Youthquake Revisited: Youth Voting Behavior and Their Risk-Seeking Attitudes

• In Event: Poster Session: Predicting Political Participation

Abstract

Many recent political events have been decided by an unexpected mobilization of youths—a Youthquake. However, the political preferences of young voters were far from uniform. Disproportionate support among youths propelled heterogeneous political forces, from the leftist Podemos in Spain, through Macron’s socially liberal En Marche in France, to the nationally-conservative Freedom Party and People's Party in Austria, and even the far-right True Finns and Swedish Democrats in the Nordics. We explain this puzzling diversity in ideological preferences among young people by their higher risk-seeking tendency. Young individuals are increasingly likely to support parties with lower prospects of gaining representation and influencing post-electoral politics, whether due to their newness, small size, or position on the edges of the political spectrum. While the risk-seeking attribute remains constant, a ‘risky’ vote depends on the political context of a given country, manifesting as a wide range of ideological alternatives. This theoretical proposition gains robust empirical support in a cross-national examination using multilevel models estimated on 62,201 voters from 77 election surveys conducted in 26 countries included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). An additional analysis zooms in on the risk-seeking attitudes available in a panel survey conducted in Germany, yielding consistent findings. Given the consistent empirical support across indicators and robustness towards various model specifications, the research concludes that risk-seeking attitudes constitute an essential element in young people’s voting behavior, holding true across time and contexts.

Authors

• Miroslav Nemčok, University of Oslo

• Theodora Helimäki, University of Helsinki