Temporal Discounting in Politics

Voting over future collective outcomes is often not directly studied because conditions in the country such as a strong economy and a livable environment are uncontested valence issues. When we consider preferences for the timing of collective outcomes, preference heterogeneity emerges with some people more willing than others to sacrifice long-term benefits for a sooner but small improvement. Voters who discount collective outcomes in this way might dissuade politicians from addressing long-term policy challenges. In six different survey samples, we estimate overall low temporal discounting of politically relevant collective outcomes. This finding is unexpected because research in economics and psychology shows steep discounting for individual outcomes, such as money. These insights are made possible by two innovations. First, we adapt an established elicitation method (the Convex Time Budget approach) to collective outcomes involved in “sociotropic” voting. Second, we derive individual-level estimates of discounting to explain variance in the U.S. population and distinguish discounting from related concepts such as issue importance. This paper provides political science with a toolkit to measure discounting and encourages consideration of timing in the study political attitude formation, voting behavior, and representation.