Governing for the Future? life expectancy and the politics of environmental investment

• Life expectancy shapes environmental spending priorities. • Younger legislatures invest less in sustainability. • Executives with longer horizons raise capital investment. • Institutional roles drive intertemporal policy choices. • Novel lifespan metric links demography to environment. This article investigates whether the temporal orientation of political actors influences the allocation of public resources to environmental policy. We construct an original panel dataset covering Italy’s regions from 2000 to 2021, linking demographic information on both executives and legislative assemblies to disaggregated data on public expenditure. Using fractional response models, we estimate the effect of policymakers’ life expectancy-adjusted age on the share of environmental spending across current, capital, and total expenditure. Our results show that regions with legislative bodies with longer remaining life spans allocate a significantly smaller share to environmental policy, while the temporal horizon of executives exerts a positive influence on capital investment in the environment. These findings are robust across specifications and highlight the institutional asymmetries in the intertemporal politics of public goods. The study contributes to the literature on demographic influences on public finance, emphasizing how internal heterogeneity in politicians’ time horizons affects intergenerational policy choices.