hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now i've been going through unit 4 of the ap government curriculum and in this video that means it's time to talk about how our political beliefs change as a result of generational and life cycle effects so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked then let's get to it so in this video here is what we're trying to do explain how cultural factors influence political attitudes and socialization if you saw the last video we talked about the six main factors that influenced the way we come to hold differing political opinions and the term for that is political socialization and we mentioned families schools peers media civic and religious organizations and globalization all of those factors affect the kinds of political opinions that we hold so now let's talk about another factor that influences political ideology namely a person's generation and we'll talk about life cycle effects which can cause a person to change or modify his or her political opinions so let's begin with generational effects this basically means that a person's voting behavior and political ideology is very much influenced by the generation into which they're born so let's briefly consider four major generations that are consistently analyzed by political scientists namely the silent generation baby boomers generation x and millennials now before i get into it i should mention that everything i'm about to say here is a generalization and that in reality there is great variance of voting behavior and political ideology in each generation but here we're only focusing on generalizations that can be made so let's start with the silent generation and this includes folks that were born before 1945. they came of age during the great depression in world war ii and many of them were young adults during the age of conformity during the 1950s and as such they tend to have a high value on religious belief in church attendance furthermore many folks of the silent generation adhered to a social order that attached rigid gender roles to men and women thus the folks in this generation are generally conservative so this leaning led some of them to oppose the great cultural upheaval in the 1960s with the counter-culture movement of the women's rights movement and the gay liberation movement after all these movements tore apart the cultural fabric which these silence grew up with now when it comes to foreign policy these people grew up in the midst of the cold war and thus generally supported american intervention abroad in order to stop the spread of communism notably in the vietnam war also in general the silent generation consistently votes for candidates who style themselves as tough on crime and terrorist which is generally a conservative position and one thing this generation can very much not understand is the push to legalize marijuana now why on god's green earth would you hippies want to legalize that wacky tobacco anyway as a group senior citizens vote in higher numbers than any other group okay now let's shift and talk about baby boomers these are folks who were born after world war ii up till about the mid-60s the prosperity of the 50s combined with men and women returning home from war meant that people were making babies like mad and so this is a huge generation they came of age during the tumultuous 60s and thus they learned to appreciate the changes better than their parents and that meant they were slightly more liberal as a whole than the silent generation though they still reliably voted conservative then came generation x who were born between the mid 60s and 1980s these were folks who grew up with lots of divorce and were the first to really use the internet as a generation as a group they were slightly more liberal than their parents in the baby boomer generation partly because they're more ethnically diverse than either of the two previous generations that i've spoken about then we get to the millennials who were born in the period 1981 to 1986 and this group is even more liberal than any of the previous generations that i've mentioned millennials are more ethnically diverse than exers were which is to say according to pew research about 40 of this group is not white which is huge compared to the silent generation which was 79 white as a result of this millennials have leaned hard into the liberal policies of the democratic party and they're more likely than not to believe that racial discrimination plays a big role in society they're more favorable towards immigrants than the previous generation and in general they are more favorable towards what could be considered more socialist policies with significant government intervention now i spent all that time explaining some of these generational characteristics to you to make this point the four generations of today's adults fit into a pretty tidy political pattern the older you are the more likely you are conservative and the younger you are the more likely you are liberal since the silent generation each succeeding generation has become more liberal than their parents and a good example of this is a poll from pew research that compared each generation's opinion on conservative president donald trump's performance you can see here that 46 percent of the conservative silent generation approved 44 of boomers 36 percent of extras and 20 of millennials said that trump was doing a good job so classified into groups the four adult generations range from conservative to liberal and depending on what generation you find yourself in you are more likely than not to agree with this group's political affinities so all that to say generational effects can determine how you think about politics but there are also life cycle effects that contribute to political socialization as well and the idea here is that whatever stage of life a person is in will contribute to their political beliefs and behavior for example if you were 18 years old and casting your first vote during the 2020 presidential primaries you might have been very attracted to a candidate like bernie sanders who ran on a platform of free college tuition at that stage in your life that matters a lot to you especially since college has gotten so expensive and you're not interested in paying for your ceramics degree until you're 73 but those in the silent generation who are not going to college and have adult children and grandchildren they don't care as much about that and they're thinking like yeah somebody has to pay for all of that so they would in general be less attracted to that proposal because of where they are in their life but then maybe you get married and you have kids and at that stage in your life cycle you're less interested in free college tuition than you are in pre-k legislation or lower taxes so you can better care for your family and those commitments might lead you to change your voting behavior so the point is political socialization happens as a result of your generational membership and it can change over time as you progress through different stages of life okay thanks for watching click right here to grab view packet if you need help getting an a in your class and a five on your exam in may if you're watching this and you're millennial and you probably are then you don't need me to tell you that subscribing is the best way for you to let me know to keep making these videos so i'll see you in the next one heimler out