Patient Politics: Why Do Some Voters Support Far-Sighted Policies?

• In Event: Policy Attitudes and Preference Formation

Abstract

In many policy domains, reforms involve long-term planning. For example, social security reform in the United States requires changes to future benefits and/or payroll taxes. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions entails raising energy costs sooner for the benefit of limiting temperatures decades in the future. This paper examines people’s support for such far-sighted policies—what we call “policy patience”. Do people support policies whose benefits occur years or decades in the future? Do they support such policies when these long-term benefits come at the expense of more immediate costs?

Policy proposals often bundle time-varying costs and benefits. We define POLICY PATIENCE as support for policies with larger future benefits and smaller more immediate costs (e.g., payroll tax to fund retirement programs; carbon tax to fund climate change mitigation).

Support for such far-sighted policies can have many causes other than patience, including overall support for the policy goal, partisan attachments, and income. To isolate the role of patience, we also measure the concept using two methods that are largely context neutral and do not reference any particular policy. First, people vary in INDIVIDUAL OUTCOME PATIENCE over outcomes that affect only themselves, such as monetary payments. Second, people vary in COLLECTIVE OUTCOME PATIENCE, their relative evaluation of sooner and later conditions pertaining in the country as a whole (that is, outcomes, such as
economic growth or job creation, that are of public, rather than solely private, interest).

We measure individual outcome patience using established methods from behavioral economics and psychology. We then adapt them to measure collective outcome patience. Finally, policy patience is measured for social security reform and environmental policy. Questions ask respondents about tradeoffs between differently timed incremental costs (payroll taxes rise) to avoid larger costs later (one-fifth benefit cut in 2034). The questions were included in surveys conducted on different platforms, including a 2022 probability sample designed to be representative of the U.S. population provided by NORC at the University of Chicago.

We first characterize the extent of policy patience in our samples. All questions are designed so that respondents can delay costs entirely for several years. Impatient people should find delay attractive because their high discount rates reduce the present value of costs imposed later. Perfectly patient people should accept immediate costs—but only if they have sufficiently long time horizons. Our analysis then examines if policy patience is related to individual and collective outcome patience when controlling for overall policy support, party ID, and income. We also document how individual-level characteristics (age, gender, education, race/ethnicity) covary with the different concepts of patience.

Authors

• Markus Prior, Princeton University

• Abdelaziz Mohammed Alsharawy, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

• Talbot M Andrews, Cornell University

• Mael van Beek, Princeton University