… at least in the “Anglosphere”
One of the striking features of the racist riots in Britain has been the wide spread of ages among those (nearly all men) convicted so far[1]. This is unusual, since criminal violence of all kinds is most commonly associated with young men. And it’s a counter-example to what has become a standard talking point.
The belief that young men have shifted strongly to the right and far-right has become a background assumption for lots of political journalism. But there’s plenty of evidence that, in Britain and other English-speaking countries[2], both young men and young women are more likely to support left and centre-left parties. The recent UK election gives a striking example
(click for clearer view)
The age gradient here is stunning. That probably reflects the division over Brexit a disaster inflicted on the young, primarily by nostalgic retirees (the vast majority of this group voted for Tories/Reform in 2024). If you squint you can see a slightly larger gender gap among young voters than in older cohorts. But, as is true elsewhere, this reflects a leftward shift among young women, rather than a move to the right by men.
The same pattern is evident in Australia and New Zealand, with a larger but still modest gender gap, once again driven by young women shifting left. As this lament frm a rightwing thinktank shows, the Greens are far ahead of the main conservative party among Gen Z voters.
In the US case, there are some surveys suggesting a sharp gender divide among the young, though results complicated (as always in the US) by race and by the chaos created by Trump and Trumpism. However, the evidence suggests that young women have moved left while young men have, on average, not moved much at all.
In all cases, other factors like income, education, rural/urban divides, religion and so on interact in complex ways with age and gender. And a lot of punditry reflects over-reaction to the swing of the electoral pendulum, which makes it easy to discern spurious trends in just about any group you want to look at.
All of this is in the context of (broadly) two-party systems. In European multi-party systems, the big issue has been the rise of support for far-right parties that mostly get around 20 per cent of the vote, and fluctuate a lot more. That’s hard to interpret, but there’s plenty to cast doubt on the idea that young voters, and particularly young men, have shifted to the right en masse. Here’s a thoughtful analysis of recent German elections, for example.
Overall, voting patterns in the English-speaking countries show an age gradient that is getting steadily steeper, along with a gradually increasing gender gap. The net result, in most cases has been a modest shift to the left among young men, and a much sharper shift among young women.
fn1. The Jan 6 insurrection showed something similar.
fn2. Here, I’m not considering former colonies where English is widely spoken but not the dominant first language, such as India and South Africa. The politics of these countries can’t easily be fitted into the framework used here.
{ 36 comments }
J-D 08.15.24 at 6:31 am
I imagine there was supposed to be a link there, but if so it’s gone missing.
nastywoman 08.15.24 at 7:43 am
@’In European multi-party systems, the big issue has been the rise of support for far-right parties that mostly get around 20 per cent of the vote, and fluctuate a lot more. That’s hard to interpret’
It isn’t – as the rise of far-right parties with programs which pretty much matched the program of the German NSDAP during Adolfs time is too obvious and so – not only Trump has Hitlers Mein Kampf on his night table but also lots and lots of Germans and Hungarians and absurdly even a lot of people in the Anglosphere which supposedly always was once the enemies of the German Nazis.
And that of all people LePen and Meloni suddenly realised the irony – of becoming partners of people who wished back the German SS – or better said the ‘nasty absurdity’ of building coalitions with people who hold Mein Kampf dearly – says also something about them realising that especially young men seem to be very… should we say ‘fascinated’ bei Adolf and his minime’s again.
And how about doing some surveys about that?
(which doesn’t have to do anything with the fact that somehow ‘Der Neue (Alte) Führer’ for very, very old German Neo Nazis including the UK’s Farange – is some ‘American’ or still ‘German’? called FF VON CLOWNSTICK)
novakant 08.15.24 at 8:31 am
A side note: the numbers of young people voting for the Green Party / Lib Dems are certainly encouraging when it comes to the environement. It’s strange that so many older people don’t seem to care (considering the abysmal record of the Tories).
