Voting for the Future: Electoral Institutions and the Time Horizons of Democracy

Abstract

The urgency of climate change has prompted political theorists to consider how democracy might be reconfigured to cope with the future challenges that our current social and economic practices will generate. There have been in recent years numerous promising proposals for how political systems might be reformed so as to make them more forward-looking. This article offers an assessment of a number of such proposals that touch on elections. The main contribution of the article is to bring together suggestions put forward by political theorists and evidence from empirical social science that is of relevance to these suggestions.