Going Grey: The Mediation of Politics in an Ageing Society by Scott Davidson (review)

Going Grey contributes to the field of political gerontology, as it details the demographic dynamics affecting electoral ridings and analyses the ways in which the media and political parties portray older citizens. This UK case study revives a longstanding intellectual interest on older voters while employing critical lenses to study how media and politics interact. As such, it represents an interesting contrast to approaches in vogue in both political science and public policy with their heavy emphasis on the importance of policy feedbacks and the power of interest groups representing older citizens. This book will appeal primarily to scholars interested in the social construction of aging and in mapping the “grey vote” in UK electoral ridings. Professionals involved in the field of communication and the practice of politics will also enjoy it, most particularly chapters 6, 11, and 12, because the authors explicitly links both fields of inquiry.

The last four chapters comprise 92 out of the book’s 174 pages and are clearly the most interesting due to its in-depth analysis of the grey vote in the UK. The previous nine chapters consist chiefly of succinct critical reviews of well-known debates in social gerontology such as theories of aging, the role of media in constructing older citizens, and the politics of aging. Among those, chapter 9 on political marketing and the segmentation of the “grey vote” is the most innovative; it highlights the multiple variables, such as life-stage and identity, that “segment” older voters. These nine chapters cover a lot of ground, but this also results in a loss of focus. The diffused focus makes it difficult to link the arguments advanced in some chapters and to understand how these inform the ensuing material. In some cases, this is also an issue within chapters. For example, the last section of chapter 9 describes how the Labour government altered its thinking on pension policies from preserving the Conservative legacy to embracing traditional social democratic values like gender equality and citizenship based entitlements for the basic pension. However, the chapter is somewhat unclear regarding how the preceding theoretical discussions on voter segmentation and the political allegiance of older voters enlighten this pension shift.

That being said, two findings originating from this book clearly stand out. First, utilizing discourse analyses of multiple sources of content (such as newspapers, TV documentaries, political brochures, and political posters), Davidson convincingly demonstrates that there exists a growing gap between the media and political parties regarding the conceptualization of older citizens. In brief, the media continue to present a very simplistic “doom and gloom” scenario. Considering that British retirees are amongst the poorest in industrialized countries, claims of excessive use of public programs by “baby boomers” are somewhat surprising. This portrayal is on full display in chapter 11, which analyses in depth a BBC program entitled If … The Generations Fall Out. Kotlikoff’s writings on intergenerational accounting provided the intellectual fuel for the content of this program while other well-known figures such as Tremmel and Wallace, from the Foundation for the Right of Future Generations and The Economist, strengthened the legitimacy of the doom-and-gloom scenario.

Contrary to the media, political parties are moving away from using negatively framed terms such as “the elderly”, opting instead to employ more-positive terms associated with active aging. This is the focus of chapter 12, which presents a thorough analysis of four discourses (on older adults, pensioners, contributory principle, and active aging and public burden) in which the reader can detect a slow but steady transformation that occurred between 2005 and 2010. This widening (and highly interesting) gap in discourses between the media and political parties would have benefited from further scrutiny in the book.

The second finding in Going Grey emerges from the significant time and energy that Davidson devoted to construct a projection of the British electorate (chapter 10). Assuming similar voter turnout rates, 478 constituencies (out of 632) are expected to have a grey-voter majority...