As widely reported by CNN, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, the sophistication of speeches by US politicians has declined in recent years, dropping from an 11th-grade level in 2005 to a 10th-grade level today. The reports are based on an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, based on textual analysis of congressional speeches given since 1996 provided by the Capitol Words API. You can see where your favourite legislator ranks in this table. Picking out a couple of famous names, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) ranks near the bottom with an 8th-grade speaking level; near the top of the ranks is retiring senator Olympia-Snowe (R-ME) who speaks at a Grade 14 level.
A regression analysis detailed in the article teases out some of the contributing factors. While the speech levels of members of both parties have declined over the past couple of years, the chart below shows that for Republicans, the more ideological extreme the congressperson, the less sophisticated the speech.
It's clear that the data visualizations were created using R's ggplot2 package; presumably the statistical analyses were peformed with the R language as well. For the infographic circulated to the media, the ggplot2 charts have been cleaned up using an editing tool like Illustrator (easy if you export the chart to PDF from R).
Read the details of the analysis in the full report from the Sunlight Foundation linked below.
Sunlight Foundation: The changing complexity of congressional speech
Looks like 2 sad eye, maybe a nation crying.
Posted by: John | May 22, 2012 at 22:25
Unfortunately, the "cleaning up" using Illustrator removed at least the congress member with the highest grade level, presumably Rep. Daniel Lungren (R), CA (as can be seen in another graphic in the linked pdf), leaving the impression that the Democrats have the congress member with the highest rank. Not so nice aspect of an otherwise nice communication of stats to the public.
Posted by: Henrik Singmann | May 24, 2012 at 08:23
Not that it makes that much difference I'm guessing, but why are all the Democrats voting scores < 0 and Republican voting scores > 0? I would think there would be some overlap since anecdotal information has some Democrats voting pro-conservative on some issues and vice versa for Republicans.
Posted by: Danny Kugler | June 06, 2012 at 15:53
@Danny, that's for the most recent Congress, which is the most partisan in history. The latest Congressional voting ratings from National Journal show that there's no overlap between Republicans and Democrats any more. "There's not a single Democratic Senator who was more conservative than the most liberal Republican." So it's likely the chart is accurate.
Posted by: David Smith | June 06, 2012 at 16:07