Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
Available online 20 November 2021
0261-3794/© 2021 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Young trendsetters: How young voters fuel electoral volatility☆
Roderik Rekker
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
A R T I C L E I N F O
Keywords:
Young voters
Electoral volatility
New parties
Generations
Age
A B S T R A C T
Sociological theory posits that social change occurs first and foremost among young people, who set trends that
may eventually carry over to older citizens. This study examined to what extent this proposition applies to
electoral shifts by comparing parties’ electoral gains among young (age <25) and older voters (age >24) in 21
Western established democracies between 1948 and 2019. An analysis of 219 national election surveys revealed
that winning parties typically gained disproportionately among young voters. This youth bonus was even stronger
for new parties, whose electoral breakthroughs were importantly facilitated by youths. Electoral shifts among
young voters furthermore predicted similar changes among older citizens in the subsequent election. This indicates
that young people are not only more sensitive to electoral trends, but that they can also set trends that
eventually carry over to older citizens. Young voters should therefore be seen as important drivers of electoral
volatility.
1. Introduction
The German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1928) theorized that young
people play a key role as drivers of change in society. In his footsteps,
many scholars have argued that social change occurs first and foremost
among young citizens (e.g., Münchmeier, 1982; Prakke, 1959; Rogers,
1995). Indeed, youths are often the first to embrace the latest trends
such as new music (Smith, 1994), new fashion (Behling, 1985), or new
media (Newman et al., 2020). There are compelling reasons to expect
that young voters could play a similar role in electoral shifts. At a young
age, most voters have not yet developed strong attachments to political
parties (Dinas, 2014). Unconstrained by such party loyalties, the youngest
age group may be most likely to follow electoral trends by supporting
parties that have momentum in any particular election.
Reversely, young voters may be the first to turn their back on parties that
have fallen out of grace. Youths may also facilitate the breakthrough of
new parties due to this lack of loyalty to existing parties. In addition to
being more sensitive to electoral trends, it is moreover conceivable that
young voters could function as trendsetters by creating momentum for
parties that eventually carries over to older citizens.
To what extent youths play such a driving role in electoral shifts has
never been systematically examined. Previous research on young voters
has typically focused either on their role in long-term electoral change
through generational replacement (e.g., Van der Brug and Franklin,
2018) or on their formation of political preferences (e.g., Dinas, 2014).
Consequently, little is known about how the unstable party preferences
of individual young voters (i.e., individual-level volatility) manifest
themselves in electoral shifts between political parties (i.e.,
aggregate-level volatility). The present study therefore compared
parties’ electoral gains among young (age <25; N = 47,993) and older
voters (age >24; N = 509,139) in 219 national elections that took place
between 1948 and 2019 across 21 countries in North America, Western
Europe, and Australia. Specifically, this study examined (1) if parties
that win vote share gain disproportionately (i.e., more than among older
voters) among young voters, (2) if this youth bonus is even stronger for
new parties, and (3) if electoral shifts among young voters predict
similar changes among older citizens in the subsequent election.
These questions are crucial to understand the electoral behavior of
young voters. When new or winning parties are popular among youths,
scholars often hypothesize that this popularity could be driven by
generational differences in attitudes (e.g., Norris and Inglehart, 2019)
and similar interpretations are common in the media (e.g., Financial
Times, 2017; The Huffington Post, 2016; Vice, 2020). The possibility
that new and winning parties attract a young electorate precisely
because they are new or winning is however rarely considered. Before
we can attribute the vote choice of youths to generational attitude differences,
we first need to determine if their electoral behavior may
instead reflect a heightened sensitivity to trends. Examining how young
☆
Universiteit van Amsterdam: Afdeling Politicologie, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail address: r.s.b.rekker@uva.nl.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Electoral Studies
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2021.102425
Received 4 February 2021; Received in revised form 7 November 2021; Accepted 13 November 2021
Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
2
voters fuel electoral shifts may furthermore contribute to our general
understanding of electoral volatility and why it is increasing in many
countries (Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2017).
2. Theory and hypotheses
2.1. Young voters and winning parties
The first objective of this study was to examine if winning parties
gain disproportionately among young voters. Such a youth bonus for
winning parties should be expected based on four theoretical mechanisms.
The first mechanism is the idea of life-cycle differences in party
loyalty. In ‘The American Voter,’ Campbell et al. (1960) reasoned that
voters develop increasingly strong levels of party identification as they
grow older. This idea was further elaborated by Converse (1969), who
argued in his essay ‘On Time and Partisan Stability’ that voters’ party
loyalty increases as they age and spend more time participating in the
electoral process. The Michigan scholars theorized that party identification
creates a ‘perceptual screen’ through which citizens interpret new
information. As voters age, they are exposed to an ever-increasing
amount of information about political matters. Due to motivated
reasoning, people have a tendency to interpret this new information in a
way that confirms their political identity (Bartels, 2002; Kahan, 2016).
Voters’ party identification may therefore strengthen over time, which
in turn increases the partisan bias in their processing of new information.
Sixty years of research on this phenomenon has indeed shown
unambiguously that older voters are more likely to identify with a political
party (Campbell et al., 1960; Van der Brug and Franklin, 2018),
more likely to be strong identifiers (Converse, 1969/1976; Markus,
1983), less likely to change their identification (Alwin and Krosnick,
1991; Hobbs, 2019; Jennings and Markus, 1984), more likely to hold
identity-consistent beliefs (Converse, 1964; Stoker and Jennings, 2008),
and more likely to vote for a party that they identify with (Van der Brug
and Rekker, 2021). Another explanation for these life-cycle differences
in party loyalty lies in the psychological effect of voting itself. Due to
cognitive dissonance, people tend to rationalize their choice after casting
a vote by strengthening their preference for the party they supported
(Dinas, 2014). As a result, citizens may gradually start to view their
party preference as a core component their social identity as the number
of instances that they have voted for the same party increases. Several
studies have shown that citizens who have repeatedly voted for a party
are indeed more likely to identify with that party and less likely to
switch their vote (Dinas, 2014; Jennings and Markus, 1984; Meredith,
2009; Gomez, 2013).
