The cross : How do families vote? Do children vote like their parents?
Olivier Galland: Yes, there is a transmission of political preferences in families. Children are influenced by their parents, but there is nothing automatic. If 100% of children voted like their parents, there would never be any evolution in votes. They can also rebel and take the opposite view. As they grow up, they gain independence and the peer group can take precedence over the fathers’ group.
And then there are sometimes generational movements which make one generation stand out politically or in terms of values from previous ones. But there must be a historical upheaval, major changes, like in 1914, in 1940 or in 1968.
Since 1968, we have tended to think that young people vote left. Is this the case?
O. G. : Yes, young people vote, on average, more to the left than other age groups. But this has been a little less true since the 1990s. In 1995, Jacques Chirac did very well among young people, with the theme of social division. And the National Front began to seduce this electorate.
In reality, the first party of young people is abstention. In 2021, with my colleague Marc Lazar, we conducted a large study among a representative sample of 8,000 young people aged 18 to 24, which showed the political disaffiliation of young people: 55% did not recognize themselves as close to any party, either because they did not want to be, or because they did not consider themselves competent enough to have an opinion. It is this movement of political disaffiliation that is confirmed from election to election.
So why do we have the image of youth on the left?
O. G.: What maintains this image is the fact that the most educated part of the youth has shifted very strongly to the left, even to the extreme left. And since it has greater media visibility, because these are young people who express themselves, who demonstrate – we saw this again recently at Sciences Po – we tend to think that it represents all of the youth.
Left-wing ideals are all the more easily adhered to when one is assured of one’s social position due to one’s good studies. Young people who have a CAP or even a BTS think first of employment, housing, income. This does not prevent them from having ideals, but they have more pragmatic aspirations. A recent study on young RN voters shows that they are rather poorly educated and identify more with the personality of Jordan Bardella than with his ideological or political orientations.
Does voting change with age?
O. G. : This is a classic question in sociology: are the opinions we have at 20 linked to an age effect or a generation effect and, when we get older, do they evolve to join those older people? If we want to respond rigorously, we need to have surveys repeated over time which make it possible to neutralize the generation effect, but it is difficult.
I would say yes, despite everything, opinions evolve with age. If you are a revolutionary at 20, you risk being less so at 40 or 50, when you will have acquired a status, founded a family, built up a small estate and occupied a social and professional role associated with certain responsibilities… All this means that you are more integrated into society and that you must adopt a certain number of attitudes that are a little more conformist than those of young people who have no commitment and are totally free to their opinions. But, there again, there is nothing automatic. Some people can be very left-wing at 20 and remain so all their lives.
Find, as soon as they are officially published, the results of the 1st round of the 2024 legislative elections municipality by municipality.
