Introduction

According to a common scholarly understanding, democratic institutions (at least in their current forms) are biased towards making short-sighted decisions (Nordhaus 1975; Bechtel and Hainmuller 2011; Jacobs 2011; MacKenzie 2021b). These biases are particularly problematic in the contemporary world, where many of the most pressing problems, such as climate change, immigration and aging populations, require policy responses that must be enacted over several electoral cycles. Policy responses to long-term problems typically require paying costs in the short term in order to produce benefits in the future.

‘Long-term policy investments’, as Jacobs (2011) calls them, are difficult for democracies to make for many reasons. Politicians seeking re-election may be reluctant to promote policies that impose costs on voters today, even if substantial benefits could be expected later. Decision makers may also face fierce opposition from organised interest groups worried about carrying significant costs associated with long-term policy initiatives. The future is also uncertain and complex. From the viewpoint of voters, who typically try to minimise informational costs, the uncertainties associated with future policy benefits are likely to make short-term options more attractive (Jacobs 2016: 439). Many scholars have called for more authoritarianism in the handling of long-term political issues, precisely because future uncertainty requires unusual competence and wisdom, which is possessed, it is argued, only by the few (e.g., Shearman and Smith 2007). Indeed, voters are typically not very well-informed about politics (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996), which could further contribute to voter myopia.

In representative democracies voters are nevertheless in a key position. Politicians cannot act only on their own initiatives but must consider the preferences of voters when they make policy. If voters are biased against the future, elected officials may be incentivised to make myopic policy choices, even when they know better than to do so. Despite the prevalence of this argument, the empirical evidence for voter myopia is rather thin. Only a handful of studies directly measure the temporal component in voters’ policy preferences and these studies do not find strong evidence of voter myopia (e.g., Jacobs and Matthews 2012, 2017).