Lectures, Democratic Myopia and its Remedies: Institutions for Long-term Governance

Democratic decision-making tends to be short-sighted. This course explains why and introduces tools for enhancing future-sensitivity of policymakers.

Democracies are prone to political short-sightedness, because their functioning is based on the representation of particularistic interests under short electoral cycles. For this reason, climate change and other slowly developing megatrends pose severe problems for political leaders in all democracies.

To gain a better control of the looming crises, scholars and policymakers have recently started to seriously analyze the drivers of political myopia, with the hope of developing more future-regarding political institutions. Finland possesses the world’s most advanced state-level foresight system, and it is widely regarded as a forerunner and global example in future-sensitive governance.

This course takes a problem-based approach on this pressing matter. It begins by describing the normative, institutional and behavioral origins of political short-sightedness, and proceeds to introducing and critically examining the various institutions that have been designed for overcoming the problem. Wedding theory with practice, the course analyzes real world problems with normative and theoretical lenses of political science. We are particularly interested in the conditions of policymaking elites, of the factors that hinder and enhance policymakers capacity to also work for future generations.