Enhancing active citizenship

Overview

These activities create the knowledge base for enhancing the political participation of senior citizens, and improving the capacity of adapting to change.

Central to MOPACT is the idea that in order to make longevity an asset for socio-economic development, we need to put in place social and political institutions that induce higher levels of political participation, and increase our ability to resolve emerging distributive conflicts and to adapt to societal change.

This research field aims to contribute to these objectives in the following ways:

• To map age-based distribution of preferences with regard to the distribution of public resources, and understand how this is influenced by ageing processes.

• To assess the receptivity of stakeholders, namely senior citizens, to the different policy proposals identified by our consortium as promoting a new paradigm of active ageing.

• To chart the different patterns of participation of senior citizens in various levels of policymaking and investigate its socio-economic correlates.

• To identify ways of promoting positive representations of senior citizens, which may booster social and behavioural processes that promote their empowerment and overcome the stigmatising representations about senior citizens that can create an obstacle/disincentive to their civic participation.

• To identify good practices and promising approaches in successfully advancing effective senior citizens participation in policymaking processes.

See our findings

The Innovations section contains details of social innovations related to this research field. They were collected as part of an overarching task exploring the potential for social innovation to support active and healthy ageing undertaken as part of the ‘Active and healthy ageing as an asset’ research field.