abstract: The population of advanced capitalist democracies (acds) has aged substantially in the last decades. Yet we know little about the consequences of aging for the electoral politics of economic performance. This article develops a novel theoretical framework linking aging to lower economic growth in four interrelated steps. First, elderly voters care more about pensions than other voters do, but less about policies related to child care, family, and education. Second, elderly voters are less likely to penalize governments for low growth and unemployment. Third, gray power pushes governments to protect the growing share of budgets allocated to pensions at the expense of more growth-enhancing policies, most notably social and public investments, while also weakening policy responsiveness during recessions. Fourth, this policy reallocation undermines economic growth. The author tests this theory using multilevel and fixed-effects regressions, an instrumental variable approach, and causal mediation analysis on micro- and macrolevel data across twenty-one acds from the 1960s onward. The results show that aging fundamentally alters the electoral politics of economic stagnation in acds.
Tim Vlandas (2026) studied this question.