Abstract
In recent decades, and especially since the economic crisis, young people have been finding it more difficult to maintain or exceed the living standards of their parents. As a result, they increasingly expect socioeconomic downward mobility. We study the influence of such a pessimistic view on political attitudes, assuming that it is not so much young adults’ current economic status, but rather their anxiety concerning a prospective socioeconomic decline that affects their ideological positions. Drawing on data from a survey among young adults aged 18–35 in eleven European countries, we explore to what extent expected intergenerational downward mobility correlates with right-wing and left-wing self-placement. We find that young adults who expect to do worse than their parents in the future are indeed more likely to locate themselves at the extreme ends of the ideological scale.
Highlights
The promise of economic well-being achieved through meritocratic means lies at the very heart of Western liberal economies
Motivated by the growing anxiety about the future of the young generation in the wake of the economic crisis, we analyzed how expectations concerning downward intergenerational socioeconomic mobility affect the political attitudes of young adults
Based on previous research that offers evidence for both a rightward and a leftward effect of economic insecurity and anxiety about the future, as well as the premises of prospect theory, which suggests that pessimistic expectations might result in more radical political attitudes and behavior, we tested whether there was a bidirectional effect of expected downward mobility on left–right self-placement
Summary
The promise of economic well-being achieved through meritocratic means lies at the very heart of Western liberal economies. The main independent variable, expected intergenerational socioeconomic downward mobility, was measured based on a survey question retrieved from the 2011 German Socio-Economic Panel (Schöneck et al 2011), worded as follows: “Thinking about how your standard of living will be like in the future, how does it compare to how your parents are doing today?” The item was measured on a 5-point scale with answer categories running from “much worse than my parents” to “much better than my parents.”
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