Populations and Policies in a Younger but Faster-Aging East Central Europe: The Political Demography of Missed Opportunity

Abstract

The new democracies in East Central Europe started the post-communist era with comparatively young populations. After 1989-1990, they have largely spurned a quarter-century long demographic window of opportunity for reform, by insufficiently adapting their policy models to prepare for fast population aging ahead. Especially in Romania, Bulgaria and the Visegrad Four, this is reflected in low active aging and child wellbeing index rankings, relatively small social investment in early human capital, weak improvements in prospective old age dependency ratios, and large-scale emigration. Slovenia and the Visegrad Four, but not the Baltics, also became „pensioners‘ welfare states“ with prematurely strong pro-elderly policy bias. In some cases, massive early exit worsened pension system sustainability while boosting pensioners‘ electoral power (political push before demographic pull). However, around the time when the demographic window started closing (2010-2015), the political salience of family policies, work-family reconciliation policies, and active aging policy increased, often spurred by the same Christian-conservative and/or nationalist-populist parties that caused illiberal democratic backsliding. But by then, the relative political power of elderly voters during elections in East Central Europe was among the highest in the world.