Epistemic orientation in parliamentary discourse is associated with deliberative democracy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable method to measure epistemic orientation in parliamentary discourse using LLM-based scores, revealing its positive association with deliberative democracy and governance quality across multiple countries and decades.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel EMI scoring approach derived from LLM ratings and semantic similarity, enabling large-scale analysis of epistemic orientations in political speech.

Findings

EMI correlates positively with deliberative democracy over time.

Higher EMI is associated with more transparent and predictable law implementation.

The approach is validated across 15 million speech segments from seven countries.

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.