The Empirical Econometrics and Quantitative Economics Letters ISSN 2286 – 7147 © EEQEL all rights reserved Volume 3, Number 2 (June 2014), pp. 15 - 32. Analyzing the economic policy uncertainty index and presidential rhetorical simplicity in the United States Christopher Olds Visiting Lecturer, Department of Government & International Affairs, University of South Florida E-mail: chris@chrisolds.com ABSTRACT Recent efforts by Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2013) make it possible to evaluate whether changes in economic policy uncertainty have any bearing on the actions taken by political officials. This current project assesses whether economic policy uncertainty in the United States compels the U.S. president to increase the linguistic and substantive simplicity of public remarks. In an attempt to either decrease rising economic policy uncertainty, or stop the occurrence of economic policy uncertainty altogether, the president can choose to discuss issues in a very simple way. Time series analyses of monthly information spanning between 1993 and 2013 indicate that an increase in the economic policy uncertainty index results in an increase in presidential rhetorical simplicity. This provides an initial indication that the rhetorical strategy of linguistic and substantive simplicity employed by presidents can be shaped by economic conditions. Keywords: economic policy uncertainty index, presidential rhetoric, rhetorical simplicity, political communication, vector autoregression, moving average representation JEL Classification: E02, E60, C22