Tim Vlandas (Oxford) will present "Ageing Democracies: Grey Power and Economic Performance."
Abstract The population of Advanced Capitalist Democracies (ACDs) has aged substantially in the last decades. Yet we know little about the consequences of ageing for the electoral politics of economic performance. This book develops a novel theoretical framework linking ageing to lower economic growth in four steps: first, elderly voters care more about pensions, but less about more growth-enhancing policies, for instance childcare, family, education and investment policies; second, they are less likely to penalize governments for low growth and unemployment; third, grey power pushes governments to protect the growing share of budgets allocated to pensions at the expense of more growth-enhancing policies, most notably social and public investments, and also undermines optimal policy responsiveness during recessions; fourth, this policy reallocation leads to lower economic growth. The theory is tested using multilevel, fixed effect and instrumental variable regressions as well as causal mediation analyses on micro- and macro-data across 21 ACDs since the 1960s. The results show that ageing fundamentally alters the electoral politics of economic stagnation in ACDs. Under currently prevailing institutional and political contexts, ageing partly severs the symbiotic relationship between capitalism and democracy.
