Growing apart: How cohort, gender, and education shape the support for the New Left and the Populist Right

Recently, the widening gender gap in voting has attracted public and academic attention. In particular, younger women and younger men tend to vote for different parties. As our own research shows, this gap is even wider when we differentiate between women and men with different levels of education in an age-cohort-period analysis. Highly educated young women support the New Left in large numbers, while men with low and medium levels of education are among the strongest supporters of the Populist Radical Right. In this paper we take a closer look at these patterns in Germany. Using both cross-sectional and panel data, we analyze long- term trends in party voting, voting intentions and party identification over a period of 40 years. We focus on the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland and the Green and the Left Party, which are most clearly associated with the developing universalism/particularism divide in Western Europe. The results confirm the gender- education gap in support for New Left and New Right parties among the youngest cohorts, while older cohorts remain more attached to center-right and center-left parties.