Ageing Advanced Capitalist Democracies: the new Electoral Politics of Economic Stagnation

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 article develops 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. This 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.