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.

We explore the dimensionality of attitudes towards the welfare state among university students in eight countries representing four worlds of welfare: liberal, radical, conservative and social democratic. We use new data from cross-nationally comparable 25-item questionnaires to derive a two-level bi-factorial hierarchical model that specifies six different attitude facets. These facets are clustered into two distinct sets of attitudes: the 'market-based frame', which entails (a) individualism, (b) work ethic and (c) internal attribution of inequality and the 'welfare-statist frame', which entails (d) egalitarian redistribution, (e) broad scope of welfare and (f) external attribution of social inequality. In line with our expectations, respondents across different regime types structured their welfare state attitudes according to the six a priori defined types of attitudes and two sets of opposing attitudes. The study also found that the six facets are differently affected by regime type, which further corroborates our argument that the construct of welfare attitudes is complex and inherently multidimensional. IntroductionThis article proposes to explore a new approach to study the structure of citizens' attitudes towards the welfare state in eight democracies. We ask how citizens across different welfare regimes organise and integrate their welfare attitudes across different dimensions and whether convergence can be found in attitude patterns across different regime types. To do so, we need to understand 'what welfare programmes do' and how they interact with households and labour markets in the production and allocation of welfare. The analytical focus by

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.

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