“As people age, they become more conservative” is a very common political aphorism. It is often mentioned in discussions and research on generational politics. It has been deployed in various ways in popular discourse—a way of talking about the limits of progressive politics and the power of popular wisdom.
But in a world that some say is spiraling towards disaster, with climate change, the threat of nuclear war and economic instability constantly in the news – is this oft-parroted line still persuasive?
Some research has pointed to a growing liberalism among the younger generations. ONE recent report in the Financial Times suggest that the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis may well turn millennials into lifelong liberals, noting that those born between 1981 and 1996 adhere more closely to liberal values than previous generations.
Are generational changes in political attitudes as strong as we think?
Northeastern Global News asked Nick Beauchampassociate professor of political science at Northeastern, to offer some thoughts on how a person's age affects their political views.
Can you explain why we, those of us in the media, are obsessed with this question of how do people's political attitudes change over time?
In the literature, we have “age, period, and cohort,” or APC, to help explain some of these things. and for an entire century, we have been developing models to try to distinguish these three ideas.
The problem is that, causally, people believe that all three of these things play a role in political ideology. So as you get older, one theory is that something about the aging process itself makes you more conservative, or the age effect. Another theory is that what happens in the world affects your ideology. Here, as the world becomes more violent and full of terrorism, let's say, then All becomes more conservative—and you have this general inclination toward conservatism overall. This is the period result.
And then there's the cohort effect, which states that the primary factor influencing your political disposition for the rest of your life is what happens when you “come of age.” If you come of age during [President Ronald] Reagan, for example, you are more conservative. If you came of age five years earlier during [President Jimmy] Carter, you are more liberal.
What do you make of Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch's analysis suggesting that millennials are bucking the 'get more conservative as you get older' trend?
He seems to be claiming that millennials are becoming less conservative as they get older. Already that language, “millennial voters don't follow the typical pattern,” is a bit ambiguous. This means that the pattern it refers to is this one anyone do they just get more conservative as they get older or does it mean older people are more conservative? The problem is that these are two different questions. Perhaps they are more conservative because the effect of aging has made them more conservative. or maybe they're more conservative because it's a more conservative era than it used to be. Or maybe because the era they were captured in was a more conservative era – we don't really know.
About 40 years ago, it was believed that people became more liberal as they got older. At that time, the oldest people were the people who came of age during [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt—or the Silent Generation. Overall, the Silent Generation was more liberal than some subsequent generations. So when you just look at the relationship between ideology and age, what you find in this case is that older people were more liberal and younger people were more conservative. Then the thought occurs: getting older makes you realize that liberalism is the right way to see the world.
But as time went on, it kind of changed because all those people died and the people who came of age in the 50s became old, and the people who came of age in the 60s and 70s were younger and more liberal. Now we've gone through a few waves of this, because I understood that the cohort effect of the 80s was quite powerful in making people more conservative.
At the same time, there was a general shift of everyone to become a little more liberal. Now millennials are coming of age during [President Barack] Obama and his later part [President George] Bush, when Bush was unpopular, which led to people becoming more liberal. If you add in the fact that people are drifting more liberal in general, it gets complicated.
In the end, what role does age itself play in all this? Is it just for the season you are in? Trying to understand the effect of age itself is very difficult.
At the end of the day, do you think it matters? Is this an important question about our political existence?
There are two ways to answer this. One way is to say that the effect of age is quite small. That is, the predictive effect of age compared to, say, income, education, and race is very small. It's one thing to watch the behavioral changes of 20-somethings as they grow older, and another thing to try to understand what it might be like to go from white to black or poor to rich or from no education to college. a college education. Those are much bigger results, in my opinion.
Tanner Stening is a reporter for Northeastern Global News. Email him at t.stening@northeastern.edu. Follow him on Twitter @tstening90.
