Politicians' temporal focus
Lead Research Organisation:
Royal Holloway University of London
Department Name: Politics, Internatl Relations & Philos
Abstract
Some of us dwell on the past. Others live in the present. Others still look towards the future. The degree to which our thoughts are directed to the past, present or future is called our *temporal focus*. Psychologists have studied people's temporal focus, and have found that future-focused individuals are more likely to engage in pro-social behaviours and perform well in their studies and in their careers.
This project is about politicians' temporal focus. Politicians are often accused of having a particular temporal focus-of focusing too much on the present, or of being "short-termist". This focus (runs the argument) prevents politicians from tackling long-term challenges such as climate change or caring for different generations. Tackling these challenges can involve making sacrifices now in order to gain advantages later. Politicians (and the voters who elect them) may discount these future benefits.
The problem is that we don't know whether politicians are short-termist in this way. Indirect evidence is just that-indirect. Politicians who neglect climate change might do so because of short-termism, but might also do so because they don't believe in climate change, or believe that costs of tackling climate change outweigh the benefits. Direct evidence is better, but harder to collect. It is difficult to convince MPs to answer survey questions about their attitudes, and impossible to do so for historical politicians.
This project solves this problem by developing an unobtrusive measure of politicians' temporal focus by looking at the language they use. Computational linguists have shown how to extract different features-parts of speech, dates, and abstract references to the future or past-from large bodies of text in an automated fashion. Psychologists have shown how these features of a person's language use can be used to predict their temporal focus. These studies have been carried out on short texts (typically social media posts) by young adults or students.
We extend these techniques to cover politicians' speech, and produce measures of politicians' temporal focus for politicians in 3 national parliaments (the UK Parliament, the Australian Senate, and the Finnish Eduskunta). We test whether these measures make sense by comparing them to questionnaire responses from a small group of politicians in the UK Parliament, surveyed in collaboration with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Future Generations. We then go on to show how politicians' temporal focus varies according to age and different political and life events, and compare temporal focus in politicians to temporal focus in the general population.
Knowing about politicians' temporal focus is valuable for its own sake, but it is also valuable because it allows us to answer questions about how we design our political institutions. Our project looks at three different institutional choices: the choice to elect or appoint politicians, the choice to have longer or shorter parliamentary terms, and the choice to have specialised institutions which focus on the future. By careful within-country
comparisons, we test whether particular institutional choices change politicians' temporal focus beyond what we would expect as a result of ageing and chance events.
Our project has concrete benefits for countries considering institutional reforms. In the UK, numerous groups have called for "more long term thinking in UK policy". In New Zealand, party leaders have expressed willingness to lengthen parliamentary terms to avoid short-termism. If we want to avoid short-termism, and promote a different temporal focus in our politicians, we need to be able to measure temporal focus, and relate temporal focus to different institutional choices. This research will do just that.
This project is about politicians' temporal focus. Politicians are often accused of having a particular temporal focus-of focusing too much on the present, or of being "short-termist". This focus (runs the argument) prevents politicians from tackling long-term challenges such as climate change or caring for different generations. Tackling these challenges can involve making sacrifices now in order to gain advantages later. Politicians (and the voters who elect them) may discount these future benefits.
The problem is that we don't know whether politicians are short-termist in this way. Indirect evidence is just that-indirect. Politicians who neglect climate change might do so because of short-termism, but might also do so because they don't believe in climate change, or believe that costs of tackling climate change outweigh the benefits. Direct evidence is better, but harder to collect. It is difficult to convince MPs to answer survey questions about their attitudes, and impossible to do so for historical politicians.
This project solves this problem by developing an unobtrusive measure of politicians' temporal focus by looking at the language they use. Computational linguists have shown how to extract different features-parts of speech, dates, and abstract references to the future or past-from large bodies of text in an automated fashion. Psychologists have shown how these features of a person's language use can be used to predict their temporal focus. These studies have been carried out on short texts (typically social media posts) by young adults or students.
We extend these techniques to cover politicians' speech, and produce measures of politicians' temporal focus for politicians in 3 national parliaments (the UK Parliament, the Australian Senate, and the Finnish Eduskunta). We test whether these measures make sense by comparing them to questionnaire responses from a small group of politicians in the UK Parliament, surveyed in collaboration with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Future Generations. We then go on to show how politicians' temporal focus varies according to age and different political and life events, and compare temporal focus in politicians to temporal focus in the general population.
Knowing about politicians' temporal focus is valuable for its own sake, but it is also valuable because it allows us to answer questions about how we design our political institutions. Our project looks at three different institutional choices: the choice to elect or appoint politicians, the choice to have longer or shorter parliamentary terms, and the choice to have specialised institutions which focus on the future. By careful within-country
comparisons, we test whether particular institutional choices change politicians' temporal focus beyond what we would expect as a result of ageing and chance events.
