Politicians' temporal focus

有些人沉湎于过去。其他人活在当下。其他人仍然展望未来。我们的思想指向过去、现在或未来的程度被称为我们的“时间焦点”。心理学家研究了人们的时间焦点，发现关注未来的人更有可能做出亲社会的行为，在学习和职业生涯中表现出色。这个项目是关于政治家的时间焦点。政客们经常被指责过于关注当下，或者是“短视主义者”。这种关注阻碍了政治家应对气候变化或照顾不同世代的人等长期挑战。应对这些挑战可能需要做出牺牲，以便在以后获得优势。政客们（以及选举他们的选民）可能会低估这些未来的好处。问题是，我们不知道政客们在这方面是否短视。间接证据就是间接证据。忽视气候变化的政客这样做可能是出于短期主义，但也可能是因为他们不相信气候变化，或者认为应对气候变化的成本大于收益。直接证据更好，但更难收集。很难说服国会议员回答有关他们态度的调查问题，对历史上的政治家来说更是不可能。这个项目解决了这个问题，通过观察政治家使用的语言，开发了一种不引人注目的方法来衡量他们的时间焦点。计算语言学家已经展示了如何以自动化的方式从大量文本中提取不同的特征——词性、日期以及对未来或过去的抽象引用。心理学家已经证明，一个人使用语言的这些特征可以用来预测他们的时间焦点。这些研究是针对年轻人或学生的短文本（通常是社交媒体帖子）进行的。我们将这些技术扩展到政治家的演讲，并为3个国家议会（英国议会、澳大利亚参议院和芬兰议会）的政治家提供了政治家时间焦点的测量方法。我们通过将这些措施与英国议会中一小群政客的问卷回答进行比较，来检验这些措施是否有意义，这些问卷是与未来世代的跨党派议会小组合作调查的。然后，我们继续展示政治家的时间焦点如何随着年龄和不同的政治和生活事件而变化，并将政治家的时间焦点与一般人群的时间焦点进行比较。了解政治家的时间焦点就其本身而言是有价值的，但它也有价值，因为它使我们能够回答有关我们如何设计政治制度的问题。我们的项目着眼于三种不同的制度选择：选举或任命政治家的选择，延长或缩短议会任期的选择，以及建立专注于未来的专门机构的选择。通过仔细的国内比较，我们测试了特定的制度选择是否改变了政治家的时间关注点，超出了我们对老龄化和偶然事件的预期。我们的项目对考虑进行体制改革的国家有具体的好处。在英国，许多团体呼吁“英国的政策要有更长远的考虑”。在新西兰，政党领导人表示愿意延长议会任期，以避免短期主义。如果我们想要避免短期主义，并在我们的政治家中促进不同的时间焦点，我们需要能够衡量时间焦点，并将时间焦点与不同的制度选择联系起来。这项研究将做到这一点。

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.