Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment - Softcover

Jacobs, Alan M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521171776 ISBN 13: 9780521171779

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2011

Synopsis

While political analysis has commonly focused on the distributive problem of who gets what, many of the hardest choices facing modern societies are dilemmas of timing. If governments want to reduce public debt, slow climate change, or shore up pension systems, they must typically inflict immediate pain on citizens for gains that will only arrive over the long run. In Governing for the Long Term, Alan M. Jacobs investigates the conditions under which elected governments invest in long-term social benefits at short-term social cost. Jacobs contends that, along the path to adoption, investment-oriented policies must surmount three distinct hurdles to future-oriented state action: a problem of electoral risk, rooted in the scarcity of voter attention; a problem of prediction, deriving from the complexity of long-term policy effects; and a problem of institutional capacity, arising from interest groups' preferences for distributive gains over intertemporal bargains. Testing this argument through a four-country historical analysis of pension policymaking, the book illuminates crucial differences between the causal logics of distributive and intertemporal politics and makes a case for bringing trade-offs over time to the center of the study of policymaking.

About this title

Book Description

This book examines how democratic governments manage long-term policy challenges. The book seeks to understand how elected officials make trade-offs between the present and the future as they confront such challenges. Why do governments sometimes choose to impose costs on their constituents today to invest in solutions to long-term problems, but at other times leave future problems for their successors to address? To answer this question, the book develops a theory of "intertemporal policy choice," then analyzes how governments in four countries have managed long-term challenges to their pension systems.

About the Author

Alan M. Jacobs is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. The recipient of the 2009 Mary Parker Follett Award of the American Political Science Association and the 2005 John Heinz Dissertation Award of the National Academy of Social Insurance, Jacobs is the author of several articles and book chapters on comparative public policy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0521171776
• ISBN 13: 9780521171779
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 324