Epistemic orientation in parliamentary discourse is associated with deliberative democracy
2026-04-21 • Computation and Language
Computation and LanguageComputers and Society
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a way to measure how much political talks rely on evidence versus intuition using a score they call EMI. They analyzed millions of speeches from parliaments in seven countries dating back to 1946. They found that when speeches are more evidence-based, the country tends to have better democratic discussions and clearer, more predictable laws. This shows that the type of reasoning in political talks matters for democracy and good governance.
epistemic orientationEvidence--Minus--Intuition (EMI) scorelarge language modelsparliamentary speechesdeliberative democracygovernancepolitical discoursesemantic similaritytransparencypolicy implementation
Authors
Segun Aroyehun, Stephan Lewandowsky, David Garcia
Abstract
The pursuit of truth is central to democratic deliberation and governance, yet political discourse reflects varying epistemic orientations, ranging from evidence-based reasoning grounded in verifiable information to intuition-based reasoning rooted in beliefs and subjective interpretation. We introduce a scalable approach to measure epistemic orientation using the Evidence--Minus--Intuition (EMI) score, derived from large language model (LLM) ratings and embedding-based semantic similarity. Applying this approach to 15 million parliamentary speech segments spanning 1946 to 2025 across seven countries, we examine temporal patterns in discourse and its association with deliberative democracy and governance. We find that EMI is positively associated with deliberative democracy within countries over time, with consistent relationships in both contemporaneous and lagged analyses. EMI is also positively associated with the transparency and predictable implementation of laws as a dimension of governance. These findings suggest that the epistemic nature of political discourse is crucial for both the quality of democracy and governance.