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：追求真理是协商民主与治理的核心，然而政治话语呈现出不同的认识取向——从基于可验证信息的证据推理，到植根于信念与主观阐释的直觉推理。我们提出了一种可扩展的衡量认识取向的方法，该方法采用基于大语言模型评分与嵌入语义相似性的"证据-直觉"分值。通过对七个国家1946至2025年间1500万段议会发言进行建模分析，我们考察了话语的时间演变模式及其与协商民主和治理的关联。研究发现，在国家内部纵向维度上，"证据-直觉"分值与协商民主呈正相关，同期分析与滞后期分析均呈现稳定关联。该分值还与法律透明度及可预测执行这一治理维度呈正相关。这些发现表明，政治话语的认识论特征对民主质量与治理效能均具有关键作用。