ABSTRACT
Young adults today can hardly challenge the establishment if they don’t have a basic grasp of what is going on in the political world. This chapter addresses the question of whether today’s young adults are in fact less informed about politics due to their not reading newspapers, not watching TV news, and not following political stories to the same degree as previous generations of young people. Given their relative lack of exposure to political news and current events, young people should be falling more and more behind their elders in terms of political knowledge despite their relatively high levels of educational achievement. Cross-national studies of political behavior typically focus on universal questions that will be relevant across a variety of different countries, thereby making it impossible to replicate the American analysis regarding age patterns for following current events.
