Socialization and generational political trajectories: an age, period and cohort analysis of political participation in Britain

Grasso, Maria T.; Farrall, Stephen; Gray, Emily; Hay, Colin; Jennings, Will

doi:10.1080/17457289.2018.1476359

Cited by 56 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…Various methods have been proposed and used to deal with this problem in prior studies (e.g., Yang et al ; Luo ; Persson et al ) but arguably the most theoretically straightforward approach is to limit this collinearity by splitting respondents into broader categories of birth‐year cohorts, based on theory and prior research on historically distinctive formative periods. In this study, I base the categorization of cohorts on one which prior studies have found to be valid and theoretically meaningful when analysing political participation in Western Europe (Grasso ; Fox ; Grasso et al ). This categorization is based on the years in which respondents experienced a majority of their formative years and yields the following cohorts of citizens: Pre‐WWII generation: Born before 1926 Post‐WWII generation: Born between 1926–1945 60s and 70s generation: Born between 1946–1957 80s generation: Born between 1958–1968 90s generation: Born between 1969–1981 Millennial generation: Born after 1981 …”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential Turnout Decline in Norway and Sweden: A Generation of Apathy or Alienation?

Valgarðsson

2019

Scand Pol Stud

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Voter turnout has been in a trend of gradual decline in most established democracies in recent decades and the reasons for this are by no means fully understood. While most studies agree that the trend is largely driven by younger generations voting less than older cohorts, the individual-level mechanisms of their declining propensity to vote are still disputed. A major distinction in the literature on democratic developments is that between theories of political apathy and political alienation: whether citizens are less interested in politics or still interested but instead estranged from their political systems. An interesting test for these different explanations can be found in Scandinavia: While Norway and Sweden have intimate historical, political and cultural similarities, Norway has been experiencing gradual turnout decline, while there has been no clear overall trend in Sweden. This study uses a combined dataset of over 50.000 respondents from 31 national election studies in these two countries from 1956-2013 to test the relative roles of apathy, alienation and generational dynamics in explaining these different trends in turnout. The results indicate that apathy has been declining while alienation has been rising in both countries. However, in Norway, those who are more apathetic today are much less likely to vote than apathetic citizens were in the past. The youngest generations are also significantly more apathetic and less likely to vote in Norway than in Sweden. These dynamics appear to account for the larger trend of turnout decline in Norway.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential Turnout Decline in Norway and Sweden: A Generation of Apathy or Alienation?

Valgarðsson

2019

Scand Pol Stud

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“…Studies show that young people are less active in core representative institutions such as elections and political parties (e.g., Chou, 2017;Grasso et al, 2018). One interpretation of the developments in youth political engagement contends that young people do not want to be more active in democracy.…”

Section: Literature Review: Youth Political Participation and Implications For Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, young citizens' apparent lack of engagement in the traditional institutions of politics does not signal political apathy: on the contrary, young people are involved in political matters, but they participate in different ways than older generations do. Several studies investigating youth participation contends that the decline in electoral participation and party membership (e.g., Furlong and Cartmel, 2007;Bennett, 2008;Grasso et al, 2018), is evidence of a shift in young people's participation habits (e.g., Inglehart, 1997;Dalton, 2016;Chou, 2017;Pickard, 2019;Huttunen and Christensen, 2020). Instead of merely showing their opinions on the Election Day, young people participate in myriads of ways between elections, e.g., in single-issue movements, social movements, through ecological consumption and online activism, and they have a broader view of political participation than previous generations.…”

Section: Literature Review: Youth Political Participation and Implications For Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since young people often participate less in institutionalized politics (e.g., Furlong and Cartmel, 2007;Bennett, 2008;Grasso et al, 2018), it is important to examine cases when young people do engage in politics to understand their attitudes regarding political participation. This article provides a case study on young FFF activists in a country where the movement has been active since its early stages, Finland.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Young Rebels Who Do Not Want a Revolution: The Non-participatory Preferences of Fridays for Future Activists in Finland

Huttunen

2021

Front. Polit. Sci.

