My topic is whether or not age had an impact on the way that people voted. I first looked at the average age of people in each party and found out that on average, republicans in 2016 were older than democrats. However, this has no been constant throughout the years of data as at several points democrats were older than republicans. Secondly, I looked at how generations changed the way that they voted. My graphs looked at generation x, baby boomer generation, and the silent generation. I looked at the proportion of republican share throughout the generations. I found that in our data, republican share increased in all three of the generations as they aged.
My research question helps dig into many different questions that we have studied regarding politics. We have talked about many forms of how people align themselves politically such as sorting. My research about how age affects politics and how generations shift throughout time helps give a lot of interesting information about how people change over time and how they sort themselves into different groups as they age.
My first figure is a graph that presents the proportion of republican vote-share (in the ANES sample) by generations. The orange line represents the silent generation, the light green line represents the baby boomer generation, and the blue line represents generation x. In our data the proportion of republican share of vote for both Generation X and Boomers has decreased since the early 1980s. Of the three generations, the Silent Generation has had the highest Republican Vote Share since the early 2000s.
My second graph shows the average age of party members for the Republican Party and the Democrat party. It shows that in the most recent election in the data (2016), republicans were older on average than democrats. However, this is not always the case as the graph shows that the older party has switched several times between the years of 1950 and 2016.