A generational shift: how partisan alignment and the rise of social issues have produced a generation of Democrats

ABSTRACT

American political elites are today more neatly divided on a wider range of issues than at any other point in the postwar era. How have these trends affected the political socialization of American youth? We argue that two distinctive aspects of US polarization, namely ideological alignment and the emergence of non-economic issues, have formed the foundation of a generational shift in favor of the Democratic party. We find that Millennials and Gen Z display levels of ideological alignment across economic, civil rights, and moral domains that are equal to or greater than previous generations. Their liberal positions on moral and civil rights issues are not only strongly predictive of vote choice, but also tend to offset any conservative positions on economic issues – in contrast to the way previous generations resolved such ideological tensions. As such, the push for a non-economic political agenda – a popular strategy in the last few decades, especially among Republicans – might well benefit the Democrats electorally as older generations are replaced.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data used in this paper are available to download from https://electionstudies.org. Replication code can be accessed at https://osf.io/s7cer.

Notes

1 We use the terms “generation” and “cohort” interchangeably, but note that “generations are usually thought of as connected by some shared historical experience” whereas cohorts are not (Neundorf and Niemi 2014, 2).

2 For a similar approach in a different national context, see Grasso et al. (2019a; 2019b) and their assessment of “Thatcher’s Children” and “Blair’s Babies.”

3 Though the proportion of cross-pressured individuals has declined across generations, this group remains substantial. These distributions are approximately normal, centered around zero, with the exception of Gen Z, which skews socially liberal.

4 Interestingly, the generational gap in turnout was greater in Canada and the United Kingdom, compared to the US, for much of the 1990’s and 2000’s (Smets 2012).