Does a politician’s age matter to voters?

Not really, a new study from the University of Colorado Boulder found. 

Damon C. Roberts, a doctoral candidate at CU, noticed that many of the country’s political leaders had been getting senior citizen discounts for years — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is 82, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is 80, and President Joe Biden is 79. Roberts and Jennifer Wolak, a political science professor at Michigan State University, asked: How does agism impact ballots on Election Day?

“We had been wanting to study underrepresentation of demographics in politics and knew that age had not been studied as much as race or gender,” he said.

He and Wolak looked at datasets tracking the attitudes of American voters in congressional districts around the country from 2006 to 2020.

Young voters do hold a slight bias against older politicians, the research team found. Eighteen-year-olds generally approve of the job performance of their roughly 30-year-old representatives about 60% of the time, but only 54% of the time when representatives reach 80.

Researchers also found that people tend to see younger candidates as less experienced, less qualified and less conservative than older candidates.

To investigate whether this agism actually affects voter decisions, Roberts and Wolak ran a simulation with roughly 1,000 voters online. The voters were provided a vignette starring a hypothetical candidate running for state legislator. In some cases, the candidate was a 23-year-old politician. In others, the candidate was 50 or 77 years old. The respondents reported equal levels of support, regardless of the age of the fictional candidate.

“We found that there is penalization for age when politicians are representing voters in Congress. But once a party picks a candidate, voters will fall in line to support them regardless of age,” Roberts said.

Roberts believes that this is the result of political polarization and party support. Voters care more about putting their political party in office than the age of the candidates they are voting for.

Parties also put resources behind candidates they think are going to do better, which overrides the age biases of voters.

“If there is a younger (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) type candidate and an older candidate in a primary election, younger candidates are a lot more ideologically extreme on both sides. So the party often provides resources and support to people who have more experience, who tend to be older candidates,” Roberts said.

The study has implications for the future of Washington as the younger generation begins voting.

“I can see this becoming a bigger issue with climate change and mass shootings. We will see youth being much stronger advocates,” Roberts said.