Governing for the Long Term

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.