Political Generations Research Paper

1. Generation And Cohort

Birth, aging, and death gradually transform the composition of any society. New generations supplant the old, but transforming the population may or may not lead to social and political change. The young may resemble the old in their political attitudes and behaviors and, even when young people do differ from their elders, they may come to resemble them when they themselves age.

But although each generation perpetuates society, it may also change it. If the young could be isolated from their elders, it would be easier to create a new social order, and thus Plato argued that philosophers could establish the ideal polity more quickly if they expelled all citizens above the age of 10 from the republic. At times a generation may be too corrupt to establish a new political order. The Book of Numbers relates that the generation freed from Egypt, which again and again showed its faithlessness, was condemned to have its carcasses consumed in the wilderness until a new generation, born in freedom, was reared to conquer Canaan.

Although the concept of generations has biblical and Greek roots, the social scientific study of generations began with Mannheim’s essay, ‘The Problem of Generations’ [1928] (1952).

According to Mannheim (1952), the concept of generations is both biological and sociological. Generations are produced through ‘the biological rhythm in human existence,’ but ‘individuals who belong to the same generation, who share the same year of birth, are endowed, to that extent, with a common location in the historical dimension of the social process’ (p. 290).

Mannheim (1952) maintains that historical experiences are most likely to influence persons in their late adolescence and early adulthood, postulating that ‘personal experimentation with life’ usually begins at about age 17. Whether young people are actually influenced by historical events depends on social and historical conditions. For example, young adults living in different cultures may experience quite different events, and, even within a single society, some persons may be relatively isolated from the mainstream of social events and thus be unaffected by major historical movements. Nor do all historical periods produce conditions that influence young adults in distinctive ways. Mannheim (1952) argues that distinctive gene- rations are more likely to form in periods of rapid social change. But his basic point is that there is no guarantee that socially or politically distinctive gene- rations will emerge: ‘Whether a new generation style emerges every year, every thirty, every hundred years, or whether it emerges rythmically at all, depends entirely on the trigger action of the social and cultural process’ (p. 310).

Following Mannheim’s (1952) cautions, it is unwise to label a group of people a political generation unless one can establish that they are actually distinctive in their attitudes and behaviors. Therefore, social scientists need a term describing persons born during the same years, but making no other assumptions about their distinctiveness. The term ‘cohort’ is used for this purpose. This term derives from Roman military terminology, since the cohort was a unit within a Roman legion, but the term now has a much broader usage. Scholars usually define a cohort as a group of people born during the same years, but there are many other factors that can define a cohort: the entry class of a school, persons married during the same period, or persons who vote for the first time in the same election. But the most basic experiences are usually birth and death, and the former is usually used to define a cohort.

There is no definitive answer to how many years a cohort should include. In the 1960s, and even into the early 1970s, survey researchers often used arbitrary age categories to code years of birth, often grouping respondents into 10-year age categories in order to save one column of usage on the IBM punch cards that were used to store data. Scholars who want to work with these early data sets must employ these arbitrary age categories. With computerized storing techniques, survey age is usually coded by year of birth, and one has great flexibility in analyzing survey results For example, a major analysis by Converse (1976) divides respondents into three-year age categories, and throughout their study of the US electorate, Miller and Shanks (1996) generally divide their results into cohorts that are four years in width.

2. Life Cycle, Generational, And Period Effects

Whenever young adults differ from their elders there are usually two plausible interpretations for these differences. A life cycle interpretation maintains that these differences result mainly from the inexperience of the young, and postulates that the young will become more like their elders when they age. A generational interpretation maintains that these differences result from the differences between the formative experiences of young adults and those of their elders.

