Electoral Studies 33 (2014) 1–6
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Electoral Studies
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud
Editorial
Beyond political socialization: New approaches to age, period, cohort
analysis
Keywords
Cohort analysis
Empirical methods
Political behavior
Research on political socialization has accumulated a
large number of insights about how voters acquire their
political attitudes. Yet for all that, we know relatively little
about when and why socialization experiences lead to
generational differences in how citizens perceive and
evaluate politics or behave in the political arena. Recog-
nizing that societies are constantly changing, it is important
to identify generational features of the electorate both to
understand the present and to make predictions for the
future. Ryder’s (1965) seminal article on “the cohort as a
concept in the study of social change” was a plea to think
about the transformation of society in such a way by taking
into account cohort changes and replacements. He
famously noted that “society persists despite the mortality
of its individual members, through processes of de-
mographic metabolism and particularly the annual infusion
of birth cohorts (.). Successive cohorts are differentiated
by the changing content of formal education, by peer-group
socialization, and by idiosyncratic historical experience”
(Ryder, 1965: 843). Based on the importance to empha-
sizing cohorts he further added that “since cohorts are used
to achieve structural transformation and since they mani-
fest its consequences in characteristic ways, it is proposed
that research be designed to capitalize on the congruence of
social change and cohort identification” (Ryder, 1965: 843).
Motivated by Ryder’s message, and drawing on a
collection of six papers in Electoral Studies symposium
“generational differences in electoral behavior”, Wouter
van der Brug and Sylvia Kritzinger not surprisingly
conclude that ”if one wants to understand political
changes, one must not overlook generational differences”
(2012: 248). However, despite the recognition accorded
this point, studies of the make-up of political generations
are still scarce. A major reason is the methodological
challenge posed by questions involving generational turn-
over and replacement. Some of the papers in the recent
Electoral Studies collection explicitly address these
0261-3794/$ – see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2013.06.012
problems (Konzelmann et al., 2012; Bhatti and Hansen,
2012), while others acknowledge the limitations their
study might have “in distinguishing life-cycle and genera-
tional effects” (Walczak et al., 2012: 282). The aim of the
collection of papers in our follow-up symposium is to
discuss diverse methodological approaches that address
the problems that arise from such empirical analyses and
provide solutions for overcoming them.2
This special issue hence brings together scholars in the
field of political socialization and cohort analysis in an
effort to explicate and advance various statistical ap-
proaches with reference to a variety of data. The wide
availability of panel studies and repeated cross-section
surveys, often covering several decades, as well as impor-
tant methodological advances which have been made in
demography, statistics, and sociology, have the potential to
promote the importance of age, period, and cohort (APC)
analyses and increase our confidence in their results. This
paper symposium therefore focuses on new methods of
identifying political generations and, more generally, of
observing APC effects, which are applied to the area of
political behavior and attitudes. The emphasis therefore is
on the methods used in order to give political scientists
interested in conducting theoretically interesting APC an-
alyses and understanding of how such investigations can
and should be conducted. The focus lies especially on
cohort effects, as studies investigating these are still scarce
in the political science literature or are often too tenuous to
draw meaningful conclusions. To set the stage for the ar-
ticles in this special issue, this introduction provides an
overview of APC analysis in general.
1. Defining age, period, and cohort effects
Research into the question of why an individual holds
specific attitudes or behaves in a certain way might hold
three different – but highly-related – factors accountable:
aging, enduring intercohort experiences, and time (Yang
and Land, 2013). Firstly, we might attribute differences in
2
For an excellent overview of cohort analysis and methods used in to
estimate age, period, and cohort effects, see also Yang and Land, 2013.
2 Editorial / Electoral Studies 33 (2014) 1–6
attitudes or behavior to age. Empirical studies often confirm
that young and old citizens differ considerably in their po-
litical outlook. So-called age effects refer to changes that are
associated with basic biological processes or progression
through the life-cycle as social roles change with age or as
the accumulation of social experience increases. These
aging, or life-cycle effects, are usually indexed simply by an
individual’s age, though sometimes by a measure of their
“place in the life-cycle” (e.g., parent of young children;
retired person).3 Secondly, observed attitudes or behavior
might be thought of as a function of the current political,
economic, or societal situation and idiosyncratic events that
produce fluctuations over time and affect all age groups
simultaneously. These period effects are usually measured
by the current time t, for example, the year of a survey.
