In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police in 2020, polls showed White Democrats as the most racially progressive group of Americans. In this paper, we examine this group’s racial progressiveness. Using the racial resentment scale deployed in the American National Election Studies, we show that the youngest generation of White Democrats has become more liberal on race when compared to older generations of Democrats and both younger and older generations of Republicans. We examine White Democrats’ racial attitudes further using four framing experiments that we embed in a nationally representative survey. The experiments demonstrate that younger generations of Democrats are often, but not always, the group most supportive of progressive racial rhetoric when compared to older Democrats, Republicans in their generation, and older Republicans. Older Democrats often mirror the attitudes of their younger counterpart. Thus, we find that racial attitudes are shaped not just by generation but also by partisan cues. Last, when it comes to reparations, young Democrats are merely less hostile to the policy than other groups in our sample but do not endorse reparations. Overall, our findings thus suggest that while younger generations of Democrats are sometimes more progressive in their racial attitudes than other groups, their racial attitudes are somewhat inconsistent. While they support racially egalitarian rhetoric, they do not express the same level of support for a policy designed to create equal material conditions.

The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS (dress, trap), plus price and face, known respectively to monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and LBMS-implicated lot/thought. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians born in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in face-centralization. In Generation X, retraction of front lax vowels begins, leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support findings that regional vowel systems declined precipitously following a Gen X “cliff,” raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period.

Why has voter turnout declined in democracies all over the world? This article draws on findings from microlevel studies and theorizes two explanations: generational change and a rise in the number of elective institutions. The empirical section tests these hypotheses along with other explanations proposed in the literature—shifts in party/candidate competition, voting-age reform, weakening group mobilization, income inequality, and economic globalization. The authors conduct two analyses. The first analysis employs an original data set covering all post-1945 democratic national elections. The second studies individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and British, Canadian, and US national election studies. The results strongly support the generational change and elective institutions hypotheses, which account for most of the decline in voter turnout. These findings have important implications for a better understanding of the current transformations of representative democracy and the challenges it faces.

This paper presents the findings of the first empirical study of the experiences of young lawyers who have entered an increasingly uncertain profession following a highly competitive education and recruitment process. These ‘millennial lawyers’ are framed by a narrative of ‘difference’. This ‘difference’ is commonly articulated negatively and as a challenge to organisational and professional norms. However, our findings suggest a more complex reality. In its synthesis of work on structure and agency, with the temporal focus required by generational sociology, this paper advances an original approach to the analysis of organisational and professional change within contemporary legal practice. Drawing on new empirical research, it demonstrates that although our sample shares many field-level expectations, there is also considerable stress, unhappiness and discomfort. This is generated by a complex interaction between the lawyers’ expectations of practice, and the structuring properties of the field. Thus, the capacity for organisational and professional change is more comprehensively understood within a temporal frame. This paper challenges academic and professional paradigms of generational change within the legal field. It concludes with recommendations for legal educators and the profession which foreground the complexity of millennial lawyers’ expectations of practice.

Recent reforms of family policy signal a turning point in the Korean welfare state, as they undermine the welfare developmentalism that is commonly ascribed to Korean social policy. Drawing on the East Asian as well as Western welfare state literatures, this research seeks to understand the politics behind family policy reforms. In doing so, this research argues that political parties were the driver of these reforms, contrary to the conventional ‘parties do not matter’ perspective that dominates the East Asian welfare state literature. Utilizing the party competition thesis from the study of Western welfare states, this article demonstrates that political parties, the unlikely reform agency due to their perceived non-policy orientation, moved family policy to centre stage in election campaigns. Far-reaching changes in the electorate, namely the diminishing effect of regionalism and the increasing importance of young voters, incentivized parties to promote family policy. Thus, this research calls for bringing political parties into the analysis of East Asian welfare politics.