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/take-action/project-climate-vote/ranking/
Matt Young 08.15.24 at 9:46 am
Good points, John.
Regarding the data on the last UK election, can someone better versed in UK politics explain to me why the Lib Dem vote share is to the left of the Greens on the YouGov bar charts? From what I do know about their respective platforms, and past behavior of LibDems in coalition, it seems like they should be switched. I’ll leave the question of whether todays’ Labour belongs in the leftmost position aside for the moment…
Tm 08.15.24 at 10:01 pm
„in Britain and other English-speaking countries[2], both young men and young women are more likely to support Left parties“
Good for you. It’s still noteworthy that the gender gap is biggest among the young generation. This is in line with data from a host of countries, e. g. https://academic.oup.com/sp/article/21/2/315/1620322
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11577-023-00904-4
https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998
The phenomenon of women voting more to the left than men is relatively recent and the gap seems to be growing. In Germany in the most recent elections, young men voted no more progressive than men in general. The fascist party has most support among 35-59 yo men, it the young men weren’t far behind. I envy the anglos in this respect because the reactionary turn of many young men is indeed worrisome.
https://troet.cafe/@piglet/112597616338970272
John Q 08.16.24 at 12:42 am
I’ve added the missing links
Alex SL 08.16.24 at 3:00 am
I wonder to what degree the data point that 20% are voting neo-nazi really indicates a right-wing shift in opinions and to what degree this fraction of the population always held similarly far-right views but didn’t think it was wise to express them in the same way. Or maybe they always held the same views but felt they were represented well enough by their nation’s mainstream conservative party, but now party affiliation isn’t as strong anymore as it was in, say, the 1970s.
A problem for conservative parties is that their business model has been for decades to scare-monger against immigrants and minorities and then, when elected, make off with the family silver while not actually doing anything substantial to curtail immigration, because not having sufficient labour would hurt business interests. It is not surprising that those 20% would at some point think, wait a second, you keep telling us “vote for us because brown people bad”, but you aren’t actually doing anything…
That being said, opinions do shift over decades, and that also makes it more difficult to evaluate a statement such as young men voting more right-wing. The centre-left of today, for example, is far to the left of where it was in the 1970s on questions like gay rights or feminism, but it is far to the right of where it was then on questions like tax policy, economic regulation, or the welfare state.
John Q 08.16.24 at 6:49 am
Alex SL. I agree. Nearly everwhere, there’s a constituency of at least 20 per cent for far-right views, and maybe more, which comes into the open from time to time. Usually, but not always it gets pushed back into the shadows again once it becomes evident that it has nothing to offer but a chance to vent hate.
Tm 08.16.24 at 8:27 am
The 20% have probably always been there. The real problem is the normalization and mainstreaming of fascism. This has been out of the question for many decades since WWII and now suddenly it’s happening again.
engels 08.16.24 at 9:09 am
There are no left parties shown on this chart and the traditionally left-most one, Labour, has itself recently shifted sharply to the right, so I don’t see how it can show any group is left or hasn’t moved right.
engels 08.16.24 at 9:18 am
An alternative metric might be how many are fans of Andrew Tate.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/andrew-tate-influence-young-men-misogyny-b2283595.html
somebody who remembers paul ryan was a young gun, age 40 08.16.24 at 5:29 pm
interesting analysis. i suggest that perhaps the hatred of women causes many to check out of community institutions (normal churches, normal schools, etc.) and enter into the cult-like political world of tate, peterson, musk, “tradcath” extremism, bari weiss’s fake college, prageru, etc. if those community institutions begin to have more women as leaders. even if men still run them! studies have shown that men perceive women to completely dominate social situations even if they talk less than men or are vastly outnumbered by men. simply the presence of a woman is too much for some men to take. you dont have to go far to find millions of americans that say their military is completely feminized even though it’s only 17 percent women. the military! the loathing of women crawls into places in the mind that you would not expect to find it, waiting to bite, like a plague rat, if you shine a light too deep into the shadows. as women assert their rights we will likely to continue to see a backlash of this kind. the rat must gnaw.
