-American studies, which emphasize a clear positive correlation between a text’s complexity and a party’s propensity to populism or right-wing ideology, this correlation could not be confirmed. When it comes to social media messages this study even shows a contrary tendency.

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