The Readability of Political Party Manifestos of the 2016 General Elections in Ghana

The objective of the study was to determine the readability of the manifestos that three political parties, namely National Democratic Congress (NDC), New Patriotic Party (NPP) and Convention People’s Party (CPP), in Ghana used in the 2016 general elections. These parties were chosen because they were the only ones in Ghana with parliamentary representation at the time of the study. The readability indexes used were the Coleman-Liau Index and the Gunning Fog Index. 12 random sections of each manifesto were selected for analysis. Then, texts of no less than 300 words were sampled from each section. The readability formulas used were available on the internet. The statistics show that all three manifestos were written at difficulty levels that were quite above the reading abilities of the average Ghanaian voter. Further, it was found that the manifestos did not differ significantly from each other, statistically speaking. Keywords: readability, readability formulas, manifestos, political parties, linguistic complexity