There is widespread agreement that social and political acceleration puts inclusive political systems under chronic time pressure. Researchers have used many labels such as acceleration, crises, urgency, or turbulence to describe how the frequency, pace, and duration of demands to responsiveness have been compressed. At the same time, political systems gain complexity which led some researchers to highly pessimistic conclusions about the future of inclusive decision-making, whereas others have described how the locus of power simply re-locates when acting under time pressure.
Despite the prominence of time pressure in the social sciences, the concept of time pressure had never been systematically measured. I propose a procedure to measure time pressure in political texts that builds on a linguistic model of perceived time pressure by politicians attached to policy issues. The measurement includes the temporal dimension of an envisaged policy response. Politicians can not only raise the temporal pressure a certain political dynamic exerts, but they might directly ask for fast action as another manifestation of time pressure. However, demands for more time are logically unrelated to time pressure. Thus, politicians can acknowledge time pressure and still demand more time in order to reflect, deliberate, or include more stakeholders in the decision-making process. Combined, politicians can perceive time pressure and want to act timely, they might perceive time pressure but demand a slower response, they might feel no time pressure but still want to act quickly or they perceive no time pressure and prefer to act slowly. Perceptions about the amount of time left for a response are a crucial extension to “purely” substantial representations of policy preferences. In many cases, political actors might agree on the substance but disagree on the time. In order to reach decisions, both dimensions of potential disagreement have to be integrated.
Methodologically, I have developed an encompassing coding scheme that is employed by trained researchers to text data from European commissioner speeches to identify invocations of time pressure on the token level. The labelled data are used to train a natural language model (Bert) to classify invocations of time pressure on the token level within all commissioner speeches from 1990 until 2024. I validate the classification with a random hold-out sample of annotated speeches and compare the measurement to other existing temporal classifications such as tense tagging. Based on the commissioners’ portfolio, I can compare how the perceptions of time pressure vary across policy issues and over time from the commissioners’ perspective.
A valid representation of the perception of time pressure in text data provides a valuable source of data to assess a large series of key claims from different kinds of literature, such as the canonical models of political acceleration, and differences in temporalities of political actors, institutions, and political systems. Models of party competition could be enriched by complementing spatial elements with time. In short, there is a broad range of applications that can benefit from a valid representation of time pressure in political communication.
