Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the challenges that Japan’s rapid demographic aging poses for the democratic system along the dimensions of political participation, political representation, and policy-making. It furthermore explores the perspectives for generational pluralism.

Paper long abstract:

While the impact of demographic aging is (relatively) well documented for the welfare system, healthcare, or the labor market, the repercussions of an aging electorate for the democratic system have received less attention. This paper asks how democratic processes and norms change in the face of an aging population and explores these dynamics along three dimensions. (1) Political participation: Elderly voters increasingly make up a significant share of the constituency upending the power equilibrium between the generations; (2) Political representation: Parliaments in many liberal democracies are now dominated by elderly lawmakers; (3) Policy-making: Policy analyses in major OECD countries regularly reveal an imbalance in public spending favoring the older generations. These three dimensions are analyzed taking the case of Japan, the democracy with the oldest electorate. This paper examines if the changing political equilibrium in the aging democracy results in a marginalization of young people’s voices, as often assumed, and inquires the perspectives for strengthening generational pluralism.