Important domestic and international actors articulate often extreme views on the policy implications of population ageing, yet we have surprisingly little evidence of what these implications are. Ageing Populations in Post-industrial Democracies makes a major contribution towards addressing this paucity of data and empirically informed argumentation in an area that has raised so much interest and controversy in recent decades, but until now remained largely unexplored territory in the literature.
The acknowledgements to this book state that the editors benefited from blind-reviews conducted by referees: emulating the journal review process in this way is one way of raising the standard of chapters in edited volumes, but it may also lead to a weaker editorial imprint on a book. Indeed, in this case I would have liked to have seen more evidence of editorial synthesis in the form of a stronger concluding chapter by the editors themselves. Arguably the main comparative advantage of (edited) books over journal articles is that they allow for more summative accounts of the state of scholarship, and, very importantly, for theorising the field. I also feel that this book would have benefited from a stronger editorial hand in organising and dividing the chapters into two or three sections to reflect the differences in generational politics in relation to younger people's welfare entitlements and fertility behaviour, and older people's entitlements, parties, voting behaviour and interest group activity.
Despite this, the reader of this book can piece together an interesting story. The excellent epilogue by Robert B. Hudson draws attention to some important differences between Europe and the United States of America, although it does not replace what could have been a path-breaking state-of-the-art encapsulation by the editors themselves. In my reading, the chapters amount to a firm rejection of the ‘grey power’ hypothesis and the ‘war of generations’ stereotype, with the complexity of generational politics convincingly highlighted in the individual chapters. Generation and age matter surprisingly little in the light of the empirical evidence marshalled here: rather, institutions and structures (welfare state design, electoral system, interest organisation) are paramount. Interestingly, perceptions are also highlighted as important, in particular the perceived need to control budgets which may trump over the perceived need to protect age-related entitlements. Grey power, to the very limited extent that it exists, is therefore highly conditional on favourable institutional factors. These are some of the important insights that I gleaned from the chapters, yet was left wondering what is the key message of the book as a whole.
The book is focused on macro-level politics, but some chapters shed light on socio-economic status and gender in shaping micro-level attitudes and engagement in generational politics. Entitlements are, in many welfare states, powerfully stratified by occupational status and income, and sustained differences in the lifecourse give men and women differential stakes in many age-related entitlements. Chapter 5, by Mehmet F. Aysan, contains some insightful discussion on gender, but is dominated by consideration of institutional factors in different pension regimes. Chapter 9, by Jonas Edlund and Stefan Svallfors, marshals data to back up the argument that class continues to supersede age as the key attitude-shaping variable. These are just some of the multiple variables that influence generational politics: the central contribution of this book is that these variables are discussed for the first time within a single volume, albeit with considerably more attention to the ‘macro’ than to the ‘micro’ level. Chapter 8, by Achim Goerres and Markus Tepe, takes some interesting steps towards hypothesising the inter-relationship between the two, including the ‘socially constructed nexus between the family and the welfare state’ (p. 199), which in turn points towards ‘motives of reciprocal exchange between generations rather than pure age-based self-interest’ (p. 200). These are important steps towards what may be major theoretical breakthroughs.
Reading this timely volume, with its many thoughtful contributions, I kept wishing the editors had seized the opportunity that books offer to theorise more boldly and thereby set the agenda for future work in the emergent field of generational politics. Nonetheless, in the light of their commendable ambition and prolific publications record, I am convinced that the editors, and many of the contributors to this volume, will go on to produce such formative work in the future. Ageing Populations in Post-industrial Democracies has provided a tantalising invitation for advancing an increasingly important field of scholarship and is essential reading for graduate students and researchers working on this topic.
