The Failure of a Welfare Market: State-Subsidized Private Pensions Between Economic Developments and Media Discourses

At the beginning of the new millennium, the German government created a new market, a welfare market for pensions, which was nicknamed the ‘Riester pension’. More than 15 years after the establishment of the Riester pension scheme, the welfare market failed in economic and political terms. This development is quite surprising and contradicts the expectations of a worldwide expansion of three-pillar systems. The chapter elaborates the reasons for the failure of this welfare market after 2011 by integrating insights from political, economic, and discursive analyses. Decreasing interest rates in its interplay with an ongoing decline of support in media debates explains why legislative efforts to ameliorate the conditions for the purchase of Riester pension products could not turn around the downward trend.