Politicians are learning to speak like TV news anchors, study shows
Swedish parliamentary speeches have shrunk by half over the past century, with a sharp shift toward pithy slogans since the 1990s. The change reflects how politicians now craft messaging for media consumption—a trend that shapes everything from legislative debate quality to voter expectations of political communication.
Originaltitel: Self-mediatisation and the format of Swedish parliamentary speeches: speech length and political slogans, 1920-2019
<p>In this article, we investigate traces of a news media logic in the Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2019. Drawing on theories of mediatisation, we examine two aspects: the length of the speeches and repeated political slogans. Our analysis is based on a complete corpus of parliamentary records with annotated speeches. Speech length was measured based on word count, and the identification of slogans was based on repeated seven-word segments, filtered to exclude generic phrases. While it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about the influence of an external media logic, the speech length has dropped by 50 per cent since 1920. This change relates to new parliamentary procedures, and from the 1980s, with the explicit goal to attract the news media. Short and snappy political slogans have increased significantly since the 1990s. This development reflects previous research stating that sound bites are getting shorter.</p>