Introduction

Can democratic institutions help us to act in future-regarding ways? Many people – even committed democrats – have their doubts. Representative democracies, especially those with well-functioning bureaucracies, tend to provide their people with relatively high levels of economic prosperity and social welfare (Norris 2012). Overall, democratic systems fare better in this respect than autocratic ones, even those with high levels of state capacity. But it is not clear that democratic systems are equally good at ensuring the welfare of their people over the long term or acting with the potential interests of future others in mind.

Governments have failed to address climate change, plastics pollution, the loss of biodiversity, generational reproductions of racism and inequality, and many other long-term problems. Most countries also have huge – and growing – public debts that cannot be sustained over the long term. Furthermore, it is now apparent that no country was adequately prepared to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, despite advance warnings from many public health experts. Even wealthy, stable democracies, such as Switzerland, often have trouble making investments in the future. Recent attempts to reform the Swiss public pension system by raising the retirement age have been rejected several times in referenda, even though it is clear that the system, as it exists, is unsustainable over the long term (Bello and Galasso 2021).

These examples seem to suggest that democracies – like other regimes – are myopic and seek to maximise short-term welfare at the expense of the future. As Alan Jacobs (2008) points out, politics is not just about the distribution of costs and benefits between people, it is also about the distribution of costs and benefits over time. But political regimes, of all types, have reasons to neglect the future in favour of the present. As the authors of the Brundtland Report state in their opening chapter: ‘We act as we do because we can get away with it: future generations do not vote; they have no political or financial power; they cannot challenge our decisions’ (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 8).