When Do Young Voters Turn Left? How Political Parties Shape Age Divides at the Ballot Box

In this episode, I sit down with Ruth Dassonneville, political scientist at the Voting and Democracy Research Group at KU Leuven, to talk about why young people and older people often vote differently. 

We often hear that young voters are more likely to support parties on the left. But is this always true? Ruth explains why this pattern appears clearly in some countries and elections, but is much weaker, or even absent, in others.

We also discuss why younger generations may see politics differently from older generations, and why this does not automatically mean that they will always vote for left-wing parties. A lot depends on what political parties themselves do.

In particular, we talk about how the positions that parties take on social and cultural issues can shape whether young voters turn toward the left. The episode shows that the political divide between young and older voters is not fixed. It depends on the choices parties make and on the broader political context.

The research discussed in this episode is based on the following article:

Dassonneville, Ruth and Ian McAllister. 2026. “Is there a ‘Youthquake’? The Structure of Party Competition and Age Differences in Voting” Comparative Political Studies 59(1): 193-225

Transcript

Speaker 0:03

Hi, this is the Reasonably Political Podcast, and I am Semih Çakı r, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa. In this podcast, I explore how scientific research helps us understand the political challenges we face in our societies. My goal is to make scientific research accessible to a broader audience and bring evidence-based perspective to public debates. But don't worry, we keep things clear and avoid unnecessary jargon or technical language. Or at least we try to. In this episode, we talk about something we hear a lot these days, which is young people and older people vote differently. And by voting differently, we usually mean that young voters are more likely to support left-wing parties. That sounds intuitive, and sometimes it is true, but not always. Even within the same country, there are elections where this age divide is very clear, and others where it is much smaller, or barely visible at all. So what explains when young and older voters divide at the ballot box? Why does age seem to matter a lot in some elections, but much less in others? And what role do political parties themselves play in shaping these differences? To talk about this, I am joined by Ruth Dassonneville, a political scientist at Voting and Democracy Research Group at KU Leuven. Hi Ruth, it's a pleasure to have you here.

Speaker 1 1:31

It's a pleasure. Thanks for the invite.

Speaker 1:34

So Ruth, your paper asks whether there's a youthquake. Before we get into that question, can you explain what a youthquake is?

Speaker 1 1:42

So according to Oxford Dictionaries, a youthquake is a significant cultural, political, or social change that arises from the actions or influence of young people. And so if we if you apply this to politics and to elections, youthquake elections are essentially elections where the outcome of the election is decided by the fact that young voters disproportionately vote for specific parties. Then leads to an upshake, to a search of a specific party, or to a change in government. And so Youth Quake was named Word of the Year in 2017 by Oxford Dictionaries. And back then there was this narrative that was being circulated in the media of the young being the cause of big political change in different countries. Specifically in 2017, which was the year that the youthquake was named word of the year. In both the UK and in New Zealand, there were elections. And so both of those elections have been described as youthquake elections. Elections in which the young voted very differently from older voters, and they disproportionately supported left-wing parties and the left-wing opposition at the time in both the UK and in New Zealand. In the UK, the young disproportionately voted for Corbin's Labour Party, leading the Conservative government of then Theresa May to lose its majority in Parliament. And in New Zealand, De Young also strongly supported the Labour Party, leading Jacinda Ardern to become Prime Minister of a new left-wing government.

Speaker 3:20

Okay. Before getting into your findings, can you help us understand the main ways scholars explain age differences in politics?

