Measuring Policy Patience: How People Value Policy Outcomes Depending on Timing

• In Event: How Citizen Political Knowledge and Patience Matter

Abstract

In many policy domains, reforms involve long-term planning. For example, social security reform in the United States requires changes to future benefits and/or payroll taxes. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions entails raising energy costs sooner for the benefit of limiting temperatures decades in the future. This paper examines people’s support such far-sighted policies—what we call “policy patience”. Do people support policies whose benefits occur years or decades in the future? Do they support such policies when these long-term benefits come at the expense of more immediate costs?

We combine approaches from political science, behavioral economics, and psychology to develop self-reported and behavioral measurement instruments. We have conducted several surveys to establish that measures of time preference developed in behavioral economics can be adapted to studying dynamic political judgments. Surveys extend the domain of measurement from economic evaluations to other policy issues, such as air pollution and covid vaccinations.

One measurement strategy builds on recent innovations developed in behavioral economics. Aiming to understand choice between present and future alternatives, behavioral economists have devoted a lot of attention to describing the extent to which people discount future benefits. One measurement strategy is the Convex Time Budget (CTB) approach developed by Andreoni and Sprenger (2012; Andreoni, Kuhn, and Sprenger 2015). It is designed to describe “time preference” by distinguishing the impact of long-term discounting, the unique draw of the present (impatience), and the diminishing appeal of more and more of the same thing at the same time.

The CTB asks respondents to choose between different allocations of a sooner and a later payment; for example, either $2.80 today and $16 a year from today or $11.20 today and $4 a year from today. At a specific interest rate—a 25 percent annual interest rate, in this example—the allocations have the same future value. Repeating this task with different interest rates, different timing of the “sooner” payment, and different intervals between the “sooner” and “later” payment reveals people’s long-term discount functions, their preference for payment in the present (impatience, often referred to as “present bias” in the behavioral economics literature), and the extent to which utility for payments changes as the size of the payment increases. We adapt the CTB approach to understand how the timing of economic growth and job creation affects economic evaluations.

The CTB approach is cognitively demanding. We experimentally assess if a visual interface can make it easier for respondents to meaningfully indicate their preferences over outcomes at different times. We also rely on simpler measurement approaches, including staircase methods (repeated paired choices to pinpoint indifference between outcomes at different time points) and direct questions about preferred outcome allocations over time. Finally, patience can also be inferred from evaluations of outcome sequences, such as charts of annual economic growth often used in the political science literature on retrospective voting. We use the same measurement strategy as Healy & Lenz (2014) but apply it to future outcomes.

Our paper compares these different measurement instruments in terms of response quality (amount of missing data, response times) and internal consistency (between-measure correlations). We included the instruments in a series of opt-in and probability-based surveys of U.S. residents conducted between in 2020 and 2022. This research project will begin to empirically characterize the distribution of policy patience in the United States.

Author

• Markus Prior, Princeton University