Effects of the Perceived Sustainability of Public Pension Systems on Attitudes and Policy Preferences: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Germany, Spain and the United States

Due to major pension retrenchment undertaken in advanced economies over the last decades, public pension benefits will be considerably lower in the future whereas statutory retirement ages will be higher. While many such pension reforms have been legislated, the consequent parametric shifts in regulation will typically be phased in gradually over various decades. However, it is largely unknown to what extent people are aware of these upcoming changes, and how much the technically complex public discourse on demographics and pension reform has transformed their perceptions of “the future of ageing societies”.

This study presents new evidence from an online survey experiment on knowledge of the financial sustainability of pension systems carried out in the Autumn of 2017 in Germany, Spain and the United States. To better understand the formation of attitudes towards welfare reform, we examine how knowledge on societal ageing affects the support for concrete public policy reforms. By randomly exposing one subset of survey respondents to an information treatment, the first objective of the project is to ascertain whether providing hard, objective data on societal ageing to individuals shapes their political attitudes toward social spending and welfare state reform. The second objective is to discover whether this knowledge impacts on personal outcomes such as saving intentions or age norms regarding appropriate retirement timing. Finally, the study analyzes whether and how individual characteristics – such as age, gender, education, and prior knowledge – moderate any information effects on policy preferences and personal outcomes. The project has important implications for the dynamics of public discourse on welfare reform.