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We analyze political stability of social security that involves pre-funding. We employ an overlapping generations model with intra-cohort heterogeneity and introduce partial funding, which is efficient in Kaldor-Hicks sense and has majority political support. Subsequently, agents vote on capturing the accumulated pension assets, and replacing it with the pay-as-you-go scheme. We show that even if capturing assets reduces welfare in the long run, the distribution of benefits across cohorts living at the time of voting yields always sufficient political support. We explain the mechanisms which yield this counter-intuitive result. Preventing the asset capture requires switching off the fiscal channel, i.e. funding becomes politically stable if capturing of the pension assets cannot be used to reduce taxation and/or public debt.
