Old enough to watch the world burn, old enough to vote: Youth enfranchisement, political ideology, and climate change attitudes [Author Accepted Manuscript]

Despite prominent academic and political debates surrounding lowering the voting age to 16, little is known about the psychological processes driving changes in public voting age attitudes. Drawing on ideological constraint theory, we examine how broader ideological orientations structure attitudes toward youth enfranchisement. Specifically, we use three waves (2016, 2019, 2022) of an Australian panel study (N = 707) to examine how political ideology and climate change concerns jointly shape attitudes toward youth enfranchisement. We apply random-intercept cross-lagged panel models to disentangle stable between-person differences from within-person changes in these constructs over time. As expected, trait-level conservatism correlated negatively with support for lowering the voting age, and within-person increases in conservatism preceded subsequent declines in support over time. However, while trait-level climate change concerns correlated positively with support for lowering the voting age, there was only limited evidence for within-person increases in concerns about global warming, specifically, contributing to increased support for lowering the voting age. These findings demonstrate that enduring ideological worldviews and issue-specific climate attitudes jointly anchor public support for lowering the voting age, but temporal changes toward conservatism, in particular, directly reduce support for youth enfranchisement over time.