Global Political Demography: The Politics of Population Change sits at the intersection of demography and political science. Previous generations of demographers and political scientists—and indeed policymakers—would have easily recognized this intersection. Not so much now, however. It is a connection that needs to be actively made, and made visible. Editors Achim Goerres and Pieter Vanhuysse's extensive collaborative program has done just that, now collected into an important and ambitious volume, building from the wide-ranging Global Political Demography Database (https://osf.io/xcvdh/). Over many years, they have built both the database and this team to analyze it, and Global Political Demography stands as a key record of this work. It is a major achievement that will be highly regarded and prove useful across the social sciences and policy-relevant areas.

This is a past-and-present book, hindcasting to 1990 and forecasting to 2040. We benefit from many expert assessments of regional change and population dynamics, looking a generation back and a generation forward. Its scope is global and is cut two ways: thematically and geographically. A useful set of scoping chapters review migration (Skeldon), youthful age structures (Cincotta and Weber), and poverty and religious affiliation (Skirbekk and Navarro). Then we learn about demographic changes and their political implications across the world, in South Asia and East and Southeast Asia; in sub-Saharan Africa; in South and North America; in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe; and Australasia. Pulling this many geographically focused experts together, and into such coherent order, is a significant accomplishment.

At its most basic, the contributors’ conception of political demography is tied to analyzing the implications of changing demographic profiles to political influence, as voting blocs, for example. How can we assess likely changes to public policy or political order, especially in the light of changing age structures and composition, both aging and youth bulges? While we are used to understanding aging as a welfare problem for twenty-first-century states, the editors’ focus—extended by many of the authors—turns rather more to a future shaped by “grey power” voting, proelderly policymaking, and even “gerontocracy.” It is a regionally specific problem, or trend, of course. This is part of what the book highlights: regions and nations that already hold considerable global power are aging; poorer countries, by contrast, generally have youth bulges. We have data and analysis here to compare policy responses to aging in Japan, China, South Asia, the United States and Canada, and western Europe, for example.

At the same time, the chapters demonstrate and substantiate how certain demographic trends—especially aging—are not automatically population problems. They do, however, typically elicit some kind of political response, at the level of policymaking and policy implementation. We learn about Japan's policy response to aging, for example its efforts to make up shortfalls in labor through increasing women's work opportunities in the paid workforce, through maintaining older citizens in that workforce, and through the ongoing replacement of humans with machine labor. Declining fertility is another political question, however, even if related demographically. It is almost always comprehended as a social, economic, and political problem by policymakers and others. Many chapters explore the link between fertility decline and migration policies, as well as migration and urbanization.

It is perhaps instructive to consider what politics are left out of this volume or are minimally treated. In his very useful epilogue, Stuart A. Gietel-Basten signals the move towards pronatalist policies in many polities, in which “a conservative worldview of the family frequently prevails.” Of course, we know that one response to fertility decline is various forms of pronatalism. And of course, we know that this is a blunt response, with a delayed outcome at best. But there is a clear gender politics here that seems underplayed throughout the chapters: conservative worldviews of families are just that precisely because of the hierarchy of women and men. Both women and men are affected, but differentially so. So where is the analysis of policy and politics? Given that so many chapters deal with welfare, labor, superannuation—just considering the politics of women as workers and welfare recipients alone would seem to warrant more attention. Age seems to have displaced sex as a key axis of political demography, even as demographers know better than almost all other social scientists that sex and gender matter. There is no population or population change without it.

Several generations ago, the politics associated with demography was almost always about food security, for better or worse. That no longer seems to be the case, or only indirectly so. It is very clear that this book begins in 1990, at the point when the old political demography that problematized net world increase and accelerating growth rates was well and truly in decline. But over the 1990s another kind of world politics emerged related to environmental issues, as awareness of greenhouse gases, and then climate change became clearer. The chapters here only approach environmental politics lightly, however. That politics too was rather more explicitly part of global political demography in prior eras. For many laypeople—but also, I suspect many policymakers—population change is political in relation to its perceived meaning within a climate change context. This is especially the case as we look forward to the middle of the twenty-first century. It is difficult to think about the best way to factor demographic change into processes for decarbonization. Indeed, just why population change is rarely factored in is itself interesting. There is a politics there, too, which few of the authors tackle.

Instead, this book thinks through the politics of population change more in the context of labor and welfare: labor shortages; migration to offset shortages; employment and unemployment differentially considered across macroregions. This is the classic business of political economy as well as economic policymaking, and we know that policymakers look to demographic forecasting constantly, to support this or that agenda. There is much here to assist that conversation, core business for social scientists. The editors and authors are entirely correct to claim it is impossible to think about demographic change without also thinking about politics. At the same time, the understanding of the domain of the political is—for many but not all authors here—a circumscribed one.