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Young people’s lack of participation in elections has been taken as a sign that the young are wary of representative democracy and reject traditional authorities. Instead of election participation, it is expected that the young want more possibilities for direct involvement in political decision-making. Fridays for Future (FFF) is a global, youth-led climate movement that has been able to mobilize millions of young people around the world into political action (de Moor et al., 2020; Wahlström et al., 2019) in times when youth participation is generally declining, especially in traditional forms of political participation. While many have taken this as evidence that young people dismiss representative democracy in favor of a more participatory democracy, in-depth studies of their motivations are still lacking. This article helps fill this lacuna by providing a case study on Finnish FFF participants. Through semi-structured interviews and theory-guided content analysis with 15- to 20-year-old climate activists, the Finnish FFF participants’ attitudes toward political participation are examined. The data consists of 11 one-on-one in-depth theme interviews with young people, who participated in the FFF movement by attending at least one protest in Finland in 2019. The interviews focused on the following themes: motivation for participation in the FFF movement, interviewee’s background, and the participant’s ideas regarding politics, democracy, and political participation. The interviews were combined with material from various news sources to contextualize the information in the analysis phase. Based on the empirical evidence, I argue that although these young citizens have become politically active in a climate protest movement, it does not necessarily mean that they want major reforms to the representative democracy toward a more participatory system. Instead of more participatory possibilities, the Finnish climate activists want a better-functioning representative system with politicians who listen to their demands.

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“…There has also been a key development in European studies in which scholars use qualitative research to understand democratic linkages (Duchesne et al, 2013; Van Ingelgom, 2014)—which can help explain democratic linkages that have been documented using quantitative research (e.g. Hooghe & Stiers, 2016; Grasso, Farrall, Gray, Hay, & Jennings, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A theory of “popular political legitimation”: A dual‐process model approach to legitimation and political socialization

Vila‐Henninger

2020

J Theory Soc Behav

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How do everyday people-or actors who do not occupy positions of political authority-legitimate political systems? Responding to this question, I use work from sociology, political science, and cognitive science to build a theory of "Popular Political Legitimation" (PPL)-defined as everyday people's legitimation of a political system. To answer how PPL happens, we must To answer how PPL happens, we must answer two sub-questions: 1) What are the processes of socialization through which individuals learn the norms, widely held beliefs, and values that create the perception of consensus about compliance with political power? 2) How do individuals subsequently use these norms, widely held beliefs, and/or values to help reproduce the perception of a consensus about the compliance with said power through legitimation? In this light, then, we see that a model of socialization is central to understanding how PPL happens. Thus, to understand legitimation we must understand how individuals are socialized into norms, widely held beliefs, and values (sub-question 1) and then how said norms, beliefs, and values are used for PPL (sub-question 2). The goal of article is thus to develop a model of PPL that incorporates a model of socialization. This article will formulate a theory for answering the how question of PPL by addressing sub-questions 1 and 2. I develop this model in four steps. First, I review eight literatures from sociology, political science, and political psychology that address political legitimation, justification, and rationalization. The core gap in these overlapping literatures is that they lack a model of socialization that explains legitimation-although many of these literatures include socialization as a motive or factor for legitimation. Next, I review the literature on political socialization from sociology and political science and find that it also does not explain how socialization generates legitimation. Third, I turn to neuroscience and psychology (for reviews see Greene, 2017; Cushman, 2020) to review models of socialization and rationalization. Here, I pay special attention to "dual-process models." Finally, I synthesize these literature reviews to develop a dual-process model that explains the link between political socialization and PPL. In my review, I outline different literatures in order to showcase their nuances. Each literature makes important contributions that distinguish it from other literatures. The review section then celebrates these nuances and particularities as they relate to the concepts of PPL and socialization. The theory building section, then, synthesizes these accounts-thus building theory by highlighting the commonalities of these different literatures in order to create a single narrative about political socialization and PPL. Ultimately, I build a dual-process model that theorizes political socialization and incorporates an account of how Type II processes are used for PPL. It is important to note that dual-process models each have a specific application and thus scope c...

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Socialization and generational political trajectories: an age, period and cohort analysis of political participation in Britain

Cited by 56 publications

References 75 publications

Differential Turnout Decline in Norway and Sweden: A Generation of Apathy or Alienation?

Differential Turnout Decline in Norway and Sweden: A Generation of Apathy or Alienation?

Young Rebels Who Do Not Want a Revolution: The Non-participatory Preferences of Fridays for Future Activists in Finland

A theory of “popular political legitimation”: A dual‐process model approach to legitimation and political socialization

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