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"This book examines how democratic governments manage long-term policy challenges, asking how elected politicians choose between providing policy benefits in the present and investing in the future"--

A range of policy problems—from climate change to pension sustainability to skill shortages—confront governments with intertemporal dilemmas: trade-offs between maximizing social welfare in the present and taking care of the future. There is, moreover, substantial variation in the degree to which democratic governments are willing to invest in long-term social goods. Surprisingly, the literature on the politics of public policy has paid little explicit attention to timing as a dimension of policy choice, focusing almost exclusively on matters of cross-sectional distribution. This article develops a framework for explaining intertemporal policy choices in democracies by adapting findings from the literatures on distributive politics, political economy, and political behavior. The article makes a case for analyzing the politics of the long term as a struggle over how welfare should be allocated across groups and over how policy effects should be distributed through time.

How do ideas affect political decision making? Despite much evidence that ideas matter, relatively little is known about the specific mechanisms through which they influence actors' beliefs, goals, and preferences. Drawing on psychological findings, the article elaborates a cognitive mechanism through which ideational frameworks shape political elites' preferences among options. It argues that actors' mental models of the domains in which they are operating systematically guide their attention within processes of decision making. By leading them to reason about certain causal possibilities and data and to ignore and discount others, politicians' and policy makers' mental models can powerfully shape their causal belief sets and, in turn, their policy preferences. Furthermore, these attentional effects help explain why ideas persist under some conditions but change under others. The argument is empirically probed through an examination of key episodes in German pension politics over seven decades, drawing on detailed records of high-level policy deliberations. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2009.]

How do ideas affect political decision making? Despite much evidence that ideas matter, relatively little is known about the specific mechanisms through which they influence actors' beliefs, goals, and preferences. Drawing on psychological findings, the article elaborates a cognitive mechanism through which ideational frameworks shape political elites' preferences among options. It argues that actors' mental models of the domains in which they are operating systematically guide their attention within processes of decision making. By leading them to reason about certain causal possibilities and data and to ignore and discount others, politicians' and policy makers' mental models can powerfully shape their causal belief sets and, in turn, their policy preferences. Furthermore, these attentional effects help explain why ideas persist under some conditions but change under others. The argument is empirically probed through an examination of key episodes in German pension politics over seven decades, drawing on detailed records of high-level policy deliberations.

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.

With this issue, we complete our term as co-editors of Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. It has been an honor to edit QMMR, which we had the good fortune of taking over as a well-established venue for cutting-edge work and high-quality debate about qualitative and mixed-method research in political science, thanks to the splendid stewardship of the editors who preceded us: John Gerring (2003-2006), Gary Goertz (2006-2011), and Robert Adcock (2011-2014).

We develop an approach to multimethod research that generates joint learning from quantitative and qualitative evidence. The framework—Bayesian integration of quantitative and qualitative data (BIQQ)—allows researchers to draw causal inferences from combinations of correlational (cross-case) and process-level (within-case) observations, given prior beliefs about causal effects, assignment propensities, and the informativeness of different kinds of causal-process evidence. In addition to posterior estimates of causal effects, the framework yields updating on the analytical assumptions underlying correlational analysis and process tracing. We illustrate the BIQQ approach with two applications to substantive issues that have received significant quantitative and qualitative treatment in political science: the origins of electoral systems and the causes of civil war. Finally, we demonstrate how the framework can yield guidance on multimethod research design, presenting results on the optimal combinations of qualitative and quantitative data collection under different research conditions.

This article examines the link between citizens' policy attitudes and the institutional context in which policies are carried out. The article develops a theory of opinion formation toward policies that impose costs on citizens in order to invest in broadly valued social goods. In this framework, problems of agency loss and time inconsistency leave citizens uncertain about whether promised policy benefits will be delivered. Citizen support for public investments thus depends on whether the institutional context makes elites' policy promises credible. We consider hypotheses about how the institutional allocation of authority and the institutional rules governing implementation affect citizen support for public investment, and we find broad support for the framework in three survey experiments administered to representative samples of U.S. citizens. The results shed light on the link between political institutions and citizens' attitudes, the capacities of voters for substantive political reasoning, and the political prospects for public investment.

Most studies of policy feedback have focused on processes of self‐reinforcement through which programs bolster their own bases of political support and endure or expand over time. This article develops a theoretical framework for identifying feedback mechanisms through which policies can become self‐undermining over time, increasing the likelihood of a major change in policy orientation. We conceptualize and illustrate three types of self‐undermining feedback mechanisms that we expect to operate in democratic politics: the emergence of unanticipated losses for mobilized social interests, interactions between strategic elites and loss‐averse voters, and expansions of the menu of policy alternatives. We also advance hypotheses about the conditions under which each mechanism is likeliest to unfold. In illuminating endogenous sources of policy change, the analysis builds on efforts by both historically oriented and rationalist scholars to understand how institutions change and seeks to expand political scientists' theoretical toolkit for explaining policy development over time.

It is widely assumed that citizens are myopic, weighing policies' short-term consequences more heavily than long-term outcomes. Yet no study of public opinion has directly examined whether or why the timing of future policy consequences shapes citizens' policy attitudes. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to test for the presence and mechanisms of time-discounting in the mass public. The analysis yields evidence of significant discounting of delayed policy benefits and indicates that citizens' policy bias towards the present derives in large part from uncertainty about the long term: uncertainty about both long-run processes of policy causation and long-term political commitments. There is, in contrast, little evidence that positive time-preferences (impatience) or consumption-smoothing are significant sources of myopic policy attitudes.