Delayed Maturation and Conservative Voting

In Britain, age has traditionally been a strong predictor of vote choice, with older people much more likely to vote for the Conservatives and younger people much more likely to vote for Labour or the Liberal Democrats. Remarkably, this age gap has increased consistently over the last three general elections and was also well reflected in the 2016 EU membership referendum, with younger voters much more likely to support Remain over Leave – leading scholars and polling agencies alike to note that age appears to have become the new distinctive cleavage in Britain’s voting behaviour. The growing relevance of age as a predictor of voting has thus been the object of much research in recent years. An overlooked aspect in this literature concerns the changing influence of life-cycle effects on voting. Things such as completing education, getting married, having a child, starting a full-time job, or buying a house inevitably impact individuals’ structural position in society, potentially also driving political attitudes. The sum-total of life-cycle events ever experienced only ever increases with age, but everyone experiences these events at different rates. The delayed maturation thesis thus maintains that, in some sense, 30-year olds in the UK are now “younger” than 30-year olds from previous generations because they have undergone fewer life-cycle events. This has been found to explain decreased youth turnout (e.g. Smets 2016), and may also explain the widening age-gap in party choice. As the events marking the transition into adulthood, or 'maturation', are increasingly rare across young voters, it may be that their decreased likelihood to support the Conservative party is due to a lack of (economic) incentives for doing so. This paper tests this hypothesis using data from the British Election Study (1964-2019). Results show that higher ‘maturation’ levels have a large impact on voting for the Conservative party, and this effect is particularly strong for the Millennial generation. For this cohort, each increase on the ‘maturation index’ results in a 4.3% increase in their chances of voting Conservative. This provides evidence that if certain life stages were achieved earlier in life, the Conservative vote-share across the youth would be significantly higher.