Across Europe, birth rates are declining rapidly while life expectancy has increased significantly over the last centuries. In the last years, several countries of the Baltic region even reached all-time low fertility rates. This development points towards accelerating demographic change in the upcoming decades, which will challenge pension systems and healthcare provision. This welfare state dimension of societal ageing receives ample attention both in public and scholarly discussions. But changes in the age structure of populations can also impact the functioning of representative democratic systems.
One potential impact arises through Shifting Expectations with regard to political representation, particularly among younger and older citizens. From the perspective of older people, demographic ageing may lead to rising expectations as they increasingly constitute a majority of the electorate. For younger people, demographic change generates a different but equally consequential set of expectations. As younger cohorts shrink relative to older generations, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to assert age-specific interests through electoral politics. Over time, this can lead to frustration, political disengagement, and a sense of being structurally disadvantaged within representative democratic systems. Demographic ageing can thus be understood as a potential turning point, a peripety. It harbours the potential for crises and forces politics to actively address the consequences of this change. The project therefore asks whether and how age groups differ in the perception and evaluation of political representation in ageing societies. Based on a comparative mixed-methods approach, it aims to analyse which dimensions of representation are particularly relevant for younger and older citizens and how these perceptions are linked to interpretations and narratives of demographic change.
It builds on a relational understanding of political representation, shifting attention away from purely descriptive metrics toward the quality of the representative relationship itself. Fair and just representation, in this view, does not necessarily require proportional descriptive representation, but rather that representative relationships function equally well across age groups—while acknowledging that descriptive representation can impact this relationship.