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.

我们中有些人居住在过去。其他人生活在现在。其他人仍在寻找未来。我们的思想指向过去，现在或将来的程度称为我们的 *暂时重点 *。心理学家研究了人们的暂时关注点，并发现以未来为中心的个人更有可能从事亲社会行为，并在他们的研究和职业生涯中表现良好。该项目是关于政治家的临时重点。政客通常被指控特定的时间重点过多地关注当前或“短期主义”。这种重点（举行论据）阻止政客无法应对长期挑战，例如气候变化或照顾不同的世代。解决这些挑战可能涉及现在做出牺牲，以便以后获得优势。政客（以及选民选民）可能会折价这些未来的利益。问题是我们不知道政客是否以这种方式是短期的。间接证据只是这种间接的。忽视气候变化的政客可能会因为短期主义而这样做，但也可能是因为他们不相信气候变化，或者相信应对气候变化的成本超过了收益。直接证据更好，但很难收集。很难说服国会议员回答有关其态度的调查问题，而对于历史政治家来说不可能做到这一点。该项目通过查看他们使用的语言来开发不显眼的政治家暂时关注点来解决这个问题。计算语言学家已经展示了如何以自动化的方式提取对未来或过去的大型文本的不同特征的零件。心理学家已经展示了如何使用人语言使用的这些特征来预测其暂时的重点。这些研究是在年轻人或学生的简短文本（通常是社交媒体帖子）上进行的。我们扩展了这些技术以涵盖政客的言论，并在3个国家议会（英国议会，政治家，政治家对政治家的临时关注度量）（澳大利亚参议院和芬兰的Eduskunta）。我们通过将它们与英国议会一小部分政治家的问卷进行比较来测试这些措施是否有意义，并与子孙后代的全党议会集团合作进行了调查。然后，我们继续展示政治家的暂时关注如何根据年龄以及不同的政治和生活事件而变化，并将政治家的时间重点与普通人群的暂时关注相比。关于政治家的临时重点是有价值的，但对于其自身的缘故而言是有价值的，但是这也很有价值，因为它使我们能够回答有关如何设计政治机构的问题。我们的项目着眼于三种不同的机构选择：选择或任命政客的选择，选择更长或更短的议会条款的选择，以及选择专门针对未来的专业机构的选择。通过仔细的国内比较，我们测试特定的机构选择是否会改变政治家的临时关注范围，这是由于衰老和机会事件的期望。在英国，许多团体呼吁“在英国政策中更长期思考”。在新西兰，党的领导人表示愿意加长议会条款，以避免短期主义。如果我们想避免短期主义，并在政客中促进了不同的时间关注，我们需要能够衡量暂时的重点，并将时间重点与不同的机构选择联系起来。这项研究将做到这一点。