Democracy, Public Policy, and Timing: Toward a Theory of Intertemporal Policy Choice Alan M. Jacobs Department of Political Science University of British Columbia C472 – 1866 Main Mall Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1
[email protected] DRAFT: DO NOT CITE Presented at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, June 3-5, 2004, at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. In the title to a 1950 book, Harold Lasswell provided what has become a classic definition of politics: “Who Gets What, When, How.”1 Lasswell’s definition is an invitation to study political life as a fundamental process of distribution, a struggle over the production and allocation of valued goods. It is striking how much of political analysis – particularly the study of what governments do – has assumed this distributive emphasis. It would be only a slight simplification to describe the fields of public policy, welfare state politics, and political economy as comprised largely of investigations of who gets or loses what, and how. Why and through what causal mechanisms, scholars have inquired, do governments take actions that benefit some groups and disadvantage others? Policy choice itself has been conceived of primarily as a decision about how to pay for, produce, and allocate socially valued outcomes. Yet, this massive and varied research agenda has almost completely ignored one part of Lasswell’s short definition. The matter of when – when the benefits and costs of policies arrive – seems somehow to have slipped the discipline’s collective mind. While we have developed subtle theoretical tools for explaining how governments impose costs and allocate goods at any given moment, we have devoted extraordinarily little attention to illuminating how they distribute benefits and burdens over time.