Sentences From the House of Commons Annotated for Temporal Focus, 1979-2023

Hanretty, Chris and Hussain, Abid (2025). Sentences From the House of Commons Annotated for Temporal Focus, 1979-2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857649

Some of us dwell on the past. Others live in the present. Others still look towards the future. The degree to which our thoughts are directed to the past, present or future is called our *temporal focus*. Psychologists have studied people's temporal focus, and have found that future-focused individuals are more likely to engage in pro-social behaviours and perform well in their studies and in their careers.

This project is about politicians' temporal focus. Politicians are often accused of having a particular temporal focus-of focusing too much on the present, or of being "short-termist". This focus (runs the argument) prevents politicians from tackling long-term challenges such as climate change or caring for different generations. Tackling these challenges can involve making sacrifices now in order to gain advantages later. Politicians (and the voters who elect them) may discount these future benefits.

The problem is that we don't know whether politicians are short-termist in this way. Indirect evidence is just that-indirect. Politicians who neglect climate change might do so because of short-termism, but might also do so because they don't believe in climate change, or believe that costs of tackling climate change outweigh the benefits. Direct evidence is better, but harder to collect. It is difficult to convince MPs to answer survey questions about their attitudes, and impossible to do so for historical politicians.

This project solves this problem by developing an unobtrusive measure of politicians' temporal focus by looking at the language they use. Computational linguists have shown how to extract different features-parts of speech, dates, and abstract references to the future or past-from large bodies of text in an automated fashion. Psychologists have shown how these features of a person's language use can be used to predict their temporal focus. These studies have been carried out on short texts (typically social media posts) by young adults or students.

We extend these techniques to cover politicians' speech, and produce measures of politicians' temporal focus for politicians in 3 national parliaments (the UK Parliament, the Australian Senate, and the Finnish Eduskunta). We test whether these measures make sense by comparing them to questionnaire responses from a small group of politicians in the UK Parliament, surveyed in collaboration with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Future Generations. We then go on to show how politicians' temporal focus varies according to age and different political and life events, and compare temporal focus in politicians to temporal focus in the general population.

Knowing about politicians' temporal focus is valuable for its own sake, but it is also valuable because it allows us to answer questions about how we design our political institutions. Our project looks at three different institutional choices: the choice to elect or appoint politicians, the choice to have longer or shorter parliamentary terms, and the choice to have specialised institutions which focus on the future. By careful within-country
comparisons, we test whether particular institutional choices change politicians' temporal focus beyond what we would expect as a result of ageing and chance events.

Our project has concrete benefits for countries considering institutional reforms. In the UK, numerous groups have called for "more long term thinking in UK policy". In New Zealand, party leaders have expressed willingness to lengthen parliamentary terms to avoid short-termism. If we want to avoid short-termism, and promote a different temporal focus in our politicians, we need to be able to measure temporal focus, and relate temporal focus to different institutional choices. This research will do just that.

Data description (abstract)

This collection includes almost four thousand sentences taken from the Commons Hansard between 1979 and 2023, and independently coded for their temporal focus by two researchers.

The sentences were drawn randomly from XML versions of the Hansard Corpus as maintained by https://www.publicwhip.org.uk/, and after removing procedural language found in italics, or language with no associated speaker. The data therefore approximate a simple random sample of the population of sentences spoken in the Commons during this period.

Sentences are classified as being about the past, the future, or the present. The data contains the codings given independently by each researcher, together with the consensus coding established by the two researchers working jointly.

The purpose of this human coding was to fine-tune a large language model in order to classify other sentences from the UK House of Commons and other English language legislative bodies; to use these classifications to determine how much politicians speak about the future; and to determine how, if at all, the proportion of speech which is about the future changes in different individual and political contexts.

The coding is specific to parliamentary language, and transferability to other contexts may be limited.

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Hanretty Chris	Royal Holloway, University of London	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8932-9405
Hussain Abid

Sponsors:

ESRC

Grant reference:

ES/X001695/1

Topic classification:

Politics

Keywords:

LEGISLATIVE PROCESS, POLITICIANS, LANGUAGE VARIATIONS, FUTURE SOCIETY

Project title:

Politicians' temporal focus

Grant holders:

Chris Hanretty, Sarah Childs, Vesa Koskimaa, Patrick Leslie

Project dates:

From	To
25 June 2023	25 December 2024

Date published:

03 Feb 2025 11:13

Last modified:

03 Feb 2025 11:13

Coverage and Methodology

Access and Administration

Data sourcing, processing and preparation:

