Review | Open Access
The Conditionality of Political Short‐Termism: A Review of Empirical and Experimental Studies
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Abstract: Political short-termism prioritizes short-term net policy benefits over long-term benefits and thus can hinder policy investments that impose short-term costs to society to address long-term policy challenges. This literature review explores when political short-termism can be driven and mitigated in a democratic system by reviewing empirical and experimental studies and identifying the various factors that can influence policy investments: elections, economic conditions, power-sharing arrangements, partisanship, the presence of compensation schemes, and media coverage among politicians; discounts of future policy benefits, policy trade-offs, political ideology, and socioeconomic and demographic factors among voters; and compliance costs, power-sharing arrangements, compensations, and long-term political signaling from governments among special interest groups. Finally, I discuss the findings and provide suggestions for future research.
Keywords: democracy; electoral cycles; interest groups; long‐term policymaking; political short‐termism
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© Masakazu Ogami. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.