Does demography determine democratic attitudes?

This paper presents new evidence on how demography affects attitudes toward democracy and policy preferences. The empirical analysis disentangles age effects from cohort effects and separates their role from economic and political factors that shape political preferences in a given period, using survey responses for more than 200,000 individual observations from 90 countries. The results show that the support for democracy increases with age and, at the same time, depends on cohort-specific factors that are related to past experiences with democracy and socioeconomic status. The findings shed new light on the role of demography in terms of life-cycle and cohort effects for political attitudes.