Speaker 1 3:28

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that that's a good question, because there are indeed different theoretical perspectives on how exactly age relates to ideology and to different partisan preferences. And these theories have sort of different expectations about the nature of the association between age and ideology or voting behavior, but also they have different expectations about the specific time dynamics that explain why the young have different preferences than older voters. And so I think there's three main perspectives that scholars talk about a lot. A first perspective focuses on the effect of age itself. Scholars in that perspective make the argument that as people age, they grow more conservative. And so the idea there is that this is in fact the result of a psychological effect, whereby as people grow older, they also become more close-minded. And that then is reflected in the development of more conservative political attitudes and preferences. So they're less open to new things, which are sort of generally more progressive things. A second perspective then also focuses on the role of age, but specifically zooms in on the political effects of specific things that happen in life at different points in one's life, such as the effects of entering the workforce, of getting married, or getting children. And so such life cycle effects then explain why people of different ages have different political views or attitudes. For example, there's this expectation that as individuals grow older, through different things that happen in their life, they over time accumulate more resources, they grow more financially secure, and that then leads to the expectation that they will have more economically right-wing preferences. And then the third perspective moves away a bit from the focus on age and instead argues that the young today have different political preferences, not because of their young age, but because they are of a different generation than older people are today. And so the scholars who argue that generations are key, they point out that individuals' formative years are key for understanding which political attitudes they will hold. Just this idea that during people's formative years they are socialized politically, and so their political attitudes develop. So their political preferences, in fact, reflect the time period in which they have grown up. Ronald Inglehart is probably one of the most influential scholars who's argued for this third perspective, who's argued for the presence of generational effects. And he specifically pointed out that generations that have grown up in a time of affluence, of economic security, have different political preferences than those who grew up in a period of period of more economic insecurity. And that specifically because the younger generations have grown up in a period of affluence, they focus on different things than economic concerns, and they develop more post-materialist attitudes and values. For example, they're more in favor of gender equality, they're more tolerant of outgroups, and they're more concerned with the environment. And so they hold overall more progressive values, and then that is reflected in how they vote as well. So Inglehart definitely focuses on this, the role of the context uh during which one grows up and emphasizes the role of generations. I will maybe add that if you think about the three different perspectives, so some focusing more on the role of age, and others focusing more on the role of generations, if you want to figure out which of those is more important, that isn't super straightforward, especially because there's also a third source of potential effect, and those are time period effects. Those are effects that capture sort of over time changes in values or preferences that affect everyone across generations. And because age, generation, and time period are perfectly collinear, it's not, it's really not easy to methodologically disentangle those three effects, despite those methodological challenges. Between age or generation, I think most scholars would would emphasize the generational effects as being the more important ones. So while there's some evidence for the expectations that as individuals grow older, that evidence overall is fairly limited, but there is consistent empirical evidence pointing out to those generational effects. Younger generations are specifically more progressive. Um so not necessarily economically that different from older generations, but when it comes to their uh social attitudes and their values, um younger generations are more progressive.

Speaker 8:17

Okay, um, so it seems like there are three explanations here. One says people become more conservative as they age, another says political attitudes might change because people's life circumstances might change. And the third one says that the key factor is the generation you belong to and the context in which you grew up in. But in practice, you also mentioned that these three explanations are difficult to separate empirically because they are collinear. So uh what do you mean by that? Them being collinear?

Speaker 1 8:49

Well, it basically means that if you have information on two of those three elements, you can perfectly predict the third one. If you know what year, for example, a survey has been taken and what age a respondent had at the time of that survey, you'll also know or can calculate when they were born, and hence you know their generation. Um, and so that makes it impossible to include birth year, um, the age of someone, as well as the year that they took a survey in simultaneously in a single model. And scholars have to find other ways to disentangle those three effects.

Speaker 9:26

Okay, so where do these generational differences come from? How do different generations end up developing different political outlooks? Can you give us some examples on this?

Speaker 1 9:37

Yeah, so the the the mechanism, as I as I referred to earlier, is that citizens' attitudes they develop during their formative years, when their political attitudes develop. And there's definitely some debate on when exactly that is those those formative years. And most scholars focus on late adolescence or early adulthood. There's scholars that that make the argument that political socialization starts even earlier. But regardless of the exact timing of that, those formative years, the idea is always the same. And the idea is that the political attitudes and the preferences that develop early in life sort of set people in a certain way. They develop attitudes early, and then those attitudes stabilize over time. And new influences, new events have less and less of an influence later on, uh, partially because partisanship, for example, has developed. And then once partisanship has developed, then people will interpret new information through partisan lenses, and so it becomes harder for them to still change. And so if you think a bit more about what exactly happens during those formative years, there's different aspects of that context during which people grow up that have been argued to shape people's values and attitudes. Ingelhart, which I referred to earlier, really emphasized the role of the economic context. If if you grow up in a time of affluence, then you don't have to worry about economic concerns anymore. You don't have to think about survival, and you can instead prioritize other things like think about gender equality and uh develop your attitudes based on those other issues and other priorities. But there's also work that highlights that the political context in which you grew up can also have a long-lasting effect. That, for example, the uh the government that was in place at the time when someone develops their political attitudes is important and has a continued effect on them later in life. An example comes from a paper by Maria Grasso and co-authors, and they focus on the on the context of the United Kingdom and where they show that those people who grew up during the conservative governments of Thatcher and Major still hold more conservative attitudes today. So the political context during which one grows up sort of stays with you and can have a long-lasting effect later on.