The full-text of Hansard in XML format was taken from The Public Whip/My Society's ParlParse. You can find a description at https://parser.theyworkforyou.com/parser.html The work of the two human coders in coding sentences was guided by grammatical tense, semantics, grammatical mood. Particular issues arose in connection with the near-past and near-future, and with multi-clause sentences and sentence fragments. We illustrate these points with example sentences below. Grammatical tense As a general principle, the use of the simple future is ordinarily enough to classify a sentence as being about the future where there is no other tense present in the sentence. Constructions that indicate the simple future include uses of “will” and “shall”, and “going to”. Examples include: “Calves will still face 11-hour journeys, cattle and sheep will face anything up to 33 hours and pigs will face 26 hours” (Tony Banks, 22nd June 1995; FUTURE) and “Will we get more independents, as they seem to keep their prices down?” (Bob Stewart, 2nd April 2014; FUTURE) One exception to this principle concerns the use of an initial “will” as part of a question. We regard this use of “will” as expressing a request, somewhat similar to sense II.i.14.c. in the OED entry for “will”). Examples include: “Will the Honourable Gentleman now begin the New Zealand butter part of his speech?” (Mr Deputy Speaker, 25th July 1980; PRESENT) These are coded as being present-focused requests. Other exceptions to this principle include uses of the simple future where the future state or action is in the near future. See the section dealing with the near future. Just as with the simple future, sentences in the simple past were ordinarily classified as being about the past. For example: “In January 1997, there were 1,171 maintained special schools in England.” (Margaret Hodge, 24th March 2005; PAST) Slightly more complicated are other tenses such as the present perfect continuous. Although the present perfect continuous is used for actions which started at some recent point in the past and may continue until now, we normally coded these as past. For example: “A particular target has been so-called social studies, which is how the UGC describes them.” (Dafydd Elis-Thomas, 18th November 1981; PAST) This could mean that social studies were a target, and that social studies continue at present to be a target, but we think it would be quixotic to consider this statement as being about the present. We generally understood actions starting in the past but continuing into the present to be past-focused. Semantics: words that indicate temporal extension to the future Sometimes sentences are in the present tense, and have no particular grammatical mood, but use words which suggest a future orientation. These can often be verbs that relate to planning or intentionality. Here is a long example: “As someone rooted in the co-operative traditions to which my right Honourable Friend refers, I warmly welcome the proposals for foundation hospitals, not least because they offer the prospect of replacing local quangos, which are too often not accountable to local people, with democratically elected boards.” (Gareth Thomas, 14th November 2002) Here, the “proposals” themselves are proposals for some future development or state of affairs; a “prospect” is also something that suggests the future. Another example is the following: “Let me ask a simple question: is it the Labour party’s intention to scrap the tax—yes or no?” Here, the tense is the present tense (“is it”), but the reference to intention means that it is about the future. A separate category of words which have temporal connotations are words referring to increases or decreases. Because quantities increase or decrease over time, it is not always clear whether the focus of the sentence is on the point at which the increase or decrease began, or the point at which the increase or decrease stopped. We generally coded such references as being references to the end point of the increase or decrease, except where the speaker went on to draw a rhetorical contrast which marked the start or end point. Mood Irrealis moods (as opposed to the realis) include hypotheticals and conditional statements. As a general principle, we code hypothetical or conditional statements as present, even where other aspects of grammatical tense or word choice suggest the future. We do this because we believe that counterfactuals and things that don’t actually exist can’t properly be said to exist in the future or the past, and so we code them together with the present. Examples include: “However, let me tell her that if such well-funded industries as the food processing and advertising industries thought that her conclusions were likely to be valid, they would have commissioned their own research and presented it to us” (Nigel Griﬀiths, 25th April 2008; PRESENT) Here, the fact that the counterfactual (“industries presenting their research to the minister”) took place in some counterfactual past, as suggested by the tense, is not relevant. Sometimes it is not clear whether the sentence is entirely hypothetical or conditional in nature. For example, we code the following sentence as future-focused: “Subject to the views of other members of the board, he could expect to remain chair of the FSB until 2018” (George Osborne, 26th November 2012) since this sentence involves a clear reference to the future (2018 is in the future relative to November 2012), and because the conditional (“the other members of the board acting so as to preventing the chair of the FSB from remaining chair of the FSB”) is implicit rather than explicit. Hortative moods include recommendations of particular action or praise. Sometimes – perhaps even often – politicians recommend particular courses of action. Some of these courses of action would necessarily take place in the future – they cannot take place on the same day. As a general principle, the presence of the hortative mood on its own is not enough to