The youth political knowledge gap is a recent, cohort-driven development

Evidence

Today’s generation gap in political knowledge does not reflect some permanent tendency for the young to be less well informed than their elders but is instead a recent development. From the earliest opinion polls in the 1940s to the mid-1970s, younger people were at least as well informed as their elders were, but that is no longer the case. This news and information gap, affecting not just politics, but even things like airline crashes, terrorism, and financial news, first opened up with the boomers in the 1970s and widened considerably with the advent of the X generation. Daily newspaper readership among people under thirty-five dropped from two-thirds in 1965 to one-third in 1990, at the same time that TV news viewership in this same age group fell from 52 percent to 41 percent. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 95

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Each successive youth cohort gets labeled as a distinct political generation — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 346; Large youth cohorts historically coincide with protest, extremism, and revolution — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 321

Broader Connections

• Each successive youth cohort gets labeled as a distinct political generation #expands (0.78) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 346
• Large youth cohorts historically coincide with protest, extremism, and revolution #qualifies (0.72) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 321