Measuring perceived time pressure in political communication - The case of the European Commission

The consensus regarding social and political acceleration's impact on inclusive political systems is widespread, inducing chronic time constraints on politicians. This phenomenon, described variably as acceleration, crises, urgency, or turbulence and compresses demands for responsiveness in terms of frequency, pace, and duration. Simultaneously, rising complexity in political systems has led some researchers to bleak conclusions about inclusive decision-making's future, while others suggest a mere relocation of power under time constraints. Despite time pressure's significance in social sciences, it lacked systematic measurement. To address this, I propose a method to gauge time pressure in political texts. This approach relies on a linguistic model assessing politicians' perceived time pressure linked to policy matters. Politicians may heighten temporal pressure within a political dynamic or explicitly call for swift action, yet also seek more time for reflection or broader stakeholder involvement, despite acknowledging time pressure. This diversity leads to varied circumstances: acknowledging and acting on time pressure, perceiving it but demanding slower action, feeling no pressure but acting promptly, or perceiving no pressure and favouring a slow response. Integrating perceptions of time remaining for a response extends beyond spatial policy preferences. Methodologically, I developed a comprehensive coding scheme for trained researchers to identify instances of time pressure invocation in European commissioner speeches. This data is used to train a natural language model (Bert) to classify time pressure mentions within commissioner speeches from 1990 to 2024. Validation against annotated speeches and comparison with existing temporal classifications confirm the model's accuracy. Analysing commissioners' portfolios allows for understanding how time pressure perceptions differ across issues and time. Accurately representing time pressure perception in text data serves as a valuable resource for evaluating numerous social science perspectives, including acceleration models, temporal differences among political actors, institutions, and systems and may enhance party competition models by integrating temporal elements.