Has the Great Recession Shaped a Crisis Generation of Critical Citizens? Evidence from Southern Europe

ABSTRACT

This article examines the potential emergence of a ‘new’ and ‘critical’ political generation in Southern Europe after an exceptionally intense political period. Using country-specific classifications of political generations, we first describe the evolution of a combination of two main attitudes towards the political system – frequency of political discussion and satisfaction with democracy – and then propose a fourfold typology: happy, critical, unengaged and disillusioned citizens. Grounded on political socialisation theories we hypothesise that the crisis generation, which developed its main political attitudes during the Great Recession, will be particularly critical in the long term, combining dissatisfaction with political engagement. To identify this potential new generation, we use a longitudinal perspective and Eurobarometer data from 1985 to 2019 and find empirical support to identify such a ‘critical generation’ in Spain and Greece. In contrast, results in Italy and Portugal suggest an increase in happy citizens who are satisfied with how democracy works and who are politically engaged.

KEYWORDS:

• Political generations
• young people
• political attitudes
• democratic satisfaction
• Greece
• Spain
• Italy
• Portugal

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible thanks to funding from The Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (grant reference number CSO2016-75090-R). The authors want to thank Irene Martin for her comments and inspiration on previous versions of this project and to Clara Pacheco for her research assistance. Finally, the special issue editors and the journal editors have provided us with extremely generous help, suggestions and feedback throughout the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2021.1949672.

Notes

1. Table 1 provides references where to look to further explore patterns of behaviour of each generation.  See also García-Albacete (2014) and Lorente (2019). 

2. Eurostat database, see https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/lfs/data/database.

3. South European generations show common patterns, but also some differences. In Greece, all generations are politically involved except the one socialised during the democratic period. The opposite occurs in Portugal, where the cohort socialised during the democratic period tends to be more engaged.

4. The use of political discussion as a measure of political engagement has advantages over measuring other types of political behaviours because preferred forms of participation vary across ages, and therefore are not comparable. In any case, the EB does not ask regularly about any other form of involvement. For a study on the political participation of the ‘post-crisis’ generation in Europe using the European Social Survey, see García-Albacete and Lorente (2019).

5. For descriptive information on generations’ variables see Figures A1 to A4 in the Online Appendix. Those instances in which a generation has less than 50 observations for a specific year were dropped from the analyses.

6. Lines in Figure 2 to 5 represent local smoothed regressions (LOESS), a non-parametric technique that allows an exploration of the main trends for each generation without imposing any rigid function on the data.

7. The average percentage of critical citizens before 1999 in Greece, Portugal and Spain are 39, 20 and 25 per cent, respectively.

8. Regarding covariates, they work as expected. In general, better education relates negatively to disillusioned or unengaged attitudes in comparison to critical ones. Besides, citizens that have reached the highest levels of education tend to be more happy than critical in Italy, Portugal and Spain. This may be due to the impact of social class, intimately related to education, or dependent on the period analysed. Women tend to be less critical than disillusioned and unengaged, but also more happy in Italy. Finally, employment and civil status are variables that behave in a similar vein. Having a family and having a job seem to foster more critical attitudes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gema García-Albacete

Gema García-Albacete (PhD Political Science, University of Mannheim 2011) is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of University Carlos III of Madrid. Her research relates to citizens’ inequalities in political engagement. She has published in the International Journal of Press Politics, West European Politics and the International Journal of Public Opinion, among others. Her monograph Young People’s Political Participation in Wesrern Europe: Continuity or Generational Change? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) summarises part of her work on young people.

Javier Lorente

Javier Lorente is an assistant professor at the Department of Public Law I and Political Science of the University Rey Juan Carlos. His research interests are focused on young people’s political attitudes, political culture and ideology, and political participation. His recently published book “Los jóvenes y la división izquierda-derecha en Europa en los últimos treinta años: generaciones y voto“, (CIS, 2019) provides a systematic analysis of ideological change and age in Europe.