The recent rise of authoritarian populist and far-right parties in Western democracies has raised concerns about democratic stability in these countries. While existing research often focuses on electoral outcomes, we argue this approach inadequately captures citizens’ regime preferences due to the complexities of electoral processes and national politics. To address this limitation, we examine the relationship between immigration and regime preferences through a democratization framework using structural equation modelling across 17 established Western democracies between 2008 and 2020. Our findings reveal a positive association between immigrant population rates, individuals’ authoritarian predisposition and anti-immigrant sentiments, with stronger anti-immigrant attitudes correlating with increased support for authoritarian governance models such as dictatorship and army rule. This relationship appears particularly pronounced among individuals with low authoritarian predispositions, underscoring the mobilizing effect of immigration. This research offers insights into the recent political landscape in Western democracies, contributing to debates on democratic resilience and challenges posed by changing demographics.

This paper examines the impact of demographic change on political perceptions, specifically attitudes toward the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Utilizing data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, we explore how changes in county-level nonwhite populations influence whether individuals label the event as a protest or an insurrection. Our findings reveal a curvilinear relationship: respondents in counties with moderate increases in nonwhite populations are more likely to view the event as an insurrection, while those in counties with substantial increases tend to see it as a protest. This pattern holds across racial groups but is primarily driven by respondents who did not vote for President Trump. The study shows the broader implications of demographic shifts on political stability and social cohesion, highlighting how changes in racial and ethnic composition shape interpretations of major political events. These insights are crucial for understanding voter behavior and political messaging in the 2024 presidential election.

This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the process of regional welfare-making in the Aso region (Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan). It demonstrates how local stakeholders such as social welfare councils have been promoting the ideal of community-based regional welfare, while adapting to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic hindered social exchange and amplified longstanding processes of community decline, it further complicates the ongoing challenge of activating local communities to realize the vision of a healthy “aging in place” based on mutual support.

A prominent paradigm demonstrates many White Americans respond negatively to information on their declining population share. But this paradigm considers this “racial shift” in a single hierarchy-challenging context that produces similar status threat responses across conceptually distinct outcomes, undercutting the ability to both explain the causes of Whites’ social and political responses and advance theorizing about native majorities’ responses to demographic change. We test whether evidence for Whites’ responses to demographic change varies across three distinct hierarchy-challenging contexts: society at large, culture, and politics. We find little evidence any racial shift information instills status threat or otherwise changes attitudes or behavioral intentions, and do not replicate evidence for reactions diverging by left- versus right-wing political attachments. We conclude with what our well-powered (n = 2100) results suggest about a paradigm and intervention used prominently, with results cited frequently, to understand native majorities’ responses to demographic change and potential challenges to multiracial democracy.

We study whether the increased adoption of available automation technologies allows economies to avoid the negative effect of aging on per capita output. We develop a quantitative theory in which firms choose to which extent they automate in response to a declining workforce and rising old-age dependency. An important element in our model is the integration of two capital types: automation capital that acts as a substitute to human labor, and traditional capital that is a complement to labor. Empirically, our model's predictions largely match data regarding automation (robotization) density across OECD countries. Simulating the model, we find that aging-induced automation only partially compensates the negative growth effect of aging in the absence of technical progress in automation technology. One reason is that automated tasks are no perfect substitutes for non-automated tasks. A second reason is that automation raises the interest rate and thus inhibits positive behavioral reactions to aging (later retirement and investment in human capital). Moreover, increased automation generates a falling net labor share of income and rising welfare inequality. We evaluate alternative policy responses to cope with this inequality.

The theory of the monetary circuit aims to provide a highly stylised account of the workings of a modern monetary production economy. While there may have been a time when it succeeded in this aim, that time is over. The key development in the monetary sphere of capitalism over recent decades is the advent of financialisation, a phenomenon that circuit theory cannot explain other than by omitting some of its most important characterising features while indiscriminately dismissing those features that it does address as dysfunctional outgrowths. The fact is that a theory that has the aggregate monetary circuit as its methodological framework and whose sole focus is on the financing needs of firms is simply not flexible enough to accommodate the new reality of financialisation. To make that accommodation what is needed is a framework that is sufficiently elastic as to be able to encompass a broad range of socio-economic factors, most notably those associated with demographic change, as co-drivers of financialisaton. This article argues that a framework based on Marx's commodity principle meets this requirement.

This paper evaluates alternative reforms of the public pension system in an overlapping generations model for an open economy facing demographic change. We make progress compared to existing literature on pension reform by modelling individuals with heterogeneous innate ability and endogenous human capital, and by putting (the reduction of) welfare inequality effects of reform at the centre. Frequently adopted reforms such as an increase of the normal retirement age or a decrease of the pension benefit can guarantee financial sustainability, but they fail when the objective is also to avoid intergenerational or intragenerational welfare inequality. Our results prefer a reform which combines an increase of the retirement age with an intelligent linkage between the pension benefit and earlier labour earnings. First, this design conditions pension benefits on past individual labour income, with a high weight on labour income earned when older and a low weight on labour income earned when young. Second, this linkage is complemented by a strong rise in the benefit replacement rate for low ability individuals (and a reduction for high ability individuals).

Why do communities with larger shares of ethnic and racial minorities have worse public goods provision? Many studies have emphasized the role of diversity in hindering public outcomes, but the question of causality remains elusive. The authors contribute to this debate by tracing the roots of both contemporary racial demography and public goods provision to the uneven historical expansion of the state. Focusing on new historical data from Brazil, the authors show that more remote municipalities with lower levels of state capacity in the past were more frequently selected by escaped slaves to serve as permanent settlements. Consequently, such municipalities have worse public services and larger shares of Afro-descendants today. These results highlight the pervasive endogeneity of the relationship between ethnic demography and public outcomes. The failure to account for context-dependent historical confounders raises concerns about the validity of previous findings regarding the social costs and benefits of any particular demographic composition.

