Since  the age of the average OECD median voter has increased three times faster than in the preceding  years. We use panel data from - to investigate the effects of population aging on both the program size and the benefit generosity of public pensions in  OECD countries. Population aging is accompanied by cutting smaller slices out of larger cakes: it increases aggregate spending on pensions but freezes or decreases the generosity of individual benefits. Controlling for political, institutional and time-period effects, we find that public pension efforts are significantly mediated by welfare regime type. Moreover, since the late s pension effort has more fully adopted a retrenchment logic. It is the politics of fiscal and electoral straitjackets, not gerontocracy, which shape public pension spending today. While population aging is accelerating, contrary to alarmist political economy predictions democracies are not yet dominated by a new distributive politics of elderly power.

When faced with the necessity of reforming welfare states in ageing societies, politicians tend to demand more solidarity between generations because they assume that reforms require sacrifices from older people. Political economy models, however, do not investigate such a mechanism of intergenerational solidarity, suggesting that only age-based self-interest motivates welfare preferences. Against this backdrop, this article asks: Does the experience of intergenerational solidarity within the family matter for older people's attitudes towards public childcare -a policy area of no personal interest to them? The statistical analysis of a sample with individuals aged 55+ from twelve OECD countries indicates that: intergenerational solidarity matters; its effect on policy preferences is context-dependent; and influential contexts must -according to the evidence from twelve countries -be sought in all societal spheres, including the political (family spending by the state), the economic (female labour market integration) and the cultural (public opinion towards working mothers). Overall, the findings imply that policy makers need to deal with a far more complex picture of preference formation toward the welfare state than popular stereotypes of 'greedy geezers' suggest.

In order to explain why people differ in their attitudes towards public childcare, we present a theoretical framework that integrates four causal mechanisms: regime socialisation, political ideology, family involvement and material self-interest. Estimation results obtained from multivariate regressions on the 2002 German General Social Survey and replications on the 2008/9 European Social Survey can be condensed into three statements: (1) Regime socialisation is the single most important determinant of attitudes toward public childcare, followed by young age as an indicator of self-interest and political ideology. Family involvement does not have any sizeable impact. (2) Regime socialisation conditions the impact of some indicators of political ideology and family involvement on attitudes toward public childcare. (3) Despite a paradigmatic shift in policy, the dynamics of 2008 mirror those of 2002, highlighting the stability of inter-individual differences in support. The results suggest that the 'shadow of communism' still stretches over what people in the East expect from the welfare state and that individual difference in the demand for public childcare appears to be highly path-dependent.

This study explores a refined model of public/private sector cleavage voting. Assuming that market and work experiences are crucial for people to develop common political views, it investigates three contexts that shape government employees' willingness to vote as a single constituency: the branch of public sector production, the occupational status, and the type of service economy. Estimation results obtained from regressions on European Social Survey (ESS) data indicate that government employees in public health, education and service production rather than public administration utilize sector cleavage voting. Regardless of their actual occupational status, public health and education employees show persistently stronger attitudes in favour of expanding state responsibility. With respect to party choice, stronger signs of alignment along the sector cleavage are observed in Social Democratic service economies. In sum, the public/private sector cleavage continues to matter in a more complex way than a simple sector dichotomy would suggest.

Over the past decades, all affluent welfare states have been coping with two major new trends: population ageing and new social risks resulting from de-industrialization. How have these demand-side trends, and their timing, affected welfare spending? We investigate up to 21 OECD democracies with respect to eight separate programmes and two composite indicators of aggregate welfare spending bias towards the elderly and new social risks. We find that welfare regime logics still matter crucially in accounting for variation between countries, as does the timing of the large-scale arrival of new social risks. Both Southern European welfare states and countries that entered the post-industrial society comparatively late spend less on programmes such as education and family allowances, and more on survivor pensions. However within countries, contemporaneous levels of new social risks conspicuously fail to affect spending on programmes that deal with these risks. These findings defy simple neo-pluralist expectations of social policy responsiveness: on their own, even dramatic demand-side trends influence welfare spending relatively little in advanced democracies.