Governing for the long term : democracy and the politics of investment /
"This book examines how democratic governments manage long-term policy challenges, asking how elected politicians choose between providing policy benefits in the present and investing in the future"--
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press,
2011.
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| Online Access: | Contributor biographical information Publisher description Table of contents only |
| Summary: | "This book examines how democratic governments manage long-term policy challenges, asking how elected politicians choose between providing policy benefits in the present and investing in the future"-- "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"-- |
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| Physical Description: | xiv, 306 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-293) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780521195850 0521195853 9780521171779 (pbk.) 0521171776 (pbk.) |