Political Preferences and the Aging of Populations

the long version

Oliver Pamp analyzes the likelihood and extent of pension reforms from a political-economy perspective. It is shown that voters’ preferences for or against reforms are influenced by a societies’ demographic development, the generosity of its existing public pension scheme and its electoral system. The author extensively reviews existing formal models of pension systems, discusses their merits and limitations, and develops a three-period overlapping generations model. The model’s insights regarding individual reform preferences are then put into the context of different electoral systems, thus emphasizing the important role of electoral institutions in the aggregation of societal preferences. Finally, using cross-national survey data, logit and ordered-logit analyses tentatively confirm some of the model’s main implications. Contents Population Aging and its Economic and Financial Consequences Formal Models of Pension Systems Pension Preferences and Reform – A Political-Economy Model Econometric Analyses of Cross-National Survey Data on Individual Pension Reform Preferences Target Groups Researchers, lecturers and students of political science and economics The Author Oliver Pamp is lecturer for empirical and formal methods at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (Germany). His research focuses, among other things, on the political economy of government budgets and social policy.