Issue voting amongst the youngest cohort of voters: Evidence from Austria

Lowering the voting age to 16 has raised lots of scholarly debate in political science in the last few years. Most of the research conducted so far focuses on the effect voting at 16 has on voter turnout. Thereby, research has found that political interest and political knowledge are important indicators in understanding the motivations of these young citizens to turn out to vote. Meanwhile, we do not yet fully know what drives the party choices of this youngest cohort of voters. In this paper, we will analyze the effect young voters’ issue attitudes have on their electoral decisions. In particular, we will focus on the degree to which issue competence can influence their vote choice. According to the concept of issue ownership, voter perceptions of party competence on specific issues can, to a large extent, determine their party choice. However, party competence develops over time and reflects how parties compete on certain issues. Furthermore, issue competence should only influence electoral behavior if the issue in question is salient to the voter. These assumptions might be difficult to meet for young voters as for one they have not yet been fully integrated into the political discourse and therefore lack experience on parties’ issue competence and might not have established which issues are salient to them. For another, young voters might possess a less developed party identification compared to older cohorts, leading us to assume that young voters’ party choices are more likely to be based on their issue perceptions. In this paper, we test these theoretical concepts analyzing the voting behavior of the youngest cohort of voters. If their vote decisions are strongly driven by issue motivation we have first indications that young voters are able to vote according to their issue perceptions and preferences. Critics of lowering the voting age might then have to reconsider their arguments. For our analyses we rely on data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) which has oversampled the cohort of youngest voters. A comparison to older cohorts will allow us to draw conclusions to which extent issue voting applies to the youngest cohort.