Thirdly, citizens might differ in their political attitudes
because of different socialization experiences which man-
ifest themselves in their belief systems. The resulting cohort
effects or, as they are sometimes called, generational effects
are defined as “enduring intercohort distinctions that are
attributable to the common ‘imprinting’ of cohort mem-
bers. With regard to attitudinal dependent variables,
generational effects are often presumed to be the result of
cohort members having shared similar socializing experi-
ences, especially during late adolescence and early adult-
hood” (Markus, 1983: 718; cf. Mannheim, [1928] 1952;
Ryder, 1965). This influential phase in an individual’s life-
cycle is often labeled the formative or impressionable years.
A cohort is very generally defined as a “number of in-
dividuals who have some characteristics in common”
(Glenn, 2005: 2) or that “share experiences” (Fienberg and
Mason, 1985: 51). Ryder (1965: 845) describes a cohort as
“an aggregate of individuals” which has “a distinctive
composition and character reflecting the circumstances of
its unique origination and history.” Cohorts are most often
operationalized by people’s birth years, but they are
sometimes divided into equal time periods – such as five-
year intervals – where the span of years for each cohort
may be dictated by theoretical concerns or by data con-
straints. But cohorts may also be defined with reference to
any of a number of variables (e.g., persons who came of age
at the same time or individuals who finished high school in
a particular year).4
The term cohort analysis is usually used to describe the
systematic comparison of two or more cohorts in regard to
one dependent variable or a set of related dependent var-
iables (Glenn, 2005: 3). The studies presented in this spe-
cial issue follow this logic. Fig. 1 illustrates a simple cohort
analysis by plotting annual percentages opposing interra-
cial marriage for four different birth cohorts from the
3
Biological processes and place in the life-cycle may not coincide; one
could, for example, be the mother of an elementary school child in one’s
mid-20s or in one’s mid-40s or beyond. In practice, however, it is rare that
a sharp distinction is made between the two concepts.
4
The terms ‘cohort’ and ‘generation’ are often used interchangeably,
though generations are usually thought of as connected by some shared
historical experience such as having grown up during the Great
Depression (Elder, 1974). The boundaries of such events are often
imprecise; nevertheless, for purposes of analysis, generations are often
operationalized in terms of specific birth years.
United States between 1972 and 2002.5 The idea of such an
analysis is to explore whether these cohorts differ in their
attitudes and, typically, whether the differences can be
attributed to events or attitudes characteristic of the time at
which each cohort matured. Here it would seem relatively
straightforward. The oldest cohort – born before 1930 –
was socialized in a highly racially divided country, whereas
the cohort born after 1970 grew up after the turbulent
times of the Civil Rights Movements of the 1950s and
1960s, when legal and quasi-legal racial discrimination was
abolished.6 The changing historical legacies during the
formative years of these four cohorts are assumed to have
shaped racial attitudes.
According to Fig. 1, the cohort born before 1930
consistently exhibits the highest anti-miscegenation atti-
tudes, with as many as 50 percent opposing interracial
marriage in the mid-1970s. Each cohort born and socialized
later is less against interracial marriages.7 This simple
graph reveals three findings. Firstly, we observe a period
effect, as all cohorts seem to become less and less racially
intolerant over time. Secondly, the declining, more-or-less
parallel lines of each cohort confirm that clear differences
exist regarding racial attitudes depending on the time a
respondent was born and hence socialized. Thirdly, we note
what some people call generational replacement. That is, the
thick solid line, which plots the overall trend in anti-racial
statements, is not just declining at the same rate as, for
example, the cohort born before 1930, but more sharply.
Note that after the mid-1990s, the overall trend line is
lower than the average attitude among the cohort born in
1930–1950. The explanation for this observation is simply
that the weight of the ‘older’ cohorts in the overall popu-
lation is decreasing as members of these two groups are
fewer in number, as they are getting older and eventually
dying. Similarly, the graph shows how new cohorts are
entering the population, with the post-1970 cohort first
included in the General Social Survey in 1989.
Overall, it is assumed that cohort analysis or APC anal-
ysis in general – as illustrated here – is a method for
studying longitudinal patterns of change.
