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.
- ISBN10 6613110930
- ISBN13 9786613110930
- Publish Date 31 March 2011 (first published 28 March 2011)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 11 September 2012
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Cambridge University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 324
- Language English