André Santos Campos

IFILNOVA, NOVA University Lisbon

Multitemporal Democracy and the Long Term*

8 February 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract 

Democracy is typically considered government pro tempore. Self-limitation and renovation in time are standard features of democratic governance. Recent phenomena such as climate change, for instance, have put this view under serious pressure, however. Contemporary democracies’ power to affect the future is so high that it may impact on communities and unborn persons to the point of carrying existential risk. The challenge democracies face is enormous: they rely on time-sensitive criteria of legitimacy (e.g., elections) that offer strong incentives for short-term governance while also facing what I call ‘the urgency of the long-term view’. Are they up to the challenge, or is short-termism so embedded in them that favouring the long term puts them at risk? In this talk, I intend to show that the commonplace view of liberal democracies as inherently ill-suited to deal with the long term is based on a misconception about the nature of political time in a democracy. While it is true that democratic frameworks facilitate, privilege, and reinforce short-term thinking, contemporary democracies incorporate a variety of principles and institutions that have extended time horizons. Understanding democratic time in terms of multitemporality will provide the conceptual backdrop against which to set the balance, in contemporary democracies, between short-term and long-term decision-making, thereby leaving room for an argument from democracy that promotes the long term. The conclusion reinforces the view that multitemporality in normative and practical terms is a necessary feature of liberal democracies that affects the way they are hard-wired to deal with long-term problems.

* Presentation in English, discussion in both Portuguese and English