2. Age, period, and cohort analysis in political science
Research on age, period, and cohort effects is not new in
political science. However, the attention is often on only one
of the three. The interest in cohorts evolves mainly around
the question of the ‘making of a generation’ side of it,
5
The question wording was as follows: “Do you think there should be
laws against marriages between Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans and
Whites? – Yes or No.” Fig. 1 plots the percentages agreeing with this
statement. The data was taken from the U.S. General Social Survey, which
is available annually or bi-annually since 1972. The question was not
included after 2002.
6
Among the most important actions for abolishing state-approved
discrimination in public life were ratification of the 24thAmendment to
the U.S. Constitution (outlawing poll taxes) and passage of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
7
The small and initially inconsistent difference between the 1951–
1970 and the post-1970 cohorts is likely due to a declining cohort effect
but may also be affected by small numbers of respondents when the
youngest cohort first entered the analysis.
 Editorial / Electoral Studies 33 (2014) 1–6 3

60
Anti- Interracial Marriage (in %)
40
Born<1930

20
1930-1950
All
1951-1970
Born>1970
0

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Survey year

Fig. 1. Cohort differences regarding interracial marriage.

focusing on political socialization. The classic definition of of socialization as a process of individual development and
political socialization was established by Hyman (1959: 25) learning. However, even studies that confirmed that polit-
as an individual’s “learning of social patterns corresponding ical learning extends well beyond childhood acknowledged
to his societal position as mediated through various agencies that young adults change more rapidly than older adults
of society.” Since then, a focus on learning has produced a (Jennings and Niemi, 1981; Alwin and Krosnick, 1991;
large volume of research on the formation of political atti- Jennings et al., 1989, 2009; Niemi and Jennings, 1991). As
tudes and behavior (Adelson and O’Neil, 1966; Easton and a consequence, life-cycle and aging effects became more
Dennis, 1969; Jennings and Niemi, 1974, 1981; Niemi and and more the center of attention.
Junn, 1998; Sears and Valentino, 1997; Campbell, 2006; Moreover, the research focuses also shifted to possible
Zuckerman et al., 2007; Sherrod et al., 2010). period effects that alter political attitudes. Party identifi-
An important implication of the research on political cation is a central concept in the study of socialization,
socialization is the assumption that it produces “relatively including both life-cycle and period effects, and analyses of
enduring orientations toward politics in general” partisanship served as the main battlefield for the different
(Merelman, 1986: 279; emphasis added). In the beginning proponents. Some scholars thought of partisanship less as
of the scientific analysis of the formation of political ideas, an identity – being stable over the life-cycle – and more of
the focus was mainly on young children, as it was assumed, an attitude that comes about as a function of informed
more or less unquestioningly, that political attitudes were reactions to the performance of governments and opposi-
determined very early in life (cf. Easton and Dennis, 1969). tion parties on a number of policy areas, most notably the
Often it was assumed that what was learned prior to economy (Ordeshook, 1976; Fiorina, 1981; Page and Jones,
adulthood remained unchanged in later life.8 It was also 1979; Franklin and Jackson, 1983; MacKuen et al., 1989).
frequently believed that what is learned earliest in life is As governments and economic good times are never per-
most important, as it served as an unchanging value basis manent, an individual’s affiliation with a political party is
for later attitudes (Niemi and Hepburn, 1995). always subject to ‘rational updating’.9 Hence this research
However, as it became evident that political ideas that tries to uncover how the nature of the current time affects
develop during childhood are revised due to college the direction and strength of certain political attitudes,
experience and general maturation (Searing et al., 1973), including ones so seemingly basic as partisanship.10
the scientific discussion shifted the research focus away Scientific debates about age and period effects as well as
from early political learning to more in-depth studies of more broadly on the origins of political attitudes and
aging. Most especially, Marsh’s (1971) critique of earlier behavior are often unconnected to one another. Cohort
studies challenged the assumption that “adult opinions are effects have been discussed rather sporadically, even
in large part the end product of political socialization” though it was acknowledged that it is important to take
(1971: 455). He noted that extensive carryover into adult-
hood may apply only to important personality variables,
whereas the influence of early socialization on political
attitudes remained uncertain. The research shifted
accordingly from attitude stability to the conceptualization 9
One-time events and suddenly changing circumstances can also exert
relatively uniform effects on citizens, as in the mid-1960s when parti-
sanship suddenly weakened in the U.S. and as African-Americans shifted
their partisanship from Republic to Democratic (Abramson, 1975).