code something as being future-focused (or past-focused, in the case of sentences featuring “should have” or similar words). An example is the following: “I agree with him absolutely that there is no reason why the Soviet Union should not reduce its weapons of that kind unilaterally to NATO levels.” (Geoffrey Howe, 10th May 1989) Here the Soviet Union cannot reduce its weapons to NATO levels in a single day; what is being urged is therefore a future action. However, that alone does not qualify it as being coded as concerning the future. Near past and near future Sometimes sentences are in the past or future tense, and have no grammatical mood (irrealis, hortative) which complicates the coding, but concern the near past or near future. As a general principle, where a sentence concerns the near past or near future, defined here as “sometime earlier or later on in that same day”, we code these as present. One (somewhat facetious) example is the following: “The essence of Private Members’ Bills is time, so I shall now sit down.” (James Pawsey, 1st May 1981) Here, the use of shall indicates the future tense, but the action (“James Pawsey’s sitting down”) follows on immediately from the utterance. A slightly less obvious example is: “When I made the point earlier about the definition of areas, which the right Honourable Gentleman sets out in clause 1, I mentioned areas such as Grampian specifically for the reason raised by my Honourable Friend, but it will not have gone unnoticed by him that the region makes allowances for the teaching of Gaelic in the schools in its rate apportionment to the education authority for that purpose.” The classification of this sentence depends on what is meant by “earlier”. We took the view that “earlier” in this context probably meant “earlier in this debate”, and that therefore it was probably the same day. Sometimes it is not altogether clear whether past or future reference is in the near-past or near-future. As such, applying this principle requires some judgement and some knowledge of parliamentary procedure. For example: references to a committee report are references to an earlier stage in the parliamentary process, but the Committee is unlikely to have reported that same day. Sometimes even with this knowledge it is hard to classify. For example: we coded “The full text of the letter that I have received from the Prime Minister about my new role has been deposited in the Library.” (John Prescott, 17th May 2006). as being about the past, rather than the present, because it was not clear that the deposit or the receipt of the letter were on that same day. Multi-clause sentences Some politicians have acquired a reputation for being prolix. It is certainly true that many of the sentences that we coded were multi-clause sentences. Multi-clause sentences cause diﬀiculties for coding because different clauses within the sentence can have different temporal focus. Here is a simple example: “Later this year, the Chester to Shrewsbury service will become an hourly service, and the Wrexham to Bidston service already is hourly.” (Ian Lucas, 16th May 2005) We can split this sentence into two clauses, separated by the coordinating conjunction “and”: • “Later this year, the Chester to Shrewsbury service will become an hourly service” • “the Wrexham to Bidston service already is hourly” The first clause concerns the future, whilst the second clause concerns the present. Where we faced multiclause sentences, we tried as far as possible to disaggregate the sentence into clauses, and classify on the basis of these constituent clauses. We followed two general principles. First, where we faced sentences with two clauses, we tended to code on the basis of the clause that was longer in terms of characters. In the example above, the clause referring to developments later this year is the longer clause, and so we classified the sentence overall as having a focus on the future. Second, where we faced sentences with three or more clauses, we tended to code using the most common code. Exceptions to these two principles concern sentences which contained clauses focused on the past and the future, where we “split the difference”, and coded the focus as being on the present. Here is an example: “Given that alcohol misuse is estimated to cost £7.3 billion in crime and antisocial behaviour, and that it was a factor in 18,000 incidents of violent crime in Wales in 2008, can he assure the House that help for prisoners with alcohol problems will be given the same priority as help for offenders with drug problems?” (Nick Smith, 23rd November 2010) We can split this sentence into three clauses: • “alcohol misuse is estimated to cost £7.3 billion in crime and antisocial behaviour” [PRESENT] • “it [alcohol misuse] was a factor in 18,000 incidents of violent crime in Wales in 2008” [PAST] • “can he assure the House that help for prisoners with alcohol problems will be given the same priority as help for offenders with drug problems” [FUTURE] Because some parts deal with the past, and some with the future, we judged that it would be misleading to code this sentence as having a temporal focus on the past or the future, and so we coded it as the present, which has something of the character of a residual category. Most generally, these principles were points of departure, and we could depart from these principles if we thought that the main focus of the sentence was different from what these principles would suggest. For example: one constituent clause might be very long only because it contains a non-restrictive subclause or parenthetical remark. Sentence fragments Most of the time we refer to classify sentences – pieces of text which contain verbs which have a tense. Sometimes we deal with sentence fragments. Where we have sentence fragments which lack any tensed verb, we code these as focused on the present. Generally, the “present focus” code is something of a default or residual category.

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