How Birth Year Influences Political Views

[Dan '82]

I want to make sure this is posted here.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/...pshot&_r=0

[Danilynn]

Most of that is not surprising. I'd have really enjoyed a more in depth look at why it African American voters lean always Democratic. Some actual reason of why.

But as a '75 born Xer it pegs me fairly accurately as a Republican.

[gabrielle]

It's not accurate for me.  

Generally, I've found that white males my age (Generation X) tend to be conservative and Republican voters, and sometimes their wives are too, but single females like myself are left-leaning and usually vote Democrat.  I've heard chauvinistic men say that this is because we don't have men to support us (implying that we're moochers), even though we have jobs and work as hard as anybody else.  Arguably the single mothers work even harder.  Hell, I would think that would be all the more reason to support equal pay for women.

[Odin]

(05-16-2016, 12:18 PM)gabrielle Wrote: It's not accurate for me.  

Generally, I've found that white males my age (Generation X) tend to be conservative and Republican voters, and sometimes their wives are too, but single females like myself are left-leaning and usually vote Democrat.  I've heard chauvinistic men say that this is because we don't have men to support us (implying that we're moochers), even though we have jobs and work as hard as anybody else.  Arguably the single mothers work even harder.  Hell, I would think that would be all the more reason to support equal pay for women.

I myself have noticed a gender polarization among Xers. The vast majority of left-wing Xers I know are women, and most of those are unmarried (but not necessarily single) women.

As a side note, I have noticed that Xer women are far more receptive to the overtly "hippie" and New Age aspects of the Counterculture than Xer men.

[Bronco80]

Jimmy Carter was a lame duck when I was born.  Where does that put me on the graph?

Oh, and as to the discussion emerging on the pay gap, I'm splitting off my opinion here:

http://generational-theory.com/forum/thread-107.html

[Dan '82]

(05-16-2016, 04:01 PM)Odin Wrote: As a side note, I have noticed that Xer women are far more receptive to the overtly "hippie" and New Age aspects of the Counterculture than Xer men.

I think this is especially true for late wave Xers; a noticeable percentage of them had "hippie chick" personas in the 90s.

[Bronco80]

(05-17-2016, 11:19 AM)Dan Wrote:

(05-16-2016, 04:01 PM)Odin Wrote: As a side note, I have noticed that Xer women are far more receptive to the overtly "hippie" and New Age aspects of the Counterculture than Xer men.

I think this is especially true for late wave Xers; a noticeable percentage of them had "hippie chick" personas in the 90s.

My anecdotal evidence would concur with this.

[gabrielle]

There was definitely a hippish youth subculture going on in the nineties, more so than in the following decades (though naturally not as much as during the Awakening).  Environmentalism, Phish heads, hacky sack kickers.  And yes, it seemed to me that New Age was somewhat more popular back then than in recent years, though Gen Xers generally seemed to favor stuff like Wicca and neo-paganism more than 70s style human potential groups like EST.  It seemed to me that Millies didn't really go for this stuff so much, but that could be changing.  

[Kinser79]

Heathenry, the proper term for those who practice paganism and neo-paganism, is not just popular with Xers.  Millies, the rebellious ones at least, are in on it too.  Of course that could be my area of the country.

[Odin]

(05-19-2016, 01:24 AM)gabrielle Wrote: There was definitely a hippish youth subculture going on in the nineties, more so than in the following decades (though naturally not as much as during the Awakening).  Environmentalism, Phish heads, hacky sack kickers.  And yes, it seemed to me that New Age was somewhat more popular back then than in recent years, though Gen Xers generally seemed to favor stuff like Wicca and neo-paganism more than 70s style human potential groups like EST.  It seemed to me that Millies didn't really go for this stuff so much, but that could be changing. 

In my experience it seems to be a thing for a lot of teenage girls to have a Wicca phase. It seems to be the female version of the "edgy annoying Atheist" phase many teenage boys go through.

[Mikebert]

The referenced paper in the article is very useful because it explicitly shows the operation of the generational dynamic.  It provides empirical evidence that S&H-type generations are real, are created by history and in turn create history.
 
The generation creation is "imprinting" as first hypothesized by Karl Mannheim in the 1920's.  The paper defines "history" as the presidential approval rate over time.  They find that past approval by party affects present voting behavior.  The effect of the past is not uniform, but  instead concentrated over the period from age 14 to 24.

That is, a "political generation" is created by the experience of young people to the parties relative popularity.  This tends to forge generations into Democratic or Republican leaners.  These biases are then expressed later in life.

So you have a track record of presidential performance over time, which defines period with higher than average levels of approval for one party or another.  Call these periods liberal or conservative "turnings".  A liberal turning then creates a generation of liberal-leaning voters, who then create another liberal turning when they get older and start making their maximum generational impact.  Same for conservatives. 

If you replace presidential approval rating with political environment, and voting with policy making you get a situation in which those you are young during an era with a conservative political environment are forged into a conservative-leaning generation who when they come to power make policy that defines the period as a conservative one.  Ditto for liberals.

This mechanism will produce a series of alternating liberal and conservative generations and turnings.  If you mathematically integrate the formative years graph in Figure 4 from 0 to T you get the cumulative formative effect at age T.  The age of a typical policy maker (society leader) would be 50-60.  The cumulative formative effect at T = 22 is half of its value at T = 55. That is, the median or 'average" age at which political beliefs are established for someone of leadership age is about 22. 

Thus we can say that the generation in leadership (who makes history) have belief systems that were created with they were 22.  Individuals will wide quite widely as to when they formed half of their beliefs, but on average it be 22.  Similarly a conservative generation will have many liberal individual members, and vice versa, but the average or median member will be conservative.  It is this bias from the long-term average that defines generations. 

Note that 22 is the same value given by S&H for their standard generation length, which they say is related to the length of time between birth and beginning of full adulthood.

[Mikebert]

(05-16-2016, 12:18 PM)gabriell Wrote: Generally, I've found that white males my age (Generation X) tend to be conservative and Republican voters, and sometimes their wives are too, but single females like myself are left-leaning and usually vote Democrat.

This is statistically the case.

[Eric the Green]

There has been a lot of research posted in the generations forums over the years on this topic, but it isn't here in this thread. The New York Times published an article this morning on polls showing which age groups favor which candidate, Trump or Biden, and posits that Trump carried the baby boomers in 2016 but has lost them in 2020. But the graph they posted seems in line with how the age groups have voted over time. Besides the older civic generation that S&H called the GIs, who are now virtually gone from the electorate, the core baby boomers have always been the most Democratic-voting bloc older than the new civic generation the Millennials, and the "Jonesers" (younger boomers and older/core Xers like our Classic), who came of age under Reagan, the most conservative. That is true again this year, according to this graph published by the Times today.