8 10
There was, initially, an empirical basis for this belief in that analyses Of course researchers outside the United States have from early on
of recalled party identification suggested that partisanship, once formed, viewed partisanship as reacting strongly to current policy and party
rarely changed (Campbell et al., 1960, ch. 7). preferences. See especially the influential article by Thomassen (1976).
4 Editorial / Electoral Studies 33 (2014) 1–6
these into account as well.11 Conover (1991: 130), for
example, argued that life-cycle and cohort effects are
interwoven, as “people change in political orientations
throughout their life, (but) generations respond differently
to the same events.” Also Inglehart shows in his famous
studies on value change (Inglehart, 1977; Abramson and
Inglehart, 1995) that later learning must overcome the
inertia of pre-existing orientations. Jennings (1996: 249)
adds to the discussion by noting that “what each cohort
brings into political maturity has a good deal of continuity
and provides a certain degree of stability in terms of what
that cohort is likely to draw on as it moves through the rest
of the life-cycle.” But as Niemi and Sobieszek (1977: 228)
pointed out 20 years earlier, “sorting out the relative impact
of life-cycle, generational, and period effects will no doubt
prove to be extraordinarily complicated.”
3. The tenacious problem of age, period and cohort
analysis
The problem of sorting out age, period, and cohort ef-
fects is evident in Fig. 1, as our description of these results
fails to take into account a possible aging effect. This
shortcoming gets to the core of the problem of any APC
analysis. The difficulty in making claims about any of the
three factors, whether the focus is on cohort, age, or period
effects, is the requirement of accounting for all three
simultaneously. If we fail to do so, we cannot know whether
an observed attitude or behavior (Yijt) of an individual i
(i ¼ 1, ..., I) is because she belongs to a specific cohort j (Cj;
j ¼ 1, ..., J) or because of her age (Ait) or because of the current
time t (Pt; t ¼ 1, ..., T). This can be summarized as

diverse types of data (Harding, 2009: 1450). Firstly, aggre-
Yijt ¼ f Ait ; Cj ; Pt (1)
It is not possible to disentangle the effects of age, cohort,
and periods in this generalized linear model (1) without
some kind of restrictions on the function f (Mason and
Fienberg, 1985: 3; cf. Mason et al., 1973). The problem re-
sults from the linearly dependent relationship between age
and the birth cohort a respondent belongs to at any given
time t – assuming that all three effects are measured in the
same time units, for example, years – which is typically
expressed as
Cj ¼ Pt  Ait (2)
As can be seen from Eq. (2), the three effects cannot be
identified with survey data from one time point, since one
phenomenon would be completely determined by the
remaining two. For example, knowing that a survey
respondent who was interviewed in 2000 was 30 years old,
we can infer approximately when she was born or to which
birth cohort she belongs to. Or put differently, knowing that
11
Studies that explicitly focus on APC analysis: Baker (1978); Abramson
(1979); Claggett (1981); Markus (1983); Miller (1992); Tilley (2002) and
Tilley and Evans (2011) – partisanship; Klecka (1971); Prior (2010) –
political interest; Watts (1999); Lyons and Alexander (2000); Franklin
et al. (2004) – turnout/participation; Cutler and Kaufman (1975) – ide-
ology; Jennings (1996) – political knowledge; Jennings and Stoker (2004)
– civic engagement; Mishler and Rose (2007); Neundorf (2010); and
Mattes (2012) – democratic attitudes. This list is by no means exhaustive.
a respondent was born in 1970 when interviewed in 2000,
we can deduce that this person was about 30 years old at
the time of the interview. That is, once the values of any
two factors, such as cohort and period, are known, the
value of the third factor is completely determined. Hence,
model (1) is not identified.