Z 08.16.24 at 6:45 pm
Relatedly, I feel like over the last 8 years or so, there have been various attempts to explain Republicans in terms of “traditional” or toxic masculinity etc., but not much if any journalism or academic research about women and the Republican party, particularly those that don’t fit a “traditional” stay-at-home and defer to your husband type- the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Lauren Boebert faction of the Republican party, if you will. If anyone knows of any such literature that explains this (significant) part of the Republican Party, please share with the rest of us.
John Q 08.17.24 at 12:05 am
TM @9 The far-right has re-emerged on multiple occasions in different places since 1945, and has (so far) been beaten back on most points. But migration remains a hot issue almost everywhere. I will try to write something about this.
Alex SL 08.17.24 at 1:10 am
Tm,
Yes, that was one of the possibilities I tried to express. The hatred is always simmering, but this part of society gets either a strong signal that they will be shunned if they act on it or a signal that it is okay for them to let it rip, be it through shouting abuse at others in the street, throwing firebombs at mosques, or chucking rocks at the windows of shops owned by minority members.
And that is, IMO, the insidiousness or, to be charitable, myopia behind the “radical free speech” or “light is the best disinfectant” stance. Because it just isn’t true on the facts that letting all opinions flourish, no matter how vile or stupid, will lead to the dominance of the most ethical and best-evidenced ideas. Instead, an absence of quality control leads to the dominance of those ideas that are most emotionally appealing and/or propagated by those with the most resources to propagate ideas, and the overlapping area in that particular Venn diagram reads “those immigrants/gays/poor people are why you are unhappy, not me, the very rich and powerful guy who actually has power to shape the social conditions that made you unhappy”.
What I continue to be perplexed by is why people are so upset specifically about immigration, because I do not get it at any emotional level. I was born in one country and lived there for four years, then raised in a second country and stayed there until my first postdoc, did a second postdoc in a third country, and then immigrated to a fourth country in 2010 for my current job. I am surrounded at my workplace by people whose parents came from China, New Zealand, Germany, France, the UK, the USA, Colombia, Venezuela, etc., and I absolutely fail to see any problem whatsoever with that.
I have to accept that there are those who think differently, who apparently want everybody to stick forever to where they were born(1), but I have the same intellectual and emotional understanding for their position as for somebody who insists on wearing a live duck on their head at all times. That means I have absolutely no idea, unfortunately, for how to deal with them politically or even in conversation.
(1) Unless, of course, it is their ancestors who moved across continents and murdered the indigenous people to steal their land. That, apparently, is normal and fine, but somebody immigrating peacefully 150 years later to drive a taxi while wearing a turban is bad. And again, they could just as well walk in with a duck on their head for all that I understand that logic.
nastywoman 08.17.24 at 5:52 am
@’An alternative metric might be how many are fans of Andrew Tate’.
and that’s probably the major irritating contradiction to the ‘young men who seem to be very… should we say ‘fascinated’ bei Adolf and his minime’s again?
As what did the real Adolf say so famously:
“Die Arbeit ehrt die Frau ebenso wie den Mann. Aber das Kind veredelt die Mutter.”
googly translated:
“Work honors the woman as well as the man. But the child ennobles the mother.”
the second part actually could have been said by J.D.Vance… who must have read the NSDAP program much more thoroughly than Tate.
nastywoman 08.17.24 at 6:09 am
and about
@migration remains a hot issue almost everywhere. I will try to write something about this.
PLEASE
don’t forget the main… shall we call it ‘origination’ of this ‘hot issue’
the basic:
‘FREMDENFEINDLICHKEIT’
Reason 08.17.24 at 5:22 pm
Matt Young – I think the chart is just arranged to match the colour spectrum, not to show a strict left to right pattern. If it was then the Greens would be leftmost and Reform rightmost.
