With the retirements of leading scholars such as M. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi, there was certainly a void in the study of political socialization. Fortunately, Stella Rouse and Ashley Ross help to fill that void with their groundbreaking book, The Politics of Millennials. This book is notable for two reasons. First, it is one of the first large scale studies of political behavior of the millennial cohort, those born between 1980 and 2000. Second, this book foregrounds discussions of race and ethnicity in exciting ways. In their hands, race and ethnicity are more than mere control variables; rather, they serve as analytical and comparative frames of reference for the entire project. This is refreshing and a good example of how the study of race and ethnicity can be effectively integrated into broad questions of political science.
Unlike other work which focuses almost solely on voter turnout or the acquisition of partisanship among millennials, Rouse and Ross take a comprehensive look at partisanship, public opinion, and policy preferences among this large and influential group of Americans. They describe the values that are common across this generational cohort; and they seek explain how within-cohort variations in attitudes and political behaviors can be explained by race and ethnicity.
Rouse and Ross conduct this cross-group examination in a number of different domains using multiple methods, including surveys with minority oversamples and focus group data. They look at partisanship and attitudes about the economy, foreign policy, immigration, environmental policy, and abortion rights, among others. They compare millennials to non-millennials and millennials of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Rouse and Ross find that despite the composite diversity of the millennial cohort, race and class identity still matters. That is, an individual millennial's policy preferences and attitudes can be predicted by her race/ethnicity and educational level, among other factors. For example, while millennials are more supportive of immigration than older adults, Latino/a, liberal and well educated millennials are even more supportive of pro-immigration policies.
In addition, millennials are not necessarily more liberal than older generations. While Rouse and Ross find, perhaps not surprisingly, that millennials are more likely than their elders to favor liberalizing marijuana laws, they did not find that millennials were more likely to support gun control. Moreover, millennials were statistically no more likely than their elders to believe in global warming.
These findings are noteworthy and are essential in helping to frame both popular and scholarly discussions of cohort effects. In everyday parlance, there is a tendency to frame current political debates as a function of generational replacement in progress. “Let the old fogeys die off,” the logic goes, “and they will be replaced by more reasonable, progressive voters.” Rouse and Ross' data show us that while the substance of racial debates may look (slightly) different in each generation, race and ethnicity remain strong predictors of Americans' political attitudes, no doubt because they still play an outsized role in predicting life chances. Based on Rouse and Ross' findings, we can still expect to see racial cleavages in American politics for at least another generation or two.
Second, their findings challenge the notion that younger Americans are universally liberal, across the range of public issues. Yes, they support marijuana legalization and are reluctant to support war. But they also tend to be moderate in their economic preferences, which Rouse and Ross attribute to a risk aversion borne of having seen their economic prospects proscribed by the Great Recession of the last decade.
The study does have some limitations. The first quibble is a small one. The authors artfully weave the focus group responses throughout the book. These respondents come from Washington, DC, New Orleans, San Antonio, and Los Angeles, which by implication, allows for the recruitment of a racially diverse group of respondents. The location of these groups also offers East-West geographic representation. If possible, future studies should consider North-South representation as well—would respondents from New York, Chicago, or Portland have made different observations? As someone who has done groups like this, though, I totally understand how cost and time constraints require tradeoffs in terms of geographic selection. As such, I want to emphasize how mild this particular critique is and affirm my respect for their mixed-method approach, which I think is very effective.
My other concern is about the cross-generational comparisons. Here, such comparisons are made with cross-sectional data, which allows the authors to compare millennials to older respondents in the moment regarding the most contemporary issues. Thus, Rouse and Ross chart cohort effects, but not life cycle effects. I know that there are limitations based on the availability of prior survey questions, but I would have liked to see more comparisons of millennials to older respondents when those previous generations were in their 20s and 30s. This would have been especially helpful in the foreign policy chapter and would have allowed them to distinguish attitudinal differences based on socialization from differences based on being at a certain life stage.
In some places, I also wonder if the cohort analysis would be strengthened by analyzing the millennial cohort in subgroups? There are a few places where I suspect that there may be attitudinal cleavages between older and younger millennials. For example, the authors make some claims about how 9/11 may have impacted the foreign policy attitudes of this generation. I suspect that such an impact would be different for a respondent born in 1982, who would have been an adult on 9/11, and a respondent born in 1999, who is too young to remember the terrorist attacks.
These concerns aside, Rouse and Ross make an important scholarly contribution with this book. This volume reinvigorates the literature on political socialization, and it makes important strides in centering race and ethnicity in “mainstream” political science studies. This book is an invaluable resource to anyone studying young people, public opinion, and policy preferences, and should be a foundational text (and citation) for anyone seeking to do future work on political socialization or cohort effects.
