The pursuit of truth is central to democratic deliberation and governance, yet political discourse reflects varying epistemic orientations, ranging from evidence-based reasoning grounded in verifiable information to intuition-based reasoning rooted in beliefs and subjective interpretation. We introduce a scalable approach to measure epistemic orientation using the Evidence--Minus--Intuition (EMI) score, derived from large language model (LLM) ratings and embedding-based semantic similarity. Applying this approach to 15 million parliamentary speech segments spanning 1946 to 2025 across seven countries, we examine temporal patterns in discourse and its association with deliberative democracy and governance. We find that EMI is positively associated with deliberative democracy within countries over time, with consistent relationships in both contemporaneous and lagged analyses. EMI is also positively associated with the transparency and predictable implementation of laws as a dimension of governance. These findings suggest that the epistemic nature of political discourse is crucial for both the quality of democracy and governance.

翻译：追求真相是协商民主与治理的核心，但政治话语反映出的认识取向各不相同，从基于可验证信息的证据推理，到植根于信念与主观解释的直觉推理。我们提出一种可扩展的方法，通过基于大语言模型评分的证据-直觉分值和基于嵌入的语义相似性来测量认识取向。将该方法应用于七个国家1946年至2025年间1500万条议会演讲片段，我们考察了话语的时间模式及其与协商民主和治理的关联。研究发现：在一国范围内，证据-直觉分值与协商民主随时间呈正相关，且在同期分析和滞后分析中均显示出一致的关系；该分值还与法律透明度及可预测实施这一治理维度呈正相关。这些结果表明，政治话语的认识本质对民主与治理的质量至关重要。