Over seven decades ago, Harold Lasswell (1936) defined politics as “who gets what, when, how.” Lasswell's now-classic formulation is an invitation to study political life as a fundamental process of distribution, a struggle over the production and allocation of valued goods. It is striking how much of political analysis, especially of public policymaking, has centered on conflicts over who will gain – or lose – what, and by what means. Why and through what processes, political scientists have so often inquired, do governments take actions that benefit some groups in society while disadvantaging others? The problem of policy choice has, in large part, been understood as a problem of distribution.

This massive and varied research agenda, however, has almost completely ignored a critical part of Lasswell's oft-cited definition. The matter of when – when the costs and benefits of public policies arrive – has been the focus of remarkably little systematic inquiry. Just as distributive choice is an unavoidable challenge of governing, politicians also routinely confront intertemporal dilemmas in making policy choices – trade-offs between the short-term impact and the long-run consequences of state action. Indeed, for elected governments the problem of timing may be among the thorniest of policy predicaments: while the electoral calendar forces politicians to court voters in the near term, many of the most important social problems and policy ramifications lie in the distant future. Students of the politics of public policy, however, have seldom conceptualized policymaking as a choice about timing.