Long-term policymaking and politicians' beliefs about voters: Evidence from a 3-year panel study of politicians

Politicians are required to make policy decisions that involve short-term and long-term tradeoffs, and existing theory largely expects election-driven myopic thinking to dominate their reasoning when they do so. Direct evidence on this is surprisingly absent, leaving open questions on whether and when politicians do support future-oriented policies, and what factors, beyond the shadow of elections, influence such choices. Responding to this gap, we report results of a multi-year survey of more than 1500 elected politicians who faced an original decision task involving short-term and long-term solutions to a local policy problem. First, we show that politicians' theories of voting behavior-specifically, their beliefs about whether voters focus on the short or the long term-strongly predict their decisions when facing inter-temporal policy tradeoffs. Second, we show that politicians are responsive to changes to short-run costs associated with long-term policy investments. Finally, we leverage the panel design of our study and find-in contrast to prevalent assumptions-no evidence that politicians' policy choices are related to their proximity to the next election. In doing so, we expand and refine the theoretical framework on inter-temporal choice by policymakers, and outline a comparative research agenda for studying how politicians think about the future.