Deservingness, Economic Anxiety, and Support for the Elderly in Aging Societies

• In Event: Support for Democracy and Distributive Policies

Abstract

Rising concerns about welfare states in aging societies lends urgency to the question of support for old-age care. Limits on public provision of pension and old-age care are generally framed as necessary to meet budget constraints, particularly in the face of strained welfare states. Yet policy action also requires support from the public, a point receiving little attention in comparative research on old-age care. Indeed, we know surprisingly little about whether and why people hold differing preferences for elderly support.

Who supports spending on the elderly in aging societies, and under what conditions? Unlike the case of cross-class transfers – preferences for which are shaped by more or less permanent attributes like partisan attachments, income, or race –, support for elderly is generally assumed to be wide-spread and stable among developed welfare states. This is because compared to marginalized groups in need such as unemployed, the poor, or immigrants, the elderly rank relatively high on perceptions of deservingness. In addition, since aging is relevant to everyone, there is public belief that working-age people’s contribution to senior citizens will be paid back through benefits from government support for their post-retirement lives in the future. As a result, spending on the elderly is not thought to be susceptible to stigmatizing benefits.

We challenge this view. Examination of public opinion trends belies the notion that financial support for the elderly is high and universal. Rather than assuming that deservingness shields the elderly, we argue that population aging coupled with cohort-specific economic anxiety raise concerns about deservingness and push down individual-level support for spending on the elderly. In face of rising fiscal burden and limited financial resources caused by demographic shifts, growing economic anxieties lowers support for elderly-related spending among working-age groups. For workers, intragenerational transfers carry a negative impact on resources directed to them.

We assess this argument by using demographic, spending, and public opinion data from 12 countries over a twenty-year time span. Along with finding changing patterns in public opinion about elderly support, we further examine conditions in which an age-based divide in policy preferences can be mitigated or exacerbated. In particular, we assess how age-oriented social policies either reinforce or weaken an age-based policy interests in the face of population aging. Our research contributes to understanding “aged” effects of economic marginalization and political implications of population aging.

Authors

• Timothy Hellwig, Indiana University, Bloomington

• Yesola Kweon, Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU)