New Zealand: The Supreme Political Football
Cutting pensions for the elderly is a difficult task for any government. The elderly are a large, politically active group, and they are viewed sympathetically by the rest of the electorate. Thus, reform of public pensions has been very much on the agenda in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand. This project outlines common pressures that have given rise to pension reform initiatives in these countries, and discusses how differences in political institutions and policy legacies might lead to different policy outcomes.
The first section of this paper outlines the common pressures that have given rise to pension reform initiatives in the United States and Canada, and discusses how differences in political institutions and policy legacies that might lead to different policy outcomes. The middle two sections review the experiences of the two countries with pension retrenchment. The final section reflects on and tries to draw lessons from these experiences about the political limits on pension reform specifically and loss-imposition generally in the two political systems.
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