Leader: Catherine De Vries (Università Bocconi); Other collaborator(s): UPO
Population ageing may have political consequences. The potential for age-based political conflict increases with age-based polarization (demand) and when it is electorally attractive for political entrepreneurs to exploit this polarization (supply). This conflict may be muted due to lack of supply, but increased age-based resource competition during the pandemic and over environmental issues has made the conflict more salient. We aim to use machine learning to explore patterns in existing survey data and textual data from parliamentary debates in Italy to evaluate this conflict. Normatively, we discuss whether younger generations should be allowed to vote while senior citizens disenfranchised, or their votes should have less weight.
Brief description of the activities and of the intermediate results
The research team has conducted further empirical analysis on survey data comparing old and young. and social media data on elite age-based rhetoric from Italy and the US. A working paper was presented at the American Political Science Association online research conference and was accepted for presentation at the European Political Science Association meeting in July 2024.
The research team has designed a survey experiment to better understand the reasons why young voters in Italy support populist right parties, testing cultural and economic anxiety explanations. This survey experiment will be run in the aftermath of the 2024 EP elections in June 2024.
Main policy, industrial and scientific implications
Coming soon
The research team has prepared two papers about the how political parties appeal to younger vs older voters. One paper employs Twitter data from elites and combines this with survey data from voters. The paper presents new theory and evidence on group mobilization by political candidates. While a large literature shows that candidates try to secure votes through policies, in this paper we focus on a different strategy: candidates' appeals to demographic groups, for example younger and the older voters. We argue that politicians use group appeals to signal their commitment to underrepresented segments of the electorate. The supply of group appeals hence reflects the group composition of districts and the changing importance of specific groups due to major societal events. To test these intuitions, we introduce a novel measurement strategy that combines natural language processing techniques to detect group appeals in text data, and apply it to the universe of tweets posted by candidates. We establish three sets of findings. 1) A strong relationship between the demographic composition of districts and candidates’ supply of group-specific appeals exists; 2) group appeals increase in response to major protest events that raise the importance of specific groups (i.e., young voters); 3) Especially among young voters, group members are more likely to turn out for candidates appealing to their own group. Our evidence sheds novel light on the strategic mobilization of voters by political candidates. A working paper was presented at the American Political Science Association online research conference and was accepted for presentation at the European Political Science Association meeting in July 2024. It is currently prepared for submission.
The research team has designed a survey experiment to better understand the reasons why young voters in Italy support populist right parties, testing cultural and economic anxiety explanations. This survey experiment was run in the aftermath of the 2024 EP elections in June 2024. So far, we find that both cultural and economic anxiety explanations matter, but the differences between young and older voters voting for the far right do not differ substantially. In additional observational analysis we wish to study the patterns more in-depth for other European countries as well. A working paper is submitted for presentation at the European Political Science Association meeting in July 2025.
Coming soon