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Global Political Demography. The Politics of Population Change
This book is about the politics and public policies of population change
across the globe. It is our attempt to make interdisciplinary progress at
the intersection of demography and political science in order to fully
understand the breadth and pace of demographic change worldwide.
This book grew out of an idea that we tossed around at a workshop
in Gothenburg in autumn 2015. In 2012, we had edited a volume
on the comparative politics of population ageing in advanced industrial
democracies in an attempt to make some advances in the fields of political
sociology, comparative politics, comparative political economy and
welfare state research (“Ageing Populations in Post-industrial Democracies:
Comparative Studies of Policies and Politics, Routledge”, Routledge).
In late summer 2016, we met in Odense to sketch out the
first ideas for this book and identify suitable experts from across the
globe. Since we had been working mostly on the OECD world ourselves,
this was a steep learning experience. In 2017, we approached the Käte
Hamburger Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University
of Duisburg-Essen with the question whether they could fund an international
conference to bring together such a global group of experts.
Luckily, they were able to do so, leading to a conference that took
place on 23–24 November 2017 in Duisburg.
For this volume, we wanted to adopt a wide scope across three dimensions.
First, we wanted not only to include population ageing as the dominant
driver of change in the age composition of modern societies, but
to also add an in-depth analysis of migration as a fundamental factor of
population change. Second, we wanted to expand the perspective beyond
advanced industrial democracies to cover all major macro-regions of the
world in order to develop a fuller picture of the dynamics of the politics of
population change. Third, we wanted to broaden the time period under
consideration, from 1990 to today and into the near future, up to 2040.
This ambitious open-access book draws the big picture of how population
change interplays with politics across the world from 1990 to
2040. Leading social scientists from a wide range of disciplines discuss,
for the first time, all major political and policy aspects of population
change as they play out differently in each major world region: North and
South America; sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region; Western and
East Central Europe; Russia, Belarus and Ukraine; East Asia; Southeast
Asia; subcontinental India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Australia and New
Zealand. These macro-regional analyses are completed by cross-cutting
global analyses of migration, religion and poverty, and age profiles and
intra-state conflicts. From all angles, the book shows how strongly contextualized
the political management and the political consequences of population
change are. While long-term population ageing and short-term
migration fluctuations present structural conditions, political actors play
a key role in (mis-)managing, manipulating and (under-)planning population
change, which in turn determines how citizens in different groups
react.