To date, the suggested strategy for identification of APC
models has been to specify some set of restrictions on the
estimated age, period, and cohort parameters that allow the
model to be identified. Firstly, best known is the grouping of
birth years into five-year cohorts, which forces grouped
birth-years to have identical effects (Fienberg and Mason,
1979; Mason et al., 1973). Secondly, it is also possible to
remove one of either age, period, or cohort entirely on the
assumption that it does not matter at all (Converse, 1976,
chs. 2–3). Thirdly, one can examine higher order trans-
formations of age, period, or cohort, such as age squared
(Fienberg and Mason, 1985). Fourthly, one can use a ‘proxy’
variable approach that assumes the cohort or period effects
are proportional to certain measured variables (Rodgers,
1982; Heckman and Robb, 1985; O’Brien, 2000). Of course,
none of these approaches solves the underlying problem,
and none has proven entirely satisfactory (Glenn, 2005).
4. This symposium: new opportunities in age, period
and cohort analysis
Today’s much expanded data availability allows a
promising new range of statistical methods to conduct APC
analyses. Researchers today have the happy prospect of
using a broad range of data that is often freely available for
our purposes. APC analysis is typically conducted on one of
gated data containing means or counts of the outcome of
interest for various age groups at different time points can be
used. When such data is arranged in a period-by-age table,
cohort differences can be followed on the diagonals. Most
previous studies focus on such aggregated population-level
contingency tables for conventional multiple classification.
However, these descriptive methods do not allow one to
account for any factors other than age, period, and cohort.
Increasingly, however, individual-level data sets in the
form of a series of repeated cross-section sample surveys or
panel studies are available to political scientists. These create
both new opportunities and challenges to APC analysis. New
data availability and the development of innovative
methods offer new paths to study theoretically relevant age-
, cohort-, and period-related research questions. The articles
of this special issue cover several of these new methods.
The aim of this collection of eight papers is to introduce
diverse methodological approaches to illustrate the prob-
lems of APC analyses and propose possible solutions to
varied research questions. Some papers focus on identi-
fying cohort effects (Tilley and Evans, 2014; Pop-Eleches
and Tucker, 2014; Grasso, 2014), while others try to single
out factors that explain cohort differences (Dinas and
Stoker, 2014; Smets and Neundorf, 2014; Stegmueller,
2014). Still others emphasize the age-factor in their APC
analyses (Bartels and Jackman, 2014; Kroh, 2014).
More specifically, Tilley and Evans provide an example
how to combine different individual-level data sources
 Editorial / Electoral Studies 33 (2014) 1–6
(panel studies and repeated cross-sectional data) and
aggregated election results. Using the side-information of
these diverse sources makes it possible to estimate true age
and cohort effects. They apply their approach to the ques-
tion of whether support for the British Conservative Party is
driven by aging effects or generational replacement.
Bartels and Jackman employ their mathematical model of
political learning to partisanship, in this case in the US.
However, their focus lies on age-effects, estimating the crit-
ical years of heightened impact of period-specific effects or
historical shocks on a citizen’s party attachments. They show
that individuals of different ages attach different weights to
political events. Their paper is one of the first empirical tests
of the exact ages of the so-called formative years.
The idea of historical shocks is also utilized by the
design-based approach by Dinas and Stoker. Focusing on
cohort effects, they introduce the language of experiments
to APC analysis. The authors propose a method to test the
impact of the socialization environment (“treatment”) on
long-lasting attitudes. In order to test whether specific
treatments, such as changes in enfranchisement, affect fe-
male turnout propensities, Dinas and Stoker use control
groups (men, for one) to aid in the identification of cohort
effects while also accounting for age and period effects.
Using their approach, researchers have to consider who got
a historical “treatment” and who did not.
The idea to single out factors that account for cohort
differences is also discussed by Smets and Neundorf. Their
paper is proposing an approach that enables researchers to
test whether substantively interesting factors can account
for any observed cohort heterogeneity. For this the variance
of cohort differences in turnout propensities is modeled in a
multilevel structure. Stegmueller further uses this approach
and extends the cross-classified model by allowing random
effects (cohort and period) to be time-structured. Doing so,
his model links theoretical ideas about the nature of social
change, which is – in the absence of strong shocks – gradual
and evolutionary. By using time-structured priors for cohort
and time-period random effects, he explicitly models
dependence of new cohorts and periods on the past.
As mentioned above, a widely used approach in cohort
analysis is the categorization of the APC variables. The study
by Pop-Eleches and Tucker categorizes historical socializ-
ation periods in a meaningful way that identifies aging and
generational effects of experiences during Communism on
people’s democratic and economic attitudes. Grasso further
develops this approach by proposing non-parametric
methods for testing the validity of these pre-defined cate-
gories. This approach moreover allows one to assess the
functional form of the cohort effect, while at the same time
accounting for possible life-cycle and period influences.
