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Population aging voting and political agendas

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Francesco Barilari, Nicola Mastrorocco, and Matteo Paradisi’s 2025 article uses European Social Survey data and political-party manifestos to connect population ageing, turnout, and agenda emphasis. The local manuscript corresponds to the open-access article published in the European Journal of Political Economy.

The authors find that people under 50 moved from a majority to a minority of the European voter population during the study period. Demographic change accounts for most of the shift, but lower reported turnout among successive younger cohorts amplified it. Using ESS waves from 2002 through 2018, they estimate that under-50 turnout propensity fell while over-50 turnout propensity rose.

Their manifesto analysis finds increasing attention to pensions and retirement relative to unemployment. The shift was larger in countries that aged more rapidly, and the retirement passages increasingly emphasized welfare expansion rather than limitation. The study therefore supplies direct evidence for the participation and agenda-setting channels in ageing democracies.

It does not demonstrate Moving cohort capture. The analysis groups voters above and below age 50, uses self-reported turnout, and studies aggregate manifesto language. It cannot show that one birth cohort caused policy to follow its changing material position across the life course, nor that manifesto emphasis became enacted distributive advantage.

The article directly replaces the opaque citation behind the European turnout-and-manifesto claim that appeared in the conversation underlying Boomers and democracy.

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