YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

264 Many believe that we are on the verge of a generational conflict (e.g. Bengtson, 1993; Kohli, 2010), as the institutionalisation of pensions and social and health care for the elderly has made old age a key element of eligibility for certain resources. Their scarcity has created the risk that the need for public resources becomes a zero-sum game in politics, with important implications for political competition and the perception of different age groups by political actors. The elderly are numericallymuch stronger than the younger generations, which are demographically weaker but also less active in the electoral processes. As a consequence, politicians are pandering to the older generations and public policies are becoming friendlier and friendlier towards the elderly and more, and more neglectful towards the young. As these processes are taking place in the context of structural changes that justify the “discrimination” of particular age groups (i.e. an elderly person of the “baby boomer” gener- ation will be entitled to completely different social transfers than an el- derly person of the “Y” generation, even though both have paid the same or even more), such differential treatment of individuals no longer has a justifiable basis, and such political prioritisation of one generation may lead to a clash between them. In addition to the political implications, the way in which social values are redistributed in modern welfare states, based on clear and institu- tionalised age periods in an individual’s life (Kohli, 2010), also limits contact between generations and thus reinforces prejudices about age groups, which also leads to the formation of negative stereotypes. The following quote clearly shows the challenges of being informed about other age groups that all members of society experience.