The Politics of When: Redistribution, Investment and Policy Making for the Long Term

Abstract

Why do some elected governments impose short-term costs to invest in solving long-term social problems while others delay or merely redistribute the pain? This article addresses that question by examining the politics of pension reform in Britain and the United States. It first reframes the conventional view of the outcomes – centred on cross-sectional distribution – demonstrating that the politicians who enacted the least radical redistribution enacted the most dramatic intertemporal tradeoffs. To explain this pattern, the article develops and tests a theory of policy choice in which organized interests struggle for long-term advantage under institutional constraints. The argument points to major analytical advantages to studying governments' policy choices in intertemporal terms, for both the identification of comparative puzzles and their explanation.

Footnotes

^a The author thanks Maxwell Cameron, Nicolas Dragojlovic, Kathryn Harrison, Macartan Humphreys, Christopher Kam, Orit Kedar, Benjamin Nyblade, Angela O'Mahony, R. Kent Weaver, the Journal's anonymous reviewers, and audiences at Columbia University, the University of Iowa and McMaster University for comments on prior versions of this article. Keith Banting, Peter Hall, Torben Iversen, John Myles, Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol also provided invaluable advice at earlier stages of the project. Frank Hangler provided superb research assistance. Parts of this research were supported by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, LSE Health, the Canadian Embassy in the US and the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies and Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University.