A New Political Generation and Its Political Parties

Watch these clips from this panel from the AGI Annual Symposium:

Top of the Agenda: What Concerns Millennials? (2:44)

Will Millennials Breath Life into Transatlantacism? (3:06) 

A Perfect Generational Storm: U.S. Millennials Are Political Characters (3:45) 

The Digital Divide in Tübingen (1:54)

The “Millennial Generation,” those born between approximately the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, is coming of age in terms of voting, alternative means of political action, and political leadership. Characterizations of this generation widely diverge from extreme narcissism on the one side to extensive civic-mindedness on the other. The panel will focus on what is different about this generation, and the political consequences of that uniqueness, along four dimensions:

Make-up of the Millennial Generation

• socio-economic
• racial
• ethnic
• gender
• political ideology

New domestic policy priorities

• employment
• education for a new economic and technological age
• environment
• less traditional “hard” foreign policy interest and more emphasis on “softer” issues such as energy security and human rights

New arenas for engaging in politics

• growing disaffection with national politics
• increased emphasis on state, local and virtual communities

New methods of political engagement

• extensive use of social media
• new technologies and the internet, as seen, for example, in the activities of the Pirate Party in Germany and Mobilize.org in the U.S.