Intergenerational conflict—or the potential for future conflict—has been the subject of scholarly research and political debate for decades, with little consensus on either front. Politically, budgetary pressures on old-age entitlements, fueled by population aging and increasing health-care costs, have heightened partisan tensions over the size and scope of aging-related benefits and conservative proposals for privatization or other entitlement reforms. Social Security and Medicare remain widely popular across all age groups, and scholars for decades have found little or no difference in voting patterns across age groups—although older voters have been more supportive of Republican candidates since 2010, perhaps in response to often-deceptive characterizations of the Affordable Care Act as harmful to Medicare benefits or as subjecting the elderly to so-called death panels. Studies have also found old-age benefits to be particularly salient to older voters, who are often moved to action, especially to contacting policymakers, when their programs are threatened. Normatively, debates focus on two opposing views: the “generational equity” view (that younger people are shortchanged as old-age benefits consume a large and expanding portion of the federal budget) and the “generational interdependence” view (that generations support each other through family and community bonds rather than compete for resources).

Brittany Bramlett’s Senior Power or Senior Peril adds to the mix by examining the political attitudes and behavior of older and younger adults in the context of their communities’ age composition. How does living in an aged community—one with a heavy concentration of older people—affect the salience and support for aging policies among older and younger voters? Are older people in those communities more likely to form powerful political blocs, or more likely to retreat from political activity? With the enormous baby-boom generation reaching retirement age, and with the growth of retirement communities and senior living centers as well as rural areas largely abandoned by younger people moving away for school and jobs, these questions become increasingly relevant. Bramlett finds little evidence, overall, for the senior-power thesis that population aging leads to a powerful bloc of older citizens making demands on the system at the expense of the middle-aged and the young.

Theoretically, Bramlett suggests that a community’s age composition affects people’s political attitudes and behavior through two mechanisms. One is the amount of social interaction, including political discussion, with older people; the second is the available cognitive content, including news media and other information outlets that may be biased toward the interests of the community’s dominant age group. Empirically, the author measures age composition as the percentage of persons who are age 65 and over, both at the zip code level (ranging from 0% to 83%) and at the county level (ranging from 3% to 35%). The differences she finds tend to be the same at the zip code level as at the broader and more diverse county level.

Bramlett analyzes the age-contextual effects on political knowledge, social welfare attitudes, political efficacy, and voter turnout. She finds that in communities with higher concentrations of persons aged 65 and over, older adults—especially the “young-old” between the ages of 65 and 74—tend to know more about the political system and about candidate positions on aging-related issues than do their age peers elsewhere. Both older adults and young adults in aged communities are more supportive of safety-net policies than their age peers elsewhere, but they also tend to have lower political efficacy. It is not clear from the analysis why political efficacy tends to be lower in aged communities than in communities with fewer older people, especially since older age tends to be related to higher levels of political knowledge and interest generally. But Bramlett speculates that in addition to the physical challenges experienced among the oldest voters that may dampen political engagement and activity, people with several decades of political experience behind them may have developed a sense of cynicism or pessimism about politics, and a lack of faith in political leaders driven by familiarity with the limits of power and political action. These feelings may be reinforced both among the old and the young in the context of frequent contact with older people and aging-related political messages and information.

Bramlett’s conjecture about the reasons for lower political efficacy among adults of all ages who live in aged communities seems intuitively acceptable. But it might have been tested, at least tentatively, using questions about trust and confidence in government as intervening variables. Some of those factors were used as dependent variables measuring aspects of political efficacy, however, making the conjecture about cynicism and pessimism in government as a cause of lower efficacy rather tautological.

Evidence of age-contextual effects on voter turnout is mixed, as Bramlett finds that living in an aged community tended to depress turnout slightly among both younger and older voters in 2000, while increasing turnout among the oldest old in 2008. Thus, the electoral context influences turnout as does the age context. Perhaps, she suggests, older voters in aged communities were particularly motivated to vote in 2008 out of anxiety about the recession and its potential effects on old-age entitlements. At any rate, the evidence overall does not support the “greedy geezer” stereotype of older voters in aged communities vigorously defending their government programs at the expense of the young. The somewhat lower political efficacy and the unimpressive turnout among residents of aged communities, as well as the widespread support for social safety-net programs among both young and old, work to counteract any potential for intergenerational conflict. Bramlett concludes: “As American politics and issues evolve, senior citizens may feel particularly threatened and wield their influence and power—just not yet” (p. 122).

This study is part of a broader research program examining contextual effects on public opinion and political behavior. Bramlett notes that other studies, for example, have examined the effects of communities’ racial composition or their concentration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations. But few studies have looked at the age composition of communities, and those that have done so focus primarily on its effects on older people’s age consciousness. The author uses multilevel modeling for the quantitative contextual analysis, which appropriately allows for the inclusion of both individual-level and community-level factors. She supplements the quantitative analysis with qualitative interviews in a relatively affluent Florida retirement village.

After the failure of Republican proposals to partially privatize Social Security and Medicare in the early twenty-first century, aging-related issues are somewhat on the back burner nationally, as other issues like international terrorism, immigration, racial justice, tax reform, and alleged presidential scandals have taken center stage. But with budgetary and demographic pressures bearing down on old-age entitlements, they will surely return soon to the center of partisan debate. As such, it behooves us to learn more about how age context affects political attitudes and behavior across the generations.

Many of Bramlett’s conclusions about the political effects of living in an aged community are based on moderate findings that sometimes lack statistical significance. But they do support her broader conclusion that warnings about impending senior power and intergenerational conflict are overblown. Senior Power and Senior Peril is a valuable addition to the study of aging and politics.