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TALKING POLITICS

Are Young People Losing Faith in Democracy?

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.72.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David talks to Roberto Foa about his recent report into young people's attitude to democracy around the world. Why are millennials so much less satisfied with democratic politics than older generations? Can populist politics do anything to alter that? And what does the generation divide tell us about changing attitudes to Trump? Plus we discuss the generational politics of climate change, education and wealth inequality. 


The report in full: https://www.cam.ac.uk/system/files/youth_and_satisfaction_with_democracy.pdf

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. In today's extra episode,

0:09.0

I'm talking to Roberto Foea about his recent report on youth engagement with democracy

0:15.0

or rather disengagement. Why are young people losing faith in democratic politics?

0:23.6

Talking politics is brought to you in partnership with the London reviewer books. If you enjoy

0:28.3

listening to Talking Politics, you'll definitely enjoy reading the LRB. That's why they publish a

0:34.0

reading list of relevant writing from the archive to accompany every episode on lrb.co.uk and also,

0:41.8

why you, Talking Politics listeners, are invited to subscribe for just one pound of

0:47.2

issue via the url lrb.me slash talk. That's lrb.me slash talk. Talking politics in partnership with

1:00.0

the London reviewer books.

1:03.3

So, Roberto, when we spoke before, we were looking at this huge data set that you have gathered

1:18.0

and you have mind covering the world and going back more than a generation. And we were looking at

1:24.0

the big picture analysis about trends in different places and over different timeframes in people's

1:30.5

relative satisfaction with democracy. But you've now really mined it for the generation gap,

1:35.6

something I've talked about a lot on this podcast. And you have discovered essentially that there is

1:40.9

a striking trend. Younger people are growing much more dissatisfied with democracy, though there are

1:46.6

caveats which will come to. And as you say, it is both relative and absolute. So it's both that young

1:52.2

people are more dissatisfied than older people, older people, and they're more dissatisfied than older

1:57.4

people were when they were young. So just take us through that double finding.

2:02.0

I mean, we've known for a very long time that when we run public opinion surveys that we find

2:07.4

that younger generations and younger individuals tend to express higher levels of dissatisfaction

2:13.1

with the performance of democracy and frustrations in a wide variety of areas. But a sort of

2:19.3

conventional view, perhaps until now, has been that this is simply a life cycle effect. That people start

...

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