It's a bit of a commonly accepted popular belief:you become more conservative as you get older. Just look at the former sixty-eighters, in the forefront of whom is Daniel Cohn-Bendit:Maoists then, members of the government today – and there is nothing Maoist about him! Antoine Blondin summed up these trajectories with a witticism that underlined their inescapable nature:"I never dared to be on the left when I was young for fear of becoming on the right as I got older." The years therefore pass, and are often accompanied by a turn to the right, which those on this side gargle with phrases such as:"not to be a communist at 20 is to have no heart. to be still at 40 is to have no head." A somewhat arrogant way of sweeping away any form of alternative, combining wisdom and conservatism. But is this belief really justified? Do we really observe a shift to the right with age?
If this question deserves to be asked, it is because, in addition to its sociological interest, it also raises a major political issue, since the aging of the population leads seniors to weigh more and more heavily in the political balance. If they are more conservative, the parties in power are also more likely to be so - especially since it is the most mobilized electorate during the various elections, including and especially during the intermediate elections. . However, the latter tend to set the tone for the themes on the agenda, since they punctuate the political agenda between the presidential elections. The media therefore tend to persist in focusing on conservative themes, including during these elections, since retirees increase their visibility tenfold through their political commitment — at least, if we consider that commitment is limited to voting — most important. Moreover, the primaries are characterized by an overrepresentation of the elderly electorate, on the right as well as on the left. It was François Hollande, the least radical candidate in his camp, who won that of 2011, where seniors were again overrepresented.
Concretely, this would therefore imply more conservative themes on the social level (for example, identity themes) as well as on the economic level, where the disconnection of retirees from active life, which only increases with the passage of years, would lead them to adopt moralizing economic perspectives (particularly on the "recipients"). In short, seniors therefore constitute a part of the population whose interests are overrepresented in the political game.
It is still necessary to confirm this supposed inclination. And cut short immediately to the suspense:the seniors are indeed much more conservative, at least in their voting habits, than the rest of the French population. Cities where the population is older on average, for example, vote overwhelmingly on the right. It is moreover towards the Republican right that this vote is oriented, and not towards the far right, which achieves better scores among young people. For example, in the 2017 presidential elections, it was among the elderly electorate that François Fillon achieved his best scores, while Marine Le Pen only came third among this age group, quite far behind him and Emmanuel Macron. In the second round, the latter also won by a wide margin among the elderly, with the National Front candidate winning only 24% of the vote, against 34% among the general population.
However, the really interesting question is not so much that of the vote of seniors, but that of an evolution with age. In other words, do we become more conservative as we age? Indeed, there is nothing to indicate that it is age itself that is a determining factor with regard to this conservative tropism. As we can never repeat it enough, correlation is not causation. It is not because the elderly vote more conservative that age necessarily explains this inclination (to reason by the absurd, it would be a bit like saying that the under 18s are totally depoliticized because they do not vote , forgetting to specify that they cannot vote!):it is therefore rather among all the social characteristics of seniors that we must look for the structuring causes of this trend.
Thus, there are several factors that seem to play a more instrumental role in shaping this conservative sensibility. One of them is that of exclusion from the production cycle (but of course not from that of consumption, quite the contrary) with access to retirement. This form of social disintegration makes them less sensitive to the relations of production, and this all the more so as the years of their former active life separate them. This is something that is also found with regard to the vote of women, and particularly older women, who belong to a generation where their activity was less (following the obtaining of the right to vote for women, they voted much more to the right, which even made François Mitterrand say that he would have been president in the 1960s if women had not had the right to vote). The withdrawal into the home that accompanies retirement therefore tends to generate conservative tendencies. In addition, since women have a longer life expectancy, they are overrepresented among the elderly electorate. This female electorate influences the orientation of the vote of seniors. Indeed, if sex has hardly been a factor in the orientation of the vote since the 1990s, older women belong to a generation where they were more often excluded from working life and higher education, two traits favoring a tropism conservative.
In addition, age is generally accompanied by an accumulation of wealth. The majority of retirees, for example, own real estate, which again tends to steer the vote to the right. People with wealth tend to be sensitive to measures advocating a certain economic liberalism, particularly with regard to the reduction or abolition of the wealth tax. It is a heritage that they are also keen to pass on, which makes them particularly sensitive to measures aimed at reducing inheritance taxes. Seniors also do not have to suffer from an increase in the retirement age (even though they were able to access it at a younger age) while this also perpetuates their own pensions. So many factors that direct them to the right.
Finally, another determining factor in the orientation of the vote of the elderly is that of religious orientation. Indeed, Christianity and more specifically Catholicism is much more present among our elders. However, the latter's moral prescriptions are aligned with a conservative political culture, which advocates order and authority and is reluctant to liberalize morals. In 2017, 43 to 44% of those over 65 voted Fillon in the first round when they were also Catholics. This rate was only 20% among non-practitioners.
Beneath its veneer of implacability, adages tending to make it a matter of wisdom and maturity, the vote for the right of the elderly is ultimately, as always, above all a matter of social and material conditions. It is quite misleading to consider age as a significant factor, regardless of the generation concerned, since these populations are ultimately not homogeneous. The relative breakthrough of the National Front in 2017 with the elderly electorate was also made among the most modest among them.
This therefore means that this conservative tropism is not inevitable. While some of these factors are immutable, such as access to retirement and withdrawal from working life and the production relations that accompany it, and will no doubt always tend to favor a conservative shift, others are rather generational order, and no doubt will evolve over time. This is the case of the secularization of the population, or the now almost zero disparity between the female and male electorate. It should be kept in mind that seniors constitute an extremely wide age group, and that generations matter. A young retiree does not always have much in common with an octogenarian. Their political socialization was also not marked by the same events. The sixty-eighters would thus be more volatile and less conservative in their votes.
The Conservative vote, as its name suggests, is more in favor of maintaining the status quo. However, this is particularly favorable to older generations. This is what is reproached to that of the baby-boomers by its descendants:to have stuffed itself at the banquet of globalization and the glorious thirty years, leaving behind only damaged remains and a lot of cleaning. While seniors will probably always be sensitive to measures protecting their achievements and privileges, the change in mores, particularly religious, may suggest room for development.
