I know this is old but came here with a similar question and decided to post my findings, The timeout, as a global parameter, is supported by the drivers as part of the connection string, which makes sense because it's the driver the one that can control this global parameters, here you can find documentation about this: https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/connection-string/, but each driver can handle this slightly different (c# for example uses Mongo Settings parameter for this, python has it as parameters in the init constructor, etc)
To test this you can start a test server using mtools like this:
mlaunch --replicaset --name testrepl --nodes 3 --port 27000
Then an example in python will be like:
from pymongo import MongoClient
c = MongoClient(host="mongodb://localhost:27000,localhost:27001,localhost:27002/?replicaSet=testrepl&wtimeoutMS=2000&w=3")
c.test_database.col.insert({ "name": "test" })
I'm using the URI method so this can be used in other drivers, but Python also supports the parameters w and wtimeout, in this example all the write operations will be defaulted to 2 segs and 3 nodes have to be confirmed before returning, if you restart the database and use the wtimeout of 1 (meaning 1 ms) you will see an exception because the replication will take a bit longer to initialize the first time you execute the python script.
Hope this helps others coming with the same question.