Our project has concrete benefits for countries considering institutional reforms. In the UK, numerous groups have called for "more long term thinking in UK policy". In New Zealand, party leaders have expressed willingness to lengthen parliamentary terms to avoid short-termism. If we want to avoid short-termism, and promote a different temporal focus in our politicians, we need to be able to measure temporal focus, and relate temporal focus to different institutional choices. This research will do just that.
| Description | First, we developed a method to classify the temporal focus of extremely large volumes of legislative speech. We wanted to say whether the amount that politicians talked about the future changed. Politicians say a lot, and some of the effects we were interested in are subtle. We couldn't read and classify everything politicians said in parliament, and whilst reading and classifying a sample of speech would have been possible, the small sample size would have limited our ability to say much about effects. Our research project built on a small sample of human coded sentences, and used these to fine-tune a large language model (LLM). With this model, we can now classify everything said in the House of Commons since 1945 in roughly a week using a desktop PC. We've published our model on the most popular machine learning website, HuggingFace, so that other people can build on our work. Second, we showed how the temporal focus of speech changes as legislators age. The future is something that affects young people more: they have more future in front of them. This might mean that younger legislators talk about the future more. This in turn might give us reasons to want to increase the number of young politicians, especially since they're under-represented compared to the general population. In our research, we've shown that if we want to increase how much politicians talk about the future, we need to flip our focus, and concentrate on capping the number of old legislators rather than boosting the number of young legislators. Legislators' focus on the future is roughly the same between 25 and 55. However, after 65 and 75 we see big declines in how much MPs talk about the future. This is true for the UK, and also true for Canada, Ireland and Australia. Third, we showed that some institutional structures promote a focus on the future. Some countries and parliaments have created special bodies or committees to think about the future. The best known committee is in Finland. We've shown that members of that committee bring future focus back with them to plenary meetings, and that the committee *creates* that interest in the future: it's not just that people who were already interested in the future sign up to be part of that committee. This implies that if we create these kinds of institutions, we can create extra demand for consideration of the future. We showed that other institutional structures don't promote a focus on the future, or even worsen it. Some countries have short legislative terms. In Australia and New Zealand, they have elections every three years, if not sooner. Some people in those countries think short terms prevent a focus on the future. We studied whether legislators in the Australian Senate -- some of whom get longer six-year terms, and some of whom get shorter three-year terms -- differ in how much they talk about the future. We found that there's absolutely no difference, and we think this means that longer terms don't promote future focus. We also found that legislators appointed for life to the House of Lords don't talk more about the future -- that in fact, they talk about the future *less*. This might fit one view of second chambers as chambers of sober "backwards looking" reflection, but it does mean that upper chambers might not be chambers for the future. |
| Exploitation Route | We think that we've created a useful tool for people studying temporal focus in legislatures, and so our research can be used by others working in legislative studies. We also think that our research leaves open some questions about the effect of term lengths on future focus. We studied variation in term lengths *within* a legislature, but people might believe that "the effect of some people getting a longer term" is different to "the effect of everyone getting a longer term", in just the same way that "the effect of some people getting a vaccine" is different to "the effect of everyone getting a vaccine". To study this question further, we'd probably need to look at regional legislatures which changed their length of term. |
| Sectors | Government Democracy and Justice |
| Title | Fine-tuned large language model for predicting the temporal focus of parliamentary speech |
| Description | This model is a fine-tuned version of distilber-base-cased designed to classify parliamentary speech into past, present or future orientation. The training data for the model consists of roughly 3,600 sentences from the UK House of Commons Hansard which have been hand-coded by two coders working independently and reconciling their differences. Sentences have been pre-processed using Duckling to turn absolute temporal references into relative temporal references. Thus, the sentence "In the year 2050, global temperatures are forecast to rise by 1 degree. " said in the year 2023 becomes "27 years from now, global temperatures are forecast to rise by 1 degree. " Note that sentences which dealt with conditional claims or were in the irrealis were classified as present-oriented. Sentences or sentence fragments which could not be classified in any other way were classified as present-oriented. The distribution of temporal foci in the training data was as follows: Present: 2421 instances Past: 825 instances Future: 363 instances |
| Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | None yet. |
| URL | https://huggingface.co/chanret/tfs_distilbert |
| Title | Fine-tuned large language model for predicting the topic of parliamentary speech |
| Description | This is a fine-tuned version of the distillBERT case-sensitive English language model. It predicts sentence-level topics using data supplied by the Comparative Agendas Project. |
| Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | None yet. |
| URL | https://huggingface.co/chanret/hoc_cap_distilbert |
| Description | Student group visit |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Gave a talk to the University of Aberdeen student politics society on age and politicians' temporal focus. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |