Minding the time gap: politicians’ perspectives on inter-temporal trade-offs in policy and politics
通过对瑞典市政政治家的原始调查，研究了政治家如何看待政策制定中的跨期权衡，发现共识导向的决策过程、低政策逆转风险及连任信心会降低他们对短期选举与长期社会利益之间权衡的感知。
Scholars in several fields share a desire to better understand the inter-temporal dimensions of policy-making. While several studies analysed individuals’ preferences regarding policies whose benefits unfold in the future, little is known about policy-makers’ own perceptions of inter-temporal trade-offs in politics. Using an original survey of municipal politicians in Sweden, we demonstrate that factors found important in macro-level research on future-oriented policy-making also matter for politicians’ micro-level perceptions. Politicians who perceive the policy-making process as consensus-oriented, characterised by corporatist concertation and by a low risk of policy reversal, and those who feel confident about (re-)election into government, are less likely to perceive a trade-off between policies that help them win elections and policies that benefit society in the long term, and less likely to view politics as short-term biased. Trade-off perceptions are, furthermore, related to previously overlooked variations in how politicians understand the inter-temporal profile of physical and social investment policies. Our findings have significant implications for comparative public policy research, by uncovering how politicians perceive inter-temporal trade-offs and shining new light on the micro-foundations of future-oriented policy-making.