Speaker 11:58

Okay, wow, that is quite fascinating because it suggests that the uh political environment people grow up in can leave a lasting imprint on them even decades later. Alright, um, so turning to your own study, what do you find? Do you find that there's an age gap? And does this age gap apply to all countries, if there are any?

Speaker 1 12:20

Yeah, we do find differences, and and I'll maybe start by saying that we went into this expecting to find age differences based on the idea that new generations are more progressive on average. This is something that's that's been found in the work of Tom O'Grady, for example. Based on that finding, we hypothesize that young people today who are of a younger generation would be more likely to vote for left-of-center parties. And I'll perhaps add that with left-of-center parties, we mean socialist parties, radical left parties, as well as green left parties. And so that's the expectation that that we tested using survey data across established democracies, focusing on the period since 2010, so that we really focus on young people, young generations today. And we find that on average, across that sample, indeed, the young are more likely to vote for left parties than older voters. However, we also found that there's substantial variation in the size of that age gap between countries and even in the direction of that gap between countries. So at one extreme, we find that there's countries like Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, where the likelihood that a voter who's young and young be defined as being under 30, the likelihood that a young voter votes for a left-of-center party is about 20 percentage points higher than is the likelihood that a voter who's older than 60 will vote for a left-of-center party. So then we find an age gap of 20 percentage points, which is quite big. But then there's other countries where the gap is essentially zero. For example, in Germany and in Sweden, we essentially find no age differences if we analyze those uh survey data since the 2010s. And then there's a couple of countries, there's that there's not a whole lot of them, but we find that there's a couple of countries where the age gap is reversed, meaning that we find that young voters, so under 30, are significantly less likely to vote for a left party compared to voters who are 60 years older. And specifically, uh we find that this holds in in Denmark and in Iceland.

Speaker 14:33

Okay, that's quite interesting. I am curious though, how big is the age gap or youthquake, so to speak, in Canada?

Speaker 1 14:40

Yeah, we find that Canada is uh somewhat closer to where Australia, Great Britain is. The the gap isn't quite 20 percentage points there, but it's it's it's close. We estimate that it's about 18 percentage points, meaning that uh the likelihood that young voters vote for the left in Canada is about 18 percentage points higher than is the likelihood that older voters, so 60 years and older, vote for the left.

Speaker 15:04

Okay. So your argument is that this is a story about generational differences, right?

Speaker 1 15:09

Yeah, um, well, we I would say that we don't exclude the possibility that age effects and life cycle effects are part of the explanation too, but mostly based on earlier work, uh, we expect that age differences are mainly the result of those generational effects. And it the focus on generational effects is also why we especially expect differences uh on the social-cultural dimension, in line with empirical findings of scholars like Tom O'Grady, who shown that younger generations are uh systematically more progressive on the social-cultural dimension than older generations.

Speaker 15:47

Okay. Um, so why is there a youth quake in some countries but not in others? What is the argument here?

Speaker 1 15:55

Yeah, in in essence, our argument is that the young, meaning the younger generation, will disproportionately support left-of-center parties when these parties have a clear progressive profile. And that that means first that left-of-center parties take positions that are progressive on the social-cultural dimension, that gives them a progressive profile. But second, it also means that left-of-center parties are unique in taking those positions, that there's no right-wing parties that are equally progressive on the on the sociocultural dimension. And so if left parties, again, we think about uh socialist parties, radical ref, green left, um, if those parties are not socially progressive, but for example, they move in an anti-immigrant direction, that means they have less of a progressive profile. And there we expect the age difference to be more muted. Why? Because the young will be less likely to vote for them, and perhaps the old or older voters will be become more likely to vote for those those parties. So we also expect the age differences to become more muted if right parties take progressive positions. Um, think about um an economically right-wing party that is also that also has a very um distinctive progressive position, for example, on abortion or our gay rights or gender equality. If the left has to compete with a right party that is also quite progressive, then again we expect this age gap in support for the left to be more muted because now all of a sudden the young have an option to economic rights that they can equally vote for.

Speaker 17:36

Okay, uh so why do young people tend to be more mobilized on the social dimension? Does this mean that young voters do not care about economic issues? Why is the social dimension so central here?

