Speaking like Ordinary People, Representing Ordinary People?

• In Event: Looking and Sounding Like a Leader

Abstract

Do voters expect political candidates to employ formal language when addressing them, or do they prefer politicians to speak in a more casual manner, with simpler words and phrases? Do all voters have the same expectations about the way political candidates express themselves? Recent studies show that citizens remember political messages better when they are written using simple words. However, this literature is primarily concerned with written content, and so far, little attention has been paid to how voters perceive political candidates in terms of the register they use when speaking. This research focuses on the role that language-based judgments play in shaping the public image of political figures. Using an experiment embedded in two surveys, one fielded in France (n = 2000) and another in the French-speaking Canadian province of Québec (n = 2000), I analyze the effects of the language register used by political candidates on voters’ attitudes. Thirty-second audio recordings corresponding to different experimental conditions will be randomly assigned to participants. The substance of the message will remain the same, but the register used will vary from one experimental condition to another. After listening to the recording, participants will be asked to indicate whether they consider that the candidate is in a position to understand their problems and represent their interests. They will also be asked to estimate the likelihood that they would vote for this individual. My analyses will enable a better understanding of the effects of language-based judgments, an understudied decision-making shortcut, on citizens’ behavior. Furthermore, since both surveys will include a battery of questions on populist attitudes, my results will allow for us to determine whether people who believe that there is an antagonism between “pure people” and corrupt elites are more likely than others to have a positive opinion of candidates who use a colloquial language register. Although this is a widely accepted belief, it has, to my knowledge, never been tested empirically.

Author

• Philippe Chassé, Sciences Po Paris