Both papers discuss the problems arising from comparative
research due to limited data availability (for example, only a
few time points are covered by comparable data sources).
All the papers mentioned use repeated cross-sectional
surveys that often cover several decades. However, it is
further possible to use individual panel data, which allows
one to observe the same respondents belonging to different
generations over time as they age. Kroh uses such a panel
study that covers 27 years, applying growth curve
modeling. Using his approach it is possible to exchange age
5
as a function of life years to more meaningful variables that
measure age effect, as in his empirical example experience
and exposure with and to the political system.
In introducing these diverse methodological ap-
proaches, all papers use examples relevant in the field of
political behavior and attitudes, including political interest,
voter turnout, partisanship, and voting behavior.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Department of Politics and
International Relations as well as Nuffield College at the
University of Oxford and the Department of Political Sci-
ence at the University of Rochester for kindly funding a
workshop meeting to put this paper symposium together.
References
Abramson, P., Inglehart, R., 1995. Value Change in Global Perspective.
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Abramson, P., 1975. Generational Change in American Politics. Lexington
Books, Lexington, MA.
Abramson, P., 1979. Developing party identification: a further examina-
tion of life-cycle, generational, and period effects. American Journal of
Political Science 23 (1), 78–96.
Adelson, J., O’Neil, R., 1966. Growth of political ideas in adolescence: the
sense of community. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4
(3), 295–306.
Alwin, D.F., Krosnick, J.A., 1991. Aging, cohorts and the stability of socio-
political orientations over the life span. American Journal of Sociology
97 (1), 169–195.
Baker, K.L., 1978. Generational differences in the role of party identifica-
tion in German political behavior. American Journal of Political Sci-
ence 22 (1), 106–129.
Bartels, L., Jackman, S., 2014. A generational model of political learning.
Electoral Studies 33, 7–18.
Bhatti, Y., Hansen, K.M., 2012. The effect of generation and age on turnout
to the European Parliament – how turnout will continue to decline in
the future. Electoral Studies 31, 262–272.
van der Brug, W., Kritzinger, S., 2012. Generational differences in electoral
behaviour. Electoral Studies 31 (2), 245–249.
Campbell, A., Converse, P.E., Miller, W.E., Stokes, D.E., 1960. The American
Voter. Wiley, New York.
Campbell, D., 2006. Why We Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape
our Civic Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Claggett, W., 1981. Partisan acquisition versus partisan intensity: life-
cycle, generation and period effects, 1952–1976. American Journal
of Political Science 25 (2), 193–214.
Conover, P., 1991. Political socialization: where’s the politics?. In:
Crotty, W. (Ed.), Political Science: Looking to the Future, vol. 3
Northwestern University Press, Evanston, pp. 125–152.
Converse, P., 1976. The Dynamics of Party Support: Cohort-analyzing
Party Identification. Sage, Beverly Hills.
Cutler, S., Kaufman, R., 1975. Cohort changes in political attitudes: tolerance
of ideological nonconformity. Public Opinion Quarterly 39 (1), 69–81.
Dinas, E., Stoker, L., 2014. Age–period–cohort analysis: a design-based
approach. Electoral Studies 33, 28–40.
Easton, D., Dennis, J., 1969. Children in the Political System: Origins of
Political Legitimacy. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Elder, G., 1974. Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life
Experience. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Fienberg, S.E., Mason, W.M., 1979. Identification and estimation of age–
period–cohort models in the analysis of discrete archival data.
Sociological Methodology 10, 1–67.
Fienberg, S.E., Mason, W.M., 1985. Specification and implementation of
age, period, and cohort models. In: Mason, W.M., Fienberg, S.E. (Eds.),
Cohort Analysis in Social Research: Beyond the Identification Prob-
lem. Springer, New York, pp. 45–88.
Fiorina, M.P., 1981. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections.
Yale University Press, New Haven.
Franklin, C.H., Jackson, J.E., 1983. The dynamics of party identification.
American Political Science Review 77 (4), 957–973.
Franklin, M.N., Lyons, P., Marsh, M., 2004. Generational basis of turnout
decline in established democracies. Acta Politica 39 (2), 115–151.
