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A Young Generation Under Pressure? pp 207–224Cite as

Being Less Active and Outnumbered?

The Political Participation and Relative Pressure Potential of Young People in Europe

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Abstract

“I am afraid to say that we are currently witnessing the early signs of a pensioners’ democracy. Older people are becoming more numerous, and all political parties pay extraordinary attention to them. This development could end in a situation in which older people would plunder the young.”

Roman Herzog, ex-judge at the Federal Constitutional Court (1983–1994) and ex-president of Germany (1994–1999), on the announcement of the German government in April 2008 to raise public pensions by 1.1% and to deviate thereby from the pension formula (Blome et al. 2008)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Other factors that accompany the post-modernisation process are (Norris 2002: 22–3): suburbanisation (individuals tend to be more mobile and less embedded in the same social networks for decades) and de-unionisation due to the shift to the services sector (individuals become less mobilised by trade unions).

  2. 2.

    There is an extensive discussion in the literature of political participation about which conceptualization is most appropriate, which I am not presenting here. Readers interested in this shall be referred to van Deth et al. (2007).

  3. 3.

    Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland. Some types of participation were not asked for in Hungary and Switzerland.

  4. 4.

    The rate of economically active people between ages 60 and 64 tends to be much lower than the rates for younger age groups. On average, it stands at 29.4% in the 21 European countries. The rate of economically active individuals aged 65 and older lies at an average of 5.1% (ILO 2006).

  5. 5.

    Obviously, this result is contingent in the age separation that I suggested here: 18–29, 30–59, and 60+. However, this categorization might be considered to be conservative as far as young people are concerned. The defining line of young people being not as settled as middle-aged people might be drawn at even earlier ages than 30. If I did so, the differences would even be starker. As to the other division line, 60 seems the most plausible social division point as it is the mean retirement age across Europe. One could argue that early retirement regimes in, for example, Italy would call for a lower division point, but the analysis is quite robust even for cut-off points between 50 and 60. Thus, we can say with confidence that currently, middle-aged people dominate in their pressure potential due to their high participation rates and demographic weight, relative to other age groups whereas young people are the least influential and older people are always in between.

  6. 6.

    The literature on preference formation and age effects tends to explain these differences with a generational account. Thus, older people are not becoming more conservative. If society moves into a certain direction with its mean value position, older people tend to maintain on average an ideal point that was prevalent during their time of early political socialization (see for example Tilley 2005; Danigelis and Cutler 1991).

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Acknowledgment

For detailed comments, I would like to thank Aaron Boesenecker, Frank Nullmeier, Armin Schäfer and Pieter Vanhuysse and two anonymous referees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cologne, Köln, Germany

    Achim Goerres

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  1. Achim Goerres
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Correspondence to Achim Goerres .

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  1. Generationen (SRzG), Stiftung für die Rechte zukünftiger, Ludwig-Erhard-Str. 16a, Oberursel, 61440, Germany

    Joerg Tremmel

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Goerres, A. (2010). Being Less Active and Outnumbered?. In: Tremmel, J. (eds) A Young Generation Under Pressure?. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03483-1_11

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