Epistemic Orientation Predicts Legislative Effectiveness Among US Lawmakers

By analyzing congressional floor speeches and social media posts through an Evidence-Minus-Intuition (EMI) metric, researchers examined how legislators' epistemic orientations correlate with institutional performance. The findings indicate that ideologically extreme politicians rely significantly less on evidence-grounded language across both platforms. Crucially, after controlling for party ideology, seniority, and topic distribution, lawmakers who consistently employ evidence-oriented discourse achieve measurably higher Legislative Effectiveness Scores (LES), linking computational text metrics to concrete policy outcomes.