Age-period-cohort analyses
From my mini-article invited by the American Journal of Sociology:
I first read about the age-period-cohort problem many years ago, but I didn’t think seriously about it until recently, when I saw some survey results showing party identification by age:
Americans in their forties are the most Republican group, a pattern that I would attribute to this group coming of political age during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Older Americans might be more likely to associate the Republicans with Richard Nixon and Watergate, whereas younger voters associate the Democrats with Bill Clinton and the Republicans with George W. Bush. Thus can the difference in popularity of successive presidents propagate into systematic patterns of political attitudes by age.
But do I really have the evidence to make this claim? Implicitly I am following a model in which voters lock in their party identification early, perhaps between the ages of 15 and 25, and then stay with this (perhaps with small changes) throughout their lives. How could we test this model? . . .
I should warn you, though, I don’t have any answers (yet)!
Comments
It is probably true that your highest earning potential is in your forties, which might also incline voters towards the Republican party. If that were so, the correlation between age and party identification should hold over time. Do you know if that is so?
Posted by: Sabina's Hat | July 13, 2008 09:57 PM
I am not sure what you mean by an "answer" to this problem. From what I understand this is a fundamental problem of identification. Period=Cohort+Age
So we can never identify each of the three effects separately. All you have done in this post is give another interesting example of where this is a very frustrating problem. Am I missing something?
Posted by: anon | July 14, 2008 11:04 AM
Sabina,
I thought people made more money in their fifties. In any case, your point is exactly why I want to analyze cross-sections taken at other times as well.
Anon,
Read the whole article.
Posted by: Andrew![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.themonkeycage.org/nav-commenters.gif)
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July 14, 2008 03:23 PM
The identification problem is worse than anon says.
So, partisanship can be a generational effect, as Abramson used to argue. But it could also change over the lifecycle, as Converse argued.
And then, there may be periods when the public is more Republican or more Democratic.
But the real problem is that these three can interact.
So maybe period effects influence some cohorts more (e.g. the young) or some generations less (e.g. the Reagan generation may be immune to the Obama effects).
And some generations may be especially distinctive at certain stages of the life cycle (e.g. Reagan generation is now at the age where they are paying property taxes and saving for college).
Some papers have sought to simplify this by making various assumptions, thereby allowing estimation. There was one in POQ a couple of years ago about attitudes toward birth control, as I recall.
Posted by: Clyde Wilcox | July 14, 2008 08:58 PM