Why do voters elect governments with only short-term interests in mind?

During World War II, the United States was desperate to develop the nuclear bomb ahead of Germany and maintain a technological advantage. To do so, they needed to produce plutonium, and lots of it. They would produce that plutonium at a site in Hanford, Washington, due to its proximity to the Columbia River and its distance from people, given the concern over an accidental explosion. The plutonium manufactured there would be used in the first nuclear bomb ever detonated. Over the following forty years, the site would produce two-thirds of the plutonium in the US nuclear arsenal. As Michael Lewis points out in his book The Fifth Risk, the Hanford site is now also a catastrophe of a cleanup job. When it was shut down at the end of the Cold War, decades of radioactive manufacturing had led to dumping 120 million gallons of high-level waste and 444 billion gallons of contaminated liquid into the ground. Left at the site are 177 storage tanks, each roughly the size of a four-storey apartment, holding, among other things, 56 million gallons of high-level waste. The site represents approximately 60 percent of the high-level waste managed by the US Department of Energy. Brian Morgan/Jeff McIntosh / The Canadian Press/unsplash Given the urgency of World War II, one can understand that the American government felt a need to focus on the short term in establishing the site. Beating Germany to the bomb was the priority, rather than ensuring proper safety and waste disposal measures. In the time since, though, there has been far less of an excuse for mismanagement. Over the years, Hanford’s residents experienced higher than usual rates of miscarriage, cancer, and genetic disorders, which were largely ignored. Sixty-seven of the 177 tanks have failed in some way, leading to leaks that pollute the groundwater and waste that slowly drifts toward the Columbia River. A cleanup would be hugely expensive. The Department of Energy spends approximately 10 percent of its annual budget on Hanford already and has not been making much progress. An original plan developed in 1988 called for the cleanup to be finished in thirty years, by 2008. In 2008, it was decided 2040 was more realistic. A 2012 study by the US General Accounting Office pointed out there remained a number of serious unresolved technical and managerial problems, suggesting it will likely be longer yet. Hanford and the failure so far to effectively address the environmental hazards it poses illustrate a number of the challenges in addressing long-term problems. [break] Humans focus on the present and not enough on the future. Our modern environment can exacerbate this tendency, fixing our attention on short-term crises rather than long-term problems. Governments are made up of individuals, who are themselves subject to a present bias. Our leaders and legislators make policy decisions and are influenced by many of the same factors that we are as individuals: the more uncertainty there is over how necessary a decision is and the lower the immediate reward or the higher the cost to a politician for taking it, the greater the tendency for them to delay taking action on it. In addition, how governments are structured can often mean they face challenges that look remarkably similar to present-biased individuals. The present self—that is, the government in power at the time—has only a limited identification with future governments, because it may not be re-elected. A government may act to benefit its members or minimize the risk of losing power, even if that imposes costs on future governments or society. Governments also face a modern environment that can constantly draw their attention to short-term crises rather than long-term goals. An election cycle can further minimize the incentive for democratic governments to act for the long term. A typical electoral term is only a few years, and after that, political rivals may be in power. Each election may bring a new party or parties into office, sometimes with diametrically opposed ideologies and preferences. Fundamentally, this creates an incentive for governments to ignore the long term: paying a short-term political price for long-term benefits holds little appeal for a government that expects to lose an election as a result of the short-term costs while the benefits will flow to their rivals. At a very simple level, this can mean governments take decisions to maximize their chance of winning elections without worrying about the long-term consequences. A classic example is increasing government handouts to key electoral areas—which provides short-term benefits to the recipients. In the long term, though, it can fuel unsustainable government deficits or require the reallocation of funds from more significant priorities, potentially overheating the economy, creating an economic bubble, and leading to a sort of political business cycle with booms before elections and busts afterward. Since such handouts can also increase the chance of re-election, however, governments may still have an incentive to increase spending shortly before people vote. This is, in fact, exactly what we see. Research on eighty-five developed and developing countries has found that government deficits increase in election years by almost 1 per cent of gross domestic product, with a larger effect in developing economies than in developed ones. Eventually, this pattern breaks down, often due to a crisis of some sort, and governments are forced to take action by reducing spending or increasing taxes. The election cycle means the current government may not be in power by the time the crisis happens, so it can avoid responsibility. Unfortunately, solving a crisis is usually more costly than avoiding one. The electoral cycle has another consequence: even if a country remains relatively stable, leaders change over time. This is more common in democracies, of course, but dictatorships also see regime changes as leaders die or are overthrown. This can lead to inconsistency over time as different leaders take different positions or choose different directions for their country. In some cases, this can be a strength as leaders correct errors of the past; in