Chicago Booth Review Podcast Do You Really Get More Conservative As You Age?

Sam Peltzman: Let's say you take as a fact that people get more right-wing when they get older, and then it's another fact that people are getting older. Well, that will cause a drift to the right, but it's too small to affect big picture numbers. It may not be too small to decide a very close election. I don't want people to misunderstand what I'm saying.

Hal Weitzman: There's a reason why people tend to avoid political discussions at family gatherings. When the conversation between grandpa and the college student turns to politics, we'd expect there to be a pretty serious generational divide with grandpa well to the right of the student. Political folk wisdom tells us that people become more conservative as they get older. But does the evidence back that up and is the political divide between older and younger voters getting bigger? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm speaking with Chicago Booth's Sam Peltzman about his research on political ideology using the general social survey run by NORC, a nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago. I began by asking him how we can track people's ideological beliefs over time.

Sam Peltzman: The simplest way to describe the relationship that you're talking about is you go out, you ask a random sample of the population, are you right, left, or in between? And then you tabulate the results by age. The problem with that is that if you are really interested in the question that you raise, do people get more conservative as they get older, is that you're talking to people who are 20 years old today and 70 years old today, and it's going to take 50 years for the 20-year-old-

Hal Weitzman: Which is a long research study.

Sam Peltzman: Which is a very long period of time. So I've just described the difference between what's called period data and cohort data. Period data is what we see today and cohort data is what happens to people-

Hal Weitzman: Tracking them over time.

Sam Peltzman: Over time. Fortunately, the data that I was using has a 50 year profile. It started in the seventies, and this question is asked every year or two.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, and so tell us the story. What do we find out?

Sam Peltzman: Let me start with the big picture. The whole population breaks down on the liberalism, conservatism question slightly to the right. It's roughly like this. 40% will say they're in the middle, about 35% will say they're conservatives of one kind or another, and 25 will say they're liberal, one kind or another. If you look at people in their late twenties, it's not 35, 25, right, left. It's about even, and immediately it starts drifting to the right, which is interesting-

Hal Weitzman: When you say immediately, how quickly?

Sam Peltzman: People who are 30 years old are more to the right than people 25 by a tiny little bit, but perceptible and over 50 years you can see that that difference becomes pretty clear and that continues. Interestingly, it continues well beyond middle age. A lot of notions in this literature about, well, they might move, but then they stop, they settle down and it's not true. There's almost as much drifting to the right from say 45 to 75, that's 30 years as there is in the 20 years from 25 to 45. So that'll give you a sense of what's going on. Slows down by a little bit, only a little bit.

Hal Weitzman: So when we say conservative, when we say liberal, what do we mean by those terms?

Sam Peltzman: Of course, those things are... The meaning is changing over time. But the specific question, do you consider yourself self-reported conservative, moderate, or liberal on a seven-point scale? Very conservative, tending toward conservative, moderate, and then the same for the liberals. I, and many others who have used this kind of data, collapse that into three. Anybody who says very yes or only a little, I lump as conservative or liberal. The moderates, which is the biggest single group have one choice, but 40% of the population always answers that they're moderate.

Hal Weitzman: So hang on. So if somebody at the age of 29 in 1972 considers themselves to be very liberal.

Sam Peltzman: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: And by the age of 79, they now consider themselves to be somewhat liberal. According to you, they haven't moved?

Sam Peltzman: In my data, they would not move. And I'll tell you why. It's not just me. People who work with the state tend to do this. The number of people who say very is tiny, really tiny. On the issues, there's another even earlier paper that I have with this data, which is about actual issues. What does it mean when somebody says they're conservative or liberal? There's very little difference between the very conservative and the, "I'm only a little bit conservative". They tend to be on the same side. So anybody who says very is exaggerating a little bit. Anybody who says not so much is covering up a little bit, and it does for purposes of understanding what's going on, it's perfectly okay to call that whole group a conservative. And your ability to track drifts within that is just extremely limited because the extremes are small. I want to emphasize this is all self-reported and it's an interviewer laying a question in front of you and you pick the answer.

Hal Weitzman: So these are self-reported labels.

Sam Peltzman: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: Correct? So how do you deal with the challenge that one person's liberal is another person's conservative? I consider myself to be moderate. My neighbors considered me to be a radical leftist or whatever. So how do you deal with that?

Sam Peltzman: You can't because you've answered the question in a certain way, and that's... Now, having said all of that, as I said, it does map into differences. Again, we're talking about central tendencies, averages, and so on and so forth. So the only answer to the question you posed is, well, what do you believe on the issues? And there the central tendency is for people who say they're conservative to have a certain set of beliefs that have changed over time, that they haven't been stable. People who say-

Hal Weitzman: Right. Because those labels have also... society has changed.

