publications

2026

1. WZB Discussion Paper

   Keep It Simple, Stupid! The Determinants of Language Complexity in Politicians’ Parliamentary and Online Communication

   Rebecca Kittel and Bruno Castanho Silva

   2026

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   Politicians can adjust the complexity of their communication to signal different things to different audiences: more complex language can indicate competence, while lower complexity may bring them closer to “common people”. These strate- gic shifts in complexity, however, remain understudied. We ask what individual and contextual factors relate to politicians’ use of more or less complex language in their communication, with a dataset matching 116,000 parliamentary speeches from 15 countries with 800,000 contemporaneous Facebook posts from the same MPs between 2018 and 2021, and apply measures of language complexity to each. Results show that women use more complex language in parliament, and that far-right politicians, while similar to others in parliamentary speech, simplify their language the most on social media, and benefit the most from higher engagement with their simpler posts. These results show new dimensions of how politicians strategically adapt their communication styles to the audience.

2025

1. EJPR

   Let’s talk populist? A survey experiment on effects of (non-) populist discourse on vote choice

   Rebecca C Kittel

   European Journal of Political Research, 2025

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   Populism research has found much scholarly and public attention alike in recent years. Most research has focused on how populism can be defined, assessed or even measured. Even though there are emerging studies on populist messages, few of them have paid attention on causally identifying ways in which discourse can affect support for populist actors. This article positions itself within this gap and aims to answer which discursive elements make (non-)populist messages appealing to varying groups of people. To answer this research question, I conducted a novel survey experiment on vote choice in Germany from December 2020 to January 2021 with N = 3325. Respondents were asked to choose between two candidate statements that displayed varying discursive elements. Thus, the experiment causally tested whether people-centric rhetoric, blame attributive languages or populist style focusing on language complexity drive the populist vote. Results show that a neutral form of blame attribution, namely towards politicians, had the highest probability of driving vote choice, irrespective of respondents’ underlying ideological preferences or populist attitudes. Simple language nearly always has a negative effect on vote choice, whereas people-centrism adds a positive touch. These results show that there may be an increasing dissatisfaction with democracy that is voiced by blaming political elites for the malfunctioning of society.

2. G&O

   Simply speaking? Language complexity among (non-) populist actors in parliamentary debates

   Rebecca C Kittel

   Government and Opposition, 2025

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   Do populist politicians use simpler language to get closer to ‘ordinary’ citizens? Current studies – both qualitative and quantitative – are divided on whether populist actors actually use simpler language. Analysing a large corpus of text of German parliamentary debates from January 1991 to September 2021, this article aims to resolve this controversy by measuring language complexity in parliamentary discourse. The article hypothesizes that populist actors use simpler language, following their ideal of a simplified world between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The analysis, however, positively refutes that, and instead shows that right-wing populist actors use the most complex language. Left-wing populists seem to use somewhat average language complexity. At the same time, the study finds that language complexity decreased significantly in the German parliament over time. Additionally, this article shows that language complexity is context-specific and people-dependent. As such, this article also discusses simple language as a tool for substantive and surrogate representation.

3. WZB-Mitteilungen

   Ein Mensch, ein Wort - Veränderungen der Komplexität von Sprache im Deutschen Bundestag

   Rebecca Kittel

   WZB Mitteilungen, 2025

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4. WZB-Mitteilungen

   Reden und Rechnen: Wie Sprachmodelle helfen, Politik im Parlament zu verstehen

   Greta Groß and Rebecca Kittel

   WZB-Mitteilungen: Quartalsheft für Sozialforschung, 2025

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2024

1. WZB-Mitteilungen

   Körper und Widerstand

   Anna Fruhstorfer, Ismael Benkrama, and Rebecca Kittel

   Quartalsheft für Sozialforschung, 2024

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2023

1. The new politics of party signalling: Language, positioning, and electoral dynamics

   Rebecca Caroline KITTEL

   European University Institute, 2023