Youth and Generational Differences in US Politics

Abstract

People are less likely to participate in politics when they are young, and yet for decades scholars have been concerned about what young people think about politics and the political system. This concern was initially motivated by the belief that the political socialization of the young is a primary input function in the political system; that is to say, the values and ideas that are passed onto the young were believed to have implications for the longevity of a democratic political system. This body of literature initially suggested that values are passed down intergenerationally from one cohort to another, and further political attitudes and values attained at a young age are enduring. However, as the subfield evolved, research later revealed that people’s attitudes have a tendency to change over their lifetime. What’s more, it is quite clear that there tends to be a difference in the way that the average member of one generation perceives the world, interacts with their political institutions, and views other members of society in comparison to the average member of another generation. These observations represent some of the forces that influence aggregate change in political attitudes and behaviors over time: age effects, period effects, and cohort effects. Age effects, or life-cycle effects, are marked by the evolution in attitudes, behavior, and beliefs that individuals may see over their lifetime. Period effects result from changes in the social, historical, and cultural environment; these effects are reflected by the shifts in the ways in which a population, on the whole, manages particular attitudes and behaviors over time. Yang Yang and her colleagues explain that cohort effects are “conceived as the essence of social change” in their article “The Intrinsic Estimator for Age-Period-Cohort Analysis: What Is It and How to Use It” (American Journal of Sociology 113.6 [2008]: 1697–1736). Cohort effects describe the aggregate changes in society’s attitudes and behaviors that occur due to the replacement of a group of people who were born at a similar time, and thus were socialized to value and believe certain things, by a new generation who have their own shared, unique set of experiences, ideas, values, and worldview. Ryder 1965 (cited under Early Works and Foundational Texts) asserted, “since cohorts are used to achieve structural transformation and since they manifest its consequences in characteristic ways, it is proposed that research be designed to capitalize on the congruence of social change and cohort identification.” Many have taken Ryder’s call to heart, but there exists the methodological challenge of parsing out period, age, and cohort effects; what’s more, there is the problem of interaction among these three effects. Even in the face of these challenges, research that concerns generational differences has evolved; scholars are increasingly able to move from simple descriptions of generational attributes and trends over time to disentangling these three aforementioned effects from one another with the use of new methodological tools and longitudinal data.