Sam Peltzman: Exactly. The labels do have... again, I don't want to exaggerate, but they do have a somewhat different meaning today than they had in 1972. There's been a drift in what those things mean, and we can talk about that if you like. As I said, it's not about the age differences and so on and so forth, but it's relevant. Anybody on the conservative side, and that's the extreme, the moderate and the little bit, all of them will tend to be against big government, at least nominally except for defense. They want more money spent on defense, less on a lot of other things. People who are on the liberal side will tend to be the other way. Less on defense, more on other things. Interestingly, on cultural issues, the gap is narrowed dramatically, which clashes with the way we feel about the polarized... most of the polarization has been on economic issues, not on cultural issues.

Abortion is a big dividing line, but if you say you're conservative, you tend to not like abortion. If you're liberal, you tend... That's what the political science people call wedge issue. But all the other cultural issues have been narrowing dramatically. Do you want to censor? One interesting exception is there's a question, do you want a censor pornography? There, the left has drifted toward being more censorious and left females have tended to become a little bit more... a little bit, not very much. But that used to be a no-no issue. Censoring pornography was for conservatives and liberals were all for not censoring anything. That's gotten narrowed mostly with what used to be the right coming to the left. As the political process emphasizes the cultural wars more, the general population is converging except on abortion.

Hal Weitzman: So as I said at the beginning, this feels intuitively correct. There's a famous quote that's misattributed, I think, to Winston Churchill, "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you've got no heart." He wouldn't have said liberal. But anyway, left is socialist. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you've got no brain. What motivated you to kind of-

Sam Peltzman: Yes, I've heard that one.

Hal Weitzman: Was it that sort of homespun wisdom that motivated you to look at this?

Sam Peltzman: I'm long retired from the academic battles and I do this kind of thing to satisfy my own curiosity and because I have a good data source, which I can easily manipulate, so I'm doing it for fun. And I was curious about this kind of thing. It does seem to be the case, but is it true? And it is. So this a case where my curiosity was, I would say satisfied, but I didn't learn. What I was surprised at is how powerful it is and pervasive and that it holds up in cohort data as well as period data. And the same if you looked at a... And there's a lot of fluctuation year to year in this. I don't want to minimize that, but if you take the 50 years as a whole, you break them in half, I tried that, and you just look at the first half like the first 25 years of the data, and then you look at the next 25, in that kind of aggregation, it's remarkably the same. The cohort data, the period data, they're all pointing to this relation.

Hal Weitzman: But let's talk about this drift that you did find. Why do you think it is? What explains it?

Sam Peltzman: I like to stick to the data. I really don't want to speculate unless I can back it up and I haven't delved deeply enough to be-

Hal Weitzman: But that data set's not going to tell you... is not going to provide you with explanations.

Sam Peltzman: It's related to the life cycle and earnings, the life cycle in-

Hal Weitzman: In other words, the wealthier you are, the more left you are to be considered?

Sam Peltzman: Well, although again, this is changing quite radically at this point. In fact, flipping in its political-

Hal Weitzman: You mean the older Americans are not necessarily wealthier?

Sam Peltzman: Well, no, no. The older Americans are wealthier.

Hal Weitzman: Uh-huh. Oh, but they're not necessarily-

Sam Peltzman: But the mapping of wealth into politics change is what's changing.

Hal Weitzman: Well, that's what I was going to ask you. So conservative, liberal, we don't necessarily mean Republican, Democrat there, do we?

Sam Peltzman: No. Well, there I can give you... I did look into that. Not necessarily, but it's correlated and in a very particular way, which explains something of what's going on in the current political environment. So again, the largest single group of the population is moderate on the left-right scale, and there's a plurality of conservatives over liberals. The parties are split 50/50 roughly speaking, roughly 50/50. The political question is, who did you vote for in the last presidential election? And we know the answer and it confirms what we know.

Hal Weitzman: So does that mean some conservatives are voting Democrat?

Sam Peltzman: No, no, no, no, no. 75% of the conservatives are Republicans. But then how do the Democrats get to 50?

Hal Weitzman: Right.

Sam Peltzman: They're only 25%. So they get-

Hal Weitzman: They turn out more.

Sam Peltzman: Obviously a large... almost all the liberals, but half of the Democrat vote comes from moderates, and only a quarter of the Republican vote comes from anything other than conservative, which would be largely moderates. So if the moderate vote moves to the right, the Democrats lose. It's not their left-wing base they have to worry about. It's the moderates that have tended to vote Democrat in recent years. They get enough of that large group to keep it 50/50.

Hal Weitzman: Do we know anything about... So if you are a moderate who used to be a liberal, are you more likely to vote Democrat than a moderate who's always been a moderate?

