Immediate rewards or delayed gratification? A conjoint survey experiment of the public’s policy preferences

Author:

Christensen Henrik SerupORCID,Rapeli LauriORCID

Abstract

AbstractPrevious scholarship has focused primarily on how citizens’ form policy preferences and how those preferences are taken into account in democratic decision-making. However, the temporal aspect of policy preferences has received little attention, although many significant societal problems have consequences that extend far into the future. To fill the gap, we examine to what extent citizens are willing to support policies, when rewards can only be expected after several electoral cycles. Using a conjoint survey experiment, we demonstrate that while a slight tendency towards more immediate policy rewards is discernible, citizens are not as impatient as has been widely assumed. In contrast with previous research, political trust does not affect the impact of the time horizon of policy choice. Instead, we find that people with higher education are more likely to choose policies the benefits of which materialize in the distant future. These findings add to the growing evidence which suggests that citizens’ short-sightedness is not a very strong driver of democratic myopia.

Funder

Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland

Academy of Finland

Abo Akademi University

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Subject

Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law,Public Administration,General Social Sciences,Sociology and Political Science,Development

Reference68 articles.

1. Abramson, S. F., Koçak, K., & Magazinnik, A. (2019). What do we learn about voter preferences from conjoint experiments? Unpublished manuscript. Retrieved from: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/023a/24a7dfaddfce626d011596b187f26361ee86.pdf.

2. Aguinis, H., & Bradley, K. J. (2014). Best practice recommendations for designing and implementing experimental vignette methodology studies. Organizational Research Methods, 17(4), 351–371.

3. Althaus, S. (2003). Collective preferences in democratic politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4. Bäck, M., Kestilä-Kekkonen, E., & Söderlund, P. (2016). Suomalaisten poliittinen luottamus ja siihen liittyvät tekijät [in English: Political trust and its determinants in Finland]. In K. Grönlund & H. Wass (Eds.), The differentation of political participation—Finnish national election study 2015 (pp. 379–397). Ministry of Justice: Helsinki.

5. Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J., Hopkins, D. J., & Yamamoto, T. (2018). The number of choice tasks and survey satisficing in conjoint experiments. Political Analysis, 26(1), 112–119.

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3