Epistemic orientation in parliamentary discourse is associated with deliberative democracy

2026-04-21

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in the literature by offering the first systematic, large-scale quantitative analysis of how cognitive orientation in political discourse influences deliberative democracy and governance quality. The authors propose a scalable method that integrates large language model–based scoring with semantic embeddings to compute an “Evidence Minus Intuition” (EMI) index, which they develop and validate to measure cognitive orientation across time and space in parliamentary speech. Applying this approach to 15 million parliamentary speeches from seven countries between 1946 and 2025, the study finds that higher EMI scores are robustly and positively associated with both contemporaneous and lagged measures of deliberative democracy and rule-of-law transparency, providing novel empirical evidence on the link between discursive cognitive structures and democratic governance.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Analogy
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

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.

Problem

• epistemic orientation
• deliberative democracy
• political discourse
• governance
• evidence-based reasoning

Innovation

• epistemic orientation
• EMI score
• large language models
• semantic similarity
• deliberative democracy