A new Australian study from Flinders University has found that younger people will tend to vote for older politicians who support ‘left-of-centre’ policies, prompting experts to express concern about the ‘grandfather effect’ among political leaders.
The phenomenon means politicians with age (70 years and older) and experience can win the support of voters in their 20s and 30s if such candidates support left-leaning policies about social and identity issues. Overwhelmingly, these political leaders are men.
According to electoral behavioural analyst Associate Professor Rodrigo Praino, the research demonstrated the youth vote was not influenced by any intergenerational bias against older candidates.
“We set out to explore why younger voters are drawn to older male candidates in more than one advanced western democracy — raising questions about whether there is something ‘different’ about the voting habits of millennials and post-millennials,” Praino said.
The academic from Flinders University’s college of business, government and law said the success of Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, and Germany’s Greens MP Hans-Christian Ströbele, who died last year at 83, showed the younger cohort of voters was happy to support policy stances aligned with issues they felt strongly about.
What’s more, younger voters were found not to care substantially about voting for a representative who was similar to their own age.
Paper co-author Professor Charlie Lees, who is now affiliated with the University of London, said the young voters were “significantly more likely to support older candidates” whose policies aligned with their values.
“All things being equal, younger voters do not prefer younger candidates to older candidates,” Lees said.
The research follows another recent survey of 1,000 young voters, which also found that those born between 1981 and 1996 (Millennials and Gen Y) and 1997 and 2012 (post-Millenials or Gen Z) had no specific preference for younger voters.
This was the case, even despite examples where there was a high voter turnout among young people for Jacinda Arden’s 2020 election in New Zealand, when she was aged just 37.
“Even though young voters are often described as disengaged and disinterested in conventional political participation, they are known to be able to mobilise in remarkable, non-conventional ways,” the study found.
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