6 Editorial / Electoral Studies 33 (2014) 1–6
Glenn, N.D., 2005. Cohort Analysis, second ed. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Grasso, M., 2014. Age, period and cohort analysis in a comparative
context: political generations and political participation repertoires in
Western Europe. Electoral Studies 33, 63–76.
Harding, D.J., 2009. Recent advances in age–period–cohort analysis. a
commentary on Dregan and Armstrong, and on Reither, Hauser and
Yang. Social Science & Medicine 69 (10), 1449–1451.
Heckman, J., Robb, R., 1985. Using longitudinal data to estimate age,
period, and cohort effects in earnings equations. In: Mason, W.M.,
Fienberg, S.E. (Eds.), Cohort Analysis in Social Research: Beyond the
Identification Problem. Springer, New York, pp. 137–150.
Hyman, H., 1959. Political Socialization: A Study in the Psychology of
Political Behavior. Free Press, Glencoe, IL.
Inglehart, R., 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political
Styles among Western Publics. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Jennings, M.K., Niemi, R.G., 1974. The Political Character of Adolescence.
Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Jennings, M.K., Niemi, R.G., 1981. Generations and Politics: A Panel Study of
Young Adults and Their Parents. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Jennings, M.K., Stoker, L., 2004. Social trust and civic engagement across
time and generations. Acta Politica 39 (4), 342–379.
Jennings, M.K., 1989. The crystallization of orientations. In: Jennings, M.K.,
van Deth, J., et al. (Eds.), Continuities in Political Action. de Gruyter,
Berlin and New York, pp. 313–348.
Jennings, M.K., Stoker, L., Bowers, J., 2009. Politics across generations:
family transmission reexamined. Journal of Politics 71 (3), 782–799.
Jennings, M.K., 1996. Political knowledge over time and across genera-
tions. Public Opinion Quarterly 60 (2), 228–252.
Klecka, W.R., 1971. Applying political generations to the study of political
behavior: a cohort analysis. Public Opinion Quarterly 35 (3), 358–373.
Konzelmann, L., Wagner, C., Rattinger, H., 2012. Turnout in Germany in
the course of time: life cycle and cohort effects on electoral turnout
from 1953 to 2049. Electoral Studies 31 (2), 250–261.
Kroh, M., 2014. Growth trajectories in the strength of party identification:
The legacy of autocratic regimes. Electoral Studies 33, 90–101.
Lyons, W., Alexander, R., 2000. A tale of two electorates: generational
replacement and the decline of voting in presidential elections.
Journal of Politics 62 (4), 1014–1034.
MacKuen, M.B., Erikson, R.S., Stimson, J.A., 1989. Macropartisanship.
American Political Science Review 83 (4), 1125–1142.
Mannheim, K., 1952. The problem of generations. In: Keckemeti, P. (Ed.),
Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. Routledge and Kegan Paul,
London, pp. 276–322 [1928].
Markus, G.B., 1983. Dynamic modeling of cohort change: the case of political
partisanship. American Journal of Political Science 27 (4), 717–739.
Marsh, D., 1971. Political socialization: the implicit assumptions ques-
tioned. British Journal of Political Science 1 (4), 453–465.
Mason, K.O., Mason, W.M., Winsborough, H., Poole, W., 1973. Some
methodological issues in cohort analysis of archival data. American
Sociological Review 38 (2), 242–258.
Mason, W.M., Fienberg, S.E. (Eds.), 1985. Cohort Analysis in Social Research:
Beyond the Identification Problem. Springer Verlag, New York.
Mattes, R., 2012. The “born frees”: the prospects for generational change
in post-Apartheid South Africa. Australian Journal of Political Science
47 (1), 133–153.
Merelman, R., 1986. Revitalizing political socialization. In: Herman, M.
(Ed.), Political Psychology: Contemporary Problems and Issues. Jossey
Bass, San Francisco.
Miller, W.E., 1992. Generational changes and party identification. Political
Behavior 14 (3), 333–352.
Mishler, W., Rose, R., 2007. Generation, age, and time: the dynamics of
political learning during Russia’s transformation. American Journal of
Political Science 51 (4), 822–834.
Neundorf, A., 2010. Democracy in transition: a micro perspective on system
change in post-socialist societies. Journal of Politics 72 (4), 1096–1108.
