Accounting for Gen Z’s pro-authoritarianism: the start of an intellectual journey.
About two weeks ago, a rather curious notification popped up on my phone. It was a link to a YouTube explainer on ‘What’s Driving Pro-Authoritarianism Amongst Gen Z?’. Counting myself as Gen Z, but not as a fan of authoritarianism, my interest was piqued.
The video emerged in response to the results of a Channel 4 study from January. It had found that 52% of Gen Z agreed that “the UK would be better with a strong leader in charge who does not have to bother with Parliament and elections”, and 33% felt that “the UK would be a better place if the army was in charge”. These figures were 40% and 18% respectively for 45-to-65-year-olds. Some linked this to a somewhat similar finding by the Open Society Foundation in 2023. Their data indicated that those aged 18-35 were the most likely to think that “army rule” or having a “leader who does not bother with parliament/elections” is a good way to run a country.
Not fully convinced by the explainer’s efforts to understand Gen Z’s apparent penchant for dictators, I did some research. Three main views emerged.
View One: The Cozzie Livs Thesis. This is similar to some of the reasons given for the rise of populist voting (see last week’s blog post). The gist is that many young people in the UK are struggling with high living costs, housing shortages, rent inflation, and a precarious jobs market. These issues affect us all but arguably have a greater impact on people at the early stages of a career, on lower wages, and with not even a pinky toe on the property ladder (all characteristics of Gen Z). To put some data to these truisms, according to the FT, the “average renter aged 16 to 24 spends 47% of their income on rent” and the “average age of first-time home buyers has hit an all-time high of 34”. Consequently, as sociologist Daniel Evans put it, Gen Z are “desperate for change” and “looking at the rise of ‘strong men’ like Trump across the world and thinking, ‘well, at least these people are saying they’re going to do something’”. In other words, Gen Z feel that democracy as usual isn’t working for them, and so they’ve logged onto Temu to shop for alternatives.
View Two: The Benevolent Dictator Thesis. Professor Linda Woodhead, another sociologist, suggested that Gen Z’s disillusionment with democracy came from the failure of current political systems to address issues like climate change. In her words, “democracies are slow and inefficient … This generation is not used to that. They have a sense of urgency because the world is burning up and it’s all going wrong”. This links to David Mitchell’s take. I know he’s not a politics expert. But it’s interesting, so I’m putting it in: “it’s clear what they’re getting at. A brilliant, dedicated and compassionate person with absolute power, making sensible decisions in the long-term national interest – not being troubled by the grubbiness of political rivalry”.
View Three: The Woke Warrior Cancel Culture Censorship Thesis. Gen Z’s inherent tendency towards cancel culture means they vibe strongly with authoritarianism. I’m a tad sceptical of that one. That’s because personal observation suggests to me that proportion of Gen Z that roughly fit the definition of a ‘Woke Warrior’ (though I’m really uncomfortable with the term), is much smaller than it’s made out to be. Furthermore, statements against democracy aren’t something that the classic ‘woke warrior’ would countenance.
But do Gen Z really want to replace Starmer with Stalin?
As I was researching explanations for Gen Z’s pro-authoritarianism, I increasingly encountered studies supporting a different conclusion. For instance, the British Election Study found that Gen Z was “the least likely generation to support a strong leader”, with only 13% keen on that kind of political leadership in 2024. Similarly, the World Values survey discovered greater support for democracy among Gen Z than millennials. Finally, NatCen’s 2024 Society Watch Report rated Gen Z as the least authoritarian generation (in terms of deference to authority and the law), and judged them to be “more liberal than their parents and grandparents ever were”.
This led me to question the methodology of the Channel 4 and Open Society research. And there are a few issues with both (as there may well also be with the studies that contradict them). Channel 4 surveyed a ‘nationally representative sample’ of 2000 13-to-27-year-olds and 1000 28-to-65-year-olds. The relatively small sample of 28-to-65-year-olds means its comparisons across generations are tenuous. This may be why they only compare the views of Gen Z and 45-to-65-year-olds on parliament and elections, leaving out those in the middle. Adding to that, phrasing matters, and using the verb “bother” to refer to these democratic processes implies to the survey participants that they are indeed a “bother”. This makes responses which criticise them more likely. The Open Society’s survey uses the same leading phrasing. Moreover, its characterisation of the views of people aged 18-35 uses data from 30 different countries but gives little indication of the variation in responses between them.
