Partisan Generational Effects: How the national mood during a cohort’s adolescent years shapes its lifelong macropartisanship

Macropartisanship varies substantially from cohort to cohort. Much of this variation is attributable to partisan generational effects. Using Sears and Valentino’s (1997) theory of event-driven political socialization, I argue that partisan generational effects are caused by the national policy mood during a cohort’s impressionable adolescent years. To test this hypothesis, I first measure changes in partisan generational effects using nearest neighbor matching to control for the demographic compositional factors that might also contribute to macropartisanship change across cohorts, and, then, show that changes in policy mood liberalism substantially explain the estimated differences in partisan generational effects from cohort to cohort.