Niemi, R., Hepburn, M., 1995. The rebirth of political socialization. Per-
spectives on Political Science 24 (1), 7–16.
Niemi, R.G., Jennings, M.K., 1991. Issues and inheritance in the formation
of party identification. American Journal of Political Science 35 (3),
969–988.
Niemi, R.G., Junn, J., 1998. Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn.
Yale University Press, New Haven.
Niemi, R.G., Sobieszek, B., 1977. Political socialization. Annual Review of
Sociology 3 (1), 209–233.
O’Brien, R.M., 2000. Age period cohort characteristic models. Social Sci-
ence Research 29 (1), 123–139.
Ordeshook, P.C., 1976. The spatial theory of elections: a review and a
critique. In: Budge, I., Crewe, I., Farlie, D. (Eds.), Party Identification
and Beyond. Wiley, London.
Page, B., Jones, C.C., 1979. Reciprocal effects of policy preferences,
party loyalties and the vote. American Political Science Review 73 (4),
1071–1089.
Pop-Eleches, G., Tucker, J., 2014. Communist socialization and postcom-
munist economic and political attitudes. Electoral Studies 33, 77–89.
Prior, M., 2010. You’ve either got it or you don’t? The stability of political
interest over the life cycle. Journal of Politics 72 (3), 747–766.
Rodgers, W.L., 1982. Estimable functions of age, period, and cohort effects.
American Sociological Review 47 (6), 774–787.
Ryder, N.B., 1965. The cohort as a concept in the study of social change.
American Sociological Review 30 (6), 843–861.
Searing, D., Schwartz, J., Lind, A., 1973. The structuring principle: political
socialization and belief systems. American Political Science Review 57
(2), 415–432.
Sears, D.O., Valentino, N.A., 1997. Politics matters: political events as
catalysts for preadult socialization. American Political Science Review
91 (1), 45–65.
Sherrod, L., Torney-Purta, J., Flanagan, C., 2010. Handbook of Research on
Civic Engagement in Youth. Wiley, New York.
Smets, K., Neundorf, A., 2014. The hierarchies of age–period–cohort ef-
fects: political context and the development of generational turnout
patterns. Electoral Studies 33, 41–51.
Stegmueller, D., 2014. Bayesian hierarchical age–period–cohort models
with time-structures effects: an application to religious voting in the
US, 1972–2008. Electoral Studies 33, 52–62.
Thomassen, J., 1976. Party identification as a cross-national concept: its
meaning in The Netherlands. In: Budge, I., Crewe, I., Farlie, D. (Eds.),
Party Identification and Beyond. Wiley, London.
Tilley, J., Evans, G., 2011. Political generations in Northern Ireland. Euro-
pean Journal of Political Research 50 (5), 583–608.
Tilley, J., Evans, G., 2013. Ageing and generational effects on vote choice:
combining cross-sectional and panel data to estimate APC effects.
Electoral Studies 33, 19–27.
Tilley, J., 2002. Political generations and partisanship in the UK, 1964–
1997. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in
Society) 165 (1), 121–135.
Walczak, A., van der Brug, W., de Vries, C., 2012. Long- and short-term
determinants of party preferences: inter-generational differences in
Western and East Central Europe. Electoral Studies 31 (2), 273–284.
Watts, M., 1999. Are there typical age curves in political behavior? The
“age invariance” hypothesis and political socialization. Political Psy-
chology 20 (3), 477–499.
Yang, Y., Land, K.C., 2013. Age–Period–Cohort Analysis: New Models,
Methods, and Empirical Applications. CRC Press. Taylor & Francis
Group, Boca Raton.
Zuckerman, A.S., Dasovi
c, J., Fitzgerald, J., 2007. Partisan Families: The
Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain. Cam-
bridge University Press, Cambridge.
Anja Neundorf*
School of Politics and IR, University of Nottingham,
Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom
Richard G. Niemi1
Department of Political Science, University of Rochester,
Rochester, NY 14627-0146, United States
E-mail address: niemi@rochester.edu
 Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 (0)115 95 14795; fax:
þ44 (0)794 694 7367.
E-mail address: anja.neundorf@nottingham.ac.uk
18 June 2013
1
Tel.: þ1 585 275 5364; fax: þ1 585 271 1616.