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：追求真理是民主协商与治理的核心，但政治话语表现出不同的认知取向，从基于可验证信息的证据推理到植根于信念和主观解释的直觉推理。我们引入了一种可扩展的方法，通过源自大语言模型评分和基于嵌入的语义相似性的证据-直觉分数来测量认知取向。将该方法应用于覆盖1946年至2025年七个国家的1500万个议会发言片段，我们考察了话语的时间模式及其与协商民主和治理的关系。我们发现，在国家内部的时序分析中，证据-直觉分数与协商民主呈正相关，且同时期和滞后分析中均存在一致的关系。证据-直觉分数还与作为治理维度的法律透明度和可预测实施呈正相关。这些发现表明，政治话语的认知性质对民主和治理质量至关重要。