Editors’ Note

This issue of Statistics, Politics and Policy hosts the second part of our special issue on Political Demography; the first part appeared in issue 4 of 2023. Even though interactions between demographic factors and politics are frequent and powerful, the intersection of political science and population studies has for a long time remained under-researched. Gladly, this is now changing – a process we want to support through our two-piece special issue.

In the last editor’s note we presented a definition of the field that was the basis for the selection of papers submitted to our open call as well as the first two articles: Cincotta (2023) focused on coup vulnerability among youthful countries and Kurz and Ettensperger (2023) presented a novel dataset that enables studies on party-level factors influencing youth representation in parliaments.

In this second part of the special issue we present three more articles from the field of political demography, covering a range of different topics. In the first article, Bruno Arpino and Ryohei Mogi analyze how political ideology influences fertility behavior and find that “people that position at the extreme right of the political ideology scale are more likely to intend to have a child” (Arpino and Mogi 2024, p. 1).

The second article from our open call on political demography is a novelty in this journal, as it presents a perspective from normative political theory. Christopher-David Preclik builds upon the idea of gerontocratic rule and the concept of adultism, to develop the concept of Political Adultism – the idea that being a legal adult might not automatically lead to being perceived as adult enough in the political sphere. A perspective that gains relevance as societies continue to age. Empirically, the article concentrates on the 2021 German federal elections and Vote16-policies.

In the third article of the special issue, Gustavo de Santis proposes an improved PAYGO (pay-as-you-go) pension scheme understanding economic and demographic factors as relative. He argues that a well-designed IPAYGO (improved pay-as-you-ho) system can counterbalance current demographic challenges “such as inequities deriving from differential mortality (with the richer living longer)” or “pension-induced low fertility” (Santis 2024, p. 1).

Apart from these three articles from the open call, this issues features two more articles: Fittingly, the first of these stems from the field of demography. Marwah S. Siam, Hussein A. Sayed and Laila O. El-Zeini apply the recently developed Mixture-Function Mortality Model to the case of Egypt and show “increasing longevity and a declining variation of age at death distribution across time for both males and females” (Siam, Sayed, and El-Zeini 2024, p. 1).

The second articles focuses on the asymmetric impact of financial development on economic growth in Mauritius between 1980 and 2021. Based on their results, Talknice Saungweme, Glenda Maluleke and Nicolas M. Odhiambo encourage the Mauritius government to continue pursuing policies aimed at the expansion of its financial sector.

Furthermore, we are delighted to announce that the 2023 Emil J. Gumbel Prize for outstanding contributions has been awarded to Fukui (2023) for his paper on the evaluation of different covariate balancing methods. This outstanding paper received already a lot of attention, which is visible with a high number of downloads.