The Dumbing Down of Congress!!

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First of all, I must make a disclaimer here: the following is based on a certain--fairly automatic-- method of analyzing a piece of language, written or spoken, to assign it a score between about 0 and about 16, which is designed to assess the education level required to understand it.  It is called the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.  Wikipedia describes it as follows:
"The result is a number that corresponds with a grade level. For example, a score of 8.2 would indicate that the text is expected to be understandable by an average student in 8th grade (usually around ages 12–14 in the USA). The sentence, "The Australian platypus is seemingly a hybrid of a mammal and reptilian creature" is a 13.1 as it has 26 syllables and 13 words."

The main article that drew my attention is one that analyzes the speech-grade level of members of Congress and Senate.  It asks: "Is Congress getting dumber, or just more plain-spoken?"  (Many users of poor language insist that they speak the way they do in order to be better understood, and to avoid irrelevant verbosity.)

Some of the best-spoken (admittedly in this very limited sense) members of Congress are Republicans: Daniel Lungren (R, CA), Olympia Snowe (R, ME) and Jim Gerlach (R, PA).  Democrats among this high-scoring group are: Lucille Roybal-Allard (D, CA), and Daniel Akaka (D, HI).  [The graphic erroneously identifies the first of these as Lucille Royal-Allard.]

The members of Congress whose speeches of record have scored at the lowest grade-level are all Republicans from the South, the two lowest being John Mulvaney (R, SC), and Rob Woodall (R, GA), which leads us to believe that Southern members of Congress have, on the average, uneducated speech, or that their constituents are intolerant of learned speech (or that the members believe that to be so), or that the audiences to which they are accustomed have attention spans which are lower than those of residents of other parts of the country.  The celebrated Senator Rand Paul (the son of presidential candidate Ron Paul) is reported to speak at a grade level of 8.04.

Some of my former colleagues tended to speak in horrible run-on sentences with a "grade level" very likely in the 20's, but their speeches were deplorably difficult to follow.  (Many members of the older generation are able to keep spewing polysyllabic inanities with their minds in neutral, while they think of substantive things to say.)

To get a handle on this "grade-level" scale, we can look at the scores of a number of well-known documents:

Gettysburg Address: 11.2;   Federalist Papers: 17.1.  Compare with Major Newspapers, which have a reading grade level between 11 and 14, and the Average American, speaking at a level roughly between 8 and 9.

One can easily see how legal documents can be expected to have a higher proportion of legal terms, which are often polysyllabic (e.g. "hereinafter"), and longer sentences, qualified by numerous clauses, both of which push the grade-level higher.  The Federalist papers, therefore, are understandably the highest-scoring items that we have reported on.  Ordinary Americans speak much like Southern Congressmen, which could explain why Southern Congressmen talk like that.  That's how anyone with a strong anti-intellectual bias would talk, regardless of how bright they were.  (Unfortunately, every time someone refers to Southern Congressmen, it nudges their grade-level a bit higher.  Meanwhile, every time some uses the word "Yankee", the grade-level goes down!  Isn't that interesting?)

[
Added later:
The website Standards-Schmandards.com supplies an online Readability Calculator, to which I submitted this blog post.  The results were as follows.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of the post: 12
Flesch-Kincaid Ease of Reading score: 39.

For comparison, they report that "Comics typically score around 90, while legalese can get a score below 10."  For what it's worth, I'm perfectly satisfied to achieve this level of readability.  My audience typically consists of high-school graduates and college graduates, and in my experience the speech and writing of an average person remains at the 12th grade level in ordinary conversation even after a post-graduate education.  A judge writing an opinion, one may suppose, will use more careful language, scoring a higher grade level.
]

Another interesting observation that the single graphic shown above also provides is the way speech-level corresponds with ideology.  The chart has been split between Republicans and Democrats.  Here's what's going on: each dot represents a single individual.  The higher up the dot is, the higher the grade-level of his or her addresses in Congress.  The further to the Right the dot is, the more conservative that person's voting record has been (according to some arbitrary standard of liberalism versus conservatism).

Looking at the Republicans, the dots seem to cluster along a certain curve that slopes from the top left to the bottom right.  The curve has been drawn into the chart, and is obviously a very broad generalization, and does certainly leave out a cluster of individuals in the bottom right.  So it would seem that the more liberal Republicans tend to make speeches at a higher grade level.

The Democrats, in contrast, are all over the place, with clustering around the center of the chart; we can safely disregard the curve that has been so helpfully drawn in.  There seems to be no correlation between the ideology of Democrat representatives and their erudition.  There are statistical measures that can be applied to this question; the test for correlation will range between 1, for very strongly correlated, or 0, for not correlated at all.  I suspect that the Democrat data would yield close to 0, and the Republican data around 0.6.  Statistics are not entirely useless, as you see.

The article's main thrust is that the grade-level of Congress has declined over the last several years.

We observe a steady decline over the years, with the following exceptions:

• A peak in 1997.  I'm at a loss to explain this; perhaps it isn't important ...
• A sudden dip in 2001, with both Republicans and Conservatives speaking at a grade level of about 11.2.
• Sudden peaks in 2002 and 2005, possibly having to do with war.
• A dip in 2009, possibly having to do with the economic downturn.

 Let's theorize a bit.  The huge dip in 2001 very probably corresponds with the attacks on the World Trade Center.  Soon afterwards, what were the immediate concerns of Congress?  Everyone was anxious to establish their patriotism, and support for the President.  There was interest in retaliatory measures.  The ideas on all sides were simple, even if there was disagreement, and the speeches were intended for the ears of the constituents.  It was not a time for subtlety; it was a time for passion.

What happened in the period 2002 to 2005?  Congress was concerned with the complex issues of the war, and of the needs of national security versus individual rights and freedoms.  These are complex issues, not easy to dispute with simple one-syllable words and short sentences.  I suspect that it was the technical issues that were important during this time that pushed the Flesch-Kincaid scores higher.

What happened in 2006 that reversed the positions of the dotted blue line (Democrats) that had lain below the dotted red line (Republicans) until that year?  It seems that the Congress of 2006 consisted of Democrat representatives whose speech was at a higher level, and Republican representatives of the "plain-speaking" variety.  Evidently, Republicans have heard the message.  After the election of 2010, the rhetoric took a dive to a new low of 10.5, with Republicans averaging around 10.2, and Democrats averaging around 10.6.  Since 2011, the scores have gone up for both parties.  Perhaps the reason is clear to some people, but it certainly not clear to me.  Can we assume that most of the "plain-speaking" Dems got zapped in the 2010 election?  In order to get more information, we have to look at the data much further back in time, against the major concerns of each congress for each year.  But at the moment I'm convinced that (1) when Congress is full of speeches aimed at the people, the scores go down.  (2) When the speeches have to do with legal issues of principal interest to the Representatives themselves: legal and constitutional matters, the scores go up.  I imagine that when the racial discrimination laws were being debated in the 70's, at first the scores would have dipped, because they were such emotional issues.  But later, when the parties found themselves required to compromise on the details of the laws, the scores would have gone up, with the sophistication and complexity of the points being debated.


[To be continued...]