Reason 08.17.24 at 5:28 pm
Z,
Now that indeed is an interesting point, although I’m sure a proportion of the candidates themselves are just opportunistic grifters. But isn’t it just the same old issue of why do so many people vote against their own interest by voting for corporate (or oligarch) controlled right wing parties. Or the question of why are there single issue voters? Humans often lack a sense if proportion, perhaps?
engels 08.19.24 at 12:41 am
What I continue to be perplexed by is why people are so upset specifically about immigration, because I do not get it at any emotional level. I was born in one country and lived there for four years, then raised in a second country and stayed there until my first postdoc, did a second postdoc in a third country, and then immigrated to a fourth country in 2010 for my current job. I am surrounded at my workplace by people whose parents came from China, New Zealand, Germany, France, the UK, the USA, Colombia, Venezuela, etc., and I absolutely fail to see any problem whatsoever with that.
A good starting point might be to consider that most Americans’ lives are nothing like that.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/07/theres-no-place-like-home.html
Tm 08.19.24 at 8:57 am
JQ 14: We have had fascist spikes before but the mainstreaming is really new. Far right leaders didn’t get to spread their propaganda at prime time public television, and of course they didn’t have millions of followers on social media.
Further, internationally, fascist movements seem to be extremely well connected and the role of leaders like Orban, Putin and Trump (and to a lesser extent Bolsonaro, Milei, Modi, Netanyahu) as models and godfathers of right wing authoritarian movements everywhere cannot be overstated. We never before since WWII had something comparable.
basil 08.19.24 at 5:06 pm
With Engels above, I propose it may be useful to think again about using Labour votes as an index for left politics. Indeed I propose that support for Labour signals opposition to left values. Those not following UK politics may be forgiven for not knowing about a mass of defections from the Conservatives to Labour, or that the prime minister and a very very senior Labour official went on tv just before the election to attack the Tories for being soft and ineffective on immigration. The video bears watching, especially as – like the young AFAB Tamworth MP – it touches on the key question of “expensive hotels”, and identifies “Bangladeshis” for condemnation.
The Chancellor has a history that includes a warning that Leeds was a tinderbox waiting to explode on account of its “immigrant” population, and the Home Secretary is just giddily authoritarian. This is to say nothing of the party’s stance on transgender issues, climate justice, war, law and order, capitalism and flagshaggery in general. They very publicly hose to signal hostility to racialised groups as a repudiation of Corbynism, and a return to patriotism.
I’d strongly recommend we consider that former Dover MP and ERG member Natalie Elphicke knows her right from her left.
And this isn’t new, Labour’s response to the Rwanda scheme over the last few years has been to out-do the conservatives on immigration. They achieved this by accepting the Tory framing – immigration as primary political issue and immigrants as criminals – and then arguing that Labour would be more brutally effective at pushing back and communicating deterrence.
iIRC, the studies of the generational gender split were initially founded on readings of responses to questions of racism misogyny class violence and their proxies, and then attitudes toward war, law and order, state violence, capitalism, and climate. Perhaps revisiting that may offer more clarity than party preferences
basil 08.19.24 at 5:18 pm
Alex SL,
My sense is that “immigration” is a useful proxy for a bundle of diffident antipathies and anxieties including both nationalisms, racial bigotry and geopolitical tensions.
As Trump, Vance, Weidel all have foreign-born partners, the question may be worthy of deeper consideration.
qwerty 08.19.24 at 6:25 pm
“…I do not get it at any emotional level […] postdoc…”
Well, it appears that anti-immigrant sentiment is more typical for the socioeconomic strata where the word “postdoc” doesn’t exist. I suspect that life experiences of people in these strata are significantly different from yours.
John Q 08.19.24 at 8:06 pm
If you define “left” in a way that excludes 99 per cent of the population as a whole (for example, people who self-identify as Marxists) then you are likely to find very few leftists in any given subgroup, such as young men.
But given that, in non-political usage, “left” is the symmetrical counterpart of “right”, I prefer understandings that encompass a large part of the population.