One of the most extensive controversies in political science research has been the well-documented finding that young US citizens tend to have weaker party loyalties than their elders. This finding was reported in The American Voter. Lacking longitudinal data, Campbell and his colleagues (1960) relied upon an indirect test comparing the partisan loyalties of persons of the same age who have held their partisan loyalties for different lengths of time. Even though their test was indirect, Campbell and his colleagues (1960) reached strong conclusions that favored a life cycle formulation. The weak party loyalties of young Americans, they argued, resulted from their youth and political inexperience. These conclusions were strengthened through a cross-national analysis, reanalyzing Almond and Verba’s study of the USA, Britain, West Germany, Italy, and Mexico. As Converse (1969) showed, The American Voter formulation could explain a process through which partisan strength among the electorate is held in equilibrium. Even though older voters with strong party ties are dying and being replaced continuously by younger voters with weak partisan loyalties, the dynamics that increase partisan strength with age could prevent the erosion of partisan strength among the electorate. If, as Campbell and his colleagues (1960) argued, party loyalties among the electorate contribute to political stability, the life cycle explanation, if valid, had major implications for the political system.

Although The American Voter explanation was unchallenged for a decade, in the early 1970s scholars began to question it, based upon the finding that partisan loyalties did not become stronger as cohorts were tracked across the life cycle. Converse and his supporters acknowledged that partisan loyalties after 1964 did not increase among cohorts as they aged, but maintained that this resulted from the political dislo cations of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, the failure of partisanship to increase with age was held to result from the events of the post-1964 period. By the late 1980s at least 20 articles had focused on this controversy (for a summary, see Abramson 1989) and several more appeared in the 1990s. But the space devoted to this controversy has declined as scholars have increasingly recognized the intractable difficulties of distinguishing among life cycle, generational, and period effects. Instead, scholarship has turned to studying the impact of generational replacement upon political attitudes and behavior.

3. The Impact Of Generational Replacement

There is no debate that the population is gradually transformed as a result of generational replacement. (Some scholars use the term ‘cohort succession.’) Replacement can play a major role in transforming the political attitudes and behaviors among mass publics. For example, during the 1930s and 1940s, replacement helped make the Democrats the majority party in the USA, and during the postwar years replacement was a major force eroding US party loyalties. Replacement benefited the British Labour party during the 1960s, but it contributed to the erosion of British partisan loyalties between 1964 and 1987. Between 1969 and 1988, replacement contributed to the decline of the Labor Party Alignment in Israel. During the postwar years, replacement may have contributed to a more partisan electorate in West Germany. Replacement may also help transform political values. For example, replacement helped to increase political tolerance in the USA between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s. (For the citations to the sources documenting these trends, see Abramson and Inglehart 1995.) Women who came of age in the USA after the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment played a major role in increasing women’s turnout (Firebaugh and Chen 1995). The most extensive analysis of the impact of generational replacement upon value change among mass publics has been conducted by Inglehart and his colleagues (Abramson and Inglehart 1995) who focus on changing levels of postmaterialism. Respondents who give high priority to postmaterialist values tend to emphasize freedom and quality of life concerns, whereas materialists emphasize economic and physical security. In all of the European societies they study, young adults are more likely to have postmaterialist values than their elders. During the two decades that Abramson and Inglehart (1995) studied, about twofifths of the population of these societies had been replaced. As Europeans with higher levels of materialism were dying out of these societies, and as they were being replaced continuously by Europeans with postmaterialist values, population turnover had affected the overall distribution of values in these societies. Analysis of a combined sample of the European societies that can be studied between 1970 and 1992 suggests that about nine-tenths of the overall shift toward postmaterialism resulted from replacement.

4. Methodological Issues And Future Research

Future research on the impact of generational replacement will face methodological problems. As cohorts are tracked over time, the older cohorts die. Samples of the very old become small and nonrepresentative and, eventually, dwindle away. The standardization procedures used by Abramson and Inglehart (1995) need to assign some value to cohorts that can no longer be tracked, but imputing any such value is problematic. The best one can do is to present estimates using a variety of assumptions, some of which have been suggested by Firebaugh (1989).

Bibliography:

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