Pensions Politics And The Elderly PDF Download

This work aims to understand how old-age pension coverage influences political attitudes and behavior of senior citizens in non-Western regions of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Arab lands, and Latin America. This dissertation notes that old-age pension coverage deserves particular attention in researching senior citizens' political behavior and attitudes. The demand for attention is justified when we consider the pension system's economic repercussions, public salience, and symbolic role of representing governments' efforts to expand social benefits to the larger population. However, the relevant policy-feedback research focusing on pensions is incipient at best. Previous works regionally focusing on a few Western welfare states are short of applying their findings to broader areas that have different political and economic contexts. Employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches, I develop a research project on policy feedback of old-age pension coverage beyond the Western setting. First, I conduct multilevel cross-national analyses with regard to the effect of pension coverage on senior citizens' political participation, using the data from Barometer surveys and various macro-level statistics. Results show that a proportion of 'social' pensioners among the elderly population encourages average participation levels of voting and protesting among older people in low-income countries and demonstrative behavior in authoritarian states. I also carry out mediation analyses to discover whether pension coverage boosts political participation of senior citizens by giving them political resources or psychological empowerment. I find that internal efficacy implying empowered individuals delivers the indirect effect of 'total' pension coverage onto the protests of seniors. Second, I conduct multilevel analyses to investigate the effect of pension coverage on senior citizens' political trust. These reveal that broader old-age pension coverage playing the role of long-term economic security can create more critical attitudes of senior citizens toward presidents or prime ministers in low-income countries. Moving on to research of the short-term effect of pension coverage on political trust with a regional focus on Latin American countries, I discover that pension policies expanding coverage boost political trust of both senior and non-senior citizens within two or three years. Last, qualitative analyses using interview data in Singapore and South Korea dig deeper into how senior citizens' attitudes toward pension policies are associated with these nations' dominant pension schemes. The broad coverage of tax-funded pension system in Korea--as opposed to Singapore, which lacks such a system--is found to generate feelings of distributional injustice, less trust in other senior citizens, and ageist self-views. My research shows that Korean seniors perceive higher levels of pension abuse even above actual levels and are thus more cautious in supporting an expansion of pension coverage or an increase in benefit levels. Moreover, interview participants in South Korea are more ashamed of a financial burden put on the working population providing the source of social benefits and link the burden to their reluctance to support increasing pension or social benefits for seniors.