Concern about Inequality, Support for government intervention, and Leftist voting. Age differences in attitudes and political behaviour (ESS, 2002-2020).

Modernization theory predicts that younger and well-educated age groups will be more supportive of (gender) equality, multiculturalism and quality of life issues. Survey research tends to support this hypothesis. Simultaneously, however, it can be observed that across Western Europe there seems to be a process of welfare state retrenchment. Social democratic and socialist parties, who traditionally have been staunch defenders of the welfare states, have suffered severe electoral loss. The net result is that inequality indicators in Europe tend to be on the rise, and the main goal of this paper is to investigate how this apparent contradiction could be explained. In trying to explain this puzzle, we elaborate on the concept of ‘stand-by citizen’, or ‘do-it-yourself citizen’, as it was developed in the writings of Erik Amna and colleagues. The key element in these writings is that especially younger age groups are less inclined to trust government institutions to achieve political goals. This leads to various forms of unconventional protest, do-it-yourself activism, local engagement or political consumerism. While these trends have been well-documented, they have not been applied yet to traditional left-right political issues of redistribution and inequality. While other political goals can be achieved even when circumventing political institutions, redistribution usually will require strong state intervention, by means of social expenditure and/or progressive tax policies. Following the logic of Hetherington, our working hypothesis is that when there is less trust in the capability of political institutions to achieve these goals, citizens (and in this case younger citizens) will not be inclined to support the goal of reaching more redistribution in society by means of government intervention. Our analysis is based on the data for the first 10 ESS waves (2002-2020), where, following our working hypothesis, we would expect that expressed concern about inequality in society, and support for more government information would be growing apart, especially among younger age groups. We can elaborate this analysis, by a more detailed analysis of the 2018 ‘Social Justice’ module of the 9th ESS round, including numerous question on various indicators for inequality and justice, a module that thus far has hardly been used in political science research. We again turn to the full 2002-2020 dataset to investigate the consequences for electoral behaviour: to what extent do concern about inequality and support for government intervention lead to a vote for socialist, social democratic of left populist political parties? In line with previous research on the persistence of the left-right ideological cleavage, we do expect that this relation will remain strongly present among older age groups, but will be weaker among age groups. For the moment these are self-evidently only hypotheses, but they do allow us to investigate the relation between trends toward more egalitarianism among younger age groups, and the observed trend toward a retrenchment of the welfare state.