Protest Politics and Generational Change: Examining Age, Period and Cohort Effects in Cross-National Comparison

It is often argued that young people participate differently in politics, with a predisposition towards protest politics more so than conventional participation in elections and campaigns. This is an argument of the contemporary era about Generation Z and Millennials, although it sounds remarkably familiar to arguments made about the Baby Boomers in the 1960s and 1970s. Is it that young people are more likely to participate in protest, and then shift towards more conventional forms of participation as they get older? Or instead, are there generational differences in protest behaviour that persist over the life course? Or third, could it be period effects that are mobilising (or demobilising) protest across cohorts? To investigate these questions, this paper disentangles age, period and cohort effects on protest participation in the advanced democracies. To do so, the paper analyses data from the World Values Survey and European Values Study in 20 democratic countries with data from the 1980s to 2020s. This includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France and the Netherlands, among others. The paper will shed insights as to whether there are generational differences in protest behaviour, drawing upon extensive cross-national survey data capturing change over time.