Blog

The Financial Times has just cited my research on ageing, which has appeared in Political Quarterly, Political Research Exchange, and Nuffield College Political Science working papers. The very interesting piece, entitled “Is the rich world stuck in an ‘upper-income trap’?” lists ageing as one of the reasons for why advanced capitalist economies might be stuck in an ‘upper income trap’.

I will be presenting the findings of my research (joint with Daphne Halikiopoulou) on 1 March 2024 at the Partito Democratico headquarters in Rome for the workshop, “Understanding right-wing populism and what to do about it.”

My research on the political economy of ageing was cited in a great piece by The Economist on the future of the Labour Party

New article by the New York Times debates the effectiveness of acceding to the right on immigration for mainstream left parties, and cites our research with Daphne Halikiopoulou.

My joint article (with Halikiopoulou) entitled “Jihadist terrorist attacks and far right party preferences: An ‘unexpected event during survey design’ in four European countries” has now been accepted in Perspectives on Politics.

One in five people in the EU and nearly one in ten in the world are now aged 65 and over. This demographic transformation is one of the great successes of the twentieth century and has been the focus of a large scholarship in the social sciences. Ageing has also profoundly altered the composition of electorates in many democracies. My new article for the political quarterly entitled “The Politics of Economic Stagnation in Ageing Democracies” explores whether and how this population ageing reshapes the relationship between democracy and capitalism. I argue that ageing changes the economic and policy priorities of a growing share of democracies’ electorates in ways that incentivise elected governments to prioritise certain social policies and economic outcomes, such as pensions and low inflation, at the expense of others, most notably greater social investments and pursuing economic growth. As a result, gerontocracies increasingly lead to what I call a ‘gerontonomia’ characterised by democratically sustained economic stagnation.

A summary of this article has appeared in the political quarterly blog and the LSE Europe blog. A more extensive version of this research project has been published as a Nuffield College working paper at the University of Oxford.

Very interesting piece by Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, on why Britain’s older electorate can live with low GDP (partly drawing on my Nuffield working paper on ageing and the economy)