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October 16, 2006
Age and voting
There was a related article in the paper today (here's the link, thanks to John K.) so I thought I'd post these pictures again:
See here for my thoughts at the time.
Thinking more statistically . . .
This is a paradigmatic age/time/cohort problem. We'd like to look at a bunch of these survey results over time, maybe also something longitudinal if it's available, then set up a model to estimate the age, time, and cohort patterns (recognizing, as always, that it's impossible to estimate all of these at once without some assumptions).
Posted by Andrew at October 16, 2006 2:41 AM
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Comments
Amazing. Under "Activities in past 2 months" there was no category for "blogging" or similar - and this in a survey that purported to include "DotNets".
Posted by: derrida derider at October 15, 2006 9:43 PM.
Even though the NYT article attempts to show the correlation between a voter's opinion and the governing party in the period of coming of age, there is something else that strikes me - the 30 year cycle, which is also the parent-child gap.
In all, this brings back the old question of heritability of political opinion: family is an environment where opinions do get transferred, and there is quite a bit of data on this (NES) - the question is how much. I also presume that this has been studied in the past.
Posted by: Aleks ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 16, 2006 8:42 AM.
A commenter on another blog pointed out that this doesn't take into account of the 'Solid South' changing parties (which would have spanned the Goldwater-Reagan time fram).
Posted by: Barry at October 16, 2006 7:54 PM.
Hi All,
For a nice look at longitudinal data on the life-course (age), period, and cohort effects on partisanship see:
Posted by: Jake at October 19, 2006 4:10 PM.