ls Ideological Polarisation by Age Group Growing in Europe?

Abstract

<p>This paper asks how strong the evidence is for a large and growing age cleavage in European politics, using new estimates of the ideological positions of different age groups in 27 European countries across four issue domains from 1981-2016, together with age-period-cohort analysis and an examination of voting patterns by age. The young turn out to be much more socially liberal than the old in most countries, but also more opposed to taxation and government spending. Age divides are generally no larger now than they were thirty years ago, are explained primarily by cohort replacement effects, and are likely to fall in the near future. Nonetheless, age divides in voting are large and in some places actually increasing. A likely explanation is that, although age-based ideological differences are not new, parties have increasingly emerged and polarised along the dimensions where the young and old have long differed from each other.</p>

Age and Support for Public Debt Reduction

“…However, these differences are relatively small (Sørensen, 2013) and do not reflect broader differences in support for political parties (Goerres, 2009). In fact, much of the existing research has found that generational issues are more pronounced with regards to social rather than economic issues (O'Grady, 2018(O'Grady, , 2020. This is consistent with existing research that emphasizes political attitudes are relatively stable over adulthood (Hatemi et al, 2009;Prior, 2010).…”

“…In line with the standard assumption of political economy models that individuals are driven primarily by material self-interest, several researchers have sought to find evidence that the young and old are likely to have diverging policy preferences and political behavior in a time of aging population (Sinn and Uebelmesser, 2003;Cattaneo and Wolter, 2009). Yet, much of this research finds that fears of a broad shift towards policies that reflect the interests of the elderly are overblown (Emery, 2012;Sørensen, 2013;Naumann, 2018;O'Grady, 2020) and that interpreting political preferences as driven by pure age-based self-interest is oversimplified (Goerres and Tepe, 2010). Before conclusive claims can be made about the effect of graying politics on policy, the relationship between age and preferences demands further investigation.…”

“…If demographic shifts do not intensify overall generational conflicts, then apparent differences in preferences could be explained in light of cohort and period effects (Grasso et al, 2019;O'Grady, 2020). For example, in the case of climate and environmental policy, a field characterized by intergenerational conflicts over the future burdens of environmental damage and short-term costs of adjustment, it is unclear if conflicts are induced by a genuine age effect or by a cohort effect.…”

Modeling public opinion over time and space: Trust in state institutions in Europe, 1989-2019

“…The recent debate on democratic deconsolidation has primarily focused on differences between age groups and cohorts, but differences between education groups have been identified as consequential in explaining the links between political trust and democracy in cross-country studies (Hakhverdian and Mayne, 2012;Kołczyńska, 2020b). Longitudinal studies of political and social attitudes also point to important dynamics in between-sex differences (Shorrocks and Grasso, 2020;Goossen, 2020;O'Grady, 2020). This paper addresses these questions, following a presentation of the longitudinal political trust data and the methods we used to create them.…”

Age and support for public debt reduction

“…However, these differences are relatively small (Sørensen, 2013) and do not reflect broader differences in support for political parties (Goerres, 2009). In fact, much of the existing research has found that generational issues are more pronounced with regard to social rather than economic issues (O'Grady, 2020). This is consistent with existing research which emphasises that political attitudes are relatively stable over adulthood (Hatemi et al., 2009; Prior, 2010).…”