A second reason to expect that winning parties gain disproportionately
among young voters lies in generational differences in party loyalty.
Although the empirical literature suggests that the stronger party loyalty
of older voters should be attributed mainly to life-cycle effects
(Converse, 1976; Dassonneville, 2013/2016; Shively, 1979), there is
also evidence that more recent birth cohorts are less likely to identify
with a political party than older generations (Claggett, 1981; Dassonneville,
2016; Van der Brug and Franklin, 2018). A first explanation for
such generational differences can be found in the decline of ‘cleavage
politics’ and ‘frozen party systems’ (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967) that took
place in most countries since about the late 1960s (Franklin, 1992).
Citizens who were socialized before this transformation may have
inherited strong and stable partisan attachments from their parents,
whereas people who grew up thereafter may have formed more
changeable party preferences after entering the electorate in an era of
volatility (Van der Brug and Franklin, 2018). Another explanation for
generational differences in party loyalty lies in the increased educational
attainment of younger generations. Dalton (1984; Dalton et al., 2000)
for example theorized that cognitively mobilized voters are less
dependent on partisan cues to determine their vote choice and more
capable of re-evaluating their party preference in every new election.
Research on this thesis has shown that the least educated citizens, who
often belong to older generations, are indeed least likely to switch their
vote (Dassonneville, 2013; Van der Meer et al., 2015).
A third rationale for vote switching among young citizens involves
life-cycle differences in the determinants of vote choice. A common explanation
for the increased electoral volatility in many countries is that
citizens have become less likely to base their vote choice on stable factors,
while changeable determinants have become more important
(Dalton et al., 2000; Franklin, 1992). This idea can be related to young
voters because research has shown that the youngest citizens are least
likely to base their electoral choice on long-term factors such as
social-structural characteristics or ideology (e.g., Boonen et al., 2014).
For example, an age-period-cohort analysis of Dutch election surveys
revealed that citizens under age 22 are least likely to base their party
preference on their social class, educational level, left-right identification,
or core issue attitudes (Van der Brug and Rekker, 2021). This
life-cycle effect can be explained by the fact that it takes most people
until about age 25 to fully develop their social-structural characteristics
(e.g., by finishing education and getting a job), their issue attitudes, and
their ideological identity (Rekker et al., 2019). A study on Dutch youths
for example revealed that the amount of variance in left-right identification
that is explained by social-structural characteristics and issue
attitudes surges from close to zero at age 13 to respectively 10% and
19% at age 23 (Rekker et al., 2019). Because young citizens have yet to
develop the long-term determinants of their party preference, their vote
choice may be relatively impressionable to short-term factors such as
political events or changeable evaluations of party leaders (Sevi, 2021).
As Campbell and colleagues (1960: 497) put it: “For the young voter the
Democratic Party is, for better or for worse, the party of Stevenson and
Truman […] A political party signifies little more to them than its current
leaders.” Another short-term determinant of vote choice that is of
particular interest to the current research question is the so-called
‘bandwagon effect’ (Robinson, 1937). Relatively uninfluenced by
long-term determinants, young voters may be tempted to join the winning
team by media coverage of which parties are gaining in the polls
(Stolwijk and Schuck, 2019; Van der Meer et al., 2016).
The fourth reason why the youngest voters may be most volatile lies
in generational differences in the determinants of vote choice. In most
countries, voters who were born before the 1950s were socialized in an
era of cleavage politics. Even many decades later, this generation may
therefore still be most likely to base its vote choice on structural factors
such as social class or religion (Franklin, 1992). Voters who grew up
after the era of cleavage politics may contrarily be less constrained by
long-term factors and hence more susceptible to short-term influences.
Research on this hypothesis has however yielded mixed results. Some
studies have indeed shown that long-term factors such as class and
religion are more predictive of vote choice among older voters (Franklin,
1992; Maggini, 2016; Van der Brug, 2010; Walczak et al., 2012), but
these results may alternatively be attributed to life-cycle differences.
Age-period-cohort studies that estimated generational differences while
controlling for life-cycle effects revealed that the vote choice of younger
generations does not so much depend less on long-term factors (i.e.,
dealignment), but rather on different long-term factors (i.e., realignment)
such as stable issue attitudes on new cultural issues (Rekker,
2016; Van der Brug and Rekker, 2021).
In sum, there are four reasons to expect that the youngest voters are
most volatile and hence that winning parties gain disproportionately
among this age group: (1) life-cycle differences in party loyalty, (2)
generational differences in party loyalty, (3) life-cycle differences in the
determinants of vote choice, and (4) generational differences in the
determinants of vote choice. The purpose of the present study was not to
empirically disentangle these mechanisms or to determine which offers
the best explanation for its findings. Indeed, this is precisely where this
investigation differs from previous studies. Whereas previous research
has focused on unraveling the mechanisms that explain vote switching
among individual citizens (i.e., individual-level volatility), the present
study examined to what extent the unstable party preferences of young
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
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voters fuel electoral shifts between political parties (i.e., aggregate-level
volatility). Drawing from the aforementioned theoretical accounts, the
first hypothesis was postulated as follows:
H1. Parties that win vote share gain disproportionately among young
voters.
2.2. Young voters and new parties
Electoral volatility is not just driven by transfers of vote share between
existing parties (i.e., alteration), but also by the entrance of new
parties to the political arena (i.e., regeneration; Chiaramonte and
Emanuele, 2017). There are compelling reasons why young voters may
contribute not just to electoral shifts between existing parties, but also
and perhaps even more so to the breakthrough of new parties. In their
first election, new parties can by definition be seen as winning parties
because their previous vote share was zero. All aforementioned reasons
why winning parties may gain disproportionately among young voters
therefore also apply to new parties. In addition, there are four reasons to
expect that new parties may benefit even more from young voters than
winning existing parties. The first reason can be found in life-cycle differences
in dormant party loyalties. Although winning existing parties also
attract voters who did not support them in the previous election, many
of their ‘new’ supporters may have already cast their ballot for them at
some point in their lives. Existing parties can therefore make electoral
gains by winning back the support of citizens who already developed
some loyalty to them in earlier elections and for whom they are still part
of their ‘consideration sets’ (Oscarsson and Rosema, 2019). New parties
however lack this dormant electoral potential and instead have to build
their voter base from the ground up. Even more than winning existing
parties, new parties therefore depend on citizens without party loyalties
and such voters may be found mainly in the youngest age group.
