Knowledge And Decisions

Time is important in many ways in political decision making, including the time horizons of decision makers and voters, the time dimension of interest groups, and problems created by arbitrary divisions of the time continuum for political assessment purposes.

Because politicians’ own time horizons are so short, the voters’ longer time horizons are crucial for transmitting a more farsighted perspective to government decision making. But time increases the cost of political knowledge and the cost of effective feedback to decision-making individuals or institutions. Consequences that take much time to become visible are less likely to be understood by the average voter in retrospect, and given the turnover of elected and appointed officials, the prospect of long run negative consequences may be little or no deterrent to an individual decision maker at the time the political decision is made. Where there is an enduring political party apparatus — a “machine” — concerned about its long-run office-holding prospects, the external costs of individual decision making may be internalized to some extent and enforce a somewhat longer time horizon than otherwise. However, with the growth of “independent” or individualized (perhaps “charismatic”) politicians, the political time horizon tends to shrink back to the individual’s own office-holding years. It may be significant, for example, that New York City’s financial crisis of the 1970s grew out of policies and practices adopted during the administration of one of its most charismatic and independent mayors during the 1960s, and that the contrasting financial solvency of Chicago at the same time was maintained in one of the last bastions of municipal machine politics.

Members of a political machine have a large investment in its future election prospects, which correspond with their own individual prospects of advancing up the seniority ladder to higher office. The more independent the individual politician is, the less is his fate tied to the long run consequences of his decisions in a particular unit of government. Negative consequences after he has departed that unit can even be used as evidence of his superiority to his successors. What matters to the independent political decision maker is how his current decisions in his current position promote his immediate prospects for higher positions elsewhere. If a given set of policies enhance a mayor’s presidential prospects, the possible damage of those policies to the city after he is in the White House is hardly a political deterrent.

The effect of a party apparatus, in contrast to a charismatic leader, can be seen in nondemocratic states as well. The incumbent leader of the Soviet Union at any given time could make himself more popular by liberalizing government restrictions or by reducing military spending and allowing the people’s standard of living to rise accordingly. The immediate dangers to his own regime during his own term of office could be minimal, and yet the larger dangers to the internal and external goals of the Communist party could well be sufficiently serious to cause that party to depose the leader for even trying to initiate such reforms. A party with a longer time horizon requires more pervasive control than an individual with only his own term of office to consider. Nonparty dictatorships in noncommunist countries may be equally (or more) authoritarian, but they are seldom as pervasively totalitarian, in the sense of intruding as far into private lives, religious beliefs, or the indoctrination of children. Nonparty dictatorships are therefore more subject to change, if only on the death of the individual dictator, as in Spain or Portugal.

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