1 Mapping the field: comparative generational politics and policies in ageing democracies

Abstract

For at least 2,500 years, scholars have written about the relationship between generations and its im plica tions for the polit ical arena. As Feuer (1976) has noted, already during Greek times, the potential for conflict between generations within the same family was ac know ledged by the great early masters of polit ical science, Plato and Ar is totle, to have the potential for causing major polit ical conflict as these conflicts were brought to the pub lic realm. To Plato, generational struggle constituted virtually the basic mech an ism in polit ical change, the always disequilibrating factor in sys tems of gov ern ment, the prime agent in the alternation of polit ical forms. Ar is totle, in turn, noted that polit ical revolu tions were caused not only by the conflict of the rich and the poor, but by the struggle between fathers and sons (Feuer 1976: 123-6). Much later, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, warned against the negligence of the con sequences of today’s pub lic pol icy de cisions for future cohorts. While there has been a permanent inter est in the phenomenon of generational pol itics among thinkers and social sci ent ists, im port ant early clarion calls notwithstanding (Cutler 1977; Heclo 1988), polit ical science as a dis cip line has lagged behind in de veloping an in teg rated body of know ledge to answer the question of which generations get what, when and how. This volume aims to be a building block for such a body of research. The con tri bu tions presented here paint a richer and more complex pic ture of the manifold dy namics of generational pol itics than pop ular stereo types of the ‘war of generations’ suggest. Although generations and popu la tion ageing are im port ant polit ical phenomena in many types of soci eties, this volume concentrates on advanced industrial demo cra cies that at the beginning on the twenty-first century are characterized by an advanced state of popu la tion ageing (a proportion of cit izens aged 60 andolder typ ic ally above 15 percent), an extensive wel fare state (average social spending of 21 percent of GDP in 2005; Adema and Ladaique 2009) and a liberal-democratic institutional framework in which the feedback of what people do and think influences the polit ical process.