A second reason why new parties may attract a young electorate lies
in life-cycle differences in voters’ preference for effective parties. A crucial
challenge for every new party is to convince potential voters that it will
be able to get elected, to express their views in debates, and ultimately to
influence policies (Eatwell, 2003; Van der Brug et al., 2005). Research
shows that voters often question the effectiveness of new parties and
that they are therefore hesitant to give a new party their vote, even if
they support its ideas (Bos and Van der Brug, 2010). Young people have
however never observed the proven track record of established parties
and may therefore be less likely to prefer existing parties over newcomers
that have yet to prove their effectiveness. Goerres (2009: 71) for
example reasoned that “some parties can leave a more prominent
impression on electors through repeated government participation or
their relatively constant electoral size” and that established parties
therefore “seem to be more successful with older voters in electoral
systems with proportional representation as they can repeatedly impress
ageing voters.”
A third rationale to expect success of new parties among young
voters involves generational differences in voters’ issue priorities. New
parties commonly attempt to break the dominance of established parties
by mobilizing new issues such as immigration, the environment, or
European unification (De Vries and Hobolt, 2020; Lucardie, 2000;
Rochon, 1985). Such new issues are usually prioritized most by young
citizens, whereas earlier generations continue to view politics in terms of
older debates that were salient during their early life (e.g., Inglehart,
1977; Van der Brug and Rekker, 2021). Inglehart (1977) for example
demonstrated that young baby boomers in the 1970s were more likely
than earlier generations to prioritize new ‘postmaterialist’ issues such as
environmental protection over ‘materialist’ issues such as economic
growth. Likewise, Carmine and Stimson (1981: 107) argued that new
issues “create the opportunity for political change” and that “new citizens
are its most likely agents.” Following this premise, they viewed new
generations as a driving force behind the rise of racial issues that
occurred in the United States since the 1960s. Research on electoral
realignment in Western Europe has similarly revealed that citizens who
came of age after about 1980 are most likely to base their political
identity and vote choice on new cultural issues such as immigration or
European unification (Rekker, 2016; Van der Brug and Rekker, 2021;
Walczak et al., 2012).
The fourth reason why new parties may perform well among young
voters lies in generational differences in media use. Most voters have no
other way to learn about new parties than through media. Getting news
media attention is therefore even more important for new parties than
for existing parties, but it may also be more difficult for them (Art,
2006). News media will typically pay little attention to an unknown
party that has yet to prove its relevance. Because new parties are more
likely to pursue a radical agenda (e.g., the radical right), they also face a
greater risk to be stigmatized as anti-democratic in traditional news
media (Art, 2006; Van Spanje and Azrout, 2019b). Due to these obstacles,
new parties may often fail to attract older voters who exclusively
consume traditional offline news. Young generations are however much
more likely to learn about politics through new online media (Newman
et al., 2020). Social media may therefore offer new parties a unique
opportunity to quickly become visible among young citizens without the
interference of media practitioners.
To sum up, there are four reasons to expect that new parties benefit
even more from young voters than winning existing parties: (1) lifecycle
differences in dormant party loyalties, (2) life-cycle differences
in voters’ preference for effective parties, (3) generational differences in
voters’ issue priorities, and (4) generational differences in media use.
Previous research has documented many instances of new parties that
attracted a young electorate (e.g., Goerres, 2008; Maggini, 2016).
However, the evidence is so far mostly anecdotal because research has
never examined the success of new parties among young voters across a
large number of countries and decades. Moreover, no study has yet
compared the success of new parties among young citizens with the
popularity of winning existing parties among this age group. It is
therefore yet unclear if new parties do well among young voters as a
result of their newness, or simply because they are by definition winning
parties in their first election. The second hypothesis of this study was
therefore formulated as follows:
H2. New parties gain even more disproportionately among young voters
than winning existing parties.
2.3. Young voters as trendsetters
By supporting new and winning parties, young people may be
enthusiastic followers of electoral trends. But could they also be trendsetters
who initiate electoral developments that eventually carry over to
older voters? This question relates to a sociological debate about the role
of youths in social change that extends far beyond the domain of political
behavior (e.g., Meeus, 1992; Münchmeier, 1982; Prakke, 1959;
Rogers, 1995). For example, Rogers (1995) argued in his influential
work ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ that young people often function as
‘innovators’ or ‘early adopters’ in the diffusion of new ideas, behaviors,
or products. Likewise, models of change in women’s dress have
commonly distinguished between ‘trickle-down’ processes in which
youths follow the upper class and ‘bottoms-up’ processes in which young
people initiate fashion trends that carry over to older citizens (Behling,
1985). A similar distinction can be made between three different models
that describe the role of youths in political change. The first paradigm
views young citizens as revolutionaries for change. This perspective describes
a state of generational conflict in which young people strive for
social change and clash with older citizens who want to keep society as it
is. The most well-known example of this paradigm is probably Inglehart’s
(1977) seminal work ‘The Silent Revolution,’ in which he
described the rise of a new generation that sought social change in the
1970s along the lines of new ‘postmaterialist’ values.
A second model views young citizens as acceptors of change. Like the
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
4
previous perspective, this paradigm describes a conflictual relation between
generations. Instead of viewing young people as revolutionaries,
this paradigm however views older citizens as reactionaries who
mobilize against a process of change that was already happening. As
Delli Carpini (1989) put it: “It is the older generations that may be
potentially the most revolutionary (or, more accurately, reactionary),
since it is their norms that are most at odds with the realities of the
society in which they live.” Following this paradigm, Norris and Inglehart
(2019) for example argued that the rise of authoritarian populism in
the early 21st century was fueled by a ‘cultural backlash’ in which older
generations mobilized to stop and reverse an ongoing process of progressive
cultural change. In line with this perspective, research has
shown that citizens who grew up with high levels of globalization,
immigration, and European unification are considerably more supportive
of these developments than earlier generations (Down and Wilson,
2013; Rekker, 2018). In another example, a study on generational differences
in the United Kingdom revealed that citizens who came of age
during or after Thatcher’s administration are more accepting of her
conservative reforms than older citizens (Grasso et al., 2019).