全球政治人口学：人口变化的政治位于人口学和政治学的交叉点。前几代的人口统计学家和政治学家——实际上是政策制定者——很容易认识到这种交叉点。然而，现在没有那么多了。这是一种需要积极建立并使其可见的联系。编辑 Achim Goerres 和 Pieter Vanhuysse 的广泛合作计划就是这样做的，现在收集到一个重要且雄心勃勃的卷中，建立在广泛的全球政治人口数据库 (https://osf.io/xcvdh/) 之上。多年来，他们建立了数据库和分析它的团队，以及全球政治人口学作为这项工作的关键记录。这是一项重大成就，将在社会科学和政策相关领域受到高度重视并证明是有用的。

这是一本过去和现在的书，追溯至 1990 年并预测至 2040 年。我们受益于许多专家对区域变化和人口动态的评估，回顾一代人，向前一代人。它的范围是全球性的，分为两种方式：主题和地理。一组有用的范围界定章节回顾了移民（Skeldon）、年轻的年龄结构（Cincotta 和 Weber）以及贫困和宗教信仰（Skirbekk 和 Navarro）。然后我们了解南亚、东亚和东南亚的全球人口变化及其政治影响；在撒哈拉以南非洲；在南美洲和北美洲；在西欧、中欧和东欧；和大洋洲。将这么多以地理为重点的专家聚集在一起，形成如此连贯的顺序，是一项重大成就。

在最基本的情况下，贡献者的政治人口学概念与分析人口结构变化对政治影响的影响有关，例如投票集团。我们如何评估公共政策或政治秩序可能发生的变化，尤其是考虑到年龄结构和构成的变化，包括老龄化和青年膨胀？虽然我们习惯于将老龄化理解为 21 世纪各州的福利问题，但编辑们的关注点——由许多作者延伸——更多地转向了由“灰色权力”投票、老年政策制定，甚至“老年统治。” 当然，这是一个地区特定的问题或趋势。这是本书强调的部分内容：已经拥有相当大的全球影响力的地区和国家正在老龄化；相比之下，较贫穷的国家普遍存在青年人口膨胀现象。

同时，这些章节展示并证实了某些人口趋势——尤其是老龄化——并非自动成为人口问题. 然而，它们通常会在政策制定和政策实施层面引发某种政治反应。我们了解日本对老龄化的政策反应，例如，日本努力通过增加女性在有偿劳动力中的工作机会、通过在劳动力中留住老年公民以及通过机器劳动力不断替代人类来弥补劳动力短缺。然而，生育率下降是另一个政治问题，即使与人口统计有关。决策者和其他人几乎总是将其理解为社会、经济和政治问题。许多章节探讨了生育率下降与移民政策以及移民与城市化之间的联系。

考虑一下本卷中遗漏了哪些政治或受到最低限度的处理，这可能是有益的。在他非常有用的结语中，Stuart A. Gietel-Basten 标志着许多政体转向生育政策，其中“保守的家庭世界观经常盛行”。当然，我们知道对生育率下降的一种反应是各种形式的先天性。当然，我们知道这是一种直率的反应，充其量只是延迟结果。但是这里有一个明显的性别政治，似乎在所有章节中都被低估了：保守的家庭世界观正是因为女性和男性的等级制度。女性和男性都会受到影响，但程度不同。那么政策和政治的分析在哪里？鉴于有这么多章节涉及福利、劳工、退休金——仅考虑女性作为工人和福利接受者的政治似乎需要更多关注。年龄似乎已经取代了性别成为政治人口统计学的一个关键轴心，尽管人口统计学家比几乎所有其他社会科学家都更了解性和性别问题。没有它就没有人口或人口变化。

几代人前，与人口相关的政治几乎总是与粮食安全有关，无论好坏。情况似乎不再如此，或者只是间接地如此。很明显，这本书始于 1990 年，当时将网络世界增加和加速增长视为问题的旧政治人口统计确实在下降。但在 1990 年代出现了另一种与环境问题有关的世界政治，即对温室气体的认识，然后气候变化变得更加清晰。然而，这里的章节只是轻描淡写地探讨环境政治。在以前的时代，这种政治也更明确地成为全球政治人口的一部分。对于许多外行来说——而且，我怀疑许多政策制定者——就气候变化背景下的感知意义而言，人口变化是政治性的。当我们展望二十一世纪中叶时，情况尤其如此。很难想出将人口变化因素纳入脱碳过程的最佳方式。事实上，为什么很少考虑人口变化本身就很有趣。那里也有一种政治，很少有作者解决。

相反，本书更多地在劳动力和福利的背景下思考人口变化的政治：劳动力短缺；迁移以弥补短缺；宏观区域对就业和失业的考虑不同。这是政治经济学和经济决策的经典业务，我们知道决策者不断寻求人口预测，以支持这个或那个议程。这里有很多东西可以帮助进行这种对话，这是社会科学家的核心业务。编辑和作者声称在不考虑政治的情况下就不可能考虑人口变化是完全正确的。同时，对政治领域的理解——对这里的许多但不是所有的作者来说——是一种受限的理解。