Evaluating the Bootstrap Objection to Institutional Responses to Democratic Myopia: A Comparative Analysis of the Feasibility and Viability of Institutions for the Future

While democracies are said to be good at coping with acute crises, they are also good at causing them in the long term (Runciman). Therefore, democracies have been characterized as myopic, failing to address long-term issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss successfully. Instead of investing in the future today, costs for short-term consumption might even be shifted to the future. The literature on democratic myopia claims that democracy’s bias towards the present is rooted in politicians’ need to present short-term successes for their reelection, uncertainty about long-term policy impacts and long-term developments in general, partially myopic voters, the lack of salience of future problems, and the missing voice of future generations affected by today’s political decisions. To mitigate democratic myopia, several political theorists have been calling for institutional reforms of democracy that would facilitate a long-term orientation and take into account the needs of future generations. However, others claim that these institutional reforms would not be feasible due to the presentist democratic incentive structure, as the creation of potentially effective institutions for mitigating democratic myopia would be subject to the very democratic myopia they are supposed to mitigate. According to this bootstrap objection, only so called non-reformist reforms could pave the way for institutional reforms in the long term. At the same time, these scholars do not seem to recognize sufficiently that reality might have overtaken their argument. Since the 1990s, several democracies created (and later disbanded) institutions for the future, even in direct response to a perceived high democratic myopia. Examples include the Knesset Commissioner for Future Generations (Israel, 2001–2005) and the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales (since 2016). In return, some scholars now claim that strong institutions for the future would not be viable, as they will lose in a struggle for influence with elected politicians who do not acknowledge their legitimacy once they actually start to threaten myopic political action. This could be called the inverted bootstrap objection, assuming that (strong) institutions for the future will not manage to stay out of the mire of democratic myopia, and eventually sink. After briefly elaborating these arguments, this paper further develops and operationalizes the non-reformist reform claim. To evaluate both the bootstrap and the inverted bootstrap objection, the study identifies nine real-world institutions for the future, five of which have been disbanded. Based on their design features, it compares their formal capacity to influence political decision-making by systematically assessing on what legal basis they are equipped with what instruments to address which phases of the policy process and which branches of government. Moreover, the conditions of their formation and disbandment are analyzed. The results contradict the bootstrap objection and to some degree affirm the inverted bootstrap objection. Although each case is unique, it can be concluded that institutions for the future can be created even under detrimental conditions, and that they are most viable when they are designed to be neither too strong nor too weak.