Legislators talk less about the future as they age

Many have argued that democracies suffer from short-termism. We investigate one possible determinant of short-termism: the age of elected representatives. Ageing is associated with various attitudinal and behavioural features that could change politicians’ temporal focus, but the direction of this effect remains unclear, with different largely survey-based study settings yielding different results. To study the link in a political setting, we introduce an unobtrusive measure of politicians’ temporal focus. We measure the temporal focus of speech in four Westminster-style legislative chambers: the Australian Senate, the Canadian House of Commons, the Dáil Éireann, and the United Kingdom House of Commons, over a period of several decades. We model the proportion of speech focused on the future as a smooth function of politicians’ age. Controlling for party, parliamentary cohort, governmental status and period effects, we find that, across all parliaments studied, politicians’ future focus declines slowly between 50 and 65 years of age, decreasing more rapidly thereafter.