Dancing Around the Issue? Public Opinion and Strategic Vagueness in Parliamentary Speech

ABSTRACT Legislators use parliamentary speeches to communicate with their relevant audiences. However, we know little about how they adapt their communication styles to public opinion dynamics and political context. Bridging the literatures on parliamentary speech and strategic use of vagueness in political campaigning, I explore whether legislators modulate the concreteness of their speeches when public opinion on policy is divided, conditional on the public and party‐level policy salience and proximity to elections. I use a dictionary‐based method to measure the concreteness of parliamentary speeches in the European Parliament's plenary (2009–2019). The results show that when public opinion is divided, legislators reduce the concreteness of their speeches if they concern matters that are salient to the citizens. In contrast, when speaking on policies that have a higher relative importance to their parties, they use more concrete language even in the face of a divided public. These findings suggest that strategic vagueness is relevant for political actors beyond communication in electoral context.