Does cohort size matter? Assessing the effect of youth cohort size and peer influence on young people’s electoral participation

ABSTRACT

Do the relative numbers of young people in the adult population affect their extent of participation in electoral politics? The answer to this question remains elusive in both the theoretical and empirical literature on youth political participation. In this study, we test the hypothesis that young people’s cohort size has a significant effect on their electoral participation. Using individual level data from the World Values Survey and country level data from the United Nations Population Division, we ran a series of multinomial logistic regression analyses with 29 democratic countries. The findings show that youth cohort size exerts a negative effect on young people’s electoral participation. The study finds this effect to be stronger for young people whose main source of information are their peers. The results of this study represent a major step towards improving our understanding of the effect of cohort size on cohort political behaviour; a topic so far neglected within the literature on youth political participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth cohort size
• voting
• peer influence
• youth bulge
• youth political participation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Accessed 9 Nov, 2020.

2 In all countries, the voting age is 18.

3 Accessed: 9 Nov, 2020.

4 For a discussion on the proper sample size on level-2 in logit models see Bryan and Jenkins (2016) and Maas and Hox (2004).

5 Due to the low number of observations on the country-level, and with the country dummies in the model, we could not calculate the margins. To produce the margins plot we removed the main effect for YCS from Model 2. The discussion of this problem is available in the Online Appendix.