Silver Democracy: Youth Representation in an Aging Japan
Why are young people underrepresented in most political institutions? And does this shortage of young politicians matter for the extent to which young people’s interests are reflected in policy outcomes?
Understanding the answer to these questions is especially important in advanced democracies such as Japan that confront the challenges of declining birth rates and aging populations. In these countries, politicians face soaring welfare costs and tough decisions about how to allocate scarce resources between the needs of younger working families and elderly retirees. Without the presence of more young people in public office, there is a concern that the decisions made by mostly older politicians will lead to welfare policies that favor the elderly at the expense of younger families. Older politicians may also be less willing than younger politicians to address long-term issues such as social welfare reform, which will have a greater impact on younger generations.
My book project is about the causes and consequences of youth underrepresentation in democracies. I examine the institutional factors that help explain why young politicians are so rare in countries like Japan (Chapters 2 and 3), provide evidence that many voters would like to see this age bias corrected (Chapter 4), and show that the shortage of young politicians has a significant impact on the social policies that are promoted and implemented by governments (Chapters 5 and 6).
My book relies on both quantitative and qualitative methods. To support my claims, I use web scraping to compile the first comprehensive dataset on Japanese municipal elections, including data on nearly 200,000 mayoral and municipal assembly candidates in over 18,000 elections (1999-2019). I then supplement the findings from this new dataset by drawing on evidence from fieldwork in Japan, including in-depth interviews in Japanese with 15 mayors and 20 municipal bureaucrats.
Part I: Why are young Politicians So Rare in SOme Electoral Contexts, and Not Others?
In the first half of the book, I begin by investigating the causes of youth underrepresentation. My central argument is that “silver democracies”—cases like Japan, where politics are dominated by older politicians—are sustained by political institutions and not older voters as is often assumed. Drawing from my municipal elections dataset and original cross-national data on 68 democracies, I find compelling evidence for these institutional explanations, as explored in Chapters 2 and 3. In settings where institutions place disproportionately higher costs on young candidates, young politicians are much less common. These costs encompass barriers that distinctly target younger individuals, such as higher minimum age requirements to run for office. They also include barriers that, while affecting all age groups, disproportionately challenge the young, such as candidate-centered electoral systems. Such systems often necessitate that candidates have significant financial assets, local experience, and name recognition to win an election—all attributes that individuals tend to accrue with age, putting younger candidates at a distinct disadvantage.
Shifting the lens from institutions to voters, conversely, there is less evidence that voter biases are to blame for youth underrepresentation (Chapter 4). In fact, by using a novel survey experiment where I manipulate candidate faces via age regression and progression software, I find that voters harbor strong negative biases against older candidates but are quite supportive of having young people serve as their representatives. Young voters especially like young candidates, indicating that higher youth turnout could lead to greater youth representation. Additionally, even older voters tend to prefer younger candidates over older ones, suggesting that the overrepresentation of older people is not due to an age affinity effect among a growing population of older voters with higher voter turnout.
Together, these findings suggest that silver democracy is not destiny. If institutions are reformed and young people are encouraged to run, voters may welcome their greater presence in public office.
Part II: Does the underrepresentation of young people matter for social policy?
In the second half of the book, I turn to focus on the consequences of youth underrepresentation for policy outcomes. I develop a theory emphasizing the pivotal role of a politician’s age in shaping their preferences for social spending. I posit that younger politicians, especially those who are young parents themselves, will prioritize child welfare spending for younger families more than older politicians. I argue this tendency is further reinforced by their longer time horizons, which make them more attuned to the long-term implications of demographic changes like declining birth rates.
I find a clear connection between a politician's age and their social policies. In Chapter 5, I use supervised text analysis of over 500,000 campaign tweets to show that young candidates tweet more often about declining birth rates and the need for greater public spending and investment in child welfare for young families. Chapter 6 then demonstrates that young mayors follow through on these campaign communications. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that young mayors greatly increase their municipality's spending on child welfare. These spending patterns are even more pronounced among young mayors who have recent personal experience raising young children. Additionally, their spending predominantly targets long-term infrastructure investments, such as building childcare centers, which supports the time horizon mechanism. Importantly, young mayors do not reduce spending on the elderly, suggesting that an increase in youth representation may reduce rather than exacerbate intergenerational conflict over social welfare.
My book project is thus one of the first studies to demonstrate that young people’s descriptive representation in elected office can lead to their substantive representation in policy outcomes. In addition to adding age to the broader literature on elite characteristics and representation, I highlight a mechanism unique to age: time horizons. In doing so, I show how young politicians are more likely to allocate government resources not only toward their young constituents, but also toward the future through greater long-term investment in child welfare infrastructure. My work also contributes to existing studies on the age orientation of welfare programs, which have traditionally emphasized the role of welfare regimes and electoral institutions. I show that even under the same welfare and majoritarian systems, the age of politicians can make a substantial difference in spending that affects the public’s well-being, especially individuals at the child-rearing life stage. My results further suggest that the extent to which young people are represented in political institutions will have ramifications for how societies respond to the challenges posed by declining birth rates and aging populations.
Recently, I have discussed insights from my book project in stories in the Asahi Shimbun, The Economist, National Public Radio [2], and The Wall Street Journal [2].