others, it can prevent a consistent approach to solving problems. Every time the government changes, planning can be thrown into chaos as a new head of government takes over, and some long-term decisions that have been taken may be intentionally reversed or simply not be implemented. The US is particularly prone to poor transitions between governments, in part because of the complexity of their system. When you think of presidential appointees, you likely think of the cabinet and top White House staff, perhaps thirty or forty people. That is a lot when you consider the significance of choosing people who will make billion- or trillion-dollar decisions, but it’s manageable in the roughly seventy days between the election and inauguration. The reality is much more complicated. Every time the party in power in the US changes, approximately 4,000 positions must be filled, over 1,000 of which require confirmation by the Senate. Many positions are never filled. The new government must also prepare budget requests, write a State of the Union address, and then, as a sideline, actually start delivering on their campaign promises. They must do this despite often having little familiarity with the work of the various departments and agencies involved and being overwhelmed by the vast flood of information coming their way. By the time the new government fully grasps the challenges it faces, the next election has quite possibly already begun. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the 2016 Donald Trump transition, in which Trump fired his entire transition team on the day he was elected. Many departments never received new appointees, and some had their senior people pack up and leave without any sense of when new leaders might arrive. Long-term plans naturally take a long time to implement, and changes in leadership, goals, or the party in power can impede successful implementation. Sometimes, these changes reflect differences in opinion or direction: other times, new governments overturn the plans of their forebears, not because they disagree but simply because they are distracted by their own priorities or because rejecting them delivers political or ideological rewards. As countries have become more polarized in recent years, this factor becomes increasingly problematic: there is little incentive for governments to implement long-term policies if they know their successors will immediately reverse them upon election. As the example of the Trump transition suggests, this effect is particularly strong when political outsiders win elections. Insiders, typically parties with a history of being in power, are less likely to shake up established ways of doing things. Outsiders, by contrast, may be more likely to overturn standard practices, reject norms, or confront existing institutions such as legislatures, creating more uncertainty for parties currently in power—which find it difficult to anticipate their successors’ actions. Changing how things are done can be valuable when the status quo is dysfunctional, but the resulting instability further reduces the incentive for incumbent governments to plan long term. If there is a broader trend toward the election of outsider parties that seek dramatic changes to the system, it will likely further reduce the incentive for governments to plan beyond the end of their mandate. [break] One remedy sometimes proposed to mediate the impacts of election cycles is to move to a system with more centralized power and fewer democratic checks and balances. Supporters argue that fewer changes in government and leaders with more centralized power and less exposure to electoral pressures could increase the space leaders have for long-term planning. This has worked in some places. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, for example, is often recognized as one of the most successful politicians of his time. When he took power in 1959, Singapore was a poor country with no natural resources and a real per capita GDP of less than $5,000 (US). When he retired in 2011, Singapore was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with a real per capita GDP of around $50,000 (US) and a reputation for clean, incorruptible government (though not democracy) and orderly and prosperous living. Lee Kuan Yew’s success was in part due to long-term thinking: he invested heavily in education and anti-corruption measures—policies which tend to have short-term costs but long-term payoffs. He was also an authoritarian, however: he was quick to use legislation to crush opposition and limit inflammatory speech, and Singapore has harsh penalties for law breaking and a system that discourages strong opposition. China is another example of a country with centralized control and power that has seen rapid economic growth, moving hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty and rapidly becoming a global power. Some observers have argued that its success in investing in long-term projects, such as smart cities and solar energy technology, is not despite its authoritarian approach but rather would not have been possible without it. If only more countries were less democratic, the argument goes, they could focus on the long term and ignore the short-term pressures of an electorate, boosting economic growth, supporting innovation, fighting climate change, and otherwise leading to wiser and more thoughtful governance. In my view, however, reducing democracy typically does not help support long-term thinking. Indeed, there are very few examples of dictatorships that fare better than the world’s democracies in making long-term decisions, whether protecting the environment or keeping stable, clean, and trustworthy governments, with Singapore as a notable exception. As Dani Rodrik, a Harvard economist who focuses on economic growth and development, has pointed out, for every Lee Kuan Yew, there are many more terrible leaders under whom economic growth is poor at best and, at worst, the economy and people’s lives are utterly ruined. Over the long term, democracies grow more predictably than authoritarian states do, have more stability in economic performance, handle negative economic shocks better, and pay higher wages. Even if a country currently has