Making comprehensible speeches when your constituents need it

Abstract

Parliamentary speech is a prominent avenue that political elites can use in parliament to communicate with the electorate. However, we have little understanding of how exactly Members of Parliament craft their speeches to communicate with the districts they represent. We expect that Members of Parliament adapt the comprehensibility of their speeches to their constituents’ linguistic skills since doing so facilitates effective communication. Using parliamentary speeches from the German Bundestag, we reveal that Members of Parliament tend to make their speeches less complicated when their constituents are relatively poor, less educated, and come from an immigration background. Our findings have important implications for the study of political representation and communication strategies.