Short Horizons: How Political Incentives Skew the Future

Societies face multiple long-term policy challenges that range from the existential, such as climate change, to the more rudimentary like infrastructure management. No doubt, we are surrounded by policy decisions about the future. In such a world, are our democratic institutions well set up to deal with these decisions?

The Problem of Short-Termism in Policy Making 

Short-termism in public policy refers to the tendency of governments to prioritise immediate political gains over sustainable long-term outcomes. This bias afflicts governments and political parties of all shapes and sizes across most of the world. They arise from political incentives tied to electoral cycles and re-election prospects as well as the difficulty of accounting for future interests in today’s decisions. 
 
The classic example of this was presented by Nordhaus in 1975 in his paper The Political Business Cycle.¹ He argued that incumbent governments implement monetary policies to reduce unemployment in pre-election periods. Conversely, after elections, they implement austerity measures to ‘balance the books.’  
 
The costs of short-termism are significant: policies designed without a long-term view may fail to address underlying issues or may even exacerbate them. For example, research has shown that in urban development, short-term planning decisions are more strongly shaped by commercial pressures and have worse planetary and public health outcomes.² On a larger scale, the Institute for Government has claimed that chronic short-termism have kept key UK public services in a negative feedback loop. 

The Importance of Paradigms 

Paradigms shape how people think about issues, often unconsciously. A policy paradigm, defined as a set of shared cognitive and normative assumptions among policymakers, influences both the goals of government action and the instruments considered appropriate to achieve them. As Hall’s classic framework³ suggests, shifts in underlying paradigms fundamentally reshape problem definitions and policy solutions. 
 
Research on ideational robustness shows how entrenched paradigms contribute to policy persistence even in the face of changing social or political environments. Policies rooted in dominant paradigms can persist because key ideas about goals, legitimacy and means become deeply embedded in institutions. As Migone and Howlett⁴ argue, the “robustness” of these paradigms helps explain why some policies remain stable despite new information or shifting public preferences. 

Equally, they define how we think about the future. Some have argued that older ways of thinking were more in line with thinking about the future and are sometimes called ‘inter-generational’ approaches to thinking. For example, in his book The Good Ancestor Kznaric has used ‘Cathedral thinking’ as a term to describe the far future thinking of those who built the cathedrals of Europe in the Middle Ages, knowing even their grandchildren would not see their completion. ‘Seventh Generation’ stewardship, a Native American principle that urges current generations to live and work for the benefit of the seventh generation into the future, goes back much further. 

How to Improve Policy Making for the Future 

Improving policymaking for the future demands both institutional and cognitive change. On the institutional side, scholars suggest a multifaceted approach that restructures incentives and capacities within political systems. Jonathan Boston⁵ has suggested proposals including mechanisms to insulate decision-making from short-term political pressures, enhance intertemporal coordination across government tiers, and embed future-oriented analysis into standard practice. 

Equally important, Evans argues, is enhancing policymakers’ capacity for foresight and anticipation. Organisational cultures that encourage long-term thinking, such as scenario planning and futures literacy, can reduce ‘temporal illiteracy’, a term used to describe the habitual discounting of future consequences in policy deliberations.  

Paradigm change also plays a central role. Shifting the dominant lenses through which policymakers view problems can reframe issues like climate change, public health, and urban planning as long-term challenges requiring sustained investment rather than short-term fixes. Achieving such shifts requires engaging not just policymakers but civil society, making the future a visible part of today’s political discourse. 
 
One institutional example that seeks to counteract short-termism is Finland’s Parliamentary Committee for the Future. The committee operates as a cross-party body tasked with evaluating long-term trends, assessing emerging technologies, and scrutinising government reports on the future. While it does not possess direct decision-making power, its influence lies in normalising long-term perspectives within parliamentary debate and embedding foresight as a legitimate and routine component of democratic governance.

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1. Nordhaus, W.D. (1975) The Political Business Cycle. The Review of Economic Studies, 42 (2), pp.169-190. ↩︎
2. Black, D., Bates, G., Callway, R., Pain, K. and Kirton-Darling, E. (2024) Short-termism in urban development: The commercial determinants of planetary health. Earth System Governance, 22. ↩︎
3. Hall, P.A. (1993) Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics, 25 (3), pp.275-296. ↩︎
4. Migone, A., Howlett, M. and Howlett, A. (2024) Paradigmatic stability, ideational robustness, and policy persistence: exploring the impact of policy ideas on policy-making. Policy and Society, 43 (2), pp.189-203. ↩︎
5. Boston, J. (2021) Assessing the options for combatting democratic myopia and safeguarding long-term interests. Futures, 125. ↩︎