AbstractWe have conducted deep optical spectroscopic follow up of a sample of radio galaxies with redshifts z < 0.7. The spectra were used to construct robust sub-samples of low excitation and high excitation AGN and perform stellar population analysis via line indices and spectral fitting. While the high excitation objects have lower luminosity-weighted ages and lower metallicities than the low excitation galaxies, this can be explained by the different stellar mass distributions of the samples. When stellar mass is taken into account the age and metallicity distribution of both populations are consistent with the galaxy population as a whole.