Politicians' temporal focus

政治家的时间焦点

• 批准号: ES/X001695/1
• 负责人: Chris Hanretty
• 金额: $ 47.37万
• 依托单位: Royal Holloway University of London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FX001695%2F1
• 关键词: Politicians; temporal; focus

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.

我们中的一些人沉湎于过去。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从事亲社会行为，并在学习和职业生涯中表现出色。政客们经常被指责有一个特定的时间焦点--过于关注现在，或者是“短期主义者”。这种关注（运行的论点）阻止政治家解决长期的挑战，如气候变化或照顾不同的世代。应对这些挑战可能需要现在做出牺牲，以便以后获得优势。政治家（以及选举他们的选民）可能会对这些未来的利益打折扣，问题是我们不知道政治家在这方面是否是短期主义者。间接证据就是间接的。忽视气候变化的政治家可能是因为短期主义，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超过了收益。直接证据更好，但更难收集。很难说服议员回答有关他们态度的调查问题，对于历史上的政治家来说也不可能做到这一点。该项目通过观察政治家的时间焦点来开发一种不引人注目的测量方法来解决这个问题他们使用的语言。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、日期和对未来或过去的抽象引用。心理学家已经展示了如何利用一个人语言使用的这些特征来预测他们的时间焦点。这些研究是在年轻人或学生的短文本（通常是社交媒体帖子）上进行的。我们将这些技术扩展到涵盖政治家的演讲，并为3个国家议会（英国议会，澳大利亚参议院和芬兰Eduskunta）的政治家制定政治家时间焦点的措施。我们测试这些措施是否有意义，通过比较他们在英国议会的一小群政治家的问卷调查，调查与未来几代人的所有党派的议会小组合作。然后，我们继续展示了政治家的时间焦点是如何随着年龄和不同的政治和生活事件而变化的，并将政治家的时间焦点与普通人群的时间焦点进行了比较。了解政治家的时间焦点本身就很有价值，但它也很有价值，因为它可以让我们回答关于我们如何设计我们的政治制度的问题。我们的项目着眼于三种不同的制度选择：选择选举或任命政治家，选择更长或更短的议会任期，以及选择拥有专注于未来的专门机构。通过仔细的国内比较，我们测试了特定的制度选择是否会改变政治家的时间重点，超出我们预期的老龄化和偶然事件的结果。在英国，许多团体呼吁“在英国政策中进行更长期的思考”。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。