Citizens' Attitudes Toward Long-Term Political Decisions – Individual-Level Explanations of Opinions on a Municipal Merger

Even though many political decisions made now have long-term trajectories when it comes to their effects, there is still very little research on long-term decision-making. Often, decisions have inter-temporal dilemmas: do we sacrifice something now in favor of potential future benefits. For instance, should our generation pay environmental taxes so that future generations can live in a better environment? For some, the answer to this question is a clear yes, whereas others are more hesitant to sacrifice their own well-being to support future generations. Individuals thus vary greatly in their inter-temporal preferences depending on various factors such as age, gender, education, occupation and levels of trust in politicians as well as political efficacy. In this study, we explore which of these individual-level factors explain citizens' inter-temporal preferences best. Our empirical case is an actual real-life proposed municipal merger in Finland, which we argue is a typical, and completely understudied from a long-term perspective, policy issue with immediate costs and potential effects residing in the future. The data consist of a population survey (N= 6,600) where citizens of a municipality considering a merger were asked about their opinions on this merger on a scale from zero to ten (strongly against-strongly in favor). By using the answers to this item as dependent variable in regression analyses with the individual-level factors as independent variables, the study is able to approximate why citizens value the inter-temporal aspect of municipal mergers differently. The findings show that life-situation factors have a clear bearing on long-term thinking but we also see that external efficacy and political trust are important too.