Speaker 1 17:48

Well, we we theorize that the social dimension is so central because this is the dimension on which younger and older generations have distinct preferences and position. And so the idea here is because this is where they're uniquely different, the more salient that social-cultural dimension becomes, the larger the age differences in voting will become as well. On the other hand, if politics would only be about economic positions and economic debates, then age differences will naturally be more muted. Because empirically we know that uh younger and older generations do not have very different economic views.

Speaker 18:23

Can you walk us through what you find? Under what conditions we see large differences between young and older voters, and when do those differences disappear?

Speaker 1 18:35

Yeah, we find evidence in favor of our argument, um, and evidence uh for the two dimensions or two dynamics rather that we argue are key in making left-wing parties stand out on the social-cultural dimension. First, we find that the positions that left-wing parties themselves take on this sociocultural dimension condition the effect of age on voting for left parties. Concretely, when left-wing parties take very progressive positions, we find that there's a substantial age gap in the likelihood to vote for left parties. In fact, in those settings where we find the most progressive left parties, the gap in the likelihood that uh voters under 30 and voters um 60 and older will vote for the left is about 20 percentage points. This gap then is significantly reduced as left parties are more socioculturally conservative on average. Um, and in settings where left-of-center parties are most socially conservative, we even find that there's um no age gap anymore. So the age gap completely disappears when we look at those settings, those countries that we analyze where left parties, so economically left parties, are taking pretty socially conservative positions. So the position that left parties take themselves matters, and we also find that the position that non-left parties take on the socio-cultural dimension matters. So if left parties are challenged on this dimension, this also shapes the size of the age gap. There we find that when non-left parties are quite socially progressive, and hence when they also appeal to those progressive young voters, the age gap in voting for the left is essentially zero. But the age gap is quite wide when non-left parties aren't progressive, when they take quite conservative uh positions on the social-cultural dimension. In sum, we find that the combination of these effects is really important. Um, and the combination implies that the largest gaps, so with young voters disproportionately voting for the left, will occur when first left parties are very progressive, and second, when there's no right-wing parties that are challenging them by also defending progressive sociocultural positions.

Speaker 21:02

Okay. Um, can we say that if a left-wing party becomes more socially progressive, then young generations will be more likely to vote for this party compared to other generations. Is that an accurate interpretation of your findings?

Speaker 1 21:19

Yeah, that is indeed what our results suggest, based on the cross-sectional data that that we analyzed. Um, and based on that, we actually wanted to gain further insights into that question of what happens when parties change their positions. And so we did some additional analysis where we tried to do just that tracing overtime changes in the age gap in support for left parties as parties move along the social cultural dimension. And one of the cases that we analyze is labor in the UK, which substantially moved its sociocultural position between 2015 and 2019. So under Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, estimates from the Manifesto project suggest that the social position of the party moved 25 points in a more progressive direction over those four years. And 25 points on that scale is really a huge, huge sweep in their position. Our expectation, um, based on the cross-sectional evidence, was that such a move of a left party to sort of becoming more progressive would increase the age gap because young voters would become more likely to vote for labor. And that is indeed what our analysis suggests. We find that in 2015, when Labor's social position wasn't that progressive, the difference in the likelihood of under 30 and 60 plus voters supporting labor was about seven percentage points. So the young were more likely to vote labor, but the difference wasn't huge. By 2019, so four years later, when Corbyn had moved the party into a more progressive direction, the age gap was substantially larger, leading the young to have a 20 percentage points higher likelihood now of voting labor compared to voters of 60 years and older.

Speaker 23:13

To follow up on my previous question, do left parties risk losing older voters if they become more progressive?

Speaker 1 23:19

That's what one could expect, though interestingly, your empirical analysis do not point to a strong effect of left party's social cultural positions on older voters. We in fact find that the social cultural positions of left parties are a strong determinant of young voters' likelihood of voting for them. But for older voters, it seems that their likelihood to vote for the left just isn't strongly influenced by these social cultural positions.

Speaker 23:46

Okay. Interesting. Is taking a more progressive position a winning strategy for left parties, or maybe not, given the aging population?