The third paradigm views young people as a vanguard of change.
Whereas the previous two models focused on generational conflict, this
third perspective describes a more harmonious relation between young
and old. In the vanguard model, young people are viewed as trendsetters
who are the first to initiate, explore, or embrace new developments.
Older citizens are however not viewed as rigid defenders of the status
quo, but rather as curious observers and potential followers of the
changes that young people initiate. In protests against authoritarian
regimes, youths are for example often portrayed as a vanguard that leads
the way for older protestors (Lührmann, 2015; Sayre and Yousef, 2016).
Also in line with the vanguard perspective, age-period-cohort studies
have documented instances in which generational differences became
smaller over time because older citizens eventually started to resemble
young generations (e.g., Rekker, 2016).
Drawing from this vanguard paradigm, the present study examined if
young voters could function as trendsetters in elections, which would
imply that electoral shifts among young voters predict similar changes
among older citizens in the next election. There are three reason to
expect that this could be the case. The first reason can be found in the
idea of trickle-up political socialization. After young voters have embraced
a new or winning party, they may to some extent be able to influence
older voters through direct personal interactions. Although such trickleup
political socialization may occur wherever young and old meet, the
most likely place is within the family. Many young people still live with
their parents when they are first allowed to vote and they commonly
discuss their party preference at home (Hooghe and Stiers, 2020).
Although the literature has long viewed political socialization as a
unidirectional process of parental transmission to children (e.g., Jennings
and Niemi, 1968), more recent studies have revealed that young
voters can also influence their parents’ attitudes and behavior (Dahlgaard,
2018; McDevitt and Chaffee, 2002; Wong and Tseng, 2008).
A second way in which youths may influence older voters is by
creating reputational boosts for parties. Achieving electoral success among
young voters may make a party look energetic, promising, and futureoriented
(e.g., Maclean’s, 2015). The British Labour leader Jeremy
Corbyn for example received quite some favorable media coverage for
his success among young voters in 2017 (e.g., The Guardian, 2017).
Indeed, parties often seem to emphasize the youthfulness of their electorate
by for example surrounding their leaders with young supporters
during public appearances (New York Magazine, 2012). Such reputational
boosts from young voters may be especially important for new
parties that still need to prove their viability. As argued above, older
voters may be more hesitant to vote for a new party that has yet to prove
its effectiveness (Goerres, 2009). Young voters may therefore be vital for
a new party’s initial breakthrough in its first election. After a new party
has proven its viability by getting elected, older voters may follow in its
second election. In such cases, young voters may set in motion a process
of party system change that eventually forces older voters to adapt to a
new political reality (Franklin and Van Spanje, 2012).
The third reason why a party’s popularity among young people in
one election may predict success among older voters in the next lies in
the process of generational replacement. During their first elections,
young voters develop voting habits and party attachments that can
remain rather stable once established (e.g., Dinas, 2014). Many young
voters who voted for a new or winning party may therefore remain loyal
to that party in the next election and possibly beyond. In other words, a
party’s success among first-time voters in one election may predict
success among second-time voters in the next election simply because
this is the same cohort. In line with this idea, research on generational
differences in party preference has revealed that many older voters still
support the party that was most popular when they were first allowed to
vote (Tilley and Evans, 2014).
In sum, there are three reasons to expect that electoral shifts among
young voters are predictive of similar changes among older citizens: (1)
trickle-up political socialization, (2) reputational boosts for parties, and
(3) generational replacement. Nonetheless, no previous study has
examined this possibility. The third hypothesis of this study was therefore
formulated as follows:
H3. Electoral shifts among young voters predict similar changes among
older citizens in the subsequent election.
3. Method
3.1. Data
This study used a new dataset that was created by compiling vote
share estimates from existing national election surveys (see Table 1 for
an overview). The rows in this dataset represent 1,232 party-election
combinations, while the columns contain the percentage vote shares
that a party obtained among respectively (1) all respondents of the
election survey (N = 557,132), (2) respondents under age 25 (N =
47,993), and (3) respondents over age 24 (N = 509,139). The cut-off
between young and older voters was age 25 because research on attitude
formation indicates that this is roughly the age at which political
learning slows down and voters’ political orientations approach adult
levels of crystallization and stability (e.g., Rekker et al., 2019). The
youngest respondents had just reached the legal voting age, which was
18 in the vast majority of analyzed elections with some exceptions at 16
and 21. This study’s dataset had to be compiled with unweighted vote
share estimates because weights were not available for every survey.
The analyzed election surveys were conducted between 1948 and
2019 in 21 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark,
Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the
Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The respondents
of these surveys were interviewed after all first-order elections:
the presidential elections in (semi-)presidential systems (i.e.,
France and the United States) and the parliamentary elections in parliamentary
systems (i.e., all other examined countries). All survey years
that were available as of June 2020 were included in the dataset. In the
case of missing survey years, only the elections from after the interruption
were incorporated to provide an uninterrupted time series. This
study used all available election surveys from Western established democracies,
but not from new (i.e., post-1989) or non-Western democracies.
This demarcation was made for a theoretical and a
methodological reason. Theoretically, the rationale for this study’s hypotheses
draws largely from accounts of electoral change in Western
established democracies. Although some of these accounts may generalize
more broadly, others may not. Methodologically, expanding this
study to new or non-Western democracies would be problematic due to a
lack of available election surveys from such countries that go back far
enough in time to allow for reliable estimates.
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
5
This study examined the vote shares of 165 political parties. Without
any inclusion criteria, a disproportionate share of the data would have
consisted of rather insignificant parties. To avoid this convolution, a
party was only included if two conditions were satisfied: (1) that the
party had participated in at least two elections and (2) that it had obtained
a vote share of at least five percent in at least one election. For
every party-election combination, a distinction was made between three
types of parties. The first category consisted of recurring parties. A party
was classified in this category if the same organizational entity had
already participated in the previous election, either under the same
name or under a different name (i.e., successor parties). For this type of
parties, electoral gains could be calculated by comparing a party’s vote
share with its result in the previous election. A second category consisted
of new parties. A party was classified in this category if it had not
participated in the previous national election either under the same
name, under a different name, or as a combination of several parties.
