Young citizens today are more skeptical of democracy than their parents were at the same age. As we pointed out in an earlier article for Journal of Democracy, published this July, this trend is especially striking in the United States, where an illiberal “cohort shift” is evident over time, and across a range of survey items. The next chart, for example, compares the number of Americans of different generations stating that it would be a “fairly good” or “very good” idea to have “a strong leader” rather than “parliament and elections” in 1995 and in 2011. Younger cohorts are simply more likely to agree with this anti-democratic point of view. In the last survey, almost half of millennials expressed approval for a “strong leader”.
Do the same findings hold across the universe of long-standing, supposedly established democracies? We do not claim that the effect is equal in all countries, and analyzing such variation would be an important extension of our work. In Sweden, for example, younger cohorts may be more skeptical of democracy than their elders — but a comparison of data over time shows they are more pro-democratic than their counterparts were in the 1990s (Figure 3). But in most of the long-standing democracies for which we have data, our trend holds. In Germany, younger cohorts used to be reliably more pro-democratic than older ones. Now, both the young and the middle-aged express more authoritarian values than people did at similar life stages in the past. The picture is even less encouraging in the United Kingdom and the United States, where millennials surveyed today are markedly more favorable to having a “strong leader” than their parents’ generation was at the same life stage.
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