13. Good political governance?

I was reading an interesting thesis the other day on why shareholders need good control mechanisms over managers, to quote


“if managers’ compensation is tied to short-term profit, they will be pressured to evaluate projects based on their immediate impact on profit rather than according to the present value of cash flows over the life of the investment. This may motivate managers to turn down profitable long-term investments”.

Not in the interests of the shareholders, obviously. Quite a good analogy with democratically-elected politicians, it seemed to me: if politicians incentive is short term (being re-elected in the next 3 to 5 years), what rationale is there for them to implement long-term policies that may be necessary but unpopular (‘carbon reduction’ springs to mind)? Shouldn’t there be some other mechanism for evaluating good political management rather than a media-driven popularity contest every couple of years?