Epistemic orientation in parliamentary discourse is associated with deliberative democracy
This work provides a scalable method to quantify epistemic orientation in political discourse, linking it to deliberative democracy and governance, which is relevant for political science and democratic theory.
The authors developed the Evidence-Minus-Intuition (EMI) score to measure epistemic orientation in political discourse and applied it to 15 million parliamentary speech segments across seven countries (1946-2025). They found that higher EMI scores are positively associated with deliberative democracy and governance quality, with consistent results in both contemporaneous and lagged analyses.
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.