Introduction

Modern democracies face many long-term policy challenges, including climate change, public debts, infrastructure maintenance, nuclear waste disposal, social programme management and disaster preparedness. Many authors worry that democratic systems in their current – representative – forms are ill-equipped to deal with such long-term policy challenges (Jacobs 2011; Boston et al. 2014; MacKenzie 2021b). Democracies have an ‘appetite for the immediate’ (Thompson 2011: 19) in that they experience difficulties in producing policies that take into account the long-term concerns of future generations (Boston 2016b; Jacobs 2016). Because of this intergenerational bias in policymaking, democracies are often considered ‘presentist’, ‘short-termist’ or ‘myopic’.

Presentism can be caused by many factors, but the institutions of representative democracy are often identified as potential culprits. In representative democracies, elected officials may be insufficiently responsive to the needs of future generations because of the political considerations created by short electoral cycles (Thompson 2011; MacKenzie 2013). A member of parliament seeking re-election thus has incentives to focus on the needs of present-day electors, rather than respond to the needs of posterity, because only the former can make it to the voting booth.

The intuitive claim that democracies, with their short electoral cycles and strategically motivated elites, are geared more towards the short term than the long term has received some empirical support (Healy and Malhotra 2009; Jacobs and Matthews 2012). Students of intergenerational justice have found evidence that democratic policymaking does indeed suffer from an intergenerational equity bias (Vanhuysse 2013, 2014; Krznaric 2020), and that future publics are not given equal consideration to current generations (e.g., Boston 2016a).

However, scholars have also pointed out that the temporal bias in favour of current (or older) generations at the expense of future (or younger) generations does not affect all democracies to the same extent (Vanhuysse 2013, 2014; Krznaric 2020). This makes sense because democracy is not a one-size-fits-all concept. Democracies come in many shapes and sizes (Gerring and Thacker 2008; Lijphart 2012), and there are myriad institutional explanations for intergenerational biases in policymaking (Bernauer et al. 2016; Boston 2016b).