Field Notes

source

Voting on social security evidence from OECD countries

StatusStableUpdatedStands on2 sourcesSupportsnotes

Friedrich Breyer and Ben Craig test public-choice models of pay-as-you-go pensions across 20 OECD countries in 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990. The preserved 1995 Federal Reserve working paper is the open version of the article published in 1997 in the European Journal of Political Economy.

Across fixed- and random-effects specifications, a higher median-voter age is associated with a larger public pension programme. The result supports the specific public-choice prediction that demographic ageing can increase political demand for retirement transfers. It is the study behind the median-voter claim cited in David Willetts’s The Pinch.

The inference is narrower than generational capture. The dependent variables cover public pensions and social-security flows, not complete lifetime transfers, housing, education, or government debt. The country panel contains only four widely spaced observations, and the authors cannot explain the strong common time trend or all effects of the age distribution. The study associates an older effective voter with a larger programme; it does not follow a birth cohort or show that its preferences changed as its members aged.

For Boomers and democracy, the paper directly supports one link between demography and policy while leaving the stronger Swedish causal sequence unresolved.

Built on 2 sources (1 archived here, 1 external).

Working out connections…