Beyond the issue in how individual studies were conducted, I also began to wonder about the inherent problems with how we do generational analysis, and to question whether we should be thinking in terms of generations at all…
What are ‘generations’ and how should we analyse them?
We have Karl Mannheim (yet another sociologist) to thank for our current concept of generations. In the 1920s, he posited that people are influenced by political, economic, social and technological climate they grow up in. Resultingly, people born at similar times experience similar influences, and get shaped in a similar way by them. He contended that the consequences of this persist throughout an individual’s life. On the face of it, this seems like a reasonable thesis.
However, as the Pew Research Centre has identified, we often do a pretty rubbish job of establishing whether an observed characteristic is generation-related, age-related, or a period effect. That is, whether it’s something that makes a certain generation different to others at the same life-stage, whether it’s something that is characteristic of younger people from many different generations, or whether it’s an effect that is occurring simultaneously across all generations. Analytically-speaking, the difference between these effects is not difficult to establish. The issue is a practical one; we often lack the longitudinal data that would allow us to compare the views of different generations at similar life stages and changing views on specific issues over time. Many of the things we’re interested in now simply weren’t on the radar of earlier researchers. Neither the Channel 4 nor the Open Society study bring in sufficient data to indicate whether their findings on Gen Z’s views on authoritarianism are a generational, age, or period effect, or a combination of the three. Notwithstanding, in the Channel 4 study, they are overwhelmingly framed as a generational effect.
A second issue is that studies presenting data on age groups that do not map onto generational boundaries are often used to make claims about different generations’ characteristics, depending on the narrative people want to present. One example of that is the Open Society research being brought into discussions of what the Channel 4 study was telling us about Gen Z. The former’s findings were based on 18-to-35-year-olds (spanning Gen Z and millennials), whereas the latter’s pertain to those aged 13-27 (just Gen Z). Likewise, a recent article from the Daily Express claimed that the military has a “lack of appeal with Gen Z”. But the data they were using was only on 18-to-27-year-olds and thus does not encompass all of Gen Z.
Thirdly, we often fail to control for factors other than age. The results of the Open Society survey are a classic example of this. We have no break-down of how nationality, gender, socioeconomic background, religion or anything else impacted the likelihood of 18-to-35-year-olds agreeing that leaders shouldn’t have to bother with parliament and elections. And it’s unlikely that the lack of detail on these factors is because they’re statistically irrelevant. As reported by the FT, for instance, many researchers have noted a growing gendered split in political orientation amongst younger people across a range of countries. (Note also that the FT article is writing about ‘Gen Z’ but uses data from a variety of age-brackets, like 18-21 and 18-30, that do not map exactly onto generational boundaries).
The Channel 4 survey is a little better at thinking about how other factors impact Gen Z’s political views. It outlines six different opinion profiles within Gen Z, labelling them ‘boys can’t be boys’, ‘fight for rights’, ‘girl power’, ‘zero-sum thinkers’, ‘dice are loaded’, and ‘blank slates’. For each, they highlight their size, gender balance and general socioeconomic profile. However, they don’t give a clear indication of the relative levels of pro-authoritarianism for these groups, only mentioning that the ‘zero-sum thinkers’ tend towards authoritarianism.
This is not to say that age is unimportant in political analysis. Far from it. NatCen argued in 2023 that “age has become the biggest demographic divide in British politics”, surpassing the importance of socioeconomic status in predicting how someone will vote. The issue is rather that we’ve gotten into the habit of giving explanatory power to the influence of what I will argue are rather random age groupings.
Who gets to decide?
A fundamental issue with using ‘generations’ to understand politics is that the age-groupings we’ve established are, to a large extent, arbitrary. For context, we have the Silent Generation (1926-45), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Gen X (1965-1980), Millennials (1981-1996), Gen Z (1997-2012) and Gen Alpha (2013 onwards). There is certainly some sense to delineating the Baby Boomers as a generation on account of the clear demographic shifts they heralded. Likewise, the drop in birth rates after 1964 could distinguish Gen X as the ‘baby bust’ generation, to use the phrasing from one Ipsos report. Nevertheless, there will always be other political, economic, social and technological events which could be designated as a meaningful basis on which to group people.
