Volume 15, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Political Demography; Guest Editor: Kira Kurz

Social scientists have long been interested in how attitudes and values influence fertility intentions and behaviors. The role of political ideology has, on the contrary, been overlooked. Right-wing people tend to be more religious, to hold more traditional views on gender roles and on the importance of the family. Therefore, right-wing people may be more likely to hold positive fertility intentions that individuals with other political orientations. In addition, political ideology may have an effect on fertility intention independent of other attitudes. Using two rounds of the European Social Survey, we show that people that position at the extreme right of the political ideology scale are more likely to intend to have a child during the three years following the interview. This association holds even after accounting for several socio-demographic and economic factors, values and attitudes. Heterogeneity tests show that the association is restricted to younger individuals (aged 20–34), with higher levels of education (at least upper secondary), and individuals in Eastern Europe. In Southern Europe right-wing individuals show significantly higher predicted probabilities of a positive fertility intention compared people that locate themselves in the political center. The statistically significant associations are also sizeable (differences in terms of predicted probabilities vary between 4 and 9 percentage points). These results point to the importance of considering a neglected factor in fertility research and contribute to the growing field of Political Demography.

Rising life expectancies and low birth rates across the Western world have heralded a profound change in the way representative democracy operates. Whereas representative democracy was politics for the young made by the old in the past, it is turning into politics for the old made by the old in the 21st century. Following Yosuke Buchmeier and Gabriele Vogt’s recent reflection on Japan’s status as the democracy with the oldest electorate, this article considers the case of Germany’s aging electoral democracy, using the 2021 federal election as its empirical foundation. Employing what Ian Shapiro labels a problematizing redescription , the paper demonstrates that a recharacterization of gerontocratic rule as political adultism better explains the election outcome than a characterization of gerontocratic rule as such. In doing so, it draws up an original conception of political adultism as the socially-accepted interpersonal, structural, and institutional discrimination of young and younger people in politics and distinguishes between two temporal phases as disenfranchised and enfranchised political adultism. The two-stage idea of political adultism gives voice to the structural injustice toward young people as political beings and facilitates a critical reflection on whether the policy of lowering the voting age to 16 would really be as desirable as many of its proponents believe it is. The unique contribution of this article is the formulation of a new social structure that diagnoses a distinctive experiential bias in democratic politics at a time in which the relationship between demography and democracy is coming to a head.

NDC (notional defined contribution) pension systems are usually considered the best in the PAYGO (pay-as-you-go) category: they mimic funding, seem to be well balanced, and have very limited distortionary effects on the labour market. In this paper, after highlighting of few of their weaknesses, I suggest an alternative solution to the pension problem: IPAYGO, or improved PAYGO. Its guiding principle, “everything is relative”, is applied consistently to both the economic and the demographic part of the problem: this makes the system viable in all possible demographic and economic scenarios. Depending on a few explicit policy (parametric) choices, IPAYGO may take very different shapes, and adapt to national preferences, such as early or late retirement, generous or limited pension benefits, and greater or lesser emphasis on actuarial equity. A properly designed IPAYGO, even in its basic form (the only one discussed here), can tackle issues such as inequities deriving from differential mortality (with the richer living longer), pension-induced low fertility, and quasi-capital gains and losses. While IPAYGO is conceived to be an operative instrument, it can also be used to evaluate existing pensions systems, and the phase a population is going through, with a novel measure of the so-called “demographic bonus” (or “malus”).

Monitoring the changes in mortality patterns and levels requires studying mortality models and measures of lifespan length and variation. Measures of lifespan length and variation can be obtained from life tables or from mortality modes. In this paper, measures of lifespan length and variation are presented for mixture model introduced by Zanotto, L., V. Canudas-Romo, and S. Mazzuco. 2021. “A Mixture-Function Mortality Model: Illustration of the Evolution of Premature Mortality.” European Journal of Population 37 (1): 1–27. This was applied to the case of Egypt for males and females in the period 1950–2021. The mixture model was able to fit Egypt’s mortality pattern well for both males and females. The calculated measures of lifespan length and variation show that there is an increasing longevity and a declining variation of age at death distribution across time for both males and females.

This paper examines the asymmetric impact of financial development on economic growth in Mauritius during the period 1980–2021. The analyses were carried out using a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model in conjunction with additional complementary tests, including the NARDL bounds F -test for cointegration, the Brock-Dechert-Scheinkman (BDS) nonlinearity test, and the Wald test for asymmetries. The findings of the bounds F -test provide support for a nonlinear cointegration, whereas the BDS test shows the presence of nonlinearity in the data for all the variables. The Wald test results revealed an asymmetric relationship between financial development and economic growth in Mauritius, both in the short and long run. The NARDL findings show that, on average, positive changes in financial development lead to economic growth in the long and short run. Therefore, the paper encourages the government of Mauritius to continue pursuing policies aimed at the expansion of its financial sector since it has a significant positive impact on its economic growth.