Evidence-Based Language

A paper published in 2025 used computational analysis on congressional speeches in the United States from 1879 to 2022 in order to determine how much evidence-based rhetoric, as opposed to intuition-based language, was used each year.

That data was then compared to numbers showing how productive each congressional term was, to see if there might be a connection between the words congresspeople use and the job they actually do while in office.

What the researchers found is that emotional, intuition-based language has been on the uptick since the mid-1970s, and that as evidence-based language has declined, congressional productivity has also dropped.