Age and Voting Behavior

TRADITIONALLY, THERE HAS not been much of a disparity of the vote choice among citizens of different ages in the United States. Despite the stereotype that younger voters tend to be more liberal than older voters, younger voters have been just as likely to support Republican candidates as older voters. Recent trends indicate that younger voters tend to be more supportive of Democratic candidates than other age groups. If history is any guide, however, this is a temporary result of the current political climate.

There may not historically be a large difference in the vote preferences of different age groups, but there is unquestionably a generation gap when it comes to voter turnout, with older Americans much more likely to vote than younger Americans. People develop values and assign priorities to their values that are shaped in large part by the socioeconomic conditions during the formative years from childhood to early adulthood. Because of changing of socioeconomic conditions over time, people from different generations emphasize different political values. Changes in societal experiences may, therefore, alter citizens' political orientations.

Exit-poll data have consistently shown that older voters have distributed their votes among presidential candidates in roughly the same proportions as the electorate as a whole and that the elderly have consistently favored the winner of the popular vote.

The result is that different generations have distinct political leanings that they tend to maintain over their lifetimes. Some generations will lean Republican and others Democratic, depending upon the political climate in which they developed their formative political views. There are distinct partisan trends for age cohorts: Those who turned 20 during the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford administrations tend to be disproportionately Democratic and those who turned 20 during the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. [Page 20]Bush, and Dwight Eisenhower administrations disproportionately tend Republican. In 2006 the most Democratic age (in terms of partisan identification) was 21, the least Democratic age was 71; the most Republican age was 36, and the least Republican age was 24.

Although those who focus on generational change generally portray the youngest cohorts as most liberal on social issues, this is not necessarily the case. For example, among whites who reached adulthood after the 1960s, there tends to be less support for legal abortion than from those who came of age during that decade. This is true outside the United States as well. There is, for example, no uniform youth orientation to politics in Britain. Rather, views in Britain differ according to social class, educational history, and gender, but not age.

Occasionally, however, younger voters will break markedly with older generations. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989–90 there was a very strong relationship between age and conservative voting, with the youth vote disproportionately going for change-oriented parties. Overall, younger groups were in favor of more rapid social change and the elderly had a greater investment in trying to maintain the status quo. In the United States, the Ross Perot candidacy in 1992 led certain alienated youths to use their vote as a form of protest by casting a ballot for an unlikely winner for president. Younger voters were much more likely to vote for Ross Perot in 1992 than the electorate as a whole.

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