Do people become conservative with age?

Author: Morten N. Støstad

Length: • 2 mins

Annotated by David

Do people become conservative with age? An update with 21 countries and 546,013 individuals.

The fascinating plot comes from @jburnmurdoch, based on the UK and US, and shows;
1. People become more right-wing with age.
2. Millennials are different.

But is this true everywhere?

I saw @jburnmurdoch's post yday () and got curious about whether this was a US+UK story or a global one.

With the wpid.world database (see the list of countries attached) and some good help from @amorygethin, here's the story:

Headline: We really do tend to grow more conservative as we age.
Across the West, the shift accounts for ~10 percentage points over the lifetime.
But there are differences across the generations. Millennials have trended in the opposite direction (!) so far.

This mirrors what @jburnmurdoch finds in the UK and US, which we replicate. (Note: Only election polls until 2020, so fewer data points.)

There are other countries where this millennial-specific trend is clear, especially in the Anglosphere.
Here's Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

But it is not true everywhere. Mainland Europe is quite different, for example.

In Germany, France, Italy and Spain, millennials are right on track, following in the footsteps of previous generations.

Belgium and the Netherlands are also similar to these, perhaps with some downward trend for millennials in the latter:

(PS: I'm noting the millennials specifically, but every generation is interesting -- lots of stories to take from each graph.)

Norway and Sweden are relatively stable overall, with millennials trending softly left. Denmark is the opposite and closer to the other European countries, and Finland has a strong progressive millennial bend (probably due to @MarinSanna!)

Japan, Hungary, and Switzerland all have interesting patterns.

(You might say that Japan is not in the West -- true. It is one of 31 more countries and ~600,000 more respondents not included in the main graphs, as left/right is often unclear outside of the West.)

Anyway, to return to our hypotheses,

1. Do people become more right-wing with age?
Yes! Almost everywhere, with rare exceptions.

2. Are millennials different?
In the Anglosphere, absolutely. But mainland Europe is different -- and each country has its own story.

Had fun making this, thanks for the idea @jburnmurdoch.

If anyone wants a different country, let me know and I'll see what I can do.