The text complexity of local government annual reports

ABSTRACT

This study explores the factors that contribute to the text complexity of local government communication and whether text complexity varies with governments’ financial performance. We first identify factors associated with text complexity, including the local government’s size, external monitoring, organisational complexity, and financial complexity. We then explore if text complexity varies with the financial performance of local governments. We find that the annual reports of poor-performing governments are less understandable, but that performance is not related to the amount of information content. Our findings contribute to research on local government communication, accountability, and transparency and have practical implications for those who interact with local governments through government documents.

KEYWORDS:

• Local government communication
• text complexity
• readability
• financial performance
• government accountability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability formula is calculated as [(0.39 × average sentence length) + (11.8 × average number of syllables per word) − 15.59]. Each decile represents a reading level from 5^th grade to advanced university degree (Lutz, Marsh, and Montondon 2003).

2. Government size also may be determined using population; however, population and total revenues are highly correlated (with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.933). As a robustness check, we recalculated our models using population and total salaries, rather than revenues, to measure organisation size. The alternative measures for size did not change the tenor of our results.

3. We note that studies rarely measure managerial obfuscation directly; absent more granular, qualitative data about managers’ intentions, obfuscation is assumed and inferred from findings about the negative relationship between organisational performance and text complexity.

4. As described, prior research on the relationship between text length and organisational performance in other contexts is mixed. Although the effects of text length have not been tested in the local government context, we anticipated that higher performing governments will have a greater incentive to be more forthcoming (or, at least, less incentive to be not forthcoming with information).