This implies that fission parties, but not fusion and successor parties,
were viewed as new parties in this study (as proposed by Hug, 2001).
National parties that were formed as a merger of local parties (e.g., Lega
Nord in Italy) were however also classified as new parties because their
predecessors did not participate in national elections. Based on this
definition, this study could treat the entire vote share of a new party as
an electoral gain because its vote share in the previous election was zero.
Fusion parties and electoral alliances finally made up a third category. The
vote share of a merger or alliance in its first election could not be used to
calculate electoral gains because this vote share could not be compared
to a result from the previous election (like for recurring parties), while it
could also not be defined as zero (like for new parties).
3.2. Variables
The primary outcome variable in this study was the hypothesized
youth bonus, which indicates to what extent a winning party gained
disproportionately among young voters. Based on a party’s percentage
vote share among young (age <25) and older voters (age >24), this
variable could be calculated as follows for a given party (i) in a given
election (t):
A party’s score on this variable therefore indicates the percentage
point difference between its electoral gains among young and older
voters. Because the hypotheses focused on winning parties, the youth
bonus was only calculated for instances in which parties’ overall vote
share increased:
Subset:
OverallVoteSharei,t > OverallVoteSharei,t− 1
The youth bonus variable was used for testing the hypothesis that
winning parties gain disproportionately among young voters (H1) and
the hypothesis that this effect is stronger for new parties than for existing
parties (H2). For a further examination of the hypothesis on new parties,
a second outcome variable was the age gap in a party’s vote share, which
indicates the percentage point difference between its vote share among
young and older voters in the same election:
AgeGapi,t = VoteShareYoungi,t − VoteShareOlderi,t Equation 2
The third outcome variable indicates the percentage point change
from the previous election to the current election in a party’s vote share
among older voters:
CurrentShiftOlderi,t = VoteShareOlderi,t − VoteShareOlderi,t− 1 Equation 3
Similarly, this study included two independent variables that indicate
the percentage point change from the election before the previous
election to the previous election in a party’s vote share among respectively
young voters and voters of all age groups:
PreviousShiftYoungi,t = VoteShareYoungi,t− 1 − VoteShareYoungi,t− 2
Equation 4
PreviousOverallShifti,t = OverallVoteSharei,t− 1 − OverallVoteSharei,t− 2
Equation 5
The variables in equation (3) through (5) were used to test the third
hypothesis that electoral shifts among young voters predict similar
changes among older citizens in the subsequent election (H3). As a
control variable, this study finally included a dichotomous ideological
Table 1
Overview of examined election surveys.
Country Election study Type of elections Period Elections Parties Obs.
Australia Australian Election Study House of Representatives 1987–2019 12 7 16
Austria Austrian National Election Study Nationalrat 2008–2017 3 6 58
Belgium Belgian National Election Study Kamer van volksvertegenwoordigers 1991–2007 5 10 47
Canada Canadian Election Study House of Commons 1965–2019 17 8 83
Denmark Danish National Election Study Folketinget 1971–2011 16 11 135
Finland Finnish National Election Study Suomen eduskunta 2003–2015 4 7 28
France French Election Study Pr´esident de la R´epublique française (1st round) 2002–2017 4 7 23
Germany Politbarometer Bundesrat 1976–2017 12 6 57
Greece Hellenic National Election Study Voulí ton Ellínon 2009–2015 5 9 38
Iceland Icelandic National Election Study Alþingi 1983–2017 11 13 64
Ireland Irish National Election Study D´ail ´Eireann 2002–2016 4 5 20
Italy Italian National Election Studies Camera dei deputati 1983–2018 10 12 54
The Netherlands Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal 1971–2017 15 11 92
New Zealand New Zealand Election Study New Zealand House of Representatives 1990–2017 10 7 58
Norway Norwegian Election Study Stortinget 1965–2017 14 7 94
Portugal Portuguese Election Study Assembleia da República 2002–2015 5 5 23
Spain Spanish Election Study Congreso de los Diputados 1993–2019 10 7 45
Sweden Swedish National Election Studies Riksdagen 1956–2018 20 9 140
Switzerland Swiss Election Studies Nationalrat 1987–2019 9 10 60
United Kingdom British Election Study House of Commons 1964–2017 15 6 61
United States American National Election Studies President of the United States 1948–2016 18 2 36
Total: 1948–2019 219 165 1,232
YouthBonusi,t =
(
VoteShareYoungi,t − VoteShareYoungi,t− 1
)
−
(
VoteShareOlderi,t − VoteShareOlderi,t− 1
)
Equation 1
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
6
classification of political parties as either ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing.’ A
party’s score on this variable was based on where its voters placed
themselves on a left-right scale. A party was classified as left-wing if
survey respondents who had voted for this party on average placed
themselves below the center of a left-right scale, whereas it was classified
as right-wing if its voters placed themselves above the center of the
scale. This study used voters’ ideological self-placement, rather than
their placement of parties, due to better data availability. Using respondents’
ideological placement of the parties would however have
resulted in nearly identical classifications and, for all intents and purposes,
identical results.
3.3. Estimation
The analyses were conducted using ordinary least squares (OLS)
estimation with standard errors that were robust to heteroscedasticity
and clustering within elections. By estimating cluster-robust standard
errors, this study could account for the fact that (changes in) the vote
shares of different parties within the same election are not independent
observations. The fact that the electoral gains of winning parties equal
the losses of losing parties was furthermore accounted for by calculating
the youth bonus variable only for winning parties. If winning parties
gain disproportionately among young voters, this logically implies that
losing parties also lose disproportionately among this age group. By only
including the vote share of winning parties in these analyses, this study
could avoid analyzing every electoral shift twice (i.e., as a gain and as a
loss).