good leaders, investing absolute power in them or removing the checks and balances of democracy tends to lead to problems eventually. Curbing democracy is not a solution to short termism: checks and balances are themselves an important part of long-term success. [break] Election cycles help drive government behaviour, but their impacts are worsened by another factor influencing government planning: the preferences of voters themselves. Even absent the election effect, governments may not feel they will be rewarded for planning for the long term. Research has found, for example, that voters will reward a party for delivering disaster relief after a natural disaster occurs but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. This stems from four related dynamics. First, voters have legitimate immediate needs, and those facing urgent problems are frequently also the most motivated to vote, write to politicians, and attend political demonstrations. The challenge of legitimate immediate needs crowding out attention to more long-term issues gets at the heart of the fact that governing is a matter of trade-offs, prioritizing one problem over another. By definition, this means some issues get more attention than others. If short-term priorities have the most vocal adherents, then they will also receive the most attention. Second, present bias can affect which policies voters support and which parties they vote for. In work I did with Paolo Roberti at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy, for example, we found that impatient voters are more likely to support governments that offered short-term rewards but long-term costs, a common feature of populist governments. In effect, these governments offer easy solutions to complex problems that are appealing in the short term but costly in the long run. This tendency can be particularly bad, because once populist governments are elected, they have an incentive to capture institutions to ensure their re-election. Without that capture, they face losing an election in the long term based on the costs of their policies. A populist government in power might seek to limit the independence of journalists, for example, or influence the Supreme Court and the independent election body to ensure they win the next election. In other words, voters’ short-sightedness can lead to not only individual policies being short term but also a long-term corruption of institutions as populist governments struggle to stay in power over time. Another factor is that for the very long term, a constituency may not exist yet. When governments are mulling over projects that will help our children or our children’s children, that group may not be of voting age or even born. Future generations cannot raise issues, vote, or campaign on their own behalf. This means that in policy discussions and decisions, issues with implications for future generations, who lack voices and votes, are neglected or ignored. Since the unborn also can’t buy or boycott products, their potential preferences are ignored by markets, compounding the problem. This creates what is in some ways a tragedy of the commons. Voters benefit today by acting in a short-term manner, such as by overexploiting natural resources or using chemicals that will affect the health of future generations, and the costs are borne by future generations. Though voters may still want a good future, they are incentivized to be overly short termist because they do not bear the full cost of their decisions, the future does. A final dynamic underpinning pressure from voters for governments to be short termist is uncertainty about whether governments will deliver what they promise. Politicians may renege on promises, a new government could take power and cancel a program, or other events could emerge which cause program failure or cancellation. Research finds that voter uncertainty can be the single biggest driver of voter short termism, and reassuring voters about how likely the delivery of a long-term policy is can help increase support for it. The more complicated a policy or the further into the future its expected benefits, the more citizens may doubt its success, and if they are not sure the policy will succeed, then why bother pushing for it in the first place? This can create a vicious cycle. If voters do not prioritize long-term issues, then governments do not take action on them, further fostering distrust and cynicism that make voters prioritize long-term issues even less. The decline of trust in government in many countries means this issue is likely to be an increasing challenge. As pressure increases on leaders to focus on the short term, governments may increasingly struggle to deliver results in the long term, and trust may fall further. Faced with multiple reasons to focus on the short term and prioritize urgent tasks, our democratic systems need to create incentives for governments to think beyond tomorrow and keep the future at the forefront of their policy agendas. Four major strategies, informed by strategies individuals use, can help: measure the right outcomes to take advantage of salience and availability bias, make long-term planning the easy option to take advantage of the human bias to do what is easy, commit governments to specific decisions by creating costs to deviate, and take an agile approach that allows for experimentation and learning instead of seeking to predict the future. In effect, today’s governments can implement changes that help nudge the governments and leaders of tomorrow to focus more on the future. Adapted and excerpted from Future-Generation Government: How to Legislate for the Long Term by Nicholas Chesterley, forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025. Reproduced with permission from the publisher. Bio: Nicholas Chesterley completed a PhD in behavioural economics as a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford. He has held leadership roles in government, including on the future of government, public service innovation and experimentation, the future of money, and innovation and growth in the economy. He lives in Ottawa.The post Why do voters elect governments with only short-term interests in mind? first appeared on The Walrus.