Assessing the Presentist Bias in Democratic Policy-Making

Modern democracies face many long-term policy challenges, including climate change, budget deficits, infrastructure maintenance, nuclear waste disposal, social program management, and disaster preparedness. Paradoxically, however, many authors claim that democracies have an "appetite for the immediate" (Thompson 2011, p. 19). Because of their short electoral cycles, democracies are assumed to be incapable of producing policies that take into account the long-term concerns of future generations (Boston et al. 2014; Jacobs 2011; MacKenzie 2013; Saunders 2014; Thompson 2011). Democracies thus benefit present-day generations over future generations. Despite the theoretical assumption that democracies are geared towards the near-term, very little is known empirically about the presentist bias in democratic policy-making. Previous scholarship has not been able to clarify whether presentism is an inherent feature of all democratic systems, or rather the result of specific systemic attributes. The overarching research question in this paper is therefore the following: to what extent is democratic policy making characterized by presentism, and which institutional attributes causes this bias? 
 In this paper, we will argue that democracies are indeed geared more strongly towards the near-term, and that this is determined by the type of democracy (majoritarian vs. consensus democracy), the rate of government turnover, the nature of the interest group system (corporatist vs. pluralist), the adoption of public sector reforms (New Public Management), the adoption of participatory innovations, and the national policy style (anticipatory vs. reactive). In order to substantiate this argument, we will rely on a novel, internationally comparative dataset which contains indicators on democratic policies and institutions in all 35 OECD member states. Based on this dataset, we will construct a composite index measuring democracies' presentist bias, which we will quantitatively link to the institutional determinants outlined above.