Speaking for the Voiceless? The Political Representation of Future Generations

This paper aims to examine democratic myopia, i.e. democracies’ incapacity of producing policies that take into account the long-term concerns of future generations. After all, it is widely assumed that democratic systems favor the immediate concerns of present generations over the distant concerns of future generations. However, despite strong theoretical consensus that democracies are geared towards the near-term, very little is known empirically about democratic myopia. Previous scholarship has not been able to clarify whether myopia is an inherent feature of all democratic systems, or rather the result of specific systemic attributes. More specifically, this paper will look at the impact of democratic innovations on democratic short-termism. The general category of ‘democratic innovations’ captures a wide range of institutional mechanisms ranging from purely aggregative innovations (such as referenda) to purely transformative innovations (such as deliberative mini-publics) (Smith 2009). Such democratic innovations have been theoretically heralded as a means to incorporate intergenerational concerns because through participation and deliberation citizens can locate themselves in the trans-generational continuum (Ekeli 2005, 2009; MacKenzie 2012). The incorporation of a long-term angle in policies can therefore be expected to correlate positively with the level of democratic innovation in a system (Jacobs 2016). After all, democratic innovations are theoretically expected to foster the inclusion of “other-regarding” and “future other-regarding” perspectives in decision making (MacKenzie & O’Doherty 2011). This means that more democratically innovative systems, i.e. systems with strongly embedded participatory and deliberative mechanisms, will be more likely to integrate the concerns of future generations (Fuji Johnson 2007). Based on a combined analysis of V-DEM data on deliberative and participatory democracy, and the Intergenerational Justice Index (Vanhuysse 2013, 2014), we argue that democratic systems that score highly in terms of participatory and deliberative quality, indeed produce policies that are more long-termist.