A More Future-Oriented Legislature? The Impact of a Permanent “Future Committee” on the Temporal Focus of MPs

Abstract

Political short-sightedness is commonly considered a problem for democracies struggling with long-term challenges, but few proposed cures for political myopia have been implemented. We study the world's first and only genuinely institutionalized legislature-based “future committee”, Finland's Committee for the Future (CF). Our outcome variable is a novel and unobtrusive speech-based measure of individuals’ temporal focus that is measured at the MP level over time. When comparing individuals before, during and after their service on the CF, we find a statistically significant but modest impact of CF membership on how much committee members talk about the future in the plenary. Compared to non-members, committee members utter roughly one more future-focused sentence every three hundred sentences. Such institutions can thus induce more future-oriented thinking into legislatures.