conflate liberal/conservative with the dominant left/right parties in these nations
does not include people who do not identify with one of those dominant parties
have some somewhat unreliable stats magic behind them
A lot of young men in the US are reporting themselves as "not a Democrat or Republican", and that's causing a lot of this proportional shift. I would bet that characterizes a lot of folks on this site who are not conservative.
As women gain independence, frightened men turn to patriarchal solutions. Hence a turd like JD Vance spouting hateful and controlling rhetoric on podcasts and Ahole Tate brainwashing adolescent boys. Fuck these people.
It's weird that the axes of where "centre" is remain stable over time. Can you imagine comparing "left vs right" between the 1890s and the 1920s? Like a bunch of stuff happened in between, history happened, and that tends to redefine left, right and centre.
The important thing here is to know how did they measure young people's political ideologies. I wouldn't expect it was self-perceived as currently, people have a hard time admitting they are conservative compared to admitting they sympathize with a conservative party.
If it was determined by a questionnaire, it would be interesting to see what questions were included. Maybe the questions weren't well planned and that's it. Maybe they equalled feminist takes to progressive liberal ones, which is something that can be discussed. In this case, I would be picky about the origin of the graphics.
The gap sounds plausible, but I highly doubt the overall positions relative to 0.
E.g., the Federal Republic of Germany has had conservative chancellors for 51 years out of the 75 since it was founded. We did not have a constant left majority (I assume that is what they mean by liberal, since the actual sense of the term doesn't make sense as an opposite to "conservative").
Edit: I fucked up, this is only about people below 30.
In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.
So it might be worth taking it with a pinch of salt because I'm betting it's using the very dumbed down "liberal vs conservative" 'murican political view. Maybe skew all results down 3-6 points.
I believe that a significant factor for this can be attributed to mental development and maturity of boys lagging behind that of girls of the same age, during formative years. And, please read on, if you assume my argument is "boys dumb, conservatives dumb. Q.E.D."
The second factor is an education system where this offset in mental development/maturity is further confounded. Boys don't typically do as well, because sitting idle and being a "good boy", is more challenging. This leads to a path for boys to start working earlier, while girls get higher degrees. (I assume the trends for higher education by gender, to be similar, if not, then that can falsify this hypothesis).
What a person then observes they get from society, vs what you pay in terms of taxes, is skewed between these two groups, and highly correlated with gender.
If this hypothesis has any validity to to it, then one could argue that a way to mitigate this is by correcting the negative causes. Where the fundamental root cause might be improved by revisiting how education is failing boys in particular.
The challenge with this is that if the conservative parties' policies are driven by what can make more people vote conservative, then this will be a negative feedback loop. The worse you make it for a certain group of people that vote for you, the more that group is willing to vote for you.
Hey look if you start taking away white male privilege they freak out when they find out people of other races, genders and creeds are better than them, who knew?
So here's the question - is the scale consistent over time? That is, do we consider the same ideas left/right wing in 202x as we did in 199x?
Let's assume it is. We're seeing men lean towards the center/right, and a lot of people are asking why. The trouble is, the answer isn't one people like to hear - in our headlong pursuit of equity, we're introducing a lot of inequality. You lift the ladies up, while you let the men climb - all based on the assumption that the women had further to climb so what you're doing is levelling the field.
Countering this is a sympathetic voice, one offering to bring back equality or offer a different kind of equity. Casting gender equity as a zero sum game, and pushing for equality aimed at the ones not being lifted up.
I often hear the "uneducated men" argument, but that's just an ugly echo from the past serving those it once oppressed in a bitter irony. The reality is that even educated people can fall for propaganda. Especially when voting in what they see as their own self interest.