Politics of old-age pension coverage: old-age pension coverage and political behavior of senior citizens

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. 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 find that internal efficacy implying empowered individuals delivers the indirect effect of ‘total’ pension coverage onto the protests of seniors. Second, multilevel analyses 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, I discover that pension policies expanding coverage boost political trust of both senior and non-senior citizens within two or three years in Latin American countries. Last, using interview data, I find that the broad coverage of tax-funded pension system in Korea—as opposed to Singapore, which lacks such a system—generates feelings of distributional injustice, less trust in other senior citizens, and ageist self-views. My research shows that Korean seniors, unlike Singaporean seniors, perceive higher levels of pension abuse even above actual levels and are more ashamed of a financial burden put on the working population providing the source of social benefits. Therefore, they link the burden to their reluctance to support increasing pension or social benefits for seniors.