So what’s going on here?
The answer isn’t that older people are more conservative than younger ones. Graphically, that would look something like this:
This is a well established pattern. Scholars have advanced two explanations for it. The “personality theory” (PT) holds that various psychological influences cause people to become more conservative as they age (e.g., Cornelis et al. 2009).
The “cohort theory” (CT), in contrast, holds that people tend to form political outlooks that reflect the ideological climate that existed when they were coming of age (late teens to early 20s, basically), & stick with those outlooks over the remainder of their lives (e.g., Ghitza & Gelman 2014; Desilver 2014).
On the CT account, today’s older conservatives, many of whom became “political grownups” in the Reagan years, are no less conservative than they were when they were younger. At some point, too, we should expect to see an association between age and liberalism as a result of the maturing of today’s younger liberals, many of whom formed their political outlooks during the Clinton era.
I generally find CT more convincing.
;)
Get your raw data here! But in any event, the patterns featured in the first graphic above don’t convey information about how political outlooks differ in relation to age. Rather they reflect how much more likely older people are than younger ones to form a political-outlook-consistent position on various policies conditional on a shared political outlook.
Thus, a 65 yr. old “conservative Republican” (a “4” and a “6”, respectively, on the five-point ideology measure and seven-point party-identification measure that were combined to form the political-outlook scale) is 13 percentage points (± 8 pct points, LC = 0.95) more likely to oppose “universal healthcare” than a 25 yr. old “conservative Republican.” The former is also 15 percentage points more likely than the latter (± 9 pct points) to be against use of carbon-emission limits to combat global warming.
What’s more, the same sort of intensification of outlook-consistent preferences shows up for liberals on at least some policies. E.g., a 65 yr. old “liberal Democrat” (“2” and “2” on the outlook scale’s component items) is 11 percentage points (± 6) to support stricter gun control laws.
So the question is, Why are older citizens either more conservative or more liberal in the intensity of their outlook-consistent policy positions than are younger ones?
Maybe someone has already observed this pattern and presented evidence to support his or her answer to the question I’m asking. Please let me know if you are familiar with such work!
Meanwhile, here are a couple of conjectures:
1. Cultural identity vs. policy. Normally we think that labels like “conservative” and “liberal,” as well as identification with one or the other of the two major political parties, imply a set of policy positions. But maybe that assumption is less supportable for recent generations. Maybe younger people view these sorts of designations as the ones that cohere best with their cultural style, even if their policy positions aren’t completely orthodox in relation to them.
2. Measurement drift. Scales like the one I constructed are supposed to be using observable indicators—here, how people characterize themselves in political terms—to indirectly measure an unobserved, unobservable characteristic—here, their political predispositions. Such a strategy, however, assumes that the indicators have the same relationship to the unobserved characteristic across the entire population whose dispositions one is trying to measure. Maybe the labels “conservative” and “liberal,” “Republican” and “Democrat,” don’t mean what they used to and thus supply less reliable guidance on what younger people’s policy positions are.
Frankly, I don’t find either of these explanations very convincing.
So I’m again asking the 14 billion readers of this blog to share the benefit of their insight and intelligence, in this case by weighing in with their own explanations—and also with ways to carry out empirical tests that would give us reason to view one hypothesis as more likely to be true than some alternative one.
Well? What do you think?
References
Cornelis, I., Van Hiel, A., Roets, A. & Kossowska, M. Age Differences in Conservatism: Evidence on the Mediating Effects of Personality and Cognitive Style. Journal of Personality 77, 51-88 (2009).
Desilver, D., The politics of American generations: How age affects attitudes and voting behavior. Pew Research Center (2014), available at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/09/the-politics-of-american-generations-how-age-affects-attitudes-and-voting-behavior/.
Ghitza, Y. & Gelman, A. The great society, Reagan’s revolution, and generations of presidential voting. Working paper (2014), available at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/07/06/generations2/assets/cohort_voting_20140707.pdf.