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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.

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    Is this question specific to the USA, or are you interested in worldwide answers? The answer might be wildly different in Russia or Senegal compared to the USA or Finland. Also, why is this tagged parties? Political participation is not limited to political parties, in particular not in a country like the USA, where the two-party system does such a poor job to represent the people.
    – gerrit
    Commented Mar 27 at 16:10
  • Cue the "No, way, my generation was much better than..." remarks. It is a little difficult to compare across timelines when the same challenges weren't present and when the social media outrage-o-meter was absent in the past. It's like the "Greatest Generation" thing: yes, impressive courage, but who's to say a latter generation would not have risen to the circumstances?
    – Italian Philosopher
    Commented Mar 27 at 22:55
  • @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica It's precisely my question. Again, I'm talking about politics as an everyday discussion among friends and family. Politics is certainly more entertaining and as interesting as hearing the latest gossip about your favorite rock star or actor. Social media definitely plays a role, but it started much earlier.
    – ATL_DEV
    Commented Mar 28 at 3:26

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"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.

us presidential election voter turnout 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.

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    @ATL_DEV That would be my generation, toward whom I know there is a lot of dislike. (I'm a boomer.) We were a very politically active generation when we were young. I have to wonder myself WTF happened to my generation.
    – David Hammen
    Commented Mar 27 at 13:59
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    @ATL_DEV I suspect that in the US, Donald Trump has motivated a lot of younger adults to become more politically aware (and to vote), and probably not in the way Mr. Trump would want them to vote.
    – David Hammen
    Commented Mar 27 at 14:47
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    1996 and 2012 are the second terms for Clinton and Obama, and then 2000 and 2016 were open elections after a period of Democratic rule - and those are the 4 lowest voter turnouts for the 18-24 group in the last 30 years. Looks to me like the young 'ens really don't like Reps being in charge, but get complacent when Dems are running the show.
    – codeMonkey
    Commented Mar 27 at 14:56
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    @codeMonkey If by "young'ens" you mean under-65s, then maybe. Because only the 65+ group isn't showing that trend.
    – AmiralPatate
    Commented Mar 27 at 15:37
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    Worth noting that the drop in the youth vote early on was due to the reduction of the voting age from age 21 to age 18.
    – ohwilleke ♦
    Commented Mar 27 at 19:28
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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

BoomersExtracted XExtracted MillenialsExtracted ZExtracted

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

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  • Just noticed that the X line for 18-25 could possibly be extended to 2004, which would change the direction significantly. This is due to me getting different definitions of age ranges for generations each time I googled it. It was not intentional!
    – Mars
    Commented Mar 29 at 7:00
  • Nice. 2 graphing suggestions: put your lines at the bottom, horizontally. and pick higher contrast (most infographics gets that wrong). Here's a 6 col high-contrast palette.
    – Italian Philosopher
    Commented Mar 29 at 15:58
  • @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica Thanks! I'll try to keep that in mind. As for the position of my lines--the original lines are at the bottom, my additions are on the right
    – Mars
    Commented Mar 31 at 0:59
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    So, my sense is supported by data. Seeing how the last two generations trend upwards is very compelling. While political consciousness can't be directly measured, voting is a fairly good indicator since have to be politically conscious to vote.
    – ATL_DEV
    Commented Apr 15 at 21:03
  • @ATL_DEV Mostly. Some pitfalls to my analysis would be: 1) A better analysis would have looked at trends in a weighted fashion instead of simply highlighting sections like I did. (For example, in 2008, only 1 year's worth of Millennials can vote in the 25-44 block, meaning the vast majority of 25-44 voters were Gen X. 2) There aren't enough datapoints to actually notice show a trend (if a trend even exists and it isn't all just random)
    – Mars
    Commented Apr 16 at 2:42

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