How Does Population Aging Influence Political Polarization

Abstract

The population aging has been considered as a major trend in China. By 2019, people aged 60 or older has exceeded 2.49 m, accounting for 17.9% of the population, while people aged 65 or older has reaches 1.76 m, accounting for 12.6% of the population. However, there were no clear empirical evidences that show how political polarization is affected by the older population. We use a four-round household data from 2012-2018 CFPS of China to construct a large panel data including 14,352 adults each year. This paper computes the polarization index of eight typical public events and combines them to construct an overall index, using Gini coefficient, Theil index, and Atkinson index. We find that the index is larger for the oldest than for the youngest group in overall and eight measures, indicating that political polarization has gradually bifurcated with age. To explain this phenomenon, we focus on the demographic differences in information channel, parental influence, occupation distribution and regional migration between young and old people as evidence of higher polarization. Then, a Tobit model estimated at the age-province level implies that increase in average age is associated with significant grows in polarization index and four channel effects also hold. These findings provide a new perspective to explain the reason for increasing political polarization.