The extent to which ballot questions use complex and legalistic language influences how likely it is that voters will exercise their right to actually vote. That is the core finding of a new article (gated) in Political Research Quarterly by Shauna Reilly and Sean Richey. The authors used linguistic software (see my post from last week) to estimate what grade level is required in order to comprehend a ballot question. Many ballot questions well exceed the average reading abilities in a given state. The normative concern is, of course, that if you make ballot questions deliberately complex you will discourage a particular segment of the population (although the authors cannot show with their data that it is indeed the poorly educated or for whom English is a second language who are more likely to roll-off). The abstract is below.
bq. Ballot questions often feature obscure and legalistic language that is difficult to comprehend. Because the language of ballot questions is often unclear, the authors hypothesize that questions with lower readability will have higher roll-off because voters will not answer questions they do not understand.The authors use an objective measure of readability to code readability scores for 1,211 state-level ballot questions from 1997 to 2007. Using hierarchical linear regression models of state-level data, the authors find that increased complexity leads to more roll-off. The authors further analyze some possible influences on readability by examining whether it is affected by the question topic.