EBRD report mentions my research on ageing

The EBRD has just published an interesting report on demographic change. There is a very good chapter on the political economy of demographic change where they build on my research to argue that addressing the challenges that ageing creates is complicated by the different policy priorities of different age groups.

More specifically, the chapter builds on the following three articles:

  • Bojar, A., & Vlandas, T. (2021). Group-Specific Responses to Retrospective Economic Performance: A Multilevel Analysis of Parliamentary Elections. Politics & Society, 49(4), 517-548. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329221989150

I’ve developed the argument in more detail in my journal article forthcoming in World Politics. In it, I argue that although the population of Advanced Capitalist Democracies (ACDs) has aged substantially in the last decades, we know little about the consequences of ageing for the electoral politics of economic performance. I develop a novel theoretical framework linking ageing to lower economic growth in four interrelated steps: first, elderly voters care more about pensions, but less about childcare, family, and education 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, while also weakening policy responsiveness during recessions; fourth, this policy reallocation undermines economic growth. My theory is tested using multilevel and fixed-effects regressions, an instrumental variable approach, and causal mediation analysis on micro-and macro-level data across 21 ACDs from the 1960s onwards. The results show that ageing fundamentally alters the electoral politics of economic stagnation in ACDs.