Age Based Conflict: Evidence for the US Congressional Elections

• In Event: The Politics of Aging

Abstract

Western societies are growing older, but when does aging become a salient dimension in political competition? This paper provides a theoretical account and novel empirical tests on politicians’ incentives to mobilize the issue of ageing during electoral campaigns. We assemble a novel dataset of the universe of tweets posted by candidates running for the US Congress in 2020 and use natural language processing techniques to estimate the prevalence of age-based language. We find a strong correlation between age structure, specifically a district's deviation from age-group parity, and candidates' supply of age-based appeals. We then exploit the staggered timing of Fridays for Future protests as an external shock to the salience of the issue of ageing and show that the protests increase politicians’ appeals to age groups only when the age structure is not too skewed towards a specific age group. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the strategic considerations that prompt politicians to incorporate aging into their political discourse, shedding light on the dynamics of issue salience in contemporary electoral campaigns.

Authors

• Luca Bellodi, Stanford University

• Catherine E. De Vries, Bocconi University