Youth transitions to adulthood have become longer, more complex and diverse, yet these shifts are often overlooked in studies of political attitudes and behaviour, leading to contradictory conclusions. This article explores the evolving nature of youth political engagement through the concept of ‘engagement biographies’, drawing on biographical interviews with young activists in Spain. It examines the extent to which young activists experience political involvement as a dynamic, context-dependent process shaped by their individualised and de-standardised paths to adulthood, interpersonal relationships and broader socio-political contexts. Adopting a biographical perspective enhances understanding of key trends identified in the literature on youth and politics, including the volatility of participation, a preference for direct and less institutionalised activism, the integration of activism into everyday life, and increasing disengagement from formal politics. These insights contribute to a more nuanced understanding of young people’s patterns of political engagement and their broader implications for democracies.

This article explores how Chilean business elites remember the Unidad Popular (UP) government (1970–1973) and how these memories shape their current political culture. Drawing on interviews, it distinguishes between two generational groups: those who experienced the UP as adults and those who lived through it as children or adolescents or did not live it firsthand. The study examines how memories of political confrontations and commodity shortages form a conservative collective narrative that resists systemic reform. These recollections often legitimize the 1973 military coup and the subsequent neoliberal transformations. The research shows that personal experiences, as well as narratives passed down through generations, contribute to the construction of a political culture among economic elites that privileges stability over change. By analyzing these memory dynamics, the article underscores the importance of elite historical consciousness in shaping their vision of Chile’s political present and its possible future.

Racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented at all levels of U.S. politics. Yet, the 2020 Census reports that people of color constitute the majority of Americans under 18, and could thus serve as a pool of descriptive candidates in the near future. We study how race and age intersect in the first of multiple steps that may lead to election: interest in running for office. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Survey, we first show that Black and Latino Americans are more interested in running for office than are White and Asian Americans. This observed ambition gap cannot be accounted for by standard explanations like socioeconomic disparities, ideology, political interest, and broad civic engagement. Rather, it is explained by differences among age cohorts: younger Black and Latino Americans are more interested in running for office, due to having been disproportionately engaged in recent movements advocating racial justice. We conclude that differences in political ambition between racial and ethnic groups do not explain the underrepresentation of Black and Latino Americans; rather, by drawing on the untapped ambition found among younger, more diverse cohorts, future recruitment efforts for the next generation of politicians can help translate this potential into representational parity in U.S. politics.

This article is a review of the recent literature on generational differences in electoral behaviour. We first discuss several conceptual issues, after which we provide a description of the main findings in three fields: the role of generations in (1) turnout, (2) party choice and (3) the determinants of party choice. In the concluding section we discuss a number of overall patterns that emerge from this very rich literature. We also sketch some pitfalls and avenues for further research.

Prominent theories claim that young Europeans are increasingly socialist as well as divided from their elders on non‐economic issues. This paper asks whether age‐based polarisation is really growing in Europe, using new estimates of the ideological positions of different age groups in 27 European countries across four issue domains from 1981 to 2018. The young in Europe turn out to be relatively libertarian: more socially liberal than the old in most countries but also more opposed to taxation and government spending. These age divides are not growing either: today's differences over social issues and immigration are similar in size to the 1980s, and if anything are starting to fall. Analysis of birth cohorts points to persistent cohort effects and period effects as the explanation for these patterns; there is little evidence that European cohorts become uniformly more right‐wing or left‐wing with age. Hence age‐based polarisation need not be a permanent or natural feature of European politics but is dependent on the changing social, political and economic climate.

When asked to place themselves on a left‐right scale, men and women tend to take different positions. Over time, however ideological gender differences have taken a different form. While women were traditionally more right‐leaning than men, from around the mid‐1990s onwards they have been found to take positions to the left of men. Using an originally constructed dataset that includes information on the left‐right self‐placement of more than 2.5 million respondents in 36 OECD countries between 1973 and 2018, I empirically verify how the ideological gender gap has evolved since. The results show, first, that while women have shifted to the left since the late 1970s, the pace of this change has strongly diminished since the late 1990s. Second, there is important between‐country variation in the size of the reversal in the ideological gender gap. Third, with the exception of the Silent generation and the Baby‐boomers, newer generations of women have not taken more left‐leaning positions than generations before them.

The EJPR article ‘A rising generation of Europeans?’ provided systematic evidence for the existence of generational differences in attitudes towards the European Union (EU). In this research note, it is argued that identifying generational differences in specifically affective orientations is the crucial issue for the future of the EU. Drawing on and extending the earlier work expectations in respect to generational and life‐cycle differences in affective orientations are developed and tested, highlighting the existence of the former, their consistency across a range of indicators, and the absence of the latter. The results are an important counterpoint to the growth in ambivalence in attitudes towards the EU.

Conflicts about ‘place’ are increasingly shaping the politics of advanced democracies, and voters are ever more divided along the urban-rural divide. However, this does not mean that members of all generations are growing apart. Instead, the urban-rural divide is stronger among younger generations, who are slowly replacing older, less divided ones. To demonstrate this, we combine post-election surveys from Switzerland spanning 28 years with macro data on the municipality level to examine the role of different cohorts in the urban-rural divide using age-period-cohort logistic regressions. The results reveal that the role of place is stronger for newer cohorts, with more recently socialized urbanites holding more progressive immigration attitudes and preferring left-wing parties compared to earlier urban cohorts. In contrast, whereas newer cohorts in urban contexts are less likely to vote for the far-right than their older neighbors, this is not the case for the same cohorts in more rural places. The results help to understand the role of generational replacement in explaining the growing differences between urban and rural citizens in Europe.

