Age and Substantive Representation in American Foreign Policy Decision-Making

Abstract

This paper investigates the extent to which U.S. foreign policy outcomes align more closely with the preferences of older Americans than younger Americans. While existing research on substantive representation (the congruence between policy preferences and policy outcomes) has demonstrated that inequality in policy responsiveness exists across income, race, and gender, age has rarely been tested using a variant of the opinion-policy congruence framework which these empirical studies have utilized. Beyond applying age as the demographic variable of interest, this study applies the framework to four major domains of foreign policy: military interventionism, climate change, trade, and immigration. Specifically, it compares age-disaggregated public opinion data on major flashpoint moments in each of these foreign policy domains with subsequent policy outcomes. The findings of this study did not support the existence of a universal age-based representation gap in U.S. foreign policy. For instance, there is little consistent evidence of a generational gap in military use of force policy and trade policy. For these reasons, in these particular domains, it seems that policy outcomes appear less connected to age-based differences. Immigration policy similarly delivers mixed results, with substantial divergence between younger and older preferences, but no consistent pattern of unequal representation disproportionately benefitting the opinions of the older cohort over younger citizens. By contrast, climate policy provides the strongest evidence of an age-based substantive representation gap. Younger generations consistently express greater support for more aggressive policy action to tackle global climate change, yet policy outcomes are often less ambitious than the preferences of younger Americans. These results therefore suggest that age-based differences in representation only emerge when generational preferences diverge clearly and outcomes disproportionately benefit the views of one age cohort over the other. Additionally, the study’s findings more broadly elucidate that foreign policy responsiveness cannot be understood by treating the public as a unified actor, and that instead, intra-public variation in preference exists across different demographic cleavages. Altogether, by introducing age into the study of substantive representation, this paper contributes to existing theories of democratic responsiveness by highlighting the conditions under which generational inequalities in alignment of foreign policymaking are most likely to arise.