The impact of policies influencing the demography of age structured populations: the case of Academies of Science

Fernando Riosmena, University of Colorado at Boulder
Alexia Fuernkranz-Prskawetz, Vienna Institute of Demography
Maria E. Winkler-Dworak, Vienna Institute of Demography
Regina Fuchs, Vienna Institute of Demography and International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

The age structure of academies of science is especially affected by trends in increased survival given the remarkable longevity of their members and virtual lifetime membership after election. Regulating the age structure of elections not only represents a potential way to control the pace of aging, but in fact the only one. However, many European academies have also enacted policies aimed to curb or slow down growth, which leads to the decision of choosing an age structure of intake that does not exacerbate aging while maintaining intake to acceptable levels. Given these trends and due to the fact that these policies and practices are relatively heterogeneous across learned societies, we aim to assess the role of the size and age structure of intake in influencing the potential evolution of regular membership of five European academies of science, namely the Austrian, Berlin-Brandenburg, Russian, and Norwegian Academies and the Royal Society of London. We do this by contrasting different projections of Regular Members in each academy into 2050 and measuring the age-compositional effect of enacting or not enacting a given policy vis-à-vis a standard policy scenario. We further decompose the differences brought in the age structure due to enacting or not enacting different policies from those brought by the likely evolution of mortality to evaluate the impact of both for the future of academies.