We document a generation gap in direct democracy outcomes across a wide range of topics that is causally related to aging. To this end, we combine different sources of postelection survey data covering more than 300 Swiss referenda and four decades. Young voters are more likely to support initiatives that favor their own generation in the present, e.g., a lower retirement age or increased unemployment benefits, or in favor of all generations in the future, e.g., environment protection. To estimate the causal effect of aging on political attitudes, we propose a novel unconstrained panel rank regression approach that separately identifies age and cohort effects. The aging effect on political attitudes is robust for controlling for arbitrary cohort effects and appears to be driven by expected utility maximization and not by habituation-induced status-quo bias.

我们在与老龄化有因果关系的广泛主题中记录了直接民主成果的代沟。为此，我们结合了涵盖 300 多次瑞士公投和四个十年的不同来源的选举后调查数据。年轻选民更有可能支持在当前有利于他们这一代人的倡议，例如降低退休年龄或增加失业救济金，或者支持未来所有世代的倡议，例如环境保护。为了估计老龄化对政治态度的因果影响，我们提出了一种新的无约束面板等级回归方法，该方法分别识别年龄和队列效应。