15:30 - 17:45
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Gema M García-Albacte
Discussant/s:
Gema M García-Albacte
Meeting Room A

Mathilde M. van Ditmars, Rosalind Shorrocks
Political gender gaps across countries and generations: the impact of socioeconomic position over the life course

Ralph Scott
Does University Make you Less Prejudiced? Evidence from a Longitudinal Cohort Study

Philip Swatton
Age Isn't Just a Number: A Comparative Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Political Beliefs

Elias Markstedt, Elin Naurin
The effects of pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenthood on the gender gap in political knowledge. A large scale longitudinal survey
Age Isn't Just a Number: A Comparative Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Political Beliefs
Philip Swatton
University of Essex

Age as a determinant of political beliefs can be conceived as capturing one of two broad processes: ageing effects, wherein ageing or changes over the life-cycle produce differences between age groups and cohort effects, wherein generations are ‘socialised’ and retain distinctive features over time. Thus far, comparative analysis of the effects of age and cohort have only been performed for beliefs on European integration. Analysis of left-right and libertarian-authoritarian beliefs have been restricted to national analyses primarily in the UK. This paper therefore fills the gap created by this apparent lack by performing an exploratory comparative age-period-cohort analysis for left-right and libertarian-authoritarian beliefs in Western Europe. It finds that age-related processes matter considerably more for authoritarian-libertarian beliefs. These results imply that as these beliefs become more salient, so too will age differences in political preferences – and therefore perhaps political behaviour.