This is a fascinating paper - one cost of governing politicians face is that voters (and opposition/backbench politicians) prefer simple language, but the business of government compels those in office to use more complex language - people want simple stories but government is complicated!
Reposted from
Frederik Hjorth
🚨 New publication 🚨 : Happy to share that my paper, "Losing Touch: The Rhetorical Cost of Governing" is now forthcoming at @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Short 🧵 about the paper here 👇 1/10
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Populist politics, people falling for scams, young men being obsessed with gambling and playing the markets rather than work.
People have stopped expecting to know how things work so they've stopped trying.
"it's just how things work these days"
Make sandwiches in Kent & sell them in Paris the same day - easy peasy
https://bsky.app/profile/tadaaa.bsky.social/post/3lchqie2kws23
“Remain” absolutely tried to say that the sunlit uplands didn’t and wouldn’t exist & that the whole thing would be a shitshow, but that got dismissed as fearmongering.
And the media - the BBC especially - colluded with that narrative by both-sidesing the debate (cf climate change).
Just as there are academics who are good communicators of complex ideas.
Sadly, not enough of either try hard enough?