Governing for the long term
Subtitle: democracy and the politics of investment
By: Alan M. Jacobs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9780521195850
Subjects: Welfare economics; Government policy; Political planning; Social policy; Externalities (Economics); Pensions; Social choice; Political aspects; Case studies
Description: "This book examines how democratic governments manage long-term policy challenges, asking how elected politicians choose between providing policy benefits in the present and investing in the future"--

"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"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-293) and index.