Legislators talk less about the future as they age

Many have argued that democracies suffer from short-termism. We investi-gate one possible determinant of short-termism: the age of elected repre-sentatives. Ageing is associated with various attitudinal and behaviouralfeatures that could change politicians’ temporal focus, but the directionof this effect remains unclear, with different largely survey-based studysettings yielding different results. To study the link in a political setting,we introduce an unobtrusive measure of politicians’ temporal focus. Wemeasure the temporal focus of speech in four Westminster-style legislativechambers: the Australian Senate, the Canadian House of Commons, theDáil Éireann, and the United Kingdom House of Commons, over a period ofseveral decades. We model the proportion of speech focused on the future asa smooth function of politicians’ age. Controlling for party, parliamentarycohort, governmental status and period effects, we find that, across allparliaments studied, politicians’ future focus declines slowly between 50and 65 years of age, decreasing more rapidly thereafter.