Seminar: 

The Trouble with Cohorts: Reconsidering Generational Differences in Democratic Deconsolidation - Elissa Berwick (McGill University)

14:00-15:00 (GMT) Wednesday, October 22.

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Abstract: Are young people really less likely to care about democracy? Attitudinal democratic backsliding and rising democratic disaffection among younger generations are central concerns in contemporary political science. Although many studies have attempted to gauge the extent of this apparent increase in democratic fatigue, the issue remains both contested and highly relevant. This study makes two key contributions. First, we critically evaluate the methodological tools commonly used in political science to analyze questions related to generational change. The current approach to this problem in political science relies on Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) to separate out cohort trends (e.g. Wuttke et al 2022; Claassen and Magalhães 2023). In this paper, we demonstrate that GAMs can only recover cohort trends under very restrictive assumptions. We propose an alternative framework that clarifies what type of conclusions we can draw about generational change without making restrictive assumptions. Secondly, we apply our new framework to the study of generational differences in democratic attitudes. Our findings reveal that generational change in support for democracy is highly context-specific. In a limited number of cases, such as in some Anglo-American and a few European democracies, we observe notable shifts in democratic attitudes among younger generations.

About the speaker(s): Professor Elissa Berwick joined the Department of Political Science at McGill University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2020, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She earned her PhD in Political Science from MIT in 2019, focusing on comparative politics and quantitative methodology. Her research examines sub-state nationalism, particularly how imagined communities of stateless nations shape political attitudes and behaviors.