DONDENA Seminar - Kevin Munger

There is rising public concern over the emergence of a gap in the ideological preferences between young men and young women in many democratic countries. If real, this gap has obvious implications for electoral politics, but also potentially for the formation and persistence of couples and therefore for a wide range of work and family outcomes. We first undertake a very wide quantitative description of this phenomenon, using cross-country data from the WVS, ESS, Eurobaromter, Latinobarómetro and in-depth country-specific analysis of time series data from the US, UK, Japan and South Korea. We confirm that the phenomenon is real, and that it is more pronounced in countries with more gender-egalitarian attitudes, following the results in Nennstiel and Hudde (2025). We then do an inductive analysis of many theorized moderators of this phenomenon and of all other survey questions on which young men and young women are diverging. Finally, we engage in a metascientific discussion of the total amount of rigor which social science can bring to bear on the investigation of this phenomenon, and whether this is sufficient for us to intervene in public discussions of it.