Sam Peltzman: Okay, so I do have something to say about that. The data, again, you don't see the same individual, but we do see these cohorts when they move at older ages, they move gradually. So that's one reason why it persists so long. The holding group is the moderates. So the first move apparently, again, because you can't see the same individual, but you can see this evolution in the data, the first move is from liberal to moderate as you get older. Then as you get older, some of the moderates become conservative. The moderate group is receiving from the left and issuing to the right, always remaining about 40% of anybody. It's true at old age as well as young age that 40% of the population is moderate. But the composition changes. If you had a general drift to the right, the marginal voters who would be costly to the Democrats would come from the moderates. Of course, you have to mobilize your base and all of that, but that's not the main issue.

Hal Weitzman: You talk there about the sort of stability, 30, 30, 40, more or less.

Sam Peltzman: It's incredibly stable. The only thing that's changed is that the meaning has become more slightly more polarized.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, explain that.

Sam Peltzman: Well, if you go back to the seventies, the big picture data that I started with, 35% conservative, 40% moderate, 25% liberal. That was true in the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, the aughts, and today.

Hal Weitzman: So to go back to this question of stability, you hear about these in Ancient Greece when they were complaining about the youngsters and how terrible they were. Is this just something you think... I mean, and of course your data's not about Ancient Greece or contemporary Greece, it's about America, but do you think this phenomenon has always been with us of this age divide, political age divide?

Sam Peltzman: I think, again, this is not me, but political scientists that I respect. I think what it reflects more than anything else is indifference. Maybe the people who listen to this podcast are political junkies, but I can assure you the population at large is not. The audience for any political event is going to be 10% of the Super Bowl, which really matters. That's what really matters to the large parts of the population. So the stability is impressive because people give the similar answers, but their investment in these issues is way exaggerated by the chattering classes and the academics and the people who make a living worrying about these things.

Hal Weitzman: But you think that this age divide has existed in the United States as long as the United States existed?

Sam Peltzman: Absolutely. Again, I don't have the data, but I would suspect goes back well before 1970.

Hal Weitzman: Mm-hmm. Okay. So people have talked a huge amount in the past decade about polarization. How do we map that onto what you've learned with this data? Do we conclude that age is a big part of polarization or?

Sam Peltzman: No. No. Again, that's something you can pin down pretty specifically. The population's getting older. The contribution of that particular, let's say you take as a fact that people get more right wing when they get older, and then it's another fact that people are getting older. Well, that will cause a drift to the right, but it's too small to affect big picture numbers. It may not be too small to decide a very close election. I don't want people to misunderstand what I'm saying, but in terms of big picture numbers about how conservative the whole population is, it would make the 35%, 36 or 37 maybe, but not more. On economics-

Hal Weitzman: Yeah.

Sam Peltzman: On economics, there's been a bigger split. If I had to give a one-sentence explanation for the rise in populism, it's nothing to do with... it does have a little to do with abortion. It's nothing to do with gay marriage or transsexual right, things that obsess academics and media people has nothing to do with that. The polarization has narrowed on those issues. Opposition to gay marriage has disappeared basically. Majority of conservatives are in favor of that, but on economic issues, particularly when it's stated in generalities, do you favor big government or little government? Interestingly, even liberals are against big government. That was an interesting result. I have another paper on how the population views government regulation, and they're all against it. They say they're against it except for certain specifics. Are your taxes too high? There's another leading question there. These are not asked every year so that we only have sporadic evidence. But there, the right-left split is-

Hal Weitzman: What proportion of people say out of interest that their taxes are not too high?

Sam Peltzman: You'd be surprised.

Hal Weitzman: Really?

Sam Peltzman: Yeah. Yeah. Offhand, I can't... And you'd be surprised that there's a right-left split. There didn't used to be, but it's now becoming more and more. So I think if I were to give a one-sentence explanation for why you've had this drift to the right especially by non-college-educated people, it's, "Get out of my life. I just want to watch the Super Bowl, and I don't want to be bothered by any of it." That's in a nutshell, the way that is. There are cultural divisions. They remain on abortion. They may have gotten wider, but by and large, it's the role of government in everybody's life.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. You're not obliged to answer this, but I'm interested if you personally have seen this-

Sam Peltzman: Have I drifted?

Hal Weitzman: In this in your own life? Yeah.

Sam Peltzman: No, I probably-

Hal Weitzman: 50 years ago, were you more liberal?

Sam Peltzman: No. I've probably have gone the other way myself, but there's another caution. Do not use any of these data as a personal guide. There's enormous variation in all of this. As I said at the beginning, there's lots and lots of old liberals and young conservatives, but myself, I probably drifted toward the middle. I used-

Hal Weitzman: From the right you mean?

Sam Peltzman: From the right, yeah. I used be further on the right when I was young. That's interesting. So I've gone the other way.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Well, you're counter to the trend, which is what we would expect from a Chicago Booth professor.

Sam Peltzman: Well, there's that too. Yes.

Hal Weitzman: Sam Peltzman, thank you so much for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Sam Peltzman: It's been my pleasure.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode. To learn more, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.