Speaker 1 23:55

I think based on the fact that we don't see a strong effect of progressive positions on support for the left among older voters, we could say yes. Um, because by by taking progressive positions, they can win over young voters without risking too much losing older voters. Um the important caveat, however, is that um these findings and the fact that there's an absence of an effect of sociocultural positions among older voters is is entirely based on correlational or cross-sectional evidence. So um that's definitely something that deserves more scrutiny.

Speaker 24:32

Okay. Can parties realistically appeal to the young and the old at the same time?

Speaker 1 24:38

I would think yes, in particular because of what I just mentioned, and is that we do not observe opposite reactions to different sociocultural positions among younger and older voters. So what we find is that the young respond to this. The young are substantially more likely to vote for left parties when they are more progressive. But we do not find that being more progressive decreases the likelihood that older voters will vote for a left party. Um, instead, they are they seem to be largely unresponsive to parties' social cultural positions. And perhaps this indicates that they're just more attentive to other things, to the economic positions of parties. So parties could potentially combine an economic left profile to attract the economically left-wing voters in general, and then combine this with a social culturally progressive profile to specifically win over the support of the young.

Speaker 25:31

I imagine some listeners might be wondering about the broader implications here. For example, if younger generations are more progressive, does that mean politics will naturally become more progressive over time? Or is that not necessarily guaranteed?

Speaker 1 25:47

That's not guaranteed, especially because we find that the age differences that we observe are mostly resulting from generational differences. And um, generational effects, as I referred to earlier, result from the context in which individuals are politically socialized. So for a very long period, every new generation has been more progressive on average than the previous one because the context in which they were socialized just set them in such a way that they could focus on post-materialist values, for example. But that doesn't have to remain as such. Um the political context can change, the economic conditions can change, and all of that can result in newer generations growing up in a period when they're not being pushed or being socialized into more post-materialist, uh more progressive social-cultural positions.

Speaker 26:41

There is a lot of debate on whether people indeed pay attention to politics. So given that this age divide is not fixed and is shaped by party behavior, does that mean people are not inattentive to what happens in the political arena?

Speaker 1 26:57

That definitely is one way of reading our results. That they show that party positions matter. So they do not only seem to matter to explain the support of a party overall, as a huge literature has already established. What the current paper or our paper also shows or indicates is that party positions also matter for explaining which voters in in particular will support a party. And in particular, in our case, social cultural positions are connected to voting behavior and help us explain when the young will will vote for left or center parties. In other words, one reading of our paper is indeed that there is some rationality in voting behavior. Voting behavior isn't isn't entirely random. There's some systematic patterns that suggest that people take into account the positions that parties take.

Speaker 27:49

We have been talking about which parties younger people vote for. But another common concern is that younger people tend to vote less than older people. Do you think the same mechanism could also help explain age differences in turnout?

Speaker 1 28:04

That is an interesting question. And one that unfortunately or data and our analysis doesn't speak to. But I could well imagine abstention to be a reaction to the types of positions that parties take as well, and specifically abstention being a reaction to a lack of progressive profiling of left-wing parties. I think in particular, if um uh young voters who want social progressive positions and and want to support parties that are progressive on that social cultural dimension, if they if they're in a context in a situation where the left is not delivering that, and there's also no right-wing parties that covers that space by by taking more progressive positions, then abstention could be could be the response of those uh young voters for sure. Um as I indicated, unfortunately, we we do not analyze this, uh, but my hypothesis would be that yes, young voters who do not have an option to vote for a progressive party will will will instead from voting.

Speaker 29:04

Ruth. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure having you on the Reasonably Political Podcast.

Speaker 1 29:11

Thank you so much for the invitation. It was a pleasure to be here, and I hope that the listeners found the discussion interesting as well.

Speaker 29:20

So, to recap, younger generations tend to be more progressive on postmaterialist issues, such as gender equality, immigration, minority rights, and the environment. This seems to be largely because of generational differences. People are shaped by the political and social context in which they grow up. But this doesn't automatically mean that young voters will always support parties on the left. What parties do matters. The age gap is largest when left parties take clear progressive positions on social and cultural issues and when they are not challenged by non-left parties taking similar progressive positions. In other words, it is not enough for young voters to be different from older voters. Parties also have to give them a reason to express those differences at the ballot box. Of course, we should be cautious. Much of this evidence is observational. So the story is not a simple causal formula, but it does show that age differences in voting are not fixed. They are dynamic, they depend on what parties do. Thank you so much for listening to the Reasonably Political podcast, and I'll see you next time.