Canadian political science has changed over the past 50 years; however, these changes have come slowly and lag behind larger societal demographic transformations. While early attention to diversity concentrated on the place of women within the discipline, more recent attention focuses on the presence of Black, Indigenous and other political scientists of colour. Accompanying a diversification of personnel has been a broadening of the substantive focus of our research, as well as an expansion in the epistemological and methodological approaches applied to the study of politics. Yet despite these adaptations, the study of political science in Canada remains siloed and often exclusionary, challenging our ability to train the next generation of scholars to be capable of addressing the issues facing a world that is increasingly complex and diverse.

Various research has demonstrated that rapid racial demographic change may aid in triggering various forms of backlash under certain conditions. This has led scholars to speak of Whites “defending” their local environment in the face of eroding racial dominance. However, little research has addressed how perceptions of racism among minorities may be triggered under conditions of demographic change. This study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between racial demographic change for Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians and perceptions of racial problems among these groups in the United States. Using standard OLS regressions, ordered logistic regressions, multinomial logistic regressions, and techniques accounting for selection into treatment, I find that Blacks and Hispanics living in counties undergoing rapid growth of Black and Hispanic populations, respectively, have higher perceptions of racial problems. Asians show no evidence of increased perceptions of racial problems in counties undergoing rapid Asian growth. For Blacks, this relationship is concentrated among those without at least a four-year degree and residents of counties with lower initial White populations (and higher initial Black populations). For Hispanics, it is similarly concentrated among those without at least a four-year degree, but also is likely stronger among residents of counties with higher initial White populations (and lower initial Hispanic populations), highlighting unique racial dynamics. This research adds to a growing body of work showing the importance of examining demographic change at the local level in order to understand some of today’s most pressing political and social issues.

After decades of relatively high inflows of foreign nationals, immigration is now at the center of substantial political divisions in most European countries and has been implicated in one of the most vexing developments in European politics, the rise of the xenophobic right. However, it is not clear whether high levels of immigration actually do cause a public backlash, or whether publics become habituated to, and supportive of, immigration. This study tests these backlash and habituation theories using novel measures of immigration mood and immigration concern produced by combining over 4,000 opinion datapoints across twenty-nine years and thirty countries. The authors find evidence of a public backlash in the short to medium run, where mood turns negative and concern about immigration rises. Yet the study also finds evidence of a longer-run process of habituation that cancels out the backlash effect within one (concern) to three (mood) decades.

This paper studies how the rates of deduction for early retirement have to be determined in pay-as-you-go (PAYG) systems in order to keep their budget stable. The derivation of these deductions requires the use of a multiperiod intertemporal budget constraint that involves assumptions about the retirement behavior of past, present, and future cohorts. In general, it is not possible to calculate budget-neutral deductions from the budget constraint of a single individual who retires before the target retirement age—an approach that dominates the related literature. Only for specific cases one can use this second approach but then one has to adjust the discount rate to the assumption about collective retirement. If there is only one deviating individual, then the right choice is the market interest rate while for a stationary retirement distribution it is the internal rate of return of the PAYG system. In this case, the necessary deductions are lower than under the standard approach. This is also true for retirement ages that fluctuate randomly around a stationary distribution. Various long-run developments (e.g., increases in life expectancy or permanent changes in the average retirement age) might cause challenges for the sustainability of the pension system. These developments, however, can only be dealt with by adequate adjustments to the basic pension formulas and not by the use of deduction rates.

Once nearly eighty percent Black, South LA is now two-thirds Latino. The demographic change was due to many factors, including a Black exodus driven by economic precarity, fear of crime, and experiences of over-policing and a Latino influx initially spurred by an immigration surge that could not be accommodated in traditional entry neighborhoods. While earlier research often focused on the conflicts between groups, time has passed and our new work points to contemporary quotidian accommodations between residents. We also document an emerging style of Black-Brown community organizing that seeks to both acknowledge the nuance of difference and create a shared sense of place identity. This article lifts up the Black experience in that transition of space and politics and notes how a sense of loss can result from such a dramatic change in a place that was once an iconic and literal home for much of Black Los Angeles. We suggest that that sense of loss is exacerbated by a legacy of racist asset-stripping and a deep worry about Black erasure due to current displacement pressures from gentrification. We close by discussing how organizers and political leaders need to take these dynamics into account when both building coalitions and ensuring Black futures in what is now a Black-Brown political and social space.

Research on the demographic impacts of mining in sparsely populated areas has focused primarily on relatively large towns. Less attention has been paid to smaller villages, which may experience different impacts because of their highly concentrated economies and their small populations, making them more vulnerable to demographic “boom and bust” effects. This paper examines demographic change in four small villages in northern Sweden, which are located close to several mining projects but have evolved through different degrees of integration with or separation from mining. Using a longitudinal “resource cycle” perspective, the demographic trajectories of the villages are compared to understand how different types of settlement and engagement with mining have led to different demographic outcomes in the long term. While the four villages experienced similar trajectories in terms of overall population growth and decline, their experiences in relation to more nuanced indicators, including age and gender distributions and population mobilities, were different, and potential reasons for this are discussed. Due to data limitations, however, the long-term demographic consequences of mining for local Sami people remain unclear. The paper problematises this research gap in light of general concerns about mining impacts on traditional Sami livelihoods.