The process by which we collectively agree that a new generation is upon us is somewhat mysterious, but research bodies like the Pew Research Centre have a role to play. The PRC (intentionally misleading abbreviation) describe how, by 2018, “it became clear to us that it was time to determine a cutoff point between millennials and the next generation”. It seems that this realisation was largely a timing thing. There are usually 15-20 years between generations. So now they needed to label the next one. They endeavoured to set a boundary between millennials and Gen Z that would be “analytically meaningful” and thus chose to start Gen Z in 1997. They list various reasons for this boundary, related to likelihood of remembering 9/11, age during the 2008 election of Barack Obama, and the launch of the iPhone. Notwithstanding, they openly acknowledge that, in contrast to the Boomers, “there are no comparably definitive thresholds by which later generational boundaries are defined”. What they don’t acknowledge, but is relevant to an international audience, is that their criteria for delineating the start of Gen Z are highly US-centric. And that’s fine – they’re an American think-tank. But it does further underscore the arbitrariness of generational boundaries when they get absorbed into other anglophone countries like the UK or Australia. Sure, in these places American political developments are important, but they’re not as important as they are in, well, America.
A counterargument to my immense scepticism around generational boundaries is that the fact that PRC’s generational boundaries were absorbed into common parlance suggests they resonate with people and thus have meaning. However, there is plenty of research suggesting that many people don’t identify with the generational labels they fall under. For instance, Ipsos polling found that, in the UK, only 49% of Gen Z strongly identify with their ‘cohort label’. Moreover, I struggle to believe that the most meaningful events that could shape or trigger a new generation occur reliably in 15-to-20-year cycles.
So, if we continue to use generations as a way to think about politics, we need to be constantly evaluating whether our age-groupings actually work, and how well they work for each issue in question. For instance, looking at age-groupings determined by memory of 9/11 might be a particularly meaningful way to analyse differing views on terrorism, but it’s unlikely to be a super helpful way to understand age-based variation in attitudes to state welfare policy.
If we don’t continue to question our categories, we can’t guarantee that they’re useful. Moreover, we’ll never know if (as is my deep suspicion), it was those pesky year of the sheepers – born 2003 – who are 95% in favour of authoritarianism and have now tarnished the noble reputation of Gen Z for good.
And there are techniques we can employ in political research to prevent ourselves automatically falling into explanations based on conventional ‘generations’. A simple example would be ensuring that you obtain people’s specific ages (alongside other demographic data) rather than just their membership of a 15-20 year age group. With that data, one could then plot a graph which more precisely indicated the correlation between political views and age. See a humorous example below. Alternatively, if you don’t have a big enough sample-size to gain useful data on the views of people born in each year, you could analyse the data based on smaller groupings (e.g. 4/5 year chunks). If it seems that the results for certain of these chunks are surprising, that can be a cue to collect more detailed data, and perhaps consider what might be distinct about the world that group grew up in which could lead to them being a statistical outlier.
We don’t need no generation.
But, clearly, it’s a concept which has a lot of staying power. My initial article plan assumed that conventional ‘generations’ were a useful way to understand politics. Maybe that was what you were thinking too when you opened this article. So why does this idea have so much purchase?
Bobby Duffy, director of the KCL Policy Institute, argues that we keep hearing about ‘generations’ and the divides between them because “conflict is clickable”. Terms like ‘boomer’ and ‘millennial’, for instance, are loaded with connotations that pit these groups against each other in a way that phrases like ‘29-to-44-year-olds’ and ‘59-to-77-year-olds’ just aren't. Duffy inadvertently proved his “conflict is clickable” thesis when, in 2022, he carried out a survey to understand how different generations perceived each other. One of the questions measured agreement with the notion that young people struggled to afford homes because they spent their money on “Netflix, gym subscriptions, fancy coffees and foreign holidays”. About 50% agreed and, interestingly, Gen Z were as likely to agree as older groups. But what the headlines read was “boomers blame Netflix and takeaways for young not owning homes”.
The other key reason for the focus on generational characteristics, is that this is seen as a way to divine the future of humanity. It’s completely understandable to want to figure out how the youth of today are going to change the future of politics. But you can ask those questions without automatically assuming the relevance of generations as we conventionally discuss them. In fact, by putting in the time and effort to throw those commonplaces into question, we’ll be able to get much better insights into our ever-changing political landscape.
Recommended Resources
Channel 4’s ‘Gen Z: Trends, Truth and Trust’ (Jan 2025)
LSE Blog on ‘The case for and against using generational labels’ (June 2024)
Open Society Foundation’s ‘Can Democracy Deliver?’ (Sept 2023)
The PRC on ‘How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward’ (May 2023)
Ipsos’ ‘Generation Z – Do they exist and what influences them?’ (2022/3)
The PRC on ‘Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins’ (Jan 2019)
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