Debunked: The Plainspoken Populist

In 2015, The Boston Globe famously reported that Donald Trump spoke at a fourth-grade level. The future president’s 2016 announcement speech scored a 4.1 on linguistic tests, meaning a fourth-grade student could understand his speech. By contrast, Hillary Clinton scored 7.1. The results came as no surprise: political scientists and commentators have long asserted that populists use simple language to appear closer to the “ordinary people” and differentiate themselves from elites. However, a recent article in Perspectives on Politics has challenged this assumption.

Professors Duncan McDonnell and Stefano Ondelli empirically investigated the veracity of the commonly held belief that right-wing populists use simpler language than their rivals. To do so, they analyzed approximately 1,000,000 words from speeches of four populist politicians and their rivals in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy.

McDonnell and Ondelli concluded that right-wing politicians’ speeches are not as simple as we tend to believe. In some cases, like the 2016 US election, the speeches of populist politicians were simpler than those of their mainstream counterparts. In others, this was not the case. In the 2017 French elections, Marine Le Pen, a renowned populist, used more complex language than the winner, Emmanuel Macron. Something similar happened when comparing the speeches of far-right populist Nigel Farage and other British politicians such as David Cameron and Ed Miliband.

The assumption that populist language is simple tends to be presented so intuitively that political scientists often do not elicit evidence in its support. Consequently, there are not many works on the subject. While a handful of researchers have produced empirical work on language utilized by populist politicians, they have relied on party manifestos and parliamentary speeches, two kinds of texts that, because of their formal nature, may not be ideal for testing the simplicity of politicians’ language. In contrast, McDonnell and Ondelli chose to analyze speeches delivered during political campaigns, one of the most traditional forms of political language.

What do McDonnell and Ondelli mean by “simplicity?” The authors understand it as “the extent to which a speaker’s language is easy to comprehend.” In addition to readability scales — which measure the length of words and sentences — these researchers used other linguistic methods to measure simplicity, such as the lexical richness (the number of different words in a text), the lexical density (the share of “content” words compared to “grammar” words), and the percentage of “non-common” words that are present in the texts. Linguistics researchers have long used all these methods. The novelty of McDonnell and Ondelli’s work is “the range of measures (they) use, which goes well beyond what has been deployed before” by political scientists.

Perhaps the most interesting part of McDonnell and Ondenlli’s work is that their selected research allowed them to test the simplicity claim across countries, languages (English, French, and Italian), and political systems (presidential and parliamentary). The authors hypothesized that if right-wing populists consistently use simpler language than their rivals, we should find this to be the case irrespective of those differences. As it turns out, this is not the case.

McDonnell and Ondelli did find that Trump’s language was generally simpler than Clinton’s. However, the gap was much narrower than anticipated. France’s results were much more surprising: Le Pen’s speeches were not only more difficult to understand than Macron’s, but they also used longer sentences and words and had a richer vocabulary. Results from the UK show a similar pattern: according to McDonnell and Ondelli, Nigel Farage’s speeches were more complex than both Ed Miliband’s and David Cameron’s. Regarding Italy, the results were mixed: while Salvini’s speeches were simpler than Renzi’s and Alfano’s in some ways, they were not in others.

These results counter the conventional wisdom about political communication and populism. One explanation would be that mainstream political elites have reduced their speeches’ linguistic complexity during the last decades. Would it be possible that right-wing populists have chosen to act differently? While some elites could have simplified their language following communication experts’ advice, the authors say, the latter may have acted differently to appear “less coached” and “more authentic.”

This empirical study of the political language contributes to our understanding of populism as a persistent phenomenon in today’s politics. Its findings remind us how important it is to standardize and test our political assumptions. As the authors say, the simpler language claim reinforces the reassuring idea that populists are vulgar figures who appeal to people’s most basic instincts. The results show that, while this kind of argument can seem intuitive and comforting, the reality — just like populists’ language — is more complicated.

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Mcdonnell, Duncan, and Stefano Ondelli. 2020. “The Language of Right-Wing Populist Leaders: Not So Simple.” Perspectives on Politics FirstView: 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592720002418.