CROSS NATIONAL RESEARCH ON THE AGED AND PENSION POLICY

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This project proposes to examine the political participation or voting turnout of the aged in the advanced industrial democracies from 1950 to 1980. It does so by analyzing up to 70 election year, voting, and public opinion surveys done in 18 nations, and thereby exploits a valuable source of microlevel data seldom studied by aging researchers. With measures of aged political activity computed for multiple nations and time points from the individual data, the project will then relate to the voting turnout of the aged to pension and social welfare spending in the same nations. This shifts the focus from individual behavior to the macro-social and political outcomes of individual behavior. The long-term goal of such efforts is to understand the forces in modern democracies that affect the status of the aged. As the aged come to depend more and more on public transfers, their ability to influence public policy becomes crucial for their status. Most theories attribute little political efficacy to the aged or to their ability to influence policy. Other theories, however, argue that the aged have become increasingly influential in the political arena, and that their political activity increases public pension spending. The former arguments thus concentrate on structural determinants of welfare state policy and the status of the aged while the latter arguments consider the political determinants. The research proposed here will evaluate these theories, contribute to understanding nature and causes of public policy, and identify the forces behind the status of the aged in advanced industrial democracies. The methodological steps in the project include the following: 1) obtaining tabulations for each survey of age by whether or not respondents voted in the last election and by party choice for those who did vote; 2) computing similar tabulations for each survey with controls for the sex and education composition of the aged and nonaged populations; 3) using the tabulations to compute measures of the aged propensity to vote relative to the nonaged, and the aged share of voter turnout; 4) describing cross-national and longitudinal patterns of aged political participation; and 5) examining the statistical relationship between measures of participation of the aged and measures of public pension spending effort.