The purpose of this panel is to remind policy scholars and practitioners that the temporal aspect of policy choices and processes can have a significant effect on outcomes. A variety of approaches have been used to examine short-term and long-term policy processes, but the authors of these papers offer new perspectives on the role of time in policy decision making. One perspective is at the individual level: how do time horizons affect the way people make judgments about policy questions, and can deliberation alter that relationship? Another paper notes that some policies may appear to be resolved in a unidirectional linear process, but that a variety of factors may cause an issue to re-emerge at a later time; in these cases, it is important to understand why particular issues can be renewed on policy agendas over periods of several years. A third paper draws a contrast between political time and policy time, noting that incompatibilities between the two sometimes impede the development of long-term policies but under some conditions the lack of synchronicity can increase the likelihood of political outcomes that benefit future interests; this paper looks at nearly a dozen major policy models and frameworks to examine their capacity to incorporate these characteristics.