Author's Keywords: intertemporal policy choice, investment, welfare state reform, institutions, veto points, United Kingdom, United States, pensions	Convention Need a solution for abstract management? All Academic can help! Contact us today to find out how our system can help your annual meeting. Submission - Custom fields, multiple submission types, tracks, audio visual, multiple upload formats, automatic conversion to pdf. Review - Peer Review, Bulk reviewer assignment, bulk emails, ranking, z-score statistics, and multiple worksheets! Reports - Many standard and custom reports generated while you wait. Print programs with participant indexes, event grids, and more! Scheduling - Flexible and convenient grid scheduling within rooms and buildings. Conflict checking and advanced filtering. Communication - Bulk email tools to help your administrators send reminders and responses. Use form letters, a message center, and much more! Management - Search tools, duplicate people management, editing tools, submission transfers, many tools to manage a variety of conference management headaches! Click here for more information.
Association: Name: American Political Science Association URL: http://www.apsanet.org
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p61544_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Jacobs, Alan. "Backing into the Future: Reconceiving Policy Reform as Intertemporal Choice" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, Sep 02, 2004 <Not Available>. 2009-05-26 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p61544_index.html>

Jacobs, A. , 2004-09-02 "Backing into the Future: Reconceiving Policy Reform as Intertemporal Choice" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL Online <.PDF>. 2009-05-26 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p61544_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Review Method: Peer Reviewed Abstract: This paper makes a case for reconfiguring the analytical lens through which we compare and explain governments’ public policy choices. Through an examination of the politics of welfare-state reform, it aims to demonstrate that a temporal lens of analysis can reshape both the policy puzzles inviting scholarly attention and the causal arguments best suited to unraveling them. The political analysis of recent welfare-state reforms has been largely structured along distributive lines, focused on explaining retrenchment. Yet, politicians seeking to control social spending have faced choices not only about who should pay the costs of adjustment, but also about when those costs should be imposed. Moreover, those governments who imposed the heaviest losses on program beneficiaries were often not those able to enact the most dramatic and costly investments in long-term fiscal sustainability. The paper contends that, in explaining reform choices as intertemporal tradeoffs, we need to employ a causal logic distinct from that used to explain retrenchment. To illustrate the argument, the paper reanalyzes a paired comparison of pension reforms from Paul Pierson’s Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. Viewed through a temporal lens, Pierson’s puzzle of policy reform is reversed. Britain -- the case of radical retrenchment -- largely delayed the costs of population aging, while the United States -- the case of incremental cutbacks -- adopted massive, costly investments in long-term sustainability. These outcomes were shaped by institutional context, but in ways contrary to the structural effects that scholars of distributive politics have usually identified. While concentrated policy authority led politicians to address long-term policy problems through distributive means, dispersed veto power generated distributive stalemate that led politicians to invest in long-range outcomes at short-run cost.

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