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

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.