Another methodological issue that has to be considered is the role of
measurement error in the estimation. This study analyzed estimates of
parties’ vote share in different age groups that were obtained from
election surveys. The sampling error of these surveys therefore manifests
itself as measurement error in the vote share estimates. On average,
every election survey interviewed 219 young (age <25) and 2,325 older
respondents (age >24). Although these average numbers suffice for a
satisfactory reliability of vote share estimates, there were also instances
in which reliability suffered because the vote share of a small party had
to be estimated with a relatively small number of young respondents (e.
g., N = 50). Because vote share estimates featured as the dependent
variable for the first and the second hypothesis, this measurement error
can only have produced error, but not bias, in these instances (King
et al., 1994). In other words, the errors cancelled each other out across
all 1,232 party-election combinations to produce an unbiased estimate
of the mean youth bonus. The issue of measurement error did however
make it difficult to estimate the mean youth bonus separately for each
individual country, especially for countries with a limited number of
election surveys (e.g., Austria or Greece). Although this study included
an exploratory analysis on cross-country differences, all hypotheses
were therefore tested across countries. For the third hypothesis, measurement
error may additionally have produced a downward (but not
upward) bias in the estimates because vote shares among young voters
were used as the independent variable in this analysis (King et al., 1994).
The estimated effect size for the hypothesis on trendsetting should
therefore be seen as a conservative estimate of the true value of this
effect.
4. Results
4.1. Young voters and winning parties
The first hypothesis was tested by analyzing all instances of electoral
gains with an intercept-only model (model 1) that featured the youth
bonus (equation (1)) as dependent variable. As displayed in Table 2, this
analysis revealed a significant mean youth bonus of 0.60. Confirming
the hypothesis, this implies that winning parties on average gained 0.60
percentage points more among young voters (5.08%) than among older
citizens (4.48%). This means that a winning party typically gained 1.13
percent (5.08/4.48) among young voters for every percent that it gained
among older voters. This pattern is depicted in Fig. 1 for fifteen parties
that revealed a particularly pronounced youth bonus effect. The Icelandic
pirate party (Píratar) for example obtained more votes among
young people when it was first elected to parliament in 2013, it then
gained disproportionately among young voters when it won vote share
in 2016, but it also lost more among youths when its vote share
decreased in 2017. Likewise, the Dutch social liberals (Democraten 66)
Table 2
Regression models for the main analyses.
Dependent variable: Youth Bonus of winning parties (Equation (1)) Sample: Instances of electoral gains
Model 1 Model 2
Intercept 0.60 (0.21)** 0.44 (0.22)*
New party (ref = Existing party) 1.80 (0.82)*
Model
Observations 538 538
R2
– 0.8%
Dependent variable: Age gap in vote share (Equation (2))
Sample: All observations
Model 3 Model 4 Model 5
Intercept − 0.44 (0.06)*** 1.41 (0.18)*** 1.42 (0.18)***
New party (ref = Existing party) 2.58 (0.77)** 3.05 (0.75)*** 2.51 (1.50)+
Right-wing party (ref = Left-wing party) − 3.70 (0.35)*** − 3.73 (0.36)***
Interaction: New party*Ring-wing party 0.87 (1.60)
Model
Observations 1232 1232 1232
R2
0.7% 9.7% 9.7%
Dependent variable: Shift in current election among older voters (Equation (3))
Sample: All observations
Model 6
Shift in previous election among young voters (Equation (4)) 0.13 (0.06)*
Shift in previous election among all voters (Equation (5)) − 0.36 (0.08)***
Model
Observations 952
R2
6.4%
Note. Estimates with standard errors in parentheses.+p < .10; *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
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Fig. 1. Electoral time trends for fifteen parties that revealed a particularly pronounced youth bonus effect (see Table 2 and Fig. 2 for the average effect size).
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
8
gained disproportionately among young voters during its three electoral
peaks in 1981, 1994, and 2017. Nonetheless, the overall youth bonus
effect size of 0.60 percentage points can be considered surprisingly
modest.
As an exploratory analysis, this study furthermore compared the
mean youth bonus across time and countries. As displayed in Appendix
1, this analysis revealed a clear absence of systematic over-time variation
in the youth bonus effect. The pattern across countries is however
less clear. Although the estimates clearly differ between countries, these
differences are only slightly larger than what could be expected based on
random variation. Although the F-test on country effects revealed a
significant p-value, only the effect for New Zealand differs significantly
from that of Sweden, which was chosen as the reference category due to
its large sample size and because the estimate for this country was
closest to the cross-country average. This exploratory analysis therefore
failed to provide clear evidence for either the existence or the absence of
cross-country differences in the mean youth bonus. As a robustness
check, Appendix 2 shows that all results of this study are identical when
cross-country variation is controlled for by adding country dummies to
the regression models.
4.2. Young voters and new parties
To test the second hypothesis, another regression model (model 2)
added a dummy variable that distinguished new parties (i.e., in their
first election; N = 48) from existing parties (i.e., all other party-election
combinations; N = 1,184). As hypothesized, the results (model 2)
revealed that the mean youth bonus was larger for new parties than for
existing parties. As depicted in the top-left corner of Fig. 2, the effect size
was very strong for this second hypothesis. New parties on average
gained 2.24 percentage points more among youths (9.33%) than among
older voters (7.09%), which was a five times larger effect than the
modest (but still significant) mean youth bonus of 0.44 percentage
points for existing parties. This means that a new party on average
gained 1.32 percent (9.33/7.09) among young voters for every percent
that it gained among older voters.
To provide a more thorough examination of the second hypothesis,
this study furthermore estimated three regression models with the age
Fig. 2. The mean youth bonus (top-left corner) and electoral age gap (top-right corner) for new and existing parties with a 95% confidence interval and the vote
shares of the ten new parties that won most disproportionately among young voters (bottom half).
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
9
gap in parties’ vote share (equation (2)) as dependent variable. The first
of these models (model 3) revealed that the average vote share of new
parties was 2.15 percentage points higher among young voters than
among older citizens, whereas existing parties reversely obtained 0.44
percentage points less among this age group. A second model (model 4)
added a dummy variable that indicated a party’s ideological position.
The difference between new and existing parties was still significant
after controlling for ideology and even increased from 2.58 to 3.05
percentage points. This means that the success of new parties among
young voters cannot be attributed to any particular ideology. Interestingly,
this model also revealed that left-wing parties obtained a higher
average vote share among youths than among older voters (+1.41 pp),
whereas the opposite was true for right-wing parties (− 2.29 pp).
