Syntactic Complexity and Political Ideology: A Study of Czechoslovak and Czech Presidential Speeches

Abstract

This study analyzes syntactic complexity in Czechoslovak and Czech presidential speeches, using a corpus of New Year’s addresses spanning nearly a century. Applying quantitative stylometric methods, we measure average sentence length (ASL), average clause length (ACL), mean dependency distance (MDD), and mean hierarchical distance (MHD) to compare syntactic structures across democratic and communist regimes. The results show that democratic presidents generally use more complex sentence structures, while communist-era speeches are syntactically simpler. However, individual differences are also observed inside groups. Husák exhibits higher complexity among communist leaders, and modern democratic presidents (Klaus, Zeman, Pavel) show a trend toward simplification. These findings confirm ideological influences on presidential rhetoric and highlight a broader shift toward linguistic accessibility in contemporary political speech.