Why are older folks more conservative?
That people become more conservative as they get older is some sort of folk wisdom, though the meaning of "conservative" is often implied and not spelled out. Some scholars seem to classify conservatism as a tendency to cling to one's beliefs, an inflexibility with respect to one's ideological position. I do not subscribe to this classification. I will simply follow the well-known formulation of Edmund Burke: a conservative is a person who is in favour of maintaining the status quo, a person who actively endorses policies designed to promote the existing social order. What's the opposite of a conservative? Academic exercises to ascertain whether people indeed turn conservative (in the Burkean sense) as they grow old are invariably from Western countries with a liberal democratic form of government. More often than not, these countries also have a de facto two-party electoral system, with one of the parties considered "conservative" and the other "l...