The Political Impact of the Baby Boom: Are There Persistent Generational Differences in Political Beliefs and Behavior?

A look at the extent to which baby boomers differ from their elders in party preferences and electoral behavior. The purpose of this paper is to assess the political impact of the baby boom. If baby boomers differ from their elders in political partisanship, or in electoral behavior, or in favoring more liberal stances on social issues, such differences should be reflected in the nature of the American electorate and public opinion over the past thirty years. As a demographic phenomenon, the baby boom was a clear disruption of an otherwise monotonic decline in fertility over the past two centuries in American society. The production of vast numbers of children by a relatively small set of cohorts over a relatively short span of time produced a bulge in the age composition of society. As a social phenomenon, those in the baby boom share a common history, reaching adulthood in the mid I96os through the late 1970s. During their formative years they experienced a unique slice of American history, specifically the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the turbulent period of student protests against the war, the Nixon years and the Watergate break-in, the post-Watergate malaise, the feminist movement, and the ascendancy of the Republican party during the 198os. Several studies have shown the baby boomers to be more tolerant with regard to race, gender, and family issues (e.g. Firebaugh and Davis, 1988; Mason and Lu, I988) and generally liberal in political orientation (Light, I988). The baby boom cohorts were raised during a period of economic prosperity relative to previous ones, and this prosperity may have helped shape their political goals and values. These are the cohorts that Inglehart dubbed "postmaterialists," noting that they are more concerned with the quality of social life than economic security or "materialism" (Inglehart, 1977). In this paper, I place this set of issues in the larger focus on the theory of cohort replacement, that is, the idea that historical events happening during early adulthood are significant factors in shaping an entire generation's political views, which tend to stabilize over peoples' lives. If this theory is true, the sheer size of the baby boom cohorts and their tendency toward liberal positions on a range of political and social issues would seem to be having major impacts on trends in political beliefs and behavior.If the baby boom cohorts are politically distinctive and if this distinctiveness is persistent over most of the lifespan, then we would expect their impact to be felt well into the next century, simply as a function of cohort replacement. On the other hand, the baby boom cohorts may not be all that distinctive, and whatever differences do exist may not persist over time, because of the influences of historical factors and the potential effects of aging. In other words, some of the recent shifts toward political conservatism may not be due to cohort differences and cohort replacement, but may rather be due to individual change, or aging itself, suggesting that the baby boomers may be growing more conservative with age. Thus, we examine cohort differences through time, taking into account the aging of the baby boom cohorts as well as their distinctiveness from other cohorts. SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH COHORT REPLACEMENT There is widespread agreement that a fundamental feature of any society is its demographic makeup. And indeed many would argue that a fundamental aspect of the changes in modem society is the changing demography of the household. From the point of view of examining the sociopolitical makeup of modem society and change in it, one cannot ignore the potential impact of the baby boom and its aftermath. But it is not just that the baby boom cohorts were larger than those that preceded them-they were also larger than those that followed. Birth rates have reached an all-time low throughout the industrialized world, with many European countries now experiencing levels of fertility that are below replacement (Davis, 1986). …