Politicians of all parties like to complain about the lack of content in election campaigns.
In the current election campaign, sloppiness in the résumé of the green candidate for Chancellor Annalena Baerbock or the years ago "exam affair" of the Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet played a bigger role on some days than questions of climate protection or digitization.
The constantly excited social media are often blamed for this.
Rudiger Soldt
Political correspondent in Baden-Württemberg.
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But apparently the parties themselves are to blame, especially the editorial collectives who draft the election programs. According to a study by communication scientist Frank Brettschneider from the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim, all of the elective programs are lacking in comprehensibility and clear German. The scientist and his team evaluated 83 election programs of the 20 federal elections since 1949 (including the election next September). Only programs of parties that were or are represented in the Bundestag were examined. In addition, only parties were considered that made it into three state parliaments during this period.
Only in 1994 were the election programs even more difficult to understand than they are today, according to the study.
Linguistically, these texts are characterized by “compromise phrases”, nested sentences and technical jargon that is completely incomprehensible for ordinary citizens.
The researchers cite a number of examples: The SPD is calling for a “life chain”, the Union for an “Agri-FoodTech venture capital fund”, the FDP for “carbon leakage protection” and the AfD for a “supranational remigration agenda”.
The programs have never been as extensive as they are today.
The Greens with the most difficult program
Brettschneider and his team use the “Hohenheim Comprehensibility Index” (HIX) for text analysis. It ranges from 0 for difficult to understand to 20 for easy to understand. The most difficult to understand, most complex and longest program was written by the Greens (HIX: 5.6 points), the easiest to understand by the Left Party (HIX: 8.4 points). Never before, says Brettschneider, has a green election platform been so difficult to understand as the current one. In the early years, the Greens even tended to use populist language, which was due to their self-definition as an “anti-party party”. Nothing of that can be found in the green Bundestag program today, instead it is strongly influenced by the language of the specialist politicians.
Today the AfD uses a demonstrably populist language. Words such as elite, establishment, betrayal or scandal often appear in their program. For all other parties, the proportion of anti-elitist or populist formulations has declined. The Greens use terms like “climate protection”, “climate crisis” or “garbage” more often than other parties; the FDP program is characterized by a striking number of terms from economic policy; In the SPD, terms from social and employment policy such as “part-time bridge” or “work”, as expected, play a greater role. Brettschneider thinks it is a mistake on the part of the parties not to try harder for comprehensibility, short sentences and linguistic clarity: “These are wasted communication opportunities. In this way, citizens who are not constantly concerned with politics willhardly motivated to deal with the political statements of the parties and to form a judgment before the federal election. "
Political scientists regularly deal with the importance of election programs.
Basically, they attribute only an indirect influence on the voting decision to the programs.
More important today are the evaluation of the top candidates, individual issues and the basic identification with a party.
A survey carried out years ago in Baden-Württemberg showed that even members rarely read the long versions of their own party's programs - if at all, they know the short versions.
The prose of the specialist working groups
But even though only a few voters make their decision after hours of time-consuming reading of programs, their language is not meaningless: Programs serve internal party integration, they can bind regular voters, offer targets for political opponents and are the basis of coalition negotiations after the election. In addition, the importance of the programs for the supporters of different parties is likely to vary: For the voters of the Greens, extensive statements on climate and environmental protection are certainly more important than fundamental statements on education policy in the Union's electoral program.
"Clear statements are always more helpful than compromise phrases," says Brettschneider, "because parts of what is in the long versions of the programs are distributed by the politicians themselves via social media and websites." Maten, the party programs are the basis. Because all programs are now available on the Internet, every citizen can enter search words and find out more about sub-areas, the importance of the programs and their language should not be underestimated.
“The parties often leave the program work to the specialist working groups, which is not for the sake of clarity. And they also tend to be tactically incomprehensible, that is, popular measures are written in short sentences with a clear subject-predicate-object structure, unpopular things are then found in long and incomprehensible sentences, ”says Brettschneider. A politician who had mastered the principle of tactical incomprehensibility perfectly was the former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.