Making Gerontocracy Work: Population Aging and the Generosity of Public Long-term Care

In English This paper examines how the aging population affects the generosity of public long-term care (LTC) in Sweden. Theoretically, aging has a direct effect on LTC policy because the elderly become a more important voter group. However, concerns for other citizens may dampen the political importance of the elderly. Fixed effects regressions on municipality-level panel data for 1999-2007 suggest that LTC generosity slightly decreases in response to an aging population. In particular, a smaller share of the elderly become entitled to LTC.