Although outside the scope of this study, this finding is consistent with
previous research on life-cycle and generational differences in vote
choice (e.g., Tilley and Evans, 2014). A third model (model 5) finally
added an interaction term between newness and ideology. This interaction
effect was small and non-significant. As depicted in the top-right
corner of Fig. 2, this means that new parties on both sides of the political
spectrum enjoy an equally large electoral advantage among young
voters. The bottom-half of Fig. 2 depicts the ten new parties that
revealed the largest age gap in their vote share. The most striking
example is the Italian Movimento 5 Stelle. During its first election in
2013, Beppe Grillo’s party obtained almost double the vote share among
young citizens (45%) compared to its result among older voters (23%).
The other examples are an ideologically diverse group of new parties
ranging from the Bloc Qu´eb´ecois in Canada to Bündnis 90/Die Grünen in
Germany and Lega Nord in Italy.
As an exploratory analysis, this study also examined to what extent
new parties can maintain their advantage among young voters after
their first election. This analysis added two dummy variables to model 3
that indicate new parties in their second and third election. The results
revealed that the age gap in vote share differs most from older parties for
new parties in their first election (b = 2.70; SE = 0.77; p < .001) and that
this effect declines in their second (b = 1.75; SE = 0.77; p = .023) and
third election (b = 1.45; SE = 0.74; p = .052). In line with the theoretical
Fig. 3. Top half: Predicted electoral gains among older voters as a function of electoral gains among young voters in the previous election with a 95% confidence
interval (i.e., estimates from Model 6). Bottom half: Six of the most pronounced instances in which electoral gains among young voters were predictive of similar shift
among older voters.
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
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reasoning of this study, this pattern indicates that new parties enjoy the
largest relative popularity among young voters in their first election and
that they may gradually lose this advantage in subsequent elections.
4.3. Young voters as trendsetters
The third hypothesis was finally tested by estimating a regression
model (model 6) with as dependent variable parties’ shifts in vote share
among older voters in the current election (equation (3)). The independent
variables were shifts in the previous election among young
voters (equation (4)) and among the entire electorate (equation (5)). The
latter variable was included to control for the fact that parties that win
an unusually large vote share (e.g., due to strategic voting) often see a
downward correction in the next election. Confirming the hypothesis,
the results revealed that a percentage point gain or loss among young
voters predicts a shift of 0.13 percentage points in the same direction
among older voters in the next election. This effect is depicted in Fig. 3
for both the average pattern (top half) and some of the most pronounced
instances (bottom half). The Movimento 5 Stelle is again an interesting
example. While the initial electoral breakthrough of this party in 2013
was fueled largely by young voters, older voters followed in the same
numbers during its second election in 2018.
5. Discussion
In the footsteps of Karl Mannheim (1928), many scholars have
argued that social change occurs first and foremost among young citizens
(e.g., Prakke, 1959). This study examined to what extent this
proposition applies to electoral shifts by comparing parties’ electoral
gains among young and older voters in 21 countries between 1948 and
2019. The results first of all showed that young voters are indeed
enthusiastic followers of electoral trends and that winning parties
therefore gain disproportionately among this age group. This article
introduced the term youth bonus to refer to this phenomenon. Of course,
the additional gains of winning parties logically imply that losing parties
also lose disproportionately among youths. Previous research has
already demonstrated that individual young citizens are more likely to
switch their vote than older citizens (e.g., Jennings and Markus, 1984),
but the present study was the first to demonstrate that this
individual-level volatility indeed manifests itself in actual transfers of
vote share between political parties (i.e., aggregate-level volatility).
Whenever a winning party seems particularly popular among young
voters, the youth bonus effect should therefore be taken into account as
a potential explanation for this popularity. This study however also
revealed that the effect size of the youth bonus is surprisingly modest in
the light of the extensive literature on the instability of young voters’
political preferences. On average, winning parties gained 1.13 percent
among young voters for every percent that they gained among older
voters. Although meaningful, this youth bonus effect only provides a
small piece of the puzzle when explaining why some parties attract a
much younger electorate than others. Indeed, accounts that use generational
differences in core political attitudes to explain the electoral
behavior of young citizens (e.g., Norris and Inglehart, 2019) explain a
much larger share of the relevant variation.
This article outlined four theoretical mechanisms that could drive
the youth bonus effect: (1) life-cycle differences in party loyalty, (2)
generational differences in party loyalty, (3) life-cycle differences in the
determinants of vote choice, and (4) generational differences in the
determinants of vote choice. Although it was not an aim of this study to
empirically distinguish between these four processes, the clear lack of
over-time differences in the youth bonus effect may nonetheless shed
some light on this issue. If vote switching would have been a characteristic
of any particular generation, this study would probably have
observed more over-time variation between the 1950s and the 2010s.
The constancy of the youth bonus effect over time is therefore consistent
with previous research that attributed the instability of young people’s
electoral behavior to life-cycle effects, rather than generational differences
(e.g., Dassonneville, 2013).
Although the magnitude of the youth bonus seems limited for winning
existing parties, this study also revealed that this effect is no less
than five times larger for new parties. In their first election, new parties
on average obtained a 1.32 times larger vote share among youths than
among older citizens. This relative advantage among young voters
moreover applied equally to new parties on both sides of the political
spectrum. This article described four mechanism that could explain this
phenomenon: (1) life-cycle differences in dormant party loyalties, (2)
life-cycle differences in voters’ preference for effective parties, (3)
generational differences in voters’ issue priorities, and (4) generational
differences in media use. Taken together, these four mechanisms
describe how the rise of new parties could be fueled by an interplay of
new issues, new media, and new voters. Although many previous studies
have provided anecdotal evidence for the success of new parties among
young voters (e.g., Maggini, 2016), the present study was the first to
systematically compare and quantify this effect across a large number of
countries and decades.
