Mitigating Democratic Myopia as a Means to Mitigate Climate Change: On Institutional Innovations, their Impact Potential and the Challenges of their Institutionalization

Democracies are said to be ill equipped to handle wicked problems like climate change adequately. In climate change, the main detrimental effects will manifest in the long term future, whereas effective counteraction is only possible today. Therefore, as the most affected, i.e. future generations, are not present today, the political incentive for powerful, immediate action is lacking. Furthermore, the electoral pressure to present short term policy impacts, the assumed short-sightedness of voters, and the complexity, uncertainty and missing salience of long-term policies all contribute to what is often called democratic myopia. Hence, mitigating democratic myopia is a necessary - albeit not sufficient - condition for mitigating climate change. One promising approach to mitigate democratic myopia is to design new institutions that introduce the interests of future generations into today’s political decision-making process. This approach is normatively justified by the democratic all-affected principle that states that everyone who will be affected by collectively binding decisions should have a voice in making them. In order to explore the potential of such institutions to mitigate democratic myopia, I proceed in three steps: First, rather than discussing the dozens of hypothetical proposals for such institutions that can be found in literature, I turn to the world’s democracies, scanning them for institutions that already do introduce future generations’ interests into the democratic decision-making process. Applying some minimum criteria, I identify 28 of them, for example the Israeli Parliamentary Commission for Future Generations (2001-2006), the recently established Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, and the compulsory sustainability assessment of the German land Baden-Wuerttemberg (since 2011). But are those institutions powerful enough to change the institutional incentive system in favor of policy-making for the long term? For a more differentiated view, secondly I develop an index of impact potential, sorting the institutions into six categories ranging from very low to very high impact potential. Impact potential is understood as an institution’s formal capability to modify the institutional incentive system of democratic politics to the benefit of the political consideration of future generations’ interests. Therefore, a high impact potential also implies a high formal capability to mitigate democratic myopia. As a result, only six institutions in four democracies show a rather high, high or very high impact potential. Still, this is puzzling, because the institutionalization of such strong institutions as the six detected ones is subjected to the very same constraining democratic myopia it is determined to mitigate. According to this hypothesis, successful institutionalizations thus should only occur in contexts where the immediate pressure of democratic myopia is relatively low, opening windows of opportunities for this type of democratic self-binding. Therefore, I thirdly employ a modified fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis in order to analyze several political-institutional, economic and cultural framework conditions which, if pronounced in a certain direction, should relax the ‘presentistic’ pressure on politicians and thereby enable the desired institutionalization. The results add some surprising insights to the debate on democratic myopia and its mitigation.