Cohort Trends in Attitudes About Law and Order: Who's Leading the Conservative Wave?

Abstract

Aging is commonly assumed to be associated with the adoption of increasingly conservative social and political attitudes. Empirical tests of this assumption have provided little support, but most analyses have focused on attitude domains where public opinion was shifting in a liberal direction. Using three items about law and order, a domain marked by conservative trends, this paper evaluates the aging-conservatism hypothesis with data drawn from 18 national surveys covering the period 1959–85. Attitude changes in four cohorts are analyzed with Tay lor's hierarchical goodness-of-fit procedures for evaluating trends in public opinion. The findings show that each of the cohorts has participated in the shift toward more conservative opinions on law and order issues, and that either constant or zero differences characterize the trends in percentage differences between the oldest and the other cohorts. In the absence of differential rates of change, we conclude that older cohorts are no more likely than younger cohorts to adopt conservative law and order attitudes and that period effects are influencing each of the cohorts equally.

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