{"id":34950,"date":"2025-11-20T13:03:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T18:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34950"},"modified":"2025-11-20T13:03:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T18:03:05","slug":"americans-pride-in-democracy-by-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34950","title":{"rendered":"Americans&#8217; pride in democracy, by generation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As a trustee of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, I&#8217;m proud of our new partnership with Gallup called the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gallup.com\/analytics\/697985\/democracy-for-all.aspx\">Democracy for All Project<\/a>, which released the <a href=\"https:\/\/news.gallup.com\/poll\/696494\/americans-show-consensus-democracy-related-matters.aspx\">first results of a national <\/a>survey yesterday. That study shows broad support for democratic values and cultural diversity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The survey finds that commitment to democracy rises with age and is lowest among adults under 30:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe title=\"Democracy is best form of government\" aria-label=\"Bar Chart\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-mofdr\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/mofdr\/1\/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"161\" data-external=\"1\"><\/iframe><script type=\"text\/javascript\">window.addEventListener(\"message\",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll(\"iframe\");for(var t in a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"][t]+\"px\";r.style.height=d}}});<\/script>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I show the percentages who agree that democracy is the best form of government. Among youth, another 35% are neutral and 12% disagree. The lower level of support among younger people is an important issue. I also recommend <a href=\"https:\/\/circle.tufts.edu\/report-genz-attitudes-democracy\">CIRCLE&#8217;s April 2025 report<\/a> on that topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here I&#8217;ll add a historical dimension. Although I haven&#8217;t found precisely the same question on surveys going back decades, the General Social Survey (GSS) did ask a relevant item in each decade from the 1990s through the 2010s. In a battery about which aspects of the country made people proud, one question asked about pride in democracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As shown in the line graph above this post, each generation has been somewhat less proud than its predecessors, but Boomers and Gen-Xers showed increasing pride as they grew older from 1996-2004 and were prouder in 2014 than they had been two decades earlier. On the other hand, Millennials lost a lot of pride in democracy between 2004 and 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am not sure how I would have answered that question at those times. I am committed to democracy but not necessarily &#8220;proud&#8221; of the way it functions in the USA. Nevertheless, the GSS trends show that today&#8217;s differences by age are fairly typical, and people change their views as they go through life and as history plays out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This background might discourage us from assuming that something has recently gone wrong with civic education in K-12 schools or that the current media environment is uniquely toxic. Both civic education and media deserve attention, but not because of a unique generational gap in the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(The GSS <a href=\"https:\/\/www.datawrapper.de\/_\/hu7mQ\/\">data<\/a> are here.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a trustee of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, I&#8217;m proud of our new partnership with Gallup called the Democracy for All Project, which released the first results of a national survey yesterday. That study shows broad support for democratic values and cultural diversity. The survey finds that commitment to democracy rises with age and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34951,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34950"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34963,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34950\/revisions\/34963"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}