Generations and Politics: A Panel Study of Young Adults and Their Parents . By M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. Pp. xii + 427. $25.00, cloth; $6.95, paper.)

Generations and Politics is not simply a study of political socialization as was the authors' The Political Character of Adolescence (Princeton University Press, 1974). Rather, Jennings and Niemi examine political change and stability among different segments of the mass public, and they wish to connect their findings to "the larger political system of which these segments are a part" (p. 3). The authors make interesting use of a unique data set: a 1965 to 1973 panel survey of young adults and their parents (nearly 80% of the high school seniors and parents from their earlier study), which is supplemented by large questionnaire samples of high school seniors in 1965 and 1973. These surveys provide measures of political characteristics including psychological involvement in public affairs, political resources (i.e., cognitive skills and motivation), political participation, policy preferences, partisanship, and evaluation of actors and groups in politics. The authors' major objective is to examine different theoretical models of persistence and change in the public's broadly defined political orientations. These models consist of standard life-cycle effects, generation effects, period effects, and their hybrid combinations. The book is packed with tables and findings for the measures described above, both at the individual and aggregate level, although their presentation would have been clearer and less repetitive had the results from the two levels been discussed in' the same chapters. Overall the analysis is careful and sound, but the failure to include significance tests for differences in correlations and differences in means occasionally leaves the reader in doubt about statistical inferences. Generations and Politics reports numerous important results and conclusions—some intriguing, others hardly surprising. At the individual level, models of persistence are lent some support for different political characteristics, although there is more discontinuity in attitudes and behavior in the early adult years (chapters 2 and 3). Clearly, any weak parental influences that had existed eight years earlier had diminished further (chapter 4). The net effect of these processes, however, is summarized more clearly and reliably at the aggregate level because of the substantial randomness and measurement error at the individual level (but, curiously, no more for the eight-year panel than for shorter time periods). This analysis is greatly aided by the youth cohort data, although by the same reasoning available national surveys should have been used to make comparisons with other adult age groups and cohorts. Jennings and Niemi find considerable intergeneration convergence or constant divergence. The generation gap differences on contemporary issues, with the young more liberal and ideologically sophisticated, was not nearly as great as it was perceived by each generation. Moreover, the 1973 seniors shifted in such a way as to reduce differences that had existed during the mid-1960s. The one noticeable pulling apart, of course, was in independent partisanship (chapters 5, 6, and 7). Jennings and Niemi argue that educational stratification provided a fundamental and early link between individuals and politics (chapter 8) and that young adult women still differed from young men in stereotypical ways consistent with the effects of motherhood (chapter 9). They find somewhat reduced differences between whites and nonwhites, and they see the generation gap among nonwhites—with the young more like the majority population—as evidence for the diminishing relevance of racial differences (chapter 10). In examining "Protest Behavior and Its Legacy" (chapter 11), Jennings and Niemi argue persuasively that Vietnam-era protesters did indeed emerge as a distinct generation unit.