Public discourse is increasingly concerned with the sophistication of political communication.

The debate is fueled by politicians like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and representatives of

populist parties who evidently communicate less sophisticated than mainstream politicians. As

a result, ever more scholarly work seeks to understand the impact of simple and sophisticated

political communication on voters and elites. Yet, existing research falls short of identifying

the causal mechanisms between politicians’ linguistic sophistication and voters’ reactions to it.

We study the effect of sophisticated political communication on voter attitudes using a large-scale

pre-registered vignette survey experiment in Germany. On the one hand, we isolate the

effect of sophisticated language by leveraging the (comprehensively pre-tested) fact that linguistic

sophistication in the German language can be manipulated by sentence length, word

length, and word familiarity while keeping content and positions constant. On the other hand,

we use a manipulation test to understand if voters’ rely on language as a heuristic for unknown

characteristics of politicians – such as class. The findings of our pre-test reveal that sophisticated

messages (as compared to simple messages) reduce message recall and the willingness to

share the message. Moreover, exposure to messages shapes voters’ perceptions of politicians.

Respondents draw inferences from the level of sophistication about the politician’s class belonging

and level of education. These findings add important new insights to our understanding of

the effects of political communication in contemporary democracies.