By supporting new and winning parties, young voters follow and
strengthen electoral trends. Nonetheless, youths can only be seen as
‘trendsetters’ if their electoral behavior eventually carries over to older
voters. This study provided evidence for this idea by demonstrating that
electoral shifts among young voters indeed predict similar changes
among older citizens in de subsequent election. This article proposed
three mechanisms that could explain this pattern: (1) trickle-up political
socialization, (2) reputational boosts for parties, and (3) generational
replacement. The finding that electoral shifts among young voters can
carry over to older citizens indicates that the impact of young voters on
electoral volatility may be larger than their relatively small numbers (e.
g., about nine percent of respondents in the analyzed election surveys)
suggest.
A limitation of this study is that it failed to provide evidence for
either the existence or the absence of cross-country differences.
Although the effect size of the youth bonus was modest when averaged
across countries, this study’s exploratory analysis hinted that it could be
substantially larger in some countries (e.g., the Netherlands and the
United Kingdom) than in others. Examining cross-country variation in
the youth bonus effect therefore remains a challenge for future research.
Because the present study prioritized parsimony by only distinguishing
between voters under and over the age of 25, future research could
furthermore expand upon its analyses by comparing a larger variety of
age groups. More research is also needed on this study’s findings on
trendsetting. The present study was the first to demonstrate that the
electoral behavior of youths may carry over to older voters and this
effect was only significant at the 0.05 level. Some caution is therefore
warranted until future studies establish the robustness and explanatory
mechanisms of this finding. A final note of caution is that this study
analyzed vote share estimates that were obtained from unweighted
survey data because weights were not available for all election surveys.
The results of this study could be influenced if the assumption is violated
that any sampling or response survey bias in volatility estimates (such as
a tendency to underreport support for losing parties) affect young and
older voters to roughly the same extent.
Taken together, this study’s findings point out that young voters are
important drivers of electoral volatility. Youths strengthen electoral
shifts by supporting winning parties and they importantly facilitate the
breakthrough of new parties. Moreover, there are instances in which
young people initiate electoral trends that eventually carry over to older
voters, either because youths replace older voters or because they influence
them. Young voters may therefore be seen as a vanguard of
electoral volatility that can lead the way for older citizens by being the
first to explore and embrace new electoral developments.
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
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Funding details
This research was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO)
with a VENI grant awarded to Dr. Roderik Rekker. Grant Number: VI.
Veni.191R.039 ‘Are millennials transforming politics? A study on
generational differences in voting.’
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Declaration of competing interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Appendix 1. Exploratory analysis on differences in the mean youth bonus across time and countries
Dependent variable: Youth Bonus of winning parties (Equation (1))
Sample: Instances of electoral gains
Model 7 Model 8 Model 9
Intercept 0.69 (2.89) 0.61 (0.53) 1.37 (3.26)
Period (ref = before 1960)
1960s 0.17 (3.29) − 0.39 (3.72)
1970s − 0.17 (2.95) − 1.17 (3.44)
1980s 0.03 (2.92) − 0.81 (3.38)
1990s 0.18 (2.91) − 0.52 (3.38)
2000s − 0.05 (2.93) − 0.70 (3.38)
2010s − 0.41 (2.93) − 1.06 (3.39)
Joint p-value .982 .985
Country (ref = Sweden)
Australia 1.13 (1.32) 1.14 (1.37)
Austria − 1.53 (2.06) − 1.23 (2.14)
Belgium 0.51 (0.89) 0.36 (1.00)
Canada − 0.54 (0.71) − 0.48 (0.77)
Denmark 0.15 (0.67) 0.23 (0.71)
Finland − 1.33 (0.96) − 1.17 (0.98)
France 0.61 (0.54) 0.82 (0.70)
Germany − 0.77 (0.82) − 0.76 (0.86)
Greece − 1.46 (1.50) − 1.16 (1.61)
Iceland 0.35 (0.90) 0.41 (0.98)
Ireland − 0.21 (3.58) − 0.03 (3.55)
Italy − 1.53 (2.11) − 1.63 (2.21)
The Netherlands 1.15 (0.83) 1.23 (0.85)
New Zealand − 2.06 (0.89)* − 2.03 (0.95)*
Norway 0.91 (0.68) 0.93 (0.71)
Portugal − 1.69 (1.09) − 1.61 (1.22)
Spain 0.36 (1.21) 0.52 (1.31)
Switzerland 0.57 (1.06) 0.54 (1.08)
United Kingdom 1.04 (0.79) 1.20 (0.85)
United States − 1.94 (2.17) − 2.04 (2.15)
Joint p-value .005 .012
Model
Observations 538 538 538
R2
0.1% 2.8% 3.0%
Note. Estimates with standard errors in parentheses. *p < .05.
Appendix 2. Robustness check: Main analyses with the inclusion of country dummies
Dependent variable: Youth Bonus of winning parties (Equation (1))
Sample: Instances of electoral gains
Model 10
Intercept 0.51 (0.51)
New party (ref = Existing party) 2.11 (0.85)*
Country dummies (ref = Sweden) Yes
Model
Observations 538
R2
3.8%
Dependent variable: Age gap in vote share (Equation (2))
Sample: All observations
Model 11 Model 12 Model 13
Intercept − 0.18 (0.07)* 2.28 (0.25)*** 2.29 (0.26)***
New party (ref = Existing party) 2.64 (0.81)** 3.16 (0.80)*** 2.61 (1.58)+
Right-wing party (ref = Left-wing party) − 3.89 (0.37)*** − 3.92 (0.38)***
Interaction: New party*Ring-wing party 0.88 (1.66)
Country dummies (ref = Sweden) Yes Yes Yes
(continued on next page)
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Electoral Studies 75 (2022) 102425
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(continued)
Dependent variable: Youth Bonus of winning parties (Equation (1))
Sample: Instances of electoral gains
Model 10
Model
Observations 1232 1232 1232
R2
0.9% 10.4% 10.4%
Dependent variable: Shift in current election among older voters (Equation (3))
Sample: All observations
Model 14
Shift in previous election among young voters (Equation (4)) 0.13 (0.06)*
Shift in previous election among all voters (Equation (5)) − 0.36 (0.08)***
Country dummies (ref = Sweden) Yes
Model
Observations 952
R2
6.8%
Note. Estimates with standard errors in parentheses.+p < .10; *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.
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