Are millennials and generation Z more politically conscious than previous generations?

Question

When I was growing up, my generation (gen X) was rather apathetic in our youth. Politics was the boring stuff done up there with little bearing on what's happening down here. It was the realm of adults whose job it was to run society. We had better things to do like rock out to the latest music, rebel against our parents, and fit in with our peers. Discussing politics in most social situations was considered nerdy and weird: you were supposed to shut up and drink your beer. Unlike other countries, part of being American then was the luxury of not to caring about your government.

After the election of George W Bush in 2000, I noticed a huge change. All of a sudden, the music stopped and the harsh lights were turned on. The cops shut down the party and everyone was sent home. The booming economy was over. For the first time, we started discussing politics openly and sorting each other out based on political ideology. If you didn't have one, then you better find one. The old "I don't get into politics" made you a nerd and uncool. We discovered politics had real consequences in our lives. There was the ongoing threat of being drafted, economic uncertainty, and hyper-vigilance after the shock of 9/11.

Ever since then, I've notice younger generations are even more politically minded. The election of Obama, the first black president followed by Trump, a ubiquitous American pop culture icon, increased political interest to the same level as what happened on last night's nationally popular sitcom episode. Washington now has more in common with Hollywood, an endless source of reality-based entertainment.

While I don't have any statistics to support it, it appears Millennials and Generation Z are more politically conscious than previous American generations. Is this a misperception on my part? To be clear, I define consciousness as different from participation. Meaning even if they do or don't participate in the political process, i.e. voting and running for office, politics is as interesting to them as the latest fashion, latest hit song, etc.

Answer 1

"Political consciousness" is hard to measure directly. But if we consider election participation a good proxy for interest in politics, then we can indeed see a trend in this statistic about voter participation in US presidential elections by age group.

What we see here is that the participation of the 18-24 demographic took a notable dip in the late 90s and then spiked in 2020 to almost the level of the very political youth of the 1960s.

To be fair, all other age groups follow a similar trend of falling and raising election participation over the years. But the trend is indeed most apparent in this particular age group.

Interestingly, this cultural discrepancy seems to disappear as people get older. Otherwise we would see the spike of 1992 and the dip of 1996 and 2000 again in the curve for the 25-44 cohort 8 years later.

Answer 2

While Voice and Equality focuses heavily on class differences and the influence of money in political participation, Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995) did not take an in depth look into the differences in civic participation among various age groups. Dalton (2016) replicated the research design from Voice and Equality to identify how civil participation has evolved over the last few decades while focusing on generational differences. Using data from the General Social Survey, he measured the change from 1967 to 2014 in levels of participation in political activities. Dalton (2016) found that in many ways the level of political participation has increased. Today, people are more likely to contribute money to politicians, write letters to their representatives, work on a campaign, and even participate in a boycott or march than they were in the 1960s or 1980s. Voting, however, has had a significant drop in participation levels, especially among the millennial generation. Dalton (2016) found that the Millennial generation has the lowest voter turnout of any generational group of young voters and argues that “it is unclear whether the Millennial generation can ever catch up to earlier generations” (p. 6).

https://core.ac.uk/download/229112648.pdf

Millennials are more involved in other aspects of politics except voting, so in fact that type of participation could be used as a proxy for measuring political savviness, at least, it could be argued so. However, participation in voting has decreased significantly compared to previous generations, perhaps suggesting that they think that there are more effective ways to participate in the democratic system.

Answer 3

An addendum to Phillips answer.

The graph is better if you show where people exist.

This isn't accounting for general trends like others mentioned, but looking at compositions, we can see a consistent gain in groups/trends where Mills and Z were active, vs a general drop in groups where Boomers and X are plentiful

Source for generation age definitions
Source for data, same as Phillip