Alex SL 08.19.24 at 10:08 pm
engels, qwerty,
As you can imagine, I am aware that there are people who live different lives than I do. But here is the thing – I do not hate those who want to stay put. Therefore I do not understand why so many of those who want to stay put feel the need to hate those of us who move around. Perhaps we should make it so that nobody gets to stay where they were born, if that automatically leads to many of them becoming hateful racists and nativists? (I do not mean that seriously, but it is the logical implication of what you wrote.)
To that can then be added the aforementioned absurdity of being anti-immigration in a country like the USA or Australia: okay then, how about you “go back to where you came from” and leave the country to its indigenous people? No? Funny that.
engels 08.19.24 at 10:26 pm
If it’s true by definition that a large population is left it doesn’t seem too surprising that it hasn’t shifted right.
Anyway I don’t say few Brits are left-wing but that Labour isn’t. There may be lots of left-wing Brits or hardly any: there’s no way of telling from this chart since the real only option they had was continuity austerity.
Alex SL 08.19.24 at 10:31 pm
John Q,
I understand that ‘left’ is relative to the times and means something different in 1840 than in 1930. But the fact that nominally Labour, socialist, and democratic parties are economically centre-right, and that there is no substantial leftist economic policy position anywhere in politics, is kind of a big deal if we hope to ever reverse the trend towards concentration of power in the hands of a few billionaires, the hollowing out of public services and infrastructure, and the precarity of employment.
That being said (regarding basil), I am actually convinced that voting Labour and equivalents generally indicates leftist positions. The problem is that many of their voters are in denial about how far to the right the party they are rusted onto has moved. I have previously mentioned here the ABC vote compass anecdote from 2022, when many Australian Labour supporters were upset and, crucially, disbelieving that the compass showed them aligned with the program of the Greens (“the ABC must be biased!”). Obama disappointed many of his supporters, and I assume the same will be true of Labour voters in the UK who may have higher hopes for a reversal of Tory policies than they will ever see realised with Starmer at the helm.
The problem is, where do you go in an effectively two party system if you are leftist but your choices are a centre-right party and a far-right party? In Germany’s proportional representation system, Schroeder permanently jettisoned about 10% of the SPD’s electoral votes with his decision to define his legacy by cutting unemployment benefits and pensions, best summarised as a gigantic middle finger towards the party’s voting base. But in a two-party system, you would still have to vote centre-right as the lesser evil and perhaps, as a rationalisation, delude yourself into thinking they are more leftist than they actually are.
engels 08.19.24 at 10:34 pm
Actually continuity Osborne
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24495275.george-osborne-rachel-reeves-mini-me/
MisterMr 08.19.24 at 11:26 pm
About the psychological aspects of hate and fear of migration, I suggest to read the book “Authoritarians” by Atlemeyer, who was the psychologyst who developed the RWA scale to measure right wing authoritarianism. It is a free pdf online and IMHO a pleasant read.
One of the factors that pushed towards authoritarianism is to have lived always or almost always in the same place; university tends to reduce authoritarianism in a big part because people move to go to university and therefore meet new people.
I think this explains quite easily why parties and movements that have political platforms likeable to high RWAs also tend to fear the different.
basil 08.20.24 at 12:49 am
I concede that the left is marginal to modern politics. My media may be biased but isn’t it clear that Labour’s sense is that the path to government demands a repudiation of left ideas, and an adoption of right wing policy preferences and priorities? Punch the minoritised, crush the left to win power. My sense is that this is so settled that journalists pitch questions with this understanding and the Labour spokespeople don’t push back. There’s not much talk of a big tent these days, and Labour call the enemy “the left”. They do not themselves imagine they are a party of the left.
But more directly, I can’t think of pronouncements more in line with those of the rioters than Starmer annd Ashworth in my previous link, and the Tamworth MP here below.