War in the former Yugoslavia still reverberates in the lives of the generations that lived through it. The aim of this study was to compare a cohort that had direct experience of the war (first generation, G1, n = 89) with those born after the war (second generation, G2, n = 30). All participants stay or live in the Czech Republic. We used an individualized approach, with a structured interview of 91 questions, supplemented by quantitative methods to measure traumatic stress (PCL-5), adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and centrality of the event (CES). G1 had a higher mean ACE score compared to G2, and the two generations did not differ in centrality of the event and trauma symptom severity, in the rate of psychiatric outpatient care use, psychiatric hospitalizations, diagnosed PTSD, current psychiatric medication use and in illicit drug use. A number of signs were indicative of good resilience, including the ability to move internationally, which implies language proficiency, and the ability to earn a sufficient income. G1 and G2 respondents represent a group of educated individuals with their mental health mostly matching that of the general population, as well as people who have success in their professional and personal lives.

Cet article tente de mesurer les changements possibles survenus dans la structure de l’opinion publique sur la question de l’indépendance du Québec. Plus particulièrement, nous comparons deux modèles théoriques qui ont été au coeur de notre compréhension des appuis à l’indépendance, soit le modèle du choix rationnel associé aux coûts-bénéfices prospectifs de l’indépendance et le modèle socio-psychologique qui met de l’avant les griefs et revendications que le Québec ressent face au régime canadien. Notre étude permet aussi d’évaluer la pertinence de ces modèles à travers les générations entre 2014 et 2024; et de considérer de nouveaux facteurs explicatifs contemporains. Dans l’ensemble, nos résultats suggèrent une surprenante stabilité quant à l’importance des différents facteurs considérés pour comprendre les mécaniques expliquant l’appui ou non à l’indépendance du Québec. Les attitudes populistes, nativistes et autoritaristes apportent aussi un pouvoir explicatif additionnel, quoique limité.

This article analyzes structures of feeling among the generation of trauma carriers who grew up under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Drawing on interviews with thirty-seven cultural producers (including filmmakers, novelists, visual artists, and memory activists), we shed light on the generational memory work involved in processing cultural trauma, emphasizing the emotional force behind memory transmission in postconflict societies dealing with legacies of terror. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s notion of structures of feeling, we explore how the generational memory of children during Pinochet’s dictatorship is shaped by melancholic intergenerational identification with past struggles. This intergenerational bond is characterized by melancholic affect in representing the previous generation, which is rooted in experiences of state violence and resistance and plays a key role in processing historical trauma and shaping contemporary social critique in postconflict Chile.

Forty years into Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, amidst persistently low rates of marriage across southern Africa, an unexpected uptick in weddings appears to be afoot. Young people orphaned in the worst years of the epidemic are crafting creative paths to marriage where—and perhaps because—their parents could not. Taking the lead of a pastor’s assertion that the wife is mother of her husband, I suggest these conjugal creativities turn on an understanding of marriage as an intergenerational relationship. Casting marriage in intergenerational terms is an act of ethical (re)imagination that creates experimental possibilities for reworking personhood, pasts, and futures in ways that respond closely to the specific crises and loss the AIDS epidemic brought to Botswana. This experimentation is highly unpredictable and may reproduce the crisis and loss to which it responds; the multivalences of marriage-as-motherhood can be sources of failure and violence, as well as innovation and life. But it also recuperates and reorients intergenerational relationships, retrospectively and prospectively, regenerating persons and relations, in time. While different crises might invite different sorts of ethical re-imagination, marriage gives us a novel perspective on how people live with, and through, times of crisis. And marriage emerges as a crucial if often overlooked practice by which social change is not only managed but sought and produced.

L'existence et la persistance de mouvements nationalistes peuvent avoir plusieurs explications, dont l'une est liée aux générations – à la façon dont elles ont été socialisées à la politique dans des contextes sociétaux distincts, et comment les générations plus âgées sont remplacées par les plus jeunes à travers le temps. Pour mieux comprendre l’évolution du nationalisme au Québec, cette étude s'appuie sur les six dernières Études électorales québécoises (2007–2022) et utilise un modèle âge-période-cohorte pour examiner la relation entre les groupes générationnels et divers indicateurs du nationalisme. Les résultats révèlent effectivement une histoire générationnelle. Les baby-boomers se distinguent particulièrement des autres générations par leur attachement au Québec, leur soutien au projet d'indépendance et leur appui au Parti québécois, tandis que les millénariaux soutiennent davantage Québec solidaire et les membres de la génération X appuient davantage la Coalition avenir Québec. Ainsi, il cohabite actuellement différentes « générations nationalistes » au Québec.

Recent election cycles show a reluctance among Black millennials to support the Democratic Party, which suggests that they are not captured by the party like their predecessors. While we know that African Americans have historically remained a loyal voting bloc, it is important to analyze whether there are generational differences with respect to Black Democratic Party loyalty. In this study, I analyze Black millennial partisanship identification and compare it to Black non-millennials (Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers). To test this, I employ a multi-method approach. My results show that while Black millennials continue to identify with the Democratic Party, they are not as loyal to the Democratic Party when compared to Black non-millennials. Further, I find that Black millennials are not changing loyalties to the Republican or a third party. Instead, Black millennials are willing to withhold their vote altogether if they are not satisfied with any Democratic candidates. My work has critical implications in how we understand Black politics and reveals that Democratic candidates will have to earn Black millennials vote going forward.