Dalton and Putnam: Teaching Political Polarization to Generation Z Students

ABSTRACT Political polarization and generational politics are important topics in contemporary political science classrooms. This article presents an approach to teaching political polarization in an introduction to politics course. Coauthored by two Generation Z students from the course and their Boomer Generation professor, the article provides conflicting views of young people and politics as found in the work of Robert Putnam and Russell Dalton. The article presents survey data on affective and issue political polarization from the course, including discussion by the two student coauthors of the survey results interpreting their generation’s political polarization. The course approaches the introductory politics course using cognitive psychology concepts including confirmative bias, motivated reasoning, and other cognitive biases. Teaching from this micro-level perspective helps students to reflect on their own political biases. The article provides concepts and readings for political science professors to use in replicating the course.

Who Identifies as “Latinx”? The Generational Politics of Ethnoracial Labels

Over the past 5 years, the “Latinx” label has become increasingly popular within academia, politics, and social media. Yet, little is known about who has adopted the term at this relatively early stage and how it might be interpreted. Drawing on a unique data set of US-born Californians, as well as Latina/o/x Studies insight, this paper provides the first academic survey results on “Latinx” identification. We find that close to 25 percent of respondents identify with the term regularly, and that its early adoption varies across groups. Specifically, political ideology, especially progressive politics, is strongly correlated with use of the label. We also find that both immigrant generation and birth cohort matter considerably, with second generation immigrants and people born in Generation Z (since 1995) most likely to identify with the term. Finally, our findings show that “Latinx” is largely understood as complementary to, not mutually exclusive of, other panethnic labels like “Hispanic” and “Latino.” Taken together, our results suggest that generational politics matter for understanding early label diffusion and that Latinos adopt a variety of panethnic labels that they likely use in different contexts. We discuss these findings in terms of our broader understanding of Latinidad, racialization, and the symbolic power of ethnoracial labels.

Black Generational Politics and the Black Lives Matter Movement

Despite its advocacy for justice and accountability in the American political system, the Movement for Black Lives is still considered controversial among groups of Americans. The in-your-face and unapologetic tone of today’s movement stands in contrast to romanticized narratives of the peaceful, nonviolent activism of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. The movement’s titular organization, Black Lives Matter, openly rejects respectability politics—the notion that individuals and groups must conform to the expectations of white mainstream norms to protect themselves from the harms of white racism and discrimination. In this article, we examine whether generational politics affect Black attitudes toward protest movements, focusing especially on the Black Lives Matter organization. We expect that protest politics are affected by generations of Black Americans who have been socialized in different eras of social and political advocacy with differing views about the actions that are acceptable for Black politics. Consistent with prior literature, we anticipate that generational differences in attitudes toward contestation, varying awareness about the political and social goals of new movements, differences in access to political information, and overall generational socialization toward respectability politics will all affect the degree to which Black Americans support the Movement for Black Lives. Using national-level data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), we find that prior theories of generational politics do not fully explain support for Black Lives Matter. Unexpectedly, we find that older generations of Black Americans are more supportive of the movement than younger generations of Black Americans. We do not find strong evidence of generational effects interacting with awareness of the movement, political opportunity structures, or respectability politics, which suggests the diminishing effects of generational differences along with traditional factors that influence support. Our results underscore the need for research on generational effects to consider the context of political socialization, which varies across generations.

Art of Connection

The Art of Connection narrates the individual stories of artisans and traders of Kenyan arts and crafts as they struggled to overcome the loss of physical access to roadside market space by turning to new digital technologies to make their businesses more mobile and integrated into the global economy. The book illuminates the lived experiences of marginalized Kenyan businesspeople struggling in the shadow of the country’s international tourism to balance new risks with new types of mobility. These new strategies are balanced against older models of development based on the co-operative industry and ethnic networks. But for many young traders, such models appear outdated and lacking innovation. An array of ethnic and generational politics have led to market burnings and witchcraft accusations as Kenya’s crafts industry struggles to adapt to its new connection to the global economy. To mediate the resulting crisis of trust, the Fair Trade sticker and other NGO aesthetics continue to successfully represent a transparent, ethical, and trusting relationship between buyer and producer. By balancing revelation and obfuscation—what is revealed and what is not—Kenyan art traders can thus make their own roles as intermediaries and the exploitative realities of the global economy invisible. The art of connection is, therefore, a set of strategies for making and maintaining connections by deploying notions of transparency. But as the book illustrates, it is also an artistic motif that represents the importance of ideals of transparency and connections in the world today.