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Stable partisanship in the United States is often attributed to attachments to political parties that become slowly and incrementally stronger with age. Here, I show that switches in partisan identification can happen quickly after major life transitions even in old age and that this pattern of party-switching can explain a surprisingly large fraction of the age-partisan stability association. Using voter registration information over 8 years for more than 20 million voters in California, in combination with American National Election Studies panel surveys, I measure how many individuals switch party affiliation when they move to new homes, switch when separating from a partner, and become less likely to switch after retirement. In both ANES and voter record analyses, accounting for residential mobility alone reduces the association between age and party-switching by 50% or more. The combined findings demonstrate that socially crystallized lives help drive steady partisanship in adulthood and suggest that continuity in day-to-day life could maintain partisan identity at 30 years old almost as much as it does at 60. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research suggests that spouses influence one another to vote, but it relies almost exclusively on correlation in turnout. It is therefore difficult to establish whether spouses mobilize each other or tend to marry similar others. Here, we test the dependency hypothesis by examining voting behavior before and after the death of a spouse. We link nearly six million California voter records to Social Security death records and use both coarsened exact matching and multiple cohort comparison to estimate the effects of spousal loss. The results show that after turnout rates stabilize, widowed individuals vote nine percentage points fewer than they would had their spouse still been living; the results also suggest that this change may persist indefinitely. Variations in this 'widowhood effect' on voting support a social-isolation explanation for the drop in turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We validate an online, personalized mortality risk measure called "RealAge" assigned to 30 million individuals over the past 10 years., Methods: 188,698 RealAge survey respondents were linked to California Department of Public Health death records using a one-way cryptographic hash of first name, last name, and date of birth. 1,046 were identified as deceased. We used Cox proportional hazards models and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves to estimate the relative scales and predictive accuracies of chronological age, the RealAge score, and the Framingham ATP-III score for hard coronary heart disease (HCHD) in this data. To address concerns about selection and to examine possible heterogeneity, we compared the results by time to death at registration, underlying cause of death, and relative health among users., Results: THE REALAGE SCORE IS ACCURATELY SCALED (HAZARD RATIOS: age 1.076; RealAge-age 1.084) and more accurate than chronological age (age c-statistic: 0.748; RealAge c-statistic: 0.847) in predicting mortality from hard coronary heart disease following survey completion. The score is more accurate than the Framingham ATP-III score for hard coronary heart disease (c-statistic: 0.814), perhaps because self-reported cholesterol levels are relatively uninformative in the RealAge user sample. RealAge predicts deaths from malignant neoplasms, heart disease, and external causes. The score does not predict malignant neoplasm deaths when restricted to users with no smoking history, no prior cancer diagnosis, and no indicated health interest in cancer (p-value 0.820)., Conclusion: The RealAge score is a valid measure of mortality risk in its user population.