Policy Discounting Across and Beyond the Lifespan, 2023

Legislators face a challenge when implementing long-termist policies that prioritise sustainability and the well-being of future generations: citizens prefer policies that pay off sooner rather than later. In this research note, I assess the hypothesis that the lifespan structures this temporal discounting effect. Do citizens show a particular preference for policies that pay off within, rather than beyond, their own lifetime? In a pre-registered conjoint analysis with age-group blocking (N = 2,405), I find little evidence in support of this explanation. Though they significantly prefer nearer-term policy benefits, citizens show no sign of especially preferring policies whose benefits will materialise within their own lifetimes. This pattern holds across a range of personal, political, and philosophical differences. The temporal discounting effect is also substantially smaller than other policy features, such as how large the payoff of that policy is expected to be. People are also clearly willing in principle to trade off the timing of benefits for the scale of benefits, preferring larger later payoffs to sooner smaller ones. Across and beyond the lifespan, the sooner a policy pays off, the better. But also, and much more so, the bigger the benefits of that policy, the better. These findings strongly suggest that temporal policy discounting is not driven by selfish concerns, while also reinforcing that any such effect does not overwhelm citizens’ evaluations of policy proposals in principle.

Speaking at the 2020 Democratic Convention, then presidential hopeful Joe Biden described the upcoming election as `a life-changing election that will determine America's future for a very long time'. In representative democracies, citizens are regularly confronted with such moments of choice, tasked with understanding the potential future paths that politics could take and then choosing which road to go down. The obvious question this raises is one that political psychology has yet to answer: how do people think about the political future? This question matters because the future guides what we do right now, in the present, in our personal as well as our political lives. My long-term goal is to become an internationally recognised authority in political psychology by tackling this question. I have begun to establish a research track record in this area in my ESRC-funded PhD research and in my postdoctoral research at the University of Exeter. The next step is to consolidate my early progress and initiate a broader, even more impactful programme of research. The purpose of the SeNSS Postdoctoral Fellowship, then, is twofold. First, the fellowship will be an invaluable resource in enabling me to develop my proposed programme of work and prepare grant applications for a project on the political psychology of the future. The goal is to give political scientists a whole new way to understand how people think about the future and how these expectations affect politics - to generate a new, interdisciplinary model of the nature, origins, and effects of beliefs about the political future. Exploring the implications of this model will involve introducing new methods to political science, drawing on innovations made in other fields. To support this agenda, I will produce competitive bids for major early career awards such as the ESRC New Investigator grant. Second, I will use the fellowship to produce immediate impacts, firmly establishing my credentials to lead a large-scale project of this kind. My PhD examiners noted that my doctoral research could be published in prestigious journals if supplemented with minimal additional analyses. In my postdoctoral work, I have also conducted substantial data collection for collaborative projects. The fellowship will allow me both to prepare my own solo-authored papers for submission to journals - including collecting some additional data - and to continue submitting collaborative work with my Exeter colleagues. Concretely, I envisage publishing two independent peer-reviewed journal articles and a minimum of three collaborative articles during the fellowship. To maximise the impact potential of these contributions, I will seek out opportunities for dissemination and knowledge exchange. As well as attending academic conferences, this will involve pitching articles to outlets such as The Conversation. My mentors and I will collaborate with the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex and the Democracy and Elections Centre at Royal Holloway University of London to organise a public panel event, with speakers including academics, industry stakeholders, and politicians, on a topic that is central to my research. My emphasis on such knowledge exchange serves my long-term goals of encouraging people to engage more critically with how they make their political decisions, informing political strategy, and fostering responsible reporting of opinion polls by research firms and journalists. Finally, I will pursue an ongoing programme of training. Alongside courses in quantitative and computational methods, attending writing workshops and holding regular writing feedback sessions with my mentor will support my goals of successfully communicating my research to wider audiences and of preparing competitive grant bids.