"OK, Boomer": How Cable News Turned Senior Citizens into Political Influencers

• In Event: The Effects of News and Ads on Participation

Abstract

Age has well-known impacts on many types of political participation in the United States, but very little work has examined the role of age in interpersonal political persuasion attempts. For the latter half of the 20th Century, age had a negative relationship with attempts to influence someone else’s vote choice. This is in contrast to many other forms of participation, such as voting, that have a known positive life-cycle trend. However, in the mid-2000’s this relationship changed, and older people are now more likely than their younger counterparts to report trying to influence someone else’s vote. Using the repeated cross-sectional data of the American National Election Studies, I first examine whether the observed age effect is due to life-cycle, generational, or period effects. I find evidence for a period effect that has a particular impact on older members of the Silent and Boomer generations. I then propose and test a hypothesized explanation for the period effect. Using panel data from the 2008 Online National Annenberg Election Survey, I find that viewing additional ideological cable TV programming (Fox News versus MSNBC) is positively related to reporting trying to persuade other people. This is a within-subjects effect, which does not extend to other networks of television news programs. This explanation is consistent with the timeline of changes to the news media landscape and the demographics of news consumers, and particularly the rise and ideological shift of Fox News and MSNBC in the mid-2000s. The interaction of interpersonal political persuasion with age may be a fundamental piece of the puzzle regarding increased polarization in contemporary American politics.

Author

• Lisa P. Argyle, Brigham Young University