THE WORLD IS GETTING OLD – PENSION POLICIES AS DRIVERS FOR U-TURN REGIME TRANSFORMATIONS

Abstract

In this thesis, I argue that pension expansions are important drivers for U-turn regime transformations. My theoretical argument focuses on the mechanism of legitimacy washing, where I propose that autocratizers use pension improvements as a strategical tool to ensure citizens’ support before they introduce authoritarian-led democratization. Additionally, I expect that the size of pension change matter for the effect on regime transformation and expect big changes as more influential. I test the three implications from the argument by a logistic and a multinomial logistic regression analyses on a combined dataset of SPAW and V-Dem Data, covering 147 countries with time series from 1900 to 2011. I find that expansion of pension universality drives U-turns and evidence that the influence work over the mechanism of legitimacy washing. The size of the pension change matters for the effect on U-turns, with small expansions highly influential. In addition, I find that pension universality policies are not used in all autocratization processes, but only in U-turn autocratizations, suggesting that the processes do not work in the same way.