Why are Older People More Likely to Vote? The Impact of Ageing on Electoral Turnout in Europe

AuthorAchim Goerres
Published date01 February 2007
Date01 February 2007
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-856x.2006.00243.x
Subject MatterArticle
Why are Older People More Likely to Vote? The Impact of Ageing on Electoral Turnout in Europe doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2006.00243.x
B J P I R : 2 0 0 7 V O L 9 , 9 0 – 1 2 1
Why are Older People More Likely to
Vote? The Impact of Ageing on Electoral
Turnout in Europe

Achim Goerres
This article analyses the reasons for higher voting participation among older people in Europe. Over
their lifetimes, citizens tend to habituate voting and comply with a growing subjective norm of
voting. Furthermore, the average voting participation of older people is influenced by their longer
duration of residence, the lack of a mobilising partner, worse physical health and less education,
although life experience replaces the function of formal education over a lifetime. Most of these
factors are founded on the very nature of human behaviour and the social context of our life course.
Thus, they arguably stand outside of the political process and will remain stable into the future.

Higher turnout among older age groups, after basic controls for education and
gender, has been a consistent finding in many years of research. Older people are
more likely to vote—no matter when or where the surveys have been carried out.
We are so used to this fact that we forget how unusual the stability of the finding
is. Across countries, differences exist in electoral systems, party systems, socioeco-
nomic development and democratic experience. Variations of these country char-
acteristics may have differential impacts on voting participation of various age
groups. Over time, there has been a general decline in turnout and a growing
disenchantment with electoral politics. In addition to this long-term trend, distinct
generations of voters such as the New Deal generation in the USA (Miller and
Shanks 1996) or ‘Thatcher’s Children’ in Britain (Russell et al. 1992) have experi-
enced electoral politics in different ways, compared to earlier and later cohorts.
Why is it that older people consistently show a higher propensity to vote despite all
these generational changes? This article suggests that older people, compared to
younger fellow citizens, have habituated voting over their lifetime and feel a
stronger subjective norm to vote. Habituating patterns of social behaviour and
complying with social norms are universal human propensities that exist every-
where. There are some further important differences between older and younger
voters. Older citizens are on average more likely to vote because they have been
living in an area for longer. They are less likely to vote because: (a) they tend to lack
a mobilising partner; (b) suffer from worse health; and (c) are less educated as a
member of an older cohort, although life experience replaces the function of formal
education over a lifetime.
This article analyses international cross-sectional data (the European Social Survey
from 2002/3). Countries in the survey vary so much in their political history that
older people have experienced a multitude of idiosyncratic national histories. This
research design allows the study of common factors such as habituation that
accompany the ageing process and are the same in all countries. After a literature
© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association

A G E I N G A N D T U R N O U T
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review, section 1 presents the theoretical conceptualisation of age effects into
cohort, life cycle and individual ageing. Section 2 discusses the methods of an
age-centred analysis of international cross-sectional data. Section 3 introduces
age-related independent variables that we are going to use as proxies for life-cycle
and cohort effects. Section 4 shows several series of random-intercept logistic
regressions and interprets their results. Section 5 reviews the empirical results in
the light of alternative explanations, outlines their wider political implications and
shows avenues for further research.
1. Theory: Age and Political Behaviour
Imagine meeting two randomly selected citizens in a European country, one of
whom is, for example, 70 and the other 40 years old. Can you make any statement
about their probabilities of voting participation? Most studies of political behaviour
incorporate age as a control variable. The impact of age as a variable is (if at all)
discussed only with regards to magnitude vis-à-vis other variables (see, for example,
Dalton 2002, ch. 2). This is not very satisfactory because chronological age serves as
a surrogate for many other social characteristics that are of importance such as
education, health or social connectedness.
Recent discussions of the relationship between age and political participation have
concentrated on the contrast between cohort and life-cycle effects in individual
countries such as Germany, Canada, Britain or the United States (Miller and Shanks
1996; Becker 2002; Blais et al. 2004; Clarke et al. 2004). These authors detect
distinct generational variations within one country. A decline in turnout at
Canadian national elections, for example, can be explained by a long-term decline
in political attentiveness and civic duty to vote (Blais et al. 2004). The disadvantage
of the one-nation approach is the lack of generalisation across more than one
nation. This approach can help us to explain differences in turnout between age
groups in a given country, but it cannot account for the prevalence of higher
turnout among older people in general.
Mark Franklin (2004) explains turnout in established democracies from an inter-
nationally comparative point of view. He argues that the fluctuation of aggregate
turnout is due to changes in the cohort composition of the electorate. Depending on
the socialisation experience at a young age, young voters belong to a group that
acquires the habit of voting to a greater or lesser extent than the previous cohort.
Besides the emphasis on early socialisation experience, Franklin stresses the habitu-
ation process connected to voting to explain higher turnout associated with higher
age. However, he does not test this proposition sufficiently. My research takes this
last aspect of his argument further.
Voting is the most fundamental form of political participation and can be concep-
tualised as a decision based on incentives and resources. If citizens do not have
certain resources such as physical health, they will not vote. Also, they do not go to
the polls if they lack some motivation, such as the belief that it expresses their
allegiance to the political system. Resources to go and vote are minimal compared
to other forms of political participation (Verba et al. 1995, 53–54); nevertheless
some amount of physical ability is needed even for postal voting and some infor-
© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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A C H I M G O E R R E S
mation either from experience or the news in order to decide for whom to vote. In
addition, one needs to feel the motivation to pay the small costs in terms of time.
My theoretical perspective includes instrumental as well as expressive motivations.
I assume that people vote because they see it as their duty or from loyalty to the
system, as well as because they believe that their vote could actually influence
policies (see, for a recent review, Dowding 2005). On the one hand, Franklin and
his colleagues have shown that institutional restrictions decrease the likelihood of
an individual going to the polls so voters must see some kind of instrumental value
in the act of voting (Franklin 1996; Franklin et al. 1996). On the other hand, André
Blais (2000) demonstrates that rational choice in the narrow sense, in which
only personal interests in the political and economic arenas matter, does not hold
up.
To what extent can the decision to go and vote based on expressive or instrumental
motivation differ between age groups? We can retrace differences between age
groups to three types of effects: cohort, life cycle and individual ageing. A ‘cohort
effect’ describes the shared experience by a group that was born during a certain
period. There are two sub-types of cohort effects. One is the lasting influence of
shared socialisation as a ‘political generation’. It matters, for example, in what
period a cohort came of political age. We are much more open to political influences
between 15 and 30 (the ‘impressionable years’) than between 50 and 65 (see
Hyman 1959; Dawson and Prewitt 1968; Sears and Levy 2003). In Britain, voters
who came of political age during the Thatcher or Blair eras seem to bother less
about politics, which makes them as a cohort less likely to vote (Clarke et al. 2004).
Current British youth do not value formal politics, of which voting forms part, very
highly (Henn et al. 2002). In terms of an evaluation of resources and incentives, the
incentive side of the equation is affected. The cohort as a whole will carry the
perception of a lower benefit value of voting (because of disenchantment with
formal politics) through their lifetimes. Although political attitudes like these are
not monolithic, they are very stable over a lifespan and will thus make that cohort
as a whole less likely to vote in the years to come (Alwin et al. 1991). There are few
historical events or processes that can potentially shape generational experiences at
a young age across national borders in the realm of voting and create similar lasting
influences at later age. Examples might be the experience of the world wars or the
fall of communism. However, the experience of the young generation is funda-
mentally shaped by national...

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