A discourse analysis of changing pension provision with a focus on capital funding

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How do people talk about financial provision for old age? This is the basic question of our research project. More specifically, the topic is the discourse on the financing of people after their period of employment in the public media. Under the question "How has old-age provision been discursively negotiated in the last ten years and what significance does capital funding have in this discourse?" we will search weekly and daily newspapers and analyze the negotiations there using a mixed methods approach.

The background to our question is the change in old-age provision from statutory, pay-as-you-go to private, funded provision over the last 30 years. In the 1980s, statutory pension insurance (GRV) still covered 70 percent of net earnings; since then, the level of coverage has fallen to 43 percent, increasing the risk of poverty in old age, among other things. The corresponding trend of "strengthening funded elements in the second and third pillars of old-age provision and the abandonment of securing the standard of living as the goal of statutory pension insurance" is referred to in academic debate as a paradigm shift. Politically, the assumption that the statutory pension scheme will no longer provide a standard of living was manifested at the beginning of the millennium in the Riester pension and the Retirement Assets Act (AVmG) and the Retirement Assets Supplementary Act (AVmEG). However, not only can the statutory pension scheme no longer finance pensions to the same extent as before, but according to the political narrative, it will no longer be possible to finance them purely on a pay-as-you-go basis in future; capital funding is one proposed solution. This assumption has become particularly apparent with the introduction of generational capital as a reaction to the inadequacy of the pay-as-you-go SPS. As a result of this development, it is becoming increasingly relevant for private individuals to take responsibility for their own pension provision. Since such action requires information, which in turn is passed on by the media, we look at the public discourse on the subject of old-age provision. We pay particular attention to the importance of capital cover.  

Accordingly, we will take a discourse-analytical approach. The analysis will be based on German weekly and daily newspapers, as these reflect the public discourse (e.g. taz, Welt Online, Die Zeit, Der Tagesspiegel, Der Spiegel, Die Bild). However, we cannot examine all articles dealing with pensions or old-age provision in the sense of close reading, which is why we will use the blended reading method. This supplements classic discourse analysis and hermeneutics with text mining procedures. In order to process even larger amounts of data, we are cooperating with the House of Computing and Data Science (HCDS) and using the D-WISE Tool Suite developed by them. This makes it possible to apply manually coded categories to large amounts of data using machine learning, without having to read the texts yourself as with classic close reading. The material obtained will first be analyzed using a velocity pattern analysis that takes temporality into account in the data analysis. We will then carry out a sociological discourse analysis according to Reiner Keller (2011). In this way, we combine classic quantitative approaches such as text mining with the otherwise mostly qualitative research approach of discourse analysis.

And here the group in their own words (German):

Refrences

Keller, R. (2011). Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse – Grundlegung eines Forschungsprogramms. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-531-92058-0.