If we are to mark xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-dark skinned racism as signature characteristics of right wing politics, it follows that Labour and other parties that are prejudiced against minoritised groups are right-wing. So the proposal that there’s a shift to the right among young men isn’t defeated by the evidence of this constituency’s support for Labour.
The collapse in Labour’s vote total, the growth of the Green vote and all those independent MPs underline that a non-trivial fraction of the electorate understood Labour’s shift and abandoned ship. It isn’t farfetched to propose that many young men saw these institutional prejudices, liked them and chose to vote Labour.
Moz of Yarramulla 08.20.24 at 3:59 am
why the Lib Dem vote share is to the left of the Greens on the YouGov bar charts?
My best guess is that based on this article Labour voters rank LibDems after Labour, with Greens third and that’s the ranking order in the chart:
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/50091-how-do-britons-rank-the-main-parties
When you’re comparing parties between countries it’s common to talk of left and right ends of a unidimensional spectrum and that often gives nonsensical results if you take the “most right” party from one country and compare it to the “most right” party in another. The situations and policy mixes are just too different. Asking whether Der Linke is policy-compatible with the US Democratic Party isn’t even relevant, it’s not as if any voter gets to rank them in preference order or even choose between them.
I suspect there’s weird artifacts coming out of the spectrum forcing, so The Greens end up being left because they also have pro-social policies, but Golden Dawn get called right because they’re on the (far) right of Greek politics despite being authoritarian socialists according to US measures of such things. On that note, UK Labour have a distinctly Trumpian view of civil liberties and comparing parties internationally on a libertarian/authoritarian axis gets very confusing very fast. We have officially-Libertarian ACT in Aotearoa wanting smaller government and more freedom but also more prisons and wider police powers, for example.
So when we say that “young men in the UK voting under FPP are less likely to support anti-immigration, pro-prison left parties” and this means something, I am not sure what exactly it means. Especially when much of the difference comes from a strong gender bias in the Green Party vote despite most of the UK not being able to meaningfully vote for that party. There’s a combination of strategic voting where there’s a winnable green candidate and gesture politics in where wasted votes go that makes actual voting preferences largely irrelevant.
Mind you, even in countries with better systems there’s often a significant gap between policy preferences and voting behaviour, so just knowing preferences isn’t a guide either. Like the woman who famously voted for Brexit because she didn’t like Eurovision.
John Q 08.20.24 at 6:41 am
So, spelling it out really slowly: the topic of the post is not whether various historically social democratic, liberal, or green parties meet some commenter’s definition of “left”, it’s whether young men have shifted to the right in their voting behaviour relative to the voting population as a whole. The answer is that they haven’t, while young women have moved to the left (again relative to the population) in lots of places.
Tm 08.21.24 at 7:51 am
Alex: “that there is no substantial leftist economic policy position anywhere in politics”
But haven’t you heard that Harris and Walz are C-o-m-m-u-n-i-s-t-s?
Ok weak joke. But the fascists freaking out about free school lunch and such do have a point. These are by any reasonable definition leftist economic policy positions, even if they aren’t revolutionary in any shape or form. If you disagree, up to you to define what you condiser leftist economic policy.
engels 08.21.24 at 6:37 pm
Oh
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/20/rachel-reeves-planning-to-raise-taxes-and-cut-spending-in-october-budget
KT2 08.22.24 at 2:55 am
JQ; “However, the evidence suggests that young women have moved left while young men have, on average, not moved much at all.”
Brookings. Surveys, artilces, links in text.
“The growing gender gap among young people”
Elaine Kamarck and Jordan Muchnick
May 23, 2024
[Brief]
– “In politics, we are seeing a gender gap amongst today’s youngest voters—aged 18 to 29—with young women being significantly more Democratic in their political leanings than young men.
“Young women have become significantly more liberal and embraced “anti-patriarchal” values over the last decade, while young men have stayed relatively the same.
“Young men increasingly feel as though they have been experiencing discrimination over the past four years.
…
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-growing-gender-gap-among-young-people/
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