Millennial politics
Key issues for US millennials include support for same-sex marriage, varying attitudes towards the LGBT community, and a more moderate stance on political ideologies compared to older generations.
Despite historically low political participation, the 2015 federal election saw a surge in youth voter turnout, influenced by Trudeau's progressive campaign promises.
British millennials, characterized by a relative political disengagement in their early years, have shown liberal tendencies on social and economic matters, favoring individual liberty and limited government intervention.
According to demographer and public policy analyst Philip Longman, "even among baby boomers, those who wound up having children have turned out to be remarkably similar to their parents in their attitudes about "family" values.
[5] The Economist observed in 2013 that, like their British counterparts, millennials in the United States held more positive attitudes towards recognizing same-sex marriage than older demographic cohorts.
)[7] Results from this Harris poll were released on the 50th anniversary of the riots that broke out in Stonewall Inn,[7] New York City, in June 1969, thought to be the start of the LGBT rights movement.
[9]2018 surveys of American teenagers 13 to 17 and adults aged 18 or over conducted by the Pew Research Center found that millennials and Generation Z held similar views on various political and social issues.
[10] In 2015, a Pew Research study found 40% of millennials in the United States supported government restriction of public speech offensive to minority groups.
Pew Research noted similar age related trends in the United Kingdom, but not in Germany and Spain, where millennials were less supportive of restricting offensive speech than older generations.
[11] In the U.S. and UK during the mid-2010s, younger millennials brought changes to higher education via drawing attention to microaggressions and advocating for implementation of safe spaces and trigger warnings in the university setting.
[14] Gallup polls conducted in 2019 revealed that 62% of people aged 18 to 29—older members of Generation Z and younger millennials—support giving women access to abortion while 33% opposed.
[18] Polls conducted by Gallup and the Pew Research Center found that support for stricter gun laws among people aged 18 to 29 and 18 to 36, respectively, is statistically no different from that of the general population.
[23] In early 2019, Harvard University's Institute of Politics Youth Poll asked voters aged 18 to 29—younger millennials and the first wave of Generation Z—what they would like to be priorities for U.S. foreign policy.
Millennials may still be a potent force at the ballot box, but it may be years before their participation rates reach their numerical potential as young people are consistently less likely to vote than their elders.
[32] In addition, despite the hype surrounding the political engagement and possible record turnout among young voters, millennials' voting power is even weaker than first appeared due to the comparatively higher number of them who are non-citizens (12%, as of 2019), according to William Frey of the Brookings Institution.
Political scientists Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin argued that it was therefore unrealistic for Hillary Clinton to expect high turnout rates among millennials in 2016.
[31] The Brookings Institution predicted that after 2016, millennials could affect how politics is conducted in the two-party system of the United States, given that they were more likely to identify as liberals or conservatives than Democrats or Republicans, respectively.
[34] As is the case with many European countries, empirical evidence poses real challenges to the popular argument that the surge of nationalism and populism is an ephemeral phenomenon due to "angry white old men" who would inevitably be replaced by younger and more liberal voters.
His core campaign message centered around gender equality, tolerance, legalizing marijuana, addressing climate change, and governmental transparency while Harper focused on tax cuts.
Nevertheless, political scientist Melanee Thomas at the University of Calgary warned that the electoral power of this demographic group should not be overestimated, since millennials do not vote as a single bloc.
Most want to address climate change, alleviate poverty, and adopt a more open immigration policy, but most important were micro-economic concerns, such as housing affordability, the cost of living, healthcare, and job-market uncertainties.
[citation needed] The Economist reported in 2013 that surveys of political attitudes among millennials in the United Kingdom revealed that they held more liberal views on social and economic matters than older demographic groups.
While support for increased welfare programs for the poor at the cost of potentially higher taxes has declined steadily since the 1980s among all living demographic cohorts in the U.K., Generation Y disapproved of such spending schemes the most, according to data from Ipsos MORI and the British Social Attitudes Survey.
A total of 65% were either very or fairly proud of the United Kingdom Armed Forces, 62% the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 77% the National Health Service (NHS).
[49] According to a YouGov poll conducted right before the referendum on the possible departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union (Brexit) in 2016, almost three quarters of voters aged 18 to 24 opposed leaving the E.U.
Many older voters came of age when Britain was a less ethnically diverse country, when collective memory of the British Empire and its victory in World War II was strong, when most people did not attend university, and spent a large part of their formative years in a society where abortion and homosexuality were illegal and the death penalty was in use.
But as countries transitioned from having industrial economies to a post-industrial and globalized world, and as the twentieth century became the twenty-first, topics of political discourse changed to other questions and polarization due to competing values intensified.
[31] But scholars such as Ronald Inglehart traced the roots of this new "culture conflict" all the way back to the 1960s, which witnessed the emergence of the Baby Boomers, who were generally university-educated middle-class voters.
Major topics for political discussion at that time were things like the sexual revolution, civil rights, nuclear weaponry, ethnocultural diversity, environmental protection, European integration, and the concept of "global citizenship".
In the twenty-first century, supporters of post-materialism lined up behind causes such as LGBT rights, climate change, multiculturalism, and various political campaigns on social media.
