Erik asked the other day why Generation X is so politically conservative, relatively speaking. Andrew Gelman, along with a couple of co-authors has a really interesting, if pretty technical, paper on this subject. We demonstrate how the fitted model aids the study of elections.

We provide a narrative of the presidentialapproval time series, emphasizing how political events, generally associated with the presiding administration,formed the preferences of five distinct generations: New Deal Democrats, Eisenhower Republicans, 1960s Liberals, Reagan Conservatives, and Millennials. Each generation is epitomized by the birth years in which partisan preferences were the strongest: 1929 (pro-Democrat), 1941 (Republican), 1952 (Democrat), 1968 (Republican), and 1985 (Democrat). I have a related belief that what’s happening around the time people are 13-17 or so has a huge effect on their long-term political identity, which begins to get formed around this time.

Gelman’s paper explains in great detail how something like that fits the data pretty well, although he adds the appropriate caveats that generational generalizations are always going to be fuzzy by their nature, and that in particular it’s important to think about the overall arc of a psychologically formative political period, as opposed to a single defining event. This NYT piece has some very cool graphics based on Gelman and his co-authors’ work. Anyway, I would anticipate that, based on this work, a lot of current teenagers are going to be imprinted with anti-right wing views for many decades, although it would make a huge difference in this regard if the Democrat elected in 2028 has what’s perceived as at least a moderately successful presidency. . . .

See also In 1980, I and just about all my friends hated Jimmy Carter. Most of us much preferred him to Reagan but still hated Carter. I wouldn’t associate this with any particular ideological feeling—it’s not that we thought he was too liberal, or too conservative.

He just seemed completely ineffectual. I remember feeling at the time that he had no principles, that he’d do anything to get elected. In retrospect, I think of this as an instance of uniform partisan swing: the president was unpopular nationally, and attitudes about him were negative, relatively speaking, among just about every group.

My other Carter story comes from a conversation I had a couple years ago with an economist who’s about my age, a man who said that one reason he and his family moved from town A to town B in his metropolitan area was that, in town B, they didn’t feel like they were the only Republicans on their block. Anyway, this guy described himself as a “Jimmy Carter Republican.” Me: You mean you liked Carter’s policies on deregulation? Him: No. I mean that Jimmy Carter made me a Republican.