Friday, March 14, 2014
Hampton (Omni Shoreham)
The debate as to the implications of demographic ageing in the nature, and extent, of the welfare state, is marked by a claim - raised by Preston (1984) and others – that older people will use their (growing) electoral power to support the adoption of policies that favour them, even if at the expense of the younger generations (see Kohli 2006: 464). The purpose of this paper is to examine if there is an age-based conflict over the level of protection that should be given to the unemployed. The paper is structured as follows. I start by showing that the existing literature fails to provide an adequate understanding of the role of age in shaping individuals' support for unemployment protection and, more specifically, how the effect of age is mediated by contextual and institutional variables. Then, using data from the ISSP module on the role of Government, I will test the hypothesis that retired persons are more likely to support cuts in spending on unemployment benefits. Next, making use of the heuristic potential of Two-Step Hierarchical Regression approach, I look at the effect of contextual (level of unemployment) and institutional variables (insurance vs. assistance based system of unemployment protection; generosity of unemployment benefits) on the likelihood that retired persons support cutting expenditure on unemployment benefits. I finalise by confronting the results of my analysis with the exiting evidence and discuss the implications of these findings for research and policy-making in Europe.
