Super-aging society and future election

Upload: 8 January 2019, Last update: 10 February 2019

One of the concerns super-aging country has is the number of total votes occupied by the elderly. One-Person One-Vote principle is important in democracy, but in the near future (or even now) we lose the balance of age more and more.

There’s no doubt that we should and must pay our respects for the elderly, but as a matter of fact, what matters is that the older generation would be the bigger part of votes.

The problem is that election will be unbalanced. When we divides people into groups, we can find some categories like age, class, etc. People in the same category tend to have the same sense. For example, the historical event people in the same age had is not experienced by the later generations. We can find those information on the Internet, by reading books or other means, but it cannot reach the point of actual situation. This signifies bias among the same generation to some extent.

Some people say that the problems of aging-society could be solved by the advancement of technology. This is partly true, I would say in terms of labour shortage, the technology would help it. However, the unbalance of election would still remain as a important issue.

It may seem that older people having more knowledge than the younger are more appropriate for votes. But the older could prevent the further development of younger people by their perspectives. Also as a matter of fact, the younger generations have more future than them. This unbalance is negative to decision by majority. We may need to find another way for future decision-making.

(Assume the opposite case the number of the younger is larger than the older, that’s the same in terms of unbalance of votes. Also just in case, I would like to emphasize that we must have the best respect for the older generations and this article is not offensive to them.)