Youthquake Revisited: Explaining Voting Behaviour of Young People by their Risk-Seeking Attitude

Many recent political events were found to be decided by an unforeseen political mobilization of youths – a Youthquake. However, the political preferences of young voters are far from being uniform. Disproportionate support among youths elevated to power heterogeneous political forces ranging from the leftist Podemos in Spain, through Macron’s socially liberal En Marche in France, nationally-conservative Freedom Party and the People's Party in Austria, to far-right True Finns and Swedish Democrats in the Nordics. We explain these puzzling ideological preferences of young people by their higher risk-seeking tendency – young people are more likely to support parties with a lower probability of gaining representation (due to their newness, small size, or position on the edges of the political spectrum) and influencing post-electoral politics. While the risk-seeking attribute remains constant, a ‘risky’ vote is dependent on the political context of a given country and therefore it can be materialized as a wide range of ideological alternatives. This theoretical proposition finds strong empirical support in two tests: A cross-national examination using multilevel models estimated on 62,201 voters from 77 election surveys conducted between 1996 and 2016 in 26 countries included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), and a closer robustness-check on the 1994 Dutch Election Study, which includes a suitable question inquiring respondents about their opinion about voting for small parties. Given the consistently strong empirical support robust towards various model specifications, the research concludes that risk-seeking attitudes constitute an important element in young people’s voting behaviour which holds across time and contexts.