Governing for the Long Term
Democracy and the Politics of Investment

This book asks how elected politicians choose between providing policy benefits in the present and investing in the future.

Alan M. Jacobs (Author)

9780521195850, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 March 2011

320 pages, 6 b/w illus. 2 tables
24.1 x 16.3 x 2.1 cm, 0.59 kg

“Governing for the Long Term offers an original and stimulating framework for understanding how politicians make decisions in sectors where costs and benefits play out over an extended period of time. This book will help analysts of politics not only to develop better explanations of political phenomena, but also to think differently about what it is that they are explaining.”
—R. Kent Weaver, Georgetown University

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.

Part I. Problem and Theory: 1. The politics of when
2. Theorizing intertemporal policy choice
Part II. Programmatic Origins: Intertemporal Choice in Pension Design: 3. Investing in the state: the origins of German pensions, 1889
4. The politics of mistrust: the origins of British pensions, 1925
5. Investments as political constraint: the origins of US pensions, 1935
6. Investing for the short term: the origins of Canadian pensions, 1965
Part III. Programmatic Change: Intertemporal Choice in Pension Reform: 7. Investment as last resort: reforming US pensions, 1977 and 1983
8. Shifting the long-run burden: reforming British pensions, 1986
9. Committing to investment: reforming Canadian pensions, 1998
10. Constrained by uncertainty: reforming German pensions, 1989 and 2001
Part IV. Conclusion: 11. Understanding the politics of the long term.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Comparative politics [JPB]