Time preferences may explain public opinion about a wide range of long-term policy problems whose costs and benefits will be realized in the distant future. However, mass publics may discount these costs and benefits because they are later or because they are more uncertain. Standard methods to elicit individual-level time preferences tend to conflate attitudes toward risk and time and are susceptible to social desirability bias. A potential solution relies on a costly lab-experimental method, convex time budgets (CTB). We present and experimentally validate an affordable version of this approach for implementation in mass surveys. We find that the theoretically preferred CTB patience measure predicts attitudes toward a local, delayed investment problem but fails to predict support for more complex, future-oriented policies. These results have implications for studying the mass politics of dynamic policy problems.
Research
Research Overview
My research investigates how institutions, incentives, and information shape political behaviour and support for public policy—especially in the context of climate policy and international cooperation.
Research Themes
Climate Policy & Cooperation
Research on public support for climate policy, international climate agreements, and the political economy of environmental regulation.
Institutions & Political Economy
Research on how institutional design shapes political outcomes, including crisis politics, redistribution, and democratic accountability.
Methods: Survey Experiments
Methodological research on survey experiments, conjoint analysis, and causal inference in observational studies.
Public Support for Policy
Understanding what shapes mass preferences over policy, including distributional considerations, fairness, and political communication.