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Can democracies govern for the long term? (2)

By Alan M. Jacobs (People's Daily Online)    12:58, January 07, 2014
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And while many countries have accumulated massive levels of public debt, this is far from a universal pattern. Governments from Canada to Belgium and Denmark to Australia spent the first decade of this century paying down their financial obligations. Likewise, not all rich democracies have ignored the fiscal challenges of demographic change or put off the day of reckoning. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, both the United States and Canada substantially raised pension taxes and trimmed benefits so that they could accumulate massive trust funds that will very soon help pay for the retirement of the baby boomers.

Many of the most important investments that OECD governments make are policies that we simply take for granted. Elected governments everywhere routinely spend a large share of their budgets on education and training. Some countries devote as much as 7 percent of current national income to forging tomorrow’s workforce.

Surely many of these measures do not go far enough to secure future prosperity or the fate of the planet. But every one of these investments required elected politicians to look far beyond the next election – to impose substantial short-term sacrifice on their constituents in order to deliver long-term social gains.

If we want to understand the prospects for wise democratic governance, we need to stop thinking of elected politicians and their constituents as hopelessly shortsighted opportunists. Rather, we need to start asking why democratic rule is sounder and more effective in some places and times than others. Why do elected governments sometimes mortgage the future but at other times invest heavily in the long run?

This fundamental question is the focus of my book, Governing for the Long Term, and related research. Answering this question can tell us a great deal about the capacity of democracy to deliver sound governance and sustainable prosperity. My analysis points to three dynamics that play a large role in shaping elected politicians’ willingness to invest in the future.

The first factor is public attention. It may be true that voters are usually more concerned with their current welfare than with abstract projections into the future. But there are also times when public attention shifts, sometimes sharply, toward long-run problems. For example, dramatic negative events – severe storm activity, an industrial accident, a collapsed bridge or levee, a financial crisis – can often quickly turn citizens’ minds to deep-seated and long-festering social, economic, or environmental problems. Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emannuel shocked some when he declared, in the midst of the 2008 financial meltdown, that “you never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.” But as an insight into the logic of democratic governance, Emannuel was exactly right. Even as they help their citizens recover from present crisis, elected governments face a window of opportunity to help avert the next one. As vivid omens of future danger, crises can allow politicians to justify costly reforms to voters, by pointing out that sacrifice today is the only way to avoid further catastrophe tomorrow.

Paying attention to the future is not enough, though. Even if politicians and citizens are thinking about the long term, they may not know what to do about it. One thing that makes farsighted policymaking difficult is that the future is often clouded in uncertainty. On the one hand, the future is uncertain because tomorrow’s global temperatures, fertility rates, and economic trends – the state of the world decades from now – are difficult to predict.

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(Editor:ZhangQian、Yao Chun)

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