The Younger, More Independent Republican Leaner

Respondents are first asked by ANES, “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?” Follow-up questions push respondents either, “Would you call yourself a strong (Rep/Dem) or a not very strong (Rep/Dem)?” or alternately, if independence is proffered, “Do you think of yourself as closer to the Republican or Democratic party?” Combining these two questions, party scholars can construct a seven-category partisan scale: Strong Democrat, Weak Democrat, Lean Democrat, Pure Independent, Lean Republican, Weak Republican and Strong Republican.

Fiorina (2012) also notes that the precise nature of independent leaners “cries out for more research that exploits the wealth of new data now available” (p. 7). I concur.

The characterization of youth as aged 18–29 is an approximation, and not a formal assumption as if some metamorphosis takes place between the ages of 29 and 30. Yet characterizing “younger voters” as aged 18–29 is an extremely common convention used by sources including national exit polls (see Figure 2) and the Pew Charitable Trusts, and accepted by scholars including Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope (2010) and Abramowitz (2013). For a narrower definition of youth as aged only 18–24, see Kaufmann, Petrocik, and Shaw (2008). According to the logic of my hypothesis, and as future research for greater corroboration, greater independence ought to be observed among a younger age subset (18–24) and less as the age ceiling for “youth” rises (aged 18–35, say).

There are, to be sure, many interesting studies of the policy preferences of the Millenial generation, studies such as Gimpel, Lay, and Shuknecht (2003); Zukin et al. (2006); Wattenberg (2007) and Dalton (2008). Fisher (2010) has also explored the relationship between the life cycle and candidate choice, although I reach somewhat different conclusions from him.

Generation X is sometimes held up to show that under-30 voters are not natural liberals. While it is true that under-30 voters did vote by a large margin for Reagan in 1984, it should also be qualified that a) younger voters did not support Reagan in any greater percentages than the public; b) to infer from 1984 that youth could support conservative economic positions today is a questionable step, since politician with Reagan’s economic platform might be deemed unacceptably liberal to the contemporary Tea Party; c) in the 1980 election where Reagan asserted a more staunch anti-government message (as opposed to his 1984 “Morning in America” campaign), he narrowly lost the under-30 vote to Jimmy Carter, while all the older exit-poll age-demographics voted Republican.

Under-30 voters do consistently average out as more liberal on the long-running ANES question whether “women’s place is in the home.” But the question began as second-wave feminism was gathering strength, and it could well be that younger voters in the 1940s and 1950s were not progressive about women’s rights. It may be (beyond the scope of this paper) that there is some interaction between youth and the increased visibility of a previously discriminated-against group, but that does beg the question of what happens if said group is not visible/mobilized.

One alternative hypothesis might be that younger Americans have a rational, self-interested motive to prefer many forms of new governmental spending, more so than older voters: the former will be around longer to benefit from them. However, I am skeptical of this hypothesis, since the public opinion data suggests to me that older generations across time display much greater variance in terms of their economic liberalism. My tentative hypothesis (untested here) is that after an initial favorable predisposition, various cohorts’ specific experiences with government, the economy and partisan leadership will trend them in different ideological directions.

The earliest observation I have found, that youth may be somewhat less prone to fiscal conservatism, is from Aristotle’s Rhetoric: “Youth least desire money because they have not yet experienced want” (Rh2.12 1389a13–34).