The European Commission's reputation for using gibberish is unparalleled -- and now data support that view. The verdict is based on an analysis of 45,000 press releases: the Commission makes them complicated, even compared to other governments, Politico writes.

This is not only makes life difficult for journalists, argues Christian Rau of the Berlin-based WZB Social Science Center. It's also a political problem. Misunderstood messages leave a lot of room for Euroskeptics and local politicians.

Thus, technocratic communication all too easily plays into the hands of those who want to create an image of a Brussels elite disconnected from the European citizen, Rau writes in the Journal of European Integration.

The Commission's press releases are not easy to read, even by the standards of national government communications and academic articles.

Rau analyzed 35 years of data from the Commission's English-language press releases, examining factors such as grammatical complexity and jargon.

He also looked at newspapers, political science essays, and communications from the Irish and British governments for comparison. While it was not surprising that the Commission was more technical than the tabloids, national governments also performed better on accessible language using common words (thus eliminating the excuse that the Commission must sound defiant because it deals with technical policy issues).

On the text-readability measure, only political scientists scored lower than the Commission. And when it comes to jargon, the Commission's communicators beat even the scientists.

Looking at the number of communications between 1985 and 2020, Rau found that the volume of press releases per month reached about 150 in the early 2000s under then Commission president Romano Prodi, with similar levels during Jose Manuel Barroso's two terms.