GENERATION IN ITSELF OR FOR ITSELF?

ABSTRACT

The concept of welfare generation and the idea of possible conflicts between generations have been discussed frequently in the context of pension systems. In order to form interest groups that could engage in such a conflict, the generations in question would have to form clear collectives with strong agendas. This article shows that the concept of generation is rather vague and that it is not possible to define a generational collective characterised by its experiences with and attitudes towards the welfare state or the pension system. Pensioner cohorts have so far been identified mainly on the basis of financial transactions. If other resources and characteristics are taken into account, the seemingly clear-cut differences between generations get blurred. Apart from these external factors, there is also no evidence to be found for specific generations perceiving themselves as winners or losers, nor do they show an outspoken conflict potential that would mark them as actors in generational disputes.

Keywords:

• generations
• generational conflict
• pension systems
• social inequality
• welfare retrenchment

Notes

¹This article has benefited considerably from comments by an anonymous reviewer who suggested including the analogy between ‘generation’ and ‘class’. Furthermore, the author would like to thank Harvey Redgrave and Steffen Hillmert for helpful suggestions and comments.

²Leading Article: ‘Questions of growing grey in prosperity’, The Guardian (London), March 27, 1990.

³This development is to a great share due to the evolution of part-time employment. However, the argument here is that the overall investment of time of an entire cohort has dropped in the past decades – whether this happened due to part- or full-time employment is not of relevance.

⁴It might be conceivable to acquire a huge data set to take all the different possible indicators into account and to add up advantages and disadvantages of cohorts. Additionally to all the different problems such a method would apply (e.g., how to measure the gain of time compared to reduced pensions), the main problem is that this data does not exist (see Hills 1996; Hardy and Waite 1997; May 2007). For a thorough analysis, one would require data for cohorts born around 1900, most of the statistics that deal with data of individual status in the welfare state only commences in the 1970s.

⁵Ronald Inglehart and colleagues (Inglehart 1977, 1990, 1997, 2008; Inglehart and Welzel 2005) have conducted a substantive amount of research on generations and values or value change. In general they describe a shift from materialist to post-materialist values in successive generations since World War II. For several reasons, I will not discuss these ideas in detail. It is quite difficult to translate Inglehart's materialist-postmaterialist index (for a discussion see Inglehart 2008) into the question of how different cohorts evaluate their situation with regard to pensions. In Inglehart's index, there is no category concerning welfare benefits, let alone pensions. Based on Maslov's scarcity hypothesis, which is employed by Inglehart, one could assume that postmaterialists are more open to the redistributive element in social insurances. When Klein (2003) and Klein and Pötschke (2004) find a return of materialist values for younger cohorts in Germany, this might imply that this is (amongst other things) due to the fact that these cohorts feel they pay too much for the pension system while they are being insecure about their own benefits later in life. However, to my knowledge this correlation has not been empirically tested yet. Furthermore, there are several empirical and theoretical problems with Inglehart's theory and design (for an overview see Thome 1985; Rössel 2011: 728–29). Clarke and Dutt (1991) find that the measure is very sensitive to short-term economical shifts that easily change the public political issue agenda. Furthermore, they find that the apparent postmaterialist trend is mainly due to the fact that Inglehart's index lacks an unemployment statement (this might be true for a statement concerning social security as well). In general, Inglehart focuses on economic conditions alone to explain value change. De Graaf and Evans (1996) however show that much of the change is due to increasing education and the lack of a wartime experience of younger cohorts. In this case, the hypothesised correlation between less generous pension benefits and the rise of materialist values would not be very convincing. In general, more research on the reasons and causes for the value change (also within different national and cultural contexts) and its theoretical problems needs to be conducted before it can serve as a basis for further research into political generations.

⁶The Netherlands were not part of the study.

⁷The Special Eurobarometers 44.0, 51.0 and 60.3 also deal with questions concerning old age insurance, the questions are however far less extensive and with less relevant contents.

⁸East Germans have experienced considerably different generational layers and generational contexts that were characterised by a socialist system of social insurance and specific structures concerning demography and job market situation after the German reunification. Consequently, strong differences in the attitudes of inhabitants of East and West Germany have been found, amongst others, by Busemeyer et al. (2009) and Armingeon (2006).

⁹In order to combine generation and age group effects, Achim Goerres has proposed four characteristics in order to research political generations and to explain differing voting behaviour of different cohorts. A ‘political generation’ effect stems from the shared experience of a group that was born during a certain period. The ‘socio-economic cohort effect derives from the varying probabilities between cohorts of acquiring certain socio-economic characteristics (e.g., class structure and educational composition.) ‘Life-cycle effects’ derive from changes in our social situation over the life course. ‘Individual ageing’ combines the accumulation of experience and growing adherence to social norms (Goerres 2009b: 13–14). He does however find no simple explanation for voting behaviour by age, as these influences seem to vary over time (Goerres 2009b: 170).