Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of InvestmentIn 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. |
Contents
| 3 | |
Chapter 2 Theorizing Intertemporal Policy Choice | 28 |
Intertemporal Choice in Pension Design | 73 |
Introduction | 75 |
Chapter 3 Investing in the State | 78 |
Chapter 4 The Politics of Mistrust | 97 |
Chapter 5 Investment as Political Constraint | 110 |
Chapter 6 Investing for the Short Term | 133 |
Chapter 7 Investment as Last Resort | 161 |
Chapter 8 Shifting the LongRun Burden | 179 |
Chapter 9 Committing to Investment | 193 |
Chapter 10 Constrained by Uncertainty | 215 |
Part IV Conclusion | 239 |
Chapter 11 Understanding the Politics of the Long Term | 241 |
| 269 | |
| 295 | |
Other editions - View all
Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment Alan M. Jacobs No preview available - 2011 |
Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment Alan M. Jacobs No preview available - 2011 |
Common terms and phrases
accumulation actors actuarial assets attention BArch British Canada Canada Pension Plan Canadian capacity causal Chapter cognitive Committee consequences contribution burden contribution rates contributory pension decades democratic distributive economic effects elected electoral safety elites employers enact favor federal fiscal future German Germany’s government’s ideational impose instance institutional insulation interest groups intertemporal choice intertemporal policy choices intertemporal trade-off intertemporal transfer investment’s labor legislators logic long-run long-term redistribution ment mental model microeconomic ministers near-term officials Old Age Security old-age Ontario options organized interests Ottawa outcomes pain party PAYGO financing payroll tax Pension Plan pension program pension scheme percent policy investment policymaking political politicians potential preferences problem program’s proposal public pension Quebec reform Reichstag retirement revenues Roosevelt short-run short-term costs social insurance Social Security spending structure substantial term tomorrow trade unions U.S. Senate uncertainty vertical investment veto points voters welfare workers