Welcome to the website for The making of ‘grey power’: How political understandings develop over the life course project, led by Jonathan Moss and Nick Clarke. The project is funded by the the Leverhulme Trust Research Projects scheme, and will run from 2025 to 2027. The project will investigate how people’s political understandings developed as they grew older in Britain from the 1980s to the present.

Age has recently become the key dividing line in British politics and older people are the new driving force – what Chrisp and Pearce (2019) call ‘grey power’. Recent elections have seen unprecedented divisions in the electorate between older and younger voters, with those over 50 voting largely for the Conservative Party and smaller parties to the right, and those under 35 voting largely for the Labour Party and smaller parties to the left. Pronounced age divisions also marked voter preferences for Leave or Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum: older voters delivered the narrow majority to ‘Leave’ the EU against the preference to ‘Remain’ of most younger voters.

Although rising electoral polarisation between older and younger voters has stimulated recent public interest in the politics of age, social scientists have a long-standing interest in the relationship between aging and voting behaviour. The popular wisdom that ‘if you are not a liberal when young, you have no heart; if you are not a conservative when old, you have no brain’(attributed to Winston Churchill) has been empirically tested by several studies looking at party preferences, vote choice, and attitudinal change over time, which have drawn few settled conclusions. This is an ongoing debate involving multiple positions and theories: cultural; economic; and psychological.

How do political understandings develop and change over the life course? This is the fundamental question underlying both new debates about emerging age divisions in British politics and enduring questions about the impact of aging on political engagement. Our project provides new insights into these debates by using previously overlooked biographical writing to explore the development of political understandings over the life course. It follows various individuals who wrote for the Mass Observation Project from the early 1980s to the present day, tracing their political development – the development of their political understandings, interests, preferences, habits, and identities – and the role of events, material circumstances, and cultural frames in this development.

We will post updates on the project on this site including regular blog posts discussing different aspects of the research.