ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1990s, the issue of how to secure pension systems in the face of demographic change has been high on policy agendas in many countries. Yet, reforming pension systems has, more often than not, proved to be a particularly difficult and awkward political undertaking. The following article explores one of the many possible reasons why pension reform in Europe has been so arduous for the would-be reformers. After briefly reviewing some basic concepts and issues involved in reforming social security systems, the paper concentrates on how policy actors at international level have constructed the pension polity issue. Specifically, the paper reviews three pension reform polity stories. Each of the stories starts from differing assumptions, produces contradictory prognoses of the pension problem, and prescribes diverging polity solutions. Significantly, each policy story provides a normative vision of a 'good' pension reform. Thus, policy stories provide templates for producing plausible polity arguments in politiucal debates: yet, thay do so by weaving scientific knowledge, 'objective' fact and normative convictions about social welfare systems into a seamless rhetorical fabric. The final section, then, looks at the seams by analysing the more contentious assumptions of the different policy arguments.
